21. Luc
21
LUC
DECLARATIONS AND DELULU
I follow Marcus all the way into the city on Saturday morning, driving toward the sun and squinting for every minute of the trip until we move from a single-lane highway onto six lanes of traffic already chugging and thick despite the hour.
Marc’s truck is large and old, squeaking every time it hits a stone on the road. While Angelo’s Charger is in showroom condition. Her age, not defining her beauty. The roar of the engine, forcing the whole frame into a soothing vibration that settles in my veins and leaves me a little jumpy as we cross the city.
Anyone who wasn’t awake before stirs to the rumble of a perfectly kept motor when I pass.
Pulling around one corner, then another as my smile grows a little larger, nerves batter at the back of my stomach as we come within a block of the girls’ soon-to-be former apartment.
I wonder what I’ll do when I see her for the first time in three years… again.
Will she look different? Will she be different? Will she still hate me? And beneath that hate, will she still love me?
Fuck knows. But a lot can change in a single second. Six years is a lifetime to some.
I follow Marcus all the way to the front of the girls’ building, double parking in the space I stopped on my bike three years ago. Curious, I glance across to the Thai restaurant I saw her lined up in front of, huddled with another man and snuggling in like they knew intimacy with one another. Then I think of the cold, miserable ride home, and the liquor I chugged until I felt warm again.
I think of the black spot in my memory, the night I know I did something bad, but the act, mercifully, wiped from my memory banks, either a result of alcohol poisoning, or pure, sheer will.
The second, probably. But I have no room in my consciousness to know what Brittany Turner looks like beneath her clothes. I have no desire to remember. And I have no intention to ever repeat the experience.
Once was more than enough.
“Kari Macchio!” Marc climbs out of his truck, banging the roof with the side of his fist and making a racket so unlike any he would usually make. But he’s still excited, and so I guess he’s living his own Lloyd Dobler moment. “Wake up, kiddo. It’s time to come home.”
“Jesus christ.” I cut the Charger’s engine and tug the key from the ignition, pushing the door open, I step onto the street outside and pray no one will scratch up Ang’s pride to spite my inconsiderate parking. “The sun has barely come up, stupid. You want the whole neighborhood to strangle you?”
He laughs and slams his door shut. “I figure if we’re noisy enough, they might be inclined to come out and help her load up and leave. Remove the troublemakers, so to speak.”
“Mmhm.” I move around to the front of the car and lean against the hood. A crime, should anyone take a photo and share it with Angelo Alesi. “And if the girls aren’t even awake yet?”
“Then they’re about to be woken up.” He looks up when the girls’ street-facing apartment window slides open in a shitty, ill-fitting frame. Then as Laine pokes her head out the window and her eyes zoom straight to me. Maybe it’s a familial bond thing, her instinctually knowing where her brother is. Or maybe it’s the shiny red hood I rest my ass against. But her eyes stop on mine and her lips flatten into dangerous lines. “Shout like that again, and I’m gonna stab you both.” She casts her eyes along the street. “Angelo here too?”
“Nope.” Marcus cups his mouth and shouts again, “Kari! Move your ass, little girl. I’ve waited six years to bring you home.”
“Shut up already.” Kari stomps through the front door of the building, her body wrapped in itty bitty sleep shorts and an oversized T-shirt that dwarfs her frame and makes her appear a little… sh ort and round. She looks at Marc first, snarling as he drags his focus down. Then she scans across and finds me.
From anger to shock.
Shock to disbelief.
Finally, she transitions from disbelief back to rage and aloofness. How someone can be both pissed and unphased, puzzles me. But when I flash a wide grin, big enough to compete with a clown on coke, her eyes only narrow. “What the hell?”
“We’re your ride home, Bear. Get your shit and pick a car.” I glance to Marcus and pray he means it when he says he’s cool with her dating. It’s not like I’m gonna grab a poster and markers and declare our history for the world to know. But I’m also done treating her like she’s five years old.
Our cards have been dealt and the game is underway. It’s time to play like I mean it.
“Cute shorts.” I bring my gaze back and stop on hers. “A little under dressed for moving day, aren’t you?”
Her nostrils flare. Her cheeks warm. And then her chest puffs forward. She wants to deck me—in fact, I think she’d love nothing more than to grind me into the concrete—but she spins on her heels instead and slams back into the building with a shouted “UGH!”
“She’s not great with mornings,” Marcus ponders. “I guess. I dunno. She used to be.”
“Sometimes people change as they age and mature.” I drop Ang’s keys into my pocket and push away from the car. “Come on. The sooner we load them up, the sooner we can be on the road. Do you know what day Bear starts at the hospital?”
“Yep!” He’s way too fucking happy. It’s weird to see Marcus Macchio so… flamboyant . “Tuesday in ten days. She’s on afternoon shift, two days in a row. Then nights.”
“Excellent.” I whistle under my breath and grab the door to the building before my friend can. “I’m on afternoons on Tuesdays, too.”
“I know.” He steps in ahead of me, smiling like he thinks he’s funny. “I talked to X, who talked to the scheduling person at the hospital, who spoke with Kari’s supervisor. Somehow, I managed to slide her in so her first month of shifts correspond with yours. Familiar faces and all that.” He moves onto the stairs and starts up on my right. “If I can’t be there with her, then I figure my best friend is the next best thing.”
“Mmhm.” I’m a dead man. Dead, dead, painful dead. But I’ll be long gone and buried before I can take the smile off my face.
“ H ow are you, Bear?” I sidle closer when everyone else is carrying boxes downstairs. It took a shit ton of maneuvering to time myself with Kari, but also with the other four, so my loitering doesn’t come across as strange and their brains would be busy with their tasks. There are six of us here today, and I’m having to manage them all just to get a single second alone with the one I want. “You look pretty today.”
“I look like a sweaty ape you visit at the zoo.” But she peers across the top of her box, hugging it to her chest, and smiles the smile of… well, someone who wants to hurt me. “Isn’t your type more along the lines of brunette, pierced, and skateboards?”
Okay. So she’s still pissed about that. Noted.
“We can talk it out calmly,” I offer. “Maturely. We’re adults now, and we’ve had years to process this clusterfuck since everything that happened back in the day. Or we can take potshots at each other until someone’s feelings get hurt.”
“I choose the second.” She bounces to readjust her box and starts toward the door. “I’m coming home to be with my brother and friends. You and I don’t need to co-exist, Luca. If you insist that we do, then I insist on cheap shots and general nastiness.”
“You want me to be mean because that’s the only way you can manage your grudge.” I move toward the door too, faster than her, so I block her exit before she can escape. “You’re a sweet girl, Bear, and your biggest flaw is your inability to stay mad at someone. You’re afraid of being my friend because you know you still want me.”
“Is that what we’re doing?” She looks at the ceiling and laughs. “You sent me away, Luc! You. Sent me. Away. Don’t act like I was the one who chose this.”
“I sent you away because you were a teenager who needed college life to see something, anything , outside those train tracks back home. You needed time to mature. You needed life experience. So that when you came back, you would know what the world had to offer. And only then would I allow you to still choose me.”
She scoffs, deep and piggish, and shoves through the door until the corner of her box scrapes my ribs as she passes. “An argument you might have had a right to… years ago. But time has gone on, Luc. How on earth do you expect me to still harbor those same feelings all this time later?”
She’s so fucking pretty.
So sweaty and dirty from the dust floating around the girls’ apartment. Her shorts, though she’s changed them, aren’t much better than the pair she wore to bed. The only difference now is that they’re made of denim and support the globes of her ass in a way the soft cotton never could.
“You’re delusional,” she adds. “Completely and ridiculously insane.”
“I’m a man who knows what he wants.” I match her steps, so we descend the stairs shoulder to shoulder. “I knew back then, too. But you were too young, and I wasn’t the man who was gonna tie an eighteen-year-old to the feelings she thought she had at the time.”
“And yet, you expect me to still have them now that I’m twenty-four.” She shakes her head, smiling to herself in the way some folks do when they think their companion is stupid and crazy. “I’m not even sure how you connect the dots in your brain to make your delusion work. My feelings back in high school were invalid, but now they’re to be honored? I was too young for you back then, but now I’m not?”
“Age doesn’t matter so much as maturity and responsibility.”
“Cute.” She stops at the landing of the third floor and meets my eyes. “I’ve been more mature than you since I was seven years old.”
She spins on her heels, hair flip and all, and continues down. “Let’s not pretend you’ve ever been anything but self-centered, egotistical, and self-serving.”
“Uh huh. But even as the less mature one, I was older.” I follow her down. She’s playing a game of Russian Roulette, walking toward her brother and spouting off at the mouth. Guess that’s a game she’s willing to play. “The fact that I was older, regardless of maturity, meant it was my responsibility to keep us both safe and emotionally undamaged. I was not going to date an eighteen-year-old, no matter how fucking mature you were. And I wasn’t gonna tie you down to a town with nothing in it.”
“But you will now? Since, obviously, my college degree somehow fixes everything.”
“Now.” I grab her arm at the next landing and swing her back until she crashes against the exposed brick wall, her breath coming out on a loud gasp, and her box, the only barrier standing between us. “Now, you’re grown. You’re fucking beautiful. And you still want me.”
She lifts a single, dangerous brow. “Presumptuous of you.”
“Is it?” I look down at her body, grinning because her pulse thunders in her throat and her lips firm into thin, unimpressed lines. “If you didn’t still want me, you wouldn’t carry so much anger. If you had no lingering feelings for what we could be, then you wouldn’t want to deck me right now.”
“You’re reaching,” she seethes. “I want to deck a lot of people in life. Doesn’t mean I want to date them, too.”
“Love and hate are a part of the same spectrum, aren’t they?” I lean in closer, folding myself over the box and crushing her against the wall. “You think you hate me, Bear. I’m patient enough to wait you out and see what happens.”
“Kari?” Marc’s voice floats up the stairs and echoes from wall to wall. God forbid the guy doesn’t see his sister for more than a minute. “You coming down or what?”
“Think about it.” I study her perfect green eyes and the freckles littering her cheeks. “Carry your anger, Bear. But when you wake up in the middle of the night, throbbing and curious, I promise I’ll take your calls. I’m not saying you have to choose commitment today and fall into line. But I’m saying we have unfinished business, and I think it’s high time we lay it out.”
“And Marcus?” Her nostrils flare, drawing my gaze down and my smile up. “My age wasn’t always our only red flag. You so easily dismiss your worries about my brother, all because I’m older?”
“I don’t dismiss them, but I allocate priority. And right now, they do not trump your needs and wants. And they sure as shit don’t trump what I want.”
“Kari?”
“I’m coming!” She glances past me and down the stairwell that turns onto the next landing. “I’m coming, Marcus.”
“Perhaps.” I lean in and press a gentle, barely there kiss to the corner of her lips. “I don’t know what the fuck we’re gonna do about this, Bear. But I know we’re gonna figure it out. I know I’m ready to make up for my mistakes.”
“As in, your mistake of sending me away? Or the mistake where you slept with Britt? Oh! Or the seventy-three thousand other mistakes I’ve heard about, parading through your door every Friday and Saturday night for the last several years?”
“You’re exaggerating.” But my smile grows larger. “And the fact that you’ve checked in on my weekend companionship proves you’re still interested.”
“The fact you had female companionship proves you’re an opportunistic pig.” She shoves off the wall, using the brick as a launching pad and the box as a shield, jamming the corner into my stomach. “You don’t know loyalty or commitment, Luca. You just know you would’ve gotten in trouble if we went to bed together six years ago. Now you see the green light—no prison time for you—and so you figure you want to add me to the tally marks scratched into your headboard.”
“And I figure you know better than that. Which brings me right back around to the fact that your feelings are hurt, so you’re gonna swipe at me until your heart feels better.”
“And I figure, seeing as how I’ve been out of town for the last little while, you must’ve run out of vaginas to stomp through. It’s a small town, after all, and you’re known to be quite the lady’s man. You want to try something you haven’t had before, and history has proven you don’t like being de-prioritized.”
“Blake?” My lips curl into a long grin. “You’re talking about him?”
“You mean … my boyfriend ?” She turns toward the stairs and wanders down. “Who is also moving to town, by the way.”
Boyfriend, my ass.
“The second you found out he existed, you ran off and fucked Britt.” Mercifully, she lowers her voice and meets my eyes. “History doesn’t lie.”
“And six years helps us all mature in new, and beautiful, ways.”
“Uh huh.”
“I’m gonna fix what I broke.” I allow her to go. To traverse the stairs without me. Because I’m not sure I can reach the bottom and look into Marc’s eyes and not share all that history Kari mentions. “Watch your back, Bear. I’m gonna fix this.”