Put Me Back Together(21)

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.”

Suddenly, he got to his feet and pulled me up with him. I gazed around dizzily.

“Come with me,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

We descended the same stairs we’d taken to come up and found ourselves on the second floor dance floor. There weren’t nearly as many people dancing as there had been earlier and I hardly had any trouble getting across the floor. I was nearly to the second staircase when Lucas tugged on my hand, pulling me back. When I saw that he wanted me to join him in the middle of the dance floor, I shook my head firmly. Was this what he had in mind? Dancing? If so, his mind was about to change very quickly, because I had no intention of going out there again. Ever.

I let go of his hand and folded my arms around my middle. He came to join me by the wall.

“Let me guess,” he said. “Aggressive guys? Grabby hands? I work here, you know. I know what some guys are like on the dance floor.”

“It wasn’t just that,” I protested, though I was surprised at how much he had guessed. “I just don’t like being on display, like… I’m not really a good dancer. I’m just not comfortable and it’s so… I’m not… I just…”