Put Me Back Together (28 page)

Tucking my head under his chin, Lucas said, “Do you know how hard it was for me to sit outside your door and listen to you crying for hours,” he said, “when all I wanted to do was hold you like this?”

I wanted to tell him that he could hold me forever if he wanted to, but the words stuck in my throat. I could only stare up at him mutely as he pressed his lips to my eyelids and my forehead and my cheeks, and when more tears began to fall, this time without my even realizing it, he kissed those away, as well.

“I know you don’t need a protector. You don’t need me to take care of you. But I need you to promise never to do that to me again.” He looked down at me, his eyes so full of pain I would have agreed to anything. “If you’re hurting, I need to be with you. I need to hold you. Last night…it almost drove me mad. I would have kicked the door down except I was pretty sure you were leaning against it.”

“I was,” I admitted.

“I don’t ever want to feel that way again,” Lucas went on. “You have to promise me you won’t lock me out again. Can you do that for me?”

Could I? Could Katie Archer, the girl who kept everyone out, the girl who prided herself on not needing anyone, ever, the girl who wore her solitude like a protective cloak, could she promise to let someone in? His request was so much larger than he knew, but I felt too spent to resist it. I wanted to give this to him. I wanted to let myself need him and be needed in return.

I wanted to let Lucas in.

“I’ll try,” I croaked. It was the most honest thing I’d ever said to him.

I worried that it wouldn’t be enough, but it earned me a small smile and the whisper of a kiss on my lips, so I guessed it was good enough for him, for now, anyway.

“Did you touch anything in there?” Lucas asked as I got up to finally make us that pot of coffee.

I shook my head once. Funnily enough, I’d almost forgotten about the mess in my room and what it meant. Remembering wasn’t pleasant.

“Good,” he said. “I’m going to make a call, and then I’m going to take you somewhere. You don’t have any plans today, do you?”

“No,” I replied as he walked toward the front door to go make his call in the hall.

“Just to be with you,” I whispered once he was out of earshot. “My only plan is to be with you.”

The words thrilled me as they came out of my mouth. It was like the first time I said a dirty word—so exciting, and yet still a little bit scary. Forbidden.

And most thrilling of all, I knew they were true.

A spring breeze blew through the car window, ruffling my hair, as we drove out of town. The snow had mostly melted away and brown grass stretched away from the highway to meet bare trees, their branches swaying. Coming from Vancouver, this year I’d experienced my first real winter—with snowstorms and freezing rain and icy streets, as promised—and I could already tell spring was becoming my favourite season in this part of the country. The wonderful release of being able to go outdoors without bundling up, to roll down the window, to wear shoes again, was intoxicating. If the world could start anew—leaves growing, plants waking up from their slumber, crocuses blooming—then maybe I could, too.

I looked over at Lucas as he stared out at the road. He’d been oddly quiet since we’d gotten into the car, which should have worried me, but it didn’t. A really determined part of me insisted I couldn’t doubt him every time he frowned, that I take my newfound trust in him seriously. He’d caught a glimpse of my demons and he hadn’t run away. It was more than I’d ever hoped for from him, from anyone. Of course, he still didn’t know the whole story, but I was trying to put that out of my mind.

“Who’d you call?” I asked as we passed the empty fields of a farm.

“Eric,” Lucas answered. “I had to ask him if I could keep his car for the day…and tell him I never returned it last night.

“Did he ask why?” I said as I gazed out at the barren landscape. Though I trusted Lucas not to judge me for spending the night weeping, I didn’t trust anyone else. I wondered what he’d told his roommate about last night. The idea than anyone else might know about the chaos in my bedroom made my stomach knot.

“Why I stayed over last night?” Lucas said. “He didn’t have to ask. Eric knows how I feel about you.”

“He does?” There was something exciting about knowing that Lucas liked me so much he’d even told his friends about it, but at the same time I couldn’t picture that scene. Had he admitted his feelings for me during a gossip session over margaritas at the local bar? Or had he whispered it across the room when they were all lying in their beds, confiding secrets under cover of dark? I realized I had no idea how guys interacted with one another when they were alone.

Then it occurred to me what “staying over” usually meant.

I said, “So he probably thinks we…” Though we’d been headed in the general direction of sex the night before, I still didn’t have the nerve to finish the sentence.

“Eric doesn’t think much,” Lucas reassured me, “so I wouldn’t worry about it.” Seeing the frown of worry on my face he took his hand off the wheel and pulled a lock of my hair playfully. “You should stop thinking, too! Besides, we’re almost there.”

I hadn’t asked him where we were going and I didn’t ask now. Instead, I took his advice and let my mind go blank for the rest of the ride, staring out the window, watching spring come rolling in. Eventually, we took an exit and entered a small town, though I didn’t see the “Welcome To” sign, so I wasn’t sure where we were. I only clued in when Lucas slowed the car to a stop on a residential street in front of a neat bungalow.

“That’s my parents’ house,” he said, looking past me out the window.

“Oh, are we going in?” I said, taking off my seatbelt and immediately worrying about my choice of clothes. If I’d known I was going to meet his parents, I would never have worn yoga pants, my glasses, or this puffy face.

“Not today,” Lucas replied, and there was a heaviness in his voice that implied this statement was non-negotiable. Not that I was about to fight him on it.

We sat a little longer looking at the house with its brown-shingled roof and flower boxes that were empty now but would be filled with cheerful blooms in a month’s time, I was sure. There was a great climbing tree in the front yard. I wondered if little Lucas had ever sat in those branches. Through the front window’s sheer curtains I saw someone moving around inside, probably his mother. When I turned to Lucas again, he was putting the car back into drive.

“That’s Jenny’s house,” he said, pointing, as we passed a similar bungalow with a red door on our way down the street.

So Jenny was literally the girl next door. Yeah, that didn’t make me jealous. Not at all.

Lucas pulled the car into a lot beside a large park about two blocks from his house. We walked across the dead grass to an empty basketball court dotted with puddles from newly melted snow. I thought maybe we’d sit down on one of the benches that ran along the sides of the court, but Lucas passed those and sat down right on the centre circle on a patch of dry cement. I sat down beside him.

He was quiet for a while, thoughtful, and it began to dawn on me that this trip might not be about last night at all. There was something else making Lucas so serious and melancholy, something that I suspected had nothing to do with me. Not wanting to question him in this moment, I looked out at the little wood overlooking the court and felt a spark of recognition. These were the trees Lucas had painted when I’d told him to paint from the gut. He must have taken the photograph from the exact spot I was standing in. This was the place Lucas loved.

“I used to play ball here almost every day after school,” Lucas said finally. “Sometimes my dad and I would come by on the weekends and play together. He was better than me. He almost made it to the pros, but then…”

“But then?” I prompted gently.

“But then I came along,” he finished. There was so much sadness in his eyes as he gazed out at his beloved playground. I wanted so much to wipe that pain away, to make it better, even if I didn’t understand it. I wondered if this was how Lucas had felt all last night while I’d been alone in my room crying myself out, and I felt a hard tug of guilt in my chest. This was agony.

I took one of his hands in mine and kissed it, holding it tight.

When Lucas spoke again, he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking out at those trees. “Katie, I wish you would tell me what happened yesterday, who broke into your place, who this person is that you’re so afraid of that you don’t even want to call the police. I’m guessing it’s the same person you were referring to when you got so upset that I nearly beat up Buck Mullard.”

He glanced at me for confirmation, I could feel it, but I could only stare at my feet.

“But I also know it’s not fair of me to expect you to tell me all your secrets when I’m keeping so many myself,” he went on.

“You don’t have to tell me anything, Lucas,” I said, running my fingers over his hand. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“But I want to,” he said. “No, I have to. I need you to know this. I need to get it out of me.”

I looked up at him and nodded. I knew what it felt like to keep something inside of you for too long, to want desperately to tell someone, to be rid of it. I’d just never tried.

Lucas was braver than me.

“It was the end of last summer when my dad got sick, just a few weeks before the start of classes,” he began. “Stomach cancer, stage four. It came on all of a sudden. One day he was fine and the next he was confined to his bed, crippled by this disease he didn’t understand. He was so outraged about it. He kept working for a little while, but pretty soon he had to stay home. The money for my tuition had to go to pay for the drugs that weren’t covered by insurance, and to pay the mortgage because my mother had gone down to part-time so she could take care of him.”

“So that’s why you had to quit the team,” I said, thinking out loud. “So you could get a job to pay for your tuition.”

Lucas nodded. “But it wasn’t just that,” he said. “I didn’t really want to play anymore. It was like the love I had for the game just left me when he got sick. He was the one who’d wanted me to play in the first place. Basketball was the thing he loved, and I came to love it, too, but without him calling me to ask me how practice went and coming to all the games…there didn’t seem to be much point in playing anymore.”

I tried to think of giving up painting, of losing interest in it, but I couldn’t. My art was what got me through. Before Lucas, and especially in high school, I often felt like it was the only thing I had. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like if this thing I was so good at, the only thing I had to hold on to, were suddenly taken from me.

“I offered to take a year off from school, get a job to pay for the bills, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They didn’t even want me to quit the team, but there was no way I could keep up with practice, work, and my schoolwork. So I came back to school in the fall, and the truth is, I was relieved to get the hell out of there. Being in that house with my dying father was destroying me. I just wanted to get back to my carefree life of girls and partying and forget any of it was happening.”

He spat out those last words, looking completely disgusted with himself.

I touched his arm. “It’s natural to want to escape something like that, to deny it. There are some things the mind just isn’t equipped to handle.” I hoped he couldn’t tell I was speaking from personal experience.

“But he needed me,” he said, his weary eyes searching mine like he was trying to find in them the solace he couldn’t give his father. He looked so forlorn I couldn’t bear to be separated from him, so I leaned into him, wrapping my arms around his chest, and he locked a grateful arm around me.

“I didn’t go home to visit all semester,” Lucas said. “I avoided his calls, but the guilt weighed on me. I stopped partying. I hooked up with a few girls, just out of habit, I guess, but…”

I could feel his hesitation. He didn’t want to talk about other girls with me. “It’s okay,” I said quietly.

He cleared his throat. “Afterward I realized I couldn’t even remember their names. I was just going through the motions, and although the sex was great…” He paused here again. “It wasn’t making me feel any better, so I just stopped dating altogether. I guess I got a little depressed. Nothing really seemed to matter—not my classes, not my friends. The only thing that mattered what happening somewhere else, and I couldn’t go there.”

I ran my hand up and down his back, thinking of the two of us last semester, both locked in our own secret miseries. “I wish I’d been there,” I said sadly. “I wish I could have helped you.”

“You’re helping me now,” he said, planting a kiss on the top of my head. I reached up and kissed his stubbly cheek before he went on.

“By the time Christmas break came along, I was dreading going back home, sure they’d both be furious with me. But they weren’t. I think my dad was just glad he could see me at all before… The cancer had spread into his lungs and his pancreas. He didn’t even look like himself anymore. The strong, healthy, barrel-chested father I remembered was gone forever, and then…”

I placed a hand on Lucas’s chest, right over his heart. If I could have, I would have reached into his chest and held his heart in my hands, held it together. Because I was pretty sure it was about to break.