Put Me Back Together (8 page)

I plastered a smile on my face as Anita kneeled on the bed behind me, gathering my hair in her hands. “Should we do her hair up or down?” she asked the room at large.

“Oh, fake eyelashes!” Emily cried as she pawed through Sally’s makeup case. “I also brought those new coloured contacts I ordered. They’re sapphire blue. You’re going to look so hot you won’t even recognize yourself!”

I groaned inwardly as they crowded around me, holding up various garments like I was a mannequin.

“Are you wearing a thong?” a girl named Melissa asked me quietly in my ear.

It was going to be a long night.

The Limo was a club on the edge of town that I’d never been to before. It had three floors, four DJs, and apparently no parking. We’d been circling, trying to find a space, for ten minutes. It was a little too far from campus to attract the university crowd, which, Sally informed me, was the whole point.

“I want to meet older guys,” she said as she flawlessly applied another layer of Hot Mama red lipstick without a mirror. It was kind of impressive. “Guys our age have no money. I want a sugar daddy!”

“I thought Alex was your sugar daddy,” Emily said as she jerked the wheel to the right, finally slipping into what appeared to be the last available spot on the block.

“Alex lives off his trust fund,” Sally said with distaste. “I want a guy with his own cash, preferably lots of it, which he’ll have no problem showering all over me. Maybe even while I’m naked, ‘cause that’s super hot.”

“Way to dream big, Sally,” Anita said.

I liked Anita. Not only was she wearing normal clothes instead of the overly revealing apparel her friends favoured, but she seemed to find Sally as ridiculous as I did. I even forgave her for wearing a tiara on her head tonight. It was her birthday, after all.

“Is Alex aware of this rich man desire of yours?” I inquired as we all piled out of the car.

“What would I tell him for?” Sally said with a puzzled look on her face.

We took off our coats and left them on the backseat to avoid paying for coat check. I linked arms with Emily as we crossed the street and joined the line outside the club, shivering in our seasonally inappropriate outfits. Barely a minute had passed before Sally was nuzzling up to the beefed-up guy standing in front of us in line, shamelessly whining that her boobs were cold and would he mind warming them up for her? He looked happy to oblige.

I took a step out of line to check how far we were from the front. The line was moving pretty quickly. We probably only had about five more minutes to wait.

“Who are you looking for, Katie?” Emily said as I came back to her side. I just saw the tip of a flask as she shoved it back into her blue sparkly clutch. That explained why they were all so giggly already. I hoped nobody would throw up before we made it inside. “Oh, I know who you’re looking for. You’re on the lookout for Lucas, your secret beau!”

“Emily!” I cried, giving her a look of death as her friends all gushed at once: “Oh, Lucas!” They drew out his name until it had about five syllables, all high-pitched and mortifying.

Clearly they already knew about Lucas and me, though there wasn’t much to tell. I didn’t even want to think about how completely Em must have exaggerated the little I’d told her about my encounters with him. She probably had the two of us doing it like bunnies in his room. There were probably already rumours of our sex tape circulating campus.

“Shut up, you guys,” I said, trying to get control of the tipsy, giggling horde. “Lucas and I are just friends. Don’t you dare go telling anybody anything different.”

“Wait, didn’t he buy you a kitten?” Melissa said.

“And hand it to you half-naked?” Anita said.

“And covered in chocolate?” Em chimed in.

I groaned in the back of my throat as they veered off into a discussion of Lucas’s abs, the abs of the whole basketball team, and how many jocks Sally had slept with last semester—they were in disagreement whether it was eleven or twelve. I gratefully tuned out.

The subject of Lucas had left me feeling guilty and out of sorts. During my three-day hibernation, he’d texted me a few times. Once to ask why I’d skipped class, and another time during class to inform me that Naomi had taken the easel next to him and that he wished it was me instead. Because she smelled like cheese. I’d wanted to text him back to say she
always
smelled like cheese, but I didn’t think it was a good enough reply. Texting was all about being clever and hilarious. It was a lot of pressure, especially when your brain was turning to mush from watching six hours straight of daytime TV. Then, just a few hours ago, he’d sent me this text:

Lucas: Hey, disappearing act. Where’d you go?

I hadn’t replied to that one, either.

A really stupid part of me had started examining my life in the context of the creepy Facebook message late last night. Other than March twentieth, the only new thing in my life was Lucas. And—here was the really dumb part—I sort of felt like I was being punished for letting him into my life. Yeah, it was pretty crooked logic, but that’s how it felt. I’d broken my rules. I’d let him get to know me, even if only a little. I had a cat under my bed. I’d lost the tight control I usually kept on my life, and look at what had happened.

Brandon had never contacted me before, not once, not in six years.

I felt like I’d been caught with my hand in the cookie jar.

And as gorgeous as the cookie jar was, I was furious with myself. What had I been thinking? That I could break my rules with no consequences? That six years ago had never happened? That I could be just like everybody else? That was a laugh.

Just before I’d fallen asleep I’d made myself a promise. No more Lucas.

If for no other reason than because I was pretty sure he would probably break my heart and I was already broken in so many other ways. I needed to keep my heart intact.

Lucas was bad news. He was out of my league. He was one hundred percent trouble.

We finally made it to the front of the line and I followed Emily into the pounding beat of the club. The girls made a beeline for the standing tables clustered in front of the bar at the back of the first floor, and Em and I took drink orders. As we pushed our way through the crowd to the bar, I was about to comment to Em that Sally would be disappointed—I didn’t see a single guy anywhere, only girls—when she grabbed my arm so tightly I jumped.

“Katie, look who it is!” she said gleefully into my ear. “Why don’t I let you order the drinks?”

I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of who she was pointing at—why was I always stuck behind people who were so much taller than me? Through the crowd I spotted broad shoulders under a black t-shirt, dark hair, those honey-coloured eyes focused downward on the drink he was mixing, and, as he handed the drink over the bar, those dangerous dimples.

Our bartender was none other than bad-news-out-of-my-league-one-hundred-percent-trouble Lucas.

6

I turned back to my sister to tell her she could make the drink order while I went and hid in the bathroom—okay, I wasn’t going to tell her that part—but she was nowhere to be found.

Great.

I considered going to one of the other bars, but I didn’t know exactly where they were. Besides, it was a Friday night and the place was packed. It would take me an hour to get back to our table with all the drinks, by which time the girls would have probably disappeared onto the dance floor.

I glanced hopefully up and down the bar, checking if there was another bartender on duty on a night as busy as this, but no such luck. All I saw was Lucas and his crowd of adoring fans. Accepting my fate with a sigh, I half-heartedly placed my elbow on the bar, waiting my turn. My face felt heavy with all the makeup those evil harpies had painted on me and the contacts were making my eyes burn. I desperately wanted to yank them out of my eyes, but how would I even get in there with all the mascara in the way? (I’d drawn the line at the fake eyelashes.) I closed my eyes to try to ease the burning, and when I opened them again Lucas was standing in front of me.

Considering what I looked like, I was a little surprised at his reaction. He smiled warmly and asked how I was, then leaned forward so I could hear him better.

“Is your sister here with you?” he asked.

I gave him a confused look. Lucas had barely shown any interest in Emily before. “Yeah,” I said. “She’s over there somewhere.” I gestured over my shoulder, nearly hitting the girl standing behind me in the eye. She seemed pretty irritated, not because I’d almost blinded her, but because I was taking up so much of Lucas’s time. I mumbled an apology and she raised her voice as she called out her drink order to him for the third time. He ignored her.

“I don’t see her,” he said as he peered into the dark, trying to locate our table.

When he looked back at me again, he said, “I like your hair,” and I looked down at my dark locks hanging over my shoulder, super-straight tonight because of the magic flat iron Melissa had provided.

It suddenly dawned on me why Lucas was asking about Emily.

“Lucas, it’s me,” I said. “It’s Katie.”

The grin slipped off his face. His eyes widened with surprise and then darkened with something else as they moved from my eyes to my lips and then downward to the insanely tight black top I was wearing. Sally had wanted me to wear nothing but a black bra underneath the see-through material, but I’d insisted on wearing a camisole. She’d produced the laciest one I’d ever seen from her bag of tricks and pulled it over my head. I noticed Lucas’s gaze lingering on that lace stretched across my chest and the generous amount of cleavage just above it. More cleavage than I’d ever shown in my life, that was for sure. I felt my neck flushing, the redness creeping up to my cheeks. As much as being stared at made me want to break something, I had to admit the guy sure knew how to make a girl feel seen.

“Katie?” Lucas said. His voice was thick and at least two octaves lower than it had been a minute ago.

“You know, you might recognize me a little better if you looked at my face,” I snapped.

“Oh, I…right,” he said. Now his eyes were planted firmly on the bar in front of him. “You’re not wearing your glasses.”

“Emily made me put on these ridiculous blue contacts,” I replied. “She says brown eyes are boring.”

“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Lucas muttered so low I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him correctly. He cleared his throat and suddenly he was all business. “What’ll you have?” he said, picking up a cocktail glass.

I recited the list of drinks and he didn’t even bat an eyelash, just began setting out the glasses in a row. I wondered if he thought Em and I were drinking them all ourselves and I was going to clarify that there were five of us in all, but I didn’t get the chance. The show going on in front of me was far too distracting.

First he dropped the glass in his hand twice then nearly dropped a full bottle of vodka when he set it down too close to the edge of the counter. I placed my chin in my palm, frowning at him. As I watched, he put double the amount of rum in Anita’s rum and Coke and then accidentally threw a lime wedge into the glass when I was pretty sure it was supposed to go on the rim. Then he asked me to repeat the names of the other drinks because he’d forgotten them. While all this was going on he didn’t look at me once.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked with some amusement as he dropped yet another glass. They just seemed to be slipping right through his fingers tonight.

“What? Nothing!” he said as he finished the last drink—a vodka cranberry, for me. He’d put three cherries in it, which I was pretty sure also wasn’t right, but I didn’t mention it. I was just glad he hadn’t made it a triple by accident—I wasn’t much of a drinker.

As I handed him the cash for the drinks he glanced down at the floor and shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe the mess around his feet. I couldn’t, either. Was he drinking on the job? Was that allowed? In movies bartenders were always doing shots with the patrons, but I was pretty sure in real life it was a no-no.

When I thanked him for the drinks he finally managed to look me in the face again. He held my gaze there, his eyes darting between mine, his chest heaving as though he’d run a mile. When he broke the gaze to look down at the drinks in front of me, I felt a physical loss and cursed myself for it.