She was sixteen again for a moment, wondering why the love of her young life was pretending she didn’t exist the day after they’d made love. But she pushed aside the feelings of angst and inadequacy and reminded herself that she was now a grown woman who’d traveled around the world, served in the Peace Corps and finished medical school at the top of her class. Those old rules about who was cool and who wasn’t didn’t apply anymore, and those old rejections should not matter at all.
“Perhaps,” she said, sounding more casual than she felt. “I did grow up here, but I left after high school.”
Recognition dawned on his face, and she felt herself shrinking inwardly. “Rat Girl!”
Lorelei winced at the cruel nickname she’d been branded with in freshman year after volunteering to loan her two pet rats to their biology class to act as class pets for the year. Her intelligence, and her uncool interest in all things creepy and crawly, had made her stand out from her peers right away, and they’d awarded her a lovely moniker to match her pets.
When he caught her expression, he realized his mistake. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. You must have hated being called that…Lorelei. We were lab partners one year, right?”
If she hadn’t been blushing before, she definitely was now. Because soon, he was going to remember the disastrous end of their senior-year lab partnership.
When she’d mistaken his kindness for attraction, she’d finally worked up the courage to blatantly flirt with him. And one day while they’d been gathering sulfur water at the local hot springs for their project, she’d kissed him right on the mouth in the middle of a discussion about the effects of sulfur on invertebrates.
And then, right there in the hot springs, the kiss had turned into an embrace, which had turned into heavy groping, which had turned into them taking off their clothes for a dip in the springs, which had turned into them making love in the pool of steaming water.
To Lorelei, that one evening had been complete bliss. And the next day at school-utter hell. He’d never looked at her, never talked to her, never offered any further help on their lab project. He’d simply pretended she didn’t exist for the rest of their senior year.
Lorelei had been heartbroken.
She pushed away the horrible memories and tried to move on. They weren’t here for a high-school reunion. “So,” she said, pretending she’d been reading important things on his chart. “You blacked out after getting hit on the head?”
He nodded, but he was still looking at her as though he was trying to remember something. “That’s what I just said.”
“For a couple of minutes?”
But she could tell by his expression now that he was remembering the hot springs. “You and I, senior year, we…”
Oh, God.
But why was she so scared? She wasn’t that inexperienced girl anymore.
“We what?” she said flatly.
“We, um, did that sulfur project together, didn’t we?” he said, obviously uncomfortable with her intense stare.
She frowned as if she was having trouble recalling. “Did we? Wow, you’ve got a better memory than I do,” she lied.
He looked at her a little oddly. “Yeah, we did.”
“I’m sorry to hurry this along, but we’re pretty backed up today. Do you happen to know exactly how long you were blacked out?”
“Oh, right, sorry. Maybe a couple of minutes?”
“Okay, good. It looks like you’re fine. If you start feeling dizzy, nauseous, have any trouble with your vision, or generally just feel like something isn’t quite right, please come back in right away.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
“Take it easy for a day-no running marathons for at least twenty-four hours.”
“Am I cleared to go back to work?”
“Yes, so long as you’re not doing any heavy lifting for a day. You can take over-the-counter pain medication if you’re feeling any discomfort from the bump on your head.”
She edged toward the door.
“Okay, thanks. Hey, it was good to see you again. Welcome back to Ocean Harbor Beach.”
Lorelei smiled as best she could. “It’s good to be back,” she said as she hurried out the door, feeling as if she were fleeing the scene of a crime.
In the hallway, Maria Valdez, one of the day-shift nurses, was passing by. She stopped in her tracks. “Are you okay?” she asked.
Lorelei blinked dumbly at the question, not sure how to answer. “Not really,” she said. “I’ll be in the break room for a few minutes.”
She headed down the hallway, her heart thudding wildly in her chest, feeling for all the world as though she was in high school again.
2
“REMEMBER that girl Lorelei Gibson from high school?”
Ryan’s coworker, Kyle Witcomb, who’d been sitting in the E.R. waiting for him, blinked uncomprehending. “Um, no. Are you going to live, or what?”
“Sure, just got a bump on the head is all. I told you guys I didn’t need to come to the E.R.”
“Yeah, well, you were slurring your words and talking nonsense at the time.”
“And, now I’m fine, so let’s get out of here,” Ryan said, then headed toward the E.R. entrance.
No matter how long he’d worked as a firefighter, he never got comfortable with the sight of people sick or in pain. It always made him feel that he should be doing something to help, and if he couldn’t, it drove him crazy.
Once they were outside in the cool, sunny December day, free of the sights and smells of tragedy, he let out a sigh of relief. His thoughts went immediately back to Lorelei.
“That girl from school I mentioned-I know you’ll remember her. She was in our biology class, and she had those pet rats-”
“Rat Girl?” Kyle said, frowning. “That weird science-geek chick who always wore hats to school?”
Ryan winced at the nickname. He still felt like a jerk for blurting it out to her in the examining room. But he had much bigger things to be ashamed of. After they’d had sex, he’d spent the rest of the year pretending she didn’t exist, unwilling as he’d been to admit he was attracted to her.
“Yes,” he said, his tone a little testy. “That’s her. She was my doctor today.”
“No kidding? I’ve never seen her around here.”
“She said she just moved back into town. I gotta tell you, she doesn’t look so weird anymore. She was pretty damn hot.”
“No way. I remember one time, she came to school smelling horrible, like she hadn’t bathed in weeks, with blood all over her clothes. When our homeroom teacher demanded to know what had happened, she said she’d found a dead dog on the side of the road and carried it around looking for its owners.”
Ryan said nothing. His thoughts went back to adolescence, when he hadn’t had the balls to publicly lust after a girl like Lorelei. All the kids in school had known she was brilliant, but that had only made her stand out even more as an oddball. It hadn’t helped that she’d been so much younger than the other kids in their graduating class.
He hated that he’d been one of the jerks who’d made her feel like an outcast. Sure, he’d been thrilled when they were assigned as lab partners senior year, but only because he knew it guaranteed him an A. The fact that she’d apparently developed a crush on him and thought he’d be interested in being more than lab partners had been lost on his eighteen-year-old self-that is, until she’d thrown herself at him the last night they’d worked together and he’d callously accepted her offer of sex without considering at all what it might mean to her.
He’d only let himself consider later that her complete awkwardness as they’d fumbled with each other’s bodies, and the pain he’d caused when he entered her, might have meant that she’d been a virgin. Which had only made him retreat even more from facing her, because it meant he was an even bigger jerk than he’d wanted to admit.