Take Me On(68)
~ Lila
She’s stunning. Yeah, she was drop-dead gorgeous two years ago, but now...
I’m staring and I need to stop, but seeing her inhibits brain function. Girls don’t know it, but standing in the presence of beauty impairs guys. At least, it impairs me.
Screw it. It’s Lila. Lila impairs me.
The ends of her golden hair curl near her shoulders. She cut it and I like the new style. A lot. When I first met Lila, she was between—not quite a girl, not really a woman. With those curves, she left between in the dust.
I was only a few inches taller than her then. I grew. She stayed the same height. Lila would fit perfectly under my arm, tucked close into my body. She let me hold her hand the night we met, and I never forgot how her skin felt like satin. I hope she’ll let me touch her again.
That is, if she can forgive me.
Her bewildered sky-blue eyes travel along my face, over my arms and chest. Crimson stains her cheeks as she prevents herself from checking out anything lower. I clear my throat to disguise the chuckle.
I want to laugh because she looks so damned cute, but she wouldn’t see it that way. She’d think I was belittling her. Lila can’t tolerate guys who view women as beneath them. I received more than one letter from her with that rant.
Lila’s house sits in the middle of nowhere. Its zip code exists in the city of Louisville, but acreage borders three sides of her house and across the street is a state park. The only beings watching me beg for her forgiveness on the wraparound front porch are the crickets and God.
It’s better this way. I’m not a people person.
Her blessed pink lips pucker to form a w and then flatten. She repeats the cycle three more times until she finally decides on a word beginning with h. “How did you find me?”
“Google.”
She gives me the you’re-crazy stare.
“Maps.” Very awkward pause. “I know your address by heart.”
The worry lines on her forehead disappear as the lightbulb turns on. “But you live...”
“Ten hours away. Yeah, I know.”
“Twelve, actually,” she mutters.
My world blanks out for a second. Does that mean she calculated the distance between us, too? “I didn’t exactly adhere to recommended motor vehicle regulations.”
Her mouth twitches; she’s well aware I’ve never been a fan of rules. “You sped.”
“I bent suggested limits.”
The blush fades, leaving her cheeks pale. “Is that how you view what you did to me?”
The hand grasping the roses begins to sweat. “I got these for you.”
Silence.
“They’re roses. Purple.” Keep talking, man. You’re losing her. “Your favorite.”
Lila folds her hands over her chest and juts her hip out to the side.
Stupid, moronic idiot. The girl has eyes and an IQ. Didn’t she score a twenty-seven on her ACT? She can think fast enough to figure out what I’m holding. “Anyway, you’re right.”
“What?” Her eyes scrunch together.
“You called me a jerk when you opened the door.”
“Not you. Stephen was. Is.” She closes her eyes, then reopens them. “I take that back. You are a jerk.”
My head snaps to the side. Stephen? Her ex-boyfriend? The kid will not give up and, when it comes to Lila, he has a proven track record of winning. This is the third time they’ve broken up. He groveled twice and both times she took him back. When we first started writing, it didn’t bother me. Lila and I were friends. But then I fell for her and Stephen became a sharp rock wedged in my side.
I trash all the questions I have about Stephen and his appearance at her house and focus on what’s important: Lila. “I’m sorry.”
“You. Lied.”
“I know.” I run my hand through my damp hair. It’s ninety degrees with the sun setting, though it could be her microscopic stare making me sweat. “I can explain.”
Her head falls back. “God, Lincoln. If you had come here two days ago or last week or last month, I would have been ecstatic. But now? I thought I knew you.”
I step forward as my heart surges out of my chest. “You do.” She does. Better than anyone else. “Yes, I lied. But everything else is true.”
The way she sucks in her lower lip as her head shakes no tells me that the odds are against me.
“I don’t believe you,” she says. “For all I know, you’re the serial killer the Post-it note warned me about.”
“What?” Never mind. It doesn’t matter. “Lila, you are the one person who knows me. I swear it. I lied to you about one thing. One minor thing.”
“Minor!” Her eyes redefine the term frigid.
I retreat a step. Bad choice in words. “Minor could be an understatement.”
“Understatement!” she shrieks. “You didn’t graduate from high school, Lincoln, and you had the balls to lie to me about it.” Lila bursts forward and stabs my chest with her long pink fingernail. Each poke a piercing reminder of my mistake. “I...was...depending...on...you.”
“You still can. I’m going to fix this.”
“Go to hell.”
A gust of air hits my cheeks as she slams the front door in my face. My arm drops and the leaves rustle together as the roses slap the side of my thigh. A few petals float down to the wooden porch. With a heavy sigh, I sit on the steps. Not that I ever wanted to know, but this is what being set on fire must feel like—everything shrouded in agony.
If I feel this way, how must Lila feel?
I glance to the left, then to the right. Disoriented. Lost. Not knowing which way is home. But that’s been the problem since the beginning. The root of all my evils.
Chapter 4
Lila
So the guidance counselor asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I answered—rock climbing. He said it wasn’t a profession and to get serious. That if I wanted to get into a decent college I needed to apply myself now.
I told him I was serious. That I loved rock climbing. He said that was a hobby and that I needed to become realistic about my “goals.”
I told him it wasn’t my damn fault he pissed away his life to make thirty grand a year and to drink cheap coffee. And then I asked him to kindly stop dumping on my dreams. He gave me two days’ detention. Did I mention the guy’s an asshole?
Do you know the last time I had detention? Never. I’m no saint, but I keep my mouth shut and head down. Rules suck. Society sucks.
Josh followed the rules and now he’s dead. He liked riding horses. Maybe if he had looked that damn counselor in the eye and said, “I want to ride horses for the rest of my life,” then my brother would still be alive today.
~ Lincoln
Sitting cross-legged in the middle of my bed, I turn over Lincoln’s letter. My fingers slide over the deep indentations of words obviously written in agitation. Words written so quickly, I wouldn’t have been able to decipher most of them if I wasn’t already familiar with his handwriting.
He sent this one to me in the fall, a week after he started his senior year. Lincoln hated his guidance counselor. He was the one who convinced Lincoln’s brother to join the Marines out of high school. It’s because of that fateful decision that I met Lincoln.
“Lila,” says Echo, her voice a bit disjointed from the speaker. “You still there?”
“Yeah,” I say and glance at my phone lying on the bed next to me. My best friend is in freaking Iowa with the freaking love of her life on their way to freaking Colorado. Right now, I despise happy people. “How’s Iowa?”
“Kansas,” she corrects.
“Whatever, it’s flat and they have tornadoes.” I pick up one of the many stacks of letters from Lincoln cluttering my bed and easily find the one I’m searching for. The one that promised he’d come with me to Florida.
Cluttering isn’t the right word. Nothing about me is cluttered. Each stack represents the month the letter was sent, and each letter is arranged by the date on the postmark. My favorite letters have a pink highlight marking the side.
My entire life is systemized like this. My books alphabetized by author on my cherry bookcase. Within the matching glass hutch, my Precious Moments figurines are organized by date received. My scrapbooking materials are boxed in color-coordinated Tupperware. I like plans and organization and not boys who promise to attend the University of Florida with me and then screw it all up by not graduating from high school.
“Lila?” says Echo. She pauses for way too long. “Did you give him a chance to explain?”
The envelope crunches in my hand. “He didn’t graduate from high school, Echo, and he didn’t tell me about it. Do you have any idea how I felt when I had to find out on my own that he lied?”
I found out only by accident, when I searched online at his local newspaper to print out the list of graduates to complete the scrapbook page I made for Lincoln’s present. His name was not listed among the one hundred and fifty graduates. I should know. I checked—three times.
She sighs through the phone. “Maybe you should talk to him.”
“You’re biased,” I snap. “You’re on Lincoln’s side because of Aires.” Lincoln’s older brother, Josh, and Echo’s older brother, Aires, were part of the same military unit. No one knows the whole story, but they died two and a half years ago in Afghanistan, in a roadside bombing. I met Lincoln at Aires’s funeral.