Easy (24 page)

“He took you for
granted, even when you stood next to him, holding his hand. Like you were an
accessory.” He frowned, and I remembered feeling exactly like that with
Kennedy. Often. “I never wanted you to get hurt, but I wanted to take you from
him. I had to constantly remind myself that it didn’t matter if you were his or
not, because you were on the other side of a line I couldn’t cross. And then you
didn’t show up the day of the midterm—or the next, or the next. I worried that
something had happened to you. He was kind of reserved the first couple of days. By the end of the week, girls were flirting with him
before class, and the way he responded told me what had happened.

“I was sure you’d
dropped the class, which made me selfishly ecstatic. Without even knowing I was
doing it, I started looking for you on campus.” He stared into my eyes and
lowered his voice even further. “And then, the Halloween party.”

I couldn’t
breathe. “You were there? At the party?”

He nodded.

“How? You aren’t
Greek, are you?”

He shook his head.
“I’d fixed the house’s A/C the night before. Maintenance doesn’t do
non-emergency stuff on evenings or weekends, but I’m contract labor, so I
agreed to do it. When I wouldn’t take a tip, a couple of the guys invited me to
the party. I only said yes because I was hoping you might be there. It had been
two weeks, and this campus is so huge I was starting to think I’d never run
into you.” He chuckled softly and rubbed a hand at the back of his neck. “Wow,
that sounds total stalker.”

Or totally hot.
God
.
“Why didn’t you talk to me that night? Before…”

He shook his head. “You were so withdrawn and miserable. Almost every guy who
approached you was rejected without a second glance. There was no way I was
going to become one of them. You danced with a handful of guys you already knew—and
he
was one of those.”

“Buck.”

“Yes. When you
left, he followed, and I thought maybe… maybe you two had decided to leave
early together, without everyone knowing. Meet outside or something.”

I watched a trio
of my classmates enter the building. “He’s my roommate’s boyfriend’s best
friend. Well, her
ex’s
best friend, now. He was a known entity. A friend,
I thought. Boy, was I wrong.”

He nodded,
frowning. “I was about to leave—my bike was parked out front. Something didn’t
feel right, but I was struggling with the same desire to take him out that I’d
felt for half the semester with your boyfriend, so I questioned my own motives.
I lost a minute arguing with myself, and I’m sorry about that. I finally decided
if you two were hooking up, I’d just go around front, rev up the Harley, and be
done with it. With you.”

“But that’s not
what happened.”

“No.”

Suddenly aware of
the lack of people bustling around us, I pulled out my phone. It was two minutes
past ten. “Crap. I’m late.”

“Uh-oh. Isn’t this
the professor who makes an example of you if you’re late?”

Impressive. “You
remembered.” Groaning, I pushed my phone into my bag. “I sorta feel like
skipping now.”

His mouth turned
up on one side. “What kind of university employee would I be, to encourage you
to skip class the last week of the semester?”

“We’re just
reviewing. I have an A. I don’t really need the review.”

We stared at each
other.

I angled my head
and looked directly into his clear eyes. “You don’t have a class?”

“Not until
eleven.” Not for the first time, the feel of his gaze drifting over my face was
like a soft breeze, or the lightest possible touch. He stopped on my mouth.

Lips parted, my
breathing slowed as my heart rate sped. “You never did sketch me again.”

His eyes darted to
mine, but he didn’t answer, so I thought maybe he didn’t remember his texted request.

“You said you were
having a hard time doing it from memory. My jaw. My neck…”

He nodded. “And your
lips. I said I needed more time staring at them and less time tasting them.”

I nodded. Good
God, what did he
not
remember?

“A very foolish
thing for me to say, I think.” He was staring at my mouth again.

My lips tingled
from his focused perusal. I wanted to rub my fingers across them. Or graze them
with my teeth to stop the tickling sensation. When I wet them with my tongue, he
sucked in a breath. “Coffee. Let’s go get coffee.”

I nodded, and
without another word, we walked toward the student center, the busiest place on
campus at this time of day.

“So you wear
glasses, huh?” We’d been sitting at a tiny table, sipping our coffees and enduring
a decidedly uncomfortable silence, so I’d blurted the first viable thing that
entered my brain.

“Um. Yeah.”

Great. I’d just
brought up
that night
. But shouldn’t I bring up
that night?
Shouldn’t we talk about it? Shouldn’t I ask him if he was pushing me away
because he was the class tutor, or because of those scars on his wrists?

“I wear contacts.
But my eyes get tired of them by the end of the day.”

Cue the mental
picture of Lucas pulling his door open, the apprehension on his face, the
glasses transforming him into someone official while the pajamas produced a
contrary effect. I cleared my throat. “They look really good on you. The
glasses. I mean, you could wear them all the time, if you wanted to.”

“They’re kind of a
pain with the motorcycle helmet. And taekwondo.”

“Oh. Yeah, I can
imagine.”

We were quiet
again, with forty minutes until his class and my rescheduled bass practice
time. “I could sketch you now,” he said.

For no good
reason, my face flamed.

Luckily, he was
reaching into his backpack, withdrawing his sketchpad, and turning to a blank
page. He took the pencil from behind his ear before looking across the table at
me. If he noticed my heightened color, he didn’t mention it. Without a word, he
leaned back in his chair, the pad on his knee, and started drawing, his pencil
making the effortless, sweeping arches of someone who knows what he’s doing.
His eyes moved from the pad to me and back, over and over, and I sat silently
sipping, watching his face. Watching his hands.

There was
something intimate about modeling for someone. I’d volunteered as a model once
in my junior year art class, for extra credit. Severely lacking in drawing
skill, I’d jumped at the extra two points without stopping to consider that I
would be sitting on top of a table for an entire class period. Giving a
classroom of teenaged boys free rein to stare at me for an hour was a whole new
sort of awkward. Especially when Jillian’s boyfriend, Zeke, started his
portrait with my chest. He stared unabashedly, showing off his artistic efforts
to his tablemates while I flushed and pretended I couldn’t hear his wisecracks
about nips and cleavage and how he wished I’d just lose the shirt altogether—or
at least unbutton it.

“Most artists
begin with the head,” Ms. Wachowski said as she looked over his shoulder. Zeke
and the other boys at the table snorted with laughter while I burned with
humiliation and the entire class looked on.

“What are you thinking
about?”

I wasn’t relaying
that
story. “High school.”

The hair falling
over his forehead obscured the crease I knew was there, but his lips pressed
tight.

“What?” I asked,
wondering at the change those two words brought.

Surrounded by
conversations, music and mechanical sounds, the scratch of the lead across the
paper was inaudible in the coffee shop. I watched the pencil dance in his hand,
wondering what part of me he was sketching, and what parts he might want to
sketch. What was he like as a sixteen-year-old boy? Did he draw then? Hang out
with other boys his age? Had he fallen in love? Had his heart broken by some callous
girl?

Had he already put
those scars on his wrists, or was that yet to come?

“You said you’d been
with him for three years.” He spoke just loud enough for me to hear him,
staring down at the pad as the pencil worked back and forth. There was no
question in his voice. He assumed I was thinking about Kennedy.

“I wasn’t thinking
about him.”

His jaw clenched,
lips compressed again. Jealousy? Guilt crept in when I realized I
wanted
him to feel jealous.

“What was high
school like for you?” I asked and then wanted to take it back. His eyes flashed
to mine and his hand stilled.

“A lot different
than it was for you, I imagine.” His eyes still roved over my face, but he was
no longer drawing, and his expression was tense.

“Oh? How?” I
smiled, hoping to either bring us back from this ledge-clinging position, or
shove us over the edge.

He lifted his gaze
to me then and stared. “For one, I never had a girlfriend.”

I thought of the
rose over his heart, and the poem inscribed on his left side. I didn’t want
that love to be recent. “Really? Not one?”

He shook his head.
“I was… unsettled, you could say. I hooked up with girls. No relationships. Skipped
class as much as I bothered to show up. Partied with the locals and the beach
tourists. Got into fights often, in school and out. Got suspended or expelled
so frequently I was never quite sure when I woke up in the morning whether I
was supposed to go or not.”

“What happened?”

His face went
blank. “What?”

“I mean, how did
you get into college and become this—” I gestured at him and shrugged “—serious
student?”

He stared at the
pencil in his hand, his thumbnail scraping over the lead, sharpening it. “I was
seventeen, about to flunk out for the last time, prepared to work the boat with
Dad the rest of my life. One night, I was partying with some friends. We made a
bonfire on the beach, which always drew the tourist kids in—and they always
wanted to be hooked up. One of my friends was a dealer. Not big stuff—just
party drugs. He’d sell high, so we could skim some off without having to pay
his distributor for it.

“His sister tagged
along that night. She had a crush on me, but she was fourteen. Totally
innocent. Not my type. She didn’t take the dismissal well, and started flirting
with the guys who financed our night, so to speak. Her dumbass brother was so
high he wasn’t watching her at all. My head wasn’t much clearer, but when the
guy she was dancing with pulled her down the beach, she looked like she was
trying to yank away from him.

“I remember going
after them, but everything after that is murky. I was told I broke the guy’s
jaw. Got arrested, charges filed. I probably would have ended up in prison, but
the Hellers were visiting that week, and Charles did something to make it all
go away.

“He and my dad had
words. Next thing I knew I was signed up for martial arts classes. I was stupid
enough to see the wrong-minded benefit of being able to beat the shit outta
people even better than I already could, so I didn’t object. What I didn’t see
coming was how it would center me for the first time in a long time. Before he
left, Charles lectured me like Dad never had. I didn’t like disappointing him.”
He looked at me closely. “Still don’t.”

We sipped our
coffees and I waited, holding my tongue, knowing there was more.

“He told me I was
throwing my future away, that I was better than drugs and fights. He said my
mother was watching, and asked if I wanted her to be proud or ashamed. Then, he
promised he’d help me get into the university, pull every string he could pull,
if I’d just try. He knew I was looking for an escape, and he gave me one second
chance.”

A chill moved down
my back at his words.

 “He’s good at
offering those.”

He smiled, just
barely. “Yes. He is. I took it. My senior year looked good, but I’d all but
killed my overall GPA before that. I don’t know how he got me accepted, even
conditionally. Dad can’t pay for it, of course, so that’s why all the odd jobs.
I pay rent for the apartment, but I couldn’t get a cot in somebody’s garage for
what he charges me.”

“He’s like a
guardian angel for you.”

Raising his light,
unnerving eyes to mine, he said, “You don’t even know.”

Chapter 20

I blinked at Erin, confused. “What do you mean, she’s probably not testifying?”

My roommate
slammed her phone onto her desk. Slammed the door of our mini-fridge after grabbing
a bottle of water from it. Kicked her shoes off and then threw one of them
across the room where it bounced off the wall over her bed and landed in the
center. “They got to her. Kennedy, D.J. and Dean. Convinced her—or have almost
convinced her—that they’ll
handle
Buck. That she’ll take down the frat
and maybe the whole Greek system if she testifies.”

“
What?
”

“They’re making
her
feel guilty. For being raped!” I’d never seen Erin so enraged. “This is total
fucking crap. I’m calling Katie.”

I got up and
crossed the room, holding her forearm to keep her from dialing. “Erin, you
can’t tell if Mindi doesn’t want you to tell.”

She looked at me
closely. “J, you know how the Greeks work. Everyone already knows.”

“Oh. Right.”

She dialed, and I
listened as she told her sorority president what she thought of the proposed
cover-up. “Okay, I’ll be there in an hour, with Mindi.” She put the phone down,
her expression calmer and more calculating. Sitting on my bed, she took my hand.
“You have to go with us, J. You have to tell them what he did to you.”

Somehow,
testifying to a bunch of sorority girls was more terrifying than the thought of
reporting Buck to the cops or giving a deposition to the district attorney. “W-why?”
I sputtered. “I’m not one of you guys, Erin. They don’t care—”