Suddenly the garage (heated floor and all) and even his arms felt cold. I wriggled sideways a little. It wasn’t like Lucas to be what sounded like evasive… not without a very good reason.

I tried to make it into a joke. “I was just thinking, you know everything about all of my accidents.”

Then I felt the smile melt off my face as I realised I didn’t know everything about all of my accidents.

The police had never found the person responsible for the first one. All I remembered was a big dark thing in my peripheral vision, and then the bang.

I stared at the big dark thing Lucas drove, and after a few seconds I shot to my feet.

“Let’s go grab breakfast and say hi to your parents.” I’d heard them moving around in the kitchen earlier. Suddenly, I didn’t want it to be just the two of us out there.

“I’m pretty hungry too.” Lucas rose easily, his long legs closing the distance between us like it was nothing.

I wasn’t going to be able to feel safe anywhere in his house, that was for sure. But I had no choice but to go through the whole breakfast routine now. Accepting Lucas’s casual affectionate gestures, exchanging polite conversation with his mother and father and answering their questions, trying not to get lost in my own boiling thoughts. And that part made it worse, because his parents were so nice. I could see myself getting close to them in a way I wasn’t with my own parents any more, strangely in part because they didn’t seem to be the type to be that invested in getting close to me.

But all of that was up in the air now if my suspicions had anything to them. And if Lucas didn’t feel like talking, I had no idea how I would find out what I needed to know.

Every time I wasn’t trying to put on a charming face for Lucas’s family or Lucas’s friends, I was going over the whole thing.

There had to be only one reason he would close up on me like that when I asked about that accident, right? If he’d been the one to hit me, he wouldn’t want to admit it. He had to know how badly I would take that.

How could he think he could just avoid admitting it by pretending it wasn’t happening? Well… it was insane, wasn’t it? We didn’t talk to one another back then. I’d been coming back from one of Dane’s building sites that day and stopped to pick up some things at the supermarket for Mum, so I wasn’t anywhere I could have expected to run into him, literally or otherwise.

I hadn’t expected to have Lucas run into me when I was on my way home from work, either. It wasn’t anywhere near his neighbourhood, and there seemed to be no way he could have tracked me unless he’d followed me straight from Rob’s repair place… which he surely couldn’t have done with all his friends in his car. If Ashleigh was already gunning for him, there was no way he could have let her see that.

One thing seemed consistent here: Lucas had his own ways of getting hold of me whenever he felt like it. I couldn’t assume much of anything, and he was still far from willing to tell me even close to everything. How could I be sure he hadn’t been watching me since before that day of the accident, making his plans? How did I really know he hadn’t put his plan into motion long before that day?

If he was the mysterious car who had hit me while I was parked then he had, hadn’t he?

The question was, what was his endgame? If he’d wanted to date me, he could have done it without all that trouble. It wasn’t like he’d remembered our prior history to think I might push him away…

But it still wouldn’t be enough for him, would it? Lucas didn’t want to be at my mercy, not even when it was a romantic situation. He had to be in control, and the only way to be in control with a girl you didn’t know well was to control the situation she was in. Put her in a state where she was r

eally vulnerable.

It was fucked-up. Nobody could be that cruel.

I walked through a day at school and an evening I opted to go home and spend with my parents in a white haze. This had been right in front of me the whole time, and I’d ignored it. I’d avoided putting the pieces together as well as I might, because I didn’t want this boy who’d shot fire through my life to be so bad I couldn’t keep him. I’d wanted… It was fucked-up, but maybe I’d wanted everything a girl from Chigwell wasn’t supposed to expect. The handsome boyfriend who looked like a million dollars because he was, the nice family, the freedom to run my life the way Lucas did, not having to think about things like money or other people.

Of course I would never run my life the way Lucas did. I would never have so little regard for those around me. It wasn’t me, and maybe that was down to our different upbringings as well. I couldn’t judge him for that any more, we’d gotten too close for that.

But maybe I couldn’t forgive everything he’d done to me enough to continue with him. Maybe I shouldn’t.

“Callie?”

I realised Mum had been trying to get my attention for a while. I hadn’t even noticed Dad leaving the room.

“It’s not going well with Lucas, is it?” she asked.

I had something snappy on the tip of my tongue—you would be happy to hear that, right—but then I realised I didn’t want to take this in that direction. Some of her previous attack on me had been unjustified, but what she hadn’t said, that was completely justified, was that I’d completely cast my parents aside since getting with Lucas, and it had been unfair to them. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me that she was so angry.

“I think you were right all along,” I told her.

She shook her head. “No, I was wrong. Or I was saying things for the wrong reasons, at least. I hope you never let me keep you from reaching for things that are…” She glanced at the shut door that led to the hallway and the bedrooms, and dropped her voice. “…more than I would ever have been able to. Any parent should want that for their child.” I did wonder, in this case, just how much she did want that for me… but she was pushing herself, and that was more than most parents would do, I suspected. “I’m just not sure what it is you’re trading here, and I don’t know if I like it.”

“I thought I knew. Now I think I didn’t ask enough questions when I had the chance.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Mum admitted. “Just… be careful. Nobody can completely change who they are overnight.”

Tags: Tiffany Sala Troubled Playthings Erotic
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