Put Me Back Together(46)

Which was exactly what I didn’t need right now.

“Look, can I be blunt?” Emily said then plowed on without waiting for my answer. “Did Lucas try something Saturday night? Is that what has you so freaked?

“I’m freaked because it’s crit day,” I corrected her, gazing through the window next to us at the pouring rain. Em was going to get soaked when she crossed campus to get to her own class. “And what do you mean ‘tried something?’ Tried what?”

He tried to kiss me, that’s all, was what I didn’t say. He tried to love me. He just didn’t realize I was unlovable.

Not that a single kiss meant he loved me. I didn’t think that. Though it might have made me fall in love with him just a little. A lot of good that was going to do me.

“What I mean is,” Em said carefully, putting on her thinking face, “did he try to…touch you?”

Still gazing out the window, I thought about Lucas’s touch, his fingers gently caressing my cheeks, the feeling of his tongue slipping into my mouth, and I felt my entire body flush. I’d replayed those few short moments over in my head so many times in the past two days, and every time I had my body had reacted the exact same way: the ache pulsing to life again in my belly, my every nerve tingling. It was mortifying and thrilling at the same time, and it was happening to me right now.

Luckily, I had only to think about how the moment had ended to make the fantasy come crashing to a stop.

“Katie!” Em cried, shaking me by the shoulder.

“Huh? What? Yes!” I said, focusing on my sister’s face as Lucas’s disappeared into the snow.

“Yes?” she said, her voice rising. “You mean he did try to have sex with you?”

Several students from my class turned our way as they filed through the door across from us. I saw Naomi trying not to laugh.

“Shut up!” I said, smacking Em on the arm. “What the hell are you talking about? Lucas didn’t try to have sex with me! We barely even kissed.”

“You kissed!” Em said, her face lighting up, then falling back into a frown. “Oh, wait, so it was a bad kiss? I don’t really see how that’s possible, since this is Lucas we’re talking about, but—”

“It wasn’t bad,” I said, looking down at my shoes. “It was really nice.”

Understatement of the year.

“Then what the hell happened?” Em demanded, rounding on me and forcing me to look her in the face. “I’m your sister. You can tell me. I’m an amazing secret keeper. By the way, forget everything I just told you about Sally and Alex’s brother.”

“I should really go in,” I said. “Class is about to start.”

Em’s face fell and she pursed her lips. “Fine,” she said in that clipped tone she took when nothing was fine at all.

I winced internally. There was no way I could tell her the truth, not about this, but that didn’t make lying to my sister any easier.

“I can’t tell you what happened,” I said to the side of her face, because she was refusing to look at me, “but I can say that Lucas didn’t do anything wrong. So don’t be mean to him. It wasn’t his fault.”

She frowned, letting her eyes creep back over to my face. “Whose fault was it?” she asked.

I smiled weakly. “Nobody’s,” I said as I walked toward the door instead of saying what I really felt—that the fault was mine, as usual, as predicted. The fault was always mine.

“Hey, sis,” Em called in a whisper as I reached the classroom door. “Your first kiss and it’s with Lucas—that’s still pretty exciting, isn’t it?”

I nodded and tried to look thrilled for her sake, my sweet sister who thought I’d never looked at a boy before, who thought her twin was the last nineteen-year-old bastion of purity. My sister who’d kissed dozens of boys, each peck as simple and uncomplicated as the next. My sister who had no idea that though Lucas had been my first kiss, he hadn’t been the first boy I’d wanted to kiss.

If only Lucas had been my first in every way, I thought to myself as I stepped into class. Then maybe I could have kept him.

I walked into the studio and added my painting to the others at the front, feeling the hairs rise on the back of my neck as I stood there with my back turned. And it wasn’t because of my painting. Sure enough, as I made my way to my stool I saw more than a few eyes following me. A girl who always spoke really slowly when she asked questions in class whispered to the skinny guy who sat next to her. He nodded as I walked by. My right hook to Buck’s nose and my dramatic exit from the party certainly hadn’t gone unnoticed. I’d had the same experience walking into my art history class yesterday. I’d become a person that got noticed, the exact thing I’d been trying to avoid all along, and this time I couldn’t blame it on any boy. This time it was all me—hitting this guy and kissing that one and destroying everything around me.

I had nobody to blame but myself.

A feeling of incredible defeat fell over me as Professor Wilkins entered the room and we began the critique. Though we were all meant to participate, I didn’t say a word, shrinking into myself instead like Alice after taking a sip from the “Drink Me” bottle, wanting desperately to become so small that I could be lost among the folds of my clothes. I had spent years feeling this way, living this way, years wasted wanting to be nothing, wanting not to exist at all. And here I was thinking I’d been making such strides, that I’d been changing my fate, changing my life, that I was getting better at living. It turned out I was exactly where I’d started: scared and alone and lying about everything and hating myself for it. I really hadn’t changed a bit.