Free Lie to Me by Chloe Cox Page A

speechless.
    Marcus wasn’t.
    He looked at me, hard. Right in the eyes.
    “I don’t want them talking about you like that,” he said, his hand hot on my arm, his voice gruff. “I don’t want them thinking about you like that. I don’t want them thinking you’re an easy fuck because you don’t have anything better to do than come around and walk the damn street in front of them after school. You’re better than that, Lo. You can do damn near anything. What the hell are you doing here?”
    Oh God, I was so overwhelmed by him. First time I felt like I was drowning in him, right there, on the hot sidewalk, in front of everybody. I scrabbled for purchase, for my next breath, for anything that would keep me from just melting in front of him.
    “Then tell them I’m not an easy fuck,” I said, and pulled away. I put my chin up and walked right back over to Rosa and Katya, determined to hang around for a while just to piss Marcus off. Just to show him he couldn’t tell me what to do.
    Because while his macho thing made me feel good, it also made me want to fight him, just to prove a point. And yet, standing out there in the hot sun, watching those girls flirt with new eyes? Man, did he have a point of his own. It did look like none of us had our own interests, like all we could think to do was hang out and watch a bunch of guys, hoping they liked us.
    So for a while I watched Marcus pound the bag like I’d never seen, knowing I was the one who’d pissed him off. I didn’t totally mind that, watching him sweat, his muscles roiling, churning in the glare of the sun. But then I started to feel stupid, standing out there like that, proving him right.
    And eventually I asked this girl Lisa, the quietest one, if she wanted to go see a movie or something.
    Which was how I started to make a new group of friends. I mean, never mind that they all of those friends kind of faded away later, after the accident, because they just couldn’t handle it; the point is that I made the choice. And it’s how I decided I wanted to be more than a woman who defined herself by what men wanted her, even if I was too stubborn to admit it at the time. All because Marcus annoyed me into it with his macho protective crap.
    I didn’t understand how much that meant at the time. So yeah, it’s kind of funny that I used to think that maybe if it wasn’t for the accident, if my parents hadn’t died, maybe I could have avoided Marcus. Maybe he just would have been the boy who taught me how to box and nothing more. If not for that one stupid accident, if not for the one day my life was wrecked beyond all repair, maybe it all would have turned out differently.
    But probably not, and it’s this memory that tells me that. Marcus helped to shape who I was even before my world ended. He was always destined to ruin me. Fate just helped him to do it quicker.
     
    ***
     
    So I’m thinking about all this in the bath while I’m pretending to debate my options, because it’s a lot easier to think about harmless high school drama than it is to think about what came later, when the shit really hit the fan. I still can’t go there. That’s fine. I don’t particularly want to.
    But I’m in the hot water, naked, with the awareness of Marcus sliding over my skin like a living thing. He moves differently now. I noticed in the bar. Just a subtle difference, like he’s grown into himself, more relaxed about being an apex predator type. Supple. Confident. Leonine.
    It was sexy as hell when he pulled that guy off the bar. I have my own cavewoman instincts.
    I can’t help but think about the other things Marcus taught me. But so many of those are walled off in the garden of Things I Can’t Bear To Think About, buried deep next to a grief that I don’t want to dig up, so that as my mind sifts through all my memories of Marcus in search of something that will help me to understand what I feel, what I want, I come back to the first night we had sex.
    Sometimes