Chapter 13
It was a rare night that all three of us were in our dorm room together. We studied for a while. Syd came over and plopped on Lily’s bed while Lily studied at her desk.
After a while, we all took off our earbuds and started talking.
You would think that three people who lived together wouldn’t need to “catch up,” but we did.
They’d both gotten to the room late. It was the afternoon Lily gave swimming lessons, and Syd was at one of her jobs.
Maybe I should get a job. I was handling school okay, didn’t need a ton of time for studying. With Lily and Syd so busy, I had extra time on my hands.
But then I thought about my upcoming second driving lesson. And would there be a third? And even if there wasn’t, I’d have more freedom having a car on campus. I could drive into Baltimore, or down to DC. Not that I would, most likely, but I could.
I hadn’t planned on telling my roomies about the car just yet. It still seemed kind of unreal, but then I realized it had been kissing Stick and standing in front of Caro Stratton’s house that had been the most unreal parts of the afternoon. Those two items I’d definitely keep to myself.
“So, my dad bought me a car. I got it today,” I said after a lull in the conversation.
Lily rolled toward me in her desk chair. “No way. That’s awesome. What kind?”
“A Corvette,” I answered, almost sheepishly.
The look that crossed Lily’s face was priceless. Like she was confused as to why I’d get that car, and yet didn’t want to say anything in case I was a Corvette junkie or something.
“It wasn’t my choice,” I said. Lily gave me a knowing, almost sympathetic look, and I felt this twinge of betrayal toward Yvette. Stupid, I know, but I put my chin up and added, “But it grew on me.”
“This just happened today?” Lily asked.
“Yes. When I came home from class.”
“Did you take it for a drive?”
I shrugged, and busied myself with putting my books away so I wouldn’t have to look at her while I answered. I didn’t want to see their reaction, and more importantly, I didn’t want them to read anything into mine.
“Sort of. It’s a stick shift, and I’ve never driven one, so it wasn’t much of a drive. But I got a little better by the time I was done.” Which might have been the exact words I would have used to describe kissing Stick—it got better by the time we were done.
“You don’t know how to drive a stick shift?” Lily asked, a touch of incredulousness in her voice.
“No,” I said, a touch of defensiveness in mine.
“Do you?” Lily asked Syd, now thinking maybe she was the odd one.
“I don’t even know how to drive,” Syd said.
Lily looked at her, then waved her away. “That’s right. You’re from New York. Nobody knows how to drive there.”
Syd opened her mouth to argue, but ended up just shrugging and asking Lily, “You do know how to drive one, obviously?”
Lily nodded. “My dad insisted I learn when I started driving.” She looked away, and I could tell she was embarrassed.
She knew neither Syd’s nor my father would be giving their daughters driving lessons.
Mine would never take the time, and Syd was cryptic enough about her home life that I assumed her dad wasn’t in the picture.
I mean, my dad was in the picture, but there was no way in hell he’d have given me driving lessons.
I could picture Grayson Spaulding, or maybe Lily’s mom, taking her out in the family Lexus or something and teaching her how to drive a stick.
But it wouldn’t have felt the same to her. The way it felt to have Stick’s deep voice telling me when to shift, coaxing me into feeling Yvette’s every need. His hand on my thigh, inching its way upward.
His lips crashing down on mine as he yanked my body into his.
I shook my head, as if trying to physically dislodge him from my brain.
Thankfully Syd brought my thoughts out of Yvette’s warm cockpit and the parking lot’s cold air, and back into our room by asking me, “So, like, it was just here when you got back from class? Did your dad bring it to you?”
Syd had seemed fascinated with the whole Joe Stratton thing after Betsy’s wedding, and then my father announcing his candidacy. Then photos would be in People and other mags, and there I’d be, alongside my family, looking like I belonged.
The whole campus had seemed fascinated for about a minute. But Bribury was full of political and celebrity offspring, and it quickly died down, thank God.
“No. He had it dropped off. Somebody…else brought it over.”
Syd nodded, but Lily looked at me strangely. Did she already know about Stick through Lucas somehow? Or had there been something weird in my voice that she picked up on?
I cleared my throat. “Actually, that thug friend of Lucas’s brought it over. We knew he could take cars. Apparently he can deliver them, too.”
“Stick? Stick brought you your car?”
So she hadn’t known. Damn, that meant she’d picked up on something else. God, did I have a Stick tell?
“And what? He just shows up with a car, hands you the keys and runs off? You must have been like…WTF.”
Of the three of us, only Lily would use the letters instead of saying the words, but it made me smile that she did.
“No. He gave me a quick lesson on driving her. Then he left in his car, which a friend had followed him over in.” All true.
The definition of “quick lesson” probably wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, and they didn’t need to know that the friend left for quite a while and then came back for Stick. But yeah, no lies or anything.
Lily eyed me suspiciously, but Syd was lying on her back on Lily’s bunk and seemed not to pick up on anything.
Not that there was anything to pick up on.
“Well,” Lily said, “if there’s anyone to teach you how to drive, it would be Stick. That guy knows a lot about cars.”
“One would assume that, given his nickname,” Syd said, as she checked her phone, then laid it on top of her stomach and put her arms behind her head.
Don’t ask, I told myself. Do not ask.
“Yeah, right. Hey, Lily, do you even know that asshole’s real name?”
Yeah, I guess I did have a Stick tell. Lily rolled even closer to my bed, her eyes narrowing. “No, I don’t. But I could find out if you wanted.” She started to reach for her phone.
“No,” I said, maybe a bit too forcefully. “Don’t bother. Who cares, anyway? I just thought Lucas might have called him by his name or something.”
She took her phone from her desk but didn’t do anything with it, just held it out, almost like she was daring me. “No, Lucas has always only called him Stick.”
“I bet he calls him a lot more than just ‘Stick’ since he was arrested. Oh, wait, he probably doesn’t even talk to the guy anymore.”
Lily shook her head, confused. “Why wouldn’t Lucas be talking to Stick? And he is. They’re together all the time, when Lucas isn’t working or…”
“With you,” I said, nodding pointedly to Lily’s bed, where Syd was texting on her phone, seemingly oblivious to Lily and me.
A flush came over Lily’s perfect face. God, she even blushed beautifully.
I wasn’t jealous of Lily’s beauty often. I had come to terms with my looks—offbeat, quirky, but attention-getting—a long time ago. I’d had to own myself early on, or my mother would have created a mini-me, and there was no way I was going to let that happen.
“In fact,” Lily said, “Lucas and Stick seem even tighter after the whole arrest thing.”
“How can that be? Doesn’t Lucas blame that asshole for even being arrested?”
“Maybe that’s his real name…That Asshole. You sure call him that enough,” Syd said, not taking her eyes from her phone. Apparently she was listening.
“Lucas doesn’t blame Stick for what happened,” Lily said.
“Why not? He should.”
She shook her head. “That’s not how he sees it. Lucas totally owns what he did.”
“Well, yeah, he should. But he should still see who put him in the position in the first place.”
Lily shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know all the details of how it went down, but I know Lucas doesn’t hold Stick responsible. At all.”
She seemed so nonchalant about the fact that her boyfriend had a Past. I didn’t want her to read anything into my question, but I had to ask. “How do you deal with the fact that Lucas has…done stuff in his past?”
A pained look crossed her face, which she quickly masked.
So, not so nonchalant after all. “I don’t know.
It didn’t seem to matter at first because it was all…
crazy attraction, and just needing to be near him.
I wasn’t thinking long term enough to where his past, his life before me, would come into play. ”
She looked away from me, out the window, into the dark night. I noticed Syd’s fingers stilled on her phone, and her head tilted in Lily’s direction, watching.
“But then,” Lily continued, “when I knew it was going to be something more, something…deeper, I had to really think about it. About how I would deal with it, how I would let it affect me.”
“And?” I coaxed when she’d said nothing for a moment, just stared out into the night.
She turned back to face me. “And…I realized that, hokey as it sounds, his past was what made him who he is right now. Am I happy that he had a drug problem? No. Am I proud of the fact that he was involved with Stick’s car theft operation?
Absolutely not. Do I believe that both of those things are firmly behind him?
Yes.” She took a deep breath, then let it out.
“Am I so deeply in love with him that I’m able to let go of his past? Absolutely.”
“But what if you weren’t as certain as you are that he’d put that all behind him? Could you still—”
“Are you saying it isn’t? Do you know something about Lucas? Did Stick say something—”
“No. No. Nothing,” I said quickly, holding up my hand as if to stop Lily’s panicking thoughts. “I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant at all. I didn’t mean to imply… That’s not where I was going.”
A look of relief came over her face, and I realized that no matter how much Lily trusted Lucas (and she did), and no matter how true it was that he was done with his past (and I believed it to be absolutely true), there would always be this tiny, minuscule part of her that knew it was there.
And it was so much larger with Stick, who was the freakin’ mastermind of his little car theft ring.
Yeah, the look he’d read on my face today, the look that said I knew he was bad news, the one that had royally pissed him off, was one that would never go away.
Lily had learned to deal with it, to push it way, way to the back of her psyche.
But I knew there was no way that I could.