“Oh, I’m not letting go of that one,” I said. “You are fucking vain, Lucas, but I hope you never change. It scares the shit out of me, but I like you just as you are.”
“You’re too loud,” Lucas whispered, and his good arm came towards me, drawing me into him; he kissed me in a way he never had before, a way nobody ever had before. I was willing to stand by my allegation that the method hadn’t even been invented before that moment. It wasn’t one kiss: it was a kiss leading into a kiss leading into another kiss. It seemed unfair somehow, a complete overwhelming of my senses.
When he pulled away from me, Petra and the others were gone. I was half-surprised the whole universe wasn’t gone too. The loudest thing I could hear was my own breathing. I couldn’t work out how I had let him do that to me… then I realised, of course, I had been participating.
“Well,” Lucas said, “that was new for me in a few ways.”
“For me too,” I said.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” Lucas said, his voice still low. Intimate. “In the hospital, I mean. On the way there.”
“So Lucy was telling me.”
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he told me. “You’re not like—”
I winced. “Not like other girls, Lucas? Really?”
“Not to me,” he said, which was supposed to be a meaningful clarification clearly. “Everything could be different for us, Callie. We could date properly…”
“Properly,” I said, “what does that even mean to you?”
Because Lucas wasn’t like other boys, he didn’t say anything then. He waited to see the worst of what I was going to lay on him.
“I think you thought of me in the hospital because you were scared, and looking for something to distract you,” I told him. “If you’d been able to just go on home, you probably wouldn’t have given me another moment of your time that night.” I snorted. “Maybe you would have cruised around the next morning just to see if I might have been still out and about.”
“I do think my feelings about you have changed,” Lucas countered.
Well, this was what I had wanted, what I’d been trying to achieve before Lucas’s accident. The thing was, I had been wrong. Lucas loving me would not save me the way I had hoped. He was too closed and unpredictable in character for me to even know what his love would do for me. The real solution had been standing up for myself, refusing to let him play with me however he liked… and I had just ruined that strategy by getting tangled up with him again.
I’d hoped to make Lucas fall in love with me… and maybe I’d screwed myself over with such a deceptive strategy, and was starting to fall in love with him myself. And given how little we really knew one another, that was just messed-up.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I feel like I’m the one who’s led you on now, letting you come out with me here, fix my car… but that was never my intention. I don’t really know how I got into this situation, but all I ever wanted to do was clear the air. I can’t take the stress of trying for anything else, not knowing how it would turn out with you… I’m so sorry.”
“Hey,” Lucas said, “it’s fine. Not holding out for you or any other bitch to make my life better, you know?” I flinched as he reached for the schoolbag still on my back, unzipping the pocket where I kept my phone and pulling it out to check the lock screen. I felt my face heating up, having that phone he’d bought between the two of us. “Well, if we start walking back slowly I reckon by the time we get to Rob’s that kid of his will have your car ready to go. Rob was really going to put the fear of God into him, sounds like.”
“Sure.” We walked out of the store together, him shadowing me. He didn’t have much to say for once, and I was screaming at myself. Wasn’t this what I’d always wanted? Why was it, every time he actually turned towards me, I sent him away? Was I making an even bigger mistake than I had the first time?
I could find out for sure if I took the risk, made the leap. But the way it worked with Lucas, the best of feelings seemed to go along with the worst. If I tried to claim everything, it might really kill me.
This was the best decision.
When we made it back to Rob’s garage, my pink car was ready for me as Lucas had predicted, now with the marks of my classmates’ utter disapproval of my attempt to rise above my station sprayed and beaten clear. Lucas rolled his eyes a little like he wasn’t impressed with the quality of the work—there was some unevenness in the paint job to be sure—but he paid Rob what was asked and made some attempt at a gracious remark when he commented that he and his people probably weren’t used to having to work on a car like that.
He didn’t have much to say when I dropped him off at home, either, trying not to peer up at the utter mansion whose wide driveway he slouched his way up.
Sitting in my car waiting to be sure he got inside safely, I started wondering if I’d really hurt him, if he cared more about me than he’d wanted to let on… then I realised that was very likely what he wanted me to be wondering. And even if he didn’t, it was a bad sign that I was thinking that way. I couldn’t imagine being in a relationship with someone and having it constantly under that much stress. It couldn’t possibly end well for either of us.
I didn’t call out to him and announce I’d changed my mind, like I’d wanted to for just a moment. I drove back home with a reasonably new-looking car and a reasonably peaceful heart. Honestly, once he got back to having nothing to do with me and all the current excitement settled down, I could probably spend the rest of my last year of school hardly thinking about him. He would be just a narrowly-dodged accident to tell my children about some day, if they ever needed to be convinced their mother had a bit of life in her once. I wasn’t going to end up like my parents, with no way to prove I’d ever been more than a sad adult whose idea of a fun evening was the premiere of the latest trashy reality show.
Chapter Seventeen
The first sign of danger was when I quit my job on Monday.
I didn’t know I was going to do it until I got into the building and Dane was in front of me, asking how things were going, and my mouth started moving without my knowing what was going to come out.
“I need to give you my notice.” Once it was out, my overwhelming feeling was of relief… and awkwardness. “Um… I haven’t actually written anything up yet, but…”
Dane was so taken aback he actually took a step back, as if he needed to take me in more fully to make sense of this.