“Well…almosteverything I need,” he added, and the words burned through me.
“Why did you need to measure the steam room?” I asked, ashamed at how rough my voice sounded.
“I’m retiling it. Starting next week, but I needed to get measurements for materials.”
“Will it be usable while you’re doing it?”
He shook his head, that silky black hair moving with him. I wondered if it would feel as soft as it looked. “No. I’ll work during the nights, so the locker room will still be in use, but the steam room will be closed.”
“For how long?”
He shrugged, looked at the figures he’d written down. “At least two weeks. Maybe longer. Depends how many hours I can put in on it each night.”
“Oh,” I said, disappointed. I really loved that steam room.
“The sauna will still be available.”
I’d used the sauna, on the other side of the locker room, twice. But once I’d discovered the steam room, it just wasn’t the same.
“But it’s not the same,” Lucas said, echoing my thoughts.
“I’ll survive,” I said. I hoisted my backpack up higher. “Well…um…good to meet you. Andy’s a great kid.” He nodded at that. There was nothing left to say. And yet I couldn’t leave.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“In Creyts. It’s by—”
“I know where it is,” he said, a tiny bit defensively.
“So…okay…”
“You’re going to walk there by yourself? Across campus? At this time of night?”
“Yes.” I did it a few nights a week, when I’d swum late, and steamed even later. I even studied here at times, in one of the classrooms in the old women’s IM building. “It’s fine. I do it all the time.”
“You shouldn’t,” he said, and moved from where he stood to come and stand beside me. He effortlessly took my backpack from me and slid it across one of his broad shoulders.
“It’s perfectly safe,” I said, following him now as he started moving on without me. “What are you doing?”
He turned around and looked at me. “I’m walking you home,” he said, then turned and kept walking.
Luckily I caught up to him just in time to hear him say, “Kade. My last name is Kade. Lucas Kade.”
Something in me moved, and I knew that name—his name—would stay with me forever.
* * *
We walkedto my dorm in silence. At first it felt like awkward silence to me, but then it just became…comfortable. Or more like comforting.
I walk this campus in the late evenings a few nights a week. And I don’t feelunsafe, but then again, I’d never felt quite as secure as I did now, with Lucas’s tall, strong body beside me. And that slight sense of danger, the feeling that as composed and controlled as he seemed to carry himself, he could unleash that big body with immense power at any time.
I admit it, I thought about all that strength and power unleashed on me. In a good way.
We passed people, most of whom I didn’t know. Bribury was a small school, and you eventually knew a good portion of the student body, but I was a freshman, and had only been here a month. If I didn’t have class with them, or they didn’t live on my floor, I probably didn’t know them.
The guys we passed looked at Lucas with curiosity. Lucas didn’t belong amongst the Bribury boys in their skinny jeans, knit beanies, and impossibly fashionable eyewear.
And Lucas made them all look like just that…boys.
