CHAPTER 19
After a week of Lucas ignoring my existence while we were in class, I wasn’t sure what to expect Monday morning. The alteration was minor, but undeniable. When I entered the classroom, his eyes met mine, the barest suggestion of a smile playing on his mouth. Everything about him had grown familiar. The night I danced with him, his features had merged into an exceptionally crush-worthy guy. Now, he was all sharp angled jaw and strong chin, his nose with the slightest hint of a prior break. A crescent-shaped scar sat high on one cheekbone, and his colorless eyes were sometimes a little eerie. The fringes of his bedhead hair were just long enough to soften the whole; if he ever cut it short, he would look like a completely different guy.
He returned his attention to the ever-present sketchbook, and I pulled my gaze forward in an effort to keep from pitching down the steps. Just hours before, he’d held my face in his hands, pressed me against the door to my truck and kissed me as though we’d done what I’d wanted to do. I’d driven back to my dorm in a state of bewildered lust.
Sliding into my seat next to Benji, I withstood the temptation to look over my shoulder. If he wasn’t watching me, I’d be disappointed. If he was, I’d be caught.
The girl on my right was giving her usual Monday morning weekend recap to her neighbor… and the two or three dozen other people who could hear her. Benji pantomimed her perfectly, if a bit dramatically, and I pretended a coughing fit to hide my laughter. Unfortunately, the coughing drew her attention.
“Are you dying or something?” she asked, affecting a perfect sneer as I shook my head. “Well, hacking up a lung out in public isn’t all that attractive—just sayin’.”
My face flamed, but then Benji leaned up and spoke around me. “Um, giving half the class an exhaustive summary every Monday morning—in lurid detail—of how much of an alcoholic skank you are? Isn’t all that attractive, either. Just sayin’.”
She gasped as nearby people snickered, and I caught my lower lip between my teeth while trying to stare straight ahead. Thankfully, Dr. Heller entered then, and class started, and I went back to fifty long minutes of attempting to forget Lucas’s presence three rows back and five seats over.
“So… nine days ’til the final.” Benji stuffed his backpack and smirked at me while I packed mine.
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Nine days until no more… restrictions.” I rolled my eyes directly at him as his brows danced up and down. “Eh? Eh?”
I couldn’t help checking to see if Lucas was still in the room. He was talking to the Zeta girl he’d spoken to before—but he was watching me over her head.
Benji sidled by on his way to the aisle, a grin splitting his face. “I’ll take Hot Tutors for $200, Alex,” he said in an unnaturally feminine voice before he began humming the Jeopardy theme song. He was still humming it when he smiled at Lucas just before exiting.
I hoped I wasn’t blushing as Lucas fell into step with me, but neither of us spoke until we were outside. Clearing his throat, he gestured toward Benji’s retreating back with one shoulder. “Does he, um, does he know? About..?”
He worried his bottom lip and the small silver ring, a slight frown on his face.
“He’s actually how I figured out… who you were.”
“Oh?” He walked with me toward my Spanish class, as he had once before.
“He’d noticed us… looking at each other,” I shrugged, “and he asked me if I went to your tutoring sessions.”
Closing his eyes for a beat, he took a breath. “God. I’m so sorry.” I waited, hoping he would tell me the reason for the Landon/Lucas charade, finally. We hiked across the hilly campus in silence for a minute or two, every step taking us nearer to my class. Without a single cloud in the sky, the sun warmed us in direct patches of light while we froze in the shade cast by trees and buildings.
“I noticed you the first week.” His voice was soft. “Not just because of how pretty you are, though of course, that played into it.” I smiled, watching our feet as we matched our steps. “It was the way you lean onto your elbows when you’re listening in class, when something catches your interest. And when you laugh, it’s never to get attention, it’s just—laughter. The way you obsessively tuck your hair behind your ear on the left side, but let the right side fall down like a screen. And when you’re bored, you tap your foot soundlessly and move your fingers on the desktop like you’re playing an instrument. I wanted to sketch you.”
We stopped and stood in a square of sun, well away from the shadowed entrance to the language arts building. “Almost every time I saw you, you were with him. But one day, you walked up to the building alone. I was holding the door for several girls in front of you, and I waited for you to catch up. When you reached me, you look pleased, and a little surprised. Unlike the others, you didn’t expect the door to be held for you by some random guy. You smiled up at me and said, ‘Thank you.’ That was the last straw. I prayed you’d never come to a session, and not with him. I didn’t want you to know I was the tutor.
“He took you for granted, even when you stood next to him, holding his hand. Like you were an accessory.” He frowned, and I remembered feeling exactly like that with Kennedy. Often. “I never wanted you to get hurt, but I wanted to take you from him. I had to constantly remind myself that it didn’t matter if you were his or not, because you were on the other side of a line I couldn’t cross. And then you didn’t show up the day of the midterm—or the next, or the next. I worried that something had happened to you. He was kind of reserved the first couple of days. By the end of the week, girls were flirting with him before class, and the way he responded told me what had happened.
“I was sure you’d dropped the class, which made me selfishly ecstatic. Without even knowing I was doing it, I started looking for you on campus.” He stared into my eyes and lowered his voice even further. “And then, the Halloween party.”
I couldn’t breathe. “You were there? At the party?”
He nodded.
“How? You aren’t Greek, are you?”
He shook his head. “I’d fixed the house’s A/C the night before. Maintenance doesn’t do non-emergency stuff on evenings or weekends, but I’m contract labor, so I agreed to do it. When I wouldn’t take a tip, a couple of the guys invited me to the party. I only said yes because I was hoping you might be there. It had been two weeks, and this campus is so huge I was starting to think I’d never run into you.” He chuckled softly and rubbed a hand at the back of his neck. “Wow, that sounds total stalker.”
Or totally hot. God. “Why didn’t you talk to me that night? Before…”
He shook his head. “You were so withdrawn and miserable. Almost every guy who approached you was rejected without a second glance. There was no way I was going to become one of them. You danced with a handful of guys you already knew—and he was one of those.”
“Buck.”
“Yes. When you left, he followed, and I thought maybe… maybe you two had decided to leave early together, without everyone knowing. Meet outside or something.”
I watched a trio of my classmates enter the building. “He’s my roommate’s boyfriend’s best friend. Well, her ex’s best friend, now. He was a known entity. A friend, I thought. Boy, was I wrong.”
He nodded, frowning. “I was about to leave—my bike was parked out front. Something didn’t feel right, but I was struggling with the same desire to take him out that I’d felt for half the semester with your boyfriend, so I questioned my own motives. I lost a minute arguing with myself, and I’m sorry about that. I finally decided if you two were hooking up, I’d just go around front, rev up the Harley, and be done with it. With you.”
“But that’s not what happened.”
“No.”
Suddenly aware of the lack of people bustling around us, I pulled out my phone. It was two minutes past ten. “Crap. I’m late.”
“Uh-oh. Isn’t this the professor who makes an example of you if you’re late?”
Impressive. “You remembered.” Groaning, I pushed my phone into my bag. “I sorta feel like skipping now.”
His mouth turned up on one side. “What kind of university employee would I be, to encourage you to skip class the last week of the semester?”
“We’re just reviewing. I have an A. I don’t really need the review.”
We stared at each other.
I angled my head and looked directly into his clear eyes. “You don’t have a class?”
“Not until eleven.” Not for the first time, the feel of his gaze drifting over my face was like a soft breeze, or the lightest possible touch. He stopped on my mouth.
Lips parted, my breathing slowed as my heart rate sped. “You never did sketch me again.”
His eyes darted to mine, but he didn’t answer, so I thought maybe he didn’t remember his texted request.
“You said you were having a hard time doing it from memory. My jaw. My neck…”
He nodded. “And your lips. I said I needed more time staring at them and less time tasting them.”
I nodded. Good God, what did he not remember?
“A very foolish thing for me to say, I think.” He was staring at my mouth again.
My lips tingled from his focused perusal. I wanted to rub my fingers across them. Or graze them with my teeth to stop the tickling sensation. When I wet them with my tongue, he sucked in a breath. “Coffee. Let’s go get coffee.”
I nodded, and without another word, we walked toward the student center, the busiest place on campus at this time of day.
“So you wear glasses, huh?” We’d been sitting at a tiny table, sipping our coffees and enduring a decidedly uncomfortable silence, so I’d blurted the first viable thing that entered my brain.
“Um. Yeah.”
Great. I’d just brought up that night. But shouldn’t I bring up that night? Shouldn’t we talk about it? Shouldn’t I ask him if he was pushing me away because he was the class tutor, or because of those scars on his wrists?
“I wear contacts. But my eyes get tired of them by the end of the day.”
Cue the mental picture of Lucas pulling his door open, the apprehension on his face, the glasses transforming him into someone official while the pajamas produced a contrary effect. I cleared my throat. “They look really good on you. The glasses. I mean, you could wear them all the time, if you wanted to.”
“They’re kind of a pain with the motorcycle helmet. And taekwondo.”
“Oh. Yeah, I can imagine.”
We were quiet again, with forty minutes until his class and my rescheduled bass practice time. “I could sketch you now,” he said.
For no good reason, my face flamed.
Luckily, he was reaching into his backpack, withdrawing his sketchpad, and turning to a blank page. He took the pencil from behind his ear before looking across the table at me. If he noticed my heightened color, he didn’t mention it. Without a word, he leaned back in his chair, the pad on his knee, and started drawing, his pencil making the effortless, sweeping arches of someone who knows what he’s doing. His eyes moved from the pad to me and back, over and over, and I sat silently sipping, watching his face. Watching his hands.
There was something intimate about modeling for someone. I’d volunteered as a model once in my junior year art class, for extra credit. Severely lacking in drawing skill, I’d jumped at the extra two points without stopping to consider that I would be sitting on top of a table for an entire class period. Giving a classroom of teenaged boys free rein to stare at me for an hour was a whole new sort of awkward. Especially when Jillian’s boyfriend, Zeke, started his portrait with my chest. He stared unabashedly, showing off his artistic efforts to his tablemates while I flushed and pretended I couldn’t hear his wisecracks about nips and cleavage and how he wished I’d just lose the shirt altogether—or at least unbutton it.
“Most artists begin with the head,” Ms. Wachowski said as she looked over his shoulder. Zeke and the other boys at the table snorted with laughter while I burned with humiliation and the entire class looked on.
“What are you thinking about?”
I wasn’t relaying that story. “High school.”
The hair falling over his forehead obscured the crease I knew was there, but his lips pressed tight.
“What?” I asked, wondering at the change those two words brought.
Surrounded by conversations, music and mechanical sounds, the scratch of the lead across the paper was inaudible in the coffee shop. I watched the pencil dance in his hand, wondering what part of me he was sketching, and what parts he might want to sketch. What was he like as a sixteen-year-old boy? Did he draw then? Hang out with other boys his age? Had he fallen in love? Had his heart broken by some callous girl?
Had he already put those scars on his wrists, or was that yet to come?
“You said you’d been with him for three years.” He spoke just loud enough for me to hear him, staring down at the pad as the pencil worked back and forth. There was no question in his voice. He assumed I was thinking about Kennedy.
“I wasn’t thinking about him.”
His jaw clenched, lips compressed again. Jealousy? Guilt crept in when I realized I wanted him to feel jealous.
“What was high school like for you?” I asked and then wanted to take it back. His eyes flashed to mine and his hand stilled.
“A lot different than it was for you, I imagine.” His eyes still roved over my face, but he was no longer drawing, and his expression was tense.
“Oh? How?” I smiled, hoping to either bring us back from this ledge-clinging position, or shove us over the edge.
He lifted his gaze to me then and stared. “For one, I never had a girlfriend.”
I thought of the rose over his heart, and the poem inscribed on his left side. I didn’t want that love to be recent. “Really? Not one?”
He shook his head. “I was… unsettled, you could say. I hooked up with girls. No relationships. Skipped class as much as I bothered to show up. Partied with the locals and the beach tourists. Got into fights often, in school and out. Got suspended or expelled so frequently I was never quite sure when I woke up in the morning whether I was supposed to go or not.”
“What happened?”
His face went blank. “What?”
“I mean, how did you get into college and become this—” I gestured at him and shrugged “—serious student?”
He stared at the pencil in his hand, his thumbnail scraping over the lead, sharpening it. “I was seventeen, about to flunk out for the last time, prepared to work the boat with Dad the rest of my life. One night, I was partying with some friends. We made a bonfire on the beach, which always drew the tourist kids in—and they always wanted to be hooked up. One of my friends was a dealer. Not big stuff—just party drugs. He’d sell high, so we could skim some off without having to pay his distributor for it.
“His sister tagged along that night. She had a crush on me, but she was fourteen. Totally innocent. Not my type. She didn’t take the dismissal well, and started flirting with the guys who financed our night, so to speak. Her dumbass brother was so high he wasn’t watching her at all. My head wasn’t much clearer, but when the guy she was dancing with pulled her down the beach, she looked like she was trying to yank away from him.
“I remember going after them, but everything after that is murky. I was told I broke the guy’s jaw. Got arrested, charges filed. I probably would have ended up in prison, but the Hellers were visiting that week, and Charles did something to make it all go away.
“He and my dad had words. Next thing I knew I was signed up for martial arts classes. I was stupid enough to see the wrong-minded benefit of being able to beat the shit outta people even better than I already could, so I didn’t object. What I didn’t see coming was how it would center me for the first time in a long time. Before he left, Charles lectured me like Dad never had. I didn’t like disappointing him.” He looked at me closely. “Still don’t.”
We sipped our coffees and I waited, holding my tongue, knowing there was more.
“He told me I was throwing my future away, that I was better than drugs and fights. He said my mother was watching, and asked if I wanted her to be proud or ashamed. Then, he promised he’d help me get into the university, pull every string he could pull, if I’d just try. He knew I was looking for an escape, and he gave me one second chance.”
A chill moved down my back at his words.
“He’s good at offering those.”
He smiled, just barely. “Yes. He is. I took it. My senior year looked good, but I’d all but killed my overall GPA before that. I don’t know how he got me accepted, even conditionally. Dad can’t pay for it, of course, so that’s why all the odd jobs. I pay rent for the apartment, but I couldn’t get a cot in somebody’s garage for what he charges me.”
“He’s like a guardian angel for you.”
Raising his light, unnerving eyes to mine, he said, “You don’t even know.”