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“Yeah. I mean everyone thinks about their high school sweetheart but with the way you guys ended… you know. He’s grown up. He feels bad about it. He always wanted to reach out and apologize to you but you went and disappeared on all of us,” Nick laughed. “Which sucked ‘cause, you know… we always kind of wondered what you’d look like when you got older.”
Oh, I remember. The boys used to bet during lunch on whether or not Isabel and my boobs would get any bigger as we got older. Advantage Isabel on that one. Mine had stayed the same but on the bright side, they still sat about as high on my chest as they did when I was eighteen. I caught Nick observing that.
“Sorry,” he grinned. “Couldn’t help it. Never could. But you remember.”
I smiled though he was bordering quickly on creepy. As usual.
Nick had been a senior when I first entered Mercer School as a junior. I remembered the way he looked at me on my first day, wandering through the dining hall and doing my best to find a table to eat at since Callum, the night before, had banned me from sitting with him and his friends. I had spent five minutes floating around and being stared at until Nick’s hand shot out and grabbed my thigh for my attention. I spun around to see him grinning at me with a table full of senior boys, their bodies hunched over the table too small for their height and size. I agreed to sit with them only because I could feel the heat of Callum’s stare from across the room. I knew he had imagined me sitting with some table of harmless girls, fellow virgins perhaps, and I found it funny. But even if I didn’t feel like pissing him off, those girls didn’t want to sit with me anyway.
“Hope you don’t mind the giant sausagefest,” Nick said when he had me sit between him and his friend, neither of them giving me much space on the bench. “And when I say giant, I’m talking about myself. Can’t speak for these guys.”
Nick Spencer had a talent for turning everything into a dick-swinging contest. All the Spencer boys did. I’d find that out later, though. Nick was asking which school I’d transferred from when Callum finally came, looking thoroughly annoyed. He muttered something to them and then dragged me off to his table at the other end of the room.
“Good thing Cal changed his mind. I was about to beat his ass if you wound up sitting with my brother’s friends.” Theo and his twinkling brown eyes smiled at me the second I took the seat across from him at Callum’s table. “You don’t want to sit with those guys. They’re all a bunch of pervert assholes.”
“Isn’t that all guys?”
“No. We’re all perverts but we’re not all assholes.”
Callum had clarified that statement for me that night at home. “Yeah, Theo’s an asshole too,” he warned me, since I’d spent our entire lunch period talking to him. “He’s been the horniest bastard since we were like, ten, and he’s… demanding with girls. But if you’re going to date someone, you might as well keep it in the circle.”
“Why? So you can keep an eye on me?” I had been so smug because it was obvious that Callum was fiercely protective of me. He just never acknowledged it.
“I’m telling you, your proud Christian virgin thing isn’t going to fly with Theo if you end up with him. He’s a good guy but he’s also… a guy. Period. If you think I need sex all the time, just wait till you get to know him.”
He had warned me, I had to give him that. And I knew I should have known the lack of sex would be a problem but Theo was so cute and I liked him enough. I liked Callum more but back in high school, everyone considered him my brother, so I couldn’t have him like that. Not that I didn’t have him anyway. We were in a relationship of our own and we’d always been – it just wasn’t the kind that was normal enough to have a name, or be something that you could tell other people about. I tried explaining it once to my roommate in college but came up empty. She sniffed and said that if Callum and I were anything real, we would know what to call each other. How to categorize each other. Boyfriend, girlfriend, friends with benefits. I disagreed but I didn’t argue. There was no point. I never thought to put Callum in words because he was just so natural to me. Like air. There was no need to describe it, it just was and we just were.
“You know Theo’s turning twenty-eight this Saturday. I’m throwing him a surprise party at XIII in Chelsea,” Nick murmured, his gaze drawing a straight line up my thighs. “You should come. You’d be the biggest surprise of all.”
“Thank you… but I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?” Nick frowned. “We’re all grown up and you’re both single. It’s time to bury the hatchet.”
“Nick, I know we’re adults now but some things that happened in the past are still hard pills to swallow.”
“Well you can’t just leave it in your throat, right? This is our chance to put all the bad shit behind us. Life’s too short to hold onto grudges. Everyone deserves a second chance, am I wrong?”
My gaze fell as I considered his words. After leaving New York, I’d spent so many sleepless nights telling myself that I didn’t deserve a second chance with Callum. But that was mostly thanks to the hate and vitriol spewed at me on a daily basis. “Trash. That’s what you are,” that awful woman loved to tell me. But as much as my surroundings confirmed it, I refused to let the idea sink into me. I told myself I was worthy. It was a mental battle I mustered the strength to fight every day because while I lived waist-deep in misery, I refused to sink all the way in. I had a life I loved at some point and I was determined to find it again someday.
“What, am I wrong?” Nick read the change of heart drifting onto my face.
“You’re not wrong but – ”
“Then pay it forward, Lake. You left two days before your best friend’s twenty-first birthday – before you guys were gonna go on this big trip together. And she forgave you because you were basically sisters since you were sixteen years old and the fact that you disappeared didn’t erase that. It’s not like you never had any good memories with Theo. It’s not like Theo didn’t spend a decade having Callum’s back and bailing him out of trouble before all that shit went down. There’s good and bad to every relationship. And the ones that have a lot more of the bad to get past only end up being more rewarding. Tell me I’m not right about that.”
He was. Shockingly so. I thrust my hand through my hair, Nick Spencer somehow saying all the right words to rip my heart right open. Of course, Theo wasn’t the one it was bleeding for.
“Okay, I’ll go to the party,” I finally blurted.
“Shit – yeah?” Nick pumped two fists in the air. “Yeah!”
I stared into space as he burst out of his chair and celebrated by gathering everyone and ordering a giant round of shots. I went with the toast and knocked it all back but underneath my smile, I entertained a bad thought. A slightly evil thought. I had agreed to go in earnest because I believed in second chances. I lived on the idea of them. But even if I didn’t, seeing Theo Spencer still might not be the worst idea.
Because all those years ago in the dining hall, Callum hadn’t brought me to his table till I’d lit a fire under his ass by sitting with Nick. A decade later, I wondered if Theo’s party might have him feeling the heat once again. It was a call to his bluff. I needed to know if I was fighting for anything – if second chances did exist. So I clinked my glass to Nick’s.
“Cheers to a new beginning, Lake DePalma,” he grinned.
I did like the sound of that.
