But, in spite of it all, I was here in the car with him. Willing to give him a chance he probably hadn’t earned.
“This is probably going to get me in all sorts of trouble for bringing it up at all, but Ashleigh was hinting at something on Monday…”
Lucas sighed.
“I think she was trying to tell me the two of you had… a thing going on once,” I persisted. “Something like what you were doing with me before, where you kept it a big secret from everyone. A lot more of a secret than it was with me, at least.”
“It’s true,” Lucas said. “And you know what, if Sarah Coleman, Jamie Turner, or Jess Cork knew about one another, maybe they’d be comparing notes too.”
All names of girls I knew well, which was an oddity around school these days. Girls I’d been going to school with for years.
Maybe I wasn’t as smart as someone like Ashleigh, but this time I got it really fast. “Did you go around every girl you were at school with before… before that thing we’ve talked about happened?”
“A lot of them,” Lucas said. “Never Tamara for some reason, if that’s what you’re asking. Thought maybe if I got close enough something would come back to me. A memory… a flicker.”
“Did you remember anything about Ashleigh?”
“Yeah, she’s a fucking nightmare.”
I was so relieved I giggled. “I remember the first day we were in kindy together and she whinged about everything. It must have only been a couple hours but I swear it felt like a day. Her best friend back then—she left before you came to the school—just cried the whole time, and Ashleigh was looking down her nose at her with such obvious contempt, I have no idea how those two ever hit it off.”
Lucas’s grin faded faster than I’d hoped. “She’s fucking shifty, Callie. She’s been hoping to bring me down ever since then, I swear. I don’t think she really wants to be friends with me.”
“Well she’s kind of justified,” I dared. “I mean, from her perspective there’s a good reason. I’m guessing she doesn’t understand what’s really going on.”
I got it, of course. Lucas, trying to control the situation instead of letting any of those girls know he needed their help.
There was a dark side to this revelation, one that made me afraid to ask my next question… but I was growing a lot more courageous when it came to asking questions. “So was I just the last girl on your list, then?”
I didn’t dare look at him directly, even aside from needing to drive, but I felt Lucas staring at me. “Fuck, no. All that shit I got over and done with in tenth grade, before a whole bunch of those girls left. I was never going to go anywhere near you. It wasn’t… it didn’t seem right, somehow. Same as with Tamara.”
“You weren’t going to go anywhere near me,” I said. “Until you did.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” Lucas said. “You were the one who had something about you I might have wanted to know… and she was your friend. Should have realised, right?”
“I wanted to tell her,” I blurted out, eager to give him honesty to match what I thought he’d just given me. “How it happened between the two of us… I was on the edge of telling her, just so I could hear what she had to say.”
“And I assume you didn’t,” said Lucas, as if I’d told him something much more innocuous than that I’d almost betrayed him to the one person gunning for him. I had to peek, to see the smile I knew was going to be there. “Well, you know I’ve always lived on the wild edge of things.”
And he was going to be the death of me at it. I had hardly taken my eyes off the road for a second, but it still scared me that Lucas could drag me so far away from where I thought my boundaries were. “If I asked you what happened with Ashleigh and those other girls, would you tell me?”
“Some things, sure,” Lucas said. “Whatever I even remember. Are you going to ask?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not really any better at this boyfriend, girlfriend deal than you are, but that’s safer-not-to-know territory, isn’t it?”
“I will tell you this without your permission,” Lucas said. “There’s not really anything there that would shock you.”
“That’s far from the worst thing I’ve gotten from you without permission at least,” I commented.
At Lucas’s house there was some awkward small talk with Lucy and his mother before Lucas dragged me upstairs. It was probably going to be a long time before I was comfortable around any of the Starlings, Lucas included, but I was confident his family were going to come to love me. Once they realised I had the power to save him from himself and that they could trust me to wield it, they would love me.
“I can just see how it’s going to be around here in a few months’ time.” Lucas backed me up against the end of his bed and tugged at my uniform. “You’re going to be so jealous of Lucy.”
My heart was all up in my mouth at the suggestion that I would be around for that long, so I made a joke of it. “You’re going to be able to keep me around for whole months?”
“I’ve waited ten years, apparently,” Lucas said, “so months is no big deal at all. And I need to keep you around long enough that my parents think we’re serious so they’ll let me dip into my savings to replace your car. I swear that fucking thing is starting to smell mouldy even with all the airing we gave it.”
“And I’m going to keep it,” I told him. I let out a completely graceless squeak as he pushed me onto my back on his bed and climbed on over the top of me, but I was determined to maintain my train of thought. “You need something around to remind you that impulsive actions have consequences, and I’d rather it not be me with a permanent injury.”