Put Me Back Together (36 page)

Facing the mirror above the nightstand, I eyed my frizzy hair and tried to remember the last time I’d washed it. I couldn’t. Instead of having pointless discussions about turning Brandon in, what I really needed to do was get home and take a shower. “Do you have a comb?” I said, not even bothering to cover up the hostility in my voice. If Lucas wanted to be with me, he was going to get all of me.

Unzipping a canvas bag sitting on the floor, Lucas took out a plastic comb. “You know I’m right,” he said as he handed it to me.

I let out a groan of frustration, both at Lucas’s persistence and because my hair was so knotted I could barely move the comb an inch. As I glared down at the nightstand, I noticed it was oddly bare, as were the shelves of Lucas’s wardrobe. I knew he didn’t have to clear out of the Res for another few days—he still had two exams this week—and Lucas might have been many things, but he didn’t strike me as the pack-five-days-ahead type.

“What’s with the suitcase?” I asked, pointing at it with the comb.

“Well, I figured since I have to be out of here soon anyway,” Lucas explained, “and since we’ve already established you have that awesome double bed, I thought I’d just…move in.”

“To my apartment?” I squeaked, taking in the larger suitcase by the door. In addition to showering and picking up breakfast while I’d been snoozing this morning, he’d apparently also been packing.

I tried not to hyperventilate at the thought of Lucas living full-time in my apartment, with my hair clogging the drain and my dirty underwear and my enormous jar of Nutella.

“Did you really think I was going to let you out of my sight?” Lucas said into my ear. “I need to be there every second so we can continue this argument ad nauseum.”

“Can’t wait,” I said, giving him a spiteful look as he began to strip the sheets off his bed. But as he finished his packing, I thought about how nice it would be to have him there, to lean on, to snuggle up with, and to do other things with in my double bed.

I turned my head so he wouldn’t see my smile. After all, I was still mad at him.

Can’t wait
, I thought.

Lucas and I spent the next few of days getting to know each other all over again. I’d been so hesitant to tell him anything about my past that he realized he knew almost nothing about my life back in Vancouver. His curiosity piqued, he started quizzing me about my history, asking some silly questions, like what board games I’d hated as a kid and what kind of apples I’d liked packed in my lunch, and other less silly questions, like what it felt like when they put me on anti-depressants.

It was hard for me to answer without being evasive. My years of avoiding ever talking about my past had me tensing my shoulders and bracing for the worst, my lips clamping shut, my eyes searching for the exit. One day, when we were both supposed to be studying but instead he was asking about my mother’s reaction during the trial, I felt tears running down my cheeks before I even realized I’d started to cry. Lucas caught each tear with his fingertips and wiped my face dry, but the next day he was back at it. I never asked him to stop. He said he wanted to know everything about me, that he couldn’t help it, and truthfully that was what I wanted, too. I wanted Lucas to know me through and through. The questions felt like a different kind of exam, a test of my courage. Once every detail of me was laid out for Lucas to see, as nobody else ever had, I knew I would feel better than if I’d aced a test. It was like a cleanse.

His love was washing me clean.

There were other lessons, too. I learned that Lucas was a lot neater than me, folding his clothes at the end of the day instead of leaving them in a pile on the floor for him to trip over like me. I learned that Turner far preferred Lucas to me. Turner’s little ears perked up every time he heard Lucas’s voice and he spent all his time tangling himself around Lucas’s legs, purring like a lawn mower, which didn’t make me jealous in the least. I also learned that Lucas did
not
know how to cook—he managed to botch boiling pasta—and since neither could I, we ordered in a lot. Because leaving the house was definitely not on the menu. My flight back to Vancouver was booked for Saturday morning, and until then Lucas had appointed himself my personal bodyguard. With Brandon still on the loose, he ruled that we should stay inside at all times except for exams. Granted, when he said this his hand was on my ass, and when I agreed I was slipping my tongue into his mouth, but the seriousness of the situation wasn’t lost on us.

Though he tried to do it when I wasn’t looking—a hard thing to do in an apartment with only two rooms—Lucas was still reading the paper obsessively, trying to track Brandon’s movements by the police reports. They still didn’t know he was in the area. There were no new threats stabbed through the door, and no texts, either. I tried not to wonder what that meant. Lucas thought it was a good sign—maybe Brandon was losing interest—but I knew better. If six years hadn’t worn him out, six days of watching me shacked up with my boyfriend wasn’t going to do the trick.

Letting myself think of Lucas as my boyfriend—that was another lesson.

Our argument over calling the police continued without much progress. Finally realizing I was never going to budge on the issue, Lucas stipulated instead that once I was safely installed in my parents’ home he would go ahead and make the call to the cops. I countered that calling the police once I was gone didn’t solve the problem. Kingston was still the town where I went to school. Brandon’s presence there would still be linked to me. Lucas then agreed that he would wait until Brandon had followed me back home, as we knew he would, before calling in a bogus tip about this whereabouts. But how would that help? How could we know exactly where Brandon was at that point? What kind of tip could Lucas give then except to tell the police what they already knew, that he’d violated his parole by missing an appointment with his P.O. Then Lucas inevitably circled back to calling the cops right away and the argument started all over again.

One thing he wouldn’t give up on was that if Brandon hadn’t been picked up by the time I got home, I had to tell my parents the truth. He was a little fanatical about it. I think the idea that he wouldn’t be there to protect me was making him a little mad, and he wanted to be sure that my parents understood the threat Brandon posed. I was also pretty sure he knew that when they heard the truth they’d be on the phone to the cops themselves in a blink. I never agreed to tell them—I didn’t want to lie—but I never flat out disagreed, either. I was being Switzerland on that one, and Lucas knew it.

One cloud hanging over us—besides the homicidal ex, that is—was the thought of being apart all summer. Now that I had Lucas, I found I couldn’t bear to lose him, and the very thought of all those days without being able to look at his breathtaking dimples was enough to drive me to distraction. Even his half-naked body in my bed couldn’t keep my attention, as we both learned one night when one moment we were kissing and the next I was picturing my lonely bedroom back home and making lists of all the movies I could watch to pass the time over the summer. When I shook myself out of my reverie and looked up at Lucas, he said, “What kind of alarm system do your parents have in their house?”

I guess we were both a little distracted.

But not so much that when my hand brushed over his boxers a few minutes later I didn’t feel his now-familiar arousal.

“Thinking about alarm systems, eh?” I said, and he turned on his side so we were spooning. In this position, I could feel him even more.

I could hear the grin in his voice as he whispered, “I told you, anytime you’re near me…”

For the next twenty minutes, before our minds wandered again, I learned about some of the other perks of having a live-in boyfriend.

One lazy afternoon, as the sun streamed through the windows onto the couch, I lay with my head in Lucas’s lap trying to keep the names of the Pre-Raphaelites straight in my head. (I kept forgetting the second Rossetti.) Turner had reluctantly given up his place on Lucas’s lap to me, opting instead to lie on the floor by his feet. Every once in a while he swiped at Lucas’s shoelaces.

Lucas’s questions that day had been getting more and more esoteric. Did I think of my father as strong? What was my friendliest memory? Then one of his questions struck a chord.

“What are you most afraid of?” he said. He felt my body react and immediately his hands went around me, tugging me closer, if that were possible. I felt his fingers digging into my shoulders, trying to loosen the muscles.

“I’m afraid of losing,” I replied softly. “That’s always been my biggest fear. Of telling the truth and losing the people I love. Losing you. Losing my parents. Losing Emily. When they know the truth about me, I’m afraid I’ll lose their love.”

Lucas sighed and smoothed his fingers over my hair. “You lived so many years thinking such awful things about yourself, Hero,” he said, “without anybody having the chance to contradict you. You’ve thought these horrible things for so long that you’ve convinced yourself they’re true. But they aren’t true. You told me everything and I still love you. There’s nothing awful about you at all. You aren’t going to lose anyone.”

I clung to his arms like they were a buoy as fear pumped through my veins, spurred by something I couldn’t explain. The idea of his love. And the idea of losing it. The idea of telling the truth to more and more people. And the idea of lying instead.

“Think of it this way,” Lucas said, gazing down into my eyes, “if you do lose your family over this, then what?”

My body actually spasmed at the very thought. I dug my fingers into Lucas’s skin. “Don’t,” I whimpered.

He shook his head. “You won’t, but let’s say the world turns on its head and you do. You have to know you’ll be okay. Look at how strong you are. You’ve lived with this secret eating away at you for six years and you’re still standing. I can’t say I could have done the same. You moved away and made a life for yourself. You make beautiful art. You’re in school, doing what you love. You made it, Katie. You survived. You can survive anything. You’re so much stronger than you think.”

“I’m not,” I protested, tears stinging my eyes, but I blinked them back angrily. “I-I’m not strong. I’m weak.”

“Being afraid isn’t the same as being weak. You’re brave,” Lucas said.

“I’m a liar,” I said.

“You’re a survivor.”

“Coward.”

“Smart.”

“Manipulative.”

“Cunning.”

“Selfish.”

“Human.”

“Cold-hearted.”

“Warm-blooded.”

“Ugly.”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,” Lucas said, prying my hands away from my face. I was trying to hide again.

I looked up at him, his golden eyes, his kind face, and a new word came to my mind, one I never could have said before I met him: “Hopeful.”

Lucas nodded. “And remember,” he said, “even if everything goes wrong, and you find yourself feeling weak, there’s one thing you’ll always have, one thing you’ll never lose no matter what.”

“What?” I asked. If he said something like “your self-worth” I was going to puke, but of course he didn’t. He said the perfect thing instead.

“Me,” he said softly, and brushed my lips with his. “Forever.”

On the day of Lucas’s last exam we treated ourselves to Chinese food. Up until then we’d been going cheap and splitting every bill because I knew Lucas didn’t have a lot of extra cash. I didn’t even know how much money he was losing by not showing up to his shifts at the club all week, though he said it was no big deal. This philosophy exam, however, was one he’d been studying hard for, and, as it was an evening exam, I felt he needed a big dinner to get through it. Besides, my credit card, which my parents paid for, was happy to take the hit.

We were sitting on the stools at the kitchen counter, eating spring rolls and leaving sticky fingerprints all over each other when I heard the muffled sound of my phone ringing. I’d misplaced it the day before and had forgotten all about it.

“Check who it is first,” Lucas warned as I jumped off the stool, wiping my hands on a napkin.

“Okay, Dad,” I sassed as I searched for the source of the ringing.

It turned out my phone was underneath the rug in front of the couch—God knew how it had gotten there. Pulling it out and dusting it off, I saw that there were at least a dozen texts from Emily, and her name flashed across the screen as the phone continued to ring.

Crap
.

I answered the call with a timid, “Hello?”

“I
cannot
believe you!” Em said. She was someplace loud. Over her yelling I was able to make out a voice asking passengers to report to the gate, final call.

Oh big, big crap
.

“Oh, no. Did I—”

“Did you forget to help me pack up all my stuff?” Emily interrupted. “Did you forget your only sister was flying back to Vancouver today? Did you forget she’s terrified of flying
alone
?”

Due to our conflicting exam schedules, Emily was flying home three days earlier than me, though if I’d known my anthropology exam had been moved up, we could have flown together—a fact she’d been holding against me.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I said, eyeing Lucas miserably. He mouthed the word, “Uh-oh.”