by Tiffany Sala
That rollercoaster… If it had been me, and I couldn’t tell my parents what was happening to me, I would have gotten on the Internet and looked up information about memories, about how to hold onto them. That would have led directly to the idea of making memories as interesting as possible to convince the brain to hold onto them: novelty and emotion and, yes, adrenaline. Things I knew about already, not because I had many precious memories to preserve, but because I’d felt the need to employ every studying trick in the book when I was working as many hours as I possibly could at the same time.
I was pretty sure I had the right trigger, but the scenario was off. Someone like Lucas would never have researched his situation like that. But if he had the memory of that rollercoaster, he didn’t need to: he would know exactly which feeling he needed to go back to, again and again… and maybe he would also get the feeling that it wouldn’t keep working so well unless he kept raising the stakes the longer he had to do it.
It made me sad, watching him placidly arranging chunks of some very brightly-coloured chicken in his bowl, to think that he might remember me screaming at him to get away from me after our car accident, but not whatever was making him smile when he looked up at me and saw how much I was struggling with my cutlery.
“Lucas.” His eyes focused on mine. “Have you forgotten anything since you were really young? Like, recently?”
His expression had shifted to extreme annoyance. “How the fuck am I going to know if I forgot one or two things here and there? Everyone does that, right?”
“I just think… maybe you’re letting something that happened because of a traumatic time in your life dictate how you live your life now, when that traumatic time is over. And that’s really sad.”
I thought he was going to get even angrier that I’d said that, but he just shrugged. “It’s hard to not be someone who is all you remember being, Callie. And it’s never over, either. Most of those memories never came back, but I’ve gotten a few, over the years. They come in flashes, like—” He gestured at me. “I know a little about what it was like back then. The feeling. And I’ve never had that again. It must have been so good back then, but we fell hard. Once you fall that far, I don’t think you can ever get even close to where you were.”
It made me remember my own slowly sinking realisation, as I grew older, that my family was not quite stable. That we weren’t going the same places as other families of kids at my school—and Lucas was a big part of that realisation. Because after he’d started to notice me, even after he’d stopped, I kept noticing him. I saw him go from expensive toys at Christmas to more parties and holidays and outings than I could imagine even enjoying… to big cars and not even living in the same world as the likes of me, because why did he need to?
But I hadn’t seen everything. I’d chosen not to see him with other girls. I never knew about Lucy either, because in my own way I lived in my own world too. I thought I knew what I was seeing so I didn’t really see what was under the surface.
Well, maybe we both needed to change the way we looked at the world. But I could only make the decision to do that for myself. Where Lucas was concerned, I could only tell him what I thought, and he had to do the rest on his own.
I couldn’t help being curious, though. As some of our dishes started emptying, I broke our easy silence.
“Lucas, am I allowed to ask what you remembered about me, at least?”
“We’re in a classroom, I think,” Lucas said. “Lots of kids. And I…” He gestured towards my hand.
“Yes,” I said. “That happened. It was kind of at the end of your run of bothering me, just after you went back on that dance invitation… which, for the record, I’m not bothered by at all these days, even if I made it seem otherwise.”
Lucas just shrugged.
“Well, I wasn’t expecting to get anything more from you at all after that, figured whatever you’d been doing was completely done with… and then you just came up to my desk at school—can’t remember what you said, Tamara was sitting next to me though—and you got my hand at some point, and then just bent over really gentleman-like and kissed it, and you were straight off back to your own desk before our teacher could tell you off or anything. Not that I think she had the faintest idea how to handle that.”
“Huh,” Lucas said.
“It was really embarrassing,” I told him. “A whole bunch of kids kept coming up to me after and asking if we were dating, or laughing at me from a distance, and I didn’t know what was happening so I didn’t have anything to say to them. You did just leave me alone after that, except for this one time… but never mind that.”
Lucas had my hand again, so I couldn’t dive back into my food to avoid the issue. “Tell me.”
“It was probably about a year after. We were in year five.”
Lucas nodded. “The year Lucy was really sick.”
“It was so random. You just came up to me, and said you wanted a hug. You were like that at the time, always hugging different girls every week, and whoever you were hugging on any particular week was a big source of gossip around the class. You know how it was back then with everyone just discovering themselves.” Lucas clearly didn’t, and I kept talking fast to cover my awkwardness. “But I was really fed up with your shit after everything that had happened the year before, so I told you no, and that I wanted you to leave me alone.”
“Firm,” Lucas said.
I winced. “I was a bit over the whole thing at that point. I didn’t want that drama to start over again. And you had literally not spoken to me at all since all the other stuff. I didn’t know what you really wanted then, at any point during that whole mess, any more than I know now.”
“Can’t tell you what I was thinking then,” Lucas said. “But I’ve always thought you were a cool girl. Very composed. I think honestly you get a lot less crap than you otherwise would because you’re just not good to rile up.”
“Well you riled me up for sure when you ran your car into me,” I said, “so congratulations I guess?”
“I think most girls would do a lot more than get riled up at that,” said Lucas, “so… I forgive you, I guess.”
We were grinning at one another. I wondered what Lucas thought of my smile.
Then I felt it fade, before my eyes could fully make sense of what they were taking in.
There were a whole bunch of kids from our class at a nearby table. I didn’t think any of them were deep into Lucas’s clique, not that I’d ever gotten close to it, but they definitely knew who he was and that I was not the sort of girl who should be having a dinner date with him. I’d taken in the noisy crowd as we came in, but I must have been incredibly nervous to miss the fact that half their uproar seemed to be related to us.
Lucas followed my gaze and said, “Never mind them.”
“Have they been going off like that the whole time we were here?” I wasn’t going to be able to look the staff in the eye again. Would they think I was part of the drama? I kept going over the sorts of things they must have seen Lucas and I doing.
Lucas grimaced. “Who cares?”
When someone came back to ask us if we wanted dessert, Lucas asked for the bill instead. I was glad to not have to eat any more under the scrutiny of that other table, but then when we were gathering our things together and Lucas had a card in his hand to pay at the counter, I felt myself freeze. I didn’t want to have to walk by the lot of them, have them see him paying for the both of us and drawing conclusions.
But what had I ever done wrong except try to understand a guy all of them had certainly never understood? They weren’t even judging me for my real mistakes. If they wanted to have a go at me in public for doing something perfectly normal, they were welcome to it.
I put my head up and strode after Lucas, focusing only on him. There might have been a bit of whispering as we passed that table, but none of them had the balls to say anything to us in that environment. As I stood alongside Lucas while he paid our bill, I felt
the posture I’d only assumed sinking into my bones, becoming a real part of me.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” I murmured over his shoulder, “in a real restaurant, watching someone pay by credit card.”
Lucas turned back to me to say, “What the fuck century have you been living in? This is just barely a restaurant and who the fuck pays anything with cash these days?”
“It’s a good restaurant to me,” was all I could think to say.
“You are very much from the wrong side of the tracks, aren’t you?” said Lucas. He took hold of my arm and led me out of whatever we wanted to call the place we’d been in, back to my own car. There definitely didn’t seem to be any weakness left in him.
“If that’s a problem for you,” I said, “you’re more than welcome to call an Uber or something, let me go home by myself.” Lucas was already fidgeting with my car, getting the top down. I sniffed the air. “You do realise it feels a lot like rain?”
“Not a problem,” Lucas said.
“Maybe not for you, but I don’t want water all in the car I have to use all the time.”
“It’s not going to get water in it,” Lucas said. “You’ll see.”
He got into the driver’s seat, which even I could tell at this point was a red flag. I didn’t really know what I was going to do about it, though. Making a fuss was not going to work, and I didn’t think I really had the energy to go through that tonight anyway.
Well, once we got to his house I could drop him off and do whatever I wanted on the way home. So I got in the front passenger seat and resolved to do everything I could to get away at the earliest opportunity.
Lucas smiled at me once I was buckled in and stroked his hand up my leg slowly, his fingertips taking a sideways detour between my legs before he took hold of the steering wheel. He drove off before I could do anything about my sudden realisation that I hadn’t seen the real red flag at all. Of course: Lucas didn’t plan on letting me go home at all. And I, for my part, didn’t think I was going to know whether I was going to be happy with that plan.
Chapter Twenty
Rain started falling around us when we were only a few minutes out from the restaurant.
I glared over at Lucas. “Are you going to stop so we can put the cover on?”
Lucas shrugged. He didn’t even need to look back at me. “Why would we? We’re not going to get wet.”
I sat up very straight in my seat. “Excuse me, how do you figure?”
Lucas didn’t answer in words. He just accelerated.
My hair started streaming back, the wind whistling in my ears. I hated the way it felt to ride fast in this car with the top down.
I clamped my hands over my ears. “Why does anyone think this is a better kind of car to have than one that’s properly enclosed?”
Even with all that ghastly racket around, Lucas’s reply came back clearly to me. “This is what I love about you, Callie. You’re so determined to succeed in life yet so resistant to anything that says money, and it’s not even something you’re doing just to make a point of it.”
I wanted to say something to that, but all I had in my head was his voice saying love.
He didn’t mean it in the sense of loving me, I knew that. But… damn it, I wanted him to. Not to protect me, not to prove a point… I just wanted to have it. And there was only one state of mind I could think of that was left to stir up that sort of desire.
Lucas turned his head to me then and smiled, his own perfectly-cropped hair staying perfectly in place, of course.
I was never allowed to enjoy these moments with him. I realised two things in that one: that we were in fact not getting wet, and that Lucas was driving way too fast in the rain.
“Lucas,” I called. My car terror was rising again, unhelpful but unstoppable, and it only left me more afraid when I knew I needed all of my wits to get him to come in line with me. I felt like I was shouting at him from the distant end of a tunnel that was diminishing to a point before my eyes. “You need to slow down. We’re going to crash.”
I could tell he’d heard what I said. His smile was taken away in the wind, and I felt—I was very sensitive to it now—the car was accelerating.
My fingers were digging into the seat. Though it felt firm underneath me, I knew nothing I could reach right now was at all stable. Lucas had gotten into an accident he hadn’t planned at least once before, when it was dark and he was angry. Rain was falling hard enough to make the world around us grey, though it was being deflected from our bodies by some trick of our fast movement. Right now I would rather myself and the car be soaked than this though. It would only take one slip and we were destroyed.
I appealed to Lucas again. He had thrown my world into this turmoil, and only he could safely stop it now.
“You have to slow down.” My fear, I was ashamed to realise, was not only for my life now. I was seeing the true recklessness inside of Lucas Starling in a way I had never wanted to. This was no calculated strike on a single driver with no other potential casualties, or an error in judgement because he was angry. This time, he was just doing something utterly stupid he hadn’t thought through… because he felt like it. Because he wanted to mess with me. Apparently, he didn’t need a better reason.
What was more, Lucas was not just running the risk of killing himself and me if he continued like this. He could kill absolutely anyone who innocently wandered into his path. Strangers. People we knew. Children. And if I couldn’t find a way to get through to him, if he was determined to be this way no matter what… it couldn’t matter how much I decided I wanted to be with him, how much I might think maybe we’d always been meant to be. I couldn’t allow myself to be with someone who had no regard for other people in that way.
I had to get through to him. If I didn’t… who else would?
Surely even Lucas cared about children.
“If you drive like this,” I called, “you won’t be able to stop if some kid crosses the road in front of you.”
“What the fuck kids are out this time?” he threw back at me, almost a growl, which was probably true, but there was something in his voice that made me doubt he was really thinking about what he was saying. He was in that wild place where he didn’t really connect with the world around him as being something separate to him, something not part of his fantasies. It was all just there for him to reach out and play with.
But if you lost your childhood, your memories of the time when you learned to be more than just a wild thing who wanted what he wanted, how easy it must be to slip back into that wild place. How hard, to understand why that was wrong.
And of course, I already knew the key to stop him. The person who was connected to him so deeply he could not see her as just another animal for him to play with. Though I had a feeling he kept her from realising her power over him.
“When you do this, Lucas, when you drive like this.” I had to be decisive, precise, and it was hard because my head was spinning and I just wanted to beg him to stop. “When you drive so fast, when you are careless, you put Lucy in danger too. She could be out on the road. She will be the one who has to bail you out of jail, or identify your body… or support you when you’re charged with killing someone else with your car.”
Lucas was looking at me. “Please,” I said, “your eyes on the road.”
He turned his head back like it was nothing… but, of course, it was the opposite of nothing.
“You’re trying to appeal to my better nature,” he informed me, like it was something tremendously amusing to him.
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“Only with you,” he said after a few seconds’ thought, “if you actually think I might have one.”
My hair had been flung into my face by the wind. I didn’t get to see what he might have been thinking. “You’ve just never let yourself think that you might have one… until you started spending time with me.”
It had been a brave guess, but when I managed to clear
my eyes and saw how he was looking, I was certain there had been something to it.
“It’s why you keep coming back, isn’t it?” I continued, shaking but determined to hold my courage. “Maybe it’s why you kept coming back to me when we were kids, too. Maybe you sensed something even then.” I didn’t really believe anything that deep, of course, but it was the sort of neat tie-up to our story that might get his attention. That might make him trust me.
And he was driving more slowly now, only just above the limit—because he needed more of his concentration to think, but it was something.
“Fucking stupid of you to think two fucking kids might have some sort of special connection,” he said.
He was right, of course, but the fact that he would speak like that—nothing at all charming or calculated about it—told me how much of an impact I was having.
“I don’t make the rules,” I said. “I’m just telling you what I see. You might want to control the narrative with me, keep me where you can enjoy me however you like, but the fact is there’s something about me you need in your life. And maybe it’s time you let me in a bit more, so we can work on our story together.”
“What the fuck would I need you for?” Lucas demanded. “I’ve got a fucking kick-arse family, all the money in the world I could need…”
“You’re right,” I said. “Your family’s great. But they don’t really know what to do with you, do they? Lucy knows you the best, and she’s scared for you. That’s why she went out and found me, after your accident: she was afraid of what you might have done to me. I get the feeling your parents don’t even let themselves think too hard about what you might be doing. Don’t you think they’ve all suffered enough, Lucas? Are you going to hurt them more, because it’s too scary for you to reach out like you need to?”
Lucas snorted. “So fucking romantic, Calista, laying down the threats. I’d better let your creepy stalker arse into my life, or I’m going to ruin my entire family?”
“Not a threat. It’s an observation. And I’m just trying to help you do what I think you really want to, anyway. I think that’s a big part of why you behave the way you do.” I considered that. “Not that I think you wouldn’t act out otherwise, I seem to remember you’ve always been a bit of a brat. But I do think you’ve been trying to send a message, even if you didn’t realise it at the time, and… well, message received, okay? I get it. Now you have to trust me and let me in.”