“Yes, Claudia—you remember her from school, don’t you?”
He nods.
“She, along with my mother, handles that side of the business. After the last phone call and hearing what was being said about me, I didn’t give her a chance to tell me what she’s planning on doing. If I call her back, it will only upset me again.” And I’m in such a happy bubble, I’d hate for it to burst.
“Out in the storm you were more than upset. It looked as if the world was crashing around you. Why did the photos and the stories affect you so much? Surely being so well-known you’d see a lot of crap written about you. As much as it sucks, it comes with being famous.”
I rub my hands up and down my legs. “I’ve always been insecure about my body. When I was a kid, my mother put me in a bunch of beauty pageants. Forced me to join ballet and gymnastic classes. Anything physical. She told me it was so I would have a talent for the pageants. I knew she wanted me to lose weight to give me a better chance of winning.” I pull the sheet from the bed and cover myself. “When I got on stage, the judges looked at me with sympathetic eyes. The other girls didn’t bother hiding their giggles when I squeezed myself into a sparkly gown. It was humiliating.”
“Why didn’t you quit?”
“I tried. My mother kept entering me in them.”
“She made you do that when you hated it?” Lucas says incredulously. “Why?”
“She had competed, and so did her mother. They were both winners. She wanted me to follow the family tradition.” Photos of their time on stage were displayed in our house. Put there to motivate and inspire me to be just like them.
“How long did this go on?”
“I started at five. My last competition was when I was fourteen.”
“What made it finally come to an end?”
“I did something to make my mother understand that I never wanted to be in another pageant again.”
Lucas raises an eyebrow. “What did you do?”
“I dyed my pink gown black, wore a black wig, and sangZombieby The Cranberries.”
Lucas laughs.
“It was the happiest I’d been on stage.” I giggle at the memory of my mother’s mortified face. “I told her if she wanted me to continue doing pageants, that was my new look. She never asked me again. The embarrassment at seeing her only daughter looking like a goth chick was too much. How could she show her face to the other mothers on the circuit again?”
“So being forced to do pageants made you insecure about your body?”
“Not just the pageants. I was always the chubby kid at school. Never the pretty, popular girl. The boys never looked twice at me.” I drop my head and smooth out the bedsheet. “Then the photos Travis took and sent through school were so humiliating, I guess I never got over it. Seeing the pictures of me online at the hotel brought me back to that memory and dragged up the old feelings.” It took me a long time to get over that period of my life. I’m not that young eighteen-year-old anymore, but that doesn’t mean the pain doesn’t hit hard.
Lucas puts a finger under my chin and tilts my face up to look at him. “Just so you know, I found out that Travis is in prison for a lot of serious shit. He was a fucking asshole, and if I’d known he was the one to hurt you back then, I would have done something about it. I’m sorry he did that to you.”
Travis is in jail? A sense of relief washes over me. Karma caught up to him.
“As for boys not looking twice at you, I lookedmultipletimes. I couldn’t stop, and I liked what I saw. Still do,” he says.
Heat fans over my cheeks at his words. I wish I’d known that back then.
Lucas slides off the mattress. Naked, he saunters to the table. My eyes drink him in. His broad shoulders, narrow waist, and corrugated abs make my mouth water. I can’t believe I had my hands all over him. What a perfect rebound guy. Except, I don’t see him as someone to help me get over Darren. Being withLucas is healing. Fixing something that was broken inside me. I’ll always be thankful to him. If I never see him again after we leave the cabin—a thought that squeezes at my heart—I’ll always have these memories. Something to pull out when I’m not feeling great about myself.
Coming back to bed with the camera, he presses a few buttons and the screen lights up. My photos are in there! How could I have forgotten about them? Maybe because Lucas has my mind on other, more exciting, things.
He holds the camera out to me. “Take a look at these. You can’t tell me there’s a man alive who wouldn’t look at you twice.”
My hands shaking with nerves, I take it from him. I pull in a deep breath and look at the screen. Gasping, I stare at the first photo. “Oh my God! This is not me.”
“It sure is.”
Still staring at it, I say with disbelief, “You must have edited it or used some kind of filter.” I flick through more. My eyes grow wider with every photo I see.
“No filter. It’s only natural light. This is you. This is whatIsee. What theworldshould see. Not the fucking photos those bastards posted.”
