Page 6 of A Totally Platonic Thing
Shit, I’d really done it now. I felt a lot more sober all of a sudden. Lucas was holding me up in a parking lot, where I’d thrown up on both of us. A club parking lot. In the middle of the night. Where he’d had to go to pick my drunk ass up.
I staggered upright, Lucas taking most of my weight and then letting go of my torso to steady me with a hand around my upper arm.
The fuck. Everyone had a bad night once in a while, right? He wouldn’t bethatmad, and even if he was, he needed to let it go.
I dared to turn my head and peek at him.
He looked exactly that mad. Like, steam coming out of his ears in big puffy cartoon plumes kind of mad. Somehow his glasses had gotten knocked slightly askew, and they’d slid a little bit down his nose. His cheeks were bright red even in the sickly glow of the orangey lamps overhead.
“Get. In. The car,” he gritted out. “Actually, screw that. Give me your keys. We’re taking yours so you can be the one to deal with cleaning up whatever gets on the floor from our shoes.”
Meekly, I fumbled in my pocket and produced the keys. He snatched them out of my hand.
“Over there by the dumpster,” I muttered, and he tugged me around the horrid vodka throw-up on the ground and over toward my car.
I still felt wobbly, and it was even worse now that I could reallyfeelit, instead of everything being muffled and fuzzy. Every step jolted my brain and my stomach. Shame, and anger at Lucas for making me feel that way, and then extra shame on top because of being angry at him for dealing with me when I’d clearly fucked up, all stewed around in my head.
Screw Aidan, anyway. It wasn’t like I was going to drive home drunk. I might enjoy a night out now and then, but I wasn’t an irresponsible idiot who’d get behind the wheel impaired. I had a couple of rideshare apps on my phone, and I’d have used one of them, like anyone with half a brain. I wasn’t a goddamn kid who needed a babysitter.
“You don’t have to put me in the car,” I snarled weakly at Lucas as he opened the passenger door for me. “I’m not a kid.”
“No, you’re not, so you should maybe stop acting like one,” he shot back, taking all the wind right out of my already-drooping sails.
Lucas dropped my arm like it was something disgusting and strode around the car to the driver’s side, muttering something under his breath. I didn’t try too hard to hear him. I was sure it was even worse.
I fumbled my way into the car on my own, managing to swing the door shut and get the seatbelt fastened before I let my head fall back, with the car, and my grouchy roommate, and the whole annoying world all spinning gently around me.
The ride home was silent and a little smelly. Lucas rolled both of our windows down without comment, and that helped with both, but I could still feel the thick tension in the air. The cool breeze could ruffle my hair off my forehead and soothe my nausea, but it couldn’t blow away the heavy weight of Lucas’s irritation.
I tried to stay angry and get all up on my high horse, but I had a horrible, shrinking misery in the pit of my stomach that felt even worse than the remaining vodka. Lucas only got mad at me when I really deserved it. He’d been on my case lately about going out a little less, especially after a couple of times when I’d stumbled in super late and woken him. He’d had to pick me up from Aeon once or twice before, too, and he hadn’t been happy.
But most of the time, he was so easygoing I almost forgot hecouldget angry. And our living situation wasn’t exactly conducive to everyone being mellow all the time.
We’d moved in together right before the winter break of our sophomore year, so…crap, I really couldn’t math when I was drunk. We were about to graduate in six weeks. So…wow, two freaking years plus a few months. It didn’t feel that long, even though we shared a studio apartment with one main room, a surprisingly decent-sized bathroom, and a tiny kitchen crammed into a corner of the aforementioned main room and divided off by a counter island. We even had to share a single closet and a single dresser because there simply wasn’t room for more than that, and my books filled—and overflowed from—a tall bookcase against the wall at the foot of my bed, the colorful paperbacks comprising all the decorating either of us had done the whole time we’d lived there.
In short, we lived in close, cramped, not super welcoming quarters. The perfect breeding ground for petty annoyances and starting to hate another person.
And yet in that two years plus, the most Lucas had ever really done was roll his eyes at me unless I’d really gone out of my way to piss him off.
For example: there’d been the incident with the guy I brought home from Aeon that one time, even though I knew Lucas would be coming home from a late lab any minute. I’d rationalized, convincing myself we could get through the main event and at least be decent by the time Lucas got home.
Spoiler alert: I’d been wrong.
Yeah, Lucas had been totally pissed about that. Not that I really blamed him for being a little annoyed when he came home to find us right in the middle of the action. Or getting more annoyed when I started laughing so hysterically that it was up to Lucas and that guy—whose name I didn’t even remember—to do the awkward introductions-and-apologies dance, my hookup still butt-naked except for the condom on his dick and scrambling for his underwear.
After the guy left and I calmed down and put on my own pants, Lucas gave me this…look. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. It was so clear how incredibly furious he was with me without yelling, or insulting me, or anything.
It took me two weeks to get things back to normal. Lucas was way, way too mature to give me the silent treatment or something like that. He waspolite. He wasfriendly. And it wasawful.
I shuddered at the memory. Shit, here I was, in for the same thing. And maybe he’d be even worse this time. I mean, that had just been me getting laid at a mildly inconvenient time. This was interrupting Lucas’s sleep and possibly making him less efficient in the engineering lab, which held, like…first place on his list of crap he hated.
“You cold?” Lucas demanded abruptly.
Without turning my head too much, because that might make me puke again, I tried to glance over at him. I couldn’t see much. We were almost home, and the quiet little residential neighborhood we lived in didn’t have many streetlights. Why did he think I was cold? He hadn’t even been looking at me.
“No,” I said, and swallowed hard. “Thanks, though.”
Lucas just grunted at me, and a second later he turned into the driveway we shared with our landlord, who lived in the house further down. We had the mother-in-law apartment over the garage, and Lucas parked right in front of our stairs.
