Put Me Back Together(76)

The door to his room was partly open and I didn’t let myself stop and think. If I gave this any thought at all I’d been running for it in seconds. I pushed it the rest of the way open and let it hit the wall with a thump. The room wasn’t tiny, but it was overcrowded considering there were three beds and desks and wardrobes squished into the space. One mattress was bare and another was covered in half-packed bags and piles of books and hockey equipment. On the third bed, which faced the window, sat Lucas.

He turned to look at me and our eyes locked. His faced seemed lifeless. It was almost as though he didn’t recognize me. That expression almost had me making a break for it, but I braced my legs instead, staying put. He walked over to me, his shoulders slumped. With one hand he cupped my cheek, barely touching my skin, and I looked up into his eyes searching for a sign, some indication that he still cared, that I wasn’t about to bare my soul for nothing. His eyes were still the colour of liquid gold and they burned straight into my heart, but in their depths I could only see one thing: sadness. After a moment he dropped his hand and turned away.

He didn’t want to have anything to do with me.

“Can I have my phone back?” I said, my voice harder than I’d meant it to be. But what did it matter anyway? If he was done with me, there was nothing to ruin. It was already ruined. I’d ruined it.

Lucas hesitated a moment before reaching into the pocket of his jeans and pulling the phone out. He placed it on the bare mattress without looking at me. When I turned it on, it opened to the texts I’d received from Brandon.

“How many did you read?” I asked.

“We were panicked,” he said. “You were practically catatonic. You’d mentioned Brandon had been texting you. I thought maybe if I could see what he’d said to upset you so much…”

I scanned through the texts, page after page. I hadn’t realized how many there had actually been. I’d just started ignoring them after a while.

“How many?” I asked again.

“All of them,” Lucas said, his voice rough, as though he’d spent the night yelling.

My heart sank into my shoes. All of them. Every disgusting name and degrading threat, every shaming, hateful, spiteful one of them. It wasn’t the fact that Lucas knew that someone else thought these things of me that made me want to curl up and die. It was the fact that I thought them, too, and maybe now so did he.

“Well, I guess now you know—” I began.

“That you lied to me?” Lucas said loudly, spinning around. His eyes weren’t liquid gold now. They were on fire.

“You think I should have shown these to you?” I said shakily, holding up my phone. “You would have called the cops in a second.”

“Oh yeah, wouldn’t want to get your boyfriend into trouble,” Lucas said bitterly.

As I tried to figure out what the hell that meant, Lucas cast around the room, looking for something. Then he picked a basketball up off the floor. I thought he might throw it at me, but instead he pressed it between his hands, as though he planned to pop it like a balloon.

“You’re still in love with him,” Lucas said. “That’s obvious.”

I let out a short, loud laugh and his eyes snapped to my face, incredulous. “You think I’m in love with Brandon?” I said, unable to stop myself from grinning. It was just so ridiculous. “I haven’t seen him in five years!”

Lucas stared at me, breathing hard, then began to pace in front of his bed, still gripping the ball. “You don’t protect someone from the cops unless you love them,” he said. “You don’t let them say things like that to you and then say it’s no big deal. He threatened to kill you, Katie! Not just once but again and again.”

He was furious now, though I couldn’t really tell with whom. Brandon? Me? Himself? He threw the ball hard against the brick wall and then caught it as it flew back. He did this several times more, knocking things off his desk, and hitting a clock that fell of the wall and broke. Then he started yelling.

“You’ve been having some kind of twisted love affair with him this whole time and making me…and telling me…!” He didn’t finish, just continued slamming the ball around the room.

I stood frozen in place, paralyzed with fear of this anger that poured out of him as he kept throwing, the ball bouncing precariously close to the window. Then, as he reached back to fling it one last time, aiming for the glass, my hands flew forward and grabbed the ball out of his grip.

The fight went out of him right away. Without his ball, he just looked like a lost boy who’d run out of things to break, his arms hanging heavily at his sides. His feverish eyes found my face and searched it, full of questions. I knew I owed it to him to answer them.

I rolled the ball under one of the beds and then folded my hands. “I am not in love with Brandon Tomko,” I said firmly. “I’m in love with you.”

It was the first time I’d said the words out loud. Something flickered behind Lucas’s eyes, but otherwise he didn’t react. I could understand that. He thought I was a liar. I was a liar.

“And because I love you, I’m going to tell you the whole story,” I said, my voice cracking on the last words. “I’m going to tell you the truth.”


I moved to his bed and sat down on the worn flannel cover, pulling my legs up underneath me. Lucas stood staring at me for a moment before following suit. He sat down gingerly, almost warily. In that moment, watching him, I really felt as though I’d already lost him completely. I wasn’t sure if it would make it easier or harder for me to tell him everything, but I knew it didn’t really matter. There was no going back now.