His grin lights up his face. He turns to the vendor, not feeding into my desires. Yet. “I’ll have three chicken tacos. She’ll take beef with extra lettuce.” He knows my order byheart, not surprising since we eat here regularly, but now that we’re together, it seems sexier.
“You want hot sauce on those chicken, right?”
“No, not today.”
I frown. “You always get hot sauce.”
“And you hate spicy food.”
WhaaatOhhhh. It clicks. He plans to kiss me sometime soon.That, I like. We pick up our orders, pay and settle down across the street on the fountain ledge.
He gently rocks the champagne cork from the bottle and it sighs once released. He pours each of us enough to fill our two flimsy Styrofoam cups.
Around the same time, I take a big bite into my taco, and sauce dribbles from the end and down my chin. Hurriedly, I find a few of the napkins that haven’t blown away, but I fear Lo has already witnessed my embarrassment.
He tries hard not to smile. “I do remember you being in cotillion. Or was that a dream?”
I snort, not helping my case. “Hardly. I had to dance with Jeremy Adams all night and he was a whole head shorter than me. Sincesomeonechose to go to the ball with Juliana Bancroft.”
He takes a large bite of his chicken taco to suppress laughter.
“I still don’t understand why you did that to me. She was horrible.” I take a big gulp of champagne, the bubbles tickling my nose. I already feel more relaxed. Liquid courage, something Lo knows a little about, but I predict that he’d be just as brazen without the added consumption.
“She wasn’t that bad,” he says, scooping fallen chicken from the tray back into the tortilla.
“She filled my locker with condoms.”
“You don’t know that was her.”
“I slept with her boyfriend. If I had known she was dating some guy from a public school twenty miles out, I would have never touched him.”
I avoided sleeping with guys from Dalton Academy. I hardly wanted a slutty reputation, so I chose my conquests very, very carefully. But obviously nottoowisely or else I would have noticed his lie when he claimed his single status. Lady Luck had been somewhat on my side, though. Juliana never told anyone what happened because she didn’t want people to know she was dating “lower” in the first place. A small plus to the horrible ordeal.
“It could have been any other girl,” Lo still refutes. I think partly to rile me. He picks up his champagne cup.
I gape. “The condoms had glittery stickers all over them. Who else in high school had a Lisa Frank fetish? She even carried around a binder with a rainbow unicorn and she was inninth grade. So not only was she cruel, but she was vain enough to practically sign her name across the crime.” I pause. “You know the sad part of that story. I actually used those condoms.”
He snorts on his champagne, choking on the alcohol.
I pat his back. “Take it easy there. Maybe you should switch to something you can handle. I’m an alcohol aficionado. You should listen to me.” I flash a smile.
“Is that so?” he says, his face red from hacking up a lung. He takes another sip to clear his throat.
“So why did you take Juliana?” I wonder. “You never answered.”
He shrugs. “I don’t remember.”
“And I don’t believe you, Loren Hale.”
“Use my full name, Lily Calloway, its authority is lost on me.” He flashes an equally smug smile.
“You escorted me to plenty of balls before that one,” I remind him. “So what changed?” I shouldn’t nag, but my curiosity prevails over my sensibility.
He sets his empty tray aside and holds the champagne bottle between his legs. I wait while he thinks about the right words, on how to frame his answer. He picks at the flowery gold paint. “The night before Juliana asked me, I came hometrashed. I paid off some guy to buy me a bottle of Jim Beam. I spent that afternoon drinking in the back of our old elementary school.” He rolls his eyes. “I probably looked like a fucking delinquent. I was bored. And I guess that’s not even a good excuse anymore. My father saw me stumbling in, and he went off on some tangent about being unappreciative.” His eyes narrow at the brick walk. “To this day, I remember what he said. ‘You can’t even fathom how much I’vefuckinggiven you, Loren. And this is how you repay me?’”
I’m afraid to touch Lo. He’s in some kind of trance, and if I put my arm around him, he may jerk out of it, sullen and unhappy. He may be both regardless.
He continues with a heavy frown, “I listened to him rant for an hour. Then he started talking about you.”
