I started awake without knowing what had alerted me, but even in a half-asleep state I somehow knew to move over to the window and peek through the curtains. Lucas was grinning up at me, leaning on the outside windowsill. He gestured me towards him.
I shook my head, mouthed no a whole lot, and started backing away towards the bed… but I didn’t let the curtain fall fast enough to miss him jerking his head in the direction of the front door.
What was he threatening to do? Break in, cause a scene that would rile my parents up? It didn’t seem to matter when I already had complete confidence in his ability to do something that would end in big trouble for me.
I’d been wanting to see him, anyway. I hadn’t had more than a distant glimpse over the past few days and I’d completely failed at getting him out of my mind for more than fifteen minutes at a time. I had an important problem to solve revolving around him, I kept telling myself… but the truth was I kept wondering about that event he apparently had planned. I hadn’t had a single encounter with him yet that wasn’t an event, so that little bit of advertising left me short of breath.
I moved back to the window, put up one finger to ask him to wait, and found a jacket and sweatpants to pull on over my pyjamas. I didn’t like my chances of having time to change properly.
I hadn’t opened my bedroom window in months and winced at an initial little squeal, but for the most part it slid open easily. I was faced with a little blast of chilly air and Lucas’s face free of glass smudges, which was even more handsome than I remembered. And then when I thought about where that pretty mouth had been the last time we were in the same room, I could barely coordinate myself enough to get one leg after the other out the window.
Lucas looked me up and down when I dropped to the ground in front of him. “Not following the dress code, I can see.”
I rolled my eyes and turned back to slide my window shut. “Maybe if you actually got me to come out with you at a regular mealtime, when normal people are likely to be dressed for something other than bed…”
“Spoken like a woman who might actually be willing to agree to come out with me now,” said Lucas.
I shrugged. “I guess a lot has changed, right?”
I was walking after him to his car parked on the street just behind mine when it hit me. “Shit, how am I going to get back into the house later? I forgot to take my keys.”
Lucas broke into a laugh so loud I winced. I felt like the entire neighbourhood was going to be looking out their windows to see what was going on, but of course in my neighbourhood, people quickly learned it was better to pretend not to notice. “Are you usually this organised or do I have a special effect on you?”
“You weren’t acting like you intended to give me enough time to get ready properly,” I said. “So I made some mistakes.”
“It’s okay,” Lucas said. “You can sleep in my car until the morning, and when you need to get in I’ll come explain to your parents it was entirely my fault. I’m actually pretty good at getting people out of trouble.”
“If you’re at least as good at it as you are at getting them into trouble we’ll do fine.” I tried to keep things a bit sassy so he wouldn’t notice I was actually really touched by the offer. It had to mean something that he was finally willing to take responsibility for the trouble he got me in, and not just because he needed to get himself out of the firing line.
Surely this was the time to talk about the rest of our history, if ever.
I was yawning as I sank into the front passenger seat of his car, but I tried to keep my head. “I guess my dad might want to have a bit of a go at you, but my mum won’t care, for sure. Honestly I think she’s been hoping something would kick off between us since that time when we were ten.”
“What?” said Lucas. The car pulled out of my street, and I sagged into my seat with a relief I would never be able to put into words. It was an awful thing to think, but maybe one of the reasons I hadn’t stood up to Lucas and his shenanigans as much as I should have was because I really liked the way it felt to be caught in his orbit, in a world where there was plenty of money for anything that came and nobody needed to worry about a fight kicking off in their street at night or someone trying to smash up the car they were driving just because it was nicer than everyone else’s. Even when he was only interested in me so long as nobody needed to know, it was a taste of a life I’d wanted for so long without even realising what it would be like.
It made me uncomfortable to think of myself as being that sort of person. Well, it wasn’t like I had some designs on Lucas, like I expected I would be able to lure him into marrying me and ‘saving’ me from my old life that way. I’d been working on my exit plan since long before he shouldered his way back into my life, after all. But I realised now I’d taken a lot for granted about what it would be like to have that life, about what I would have to do to get there. Maybe I did need him around, to show me the way. That wasn’t the same as trying to use him, was it?
I wished I hadn’t mentioned my mother and her stupid fantasies now, but I was too sleepy to come up with a way out of that now.
“It’s not like she’s ever said anything, but I’m pretty sure she’s been holding a torch for you since back then. Since you’ve started, um, hanging around a bit, she’s made it clear she still remembers.”
“Well,” Lucas said, “it’s nice that she remembers me, but perhaps you could remind me exactly what it is she’s supposed to remember from back when we were ten. Because I know we were in the same class some of the time back then, but I don’t remember having much to do with you.”
If he was joking, he wasn’t playing it in a very funny way. And I knew Lucas was capable of being very sharp when he wanted to be.
“Uh…” Maybe if I stalled, he would come out with his just kidding or something that would save me from making an even bigger fool of myself than I already had.
“I’m not screwing with you, Callie,” Lucas said. “I have no idea what the fuck you and your mother think you remember about me, and I’m sick of waiting to find out.”
“Not long after you first came to Sands Primary,” I said, each word feeling very heavy in my mouth, “you started showing up wherever my mother was waiting to come walk me home. We lived a couple blocks away from the school back then so it was easy to walk…” I shook my head to dispel details he didn’t need. “I… you… At first you’d just walk behind with my mum and talk to her, I can’t remember about what, but it must have been entertaining enough because she didn’t shoo you away, and my mum hates other people’s kids, honestly. She used to resent it when we had Tamara come home with us some afternoons if her mum was busy, she’d just go off into her bedroom and ignore both of us until someone came to pick her up…”
Lucas turned his attention off the road to scowl at me, and I went on quickly. “Anyway, after a while you started walking with me, and you’d put your arm over my shoulders while we walked even, so I couldn’t get away without making a big thing of it. But you always did that where none of the other kids from school could see, so they’d tease me about how you had a crush on my mum but had no idea about the rest.”
“You were always late out of class in the afternoon,” Lucas said suddenly. “You’d have some painting you needed to hang up perfectly, or one time you had to put all your pencils back in their case in order.”
I tipped my face back to the ceiling in relief. “You remember.”
“I don’t remember any