by Tiffany Sala
Was she flirting with him?
“It can backfire on you,” Lucas said, “if you play it the wrong way. I could walk out of here this instant and go to another store.”
He stood still, holding her gaze. Definitely not on the edge of walking out of the store.
Was he flirting with her?
This was just some advanced negotiation procedure, right? Absolutely no sensual subtext. People having sexually charged incidents while haggling to buy a smartphone was also not something that happened in the real world.
But, that being as it was, I was still incredibly uncomfortable and wanted to be as far away from the whole thing as possible.
Lucas glanced at me. It was nice to see he wasn’t so stuck gazing at her he couldn’t remember I existed. Not that I would have been jealous—well, who was I kidding, even if I didn’t want him eyeing me flirtatiously most women would feel something to be on the edge of that scene. “Well, Callie here needs a new phone, and all we’ve established so far is she’s not an Apple… so other than that detail, we are open to suggestions.”
I was ‘Callie here’. Not a friend or a girlfriend. I wondered if she’d made a note of that. I wondered why I was making a note of that.
“There’s something new that’s just come out that I’ve been recommending to everyone,” the girl said. “It’s what I’ll be buying once I need a new phone.” She led us over to a display of devices so big they could surely not be meant to be actual phones, spouting a few numbers that didn’t mean anything to me and I knew I wouldn’t remember. “It comes in a really tasteful selection of colours, too: rose pink, sky blue, and metallic gold.”
“What do you think, Callie?” Lucas asked. “Entirely up to you, just let us know what you like or don’t like.”
I sort of wanted to select something else, just because it felt weird somehow to have my new phone chosen by this stranger under Lucas’s direction, but with what I knew about them I’d just end up selecting myself a garage remote or something. I didn’t even realise that phones were supposed to say something.
So I said the only thing I could think of to say. “Metallic gold sounds like a really great colour.”
And then Lucas got a discount so big it would probably have paid for my entire phone if I had been selecting one according to my own usual budget.
“Is that normal?” I asked as I trotted out of the store after him, almost hugging the little bag containing an alarmingly large box and not caring in the slightest if I looked like some dumb girlfriend getting everything paid for by my boyfriend.
It wasn’t like I needed to be spoiled like this by anyone, but yeah, after the way he’d behaved towards me, I was owed a little something to smooth things over. And I didn’t intend to let him think he could get away with that sort of behaviour by buying me things after, either. It was a penalty, that was what I would see it as. Something he was doing in addition to making amends for his behaviour by not behaving the same way in the future. And I’d really needed a new phone anyway, I’d had my old one for years and it would have broken one way or another soon enough. If I was careful, I would be able to hold on to this one until I was able to get a pay increase and not care so much about buying things like new phones.
I realised I was trying to talk myself into being okay with the situation on a conscious level, and I really hoped I would succeed.
“Is what normal?” Lucas asked, with a little smile that suggested he wasn’t so clueless about what I was asking as he was playing it. “Having the staff recommend to you what to buy?”
“No,” I said, “that kind of discount. In the hundreds.”
“Oh,” said Lucas. “No, that is a really cracking discount. I impressed myself that time around.” I swear he puffed his chest out a little. “She must have really liked the look of me.”
“Huh,” I said.
“Callie, mark my words,” Lucas said as we stopped next to his sister’s car. “Now, my details will be in their store system, on the paperwork for that phone. That girl is going to go in and get my phone number, even though she knows she could get fired for it, and call me. She’ll find an excuse.”
“You’re fooling yourself,” I said, mostly automatically. It was the sort of retort I’d shoot at guy acquaintances who were mouthing off like that, because it would be true… but I did not think it necessarily was true for Lucas. He was an entirely different beast who operated on different rules.
“It’ll happen,” he insisted. “She’ll make out like she wanted to clarify some detail of the sale with me or make sure I knew to take advantage of some dumb special offer, but she’ll be trying to get me to launch into small talk so she can grab onto any handle to charm me and then have me say, well I don’t normally do this, but… and ask her out.”
He was grinning, but I was pretty sure he was serious. “Are you going to ask her out?” I asked.
Lucas swung himself into his side of the car. “Do you want me to?”
I hadn’t expected that answer. I didn’t know how to respond. “Let’s put this another way,” he said. “Do you not want me to?”
“You should do whatever you want to,” I said. “I mean, do you like her?”
“Won’t know until I spend some time getting to know her better, will I?” Lucas said. “I mean, all I’ve got to go by right now is she’s cute and she can hold down a job.”
“Well, if those are your standards…” I stopped myself from continuing wherever that was going.
He was fucking lying, anyway. I could see damn well there was more to it than it. There was a quality to that girl that made me go, yes, that is the kind of girl someone like Lucas would want to have an excuse to pick up. She was the kind of girl someone like him would end up marrying. As for me… I guess I was good enough for a bit of fun.
I had to start being more careful.
Lucas was smirking. I didn’t think I had stopped talking fast enough.
“Well,” he said, “let’s get you home before anything happens to you or that new phone.”
Chapter Seven
I had some vague ideas about hiding the new phone from my parents to avoid further drama, but I realised pretty quickly that would be impossible. I’d have to keep my old one around, and once they saw the condition it was in they would probably start harassing me to accept their help in buying a new one. Not to mention how much worse it would look when I finally had to come clean to them and they realised I’d been lying about it for so long.
So I tackled the problem head-on in the end. I explained to my parents over dinner that night that my old phone had fallen out of the convertible and gotten smashed, and Lucas had felt bad enough about it that he’d bought me a new one. It seemed like it was all going well until I took out the still-boxed phone and showed them. Even though I pretended I had no idea what it had actually cost, they weren’t too fooled.
“You can’t accept this sort of gift from him, Callie,” Dad told me. “It’s too much. That’s not just a replacement in any sense of the word.”
“Well he did hit her car before,” Mum pointed out, “and now this. I’m sure he’s just feeling very guilty about the whole thing.” She was frowning in a state of extreme thoughtfulness, which was a very bad state when it came to my mother. “You know, I remember his mother used to be really nice, back when she did the odd parents’ group event with us in primary school. We should see if we can have the whole family over for lunch or dinner, make it clear there’s no hard feelings over this.”
I couldn’t remember Lucas’s mother any more than I could remember his sister, but I was certain this would be a terrible idea. A whole family of people who could just replace cars and phones at the drop of one, squished up around our dining table while my dad glowered at Lucas and my mother assured his parents repeatedly that anything their son had to buy me was just fine with her?
Someone was doing burnouts along our street right that minute. I couldn’t even imagine the awkwardness of that happening with
the Starlings over for dinner. It could only get worse if there was a drug bust or a major street fight… and neither of those was a completely outside possibility.
“Mum, please,” I said. “That would be a bit uncomfortable.”
“If you’re not official, I suppose,” Mum muttered.
“We’re not even unofficial, Mum. He’s just helping me out to make up for a few things that were his fault.”
Mum stiffened. “If he’s not going to make it official with you, your father is right. You can’t accept those sorts of expensive gifts from someone who thinks of you as just someone to have fun with.”
I would have banged my head down on the table if there’d been any room between the plates for it. “Do you really think we’re—I’m not doing anything like that with him, I swear. Not that it would be anyone’s business because we’re both more than old enough to make that decision, but it really is just him helping me out. Nothing else.”
And I really did believe that after the phone shopping trip. It had seemed for a second like he was being flirty with me over that girl from the shop, but he’d hardly had anything to say once we got in the car and he drove me home. He didn’t try to touch me and he even unlocked the door properly so getting out without exposing myself didn’t have to be a big challenge.
Maybe what he’d done in the hospital had been an impulse thing, just something that happened what with all the adrenaline and general craziness of that event. Maybe it was just me wanting to believe… but maybe it really had been an accident that he’d run into me in the first place. I hadn’t seen anything, after all. Maybe I hadn’t been paying attention and he hadn’t been paying attention… maybe he’d just been looking for me after my work to bother me again, and he’d accidentally taken it too far. As far as I knew he hadn’t been injured in the crash, but I didn’t really know if he’d let anyone check him out either. He must have been in a strange mental state afterwards, at least.
If he genuinely thought I was being paranoid in accusing him of running into him, maybe he really had thought I might be stashing a knife or something in my pocket when he’d thrown my phone on the—
I was definitely losing it if I had managed to convince myself Lucas was completely innocent in all of this.
“Are you saying this guy isn’t making any sort of overtures at all?” Dad said. “Because those are the ones you need to watch out for most of all.”
“I think your dad is right,” Mum said. “You need to have a talk with him, confirm where this relationship is going.”
“That’s not what I was trying to say at all,” Dad grumbled.
“There is no relationship!” I said. “And, I swear, everything is fine. He just feels like he owes me a few, I guess. There won’t be any consequences from me taking this thing, and once I have another car sorted out there won’t be any need for us to spend so much time together.”
Mum and Dad were both shaking their heads at me, albeit probably for slightly different reasons.
“You have to trust me on this,” I tried again. “I know it isn’t the way things would have been done when you guys were my age, but things have changed a lot now.”
“We’re not dinosaurs just because we were born in a year that didn’t start with 20, Callie,” Mum said. “Most things are probably very similar.”
But they both seemed to have lost any enthusiasm for talking about it at that moment, which was just fine with me if I could get on with dinner and get to unpackaging that phone like I really wanted.
I was pretty sure they discussed ‘the situation’ further when I was in my bedroom wrangling with homework I could barely even remember receiving, what with all the excitement of the day. I heard a lot more raised voices, and voices at all, than I was accustomed to hearing over the noise of the TV. But if they were happy to keep it to themselves, I was perfectly fine with that.
There wasn’t much for them to discuss after the day of the phone-shopping date. I kept the shiny new device out from under their noses where it couldn’t provoke them, and Lucas didn’t seem interested in… well, anything to do with me. He came and picked me up each morning looking sleek and gorgeous as ever, and drove me home after school, but he didn’t try to talk to me. When I tried to take advantage of the usual ‘how are you?’ as a conversation starter, he would respond to my nervous babble with a grunt, as if he couldn’t even be bothered shutting me down.
It went without saying, but he ignored me at school as well, leaving me to face the continued questions and speculation of everyone else in our class. It was even worse than it had been when we were kids. At least then I’d thought it was real most of the time, and if everyone else had known better than me they’d at least acted like it was real, so I wasn’t hanging my head in shame from the first moment.
I knew this wasn’t real, and everyone else knew it too. They were all laughing at me for the possibility that I might think differently… and no amount of insisting I got it would have stopped them, even if that had been something I could do.
Then by the third day of the week everything about our car accident had come out, and the going theory—gleefully shared right in front of me—was that I’d threatened Lucas, or my parents had threatened Lucas, and he was stuck carting me to and from school until I decided to liberate him from the arrangement. Never mind how ridiculous it was to think that my family could ever threaten Lucas’s. I bet nobody was bothering him asking questions about me when he was just going about his business.
I dreaded having to deal with whatever car he’d organised for me, because it was bound to start up a whole new round of questions. But at least I would be free to drive to and from school myself, and steel myself for whatever crap the day had ahead for me without having Lucas’s unsettling silence to contend with. Without having to wonder if he really had hooked up with that girl from the phone store, or how much he was thinking about what had happened between us when we were kids, or what he was telling his actual friends about me. Because surely they were asking. Surely I was the reason he wasn’t leaving school with a whole bunch of them piled up in the back of his sister’s car.
What the fuck had I ever done to him to deserve this much messing with my head?
On Friday afternoon, with him pulled up outside my house, I said, “Well, thanks for driving me around this week,” and waited for him to unlock the door.
I stiffened when he turned to me. “Your new car should be ready by Monday, Callie.”
“Really?” It was good news I hadn’t been expecting. I had only just gotten the obvious bad news from Rob: my old car was not going to be worth saving according to the insurance people. I’d sort of counted on having to wait at least two weeks for whatever Lucas’s family was offering to come through, and that would have been a blessing considering it took three for me just to be ready to pay to fix my old beast.
“It’s a done deal,” Lucas said. “Come Monday morning, we’ll have your new car and mine sitting in our driveway. His and hers.”
I flinched at his wink, too. I hadn’t realised it before, but some people were more natural winkers than others… and Lucas Starling was not a natural winker in any sense. That sort of cutesy cheekiness didn’t suit him at all.
After the shock of it, the gesture did put me at ease. It sort of reminded me that Lucas was a real human after all, with a few real flaws. Like being bad at winking, ha. Some flaw.
“Should I come around to pick it up on Monday morning then?” I asked. “Or…”
“I’ll drop it to you early,” Lucas said. “Come around half an hour sooner, then you can drive me back to get mine, we can see if you have any complaints.”
“I’m not going to have any complaints,” I said. “I mean, so long as it has all the necessary parts.”
“It’s going to have all the necessary parts,” Lucas assured me.
“Are you sure I shouldn’t be putting some money towards this?” I asked. “Just to, I don’t know…” To make my parents not look at me
like I’m some really unsuccessful whore was perhaps not the best thing to say.
“Do you really think you could contribute anything meaningful to the cost?” Lucas said, nodding towards the phone I’d finally started to get less awkward about having out in his presence. When I’d been keeping it my pocket or bag earlier in the week he’d started muttering about the possibility I was secretly recording him again, and I really didn’t want to have him flip the new one over the side of the car and lose all the FarmVille progress I’d accumulated over the week.
“You know I never needed an expensive car,” I said. “I was perfectly happy with what I had, it got me from A to—”
“It got you run into all the time,” Lucas said. “People see a shitbucket, they don’t worry so much about being careful. We’re getting you something nice. It’s used, a bit newer than what you had but it’s not like we’ve sent away for something direct from the factory.”
“That’s good to know,” I said.
Lucas shook his head. “You’re an annoying mystery. Never heard a girl so relieved she isn’t going to be the first driver.”
I wanted to make some comment about how only guys cared that much about being first in something, but I started blushing so hard at the thought I knew it was a terrible idea. “How many girls have you had to buy cars for, anyway?” I said.
“Just the one, and my family is pretty happy she’s willing to accept the car and not sue my arse off for running up the back of her.” His grim stare nearly snatched my breath away. “So maybe you could keep them happy and actually just accept the damn thing.”
“Okay, okay.” I heard the click of the door being unlocked and scrambled out before he could convince me to buy any bridges as well. “I guess I’ll see you and my new car on Monday, Lucas.”
“I look forward to it.”