“So, this is all new for you? Watching Andy, taking care of him?”
He nodded, his eyes still downcast, his head bowed. I longed to reach out and stroke his head, pull him to my chest, but I stayed still.
“Yeah, it’s all new. Well, at least the living here.” He swept his arm, encompassing the small room. “I’ve tried to be in Andy’s life since he was born. But the past few years I’ve been kind of…checked out.”
“Because you were in California? At USC?”
He nodded, not looking at me. “That. Yeah, at first, that.” His shoulders tensed, hunched slightly. “But then…” He looked over at me. “Just how much do you know from wherever you heard it?”
There was no censure in his voice, just a simple question. “I googled you and it said you were highly sought after and went to USC, but left in your junior year after a bad injury. Shoulder, I think?”
He nodded. I thought back to seeing him in the pool. I hadn’t noticed any huge scar anywhere. “You had surgery?” He nodded again. “But that didn’t help?”
He sat back, sinking deeper into the couch. He moved his hands to cover his face, then lowered them, as if he knew he couldn’t hide from whatever he was about to say.
“It helped. Who knows? Maybe I would have played again, but I fucked up.”
I held my tongue, though of course I was dying to ask.
“I got into…um…” He took a deep breath and turned his body to face me. Really face me. “I got hooked on Oxy after my surgery. I got kicked out of school.”
Wow. I was thinking maybe he got caught cheating on a test to keep up academically or something. A drug habit was beyond my scope. This was a little more than I’d bargained for.
I looked into his eyes, waiting for these strong feelings—which had blossomed so quickly and become so intense—to fade or wilt with the news that he had been (is?) a drug addict.
They didn’t. If anything, they deepened, knowing that Lucas was more than just a gorgeous guy who was stepping up with his little brother. He had lived, andchanged, much like I had suspected Syd had.
“Go on,” I said.
His shoulders lowered a bit and he licked his lips. I squeezed his hand. “Go on, Lucas. I’m still here. I’mstayinghere.”
“Jesus, Lily,” he said in a mere whisper. “I think I just fell a little bit in love with you.” His eyes didn’t leave mine, and I tried to convey what I could not say.
I was already more than a little bit in love with Lucas Kade.
“Anyway. Word got out. I suppose it wouldn’t have looked good for a player—former player—to become hooked on painkillers. They agreed to keep it quiet if I just left school quietly and relinquished my scholarship. I was done with football, anyway. The shoulder wouldn’t hold up.”
“Could you have at least stayed to get your degree? Could you have—”
He held up a hand to stop me. “No. By that time I wanted to come home. I knew I could…”
“Get drugs here,” I finished when he didn’t.
He nodded, breaking eye contact, but still stayed turned toward me, still let me hold his hand.
“Oh yeah, the Oxy was easy to get here. I could have called a dozen guys and they’d be on my doorstep in an hour, happy to hand me those awesome pills.”
“But you had to pay for them,” I said, leading him to the inevitable.
“Yep. And I did…for a while. It was just a matter of time before I got caught or died, or needed something stronger and jumped to heroin or something.”
I’d been around drugs in high school. But that was more like pot and the occasional line of cocaine that was rumored to be snorted in the bathroom at a party. Sometimes you’d hear about a kid raiding their parents’ medicine cabinet and having a mystery pill-swap party. Ecstasy in clubs, stuff like that. Party drugs. Nothing that was going to derail the oh-so-promising progeny of the political world.
Certainly not heroin.
“But then something happened. My mom…she’d always had…problemswith drugs.”
“I only saw her a few times at Andy’s lessons. And I never even spoke with her.”
