Page 34 of A Totally Platonic Thing
Cool, foggy air slapped my burning cheeks as I stepped out the door, the music fading behind me, replaced with laughter from across the street and someone honking a car horn a few blocks away. The sounds of traffic and life and people doing their thing.
I wrapped my arms around myself, chilly all of a sudden. I didn’t have a jacket with me.
Lucas always had a jacket to wrap around me instead when I got cold. Even the very first day we’d met. That hadn’t been the last time he’d rolled his eyes, shrugged out of his own outerwear, and made sure I didn’t freeze. And it sure as hell hadn’t been the last time I’d smiled to myself, warm in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with his jacket. If anything, that feeling had only gotten stronger every time.
I left my phone off, because I didn’t want to know. Had I gotten a million notifications? Or none at all? Either might break me. Besides, calling Lucas was totally off the table. Like, no way in hell. And walking…right. So not happening, even though dragging myself all the way home on foot sounded like something I deserved for being such an idiot.
Since I couldn’t use a rideshare app, that left me with flagging down an honest-to-God yellow cab. So twentieth century.
The taxi dropped me off ten minutes later.
Lucas’s car sat in front of our apartment.
Oh, God. I’d hoped to have some time to get myself together before he came home. At the same time, that awful, treacherous whatever-it-was in my chest gave a helpless little flutter. Lucas had come home, which meant at least he wasn’t at that girl’s place.
Unless he’d brought her home with him.
Climbing the stairs and unlocking the door made me want to hurl.Please, please, please let him be alone.
I stepped in and shut the door behind me, swallowing hard.
Relief flowed through me; Lucas was definitely alone.
And a frisson of something else went through me too, something scary and exciting and exhilarating. Lucas was alone and standing right in the middle of the room glaring at me like he’d been waiting for me.
And he looked like he had the other night: mouth set in a hard line, eyes glinting black behind his glasses, broad shoulders rigid with tension. His hands had clenched into fists at his sides.
God, but he was tall. So freaking tall. Even though his build tended to thin and lanky rather than all bulky like, say, Aidan, he outweighed me by a lot just by virtue of being so much taller than me. And that muscle he’d put on lately made him a lot more intimidating.
“Hi,” I breathed, and then winced. So lame.
“Hi,” Lucas ground out. “Glad to see you’re alive. And not chained up in someone’s basement dungeon somewhere.”
I blinked at him. “What? A—chained up in a basement—dungeon? How drunk did you get at Sebastian’s?”
Lucas advanced on me slowly, making all the hair on the nape of my neck stand up and my heart start to pound.
“I didn’t hang out at Sebastian’s,” he said, still in that quiet, deadly tone. “I went there looking for you. After I’d already come home looking for you. And called you a bunch of times. And then I went looking for you at the library at school, where you told Sebastian you’d be. I’m guessing that was a total fucking lie, since you smell like vodka, even though I went to Aeon too and didn’t find you there. And since you obviously fucking lied. Which you have every right to do if you want to go somewhere on your own,” he went on, his voice starting to rise to something like a shout. “But after what happened this weekend—for fuck’s sake, Chris! You run off, disappear, turn off your phone which you never do! You have any clue how worried I was?”
Somewhere deep down, I had known how worried he would be. I’d known he’d blow up my phone, and I’d known he’d go looking for me, and I’d known he wouldn’t actually shrug and take a date to Sebastian and Aidan’s place and watch movies and forget all about me.
I’d known it. Deep down, like really deep down where I’d been able to hide it and not admit it, I’d counted on it. I’d wanted his attention onme, and not on that girl or anyone else.
Lucas came even closer. I had to tip my head back to gaze up at him, and he looked so uncompromising and hard that it made me…God, it gotmehard. I couldn’t help it. Oh, no, God no, this was so wrong, that knowing I’d finally gotten him totally focused on me, for all the wrong reasons and after worrying him for no reason at all, made my body come to life like someone had plugged me into a wall socket.
Guilt and shame bubbled up, along with a weird, twisted compulsion to tell him all of it: every last bit of how I’d fucked up that day.
“The TA wouldn’t take my paper late. He said he’d fail me if I missed my section again, and then I didn’t go to the afternoon class anyway. And all that reading I did was wasted, because the professor made an error on the syllabus, so at least that one’s not my fault, but I spent so much time on it! And I went to see you, but—” I swallowed down the lump in my throat. Lucas didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. Simply watched me, his eyes still so unreadable. His pulse jumped in his throat. “You were flirting with some girl,” I whispered hoarsely. “And I didn’t—I couldn’t—didn’t want to interrupt. I ditched class and went to go get a drink.”
My confession poured out of me like someone had put a gun to my head—but with Lucas’s eyes the only weapon required.
And I still couldn’t stop. The last part, the part that would really piss Lucas off, fell out of my mouth too.
“I wanted you to miss me,” I whispered miserably. “I acted like a brat to get your attention. I needed you, and you—I turned off my phone, and I knew you’d freak out about it.”
One last step. Lucas stood so close to me I could feel the heat of his body against my chilled skin. My breath came in quick pants.
“So what you’re telling me,” he said at last, “is that you manipulated me. You knew I was busy, and that I’d already set aside time to hang out with you tonight at Sebastian’s. But that wasn’t fucking good enough. Because that wouldn’t get you what you really wanted.” He leaned down, his face inches from mine, and his voice hit an even lower, gravelly register. “You knew I wouldn’t punish you unless you gave me a good reason.”
