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?”
I shrugged. “Trying to write a paper, but it’s not coming. Have you been working in the steam room?”
He shook his head, coming to sit at the desk next to me, which he scooted close, the table parts of both of ours touching. “Can’t yet. Believe it or not, there are a couple of women swimming in open swim. I need to wait until they’re out of the locker room. I’ve been futzing around the building doing odds and ends until I can get in there.”
“Women in the locker room never stopped you before.”
He waggled his brows at me. “Totally different sitch. These are women. You arethewoman. Big difference.”
I laughed. He took a peek at my laptop. “‘Who I am right now?’ Like, in some kind of existential bullshit kind of way? Like where you stand in the universe?”
I shrugged again. “Maybe. I guess. I mean, it’s supposed to be a kind of measurement of ourselves. Like, who do we think we are right now. Then we’ll look at them when we graduate and see how much we changed.”
I saw the moment I lost him. His mind went back to how much he’d changed over the past four years. Where he thought he’d be, and where he was.
I laid a hand on his arm. “Hey, I’m here,” I said, though I wasn’t sure why, or what I meant exactly.
It seemed to do the trick, though, and he laid his hand on mine, entwining our fingers.
