by Tiffany Sala
I didn’t think I was aiming to get in a relationship with Lucas anyway, which seemed to be Ashleigh’s main concern. I wasn’t sure what else there was to be going for, but I would just have to find out.
When I finally turned and started walking away properly, I didn’t even get a chance to count one before a burst of giggling rose up from behind me. Yeah, I must have seemed pretty funny to those girls, getting so fired up over a guy who did not even really exist in the same world as me.
I supposed they were welcome to laugh. I had a mystery to solve, and so far, absolutely no leads.
Chapter Ten
The next time I saw Lucas, it was three-forty on a Friday afternoon, school was finally over for the week, and I’d already just about switched my mind to where it would need to be to get my work done when I realised he was leaning against the car I could still barely believe was mine.
Well, it was a little easier to accept thanks to a small decorative addition that had been made at some point on Thursday, which I saw at once Lucas had noticed, because he was running his fingertips over the scratches, tracing the shape they formed.
“I notice you’ve been keeping the top up,” he called as soon as I got close. He had priorities, apparently.
“I like to actually arrive where I’m going without my hair all ruffled up by the wind,” I said.
“Nah,” Lucas said, “all women look better when they’re a bit ruffled up.”
He lifted his hand off the car to pinch a bit of my hair between two fingers and flick it. Suddenly I was rigid with both nervousness and something that might have been anticipation.
“I noticed the threatening symbol someone’s scratched into it on this side as well,” Lucas added, pointing at the cartoon penis outline.
I sighed. “Yeah, that was bound to happen.” I wanted to point out nobody had been interested in vandalising my nice boring used car in all the time I’d had it, but after all the time I’d spent obsessing over Jillian, finding no evidence that disproved the idea that she was his long-dead girlfriend, I didn’t have the heart to go into the car fight again. “It’s okay, it’s not particularly threatening. Not exactly very big.”
“It’s not mine,” said Lucas, “that’s for sure.” He straightened and stepped away from the car. “How about we head off somewhere for the rest of the afternoon?”
“I’ve got to go to work this afternoon,” I said. “Sorry.”
He leaned back against the car, folding his arms in front of him. “Working constantly, and still no money to buy herself a decent fucking car.”
“My car was decent for me,” I said, “until it got smashed into twice. All this work doesn’t help me if nobody will let me get ahead. I am sorry, though.” I had to push myself past my hesitation. I didn’t really want to be the one seeming to ask him out, but if I wanted to find out about Jillian it seemed he was the only useful source of information, and if I wanted to get anything out of him I would have to spend some time with him where we weren’t at odds. “I have to work a lot of Saturday too, but if you want to hang out on Sunday I’m going to be free.”
“No,” said Lucas, “I want to hang out now. I’ll come to work with you.”
“You can’t do that,” I said. “What are you going to do, sit in the car and stare at me through the window while I get my boss’s tax paperwork in order?”
“I’m going to be sitting right next to you, obviously.”
I was so stunned by the suggestion a laugh burst out of me.
“Glad to amuse,” Lucas said. “Unlock the car so I can get the top off. Women and cars tend to look better that way, you know.”
If he was trying to get a reaction out of me, I wasn’t going to give it to him. “No,” I said. “I’m going to work now. Come see me on Sunday if you want.”
But here I was stuck, because I knew as soon as I pressed the button on my key fob to unlock the car he would be right in there.
“Look, I’m not going to let you go to work on your own when people are threatening you like this,” Lucas said. “Someone needs to go and show that lot there’s someone who will come and stand up for you if they keep giving you crap.”
For a moment, I couldn’t work out what angle he was taking. “Do you mean that damage on the car? That was done here, by some of our classmates, and if you weren’t arranging all these expensive things for me and then completely ignoring me at school they wouldn’t feel like they could get away with doing that kind of shit.”
“If you feel like I’ve been ignoring you, today is your lucky day,” Lucas said. Gleefully steering away from the main point of what I’d been saying. “Come on, let’s go.”
I couldn’t imagine the horror I would have waiting for me from Dane and whoever else happened to be at the office if I had to walk in with Lucas in tow. Especially if I ended up telling them he wasn’t really my boyfriend.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “I mean, it’s pretty well documented at this point that you don’t actually care about me.”
Lucas shifted into another model-perfect posture. “I care, Callie. I just don’t feel some stupid need to prove it by telling you exactly what you want to hear.”
He certainly didn’t, any more than he bothered to do what I wanted him to do… or, more importantly, not do what I didn’t want him to do. And that led into the question I couldn’t ask: why had I not just told someone about all the shit he was doing to me? My parents, or Tamara, or one of the counsellors at my school… there had been plenty of options available to me all along, and some of them had even given me perfect opportunities.
But it came back to what had stopped me at the time, and what still stopped me now: to get anyone to listen, I would have to make some pretty serious allegations. They were the sorts of things that would follow Lucas around for the rest of his life. I could say all I liked that I wanted to keep things from getting to the level of official complaints, but once I involved others the choice might be taken out of my hands.
But if I wanted to handle it in my own way, that meant I had to actually face the situation, find a way to engage with Lucas properly. And I was only going to be able to do that at a time when he was willing to engage.
I made a show of sighing, and handed my key over to him. “Do your worst.”
It didn’t take him long to have the car in its top-down configuration. Once he was done, he opened the door properly to put himself in the front passenger seat, and tossed the keys back to me.
“Where’s your car today, anyway?” I asked as I climbed in. “Don’t tell me you’ve already smashed it and you’re here to see if you can get me to drive you around for the next week.”
“Nah,” Lucas said, studying me in a way that made me feel like he had some kind of panties X-ray vision. “Stayed over at someone’s house for a party last night. Steven drove me there and brought me to school today.”
And yet he looked just as put-together as he did any other day. “Did Steven iron your uniform for you this morning as well?” I asked.
He smiled with half his mouth, which was still more than I could face without a little shiver. “You think I still look pretty good today after a night out, huh?”
“I didn’t even know there were overnight parties happening,” I said, trying to focus on getting the car started without having any incidents that would give Lucas more ammunition against me.
“I’ll get you an invite next time,” Lucas said.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ve been to a few parties before, but when I’m working almost every day of the week it’s just more exhausting than it’s worth.”
I was trying not to pay attention to Lucas, but I saw him nodding as if this was exactly the response he’d expected from me. “You work too hard.”
I pulled out of the school carpark with Lucas watching me drive with an amused expression. Perhaps I was actually too careful for him.
Then once we were off school property, Lucas shifted his arms and legs all at
once, a movement too graceful to be completely casual, and when he was done moving his hand was resting on my knee.
I jerked my leg, an instinctive movement to throw him off, and his nails dug in. The little bite of pain startled me into stillness. I automatically made the movements to keep us driving towards the Stacks Brothers offices, my thoughts circling around and around themselves. Once again, it had hit me what a bad situation I’d gotten myself into when it was already too late.
Well, I was in control of the car at the moment. There was nothing stopping me from parking up somewhere and demanding Lucas get out or behave. But without the context of everything else that had already happened between us, it would just make me seem like a jerk.
His hand squeezed: firm, but not painful this time. His eyes were on my face, his chin up like he was daring me to say something.
And the worst part of it was, my thoughts were primarily turning over whether it would now be appropriate for me to ask him about Jillian. No—the worst part was that I was pretty sure it wasn’t, yet. Well, I should see that as a good thing. It would keep me on task.
“Is this how we’re going to do this, then?” I asked. “You just grab what you like, stick your mouth where you like?”
“Only if you’re into it like we agreed,” Lucas said, smiling at me like he was really pleased with himself now.
That was not what we had agreed, but of course it was impossible for me to argue that now. “You’re not fucking cute, you know that? You act like you can just talk or smile or flutter your eyelashes out of anything, but it’s not true. You keep pulling this shit and you’ll just have everyone seeing right through what you’re doing. People already see through what you’re doing. You should have heard what Ashleigh had to say to me the other day.”
Once that was out of my mouth, I realised I’d made a big mistake. And for all I’d said about his bullshit tactics, I knew I didn’t have one percent of his probable ability to get out of even a situation this bad.
“I’ll be sure to ask her about that on Monday,” he said now, “if I don’t see her before then. I’m sure she’ll be very interested in hearing just how much she can trust you with her thoughts.”
“I’m not usually like that, repeating what other people said,” I protested. “I just… you’ve got me so confused at the moment…”
“Because you like this,” Lucas said, his hand sliding up and down a little, shifting my skirt over my skin.
“No,” I said, “I mean, not necessarily, I—”
“I wouldn’t bother fucking around with you if you didn’t,” Lucas said. “Seriously, Callie, you’re constantly showing me you want this, even if you’re too shy to say it in words. Makes it a lot more fun than some girl who just opens her legs because I breathe in her direction, actually.”
“It is true,” I said, “you’re going to have to do a lot more than breathe to get me to just roll over for you.”
“Oh, of course,” Lucas said. “I wouldn’t expect anything less from you. But actually I really hope you don’t just roll over, Callie. Because that would probably attract a lot of attention you won’t want.”
I didn’t quite know what I was supposed to take from that, but I knew better than to ask.
When we pulled into a parking spot in front of Stacks Brothers, Lucas shifted his hand off me in a perfectly natural move as he went to grab the door. I could never forget that this guy probably ate girls for breakfast.
“Wait,” I said, as he stepped out. “I need you to help me put the roof up.”
“You’re going to be right next to it the whole time in there, right?” Lucas said, staring at the building. “It’s got a glass front and you just sit… right there?”
I didn’t bother asking him when he’d come by and watched me at work. “Dane and the other guys are going to tell me off if I leave it up again. They think it’s insecure no matter what, that I’m just making myself look like a target.”
“Well,” Lucas said, “what I think is that you shouldn’t be letting men other than me tell you what to do.”
I shivered. It was strange to think of him as a man, though technically I supposed he was now. I could barely cope when I was just thinking of him as an old version of that boy who’d made my life a bemused misery when I was ten. “Are you sure I can’t convince you to, I don’t know, go take a walk to the mall or something while I’m working?”
“Oh hell no,” said Lucas. He disappeared from my view for a second, and I started when he came up behind me and started herding me towards the doors, his hands straying so close to my arse I didn’t dare slow down. “I’m going to be right there next to you making sure nothing happens to your car if you have to take a toilet break.”
Dane appeared from somewhere in the back rooms to meet me, just like he had ever since I’d started working there. It was nice to say hi to him, to chat a bit, but I knew he was doing it less because he liked me and wanted to be friendly and more because I was a little girl to him, and that was not what I wanted. I wanted to be seen as a serious prospect for co-managing the place, taking on the role Dane’s useless brother had skipped out on long before my time, and failing that I was eager to become a trained operator of backhoes or forklifts or the like, and throw myself into the mix as one of Dane’s contractors. Anything that would get me out of a secretarial role and somewhere I would at least be believed when I said I had aspirations for myself that went further than finding a man to marry who could give me half a dozen babies to worry about.
Today, I couldn’t think about anything but how I was going to look bringing what looked for all the world like a boyfriend to work. But, of course, Lucas came forward and introduced himself and Dane fell right all over him and got him a chair he could squeeze in alongside mine at my desk, never mind even glancing at me the whole time. Maybe he was just so relieved there was now some man around to keep his uppity accountant-secretary from getting ideas women weren’t supposed to have. He didn’t even call me out over the damn car, though I saw him flick a glance out the window at it.
“You know,” I said once Dane had disappeared into his back rooms, leaving us mercifully without scrutiny. “I wish you weren’t able to do that.”
“What’s that?” Lucas shadowed me with all the dedication of a baby duck, settling himself with annoying grace into his chair after I’d dropped into mine.
“You just somehow have this way of talking people into letting you get away with things the rest of us never would,” I said, “and it bugs me.” The first thing on my list, as always, was double-checking all Dane’s figures from the previous day. All the other parts of a business were hinged on getting the numbers right, and on this occasion even if Lucas managed to hijack my productivity such that I became horrendously behind with everything else, I would at least have the most important details under control.
“You see,” Lucas said, “that is completely the wrong attitude to be taking about it. Instead of looking at me like I’m some annoying unattainable standard… see if you can work out how to attain those same things for yourself.”
“It’s a very masculine way of doing things,” I observed. I started dashing off some calculations on my notepaper. With Lucas talking to me I was going to have to go over everything three times, but if I threw him out I’d just spend the entire two hours worrying about what he’d do when I left, so this was the solution I had to go with.
“We men are known for being good at just taking what we need to take,” Lucas said, and then, so smoothly I didn’t even see him shift his position, his hand was on my knee again.
I must have been making some dramatic face, because he murmured, “Easy,” like I was a wild animal in need of a bit of taming. I certainly felt like that was the case. My eyes were flicking around the room: to the door that led out to the street and my car, to the open doorway which Dane could walk through at any moment. If Dane or any of the contractors or potential clients saw me squabbling with an apparent boyfriend while I was supposed
to be working, it wouldn’t end well for me.
I tried to ignore him and keep working, but it was proving difficult when his fingertips were running lightly over my skin, not quite tickling but definitely making my leg jump every now and then.
“What are you trying to do?” I asked in a more or less stable voice, keeping my eyes on my paper.
“It’s for your own good,” Lucas said. “You’ll like it, too.”
The sirens started going off in my head too late, as Lucas’s fingers began to wiggle up under the edge of my skirt. My free hand moved of its own accord, clamping around his wrist, and I put my head up to give him a glare.
“Let go, Callie,” said Lucas, quiet but firm, and that plus a sudden loud footstep in the next room put my head in such a spin I did let go of him and hunched more aggressively over my work, trying to give the impression of not even remembering he was there.
Dane came back out with Bill of all people following him. Bill looked Lucas up and down with great interest, and when Dane introduced him as ‘Callie’s boyfriend’ I was in too confused a state to correct him, because at that exact moment Lucas wriggled his fingers to remind me he hadn’t actually taken his hand out from under my skirt. It was planted about halfway up my thigh, and as he slid his fingers down along the soft inner skin I was very aware of just how close he was to… But he was just trying to screw with my head again, he would never…
Dane and Bill turned away from us a little to talk about some job Bill was in the middle of, and Lucas’s hand moved again, this time creeping right up to the crease of my thigh. Suddenly the side of his thumb was pressing right up against my underwear.
I wanted to look up at him, to glare at him until he moved, but for the first few seconds I was in shock, and then as his fingers began to stroke between my legs, finding and then tracing the line where my private parts came together, I was too embarrassed to look up at him. I didn’t want to know what his face looked like as he touched me.