Put Me Back Together

by Lola Rooney

  “What would I tell him for?” Sally said with a puzzled look on her face.

  We took off our coats and left them on the backseat to avoid paying for coat check. I linked arms with Emily as we crossed the street and joined the line outside the club, shivering in our seasonally inappropriate outfits. Barely a minute had passed before Sally was nuzzling up to the beefed-up guy standing in front of us in line, shamelessly whining that her boobs were cold and would he mind warming them up for her? He looked happy to oblige.

  I took a step out of line to check how far we were from the front. The line was moving pretty quickly. We probably only had about five more minutes to wait.

  “Who are you looking for, Katie?” Emily said as I came back to her side. I just saw the tip of a flask as she shoved it back into her blue sparkly clutch. That explained why they were all so giggly already. I hoped nobody would throw up before we made it inside. “Oh, I know who you’re looking for. You’re on the lookout for Lucas, your secret beau!”

  “Emily!” I cried, giving her a look of death as her friends all gushed at once: “Oh, Lucas!” They drew out his name until it had about five syllables, all high-pitched and mortifying.

  Clearly they already knew about Lucas and me, though there wasn’t much to tell. I didn’t even want to think about how completely Em must have exaggerated the little I’d told her about my encounters with him. She probably had the two of us doing it like bunnies in his room. There were probably already rumours of our sex tape circulating campus.

  “Shut up, you guys,” I said, trying to get control of the tipsy, giggling horde. “Lucas and I are just friends. Don’t you dare go telling anybody anything different.”

  “Wait, didn’t he buy you a kitten?” Melissa said.

  “And hand it to you half-naked?” Anita said.

  “And covered in chocolate?” Em chimed in.

  I groaned in the back of my throat as they veered off into a discussion of Lucas’s abs, the abs of the whole basketball team, and how many jocks Sally had slept with last semester—they were in disagreement whether it was eleven or twelve. I gratefully tuned out.

  The subject of Lucas had left me feeling guilty and out of sorts. During my three-day hibernation, he’d texted me a few times. Once to ask why I’d skipped class, and another time during class to inform me that Naomi had taken the easel next to him and that he wished it was me instead. Because she smelled like cheese. I’d wanted to text him back to say she always smelled like cheese, but I didn’t think it was a good enough reply. Texting was all about being clever and hilarious. It was a lot of pressure, especially when your brain was turning to mush from watching six hours straight of daytime TV. Then, just a few hours ago, he’d sent me this text:

  Lucas: Hey, disappearing act. Where’d you go?

  I hadn’t replied to that one, either.

  A really stupid part of me had started examining my life in the context of the creepy Facebook message late last night. Other than March twentieth, the only new thing in my life was Lucas. And—here was the really dumb part—I sort of felt like I was being punished for letting him into my life. Yeah, it was pretty crooked logic, but that’s how it felt. I’d broken my rules. I’d let him get to know me, even if only a little. I had a cat under my bed. I’d lost the tight control I usually kept on my life, and look at what had happened.

  Brandon had never contacted me before, not once, not in six years.

  I felt like I’d been caught with my hand in the cookie jar.

  And as gorgeous as the cookie jar was, I was furious with myself. What had I been thinking? That I could break my rules with no consequences? That six years ago had never happened? That I could be just like everybody else? That was a laugh.

  Just before I’d fallen asleep I’d made myself a promise. No more Lucas.

  If for no other reason than because I was pretty sure he would probably break my heart and I was already broken in so many other ways. I needed to keep my heart intact.

  Lucas was bad news. He was out of my league. He was one hundred percent trouble.

  We finally made it to the front of the line and I followed Emily into the pounding beat of the club. The girls made a beeline for the standing tables clustered in front of the bar at the back of the first floor, and Em and I took drink orders. As we pushed our way through the crowd to the bar, I was about to comment to Em that Sally would be disappointed—I didn’t see a single guy anywhere, only girls—when she grabbed my arm so tightly I jumped.

  “Katie, look who it is!” she said gleefully into my ear. “Why don’t I let you order the drinks?”

  I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of who she was pointing at—why was I always stuck behind people who were so much taller than me? Through the crowd I spotted broad shoulders under a black t-shirt, dark hair, those honey-coloured eyes focused downward on the drink he was mixing, and, as he handed the drink over the bar, those dangerous dimples.

  Our bartender was none other than bad-news-out-of-my-league-one-hundred-percent-trouble Lucas.

  6

  I turned back to my sister to tell her she could make the drink order while I went and hid in the bathroom—okay, I wasn’t going to tell her that part—but she was nowhere to be found.

  Great.

  I considered going to one of the other bars, but I didn’t know exactly where they were. Besides, it was a Friday night and the place was packed. It would take me an hour to get back to our table with all the drinks, by which time the girls would have probably disappeared onto the dance floor.

  I glanced hopefully up and down the bar, checking if there was another bartender on duty on a night as busy as this, but no such luck. All I saw was Lucas and his crowd of adoring fans. Accepting my fate with a sigh, I half-heartedly placed my elbow on the bar, waiting my turn. My face felt heavy with all the makeup those evil harpies had painted on me and the contacts were making my eyes burn. I desperately wanted to yank them out of my eyes, but how would I even get in there with all the mascara in the way? (I’d drawn the line at the fake eyelashes.) I closed my eyes to try to ease the burning, and when I opened them again Lucas was standing in front of me.

  Considering what I looked like, I was a little surprised at his reaction. He smiled warmly and asked how I was, then leaned forward so I could hear him better.

  “Is your sister here with you?” he asked.

  I gave him a confused look. Lucas had barely shown any interest in Emily before. “Yeah,” I said. “She’s over there somewhere.” I gestured over my shoulder, nearly hitting the girl standing behind me in the eye. She seemed pretty irritated, not because I’d almost blinded her, but because I was taking up so much of Lucas’s time. I mumbled an apology and she raised her voice as she called out her drink order to him for the third time. He ignored her.

  “I don’t see her,” he said as he peered into the dark, trying to locate our table.

  When he looked back at me again, he said, “I like your hair,” and I looked down at my dark locks hanging over my shoulder, super-straight tonight because of the magic flat iron Melissa had provided.

  It suddenly dawned on me why Lucas was asking about Emily.

  “Lucas, it’s me,” I said. “It’s Katie.”

  The grin slipped off his face. His eyes widened with surprise and then darkened with something else as they moved from my eyes to my lips and then downward to the insanely tight black top I was wearing. Sally had wanted me to wear nothing but a black bra underneath the see-through material, but I’d insisted on wearing a camisole. She’d produced the laciest one I’d ever seen from her bag of tricks and pulled it over my head. I noticed Lucas’s gaze lingering on that lace stretched across my chest and the generous amount of cleavage just above it. More cleavage than I’d ever shown in my life, that was for sure. I felt my neck flushing, the redness creeping up to my cheeks. As much as being stared at made me want to break something, I had to admit the guy sure knew how to make a girl feel seen.

  “Katie?” Luca
s said. His voice was thick and at least two octaves lower than it had been a minute ago.

  “You know, you might recognize me a little better if you looked at my face,” I snapped.

  “Oh, I…right,” he said. Now his eyes were planted firmly on the bar in front of him. “You’re not wearing your glasses.”

  “Emily made me put on these ridiculous blue contacts,” I replied. “She says brown eyes are boring.”

  “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Lucas muttered so low I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him correctly. He cleared his throat and suddenly he was all business. “What’ll you have?” he said, picking up a cocktail glass.

  I recited the list of drinks and he didn’t even bat an eyelash, just began setting out the glasses in a row. I wondered if he thought Em and I were drinking them all ourselves and I was going to clarify that there were five of us in all, but I didn’t get the chance. The show going on in front of me was far too distracting.

  First he dropped the glass in his hand twice then nearly dropped a full bottle of vodka when he set it down too close to the edge of the counter. I placed my chin in my palm, frowning at him. As I watched, he put double the amount of rum in Anita’s rum and Coke and then accidentally threw a lime wedge into the glass when I was pretty sure it was supposed to go on the rim. Then he asked me to repeat the names of the other drinks because he’d forgotten them. While all this was going on he didn’t look at me once.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked with some amusement as he dropped yet another glass. They just seemed to be slipping right through his fingers tonight.

  “What? Nothing!” he said as he finished the last drink—a vodka cranberry, for me. He’d put three cherries in it, which I was pretty sure also wasn’t right, but I didn’t mention it. I was just glad he hadn’t made it a triple by accident—I wasn’t much of a drinker.

  As I handed him the cash for the drinks he glanced down at the floor and shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe the mess around his feet. I couldn’t, either. Was he drinking on the job? Was that allowed? In movies bartenders were always doing shots with the patrons, but I was pretty sure in real life it was a no-no.

  When I thanked him for the drinks he finally managed to look me in the face again. He held my gaze there, his eyes darting between mine, his chest heaving as though he’d run a mile. When he broke the gaze to look down at the drinks in front of me, I felt a physical loss and cursed myself for it.

  Bad news, out of my league, one hundred percent trouble, I repeated silently to myself.

  “That’s too many for you to carry,” Lucas said, and before I could say a thing he was calling over one of the waitresses, a tattooed girl with severe eye makeup and bleached blonde pigtails. “Brit, can you help her carry these back to her table?”

  Brit started collecting the drinks onto her tray.

  “Try not to hurt anybody, okay?” I said to Lucas as we walked away, and I thought I saw him heave a sigh of relief as he smiled at me.

  “Wow,” Brit said. She was expertly carrying the five drinks on a tray balanced on her palm. “I’ve never seen Lucas like that before.”

  “Do you think he’s drunk?” I said to her as we maneuvered through the crowd. If that was the case, I was going to ask her to get him some coffee. I didn’t want him to lose his job.

  Brit gave me a funny look. “No, hon,” she said. “I’m pretty sure it was the sight of you that had him tripping over his own feet.”

  “What?” I said with a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  The girls grinned as Brit set the tray down on the table and they all reached forward to grab their drinks. Brit leaned in to talk into my ear while they were distracted.

  “Girls shove their boobs in his face all the time and he doesn’t even react,” she said. “Trust me, I’ve been working with him three nights a week for months. Lucas has the hots for you, sweetie. You’d better watch yourself.” She winked at me as she picked up her tray and made her way back to the bar.

  “What’s wrong, Katie?” Anita said. “I mean, besides the fact that these drinks are crazy strong!”

  I let my eyes travel back to the bar where Lucas was pouring a line of shots. Lucas had the hots for me? Lucas was dropping glasses and acting like an idiot because of me? It was beyond comprehension. Guys didn’t fall all over themselves for me. They did that for Em, for Sally, for the flirts of the world, not me. Still, my stomach was doing all kinds of ecstatic cartwheels at the idea. I wished I could settle into that feeling, just for a minute or two, snatch back some of that happiness from two nights ago. But Brit’s last words—You’d better watch yourself—reminded me why I couldn’t. No matter how he felt about me, all I could do was stare at him from across the room and wish and dream and yearn. The dream of Lucas—that’s all I could ever have.

  Except, that wasn’t quite true. I could also have the drink he’d made me.

  “Cheers!” I said and downed more than half my cocktail in one gulp as the other girls stared at me, goggle-eyed.

  “Oh yeah!” Sally cried, putting her arm around my shoulder. “Let’s get smashed!”

  Oh, hell yes.

  An hour later I was out on the dance floor with Sally, my head all kinds of fuzzy, Emily and the others girls nowhere in sight, and grabby male hands coming at me from every direction. If I’d had to write out the definition of a situation that was way out of my comfort zone, this would probably be it to the letter. As I watched Sally grinding up against the same beefy guy she’d met in the line, her skirt hitched up so high I could literally see half her ass, I felt another pair of hands gripping me by the hips and flung them off.

  What it all came down to was bad decision making. My first bad decision had been agreeing to come out for Anita’s birthday in the first place, although I now seemed to recall that I’d given a noncommittal maybe and it was Em who had transformed my answer into a yes. My second bad decision had been imagining that actually coming tonight was in the realm of a good idea, that Em and her friends would create a little cocoon of safety around me, allowing me to avoid actually speaking to anybody but them, that I could actually let loose and get away from myself. And the third bad decision was the most obvious one. That decision was sloshing around in my stomach and making me lightheaded and would soon be showing itself to the entire dance floor if I didn’t get out of there really soon.

  As the crowd thrashed around me, I tried to remember where Emily had said she was going before she’d disappeared through the press of bodies. To get more drinks? To the bathroom? I couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d left. I didn’t even know what time it was. The evil harpies had made me take off my watch. My head began to feel very heavy as the crowd shifted around me and I lost sight of Sally altogether. Suddenly I felt the seeds of panic beginning to germinate in my gut and I turned around, scanning the faces on every side, trying to spot Sally’s red lips and blonde curls. The threat of the Facebook message loomed large in my mind, the words echoing in my brain, louder than the music—although it occurred to me that the music in here was so loud no one would be able to hear me scream. If a hand came out and grabbed me, dragging me down, nobody would even notice.

  Just as this thought entered my brain an arm reached out and looped itself around my waist, the fingers spreading across my stomach, and I felt my panic spike up into real terror. Without looking around to see who it was, I tried to scramble away, but we were packed in so tightly there was really nowhere to scramble to. Feeling my movement, the hand tightened slightly and something inside of me snapped. I took hold of the fingers gripping me just above my bellybutton and bent them backwards as fast and as hard as I could. I heard a shriek of pain—which, as I predicted, went unnoticed by the rest of the dancing crowd—and then I lunged forward and roughly shoved my way through the bodies, adrenaline pumping like jet fuel through my veins. I focused on the edge of the dance floor and nothing else until I reached it and slammed headfirst into somet
hing sturdy and warm and tall.

  Something or someone.

  This time I actually screamed and pushed out hard with my forearms, flinging myself backwards. I heard someone calling my name but I ignored it, so intent was I on getting away, although it didn’t really seem like that was going to happen. Not when I was wearing four-inch borrowed heels and I was losing my balance, my arms pin wheeling as I careened toward the floor. I squeezed my eyes shut, preparing myself for the horrifying crunch of my bones breaking, when a pair of arms reached out and caught me at the critical last second.

  My eyes flew open as I found myself once again on my feet, my hands locked onto those arms like vises, not only to brace myself, but also out of fear of who was attached to them.

  “Katie, it’s me,” a voice said. “It’s Lucas.”

  They were the same words I’d said to him earlier when he’d mistaken me for Emily. I guess it was a night for mistaken identities.

  “Lucas,” I breathed, loosening my grip on his arms. I felt one of his hands slide down to the small of my back, holding me steady, his eyes focused on my face, full of concern. “Get me away from here.”

  Taking me by the hand, he led me up one staircase and then another to a lounge at the very top of the club. There were couches and armchairs scattered around the area and it was mostly empty, just one couple making out and two girls who seemed to be sleeping, their heads resting one on top of the other. Lucas and I sat down on a couch in the corner. It was a loveseat, meant for two people in theory, though in this case I had to assume two twelve-year-old girls—it was that narrow. I was practically sitting in his lap. I tried to wiggle over, but there was no couch left next to me, and he kept leaning toward me and touching me with his warm hands and murmuring softly to me, which was so calming, almost like a lullaby, except liking his lullaby was so totally against the promise I’d made myself. The more he tried to calm me, the more agitated I became, until I felt his hands cupping my face, holding it still.