Heat by Francine Pascal Page B

that she had cheated. And Sam hadn't said anything to Heather about breaking up. So no matter what Heather had done, they were still an official couple. Which made sleeping with the woman from the bar absolutely wrong. And all of that was way too much thinking to do with a hangover.
    The whole thing didn't make a lot of sense. Sam knew that. He was acting like some character from a book. Real people weren't supposed to think like this.
Real people slept around.
Everybody said so.
    But it didn't feel right. Maybe no one in the world would blame Sam for sleeping with this woman after Heather had cheated on him. Hell, every guy in the dorm would probably congratulate him for scoring
    with this babe even if Heather hadn't cheated on him. It didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was that Sam felt guilty. What he had done was wrong, no matter how many talk show guests and frat dudes might disagree.
    He was going to have to talk to Heather. He was going to have to tell her it was over.
    There was a knock at the door.
    Every rap of the mystery guest's knuckles went through Sam's skull
like a chain saw.
He winced and pulled the pillow tighter around his exploding head. "Go away!" he shouted as loudly as he dared.
    "Sam?" said a faint voice. "Is that you?"
    Sam groaned and rolled to the edge of the bed. The world did a little jumping, twisting lurch. "Who's there?"
    "Gaia."
    "Gaia?" Sam sat up quickly, bringing a railroad spike of fresh pain to his head. He couldn't imagine why Gaia Moore would be at his door. Especially not when she had been out with her boyfriend only the night before. He got up and stumbled across the room over a floor that pitched and heaved like a ship on the high seas. He fumbled open the door and saw that the impossible was true.
Gaia Moore had come to call.
    "Why are you . . . ," he started, then he swallowed and tried again. "Uh. Hi, Gaia."
    "Hi, Sam." Gaia was dressed in usual Gaia gear, cargo pants and a gray sweatshirt, but there was something different about her hair. It almost looked like it had been combed. If Sam weren't drunk, he would have sworn she was blushing.
    "I wanted to ask you something," she said.
    "What's that?"
    Gaia pushed her hair back from her face, glanced at Sam for a moment, then looked away. "I was wondering if you had anything planned for tonight."
    "Tonight?" Sam wondered if this was just part of the hangover.
Was it possible to have hallucinations from one night of drinking?
If he didn't know better, he would have sworn Gaia Moore was asking him out on a date.
    "It's New Year's Eve," said Gaia. "So I thought you'd probably be doing something with Heather."
    "No," said Sam. "I'm not doing anything with Heather." In his own ears he could hear both anger and guilt in that statement.
    "That's great!" said Gaia. "I mean, it's not great that you don't . . . I mean . . . I thought maybe you would want to get together tonight."
    Sam felt a moment of dizziness that had nothing to do with his hangover. Gaia Moore
was
asking him out on a date. The last few days had been an incredible roller coaster. First there was the woman at a bar, now
    this. His life was getting so strange in all directions. "Sure," he said. "Sure, I could do something tonight." Surely by then the hangover would have faded.
    "Cool." For a moment Sam caught a glance of that endangered species, a Gaia Moore smile. "I'm meeting Ed and Mary around eight. If you came over around seven, we could walk over together."
    "Ed Fargo and Mary Moss?"
    "Uh-huh. We're talking about checking out the fireworks in the park. If the weather's not too crappy, we thought we might even do the whole tourist Times Square thing. After all, this is my first New Year's in New York."
    Ed and Mary. Sam knew Ed Fargo well enough and had meet Mary Moss a few times. If Ed and Mary were coming along, then this wasn't so much a date as a kind of group activity.
Nothing serious.
Gaia might even be asking Sam more as a let's-be-friends kind of