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If that was true, he didn’t admit it then. And the thought that he might have deliberately made that call, strangely enough, left me trusting him more.
“It’s just a risk you have to take,” he told me. “Like anything else in life, right?”
He did make love to me again a few hours later with the world dark and quiet around us, just a single lamp in his bedroom barely reaching the far walls to throw its shadows. He moved slowly and intently, talking to me in a gentle voice about the design features his family’s house espoused, about the places they had gone to purchase furnishings and other supplies. He called my attention to the high ceilings and the beautifully finished cornices.
If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he assumed I had some fetish for house construction. But I thought I did know better, and I understood he was just doing what he always did: speaking things into reality. This time, it was something so minor as my dreams, how they would feel once they were actually in my life.
And, well, whatever I thought about that, he certainly knew how to get me to where he wanted to take me.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It was strange to have Lucas get out of my car and not immediately walk away. He even took my hand once I was done getting all my stuff together, which set my knees knocking in fear.
I knew, as we walked onto the school grounds linked in that way, everyone would know this had happened by the end of the day. And I didn’t know what that would mean for me, or if Lucas would be able to protect me. Maybe he wouldn’t even be interested in protecting me the way I hoped.
The regret started really hitting me as we approached a group I didn’t even know half the members of. How could I expect this to work out? When we got close enough for me to recognise Steven, whose only prior interaction with me was that sleazy hint about sitting on his lap, a weird thought struck me: should I have just gotten in the car with his friends the first time he asked, so I could get to know him properly?
I couldn’t let myself get caught up in ideas like that. If Lucas had wanted a girl who would go along with whatever he wanted it would be someone like Petra coming to join his group of friends right now. And I was pretty sure girls like Petra moved in and out of the group all the time.
“Hey,” said Steven when we reached the shade of the tree they were all standing under. “Hi, Calista.”
“So I’ve got a confession to make,” Lucas said. “Callie and I have been… hanging out, over the past few weeks, on the quiet.”
“Colour me surprised,” said Steven.
There was an awkward silence Lucas cheerfully barrelled over the top of, introducing me around the group. Other than Steven there was Axel and Mic on the guys’ side, and then Ashleigh had Sophia and Carlene with her. All of them but Ashleigh had joined us later in high school. Petra probably wasn’t a regular in the crowd after her ‘time’ with Lucas, which was all the thinking I was going to do about that because I was feeling insecure enough right now.
None of which was helped by the way Ashleigh was staring at me.
I decided, as Lucas’s attention moved to telling Steven about some wild evening he’d had at a party I never even knew had happened, I was going to address this head-on so it wouldn’t nag at me for the whole time I was this close with Lucas. Even if things went bad between us very quickly, I realised I wanted to know what the fuck was her problem.
I nudged Ashleigh to cut her out of her conversation with Sophia and Carlene, not that she seemed particularly invested in it for the moment.
“Right, so are you going to tell me exactly what’s up with you?”
She raised her eyebrows at me. “Do I need to? You’re such an absolutely sketchy bitch, Calista. You acted like you wanted my help that one time, and then you totally betrayed me, made me look like I was doing something wrong. I know you look down on all of us, but from where I’m standing, you’re the one who isn’t shit.”
At the start of this whole adventure, I would have just rolled my eyes at that. But now I didn’t know what I thought about anything.
“I’m sorry I made you feel that way,” I told her. “It wasn’t my plan. I just said something stupid I should have kept to myself.”
“Well,” said Ashleigh, “we all do that once in a while.”
I checked around us. None of the others were paying attention to us.
I leaned closer to her. “Did you just call me that day on impulse? Is there something you feel I need to know? Because now is the time to tell me.”
“I just… I heard from Lucas that you’d had an accident,” Ashleigh said, “and I wanted you to know there was support available. In case you needed it.”
“Why would you…” But I was already abandoning the question, because I could see exactly what she was leading towards.
“Maybe I was handled with a bit more discretion because I was a friend,” said Ashleigh. “Nobody knows. But I know how hard it is for you to get out of a situation nobody else knows you’re in.”
And there it was. She’d lied about it before to my face… but could I really blame her?
It had been easier to discount when it was girls like Petra, near-strangers I’d met as a teenager and had little history with. But I’d grown up with Ashleigh on the fringes of my life. I knew her family, the kids she used to be friends with when we were a much smaller group of kids, and I probably wouldn’t forget her the way I would some of these other girls.
If Lucas had secretly romanced Ashleigh in plain sight at some point… well, it could have just been because he didn’t want to deal with the whole having-a-girlfriend situation. But there had clearly been some angle to it that had really wigged Ashleigh out. If she just wanted to make trouble for me, she could have let me find out sooner. Whatever had happened, she only barely dared to reveal it to someone who might have been through the same.
