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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.
