by Tiffany Sala
“Probably both on all counts,” I said, and started the car so he would have to jump out or something to get control over the interaction, at least. Unless he tried to snatch the steering wheel from me.
He’d behaved himself with his licence suspension as far as I knew—his parents were livid and apparently that was enough to make him take notice. Perhaps I was misjudging him a little right now. I realised just how bad it was that I would even suspect him of doing something so immediately dangerous, though. It should really have told me that Ashleigh was the one I needed to be seeing this afternoon.
But, in spite of it all, I was here in the car with him. Willing to give him a chance he probably hadn’t earned.
“This is probably going to get me in all sorts of trouble for bringing it up at all, but Ashleigh was hinting at something on Monday…”
Lucas sighed.
“I think she was trying to tell me the two of you had… a thing going on once,” I persisted. “Something like what you were doing with me before, where you kept it a big secret from everyone. A lot more of a secret than it was with me, at least.”
“It’s true,” Lucas said. “And you know what, if Sarah Coleman, Jamie Turner, or Jess Cork knew about one another, maybe they’d be comparing notes too.”
All names of girls I knew well, which was an oddity around school these days. Girls I’d been going to school with for years.
Maybe I wasn’t as smart as someone like Ashleigh, but this time I got it really fast. “Did you go around every girl you were at school with before… before that thing we’ve talked about happened?”
“A lot of them,” Lucas said. “Never Tamara for some reason, if that’s what you’re asking. Thought maybe if I got close enough something would come back to me. A memory… a flicker.”
“Did you remember anything about Ashleigh?”
“Yeah, she’s a fucking nightmare.”
I was so relieved I giggled. “I remember the first day we were in kindy together and she whinged about everything. It must have only been a couple hours but I swear it felt like a day. Her best friend back then—she left before you came to the school—just cried the whole time, and Ashleigh was looking down her nose at her with such obvious contempt, I have no idea how those two ever hit it off.”
Lucas’s grin faded faster than I’d hoped. “She’s fucking shifty, Callie. She’s been hoping to bring me down ever since then, I swear. I don’t think she really wants to be friends with me.”
“Well she’s kind of justified,” I dared. “I mean, from her perspective there’s a good reason. I’m guessing she doesn’t understand what’s really going on.”
I got it, of course. Lucas, trying to control the situation instead of letting any of those girls know he needed their help.
There was a dark side to this revelation, one that made me afraid to ask my next question… but I was growing a lot more courageous when it came to asking questions. “So was I just the last girl on your list, then?”
I didn’t dare look at him directly, even aside from needing to drive, but I felt Lucas staring at me. “Fuck, no. All that shit I got over and done with in tenth grade, before a whole bunch of those girls left. I was never going to go anywhere near you. It wasn’t… it didn’t seem right, somehow. Same as with Tamara.”
“You weren’t going to go anywhere near me,” I said. “Until you did.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” Lucas said. “You were the one who had something about you I might have wanted to know… and she was your friend. Should have realised, right?”
“I wanted to tell her,” I blurted out, eager to give him honesty to match what I thought he’d just given me. “How it happened between the two of us… I was on the edge of telling her, just so I could hear what she had to say.”
“And I assume you didn’t,” said Lucas, as if I’d told him something much more innocuous than that I’d almost betrayed him to the one person gunning for him. I had to peek, to see the smile I knew was going to be there. “Well, you know I’ve always lived on the wild edge of things.”
And he was going to be the death of me at it. I had hardly taken my eyes off the road for a second, but it still scared me that Lucas could drag me so far away from where I thought my boundaries were. “If I asked you what happened with Ashleigh and those other girls, would you tell me?”
“Some things, sure,” Lucas said. “Whatever I even remember. Are you going to ask?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not really any better at this boyfriend, girlfriend deal than you are, but that’s safer-not-to-know territory, isn’t it?”
“I will tell you this without your permission,” Lucas said. “There’s not really anything there that would shock you.”
“That’s far from the worst thing I’ve gotten from you without permission at least,” I commented.
At Lucas’s house there was some awkward small talk with Lucy and his mother before Lucas dragged me upstairs. It was probably going to be a long time before I was comfortable around any of the Starlings, Lucas included, but I was confident his family were going to come to love me. Once they realised I had the power to save him from himself and that they could trust me to wield it, they would love me.
“I can just see how it’s going to be around here in a few months’ time.” Lucas backed me up against the end of his bed and tugged at my uniform. “You’re going to be so jealous of Lucy.”
My heart was all up in my mouth at the suggestion that I would be around for that long, so I made a joke of it. “You’re going to be able to keep me around for whole months?”
“I’ve waited ten years, apparently,” Lucas said, “so months is no big deal at all. And I need to keep you around long enough that my parents think we’re serious so they’ll let me dip into my savings to replace your car. I swear that fucking thing is starting to smell mouldy even with all the airing we gave it.”
“And I’m going to keep it,” I told him. I let out a completely graceless squeak as he pushed me onto my back on his bed and climbed on over the top of me, but I was determined to maintain my train of thought. “You need something around to remind you that impulsive actions have consequences, and I’d rather it not be me with a permanent injury.”
Lucas stopped smiling suddenly at that, and instead of answering when I asked him what I’d done wrong he plunged us into a bout of lovemaking that was really far more than I was ready to handle at my current level of experience. It was a hell of a lot better than getting in a car with him in this mood though, I supposed.
And once he’d taken the edge off and was holding me naked and sticky with sweat against his chest, he said one word that shook me out of my renewed shyness. “Jillian.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“Her parents weren’t quite as well-off as us. The dad was working about six different jobs to have all the money they needed to keep up with her treatments, and I think her oldest sister was the same. The mother had to be around all the time to look after her. My parents did what they could, but you can’t afford to get too deep into someone else’s trouble when you’re in that situation. Sounds a bit shitty if you don’t know any better, but it’s really every miserable little family unit for themselves.” I felt his muscles harden under my head. “But there is one thing you can give away without compromising your own kid’s welfare, if you are so lucky.”
“Money.”
“There is a treatment that’s known to be successful in a lot of cases—if you can get through it without wanting to kill yourself,” Lucas said. “Lucy and Jill were approved as candidates, but it isn’t fully recognised here yet, so it attracts a significant cost. It was a bit of a stretch even for my parents to get the money together in time, but they worked out something plausible. An arrangement that would let them pay for Lucy and Jill.”
“Her family wouldn’t take it,” I guessed.
I scrambled to cover myself as Lucas sat up abruptly, but I soon forgot about modesty. “T
hey said it wasn’t their way to accept gifts like that. They said they were afraid she wouldn’t be able to take that much suffering. They never even fucking asked her.”
“But your parents wouldn’t have asked them to pay it back or anything.” I was shaking my head just thinking about it. “I can’t imagine they would. So why the problem?”
“Some people just aren’t willing to do whatever needs to be done,” Lucas said. “They won’t work as hard as they need to, or fight for what they care about, or humiliate themselves completely. They have to hold back a little. And holding back cost Jill her fucking life. Lucy went into that treatment and it nearly fucking destroyed her, but three weeks after she was done she was able to come home again. Not long after that, Jill was dead.”
“That must have been so hard on Lucy.”
“Actually,” said Lucas, “it’s not like she and Jill were ever close. She was just one of many girls who came in and out of the hospital in the time we were there. I don’t think she ever knew about my parents’ offer, either. She remembers a lot, but not from that specific time in her life.” He was staring into space. “Things actually fucking worth forgetting.”
I put my arms as far around him as I could, resting my head against the rigidity of his shoulder. I could only hope it meant something to him.
Maybe there were a lot of people in my life and on its fringes who would be unhappy with me making something work with Lucas, but I realised now I couldn’t worry about them so much. I had to do what was right for me, even if I couldn’t make other people understand it… and even if I didn’t always have all the answers I needed to be completely happy with my decision in myself.
Like Lucas was trying to tell me through Jillian’s story, I had to be willing to throw away all the reasons I shouldn’t, and take what was on offer while it was there.
“You were such a cute kid,” Lucas spoke up suddenly. I leaned back a little, suddenly no longer bothered by my state of undress, so I could see his face.
“When I first met you,” Lucas continued, “it wasn’t like what I was feeling around other girls at the time. There was just something special about you, but I never figured out what it was or what I was supposed to do about it. Everything I tried seemed wrong. I guess because I was just a dumb awkward kid at the time. I mean…” That gorgeous smile again. “I was popular. On top of the world. But around you, I felt sort of like I guess some of the kids who really aren’t popular do.”
I was pretty sure my own face was reflecting the same wonder I saw in his.
“And now?” I asked, gesturing between the two of us, hoping he saw something coming together there too and not just awkwardness and regret. “Does this seem wrong?”
“I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Lucas said. “What would be right. But if you’re just asking me about this moment… I’d say it’s about as right as anything I’ve ever known.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
On my third sleepover at Lucas’s place, I got myself up while he was still sprawled snoring in his bed, got my clothes on, and sneaked through the house, avoiding all the areas where other members of the Starling family were likely to be, until I could make a dash for the inside door into the garage. Once there, I sat in that vast cavern and looked at our two cars, side by side.
I’d been there since about six, staring into a scene that made me feel dizzy even though neither of the cars were moving—and then I started at a hand on my shoulder.
Lucas dropped down onto the step next to me. I hadn’t even heard the door open. “Planning your getaway huh?”
I leaned into him a little. “I just like looking at our cars together like this.”
“There’s something sickeningly cute about that revelation.” And even though he made it sound like a rough joke, there was softness in his eyes. The same look he gave me when we were most closely intertwined.
Lucas wrapped an arm around me. “Hm,” he said. “You can see the fucking dent where I had the accident your friend Rob fixed up.”
“You never did tell me what happened with that one,” I murmured.
He stiffened against me—and not in the same way we’d been enjoying so much the night before. “Do you like hearing about terrible things happening to me, Callie?”
Suddenly the garage (heated floor and all) and even his arms felt cold. I wriggled sideways a little. It wasn’t like Lucas to be what sounded like evasive… not without a very good reason.
I tried to make it into a joke. “I was just thinking, you know everything about all of my accidents.”
Then I felt the smile melt off my face as I realised I didn’t know everything about all of my accidents.
The police had never found the person responsible for the first one. All I remembered was a big dark thing in my peripheral vision, and then the bang.
I stared at the big dark thing Lucas drove, and after a few seconds I shot to my feet.
“Let’s go grab breakfast and say hi to your parents.” I’d heard them moving around in the kitchen earlier. Suddenly, I didn’t want it to be just the two of us out there.
“I’m pretty hungry too.” Lucas rose easily, his long legs closing the distance between us like it was nothing.
I wasn’t going to be able to feel safe anywhere in his house, that was for sure. But I had no choice but to go through the whole breakfast routine now. Accepting Lucas’s casual affectionate gestures, exchanging polite conversation with his mother and father and answering their questions, trying not to get lost in my own boiling thoughts. And that part made it worse, because his parents were so nice. I could see myself getting close to them in a way I wasn’t with my own parents any more, strangely in part because they didn’t seem to be the type to be that invested in getting close to me.
But all of that was up in the air now if my suspicions had anything to them. And if Lucas didn’t feel like talking, I had no idea how I would find out what I needed to know.
Every time I wasn’t trying to put on a charming face for Lucas’s family or Lucas’s friends, I was going over the whole thing.
There had to be only one reason he would close up on me like that when I asked about that accident, right? If he’d been the one to hit me, he wouldn’t want to admit it. He had to know how badly I would take that.
How could he think he could just avoid admitting it by pretending it wasn’t happening? Well… it was insane, wasn’t it? We didn’t talk to one another back then. I’d been coming back from one of Dane’s building sites that day and stopped to pick up some things at the supermarket for Mum, so I wasn’t anywhere I could have expected to run into him, literally or otherwise.
I hadn’t expected to have Lucas run into me when I was on my way home from work, either. It wasn’t anywhere near his neighbourhood, and there seemed to be no way he could have tracked me unless he’d followed me straight from Rob’s repair place… which he surely couldn’t have done with all his friends in his car. If Ashleigh was already gunning for him, there was no way he could have let her see that.
One thing seemed consistent here: Lucas had his own ways of getting hold of me whenever he felt like it. I couldn’t assume much of anything, and he was still far from willing to tell me even close to everything. How could I be sure he hadn’t been watching me since before that day of the accident, making his plans? How did I really know he hadn’t put his plan into motion long before that day?
If he was the mysterious car who had hit me while I was parked then he had, hadn’t he?
The question was, what was his endgame? If he’d wanted to date me, he could have done it without all that trouble. It wasn’t like he’d remembered our prior history to think I might push him away…
But it still wouldn’t be enough for him, would it? Lucas didn’t want to be at my mercy, not even when it was a romantic situation. He had to be in control, and the only way to be in control with a girl you didn’t know well was to control the situation she was in. Put her in a state where she was r
eally vulnerable.
It was fucked-up. Nobody could be that cruel.
I walked through a day at school and an evening I opted to go home and spend with my parents in a white haze. This had been right in front of me the whole time, and I’d ignored it. I’d avoided putting the pieces together as well as I might, because I didn’t want this boy who’d shot fire through my life to be so bad I couldn’t keep him. I’d wanted… It was fucked-up, but maybe I’d wanted everything a girl from Chigwell wasn’t supposed to expect. The handsome boyfriend who looked like a million dollars because he was, the nice family, the freedom to run my life the way Lucas did, not having to think about things like money or other people.
Of course I would never run my life the way Lucas did. I would never have so little regard for those around me. It wasn’t me, and maybe that was down to our different upbringings as well. I couldn’t judge him for that any more, we’d gotten too close for that.
But maybe I couldn’t forgive everything he’d done to me enough to continue with him. Maybe I shouldn’t.
“Callie?”
I realised Mum had been trying to get my attention for a while. I hadn’t even noticed Dad leaving the room.
“It’s not going well with Lucas, is it?” she asked.
I had something snappy on the tip of my tongue—you would be happy to hear that, right—but then I realised I didn’t want to take this in that direction. Some of her previous attack on me had been unjustified, but what she hadn’t said, that was completely justified, was that I’d completely cast my parents aside since getting with Lucas, and it had been unfair to them. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me that she was so angry.
“I think you were right all along,” I told her.
She shook her head. “No, I was wrong. Or I was saying things for the wrong reasons, at least. I hope you never let me keep you from reaching for things that are…” She glanced at the shut door that led to the hallway and the bedrooms, and dropped her voice. “…more than I would ever have been able to. Any parent should want that for their child.” I did wonder, in this case, just how much she did want that for me… but she was pushing herself, and that was more than most parents would do, I suspected. “I’m just not sure what it is you’re trading here, and I don’t know if I like it.”