Put Me Back Together(39)

That’s what this crowd was doing to me.

It was making me relive my shame.

Covering my burning cheeks with my hands I cast around desperately for a place to hide. I was going down for real this time. I was going to collapse. I needed to get out of here, not in a minute, not in a second, right now.

I didn’t even notice Lucas talking into my ear or feel his arms go around me until suddenly I was being lifted into the air. My arms shot forward, grabbing hold of his shoulders. He set me down on the kitchen counter and, keeping his arms around me, moved forward, gently ungluing my knees with the pressure of his body so he could stand between them. Even then, with Lucas literally between my legs, I wasn’t really paying him that much attention—although now that I was sitting on the counter, we were exactly the same height, his eyes perfectly level with mine. Only when he leaned in and pressed his forehead to mine—this seemed to be his signature move—did I find myself focusing on his face, and specifically the details of it. The little scar above his right eyebrow that sort of looked like an arrow, his longish nose, and those remarkable dimples that were so deep they were like caves.

Without realizing it, I found myself reaching up and placing my thumbs into each perfect dimple, my fingers splayed over his neck.

“Katie,” Lucas said, “are you poking my dimples?”


“Mmmhmm,” I answered dazedly, until all of a sudden his words rang a bell in my head and I realized that I was doing something that seemed incredibly intimate in a room full of people while Lucas was standing between my legs.

For a second I actually stopped breathing.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Lucas said quickly, his hands holding me firmly around the waist as I tried to wiggle free and escape this horrifying moment. “Just pretend we’re alone. It’s just you and me alone in a room. There’s nobody else here. Just imagine it.”

Guided visualization had never really worked for me before—it was something Dr. Lepore and I had tried—but this time, in Lucas’s arms, it sort of did. With his forehead resting against mine, the rest of the room kind of disappeared and it was as though it was just the two of us in our own little bubble.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” he whispered.

I nodded. “Better,” I said.

“Now, instead of trying to run away, why don’t you tell me what the problem is?” he said kindly. “Are you disappointed to be at this party with me now that you’ve seen all the other dreamy guys in the room? Is that what it is?”

What other guys? I wondered.

“It’s just…” I squirmed under his hands, trying to get the words out. “It’s just that everyone is looking at me, at us. I just…don’t like to be looked at.”

He jerked his head back, breaking our little forehead teepee and filling me with alarm, but he didn’t go far. He seemed to have pulled back just to stare at me.

“You don’t like being looked at,” he repeated, saying it as a statement, not a question. “You don’t want all these people looking at you.”

“I just don’t like feeling like—” Lucas interrupted me before I could finish, which was a good thing, since I had no idea where I’d been going with that.

He brought his hands up to cup my face, so delicately, making sure I couldn’t look away. “Katie,” he began, “I’m going to tell you something now that will probably shock you, but I need you to believe me. Can you promise me that?”

“I guess,” I said. I really had no idea where he was going, and the way his fingers were brushing against the skin of my face so gently was getting a little—no, a lot—distracting.

“You are beautiful, Katie,” he said.

I rolled my eyes and tried to turn my face away, but he held me in place with the slight pressure of his fingers.

“No,” he said. “You promised you’d believe me. You need to know this. You need to know how beautiful you are. Everybody else does.”

“Oh, give me a break!” I said. “I think you’re mistaking me for my sister.”

“Your twin sister,” Lucas said. “Your sister who has the exact same face as you. If you can admit she’s beautiful, then why can’t you admit that you are?”

I gave him an exasperated look, though I wasn’t sure he could see it, given how close his face was to mine. “Emily knows how to do it,” I explained, as if it weren’t obvious. “She has charisma and she knows how to dress and she has so much personality it’s impossible to ignore her. I’m…not like that.”

“I hate to tell you this, Katie, but you’re more beautiful than your sister,” Lucas said, and this time I was the one to pull away just to scowl at him. “I’m not saying Emily isn’t a knockout; she is. But you’re beautiful without even trying, without even realizing it. You’re the most f*cking gorgeous girl in this room, and everybody knows it.”

The way he said it, swearing like that—and Lucas really wasn’t one to swear—somehow got the message through to me. I didn’t believe everyone in the room thought I was gorgeous—that was ridiculous. But I believed that Lucas did.

Lucas thought I was the most f*cking gorgeous girl in the room.

I nearly swooned.

“I said this to you once before, but I’ll say it again,” Lucas said, his words uttered so close to my mouth that it was like he was breathing them into me. “They’re only staring at you because you’re so beautiful. Got it?”