Put Me Back Together(67)

“I offered to take a year off from school, get a job to pay for the bills, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They didn’t even want me to quit the team, but there was no way I could keep up with practice, work, and my schoolwork. So I came back to school in the fall, and the truth is, I was relieved to get the hell out of there. Being in that house with my dying father was destroying me. I just wanted to get back to my carefree life of girls and partying and forget any of it was happening.”

He spat out those last words, looking completely disgusted with himself.

I touched his arm. “It’s natural to want to escape something like that, to deny it. There are some things the mind just isn’t equipped to handle.” I hoped he couldn’t tell I was speaking from personal experience.

“But he needed me,” he said, his weary eyes searching mine like he was trying to find in them the solace he couldn’t give his father. He looked so forlorn I couldn’t bear to be separated from him, so I leaned into him, wrapping my arms around his chest, and he locked a grateful arm around me.

“I didn’t go home to visit all semester,” Lucas said. “I avoided his calls, but the guilt weighed on me. I stopped partying. I hooked up with a few girls, just out of habit, I guess, but…”

I could feel his hesitation. He didn’t want to talk about other girls with me. “It’s okay,” I said quietly.

He cleared his throat. “Afterward I realized I couldn’t even remember their names. I was just going through the motions, and although the sex was great…” He paused here again. “It wasn’t making me feel any better, so I just stopped dating altogether. I guess I got a little depressed. Nothing really seemed to matter—not my classes, not my friends. The only thing that mattered what happening somewhere else, and I couldn’t go there.”

I ran my hand up and down his back, thinking of the two of us last semester, both locked in our own secret miseries. “I wish I’d been there,” I said sadly. “I wish I could have helped you.”

“You’re helping me now,” he said, planting a kiss on the top of my head. I reached up and kissed his stubbly cheek before he went on.

“By the time Christmas break came along, I was dreading going back home, sure they’d both be furious with me. But they weren’t. I think my dad was just glad he could see me at all before… The cancer had spread into his lungs and his pancreas. He didn’t even look like himself anymore. The strong, healthy, barrel-chested father I remembered was gone forever, and then…”


I placed a hand on Lucas’s chest, right over his heart. If I could have, I would have reached into his chest and held his heart in my hands, held it together. Because I was pretty sure it was about to break.

“He died just after New Year’s,” Lucas said, his voice cracking on those last words. Beneath my hand, his lungs stuttered as they expanded and collapsed. He was trying to hold in his tears.

Getting onto my knees, I took his face in my hands as he’d done mine this morning, and though there were no tears to wipe away, there were cheeks to kiss, and eyelids and lips. I covered his face with kisses as he held my arms tight. “I’m so sorry, Lucas,” I whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“Me, too,” he said, then pulled me right into his lap and wrapped both his arms around me, placing his chin on my shoulder so his cheek was right next to mine. “You’re the only one I’ve told.”

“You didn’t tell your friends, your roommates, Oleg, Tim?” I asked.

He shook his head. “At first I didn’t want them to know. I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. And then…I knew what they wanted of me. They want me to be the same old Lucas, always ready to party, easygoing and fun. The basketball star. The stud. They wouldn’t have understood.”

“You never gave them the chance,” I said, trying my best to be delicate. “They might have surprised you. I bet they would have wanted to be there for you.”

I frowned, realizing how hypocritical it was of me to preach openness when I’d been lying about my pain to the people closest to me for much longer than a couple of months. Try six years.

“I’m not so sure,” Lucas replied, oblivious to my inner turmoil. “But that’s why I was so glad when I met you.”

“What do you mean?” I said as I interwove my fingers with his.

“You didn’t know me before,” he answered. “You don’t expect anything of me. I can be quiet with you, or even sad, and you don’t question it. You don’t need me to be the old Lucas. When I’m with you it’s like I can breathe again.”

I pulled my hands away from his. “So that’s why you like me? Because I didn’t know you before this?” I said, his words stirring up something I didn’t like in my stomach. “Then I could be anyone, any girl you happened to stumble upon. It’s not really me that you want.”

I shifted in his lap, trying to dislodge his arms, but he wouldn’t let me go. “You’re not just any girl,” Lucas said steadily, his lips warm against my ear. “You’re the girl who didn’t even know what sport I used to play, who never noticed me in class, who doesn’t care about the next big party. You’re the girl who almost got into a fight with three guys twice her size to save a cat, who punched Buck Mullard in the face, who got me through a panic attack and then handed me, a jock, a sketchbook and expected me to draw. You’re the girl who would never even think of chasing me, who doesn’t care what I look like.” I wasn’t so sure about that one. “You’re the girl who told me she just wanted to be friends. Do you know the last time a girl said something like that to me?”