Shaking his head, he crossed the living room to turn down the stereo before he vacuumed potato chip and pretzel crumbs from the carpet, along with spilled ashes. The stink of stale beer awakened in the carpet fibers.
Anya hunted for a box of baking soda, which she located in the refrigerator. She handed it to him to sprinkle on the carpet.
“If this is your way of apologizing, you have nothing to be sorry for. Except for drinking my rum.”
“You should take a couple days off.” She hauled a full garbage bag out to the balcony, winced at the blast of cold air, and leapt back inside, securing the door behind her.
“Yeah. I’ll need to think of an excuse for my face.”
“I still like your face.”
Lucas snorted. “Maybe update my résumé while I’m at it.”
Anya lifted her hand but let it fall before he spied her attempt to touch him again. “Everything will be fine.”
“We’ll see about that.” He emptied the canister into the stainless steel can in the kitchen and returned the vacuum to its home.
“Hey, not to be nosy, but…okay, I was totally being nosy. I saw your prescriptions.”
“Anya.” He grunted and flicked his gaze to the ceiling.
“What’s the big deal? My dad made me go to therapy for a while after my mom died. And he’ll be on medication for the rest of his life.”
“You really don’t want to hear the rest of my sob story.”
“I do, actually.” She hopped onto the counter, dangling her legs over the edge.
Lucas put away the liquor bottles and scrubbed the area around the sink. “I met my ex in our sophomore year. I had everything at that point, right?” He sneered and scoured the varnished maple countertop with increasingly vehement strokes. “A girlfriend, a good career path, and of course swimming. Training took a lot of my time, but she stuck with me. Even after my sister. This was the one; I was convinced. About a year ago, I asked her to marry me.”
Anya’s fingernails bit into her palms. She was not going to cry, not now, not even with the realization that what she’d perceived as flirting was Lucas working through depression. But he was right; she didn’t want to hear it anymore.
“She said yes. Great! So I’m thinking in the next few years, I’ll have my master’s degree, be a world champion swimmer, and become a husband. Well, at least one of those things worked out.”
“What happened?” She wiggled her toes again, stretched them.
Lucas noticed and chuckled. “I got the offer for this job a couple months before graduation. She wanted to move south or west. That was the first reason.” He was still staring at her feet. She tucked one behind the other, but they were so damned big, like her father’s. “Then it was that we were too young. And maybe we were, I guess, although we wouldn’t have gotten married until sometime after college. Then it was that I’d thrown away my dream, and my sister was never coming back so get over it.”
“I’m sorry,” Anya mumbled.
“And the moral of this story, Anya, is even if we could be a thing, which we can’t, you could do way better.” Lucas gathered the last of the garbage from the kitchen and disposed of it. “She was right.”
“I don’t think you’re being objective. You have more than most guys your age. And your dream isn’t over if you don’t want it to be. You’re twenty-two, Lucas. Jesus.”
He poked his tongue at the wound in his lip. His gaze was ping-ponging all over the place, landing on everything, however briefly, except her. “Anyway, I asked you to stay because I wanted to apologize if I’ve led you on in any way. I never meant to hurt you.”
If? “That’s what phones are for.” Why couldn’t he understand how alarming this hunger for him was? That her heart’s stammers and fits in his presence convinced her she was dying?
“Too impersonal. And we couldn’t have this conversation at school. So…friends?” He held out his hand.
“Don’t have much choice, do I? It’s that or nothing.”
He lowered his arm, holding it slightly away from his ribs. “I’m flattered, Anya. And if things were different…”
“I don’t want to play that game. I’ve been watching my father play it for over a year.”
Lucas rested against the counter. “You’re fixer, aren’t you? You can’t fix your dad, so you’re looking for someone else to fix. Homecoming, when I told you about my sister—you felt sorry for me.”
She squinted at him. Her fingers tingled with a fury she’d normally take out on puck. Or, she noted with sadness, Dad. Verbally, anyway.
“It’s not a bad thing. But fixers tend to get hurt in the end.”
“I grew up with two people who worshipped each other. I know what love is.” Way to commit the biggest social faux-pas and prove Hailey right all at the same time. “I’m not saying—”
Too late. “Don’t.” He broke the eye contact he’d just allowed himself and worried his tongue at the cut again. “You don’t, Anya. Not after a few months.”
“Everyone is constantly telling me what I do or don’t think, feel, whatever, but I’m not a child. I’ll be eighteen in April. If I’m not an adult now, how do I magically become one in less than four months?”
“You have a valid point, but it doesn’t make us any less unethical. I can show you the policy in the handbook—”
Anya pounded her fist on the countertop. “Forget ethics for a minute, Lucas.”
“I can’t.” His face was strained again, his movements jittery at the coffee maker, as though his limbs had forgotten how to work in concert with each other. “School employees cannot have relationships with students. Period. And I was an idiot for inviting you here in the first place. I could be investigated if anyone even thinks there’s something going on.”
“And yet it happens all the time.”
Lucas measured two teaspoons of sugar into a mug bearing his alma mater’s logo. “I’m in the position of power here, which makes your ability to consent questionable at best. Plus I’m five years older than you are. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah. And I’m tired of my father, society, everyone telling me I don’t know what I want, or can’t possibly want it, for no apparent reason other than I have a vagina. You know boys don’t deal with this shit. Newsflash: Girls like sex too.”
His eyes bulged. He spluttered over what he’d planned to say until he managed, “You need to go home, Anya. And the only reason I’m going to tell you this is because I’ve had a few drinks, but…” Lucas skimmed his fingers over her knee. “You do have incredible legs.”
She gently touched the tender, bruised skin beneath his eye and let her fingers wander down his face to the cut. Drawing him closer, she parted her knees, her skirt hiked halfway up her thighs. Lucas skated his thumbs along the inside of each. She cradled his head in her hands and breathed him in, her knowledge of him incomplete unless she could also taste. His forehead on hers, his eyes already closed. Soft, stilted breaths murmured over her lips in a silence primed with the exhilarating secrecy of forbidden love.
His stubble scraped her chin as he moved his lips to hers. She crimped her fingers in his hair. His discolored mouth, a flower she would coax into bloom.
“We can’t,” Lucas whispered.
“If we know this is right, who is anyone else to tell us it’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to feel like I’m using you, or this is a rebound thing. She just broke up with me last spring.” Throwing everything he had at the wall to see if it stuck. He’d have to do better than that if the prohibition on dating between students and school employees didn’t scare her off. “You can’t even legally drink for another three years. What would we do for fun?”
Anya flipped her hair over her shoulder. “I don’t know, Lucas. Play with my dolls? Color? Since you seem to think I’m a child.”
“I know you’re not a child. That’s the problem.” Lucas backed away, dragging his nails along her thighs as he did. “I need you to
go.”
She reflexively parted them further, delighting in his evident struggle not to look up her skirt. “The district shouldn’t hire a hot twenty-two-year-old man and think students aren’t going to fall for him.”
“That would be age discrimination.” He smiled and rolled his cut lip into his mouth. “But thank you.”
Anya slid off the counter, adjusted her skirt, and put her godawful shoes back on. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was spouting from the stereo, begging her to shank the speakers with her high heels. Lucas had vanished into the hallway.
“Hey.” He returned with her coat and laid it over a bar chair at the pass-through. “Wait. One more dance?” Another cheeky smile. “Because I’m an idiot.”
If she were capable of refusing the opportunity to be close to him, they wouldn’t be in this mess. A current hummed through her as they joined hands. No Mrs. May to ruin it for them; no one to stop their inevitable course.
“Do you want to kiss me?”
His mouth quirked up. “Not a question you should be asking, Ms. Volynsky.”
“I know how it feels to hurt like that, you know. To miss someone so badly. To wake up from those dreams where they’re still alive, and then it sinks in again that they’re not, and…”
Lucas was staring at the bracelet, his eyes blue enough to drown in, though she had long ago sunk past the point of salvation. He lowered his head to hers. They had run out of words for this moment, or there had never been any.
He drew her bottom lip between his, triggering her body with explosives that detonated one by one as he closed his mouth over hers. The most beautiful burning consumed her. He tested her with the tip of his tongue, and she lured him in with hers, flickering, chasing, sucking. One thought swooped through her mind: Finally.
Lucas grabbed her face, steered her to the wall, and shoved her against it, lashing one arm around her waist. Pushed his tongue deeper then retreated, enticing her to follow him, Anya already addicted to his candy mouth. It hurt him; he winced and gasped, and she tasted blood as the cut reopened. But he sucked at her the way she imagined him sucking on other things, and the place she most wanted him to kindled into blazing life. His heat saturated her through his clothes, his every touch branding her. She was tingling, throbbing between her legs, her nerve endings alive with what Lucas alone could fix.
For the first time since the kiss began, he interrupted it—maybe to catch his breath or to demand she leave. As if she would. She needed him to finish what he had started. Everywhere he stroked her was fire.
“Yes,” he breathed into her ear, before skimming his lips along her jaw line. His tongue quested, coiled with hers, wordlessly seeking permission. But he was already running his hands over the contours of her body, her breasts and her ribs and her hips, lighting her up beneath her clothes. He assaulted her neck, licked and kissed and nipped, as both hands heaved her skirt up. Behind its fabric prison, his dick throbbed against her as their tongues encircled each other.
“Please.” She gripped his hair, his shoulders, his face. Kissed his chin and his throat and back to his mouth, pushing back with each lunge.
Eyes closed, he moaned into her hair. “Tell me not to do this. Tell me”—he uttered a grave laugh—“you’ve come to your fucking senses.”
“No.”
Lucas let out a long breath, the spell broken. “Then I have to.” He released her and slumped over the pass-through counter like a deflated birthday balloon. “I like you, Anya. In a way I’m not supposed to, obviously. So we need to keep this professional. Trainer and athlete. That’s all we can be right now.”
A full-scale meltdown was mere seconds from discharging a nuclear warhead inside her, the single rational response to this internecine little affair. She yanked her skirt down. “You kiss me like that, feel me up, and I’m supposed to—what? Pretend it never happened?”
He fingered the bracelet. Smears of lipstick stained either side of his mouth. “Don’t you get it? It’s the only way we can see each other. Do you want me to lose my job? I won’t be allowed anywhere near the school, let alone you.”
She wrenched the doorknob. “Merry fucking Christmas, Lucas.”
“Anya—” He shot out his arm to catch her, but she shrugged out of his grasp and swung the door shut in his face.
It wasn’t until she stood alone in the hallway, shaking with nascent sobs—because he was right, of course, which deepened their quandary—that she realized her mother’s promise ring had at some point slipped off her finger. Must’ve been during the fight. And if anyone had found the diamond-encrusted, white gold band, she’d never see it again.
“Lucas,” she called weakly, accompanied by an even feebler knock. No answer. She texted him, and the response remained the same.
Her vision blurred as she stumbled toward the elevator. A wet moan erupted from her lungs.
Dad was going to kill her.
Chapter Thirteen
Anya
“Do you have any fucking idea what time it is?” Dad paced the kitchen, seething and red-faced behind his beard. “Almost two!”
Anya glared at him, defiant. She would love him again in the morning, but in the middle of the night, heartbroken and furious, she loathed anything bearing a Y chromosome. “I can tell time.”
“That’s all you have to say?” Dad furrowed his brow and curled his lip. “Is that blood on your dress? What little dress there is?”
“Someone punched Lucas. He was defending me. He’s fine, I’m fine, everything is fine.”
“No, it is not, especially when you insisted you were going to Hailey’s. This has gone too far with him. You lied to my face.” Dad cracked his knuckles as he prowled the kitchen. Flexed and released the hands that craved something to destroy. “I’m pulling you off the team. I should’ve put you in juniors instead of letting you play for the school—”
“I’m almost eighteen! Stop trying to control me!”
“But you’re not eighteen”—he jabbed a finger at her—“and as long as you live under my roof, you’ll do as I say!”
“Forget Boston. I want to go as far as I can to get away from you!” Anya hurled her purse at the kitchen counter and stomped toward the stairs.
“You want to be treated like an adult, yet you act like a child? Go to your room! And don’t come out until I tell you to!”
“I hate you!”
“Anya Aleksandrovna Volynskaya, don’t you dare speak to me that way!” His voice boomed throughout the house, shook her foundations.
“Go to hell!”
“Oh, that is it, little girl.” Never mind his limp; Dad took the stairs two at a time after her. She fled to her room, locking the door as he rained his fists upon it. “Open this goddamned door right now, or I swear to God I will rip it off its hinges!”
She didn’t doubt his ability to do so. Her father was very tall and very strong. And furious.
“Believe me, Anya, I have nothing better to do. So you have five seconds to open this door before I break it down. One.”
“Just leave me alone!”
“Two.” He rattled the knob.
“Please, Dad, go away.”
“Three.”
She twisted the lock. The door opened, and Dad lurched in. As livid as he was, she had nothing to fear from him. He was all bluster, huffing and puffing, threatening to blow her door down, but he’d never laid a hand on her. His anger had already cooled from a boil to a simmer as he sat beside her on the bed, his shoulders stooped.
“Did someone hurt you tonight?”
Her heart lay in a million pieces on Lucas’s living room floor. Other than that…“No.”
“Did you and Lucas have sex?”
“No, Dad,” she grumbled with her face in her hands.
“What has gotten into you?”
She stared at the ceiling as though it would open up and rain answers on her. “I’m in love with him.” She swiped at her eyes, but the tears kept coming, and she gave up.
&
nbsp; Dad hooked an arm around her and pulled her close, kissed the top of her head. “I know, baby. I’m not blind, am I? But if it’s meant to be, he’ll wait until after you graduate.”
“Why would he wait for me? You’ve seen him, Dad. He’s gorgeous.” The memory of his sleek and flawless body was imprinted into her like a tintype. She choked down a sob.
“You’re not exactly some kind of troll.” Dad was giving her one of his crooked smiles. “You do have two incredibly good-looking parents.”
Anya laid her head between his neck and shoulder. “I hate this.”
“Sometimes you move past it. You get older, or you meet someone new. But you know in your heart when you’ve found the person you’re meant to be with, even when it feels like you’re dying inside.”
That was it. She was barely breathing without Lucas near. “I don’t want to quit the team.” Because I will die if I don’t have even minimal contact with him.
Because I don’t want him to forget.
“All right. But don’t let this distract you. The best thing you can do is to show him you have a complete life outside of him. Your mother did with me, and it made me even more determined to win her back. I needed to prove I still fit into her world.”
“Six months feels like forever.” Anya unbuckled her shoes, kicked them off, and flopped onto the bed. If only she could sleep through the next six months.
“It does when you’re seventeen. But there will come a day when half a year will feel like the blink of an eye. So enjoy it while you can. Have fun with your friends. And if Lucas is the one, it’ll happen when the time is right. I promise.”
“I’m sorry I said awful things to you. Again.”
Dad smiled, but her poisonous words were taking a toll on him, as if missing Mom weren’t enough of a millstone around his neck. Where once his eyes had been so expressive, now they were guarded. He was tired of being hurt, deliberately or not, by people he loved. “I know you don’t mean it.” He kissed her cheek. “Get some sleep. Good night, milaya.”
“Good night.”
He gazed at her with those sad green eyes as he pulled the door closed, until that gaze alighted on her barren right hand. “Where’s the ring?”
The Pieces Of Us (The Firebird Trilogy Book 3) Page 12