Chapter Three

Lake

“Another round?”

Nick Spencer didn’t wait for my reply before rapping his knuckles on the bar and signaling for another round.  He tossed his black card onto the counter, letting it skid across the marble surface and onto the floor for the bartender to pick up.  God, I hated him.  Everything about him, from his cheesy smile with neon-white veneers to the way he treated the waitstaff.  I had bartended for a little after running from Sunstone – right before getting caught and dragged back – but even if I hadn’t, I’d know not to treat another human being the way Nick Spencer felt entitled to.  But I wasn’t too surprised, considering who his brother was and what those two had done to me and Callum in high school.  There was never proof, but I didn’t need that to know it was them.

“Theo still thinks about you, you know,” Nick said of his brother, handing me a shot of something amber-colored.  I wasn’t sure what it was but I downed it.  Isabel narrowed her eyes at me from afar but she let me be, giving Nick the time for a “private apology,” as he’d requested.  Several of us had gone straight from dinner in the greenhouse to drinks at the bar and to my chagrin, someone had taken it upon him or herself to invite more of my former classmates.  It was becoming the high school reunion I’d never asked for.  But I sat there and drank because what else did I have to do? For once, I had nothing but time and I had to find ways to kill it.

Besides, I was kind of amazed that Nick Spencer even had the nerve to speak to me after everything he and his brother did to humiliate me, posting every last one of those horrible pictures that I had never wanted to take for him anyway.  I wished I could just look at it as high school drama but I couldn’t because the whole thing wound up changing the course of Callum’s life forever.  He was on a good path.  He’d won two Junior Olympic medals by senior year and he was beyond set to follow his father’s Team USA footsteps.  But I set him on a different one.  My chest still got tight when I thought about it and I’d fantasized so many times about punching Nick or Theo in the face if I ever got the chance again.  But now that I had it, I forced myself to hold it together because I was kind of curious as to what Nick had to say, and of course, Isabel had gone and married the oldest Spencer, Alec, so I had to show at least an ounce of respect, if only for the fact that this insane jerk was now my best friend’s brother-in-law.

I managed to give him a look of amusement.  “Theo still thinks about me?”

“Yeah.  I mean everyone thinks about their high school sweetheart but with the way you guys ended… you know.  He’s grown up.  He feels bad about it.  He always wanted to reach out and apologize to you but you went and disappeared on all of us,” Nick laughed.  “Which sucked ‘cause, you know… we always kind of wondered what you’d look like when you got older.”

Oh, I remember.  The boys used to bet during lunch on whether or not Isabel and my boobs would get any bigger as we got older.  Advantage Isabel on that one.  Mine had stayed the same but on the bright side, they still sat about as high on my chest as they did when I was eighteen.  I caught Nick observing that.

“Sorry,” he grinned.  “Couldn’t help it.  Never could.  But you remember.”

I smiled though he was bordering quickly on creepy.  As usual.

Nick had been a senior when I first entered Mercer School as a junior.  I remembered the way he looked at me on my first day, wandering through the dining hall and doing my best to find a table to eat at since Callum, the night before, had banned me from sitting with him and his friends.  I had spent five minutes floating around and being stared at until Nick’s hand shot out and grabbed my thigh for my attention.  I spun around to see him grinning at me with a table full of senior boys, their bodies hunched over the table too small for their height and size.  I agreed to sit with them only because I could feel the heat of Callum’s stare from across the room.  I knew he had imagined me sitting with some table of harmless girls, fellow virgins perhaps, and I found it funny.  But even if I didn’t feel like pissing him off, those girls didn’t want to sit with me anyway.

“Hope you don’t mind the giant sausagefest,” Nick said when he had me sit between him and his friend, neither of them giving me much space on the bench.  “And when I say giant, I’m talking about myself.  Can’t speak for these guys.”

Nick Spencer had a talent for turning everything into a dick-swinging contest.  All the Spencer boys did.  I’d find that out later, though.  Nick was asking which school I’d transferred from when Callum finally came, looking thoroughly annoyed.  He muttered something to them and then dragged me off to his table at the other end of the room.

“Good thing Cal changed his mind.  I was about to beat his ass if you wound up sitting with my brother’s friends.”  Theo and his twinkling brown eyes smiled at me the second I took the seat across from him at Callum’s table.  “You don’t want to sit with those guys.  They’re all a bunch of pervert assholes.”

“Isn’t that all guys?”

“No.  We’re all perverts but we’re not all assholes.”

Callum had clarified that statement for me that night at home.  “Yeah, Theo’s an asshole too,” he warned me, since I’d spent our entire lunch period talking to him.  “He’s been the horniest bastard since we were like, ten, and he’s… demanding with girls.  But if you’re going to date someone, you might as well keep it in the circle.”

“Why? So you can keep an eye on me?” I had been so smug because it was obvious that Callum was fiercely protective of me.  He just never acknowledged it.

“I’m telling you, your proud Christian virgin thing isn’t going to fly with Theo if you end up with him.  He’s a good guy but he’s also… a guy.  Period.  If you think I need sex all the time, just wait till you get to know him.”

He had warned me, I had to give him that.  And I knew I should have known the lack of sex would be a problem but Theo was so cute and I liked him enough.  I liked Callum more but back in high school, everyone considered him my brother, so I couldn’t have him like that.  Not that I didn’t have him anyway.  We were in a relationship of our own and we’d always been – it just wasn’t the kind that was normal enough to have a name, or be something that you could tell other people about.  I tried explaining it once to my roommate in college but came up empty.  She sniffed and said that if Callum and I were anything real, we would know what to call each other.  How to categorize each other.  Boyfriend, girlfriend, friends with benefits.  I disagreed but I didn’t argue.  There was no point.  I never thought to put Callum in words because he was just so natural to me.  Like air.  There was no need to describe it, it just was and we just were.

“You know Theo’s turning twenty-eight this Saturday.  I’m throwing him a surprise party at XIII in Chelsea,” Nick murmured, his gaze drawing a straight line up my thighs.  “You should come.  You’d be the biggest surprise of all.”

“Thank you… but I shouldn’t.”

“Why not?” Nick frowned.  “We’re all grown up and you’re both single.  It’s time to bury the hatchet.”

“Nick, I know we’re adults now but some things that happened in the past are still hard pills to swallow.”

“Well you can’t just leave it in your throat, right? This is our chance to put all the bad shit behind us.  Life’s too short to hold onto grudges.  Everyone deserves a second chance, am I wrong?”

My gaze fell as I considered his words.  After leaving New York, I’d spent so many sleepless nights telling myself that I didn’t deserve a second chance with Callum.  But that was mostly thanks to the hate and vitriol spewed at me on a daily basis.  “Trash.  That’s what you are,” that awful woman loved to tell me.  But as much as my surroundings confirmed it, I refused to let the idea sink into me.  I told myself I was worthy.  It was a mental battle I mustered the strength to fight every day because while I lived waist-deep in misery, I refused to sink all the way in.  I had a life I loved at some point and I was determined to find it again someday.