Page 28 of Be Your Anything
He walks over to the armchair next to mine and plops down into it, the photo still in his hand.
I shrug in response as he sets the picture frame down on the desk and picks up his own box of food and a set of chopsticks.
“I’m not sure. It’s been here for a while. I’m pretty sure it was here the last time you visited me.”
He bobs his head as he shovels some noodles into his mouth. A relaxed smile appears on his face and he settles further into his seat.
“What’s that little smirk for?”
“I was just replaying a memory from that party,” he says.
My heart picks up a bit at the idea that he was thinking about the same thing I was.
“Sometimes, I think back to when we were in high school and I wonder how I ever made it out alive,” he continues, his eyes focused off in the distance over my head as he reminisces. Then he looks back at me. “You know, Tinsley’s dad made me pay to replace his pool table,” he says right before stuffing some more noodles into his mouth.
I gasp, nearly inhaling some of my dinner. I let out a cough and then reach over to my desk for some water.
Lucas continues.
“I’m serious. I mean, it makes sense. No man who had a pool table in a cigar lounge wants to come home from Morocco to find it has been sunk to the bottom of a different type of pool.”
I burst into laughter at the memory. “Icompletelyforgot about that. The fact that you guys thought there wasanychance you could get it to float is beyond me. It had to have been at least five hundred pounds.”
His eyes twinkle. “Two weeks later, we were able to do it at Tyler’s.”
“No way,” I protest, not allowing myself a pause to wonder why I missed that party. I know where I was: at home, nursing a broken heart. “There is no way you can get something that heavy to float.”
He just takes another bite of beef, the gloating expression never faltering.
He’s always had that confidence, that complete command over himself and the people around him, the absolute surety that he can accomplish whatever he sets his mind to.
It’s why he’s so successful at surfing, why his business with Otto and Wyatt has been booming.
It’s also why he was able to win over Remmy Wallace, who didn’t really want to give him the time of day back when we were younger.
My previously happy bubble begins to deflate as I remind myself he’s only mine temporarily, and I dig back into my dinner.
CHAPTER6
LUCAS
We spend quite a while in her office, chatting about some of the ridiculous memories from our younger years.
The horrible group trip to the French Riviera during my senior year when Wyatt got food poisoning and threw up all over the deck of Paige’s family’s yacht.
Or the time Aaron and I, along with the entire water polo team, attached all of Principal Yeldon’s furniture to the ceiling in her office for our senior prank.
As often as Lennon and I have been at the same places together since her return to Hermosa, we haven’t taken the time to have conversations like this, to chat about the past or remember what things used to be like back when our relationship had a different kind of depth.
Our interactions recently have beenjust enoughto stoke burning embers, to charge us up for whatever we want to do together later, just the two of us. Then when wedofinally come together—physically and sexually—we don’t typically chat too much, opting instead to get down to the dirty goodness we’ve both been craving.
So today…tonight…it feels like one of the best nights I’ve had in a long while. It feels like I have my friend back.
I like it.
“How’s the event coming along?” I ask, steering the conversation away from the past and focusing it on the future.
Lennon sighs and sets her nearly empty container on the desk with an emphatic thud.
