Put Me Back Together (9 page)

Bad news, out of my league, one hundred percent trouble
, I repeated silently to myself.

“That’s too many for you to carry,” Lucas said, and before I could say a thing he was calling over one of the waitresses, a tattooed girl with severe eye makeup and bleached blonde pigtails. “Brit, can you help her carry these back to her table?”

Brit started collecting the drinks onto her tray.

“Try not to hurt anybody, okay?” I said to Lucas as we walked away, and I thought I saw him heave a sigh of relief as he smiled at me.

“Wow,” Brit said. She was expertly carrying the five drinks on a tray balanced on her palm. “I’ve never seen Lucas like that before.”

“Do you think he’s drunk?” I said to her as we maneuvered through the crowd. If that was the case, I was going to ask her to get him some coffee. I didn’t want him to lose his job.

Brit gave me a funny look. “No, hon,” she said. “I’m pretty sure it was the sight of you that had him tripping over his own feet.”

“What?” I said with a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

The girls grinned as Brit set the tray down on the table and they all reached forward to grab their drinks. Brit leaned in to talk into my ear while they were distracted.

“Girls shove their boobs in his face all the time and he doesn’t even react,” she said. “Trust me, I’ve been working with him three nights a week for months. Lucas has the hots for you, sweetie. You’d better watch yourself.” She winked at me as she picked up her tray and made her way back to the bar.

“What’s wrong, Katie?” Anita said. “I mean, besides the fact that these drinks are crazy strong!”

I let my eyes travel back to the bar where Lucas was pouring a line of shots. Lucas had the hots for me? Lucas was dropping glasses and acting like an idiot because of me? It was beyond comprehension. Guys didn’t fall all over themselves for me. They did that for Em, for Sally, for the flirts of the world, not me. Still, my stomach was doing all kinds of ecstatic cartwheels at the idea. I wished I could settle into that feeling, just for a minute or two, snatch back some of that happiness from two nights ago. But Brit’s last words—
You’d better watch yourself
—reminded me why I couldn’t. No matter how he felt about me, all I could do was stare at him from across the room and wish and dream and yearn. The dream of Lucas—that’s all I could ever have.

Except, that wasn’t quite true. I could also have the drink he’d made me.

“Cheers!” I said and downed more than half my cocktail in one gulp as the other girls stared at me, goggle-eyed.

“Oh yeah!” Sally cried, putting her arm around my shoulder. “Let’s get smashed!”

Oh, hell yes
.

An hour later I was out on the dance floor with Sally, my head all kinds of fuzzy, Emily and the others girls nowhere in sight, and grabby male hands coming at me from every direction. If I’d had to write out the definition of a situation that was way out of my comfort zone, this would probably be it to the letter. As I watched Sally grinding up against the same beefy guy she’d met in the line, her skirt hitched up so high I could literally see half her ass, I felt another pair of hands gripping me by the hips and flung them off.

What it all came down to was bad decision making. My first bad decision had been agreeing to come out for Anita’s birthday in the first place, although I now seemed to recall that I’d given a noncommittal maybe and it was Em who had transformed my answer into a yes. My second bad decision had been imagining that actually coming tonight was in the realm of a good idea, that Em and her friends would create a little cocoon of safety around me, allowing me to avoid actually speaking to anybody but them, that I could actually let loose and get away from myself. And the third bad decision was the most obvious one. That decision was sloshing around in my stomach and making me lightheaded and would soon be showing itself to the entire dance floor if I didn’t get out of there really soon.

As the crowd thrashed around me, I tried to remember where Emily had said she was going before she’d disappeared through the press of bodies. To get more drinks? To the bathroom? I couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d left. I didn’t even know what time it was. The evil harpies had made me take off my watch. My head began to feel very heavy as the crowd shifted around me and I lost sight of Sally altogether. Suddenly I felt the seeds of panic beginning to germinate in my gut and I turned around, scanning the faces on every side, trying to spot Sally’s red lips and blonde curls. The threat of the Facebook message loomed large in my mind, the words echoing in my brain, louder than the music—although it occurred to me that the music in here was so loud no one would be able to hear me scream. If a hand came out and grabbed me, dragging me down, nobody would even notice.

Just as this thought entered my brain an arm reached out and looped itself around my waist, the fingers spreading across my stomach, and I felt my panic spike up into real terror. Without looking around to see who it was, I tried to scramble away, but we were packed in so tightly there was really nowhere to scramble to. Feeling my movement, the hand tightened slightly and something inside of me snapped. I took hold of the fingers gripping me just above my bellybutton and bent them backwards as fast and as hard as I could. I heard a shriek of pain—which, as I predicted, went unnoticed by the rest of the dancing crowd—and then I lunged forward and roughly shoved my way through the bodies, adrenaline pumping like jet fuel through my veins. I focused on the edge of the dance floor and nothing else until I reached it and slammed headfirst into something sturdy and warm and tall.

Something or someone.

This time I actually screamed and pushed out hard with my forearms, flinging myself backwards. I heard someone calling my name but I ignored it, so intent was I on getting away, although it didn’t really seem like that was going to happen. Not when I was wearing four-inch borrowed heels and I was losing my balance, my arms pin wheeling as I careened toward the floor. I squeezed my eyes shut, preparing myself for the horrifying crunch of my bones breaking, when a pair of arms reached out and caught me at the critical last second.

My eyes flew open as I found myself once again on my feet, my hands locked onto those arms like vises, not only to brace myself, but also out of fear of who was attached to them.

“Katie, it’s me,” a voice said. “It’s Lucas.”

They were the same words I’d said to him earlier when he’d mistaken me for Emily. I guess it was a night for mistaken identities.

“Lucas,” I breathed, loosening my grip on his arms. I felt one of his hands slide down to the small of my back, holding me steady, his eyes focused on my face, full of concern. “Get me away from here.”

Taking me by the hand, he led me up one staircase and then another to a lounge at the very top of the club. There were couches and armchairs scattered around the area and it was mostly empty, just one couple making out and two girls who seemed to be sleeping, their heads resting one on top of the other. Lucas and I sat down on a couch in the corner. It was a loveseat, meant for two people in theory, though in this case I had to assume two twelve-year-old girls—it was that narrow. I was practically sitting in his lap. I tried to wiggle over, but there was no couch left next to me, and he kept leaning toward me and touching me with his warm hands and murmuring softly to me, which was so calming, almost like a lullaby, except liking his lullaby was
so
totally against the promise I’d made myself. The more he tried to calm me, the more agitated I became, until I felt his hands cupping my face, holding it still.

“Breathe, Katie,” he said. “Breathe.”

With his words, and the steady breaths that followed, I felt the adrenaline leeching out of my body being Withd by a none-too-subtle pounding in my head. Drawing my legs up onto the couch, I wrapped my arms around them and pressed my cheek into my kneecaps, closing my eyes. I felt his palm, warm against my back as he rubbed it and smoothed my long hair, something I’d done countless times for Emily when she was hungover, though having it done to me was quite a different thing. If the music in the club hadn’t been so incredibly loud, I might have actually drifted off.

When I finally opened my eyes again and sat up, Lucas was still right there beside me with a sweet smile. I tried to smile back but I was too embarrassed, remembering the perfect fool I’d made of myself downstairs. Luckily, Lucas didn’t ask for an explanation. Instead he handed me a bowl of pretzels.

“Here, eat this,” he said. “Sorry, it’s all we have to snack on. And drink this.”

He handed me a glass full of clear liquid, which I eyed warily.

“It’s water,” he added.

Looking down at the food in my hands, I gave him a puzzled look. “When did you get this?” I said. Had he left me alone on the couch while my eyes were closed? I hadn’t felt him move. And if he had gone, whose hand had I felt on my back? I felt my heart begin to pound again.

“I texted Brit to bring this stuff up,” he said, his voice full of reassurance. “I’m actually hiding up here with you. Brit’s covering for me.”

“You should go back to work,” I said. “I don’t want you to get into trouble because of me.”

“No trouble,” Lucas said easily. “I covered for her last month while she spent four hours behind the club having a screaming fight with her boyfriend. She owes me. This won’t even cover it.”

I nodded feebly, nibbling on a pretzel, wishing heartily that they were the dipped-in-chocolate kind.

“Are you feeling better?” Lucas said tentatively.

I took a gulp of water so I could have time to think of what to say. “I’m really fine,” I said. “I just don’t usually come out to places like this. All the people. And I lost Emily. I was just overwhelmed and a little freaked and I’m going to strangle Sally later.”

Lucas raised his eyebrows. “And who’s this Sally?”

“One of Em’s friends,” I said.

“And that’s all it was?” he asked. “You just got overwhelmed? There wasn’t anything…”

He left the sentence hanging, waiting for me to fill in the blank. I could tell he sensed I was leaving something out, but I wasn’t about to explain.

“I’m never going clubbing again,” I said.

“It’s really not that bad once you get used to it,” Lucas said. “Although I guess I had to get used to it, since I work here. And I get to enjoy it all without the help of alcohol, which is quite a treat.”

“You never mentioned that you worked here,” I said. I was actually a little surprised. I’d naively thought Lucas was living on his daddy’s dime, another rich kid like Sally’s Alex, like me—although in our family it was my mom who made the big bucks. I didn’t have to work during the school year, but it looked like Lucas did.

He shrugged. “There’s a reason I work so far away from campus. I don’t want the party to follow me here. I just want to get the work done. So I don’t really mention it to anyone.”

“Yeah, there’s not much of a party going on down there,” I said teasingly.

“But it’s not my party,” Lucas pointed out, and I nodded in agreement, though I didn’t really get it. Wasn’t Lucas supposedly the life of the party? What exactly was he hiding from?

“And what about you, princess? Since when did you become such a party girl?” Lucas asked.

He pointed at my head and I reached up to find I had on Anita’s tiara. I vaguely recalled her placing it on my head earlier. Had I been wearing it this entire time?

I snatched it off my head.

“That’s just an inside joke,” I said lamely, trying to discreetly drop it into the seam of the couch behind me, but Lucas snaked his arm behind my back and grabbed it.

“Oh, no,” he said with a wicked grin. “You have to keep it on. It goes so well with your ensemble.” He tried to place it back on my head, but I twisted away with a laugh, wrestling with his outstretched arms until I looked up and he was hovering over me, one knee next to my thigh on the couch, his other leg planted on the ground on the other side of me, his face just inches from mine. I stopped struggling and he placed the tiara back on my head, then eased slowly back into his seat, letting his eyes trail down my body as he did so, ending at my boots.

“Did I mention how much I’m enjoying these?” he said with a slow grin, placing a light hand on my left calf.

“They’re not mine,” I said, painfully aware of every finger pressing into the leather.

“And this?” he said, tugging at the bottom of my top, his fingertips grazing against the skin of my stomach.

I sucked in a breath, sharply. “It doesn’t really fit me,” I said. It really didn’t. Sally was two sizes smaller than I was.

“Oh, it fits you,” Lucas said. “Trust me.”

My body flushed again and this time the flush didn’t fade as his eyes moved to my face.

“And this makeup,” he said, his gaze darting from my eyes to my lips to my cheeks to my lips again. “It’s certainly interesting. But you don’t need it. Same with the contacts. It’s covering up the real you.”

“It’s all covering up the real me,” I said. “That’s what I like about it.”

I blinked. The alcohol seemed to have loosened my tongue along with making the room spin, though I noticed it had pretty much stopped spinning now.

I said, “I mean, we all want to pretend to be someone else sometimes, don’t we? We all want to hide.”