“You didn’t mean it.”
Lucas tipped his head to the side, not quite agreeing with her. There were better ways of not hurting someone than punching them in the face.
“We had a talk after that. Considered my options – Mum had already talked to her sister…” Family he’d hardly known because his mum had kept them hundreds of miles and a Christmas card’s distance away. “Everyone agreed this was for the best.”
“Will you go back?” Sunny asked. She’d moved her hand to rest on the wall next to his, her little finger grazing the side of his hand.
“Mum’s pregnant. Reckon they’ll need my old room for the baby.” He shrugged. “And I don’t want to. I’m happy here. Happier, I think.”
But in the pause that followed, Lucas could tell both of them were thinking of what had happened at the party.
“You do have a knack for getting in trouble you don’t mean to start,” Sunny said, her voice wavering on the edge of forgiving. “But does trouble start a lot? Around Kellan I mean?”
Lucas recalled the last time he’d been here and the horror of striking his golf ball too sweetly, watching it clear the water and plummet to where a few brave souls sat out under the stars in the beer garden of The Teeswater Sheep. How Kellan had been disappointed when all it did was strike a heat lamp.
After the grudge match in February, when Kellan was the one who’d shouted the loudest insults until a fight became inevitable.
And the time Lucas had to separate a play-fight-turned-real between Kellan and Fry.
Lucas might have believed he was breaking up a fight back at the party, but he’d known Kellan long enough to be suspicious of how it started.
“He had just found out about Ryan and Freya,” he began.
“So? Cool motive, still violent. And it’s not like you knew that when you leapt in to help him – you just took Kellan’s side because that’s what friends do. But if I had a friend who threw punches rather than talking things through, maybe I’d stop taking their side.” She sighed, frustrated. “Maybe I’d stop being their friend.”
“I guess I could talk to him.”
“You guess?”
“He’s a hard person to disagree with.” Lucas stopped what he’d been about to say, the conversation he’d had with Freya coming back to him. “Or maybe Freya’s right and I just find it hard to disagree with people.”
An “UGH” belched out of her. “Freya.”
Which was confusing.
“I thought the two of you were friends?”
Sunny turned to stare at him, mouth an incredulous squiggle of a smile. “Why would you think that?”
Lucas waved back in the direction they’d come. “All this, the parcel, coming to Kellan’s party.”
“You mean the parcel that was addressed to my sister and has contained exactly zero references to me whatsoever?” A sentence that came out on a continuous breath. “You think that’s the reason I invited myself to Kellan’s house party?”
Lucas blinked in confusion and brushed the hair out of his eyes.
“Well … yeah.”
“Well, no. It was because I wanted to see you.” Her mouth was parted, just a little, and her eyes – dark and bright as apple pips – shifted between his mouth and his eyes. Then she sighed. “But seeing you hurt other people, I’m not so keen on that.”
Lucas sighed, running his fingers through his fringe once more. “Kellan’s a mate, though.”
“Get new ones.”
“Kellan was one of the new ones.”
“Newer ones then. Mates are like iPhones. There’s always new ones available, just costs a lot to get one.”
It was impossible not to grin. “You’re comparing friends to phones?”
“Only yours.” The humour in her voice matched his. “Mine are diamonds. Priceless.”
“Just like you?” He bumped her gently and grinned.
Only she made a frustrated kind of wail. “No! Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Flirting with me.”
“I wasn’t.” He was.
“I can’t kiss people who get into fights. I have principles.”
“Are you saying you want to kiss me?”
“Obviously.” She sounded very angry about it and Lucas wasn’t sure he’d ever seen someone master the combination of smile/glare quite like the girl next to him. “You’re gorgeous.”
“I am?”
“We’ve been through this. Stop fishing.”
Her playful shove was hard enough to push him off the wall, the momentum taking Sunny with him, so that they stumbled onto the ground, grazing elbows against the stone and giggling as they struggled to keep upright. When she recovered her balance, Sunny left her hand where it was, splayed out across his chest.
He wanted to tell her that she was gorgeous too. That he’d been trying to store up every snatched image of her, from the moment Sophie had told him her name to the one they were in right now, her head tilted back to look at him, mouth in a braces-wide smile, hair wisping across her face, eyes brighter than the floodlights.
Between one blink and the next, she launched herself at him, lips bruising his in a kiss so forceful that she bounced off him.
“Dammit.” She pressed her lips together and gave him a deliciously veiled look through her lashes. “That was not supposed to happen.”
“Why not?” Lucas leaned his weight into the palm she’d not yet moved from his chest. “I liked it.”
“Because I’m supposed to have some self-control. And those principles I mentioned.”
Principles that Lucas didn’t want her to compromise, because Sunny was someone who deserved to be taken as she was or not at all.
“How about you keep your principles…” He lifted a hand to her sleeve, watching as he twisted the material of her hoodie around his fingers, “And I keep out of fights…” His gaze flowed up to her face, trying to take everything in and failing because there was far too much of her – and not enough. “And we can keep kissing.”
WIN
The two of them walked back up from the river in slow, measured steps and complete silence, each festering in their own thoughts. Win regretted being so hard on someone she liked so much – wished she could find a way to apologise that wouldn’t sound too crawling and like she hadn’t meant everything she said. Because she had. Ryan was by no means her favourite person, but what he’d said about the way Sophie treated him…
She might have told Sunny that she’d not be able to fancy someone on the wrong side of a fight, but Win had never felt more like she wanted to hug someone than she did right now. For all Sophie’s anger, for the things she’d said about Ryan, Win wished she could take away some of the hurt Freya had inflicted on her best friend tonight.
She couldn’t possibly have meant to. That last note had been written with the same breezy confidence as the one Sophie had shown Win in the common room, by someone so convinced in the unshakeable faith of her friend that she could ask the world and Sophie would deliver.
Freya was too far away, too far gone, to know that Sophie hadn’t the strength to take it.