Sweet Agony (Sweet Series Book 1) (11 page)

After all of these years, with just a few words from the boy I had loved almost my entire life, I knew all hope was gone.

Lucas Young would never care for me the way I cared for him.

Perhaps I would always be his little sister’s best friend or, as he had yelled at me today, like a sister. Either way, I would never be the thing I wanted most: his.

I put down my ice cream and grabbed the heart-shaped locket around my neck. I should take it off, put it up in my jewelry box, and never look at it again. Even as my mind screamed at me to do more than that—I should tear the damn thing off and throw it in the trash—I couldn’t seem to make my hands move.

How pathetic was I?

There I sat in the middle of the night, the lights off and staring at the darkened window of Lucas’s room across the street, my heart ripped in two from his cruel words, yet I couldn’t take off his necklace. How much battering and bruising could a heart take before it finally broke irreparably?

Apparently, my stupid heart wanted to find out.

Crawling off the floor and into my bed, I curled into a ball.

When I had been a little girl, I had curled into a ball to protect myself from an alcoholic father who would lose his temper and take his frustrations out on me and my mother physically. Now I was curling into a ball to try to protect what was left of my emotions.

The funny thing was that I swore the verbal beating I had taken from Lucas was ten times worse than any physical pain my father had ever caused. Who knew words could hurt so much?

I closed my eyes, and Lucas’s angry face came into focus. As my mind played back the incident for what felt like the hundredth time, I picked up on two things I hadn’t noticed before.

First, Lucas had kissed me back. Not timidly, either, but with a ferocity that had surprised and almost scared me. If kissing me were so awful, why had he kissed me back like that?

Secondly, there had been something wrong with his eyes as he had raged at me. Something more than anger had been there. A hint of sadness? Bleakness, even? It was hard to say for sure, but I suddenly realized something had happened to the boy I loved while he had been gone these past two years.

He wasn’t the same person he had been when he had given me the locket. Something inside of Lucas Young had died, and I wasn’t sure I could bring it back to life. Therefore, I was going to do the only thing I could do—: give Lucas space.

People said, if you loved something, set it free, and what you loved would return to you. I didn’t know if Lucas would ever return to me as the man he was before, but I loved him enough to set him free.

Still, I was going to keep the only piece of him I could possibly keep now: the heart-shaped locket. Then, one day, perhaps when I was stronger, I would take off his necklace and store it away in a box in the back of my closet where it would inevitably be lost. Until then, I would have to find a way to move on, although a piece of my shattered heart tried to tell me it wasn’t possible.

I eventually fell asleep with my hand still wrapped around my heart-shaped locket, sad that was the only piece of Lucas Young’s heart I would ever truly hold.

Chapter

9

Lucas

Twenty-Three Years Old

Due to another deployment, the next time I saw Ginny was a year and a half later. In that time, I hadn’t received one card, letter, or email from my little sister’s best friend. Mission accomplished, right?

Perhaps a little too well. I couldn’t take not hearing from Gin at all. It might be selfish on my part to want to keep in contact with her, but I couldn’t handle not knowing how she was doing.

I’d spent half my time in Afghanistan distracted, wondering about what she was doing. What she was drawing. If she had finally given up on me like I had done my best to force her to do. Imaging her with another guy was a double-edged sword. But that was what I had wanted for her, right?

The problem was, the mere idea made me want to puke my guts out, punch holes in shit, blow something up. It was irrational, and I totally didn’t give a fuck. I’d spent too much of my life taking care of the blonde-haired angel across the street to give her up completely. Maybe I couldn’t have her in the capacity that I wanted her, but I still needed her in my life in any way I could get her.

She had been dropped off at the family dinner by her boyfriend. My secret worst fear. I had no one to blame but myself, though, right? Then I had to watch as that shithead put his hands all over her while kissing her good-bye.

It had burned like a motherfucker to watch her with him, but that was my burden to bear. She was safe, seemed happy, and that was all I had ever wanted.

What bothered me that night was that she wouldn’t look me directly in the eye. She had looked over my shoulder, at my chest, but she refused to look at my face. That burned, too. I had done that to her.

I might not be able to have her in my bed for the rest of my life, but I couldn’t stand the thought of not having her in my life. I had to fix this shit.

As a result, I cornered her in the living room when she went to go grab her forgotten cell phone off the end table while everybody else was in the kitchen.

“Gin.”

Her body froze. It was painfully obvious she would rather talk to a rattlesnake than be alone with me, making me feel like more of an ass than I already did.

After turning toward me, she stared at a spot over my shoulder and replied, “Yes, Lucas?”

Nope. I refused to talk to her if she wouldn’t look at me.

Reaching out a hand, I gripped her chin with my fingers and pulled her face until I caught her gaze. “That’s better. I want you lookin’ nowhere but me while I say this. I get why you’re gun shy around me. I was an ass last time I was here. I shouldn’t have spouted off the way I did. You caught me off guard, and I reacted badly. Call me a dick. Call me a shithead. Call me whatever you want, honey. Just get it out of your system and forgive me.”

“
Forgive you
?” she snapped. “Why should I forgive you when I haven’t heard an actual apology yet?”

Seeing this new, sassy side of her made me hard, but I couldn’t concentrate on that, so I apologized, instead.

“I’m sorry, Gin.”

She only looked at me skeptically.

“Seriously, honey, I mean it. I was a dick that night, and I’m sorry. My head was in a fucked up place after my first deployment, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. Forgive me now?”

Although the uncertainty faded from her eyes, I watched as a bit of curiosity replaced it. She tilted her head to the side, and I had the distinct impression she was trying to figure me out, maybe see into my head.

Who knew what she was thinking? I had given up on trying to figure out women a long time ago. All I could do was stand there and wait to see if the girl I had known for what felt like forever would give me a second chance to be in her life in some capacity.

I wasn’t ready to let her go entirely. Honestly, I might not ever be able to let her completely go.

She studied my face for what felt like forever before she said slowly, “Forgiven.”

A smile stretched across my face as I pulled her to me, used my arm around her shoulders to guide her, and led us back toward the kitchen.

“So, tell me what you’ve been up to, Gin.”

“I have a boyfriend, and I’m in college. Which one do you want to hear about?”

Jesus. I would rather talk about her period than that boyfriend of hers with octopus hands.

“Let’s talk college, honey.”

In my line of work, I never knew if the next mission was the one I wouldn’t come home from, so I was going to take this moment with the girl I loved but couldn’t have and make it last as long as I possibly could.

Ginny

Twenty Years Old

As Lucas and I sat at his mother’s kitchen table, catching up, I thought over what had been said a little over an hour before and almost laughed. Funny how, when Lucas asked me for forgiveness, it sounded more like a command than an actual question.

You would think someone seeking such a thing would make sure they were not demanding it, but not Lucas Young. The proverbial question mark on the end of his sentence was for my benefit alone and probably not a courtesy I would get from him often in the future. If he wanted something, he would obtain it by any means necessary.

For instance, when he had told me and Olivia at his last high school football game that he would score four touchdowns, he’d made it happen. Or, like how he had planned for years to go in the Army to be in Special Forces and was drafted right out of basic. Lucas Young was relentless when he wanted something. Therefore, I should probably consider myself lucky he hadn’t dictated my forgiveness.

But instead of feeling lucky, all I felt was sad that he still didn’t want me. You could think you were over someone, and then, with just a glimpse of their face after not seeing them for a year and a half, you realized you would probably never be over them. That truth sucked in a big way. It also made me want to run back home and cry my eyes out. I wasn’t going to let myself do it, though. No, I was going to sit here and visit with him as if I didn’t give a flying Fig Newton about what he thought. Even if it was the furthest thing from the truth.

So, I sat there, chatting with the boy I used to think was my knight in shining armor, rescuing me from locked closets, and studied him.

He looked older, and not just because he was. There were lines around his eyes and mouth that told me he’d laughed … and cried. His skin was overly tan from his deployments, and even though he was doing his best to seem carefree with me, his eyes were hard, dark, and maybe even … lost?

During the past year, I’d convinced myself that there was nothing Lucas could say or do that would allow me to forgive him for what he’d done to me. Now as I studied him, my resolution wavered. There was something about his demeanor that said he needed a hug. He needed a strong shoulder to lay his head on and lose himself in his thoughts. And pathetically, there was part of me that very much wanted to be the person who gave him the comfort he needed, which was why I was crazy as hell for sitting here and talking with him at all. I should be running in the opposite direction of him and staying far, far away.

Nevertheless, my heart had almost burst out of my chest at the chance for things to be normal between us again. Or, at least I had hoped things were back to normal until he asked his next question.

“Why aren’t you wearing the necklace I gave you?”

I felt the color drain from my face and looked away. How could I answer that?
After you broke my heart, I couldn’t stand to look at it every day, let alone wear it anymore.
Yeah, because every girl wanted to admit that.

The silence between us became awkward, and when neither one broke it, I peeked up through my lashes at him. His face was set in a grim look, his lips flattened with either anger or frustration; I couldn’t tell which.

I looked down at the blue stain on the side of one of my hands in frustration, a smear of color left behind after drawing with my markers earlier. I rubbed at the spot with my thumb anxiously, using it as a focal point so I wouldn’t have to participate in the confrontation.

Who the hell was he to get upset because I wasn’t wearing his necklace? He was the one who had made it perfectly clear that we would never be more than family friends. Just because someone forgave someone else for hurting them, it didn’t mean they always forgot what had been done to them. I doubted I would ever forget that sort of agony, which made me realize Lucas and I had a stain between us now, but that damn mark wouldn’t be as easy to remove as the marker on my hand.

I was starting to wonder whether, forgiveness or no forgiveness, the blemish on what kind of relationship we did have was now permanent, sort of like a scar.

“Gin,” his rough voice called almost sadly.

I slowly brought my head back up to look at him again, and he reached across the kitchen table and took both of my hands in his, wrapping them in his warmth. There was emotion working behind his eyes, but I couldn’t name it. Regret maybe? Sorrow for still seeing the repercussions of his actions? Whatever it was, he didn’t give me long to wonder about it before he spoke again.

“You didn’t have to take off the necklace, Gin. I get you did it because I gave it to you, so in a way, you thought of it as mine”—Lucas shook his head—“but if you think that, you’re wrong. It’s yours. It’s always been yours from the moment I gave it to you. Nothing I do or say can ever take that away from you. So, when you go home tonight, put it back on, because it will always belong to you.”

With the end of that fervent but strange declaration, Lucas stood up, walked around to my side of the table, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then he walked away, leaving me sitting there with this odd feeling that something important had just happened, and I had missed it.

He had only been talking about the necklace… right?

Chapter

10

Lucas

Twenty-Five Years Old

It was Ginny’s twenty-second birthday, and my family had begged me to come home for the weekend to celebrate it with them. Her mom had saved up the money to rent us cabins at a wilderness resort not far from our small New York town. I had once again been gone for over a year, but this time, I was coming home with the knowledge I was about to ship out for a third time.

Deploying didn’t bother me. This was my job, my calling in life. What I didn’t enjoy were all the tears from my loved ones before I left.

I didn’t need them worrying about me. I needed them
living
, going about their day and living their lives to the fullest. They were the reason I was willing to fight and die for this country—to protect them, to give them the freedom to go from day to day, knowing they were safe. I wasn’t looking forward to my mother and sister’s waterworks … or Ginny’s.

Her tears were the worst, if only because I knew they came from some place deeper than worrying about a family member. They came from the place inside of her that she had stashed all of those little girl’s hopes and dreams she used to have for me—for us.