Easy (Contours of the Heart #1)

“But that’s not what happened.”

“No.”

Suddenly aware of the lack of people bustling around us, I pulled out my phone. It was two minutes past ten. “Crap. I’m late.”

“Uh-oh. Isn’t this the professor who makes an example of you if you’re late?”

Impressive. “You remembered.” Groaning, I pushed my phone into my bag. “I sorta feel like skipping now.”

His mouth turned up on one side. “What kind of university employee would I be, to encourage you to skip class the last week of the semester?”

“We’re just reviewing. I have an A. I don’t really need the review.”

We stared at each other.

I angled my head and looked directly into his clear eyes. “You don’t have a class?”

“Not until eleven.” Not for the first time, the feel of his gaze drifting over my face was like a soft breeze, or the lightest possible touch. He stopped on my mouth.

Lips parted, my breathing slowed as my heart rate sped. “You never did sketch me again.”

His eyes darted to mine, but he didn’t answer, so I thought maybe he didn’t remember his texted request.

“You said you were having a hard time doing it from memory. My jaw. My neck…”

He nodded. “And your lips. I said I needed more time staring at them and less time tasting them.”

I nodded. Good God, what did he not remember?

“A very foolish thing for me to say, I think.” He was staring at my mouth again.

My lips tingled from his focused perusal. I wanted to rub my fingers across them. Or graze them with my teeth to stop the tickling sensation. When I wet them with my tongue, he sucked in a breath. “Coffee. Let’s go get coffee.”

I nodded, and without another word, we walked toward the student center, the busiest place on campus at this time of day.

“So you wear glasses, huh?” We’d been sitting at a tiny table, sipping our coffees and enduring a decidedly uncomfortable silence, so I’d blurted the first viable thing that entered my brain.

“Um. Yeah.”

Great. I’d just brought up that night. But shouldn’t I bring up that night? Shouldn’t we talk about it? Shouldn’t I ask him if he was pushing me away because he was the class tutor, or because of those scars on his wrists?

“I wear contacts. But my eyes get tired of them by the end of the day.”

Cue the mental picture of Lucas pulling his door open, the apprehension on his face, the glasses transforming him into someone official while the pajamas produced a contrary effect. I cleared my throat. “They look really good on you. The glasses. I mean, you could wear them all the time, if you wanted to.”

“They’re kind of a pain with the motorcycle helmet. And taekwondo.”

“Oh. Yeah, I can imagine.”

We were quiet again, with forty minutes until his class and my rescheduled bass practice time. “I could sketch you now,” he said.

For no good reason, my face flamed.

Luckily, he was reaching into his backpack, withdrawing his sketchpad, and turning to a blank page. He took the pencil from behind his ear before looking across the table at me. If he noticed my heightened color, he didn’t mention it. Without a word, he leaned back in his chair, the pad on his knee, and started drawing, his pencil making the effortless, sweeping arches of someone who knows what he’s doing. His eyes moved from the pad to me and back, over and over, and I sat silently sipping, watching his face. Watching his hands.

There was something intimate about modeling for someone. I’d volunteered as a model once in my junior year art class, for extra credit. Severely lacking in drawing skill, I’d jumped at the extra two points without stopping to consider that I would be sitting on top of a table for an entire class period. Giving a classroom of teenaged boys free rein to stare at me for an hour was a whole new sort of awkward. Especially when Jillian’s boyfriend, Zeke, started his portrait with my chest. He stared unabashedly, showing off his artistic efforts to his tablemates while I flushed and pretended I couldn’t hear his wisecracks about nips and cleavage and how he wished I’d just lose the shirt altogether—or at least unbutton it.

“Most artists begin with the head,” Ms. Wachowski said as she looked over his shoulder. Zeke and the other boys at the table snorted with laughter while I burned with humiliation and the entire class looked on.

“What are you thinking about?”

I wasn’t relaying that story. “High school.”

The hair falling over his forehead obscured the crease I knew was there, but his lips pressed tight.

“What?” I asked, wondering at the change those two words brought.

Surrounded by conversations, music and mechanical sounds, the scratch of the lead across the paper was inaudible in the coffee shop. I watched the pencil dance in his hand, wondering what part of me he was sketching, and what parts he might want to sketch. What was he like as a sixteen-year-old boy? Did he draw then? Hang out with other boys his age? Had he fallen in love? Had his heart broken by some callous girl?

Had he already put those scars on his wrists, or was that yet to come?

“You said you’d been with him for three years.” He spoke just loud enough for me to hear him, staring down at the pad as the pencil worked back and forth. There was no question in his voice. He assumed I was thinking about Kennedy.

“I wasn’t thinking about him.”

His jaw clenched, lips compressed again. Jealousy? Guilt crept in when I realized I wanted him to feel jealous.

“What was high school like for you?” I asked and then wanted to take it back. His eyes flashed to mine and his hand stilled.

“A lot different than it was for you, I imagine.” His eyes still roved over my face, but he was no longer drawing, and his expression was tense.

“Oh? How?” I smiled, hoping to either bring us back from this ledge-clinging position, or shove us over the edge.

He lifted his gaze to me then and stared. “For one, I never had a girlfriend.”

I thought of the rose over his heart, and the poem inscribed on his left side. I didn’t want that love to be recent. “Really? Not one?”

He shook his head. “I was… unsettled, you could say. I hooked up with girls. No relationships. Skipped class as much as I bothered to show up. Partied with the locals and the beach tourists. Got into fights often, in school and out. Got suspended or expelled so frequently I was never quite sure when I woke up in the morning whether I was supposed to go or not.”

“What happened?”

His face went blank. “What?”

“I mean, how did you get into college and become this—” I gestured at him and shrugged “—serious student?”

He stared at the pencil in his hand, his thumbnail scraping over the lead, sharpening it. “I was seventeen, about to flunk out for the last time, prepared to work the boat with Dad the rest of my life. One night, I was partying with some friends. We made a bonfire on the beach, which always drew the tourist kids in—and they always wanted to be hooked up. One of my friends was a dealer. Not big stuff—just party drugs. He’d sell high, so we could skim some off without having to pay his distributor for it.

“His sister tagged along that night. She had a crush on me, but she was fourteen. Totally innocent. Not my type. She didn’t take the dismissal well, and started flirting with the guys who financed our night, so to speak. Her dumbass brother was so high he wasn’t watching her at all. My head wasn’t much clearer, but when the guy she was dancing with pulled her down the beach, she looked like she was trying to yank away from him.

“I remember going after them, but everything after that is murky. I was told I broke the guy’s jaw. Got arrested, charges filed. I probably would have ended up in prison, but the Hellers were visiting that week, and Charles did something to make it all go away.

“He and my dad had words. Next thing I knew I was signed up for martial arts classes. I was stupid enough to see the wrong-minded benefit of being able to beat the shit outta people even better than I already could, so I didn’t object. What I didn’t see coming was how it would center me for the first time in a long time. Before he left, Charles lectured me like Dad never had. I didn’t like disappointing him.” He looked at me closely. “Still don’t.”

We sipped our coffees and I waited, holding my tongue, knowing there was more.

“He told me I was throwing my future away, that I was better than drugs and fights. He said my mother was watching, and asked if I wanted her to be proud or ashamed. Then, he promised he’d help me get into the university, pull every string he could pull, if I’d just try. He knew I was looking for an escape, and he gave me one second chance.”

A chill moved down my back at his words.

“He’s good at offering those.”

He smiled, just barely. “Yes. He is. I took it. My senior year looked good, but I’d all but killed my overall GPA before that. I don’t know how he got me accepted, even conditionally. Dad can’t pay for it, of course, so that’s why all the odd jobs. I pay rent for the apartment, but I couldn’t get a cot in somebody’s garage for what he charges me.”

“He’s like a guardian angel for you.”

Raising his light, unnerving eyes to mine, he said, “You don’t even know.”

Chapter 20

I blinked at Erin, confused. “What do you mean, she’s probably not testifying?”

My roommate slammed her phone onto her desk. Slammed the door of our mini-fridge after grabbing a bottle of water from it. Kicked her shoes off and then threw one of them across the room where it bounced off the wall over her bed and landed in the center. “They got to her. Kennedy, D.J. and Dean. Convinced her—or have almost convinced her—that they’ll handle Buck. That she’ll take down the frat and maybe the whole Greek system if she testifies.”

“What?”

“They’re making her feel guilty. For being raped!” I’d never seen Erin so enraged. “This is total fucking crap. I’m calling Katie.”

I got up and crossed the room, holding her forearm to keep her from dialing. “Erin, you can’t tell if Mindi doesn’t want you to tell.”

She looked at me closely. “J, you know how the Greeks work. Everyone already knows.”

“Oh. Right.”

She dialed, and I listened as she told her sorority president what she thought of the proposed cover-up. “Okay, I’ll be there in an hour, with Mindi.” She put the phone down, her expression calmer and more calculating. Sitting on my bed, she took my hand. “You have to go with us, J. You have to tell them what he did to you.”

Somehow, testifying to a bunch of sorority girls was more terrifying than the thought of reporting Buck to the cops or giving a deposition to the district attorney. “W-why?” I sputtered. “I’m not one of you guys, Erin. They don’t care—”

“It shows precedent.”

How many times had I heard Kennedy use this legal jargon—one of his favorites. “Are you sure a failed attempt with me shows a pattern? It’s only twice…”