“But he didn’t.”
I shook my head, my hair getting in my eyes. I pushed it back, off my face. “No. He said if I could pass a drug test, I was hired. Even said there were some tiling projects in the plan for the next couple of years and he thought I’d be a good fit for them.”
“He remembered you learned from your dad.”
I smiled, as touched now as I was then by Frank’s generosity. “Yep. Although I needed to brush up a little. I redid our bathroom at the apartment first. When Frank saw it, he gave me the steam room as the first Bribury project. If I do a good job, he said there are a lot more custom tiling jobs around campus, and the pay will be a lot better than what I’m making now.”
“That’s great. So, you’ve go to knock it out of the park with my steam room.” She was smiling, and she stretched again, adding to the vision that was forming in my mind for the steam room. And adding to my growing erection.
“Not a problem,” I said, leaving my chair and walking the few steps to the bed, and to a naked Lily.
Chapter16
Lily
The next threeweeks were a haze of bliss. It wasn’t easy with Lucas’s hours, Andy, and, of course, classes for me.
And I tried to have a regular life away from Lucas. I desperately didn’t want to be one of those girls who dropped everything when she had a new boyfriend. I still went to some parties with Syd and Jane. It kind of did double duty—I wasn’t spending every waking moment with Lucas, and I could honestly tell my father when he called that I was hanging closely with Jane. And I did keep an eye on her when we went out, but that was more because I wasn’t really interested in anything going on around me.
Oh, it was fun meeting new people, but that was just it…they weren’t really new. More like a rehashing of all the other people I’d already met at Bribury. Hell, all the people I’d met my age my whole life.
Syd wasn’t of that mold, but God, she was trying to be. Tossing away anything that made her unique. Telling people she was from New York City, never mentioning Queens. She was turning into a Bribury Basic before my eyes, and although she seemed happy about it, it made me a little sad.
So, I’d be at these parties, or in someone’s dorm room in the evenings—when I knew Lucas was working—and I’d hold my own in conversations and stuff, but I wasn’t really there.
I was in bed with him in my room, at least in my mind. Replaying that first day, and the several other ones we were able to sneak in around my class schedule. Times when he really should have been sleeping. We’d manage to doze a little bit, but not for very long. Yeah, it was definitely the can’t-keep-your-hands-off-each-other phase.
One day he picked me up after class and took me back to his place for a glorious few hours before we picked up Andy, and Lucas dropped us both off for Andy’s swim lessons.
That was the only time we were “us” in front of Andy. And even that time we just said Lucas had seen me walking in town so he gave me a ride since I was going to the same place Andy was.
The kid was six. He bought it.
I took the requisite amount of shit from Jane about Lucas. She’d make a comment about the place smelling like townie sex when she’d come back from class and knowing that Lucas had been there.
She was exaggerating, of course, but I took to opening the windows a crack while Lucas and I went at it. It was turning out to be a semi-nice fall for the mid-Atlantic, and the air was crisp with just enough of a bite to it to cool off our sweaty bodies after we made love.
And yes, it was more and more making love with Lucas than just casual hookups. Though to be honest, my feelings for Lucas Kade had never been casual.
Now I sat in one of the classrooms at the women’s IM building working on my assignment for Montrose’s class. And waiting for Lucas’s shift to start.
I’d done lessons earlier and Lucas was taking Andy home to feed him and get him to bed before coming back for his shift. He was still using that same car of Stick’s, and I made it a point not to ask what Stick expected in return for Lucas using one of his cars.
I tapped the keys on my laptop, trying to put Lucas out of my mind so I could get this damn assignment done. It wasn’t due for another week, right before break, but I knew it was going to be a tough one so I wanted to give it as much time as I could.
A three-thousand-word essay that began with the sentence “As I write this today, the person I am is…”
It was supposed to be a self-examination done as a stream-of-consciousness kind of thing. Montrose had said to dig deep, be honest. He had this thought that we would keep them and pull them out in four years when we graduated to see the changes in ourselves.
Simple assignment, even if you just did the surface stuff and didn’t challenge yourself as Montrose suggested.
And yet my document was blank, the cursor flashing at me, mocking me.
Let’s see, “I am totally a Bribury Basic” would take up about six words. So, 2994 words short.
Maybe I should suggest to Syd and Jane that we swap and write each other’s pieces. Not in a cheating kind of way, but I felt I could easily write on both of them so much more easily than trying to find something more about myself to say than what I could pull up in my yearbook bio.
“Hey, you.” Lucas’s deep voice broke my thoughts. I could have closed my laptop, but my document was still blank other than the intro sentence. “Studying?”
