CHAPTER 25
As I drove to Lucas’s apartment Sunday night, I reviewed the numerous reasons why popping up unannounced and uninvited was a bad idea: he might not be there, he might be busy, he thinks he scared me away, he thinks we said goodbye. On the other hand, I was only going to be in town until Tuesday morning, and I couldn’t let him dismiss me without a fight.
After I knocked, I heard the bolt turn and then Lucas’s harsh voice through the door. “Who is it, Carlie? Don’t just open the door—”
“It’s a girl.” The door swung open and a pretty, blonde, dark-eyed girl was framed in the doorway. She blinked at me, clearly waiting for an explanation of who I was and what I wanted. I couldn’t speak. I was sure my heart had lodged itself in my esophagus and stopped beating.
Lucas came up next to her, scowling. When he saw me, his brows rose into the hair hanging over his forehead. “Jacqueline? What are you doing here?”
My heart revved to life and I turned to tear down the stairs. Suddenly I was airborne, my bicep caught in his grip, swinging me from the top step as he brought me against his chest and I almost, almost stomped on his instep.
“She’s Carlie Heller,” he said into my ear, and I stilled. “Her brother Caleb is inside, too. We’re playing video games.”
My heart still pounded fight-or-flight as his words sunk in and I slumped against him, feeling like a jealous idiot. I dropped my forehead to his chest. His heart was pounding as hard as mine. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled against his soft t-shirt. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have come without telling me, but I can’t be sorry to see you.”
I looked up. “But you said…?”
His eyes were silver under the porch light. “I’m trying to protect you. From myself. I don’t do…” he swung a finger back and forth between us “…this.”
My teeth chattered when I spoke. “That doesn’t make any sense. Just because you haven’t before doesn’t mean you can’t.” Too late, I apprehended a different, more likely reason for his words. “Unless… you don’t want to.”
He sighed and released his grip on my arm to run both hands through his hair. “It’s not… that…”
“Brrr! Are y’all coming in, or what? ’Cause I’m closing this door.” I peeked around Lucas. Carlie Heller looked young, but she didn’t look that young. She didn’t seem resentful, though. And she appeared to be curious.
“Well, you asked for it.” Threading his fingers through mine, Lucas turned toward the door and pushed it wider. “We’re coming in.”
Carlie darted to a corner of the sofa where Francis lay across a blanket. Scooping him up, she flopped him over her shoulder like he was an inanimate object. After climbing under the blanket, she rearranged the cat on her lap and picked up the controller. Next to her sat a scowling boy with the same dark eyes, a bit younger than (but just as sullen as) my middle school boys.
“Take all day,” he mumbled in Lucas’s direction.
“Rude.” Carlie elbowed him and he rolled his eyes.
Lucas took his controller from the sofa cushion, gesturing for me to sit in the corner opposite Carlie. “Guys, this is my friend, Jacqueline. Jacqueline, these monkeys are Caleb and Carlie Heller.” Carlie and I exchanged hellos and Caleb mumbled something in my direction. I pulled my feet beneath me and watched the game over Lucas’s head.
When Carlie ushered Caleb out fifteen minutes later, his sulking hadn’t decreased. He glanced back at me. “I can’t have girls alone in my room.”
She swatted the back of his head. “Shut it. Lucas is a grown-up, and you are just a horny pre-adolescent.”
I tried to disguise my laugh as a cough as Caleb’s face flushed red, and he shot through the door and pounded down the steps.
Carlie turned to hug Lucas and beam at me. “Y’all have a good night,” she chirped, disappearing through the door.
He watched her walk across the yard and into the house, saying goodnight before shutting and bolting the door. He turned, leaning back against it, and stared at me. “So. I thought we said we were taking a break?” He didn’t seem angry, but he wasn’t happy, either.
“You said we were taking a break.”
His lips flattened. “Don’t you have to check out of the dorm for several weeks?”
I remained in my spot on the sofa, curled up into the corner. “Yes. I’m only here for two more days.”
He stared at the ground, his palms flat on the door behind him.
I tried to swallow but couldn’t, my speech turning shaky. “There’s something I need to tell—”
“It’s not that I don’t want you.” His voice was soft, and he didn’t look at me when he spoke. “I lied, earlier, when I said I was protecting you.” His chin came up and we stared at each other across the room. “I’m protecting myself.” He took a visible breath, his chest rising and falling. “I don’t want to be your rebound, Jacqueline.”
The memory of Operation Bad Boy Phase crashed into me. Erin and Maggie had hatched the plan for me to use Lucas to get over Kennedy, as though he had no feelings of his own, and I’d gone along with it. I had no idea then that he’d been watching me the whole semester. That once we began talking, his interest would grow stronger. That finally, he would feel the need to turn away from me because of the depth of those feelings, not because he felt nothing.
“Then why are you assuming that role?” I unfolded myself from the tight little ball I’d become in the corner of his sofa, and walked across the room, slowly. “It’s not what I want, either.” As I approached, he remained frozen in place, sucking the ring on his lower lip into his mouth.
Straightening, he stared down at me as though he thought I might disappear in front of his eyes. His hands came up to cup my face. “What am I gonna do with you?”
I smirked up at him. “I can think of a couple of things.”
***
“My mother’s name was Rosemary. She went by Rose.”
His disclosure brought me back to earth. Lying pressed to his side, I’d been distractedly tracing the dark red petals over his heart, wondering how to tell him what I knew. Or if. “You did this in memory of her?” A lump stuck in my throat as my finger outlined the stem.
“Yes.” His voice was low and weighty in the dark room. He was so heavy with secrets that I couldn’t imagine how he survived it day after day, never sharing the burden with anyone. “And the poem on my left side. She wrote it. For my dad.”
My eyes stung. No wonder his father had shut down. From what Dr. Heller told me, Ray Maxfield was a logical, analytical person. His only emotional exception must have been his wife. “She was a poet?”
“Sometimes.”
My head on his arm, I watched his ghost smile appear in profile, and it looked different from that angle. His face was scruffy, unshaved, and several places on my body boasted the slightly chafed evidence of it.
“Usually, she was a painter.”
I fought to ignore my conscience, which wouldn’t quit babbling that I should tell him what I knew. That I owed him the truth. “So she’s responsible for those artist genes all mixed up with your engineering parts, eh?”
Turning onto his side, he echoed, “Engineering parts? Which parts might that be?” A mischievous smile tugged at his mouth.
I arched a brow and he kissed me.
“Do you have any of her paintings?” My fingers followed an orbit around the rose, and the hard muscle beneath it flexed with my touch. Pressing my hand to his skin, I absorbed the measured thump-thump of his heart.
“Yeah… but they’re either in storage, or displayed in the Heller’s place, since they were close friends of my parents.”
“Your dad isn’t still friends with them?”
He nodded, watching my face. “He is. They were my ride home at Thanksgiving. They can’t get him to come here, so every other year, they all go there.”
I thought about my parents and the friends and neighbors with whom they socialized. “My parents don’t have any friends close enough to be incorporated into actual holidays.”
He stared up at the ceiling. “They were all really close—before.”
His grief was so tangible. I knew in that moment that he’d not worked through it—not at all in the eight years it had been. His protective wall had become a fortress holding him hostage rather than giving sanctuary. He might never fully recover from the horror of what happened that night, but there had to be a point where it wouldn’t consume him.
“Lucas, I need to tell you something.” His heart drummed under my hand, slow and steady.
Other than shifting his gaze to me, he didn’t move, but I felt his withdrawal as he waited. I assured myself that the disconnection was all in my mind—a product of my guilt and nothing more.
“I wanted to know how you lost your mother, and I could tell it upset you to talk about it. So… I looked online for her obituary.” My breathing went shallow as the seconds ticked by and he said nothing.
Finally, he spoke, and his voice was undeniably flat and cold. “Did you find your answer?”
I swallowed, but my voice was a whisper. “Yes.” I couldn’t hear myself over the rapid thud of my heartbeat.
He shifted his eyes from me and lay back, biting his lip, hard.
“There’s one more thing.”
He inhaled and exhaled, staring at the ceiling, waiting for my next confession.
I closed my eyes and blurted it out. “I talked to Dr. Heller about it—”
“What?” His body was like rock against mine.
“Lucas, I’m sorry if I invaded your privacy—”
“If?” He shot up, unable to look at me, and I sat, pulling the covers up with me. “Why would you go talk to him? Weren’t the gory details in the news reports sickening enough for you? Or personal enough?” He pulled on his boxers and jeans, his movements rough. “Did you want to know how she looked when they found her? How she’d bled out? How even when my dad ripped out the carpet with his bare hands—” he exhaled harshly “—there was a yard-wide circle of bloodstained flooring underneath that couldn’t be sanded deep enough to get it all?” His voice broke and he stopped talking.
In shock and out of words, I could hardly breathe. He sat on the edge of the bed, silent, his head in his hands. He was so close that I could have reached out to stroke the cross that ran along his spine, but I didn’t dare. I scooted carefully from the bed and got dressed. I pulled on my UGGs and walked to stand at the foot of the bed.
His elbows pressed into his thighs, his hands obscuring his face like blinders. I stared at the dark hair grazing his shoulders, the flexed muscles of his arm and the ink circling his bicep and flowing down his forearm, his beautiful, lean torso and the words etched into his side like a brand.
“Do you want me to leave?” I surprised myself, uttering the words with a steady voice.
I don’t know why I thought he would say no, or say nothing. I was wrong, either way.
“Yes.”
The tears started flowing then, but he couldn’t see them. He didn’t move from his position on the bed. I couldn’t even be angry, because I’d crossed a line and I knew it, and meaning well wasn’t good enough. I grabbed my purse and keys from the kitchen table and my coat from the sofa, ears pricked for the sound of him coming after me, telling me to stay. There was nothing but silence from his room.
When I opened the door, Francis shot inside, along with a burst of cold air. I pulled the door shut behind me before a sob broke free. Gulping the frigid air and wondering how I’d managed to screw this up so thoroughly, I was determined not to cry until I was in my truck. I slid my hand along the railing as I rushed clumsily down the steps, because I couldn’t see through the combination of a moonless night and my tears. A splinter pierced my hand two steps from the bottom.
“Ow! Dammit.” The physical pain provided the ideal excuse for the sobbing to start. I sprinted down the long, curved driveway, unsuccessful in my attempt to curb my tears long enough to get into the truck. “Damn. Damn. Damn. F*ck.” I jammed my key into the lock by feel.
Déjà vu. That was the first thing I thought when I felt myself propelled across the bench seat. That was where the resemblance ended, though.
Buck shut the door behind him and slapped the automatic lock. His weight immobilized my lower legs and he had my left wrist in his hand before I could make out who he was, though I knew. “Good enough to spread your legs for anybody but me, huh Jackie?”