by Tiffany Sala
Lucas stiffened all over and pressed hard into me, his grip on my hair tightening until it really hurt, and suddenly I was choking on something sticky.
After a few attempts, I managed to swallow, and then my mouth was free and Lucas was pushing me up and away from him. He had his junk tucked away in record time too.
“Told you I wouldn’t keep you long,” he said. That bastard could somehow even spin coming really fast as a positive thing.
There I was, my senses a complete mess after everything that had happened in the past few hours, and the only place I had to direct my feelings now was into a whole bunch of regret at how I’d behaved. I kept telling myself I hadn’t really had a choice… but now, I could hardly believe it.
At that moment, if he’d wanted to throw me down on the back seat of this car and have his way with me, I probably would have gone along with it. I could think rationally about that possibility. That didn’t sound like someone who was completely at the mercy of another… did it?
Lucas clipped his seatbelt back on. “Time to get back to my house.”
I didn’t need my feelings or someone as smart as Ashleigh to tell me: he’d already lost interest in me. I was just some additional baggage on his route home now.
And now I was some baggage with some very dark and yet true thoughts swirling around one reality: Lucas Starling was going to take everything I had to offer him, and he wasn’t going to care if he destroyed me in the process. He wouldn’t even notice, so long as he got what he wanted. I didn’t have the strength to drive him off like I had when we were ten, either.
It was clear to me now there was only one safe place, with Lucas. He was capable of loving, and when he did he was relentless about it. I would have bet Lucas would roll right over anyone who posed a threat to someone he loved.
That was where I needed to be. I needed to make him love me, and then I would be safe no matter what he did to me, how deep this relationship went. If I occupied a similar position in his heart to that his sister held, he would never turn away from me when we were being intimate. He wouldn’t do anything that put me at risk of harm.
The question was, how was I supposed to get the love of someone who wasn’t interested in even treating me with the respect due another human?
I didn’t have that answer, or any answers, really. All I knew was that I had to keep trying to come up with something, or I wouldn’t survive this new round of being the object of Lucas Starling’s interest.
Chapter Twelve
I told Tamara about the things I had done with Lucas, though I left out the details of where those encounters had occurred. Fortunately when you tell someone you went down on a guy, their first questions don’t tend to be about the setting.
I think Tamara was a bit distracted by the fact that I was at her house for the first time in months, if not over a year. Usually I would tell her I was too tired after work to do more than a phone call, but the day after the latest Lucas incident I let her invite me for dinner. After we’d eaten with her parents and older brother, we retreated to a bedroom that was decorated in completely different shades to the last time I’d been in there, and I tried to unpack everything that was going on. It was a creative challenge when I didn’t want to tell her most of my thinking. Most of it still didn’t even make sense to me, never mind letting someone else in on it. I could just imagine what Tamara would say if I tried to tell her I had a plan to make Lucas love me. Just imagining her face as I tried to explain the distinction between the idea of falling in love and just being someone he cared about enough.
“Well,” Tamara said, trying to pick through my silences, “it’s okay if you just want to mess around with him, you know? You don’t have to have a relationship with a guy just because you let him in your pants. But I do wonder…”
“Just say it,” I told her.
“It has a bit of an awkward feel to it,” she said, each word coming out very slowly. “Like maybe he thinks he can get away with using you for whatever, because he bought you some things.”
“Would it be so wrong if I did let a guy use me because he bought me things?” The words came out of me before I gave myself time to think about it, and Tamara gave me a disgusted look. “Seriously, though…” I decided I might as well commit to it now that I’d started. “Why do we get so precious about that sort of thing? If everyone’s happy with what they get out of the arrangement, is it really some big deal?”
“I guess not,” Tamara said, grabbing one of the dolls still lined up on her bed and waving its arms back and forth. “Callie, just so we’re on the same page here… this isn’t actually what you’ve done, is it?”
“What?” I felt myself growing hot as I remembered wondering those same things myself. “No, obviously, you know why he bought me all that stuff.”
“Just trying to be extra clear about it.” Tamara squinted at me over her doll’s curly head. “That said, I do think that since you’ve gotten tangled up with Lucas, a lot of things have changed for you, and not in a good way. I do wonder if your… history with Lucas is making it hard for you to make good decisions about how to handle him.”
“Are you suggesting my judgement is off because Lucas flirted with me a little bit back when we were kids?” I demanded.
Tamara shrugged. “It was a while ago now, so I don’t remember the details that well, but I seem to recall it was a bit more to you than just a flirtation.”
“Are you suggesting I’ve been waiting all this time for Lucas to pay me any attention again?”
“I do wonder about the two of you,” Tamara admitted. “Whatever’s going on right now… I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something a bit off about it.”
I felt myself tensing all over at the thought of Tamara figuring out what was really going on with Lucas.
“Oh,” Tamara said, “did you ever figure out who that girl was? The dead one.”
If I had to pick one thing I liked about Tamara, it would be her ability to come very close to uncovering some uncomfortable truth, and then swerving onto a completely different track. A lot of the time, I wanted to keep what was going on in my life inside my head and not have to deal with the contributions of other people. It would have been hard to deal with a friend who was always digging into places I didn’t need anyone interfering.
“Jillian? I asked Lucas in the end.” I told her the basics about the situation, and her expression softened.
“They’re twins, right? Lucas and Lucy? It must really change someone to have a person who is basically the other half of you that close to being gone forever. I bet it must have changed him forever after she was sick. It’s probably why he has so much trouble getting close to people.”
I tried not to let Tamara see my jaw had dropped. Another thing about Tamara was that she had this tendency of hitting on exactly what was going on in a particular situation… without actually being aware she was doing it. I hadn’t decided yet whether I liked or hated that about her.
Was that really what was behind Lucas’s distance? He was too afraid to get close to someone else who might run the risk of leaving? I had no idea what I was supposed to do about that. It wasn’t like I was looking to get into a long-term relationship with Lucas, I just didn’t want him to steamroll all over me like he was with… whatever we were doing at the moment.
“Are you going to see him again soon?” Tamara asked.
“I have a feeling he’s going to want to hang out tomorrow,” I said. “Just a feeling, not plans or anything.”
“Well,” Tamara said, “I’d rather not hear too much about your feelings, if it’s okay with you.”
I wasn’t disappointed when Lucas was nowhere to be seen as I climbed into my car that afternoon, I was just surprised. I’d thought I was getting a grasp on some pattern of behaviour I could rely on with Lucas, but it just went to show you couldn’t jump to conclusions when you were trying to learn how someone like him worked. It was a lesson for me.
It was a good t
hing, anyway. I really didn’t need Lucas showing up at work with me and causing more havoc. It still made me feel queasy whenever I thought about how Lucas had let those men I had to work with see me in a state only suitable for the bedroom. I had hardly been able to look Dane in the eye the whole time I was in the office the day before, and I didn’t know what I might do the next time I saw Bill.
Anyway, that afternoon Dane wanted me to come with him to an almost-complete build to go over some numbers. It was always a bit of a pain figuring out the address of a house in a totally new suburb that wasn’t even on GPS yet, and a lot of the places had messy roads and nonexistent parking opportunities what with all the builders clogging things up, but I actually loved those trips. They kept me thinking about what was really important about my job, where I hoped to be in a few years from now—doing work that was practical, tangible, rather than my current abstract fiddling around with numbers that anyone could do, really.
And, though I tried not to let any of the guys on-site notice, I loved visiting the houses.
This one was a custom build for a client who had already purchased the property instead of a bog-standard package put together to sell after, and the difference was apparent as soon as I pushed my way in through the wide front door. The smell of fresh wood easily overpowered the fresh paint. There were real timber floors under my feet, not some dicey laminate shit that would look good for less than a year. Real marble benches, not just the stuff that looked ‘about right’. It was a house that had been put together by someone who gave a shit about what it would be like to live in it for ten years to come.
It was the sort of house I hoped to own or at least live in some day, if I kept my head down and kept at my job. I did appreciate that my parents had managed to keep a roof over my head between them for my whole life, but at the same time I knew they’d settled a bit, had not done everything they could have done to give us all a really nice life. I didn’t want to have to accept the same level they had, and I definitely didn’t want to have to accept whatever level some man I might get paired up with in the future would decide for me by the level of his own efforts—which was what I suspected had happened with Mum sometimes. What I thought might have broken her. Any man who got tangled up with me would learn, pretty early on, that I worked in an industry dominated by men. That I had the same expectations of a career and personal success that any man might.
I greeted a few of the guys I knew who were working around various parts of the house, then made myself known to Dane, who had happily parked himself up in the front sunroom serving as the foreman’s office. The official foreman, Elliott, was standing over Dane sitting in his own chair with a stretched smile.
“Callie,” said Dane, slumping in Elliott’s seat as if he was already exhausted, “great to see you. Now I think you know who all the teams are around here, so if you could just go around and see who has some paperwork we need to get copies of.”
I hated it when he acted like I was some servant designed to do menial tasks. He could easily have gotten off his arse to pick up those papers before I arrived.
Dane was about to give me some more instructions when my phone rang. With an awkward, “Excuse me,” I stepped out into the hallway to answer. I didn’t have the caller’s number saved so I seemed to have a mystery on my hands.
“Callie. Where are you?”
It was a short mystery. I had been hearing that voice in my dreams, murmuring into my ear as his fingers did things to me that set my body burning just thinking about them.
“Lucas,” I said, “how do you have my number?”
“Your parents gave it to me while you were in hospital that one time,” he said, as if it were some ancient history I might be expected to have completely forgotten about by now. “I explained I needed a contact number to sort out the new car, they didn’t seem to think there’d be any issue with my having it.”
I should have known my parents would find a way to screw me over again. Well, my mother, realistically speaking. I decided to let it drop for the moment and focus on what was bound to be the next issue. “What are you talking about, where am I? I’m at work, obviously.”
“No you’re not,” said Lucas, “or I’d be able to see you right now.”
I sighed. “Are you outside—no, I know the answer to that, obviously. I’ve gone out to one of our sites. If you needed something you should have let me know earlier.”
“No, I shouldn’t have,” Lucas said, and then he hung up on me. No time to waste on things like goodbye with that one.
I returned to Dane and got the rest of his instructions for me, and then hurried off on my errands.
I was lost in the methodical task ahead of me and the refreshing scent of the new house, so when some time later I stopped because Lucas had appeared in front of me in the hallway I was passing through, I didn’t immediately work out what was wrong with this scene.
Blissful ignorance didn’t last long, unfortunately. “Lucas!”
“The hardest part was actually working out which new housing development you’d be at,” he said, his big smile telegraphing just how pleased he was with himself. “Once I got here, I just had to do a couple rounds of the places on offer and your ride stuck out like anything—even if you did put your roof up again.”
“Yes,” I said, “you’ve made me a target, thanks so much for that.”
“You only need to worry if it’s the bad guys targeting you,” said Lucas. “I’m one of the good guys.”
My hands found my hips. “Is that so.”
“Oh, sweetheart, you had better believe it.”
And at that moment, after apparently being unable to get off his arse to collect some damn papers, Dane popped out of his makeshift office, Elliott on his heels, and stopped still in the hallway too, his expression as he surveyed Lucas sour.
“Callie,” he said, “you realise this isn’t our property and you can’t just have whoever you like come over.”
Of course he was blaming me. Well, I could easily just say Lucas had turned up on his own, get the heat off myself… but I didn’t think he’d really buy it unless I also told him I had absolutely no control over what Lucas did, and that was just asking for trouble.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I’ll try not to have this happen in future.”
“It’s my fault,” Lucas spoke up. He slung an arm over my shoulder—not the sort of hold a guy put a girl in when he wanted her to feel cherished, but definitely for show. “I just needed to have a private chat with Callie. She’s a hard woman to get hold of, you know.”
A memory flashed into my mind. I’d been a kid back then, and I hadn’t known the difference. It had felt like maybe it was real. And even now I knew, it felt as good to me as it had back then. Better, because now I understood what I was only just starting to want as a ten-year-old.
“It’s all right,” said Dane, folding in the face of Lucas of course, though he was still giving me a really dirty look. “We just don’t want to have the owners coming in to see we’ve let absolutely everybody on the site. You need to come to me first if you need to see Callie.”
“Or, you know,” said Elliott, “there’s me.”
“Just go upstairs if you want to talk, okay?” said Dane. “Nobody’s working there today, and we can sneak you out if we have any visitors.”
“Good to me,” said Lucas. His hand slipped off my shoulder, and he ran his fingers diagonally across my back until he could gather up my hand. “Come on, Callie, I promise it’ll be quick.”
“Don’t do this again!” Dane called after us. “Callie’s got to work!”
“Thank you so much for this,” I muttered as I climbed the stairs after Lucas. “Now my boss is going to think I’m so caught up in a guy I can’t do my job properly.”
“Maybe you can’t,” Lucas said. He was still turned away from me, and his voice never communicated much.
It made me feel really frustrated. “Is this always how it’s going to be with you,
Lucas? Whenever you get it into your head to hang out with me again, you’ll just do whatever you can to screw my life up publicly?”
Lucas turned as I joined him on the landing. “What the fuck are you talking about.”
“I swear you’ve been trying to get me to lose my job all along. You didn’t like that I had one at all, that it was getting in the way of you just dragging me off whenever you liked. Now you’re trying to make me look like I don’t even care about the job.”
“I’m trying to get you to quit,” Lucas said. “This isn’t a job, it’s a dead end. I can find much more enjoyable ways for you to waste your time if that’s what you want to do.”
“What I want is for you to stop trying to sabotage me,” I retorted. “This ‘dead end’? It’s my way into a proper career, something I can do in the future that isn’t just going to be desk work drudgery.” I lowered my voice automatically, even though I knew the walls in these new houses weren’t anywhere near as thin as the ones at my place. “My plan is to move out of this role in the long term, either go up into managing sites like on the level Dane does, or even be a contractor, run my own business. Honestly I’d love to drive one of the machines they bring through before they start building the house. I’m not the best intellectually, it’d be something I could do that wouldn’t require me to be some business whiz.”
Lucas pulled me into one of the upstairs rooms and pushed the door shut behind us. I flinched at the slam, but Lucas’s face was amused, not angry.
“We’ve both seen the way those boys treat you, Callie. You’re a bit of eye candy around the office to them, always will be. If you try to put yourself forward as some kind of candidate for leadership at Dane’s outfit, or, heaven forbid, you show up aboard a backhoe wanting to dig up a site, he’s going to block it. He’ll come up with some bullshit excuse that sounds good—another prospect with more experience, or some shit—but the truth will be he’d have you in a second if you were a man. But you’re not, and that’s just how it is.”