Chapter 1: Hey Lucas, Long Time No See
The bar was a cavern of flickering neon and cigarette haze, the kind of place that had given up on cleaning its sticky linoleum floor sometime around 1997. Spilled beer and something stickier made the soles of my black flats grip and release with every step. The air hung thick with the ghosts of a thousand stale whiskeys, a perfume of regret that clung to the walls like the nicotine stains yellowing the ceiling tiles.
Fleetwood Mac drifted from the jukebox in the corner, Stevie Nicks warning everyone about the chain, and I felt the opening bars settle into my bones like an old bruise. Of course. Of fucking course. The one bar Priya had to drag me to, forty-five minutes from our apartment because she swore the drinks were cheaper and the crowd was better, and they had Rumours on loop.
"Vera, you're doing that thing again."
Priya appeared at my elbow, a sweating gin and tonic in each hand. Her sharp eyes tracked mine across the room, cataloguing, filing away information I didn't want her to have.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you look like you just saw a ghost but you're pretending you didn't."
I took the drink she offered and swallowed half of it in one go. The gin burned going down, but it was a good burn, the kind that reminded you that you were still alive. "I'm not pretending anything."
"Uh-huh." Priya sipped her own drink, her gaze still flickering around the room. Jenna had disappeared toward the bathroom ten minutes ago and hadn't come back, which meant she was either making out with someone or holding someone's hair back. Fifty-fifty odds with Jenna. "Because you've been standing in the same spot for five minutes, and you hate this song."
"I love this song."
"You hate this song. You told me once that The Chain was overplayed and that Lindsey Buckingham was a tyrant."
"I was drunk when I said that."
"You were sober. We were doing face masks."
I opened my mouth to argue, but the words died somewhere between my brain and my tongue because the jukebox clicked over, and the opening bass line of The Chain filled the room, and I remembered exactly why I didn't come to bars like this anymore. Why I hadn't come to this bar in two years. Why the last time I'd been here, I'd been wearing Lucas's jacket, and he'd been laughing at something I said, and the whole night had felt like something I could keep.
I'd been eighteen then.
Stupid, impulsive, still young enough to believe that loving someone meant you got to keep them.
Priya's hand closed around my wrist. "Vera."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. Your face just did five different things in two seconds."
I pulled my wrist free and drained the rest of my drink. "I'm going to get another one."
The bar was packed for a Thursday night, bodies pressed together in a way that made the room feel smaller than it was, a press of heat and sweat and too much cologne. I wove through the crowd, keeping my head down, my eyes on the sticky floor, my mind carefully, deliberately blank.
I almost made it.
The pool table sat in the back corner, illuminated by a single bulb that flickered like it was trying to warn me away. I didn't look up. I didn't need to. I could feel him there, the way you feel a storm before it hits, that pressure change in the air that makes your ears pop.
I looked up.
Lucas stood at the edge of the pool table, cue in hand, his dark hair falling across his forehead in that way it always did. He'd rolled the sleeves of his flannel to his elbows, and the dim light caught the muscles in his forearms, the tendons in his wrists. He was laughing at something one of his friends said, his head tipped back, that easy, unguarded laugh that made his whole face change.
He looked good.
He always looked good.
That was the problem.
"Vera." Priya's voice was low, a warning. She'd followed me. Of course she'd followed me. "Vera, don't."
I didn't hear her.
Or maybe I did, and I didn't care.
The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them, before I could think about what they meant or where they'd land.
"Lucas!"
My voice cut through the bar like a blade, sharp enough that the guys at his table turned, their conversation dying mid-sentence. Marcus raised his eyebrows. The other one—Trey, I thought, maybe—elbowed the third guy and tilted his chin toward me.
And Lucas turned.
For a second, his face was blank, the way anyone's face is blank when they hear their name shouted across a crowded room. Then his eyes found mine, and something shifted.
His smile faltered.
Not in a bad way—not in a way that made me feel unwelcome or unwanted. It faltered the way a record skips when you bump the table, that split second of silence before the music catches up to itself.
He remembered.
I could see it in his eyes, the whole history of us, the way he used to look at me across the kitchen table at his mom's house, the way he'd stayed up with me the night my meds stopped working and the world went sideways, the way he'd held my hand at my ex's wedding like it was nothing, like it didn't mean anything, like we weren't standing in the middle of a church watching the only other person I'd ever loved promise himself to someone else.
He remembered.
And so did I.
The bar went quiet, or maybe that was just the blood rushing in my ears, the sudden, dizzying awareness of how badly I'd just fucked this up. Priya's hand was on my arm again, tugging me back, but my feet wouldn't move. I was rooted to that sticky floor, pinned in place by Lucas's blue eyes across the room.
His friends were looking at me now, really looking, and I saw the exact moment Marcus figured out who I was. His eyebrows went up, and a grin spread across his face, the kind of grin that said he was about to give Lucas absolute hell for the rest of the night.
"Shit," Priya hissed under her breath. "Vera, we can leave. We can leave right now and pretend this never happened."
But I was already moving, my feet carrying me forward before my brain could catch up, my body remembering the path to Lucas the way it remembered how to breathe.
Lucas set his cue down on the pool table.
His friends parted for me like water.
And when I stopped in front of him, close enough to smell the whiskey on his breath and the soap he still used, the same soap he'd been using the entire time I'd known him, he looked down at me with those blue eyes and said:
"You shouldn't be here."
It wasn't an accusation.
It wasn't a question.
It was just the truth, laid between us like a card on a table.
I swallowed hard. "Neither should you."
Lucas's jaw tightened. Not much, just a flex of muscle beneath the stubble he hadn't bothered to shave. He looked tired. Not the kind of tired you get from a long week at work, but the kind that lives in your bones, the kind that comes from carrying things you never asked to carry.
"Fair enough," he said, and his voice was lower now, pitched just for me. Marcus and the other guys had gone quiet, watching us like we were a car crash they couldn't look away from. "How've you been, Vera?"
The question landed somewhere between polite and cruel. Two years of silence, and that's what he came up with.
"Well, I'm not usually here," I said, laughing, but there was something burning in my eyes, something hot and reckless that I couldn't name. "But you probably already know that."
I turned to his friends, giving them a little wave, a smile that showed teeth.
"Hello, boys. Long time no see."
Marcus grinned, raising his beer in a mock salute. "Vera. Thought you fell off the face of the earth."
"Just the tri-state area." I turned back to Lucas, meeting his eyes, refusing to blink. "I can be here now. I think it's been long enough. Your brother's been married for over two years."
The words hung in the air between us, heavy with everything I wasn't saying. Two years of therapy. Two years of learning to sit with the emptiness instead of filling it with pills and strangers and bad decisions. Two years of wondering if Lucas ever thought about me the way I thought about him, in the quiet hours, in the spaces between heartbeats.
"Curiosity killed the cat," I added, letting my smile turn sharp, almost playful. Then I giggled, the sound bright and brittle, before turning on my heel and walking back toward the bar.
Priya was already there, her expression a mixture of horror and grudging admiration. She'd followed me back, watched the whole thing, probably already composing the lecture she'd give me in the car.
"What the fuck was that?" she hissed.
I didn't answer. I just leaned against the bar and signaled the bartender, a tired-looking woman with a septum piercing and eyes that had seen everything.
"Two double shots of Southern Comfort. And a round of beers for those guys over there." I tilted my chin toward the pool table, where Lucas and his friends had resumed their game but kept glancing our way.
The bartender raised an eyebrow but didn't comment. She poured the shots first, sliding them across the sticky wood, then cracked open five beers and set them on a tray.
When she carried the beers over to Lucas and his friends, I raised my shot glass in the air, toasting Lucas from across the room. He looked up just as I tossed it back, the liquor burning a path down my throat, warm and reckless.
He didn't drink his beer.
He just watched me.
I set the empty glass down and turned to Priya, my words a little too loud because the Southern Comfort was already working its way through my system, loosening the careful walls I'd built.
"Oh my god, Lucas is still so fucking hot. Somebody smack me."
Priya grabbed my arm, her nails digging in. "You're drunk."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're spiraling."
I laughed, but it came out wrong, hollow and jagged. "Spiraling implies I was ever on solid ground."
She pulled me toward the back of the bar, away from the pool table, away from Lucas and his friends, away from the heat of his gaze that I could still feel on my skin like a brand. The bathroom was a single-stall disaster, the mirror cracked, the sink stained, the fluorescent light buzzing like it was dying.
I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.
"I was doing so good, Priya."
"I know."
"I hadn't thought about him in months. Months."
"That's not true and you know it."
She was right. It wasn't true. I thought about Lucas the way you think about a scar, running your fingers over it absentmindedly, remembering the wound even when the pain had faded. He was there in the quiet moments, in the songs that came on shuffle, in the way I still reached for my phone sometimes to text him something stupid before remembering we didn't do that anymore.
"I'm going to call an Uber," Priya said, her voice gentle now. "We're going home."
I shook my head. "No."
"Vera—"
"I'm not done yet."
I pushed off the wall and opened the bathroom door before she could stop me. The bar looked different now, the neon blurring at the edges, the music louder, the floor stickier under my flats. I felt loose, untethered, like I might float away if I didn't find something to hold onto.
Lucas was still at the pool table.
He was already looking at me when I turned around.
His friends were gone, or maybe they'd just stepped back, giving him space. Marcus was nowhere in sight. The other two were at the bar, talking to the bartender, ordering another round.
Lucas set his cue down and walked toward me.
The floorboards creaked under his boots. Each step felt like a countdown, a ticking clock, a door opening that I'd spent two years trying to keep closed.
He stopped a few inches away. Close enough that I could see the flecks of gold in his blue eyes, the small scar above his eyebrow from when he'd fallen off his bike as a kid, the way his lips parted like he was about to say something he'd been holding onto for a long time.
"You shouldn't have bought us those beers," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because now I owe you one."
I smiled. I couldn't help it. "So buy me one."
He didn't move.
"I'm not going to do this, Vera."
"Do what?"
"This." He gestured between us, his hand cutting through the space that separated him from me. "The push and pull. The thing we always do. I'm not going to be your bad decision tonight."
The words hit like a slap. I felt my face flush, heat rising up my neck, shame curling in my stomach.
"You think that's what I want?"
"I don't know what you want. I never did."
"Bullshit."
"Excuse me?"
The Southern Comfort was talking now, the words pouring out of me before I could filter them, before I could stop and think about consequences and boundaries and all the reasons this was a terrible idea.
"You knew exactly what I wanted. You knew for years. You just never had the balls to do anything about it."
Lucas went still. The muscle in his jaw jumped, and his eyes darkened, the blue turning to something harder, something that looked almost like anger.
"You were my brother's girlfriend."
"I was your brother's girlfriend. Past tense. He's married now. We're not doing this dance anymore, Lucas. I'm tired."
"Tired of what?"
"Tired of pretending."
I didn't know what I meant until the words were already out, hanging in the air between us, sharp and undeniable. Maybe I meant pretending that I didn't think about him. Maybe I meant pretending that the thing between us had ever been simple. Maybe I meant pretending that I'd moved on, that I was fine, that the last two years had fixed something.
Lucas stared at me for a long moment.
Then he reached out and took my hand.
His fingers were warm, callused from work, and they wrapped around mine like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like we'd been doing this for years instead of avoiding it for our entire lives.
"Come on," he said.
"Where?"
"Away from here."
He led me through the bar, past Priya, who looked like she wanted to murder me and hug me at the same time, past the bartender who didn't even glance up, past the crowd of strangers who didn't know and didn't care that my entire world was tilting on its axis.
The back door led to a small parking lot, gravel crunching under our feet, the air cold and sharp against my face. Lucas's truck was parked under a broken streetlight, the kind of vehicle that looked like it had seen better decades.
He opened the passenger door.
"Get in."
I hesitated. Not because I didn't want to, but because I did. Because wanting this, wanting him, had always been the problem. Because getting in that truck meant admitting something I'd spent two years trying to bury.
"What about your friends?"
"They'll survive."
"What about mine?"
"Text her."
I pulled out my phone and sent Priya a quick message. I'm fine. I'll call you tomorrow. She responded immediately with a string of angry emojis and the words I hate you followed by be safe followed by I love you. I smiled and tucked the phone back in my pocket.
Then I climbed into Lucas's truck.
He got in on the other side and started the engine. The radio came on, some classic rock station playing something by Tom Petty, and he turned it down low so it was just background noise, a soundtrack for whatever this was.
"Where are we going?"
"I don't know yet."
"That's not an answer."
He looked at me then, really looked, his eyes searching my face like he was trying to memorize it.
"Somewhere I can kiss you," he said. "And not feel guilty about it."
The words landed in my chest like a punch.
"Lucas—"
"I've been waiting two years to kiss you, Vera. And I'm done waiting."
He pulled out of the parking lot and onto the dark road, and I stared at his profile in the dim light, the curve of his jaw, the way his hands gripped the steering wheel.
Two years.
Two years of silence.
Two years of thinking I'd ruined everything, that whatever was between us had died the moment his brother put a ring on someone else's finger.
But it hadn't died.
It had just been waiting.
The truck bumped along the road, the headlights cutting through the darkness, and I felt something loosening in my chest, something warm and terrifying and alive.
I didn't know where we were going.
But for the first time in two years, I didn't care.
The truck rumbled along the dark highway, headlights cutting through the nothingness ahead. I didn't know this road. Didn't recognize the trees blurring past or the occasional farmhouse lights flickering in the distance. We could have been driving to the edge of the world for all I knew, and I wouldn't have cared.
Lucas drove with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on his thigh. His knuckles were scraped, old scars from work, and I remembered tracing those scars with my fingertips once, years ago, when we were both too young and too scared to admit what was happening between us.
"Where are we going?" I asked again.
"I told you. I don't know."
"That's not—"
"I'm looking for somewhere we can stop." He glanced at me, quick, then back at the road. "Somewhere private."
The words hung in the cab, heavy with implication.
The radio played something slow, something I didn't recognize, and I let my head fall back against the seat. The Southern Comfort was still warm in my blood, loosening my limbs, making everything feel softer at the edges. But underneath the buzz, something else was stirring. Something hungry.
Lucas turned off the highway onto a gravel road that wound through a stand of trees. The truck bounced over potholes, and I grabbed the door handle to steady myself. After a few minutes, the trees opened up into a clearing, and he killed the engine.
We sat there in the silence, the only sound the ticking of the cooling engine, the distant chirp of crickets, the blood rushing in my ears.
"Why here?" I asked.
He shrugged. "It's quiet."
I looked out the window. The moon hung low, casting silver light across the empty field. No houses. No streetlights. Just us and the dark and the space between our seats.
"You planned this."
"I didn't plan shit." He turned to face me, his expression unreadable in the dim light. "I just wanted to get you alone."
"Mission accomplished."
"Yeah." He swallowed. "Now what?"
The question sat between us, loaded with everything we'd never said, everything we'd been avoiding for years. Now what. Two words that could mean nothing or everything depending on what came next.
I unbuckled my seatbelt.
Lucas watched me, his body still, his eyes tracking my every movement.
I shifted in my seat, turning to face him fully. The console separated us, a barrier I was suddenly desperate to cross.
"I'm not going to be your bad decision, Vera."
"I heard you the first time."
"Do you believe me?"
I thought about it. Really thought about it, the way his jaw tightened when he said it, the way his hands gripped the wheel like he was holding himself back.
"I think," I said slowly, "that you've spent two years telling yourself you don't want this. And now I'm here, in your truck, and you're running out of reasons to pretend."
His breath caught.
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"Then tell me I'm wrong."
Silence.
"Tell me you don't want me," I pressed. "Tell me you never thought about it. Tell me that night at your mom's house, when everyone else was asleep and we stayed up watching bad movies, you weren't thinking about kissing me."
His hands tightened on the wheel.
"Tell me," I whispered, "that you don't want to kiss me right now."
He moved fast. One second he was on his side of the truck, the next he was pulling me across the console, dragging me over the gearshift, hauling me into his lap like I weighed nothing. I landed straddling him, my knees digging into the seat on either side of his hips, my hands braced against his chest.
We stopped.
His face was inches from mine, close enough that I could see the dark ring around his irises, close enough that his breath ghosted warm across my lips. His hands had found my waist, fingers digging into the bare skin beneath my shirt, and I felt every point of contact like a brand.
She climbed into his lap straddling him, she got about an inch from his lips then whispered, "Have you been waiting for this?" She giggled, the sound bright and reckless, and then she brought her lips down slowly and she kissed him, massaging his tongue with hers. It was a deep kiss, filthy and searching, and when she finally pulled back, she whispered against his mouth, "I've wanted to kiss you for a lot longer than two years."
Lucas made a sound low in his throat, something between a groan and a growl, and then his hands were in my hair, pulling me back down, and he was kissing me like he'd been starving for it.
His tongue slid against mine, hot and demanding, and I melted into him, grinding my hips down without meaning to, feeling the hard length of him pressing up through his jeans. He was already hard. Already aching. Already mine.
"Fuck," he breathed against my mouth. "You have no idea."
"Then show me."
He pulled back just enough to look at me, searching my face for something. Hesitation. Doubt. An out.
He wouldn't find one.
"I'm not stopping," I told him. "Not this time."
Something shifted in his eyes. The last wall crumbling. The final thread snapping.
He grabbed the hem of my shirt and yanked it over my head. The fabric caught on my hair, and I laughed, shaking it loose, and then his hands were on my skin, rough palms skating up my ribcage, finding the clasp of my bra and flicking it open with practiced ease.
"Show-off," I muttered.
"I've had practice." He pulled the straps down my shoulders, eyes fixed on my tits as they spilled free. "But not with you. Never with you."
"What's wrong?" I rolled my hips deliberately, and he groaned, his head falling back against the seat.
"Nothing's wrong. That's the problem." He looked up at me, and there was something vulnerable in his expression, something raw. "You're my brother's ex. You're supposed to be off-limits."
"And yet."
"And yet here you are."
I leaned down and kissed him again, slower this time, deeper. I wanted to feel every inch of his mouth, wanted to memorize the taste of him, cheap beer and something sweeter underneath. His hands found my ass, squeezing, pulling me closer, and I could feel the heat of him through our clothes, the press of his cock against my core.
"Lucas." I was panting now. "I need—"
"What do you need?"
"Less clothes."
He laughed, a rough, breathless sound. "Yeah. Okay."
I climbed off his lap long enough to shimmy out of my shorts and boyshorts, kicking them somewhere into the darkness of the truck's floor. Lucas watched me, his eyes tracking over my body, lingering on the octopus tattoo curling its tentacles down my hip, the phoenix inked across my shoulder blades that I couldn't see but knew he remembered.
He'd been there when I got that phoenix.
He'd held my hand through the whole thing, told me I was crazy for sitting through four hours of pain, brought me ice cream after.
He'd looked at me differently for weeks after that.
I climbed back into his lap, straddling him, and this time there was nothing between us. His hands were on my thighs, sliding up, testing, stopping just short of where I wanted him.
"Please," I said, and I didn't care how desperate I sounded.
"Please what?"
"Touch me."
He slid two fingers through my folds, and I gasped. I was soaked, dripping, so wet it was almost embarrassing. He circled my clit with his thumb, slow and deliberate, and I bucked against his hand, chasing the pressure.
"You're so fucking wet for me."
"Shut up."
"Make me."
I bit his lower lip, hard enough to sting, and he groaned, his fingers sliding lower, pressing inside me, one then two, stretching me open. My head fell back, my nails digging into his shoulders, and I let myself feel it, the fullness, the friction, the way he curved his fingers just right.
"I want your cock," I said.
"Not yet."
"Lucas—"
"Not yet." He pulled his hand away, and I whined at the loss. "I want to taste you first."
"Some other time. Right now, I need you inside me."
He looked at me, and I saw the question in his eyes, the last check, the final out I could take if I wanted it.
I didn't want it.
"I'm clean," I told him. "And I've been tested. I haven't been with anyone in months."
"Same." He swallowed. "I mean, I haven't—not since—"
"Good."
I unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his jeans, reached into his boxers and wrapped my hand around him. He was thick and hot and hard in my grip, and I stroked him once, twice, watching his face contort with pleasure.
"Vera."
"I know."
I lifted up, positioned him at my entrance, and sank down slowly. He stretched me open, inch after fucking inch, and I had to breathe through it, had to focus on the weight of him inside me, the way my body was making room for him.
"Fuck," he groaned. "Fuck, you're tight."
"Been a while."
"No shit."
I laughed, or tried to, but it came out as a moan as I bottomed out, his full length buried inside me, my body flush against his. We stayed like that for a moment, panting, shaky, the enormity of what we were doing settling over us.
"We're really doing this," I whispered.
"We're really doing this," he agreed.
And then I started to move.
I rode him slowly at first, rolling my hips, finding a rhythm that made both of us gasp. His hands gripped my waist hard enough to bruise, and I didn't care, wanted the marks, wanted to see them tomorrow and remember.
"You feel like—" he started.
"Don't. Don't say anything."
I didn't want words. I didn't want meaning. I just wanted this, the slide of him inside me, the sweat gathering at my spine, the way his thighs tensed beneath me. I leaned forward, changing the angle, and he hit something deep that made me cry out.
"There," I gasped. "Right there."
He took over, thrusting up into me fast and hard, and I was reduced to incoherent sounds, little moans and curses falling from my mouth as he pounded into me.
"You like that?"
"Yes—fuck—yes."
"You gonna come for me?"
"If you—keep—doing—that."
He grin was feral, and he drove into me even harder, and I felt the orgasm building, pressure coiling low in my belly.
"Come on," he urged. "Let go. I've got you."
I came with a shudder, my whole body clenching around him, and he followed right after, driving deep and spilling inside me with a groan that sounded like it was ripped from somewhere deep.
For a moment, neither of us moved.
His heart pounded under my palm. My breath was ragged, my head was spinning, every nerve in my body lit up like a city at night.
"I don't know what this means," he said finally.
"Me neither."
"Is that okay?"
I looked at him. His face was open here. Unguarded in a way I'd never seen before. He looked younger and older at the same time, hopeful and terrified.
"Yeah," I said. "That's okay."
He kissed my forehead, gentle, and I let myself lean into it, let myself have this one small moment of peace.
But something was already stirring in the back of my mind.