Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,41

Lukas or tear off his pants or even kiss him. I just wanted to touch him, to remind him that the door was still open and I was still there, and see if maybe he was still there too. But Lukas looks so upset I suddenly feel like some kind of brutal she-rapist in my clingy blue dress.

“Um. Can we sit down for a minute?” says Lukas, his cheeks reddening. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

Now I’m going from wondering if Lukas thinks I’m an oversexed maniac to wondering if He’s Just Not That Into Me and has been too nice to tell me until now. When we sit on my bed, my heart breaks a little. This is how I had imagined us sitting. But if everything was going according to my imaginings, Lukas’s hands would be under my dress, not lying in his lap, and we’d be exploring each other, not having another sure-to-be-lengthy discussion about why we shouldn’t date.

I can hear the music playing downstairs, bright and dreamy and so utterly inappropriate for the moment we’re having, I want to smash my iPod. Lukas blurts out what he has to say in a single suffocating sentence:

“Don’t-get-mad-I-hooked-up-with-Kelsey.”

I look away before he can see the hurt and embarrassment that streak across my face like a pair of mice running out from under the stove. Kelsey Bartlett. Of course he’d choose her over me. I know I’m not that attractive, especially to someone like Lukas, who has a perfect body—I have a big mouth and too much hair and I don’t pluck my eyebrows often enough even though I come from a family of Eyebrow People and have what is basically a single unbroken line of fur across my forehead. In five seconds I’ve gone from feeling like a sleek, warm love-otter to a cold, untouchable frog.

Ribbit.

“I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, Kiri. I didn’t know you still felt that way about me.”

Lukas is peering at me like I’m a puzzle, some complex piece of machinery he didn’t realize was broken, but there it is, the missing spring, the snapped wire. I can’t stand it when people look at me that way. So I do what I know how to do. Smile and secure the perimeter.

I take a long, ragged drink of my wine and reach for the bottle to pour myself some more. A million questions push at my brain.

When did you start liking her?

Did you kiss her first or did she kiss you?

When you say you hooked up, exactly how much hooking do you mean?

But I can’t ask. I can’t show him I care that much. Instead, I give him a casual shrug. “That’s okay, Lukas. It’s not like we were dating.”

I think Lukas can tell it’s not okay just by watching my efforts to pour myself more wine. First it runs down the neck of the bottle instead of pouring out, then I swing the bottle down too close and break the glass. There’s a high-pitched chink. Wine leaking all over my dress.

“Shit.”

“I’ll get paper towels.”

“Crap.”

Lukas hops up, flees my bedroom, and all but vaults down the stairs.

“Where are your paper towels?” he calls from the kitchen.

“Goddammit.”

My lap is soaked in wine and spangled with a million isosceles triangles of shattered glass. I can hear Lukas bumping around the kitchen, opening and shutting drawers. Lukas wouldn’t survive a single night at home by himself: Who looks for paper towels in a drawer? I get up from my bed. “They’re on the counter.”

“What?”

“Bloody hell, Lukas.”

I tromp down the stairs and lumber into the kitchen, a glittering, wine-soaked King Kong. I rip a bunch of paper towels off the roll on the counter and pat myself down. In the glare of the kitchen light, all my hours of preparation are completely unnoticeable. The house is just a house. I am just a Kiri. Lukas and I are just friends. And that’s assuming our friendship survives this freaking circus.

Lukas leans against the counter and watches skeptically while I try to pick the shards off my dress.

“Be careful with that broken glass.”

“Thanks, Lukas.”

“Do you want me to get a broom?”

I’ve been shedding glass on the floor every time I move, but Lukas won’t be able to find the broom closet until Google makes an app.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I think something’s burning.”

The French bread. I lunge for the oven and pull open the door. The loaf of bread I stuck in an hour ago looks like a giant charred