I resolved to stop looking up at him. Though for most things I didn’t want to be, I was in fact my father’s daughter, and I tried to conjure up my father’s obstinate pride.
If Lucas didn’t want me…fuck him.
Oh God, but I wanted to fuck him. And have him fuck me.
But now it seemed he was just going to fuck me over.
“Lily, are you coming over for pizza tonight?” Andy asked as we were wrapping up and getting out of the pool.
“No, not tonight, Andy,” I said, pushing his little body toward the locker room. “Go with Freddy now and I’ll meet you on the other side.”
Andy and my other little boy went with Freddy while I picked up his two girls and herded them through the showering process.
When I’d come through the locker room before the lessons, I’d noticed the steam room was cordoned off with sawhorses and yellow tape, almost like it was a crime scene.
It was. It was where Lucas stole my heart.
Ha! Melodramatic bullshit. I couldn’t lose my heart to some ex-junkie townie in one week.
I immediately felt guilty and disloyal for those thoughts. It wasn’t how I really thought of him; I was just trying to protect my heart, though I feared it was way too late for that.
I threw on my hoodie and yoga pants, kept my wet hair up in its bun, and made my way out to the hallway with my charges. The two girls Freddy taught moved over to his area. I waited for Andy to move to mine, but I couldn’t find him.
“Didn’t Andy come out with you?” I asked Freddy, ignoring Casey’s mother, who wanted to speak with me about her kid.
“Yeah, he did. He left with his brother right away. The brother said he’d get any instructions on Andy’s progress from you next time.”
Freddy, of course, had seen me with Lucas and Andy on our Saturday swim date. Now Freddy was shooting me a sympathetic look. “He seemed to be in a hurry, like he had to be somewhere,” he said, trying to be helpful.
He wasn’t helpful. The whole situation sucked. And it was official.
Lucas was totally blowing me off.
Chapter13
I couldn’t believeI did it, but I swam extra laps that night and took a ton of time in the locker room. Yeah, I was waiting for him to show, though I told myself I wasn’t.
Pathetic, and it didn’t even work. He didn’t show, and I wasn’t about to stay all night to see if he’d resume work on the steam room tiling job.
I did skim under the tape to peek in. It looked like most of the demo work had been done, with all the old, gross tile gone. It looked bare and lonely and very sterile.
Kind of like how I felt.
On the walk home from the women’s IM building, I resolved to shake this off, not let Lucas affect me this way. I was a hot freshman at an elite college, for Christ’s sake; some townie blowing me off was not going to derail my college experience.
And yet I walked slowly, listening for a souped-up car to pull up behind me.
One never did.
* * *
Jane was on her phone,fighting with her father, when I came into the room. It amazed me how little Joseph Stratton knew his daughter. I’d only known Jane a little over a month and I knew that she would indeed rather transfer to a community college, or work her way through college entirely on her own, than do that which she said she wouldn’t.
Jane would not make a good politician—absolutely no compromise in her.
Wanting to give Jane some privacy, though she motioned that it wasn’t necessary, I threw my backpack on my bed and made my way through our bathroom to the other side of our suite to see if Syd was around.
When we first moved in, Syd shared a room with Megan, a girl from Nebraska, also here on scholarship. Megan seemed all right, and we tried to include her in stuff, but after the first two weeks her mother died and she left school to go home to Nebraska. She said she was coming back, and the residence association didn’t put anyone else in with Syd, but we weren’t betting on Megan returning anytime soon.
