I was nervous to be walking away from my phone with him. When he caught his blazer as it slipped off my knees and slung it over my shoulders, I felt even more twitchy. “I’m not really—”
“Might as well keep it,” he said. “This place has a way of making you feel a bit cold.”
He kept hold of my hand to lead me onto the grass and in between the graves. It was all adding up to Lucas knowing his way around ‘this place’ very well. I tried not to ask questions or hold him up, because I had a feeling he was about to tell me something very important about himself, and whatever I might think about him at the moment, I was incredibly curious.
There were a few other people walking around that part of the cemetery and I felt conspicuous with the two of us in our uniforms and Lucas’s too-big blazer draped over me, but nobody else even glanced at us. I supposed I should have expected that.
The plaque we eventually stopped in front of read Jillian Montgomery. She’d died at the age of fifteen, had left behind the usual selection of devastated family members, and in the free space alongside the text was a simple picture of two crossed hockey sticks and a ball. Jillian Montgomery, a girl who would have been about the same age as the two of us had she lived, must have been a sporting type.
Well she’d definitely never made it to Burgundy—I tried to remember if any girl by that name had gone to Sands. If there had been a death. But she would have almost certainly been in my class, and the high school was not that big. Surely I would have remembered.
“Can you imagine that?” Lucas said. He was still holding my hand, squeezing my fingers. “Dead at fifteen, no high school graduation or school formal. No first job. No first car.”
I didn’t understand how he was tying this to me, but it was clear that was what he was doing.
“I know your life has been a bit different to mine, Callie,” Lucas said. “You don’t think in the same way, and that’s fine by me. But I’m going to give you some advice and if you’re smart, you’ll listen. The truth is life can be really shit even if you think you’re doing all the right things. And life doesn’t give a fuck about whether what you do is right, or wrong, or if you did or didn’t do something because you thought it was right or because you were just stupid. It’ll fucking take you out just the same, whenever it likes, and then you’ll just be some raised letters on a rock nobody wants to come and visit because it’s too sad.”
“Lucas…”
I wanted to ask him if he’d known this girl before she died. Well… he must have known her in some way, to lead me right to her grave. But was she just a friend, or had she been a girlfriend? I didn’t really know Lucas at all to ask something like that.
“Just take that damn car, Callie,” Lucas said. He dropped my hand and turned away. “Don’t be some fucking precious idiot who won’t accept something that could help you just because you think you’d look better if you do. Nobody is standing around waiting to tell you you’re so much smarter because you insisted on accepting something a little worse than the best offer you got. Nobody gave a fuck about you before and they won’t give a fuck after. You’v
e got to actually fucking do something before people care about you one way or the other. And you won’t have a chance to fucking do anything if you don’t take what’s offered to you. You fucking got it?”
He stalked off down the hill towards the car—my car, if I accepted it. I just stayed still, stunned for a moment, and then I glanced back at Jillian’s grave, and thoughts of what lay below the surface of that neat little patch of grass in front of the stone made me start moving.
“Lucas,” I called, and started to stride after him. “Lucas! Wait for—”
I’d almost caught up with him when he whirled and grabbed me by the shoulders, the pressure of his fingertips dulled by his blazer still covering me. He slammed me against something that was rough on my back, a tree maybe. He held me there, and his eyes dug into me. Strangely beautiful eyes, I caught myself thinking: sparkling with tremendous depth. I was breathing heavily from chasing him, from the shock of his turning on me, and I was very aware of the sides of my breasts brushing against his hands as my chest rose and fell. I was pretty sure from the quick flicker of his gaze that he had noticed as well.
“Quiet in the cemetery, Callie,” Lucas whispered. I tried to look away from him, to nod, to say something to break the tension, but I was pinned in place.
Then a wicked smile curled his lips, warning me I was in terrible trouble but too late, as was always the case with him. He tilted his head as he lowered it towards me, and then he was pressing the back of my head into the tree behind me as well, his mouth hard and wet on mine.
My hands came up without my consciously directing it, my fingers working to get a grip on something, but he was holding my upper arms so that I couldn’t. His tongue parted my lips without finding much resistance, and the feel of that made my eyes roll back in my head… which was when I realised.
He didn’t have me against a tree at all. It was a big headstone, the only one in the entire area, its carvings softened with age and covered in lichen so there was no way to read whose it was originally. Lucas had me backed up against some long-dead person’s memorial, kissing me hard enough to scorch the lichen off.
Lucas’s hands on my arms twitched. For a moment I thought he was going to start groping me, but either he’d just been trying to startle me or he’d felt the way I’d stiffened, because he got off me and let me step away from the headstone.
“Let’s get back to the car,” he said. “Still got to pick up mine before we get to school.”
He didn’t sound at all affected by what had just happened, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at him to see what was happening in his face. I just followed him down the rest of the way back to the car with his scent from his blazer surrounding me and one inane thought foremost in my head: Jillian Montgomery had seen everything from her grave, and I wasn’t so sure that Lucas hadn’t intended that from the start.
When we reached the car, I went to the driver’s side and stood waiting.
“Good girl,” said Lucas without really looking at me, and tossed me the keys, which I caught one-handed this time, despite the shaking that seemed to have affected my entire body.
Chapter Nine
As I’d known it would, me and Lucas arriving late to school in two new (in my case, new enough) cars set off the rumour mills with even more of a vengeance. And of course Lucas had just muttered a goodbye once I got him back to his place and got straight out of the car, never mind that he’d devoured my face like I was his new favourite food only minutes before or the weird circumstances of where it had happened either.
I would have just believed the whole thing had happened in my head, except I didn’t think my brain was capable of coming up with anything as incredible as the way Lucas had tasted, or the fact that his stubble rubbing against my skin was actually kind of hot. Just thinking about it had my brain dissolving into a puddle right there in my skull, and I didn’t really think about anything else that morning—especially not class.
By the time I’d gotten to fourth period with Tamara and Aileen and the haze in my head was starting to die down, the overriding view in the gossip surrounding Lucas and myself was that I was blackmailing him with something I’d gotten on him (if only), and that was why he had taken me to school and home but seemed to be avoiding me as much as possible while he did it, why he’d bought me that expensive car and the phone. And honestly, without all the details only the two of us knew, it really looked like that. Ashleigh was also in that maths class with us, and just based on the looks she kept shooting me, Lucas had succeeded in convincing her that the time he spent with me was all my doing.
Not that I thought Lucas had gone to much effort to convince anyone of anything. He just didn’t care enough to come up with a story that would make me look better… and it was too much to believe he might actually want to spend time with me, wasn’t it?