Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,8

things?”

I cross my arms. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“What things?” he insists.

Sometimes, I hate Lukas.

“Well, he didn’t say specifically.”

Lukas lets out a self-satisfied grunt. “See? I told you. Scammer.”

He flicks his silver lighter and takes one long puff. He closes his eyes when he exhales, and I watch the smoke pour out from his lips and float up past the top of his head. Lukas never takes more than one hit, as if his senses are so refined that anything more than the slightest puff would leave him more baked than a tray of cookies. He hands the pipe to me. “Here.”

I flick the lighter over the bowl and suck too hard. Lukas has been trying to teach me the right way to smoke weed for months, but I always end up burning the back of my throat. My eyes water. When I open my mouth, a huge cloud of smoke billows out, like I swallowed a burning building. Lukas watches me critically.

“Try to hold it in longer before exhaling.”

I shut my mouth again before the rest of the smoke escapes. It’s hard to hold my breath with Lukas watching me like that. I nod, cheeks puffed out, wishing I’d chosen a slightly sexier expression to freeze my face in.

“And don’t draw so much in at once.”

I let out my smoke, gasping. “No kidding.”

I put down the pipe to take a breather. The room seems to sharpen, like I’m looking at it through the lenses of a new and miraculous pair of glasses. I gaze at the Christmas lights. “Lukas, did you ever notice that there’s a pattern in the ceiling that looks like the Big Dipper?”

Lukas smiles, which inexplicably makes me think of clean-faced Russian peasants singing folk songs, and reaches out to gently pry the pipe from my fingers. “You, my friend, are a little high.”

“I’m going to go back there and find that guy. I don’t care if he’s Hannibal freaking Lecter.”

“All right, Nancy Drew. Hand over the piece.” Lukas’s fingers close around mine, trying to extract the pipe, which I have suddenly decided to hang on to.

“Just a sec, it’s almost cashed.”

Lukas has been teaching me stoner terminology to go with my smoking lessons: cashed for used up, piece for pipe. I think he’s worried I’ll make us look dumb in front of the older, cooler bands we’ll naturally start hanging around with after we win Battle of the Bands if I don’t learn proper form.

He tugs at the pipe/piece, rolling his eyes. “You’re impossible.”

“Come on. One little hoot.”

“Fine.” Lukas leans back while I take one last puff. When I surrender the pipe, he looks at me with the pseudo-exasperated fondness of a person who has been made, against his better judgment, to laugh.

“Ready to play now?”

I nod, beaming. Victory is mine. “Yup.”

Playing music with Lukas is almost as good as doing Other Things with Lukas. He’s been playing drums since he was ten, and I know my way around a keyboard, and neither of us is interested in playing drippy singer-songwriter covers like some of the other so-called musicians at our school.

And yes, when I say that jamming with Lukas is almost as good as doing Other Things with Lukas, I mean those Other Things. We have Done Things right here in Lukas’s basement. Steamy things. Things that make my lady-parts glow with heat just thinking about them.

What Other Things have we done, you ask?

We kissed. Once. And Lukas put his hand on my leg. And I touched his earlobe with my finger.

It happened on the blue couch, after we’d each had half a glass of wine on Lukas’s seventeenth birthday. Which was only twenty-seven days ago.

Since then I have replayed that erotic trifecta—the kiss, the hand on the leg, the finger on the ear—over and over and over again.

Lukas’s forehead was warm. That’s a weird thing that stayed with me, how warm his forehead was when it brushed mine, as if there was a little fire right inside his skull. I wanted to press against it so it burned me like a branding iron. I wanted a mark, something to prove that this rapture had really happened to me, to us. But when I leaned in to kiss him again, Lukas pulled away with a dazed or possibly dazzled expression, as if his senses were so refined he could only take one hit off the gravity bong of our mutual desire without getting completely fershnickered. So instead I took a safety pin when I