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Lucas
Bella slouched in her seat, wrapping the jacket further around her arms, glared straight ahead, and avoided looking at Preston.
Lucas carefully shut the door, and though the night’s brisk wind cut straight through his dress shirt, Lucas gave Preston one last grin and a mock two-fingered salute. Preston seethed, eyes locked on Lucas as he walked around his beat-to-hell car.
Worth it.
Chris’ comment from that morning, She’s thinking about him, kept echoing in the back of his mind. Yeah, she was thinking about Preston but sitting next to Bella now, he saw her eyes well up and her lip tremble. Lucas' stomach churned. Sure, Bella thought about Preston, which was tearing Bella apart when she did.
"Just drive," Bella moaned, sliding low in her seat to become invisible.
“Home?” Lucas asked after pulling out of the parking space and into the relatively (in New York standards) light post-rush hour traffic.
Bella curled in on herself and made weird twisted faces at the dashboard while mumbling under her breath. As close to a yes as he was going to get. As they passed under streetlights, he saw the blotchy red patches on her cheeks grow brighter, then she turned a bit green, clutching her stomach.
Lucas let a comfortable silence settle between them.
Years of being best friends, and he'd only seen her cry a handful of times before coming home from Frontier Doctors. And countless more crying sessions since returning home.
After circling her block several times, Lucas found a parking spot up the street from Bella’s building and shut off the car. He turned and stared at Bella, still making faces at the dashboard.
“Bella?”
Lucas waved his hand in front of her face, trying to snap her out of her stupor. She didn’t react. He did it again and again, each pass getting closer and closer to her nose until he...boop!
Bella jumped a foot out of her skin. “What?” She squealed and smacked him.
Which stung. A lot. But he hid the wince and jutted his chin at her building down the street. “Home,” he said and ruffled her hair.
She heaved a huge, heavy sigh. Lucas got out, and even when he came around, she still hadn't opened the passenger door.
“Come on,” Lucas said, knocking on the window.
Bella blatantly refused to move. Slouching further in the passenger seat.
“Bella?”
Lucas opened the door and stared long and hard at her. He was actually tired, and his eyes itched terribly from too long in his contacts. Balling his fists, he stopped himself from rubbing his eyes. Bella stayed slumped in the passenger seat, resolute in staring straight ahead.
Fine. Lucas pulled both of her hands, hoping all she needed was a slight push to move. But she sat there.
Lucas repeated, “Come on.”
Fissures formed in her Preston-induced bad mood. Bella glared at him, a grin hiding behind her sour face.
Lucas gave her one more shot. “I’ll do it.”
Thank God for the dark night and not being under a streetlight. His cheeks burned hot, but Lucas followed through on the threat. It always, without a doubt, made her smile. He bent, snatching Bella's waist, and lifted her out of the car onto his shoulder.
“Lucas!” Bella squealed. Legs flailing wildly. “Put me down!”
A sharp poke hit him between the ribs. His arms hopped off Bella’s legs for a moment. She let out a sharp yelp, and he grabbed hold again before she fell.
“Truce?”
He tried to turn and see her, but all that was there was...her...no. Lucas bent and set her down on the sidewalk, Bella still full of giggles.
“Truce,” she agreed.
"Better?" Lucas asked.
She jabbed his shoulder. Bella caught the suit jacket before it fell and said, “Better.”
Lucas stopped to adjust the jacket to fit her better. His fingers lingered at her shoulders. The way she played with her lip, chewing on it, turned every last thought of his to mush.
“You coming up?” Bella broke through the mushy state.
“Pfft. Of course,” Lucas said, stuttering on each word. He recovered poorly from his stupor.
Bella always asked, without fail, if Lucas wanted to come up. And Lucas never said no. Especially when she’d been crying. Her eyes were already glassy again, a new threat of tears rearing its ugly head.
Bells turned out of his grasp and forced herself to appear chipper, skip-hopping to the door of her building.
Lucas looked up at the line of tall windows embedded in the red brick building above the door. Bella's building was older, single pane windows dripped with condensation clinging to the glass, lit by multicolored Christmas trees near the windows.
Inside the front door, Bella released his suit jacket only long enough to retrieve her mail from the wall of locked metal boxes and gasped, “OOOH, I may have just won $10,000.”
He took the sweepstakes letter and tapped her head the rest of the way up the stairs. In a series of jumps and dodges, they made their way through the dimly lit stairwell up to the third floor and Bella's apartment.
Over the last 24 hours, this was what was missing. This version of Bella. The world felt almost right again.
Lucas chuckled or ruffled her hair while she joked. Inevitably, her jokes hiccuped, and he saw it again. Preston's effect peeking through. They were at the third-floor landing when Bells gave up and sighed, and the jokes were done.
He hadn’t even thought of which question, burning in the back of his mind, to ask. What did Pres say? Are you okay? Can we file some legal documents or restraining order against him?
But Bella preempted him with, “Don’t bring it up,” while she jabbed the key in her lock and wiggled it around. Eyes piercing into his soul in the same unsettling way her mom could.
Okay. Fine. He won’t bring Preston up. But there was one other, tiny question bothering him. “Did you leave the mac and cheese at the clinic?”
A light dawned on her face, a mixture of mortification and depression.
"I mean...it went well with that suit," Lucas teased. That earned him a more brutal jab to the same shoulder from before. He pressed on, "I know nothing about color but —"
Third jab. That one hurt.
Bella began wrenching the key so violently he feared she'd break it off in the lock again. Lucas took over. In one swift move, he brought the key up and leaned in. The door gave.
Like many New York apartments, Bella's apartment reminded Lucas of a long closet. It was the exact opposite of his spacious, boxy apartment, the type of apartment an Astor should be living in.
They walked straight into the tiny living room. On cue, Bella's stomach groaned. Bella let out an agonizing moan. She flopped face first over the back of the couch right past the doorway, dragging his suit jacket over her head. Lucas ignored her and walked into her tiny kitchen. The small room consisted of a few cabinets, a breakfast bar, a sink, and a sliver of counter space for cooking next to her refrigerator and stove.
Through a door behind the kitchen, Bella's spare bedroom had been retrofitted to be a home gym but currently gathered dust.
“So,” Lucas said as he glanced at the pile of limbs and cloth, “should I make you dinner?”
Bella mumbled into the pillow.
“I’ll take that as a —” Lucas started as he swung the fridge door open and heaved his own sigh. “You have ketchup.”
Bella appeared at the fridge door so quickly that Lucas jumped.
“It’s a perfectly normal condiment to have in the fridge!”
Under normal circumstances, he would laugh at the joke and her fridge, but he was also hungry. His eyes were itching, almost burning, and he was as done with the day as Bella. He'd seen Preston Warren more times in two evenings than he'd seen him in the last six months. Particularly considering Preston was one of the legal councils for Astor Pharm.
Lucas said, “It’s the only thing in your fridge!”
Her hand grabbed the door and pulled hard. “It’s not...”
But the evidence was undeniable. There was nothing in Bella's fridge other than packets of ketchup. Not a bottle, but packets from takeout.
“What are you? My mother?”
“Don’t compare me to your mother,” Lucas replied. An icy shiver shook him to the bone.
Bella abandoned the joke. Her smile faded, and she lost focus on the conversation and the fridge.
Worried he would make whatever Bella was feeling worse, Lucas went back to searching her kitchen and overthinking what to say next.
She was out of everything. No rice, pasta, or canned vegetables. He searched through her pathetic excuse for a pantry, the freezer, even the cabinets over the fridge she couldn’t reach without a chair. Nothing.
Sitting on the counter, Bella’s eyes fixed on her Astor Pharm badge. She kept extending it out, then letting the badge snap back in.
He had to do something. This was torture watching Bella spiral.
“I missed a meeting today.”
She looked up at him, and he coughed nervously. Was this the right thing to bring up?
Lucas balled up his fists again to keep from rubbing his eyes. He should have taken his contacts out at the office and thrown on his glasses. But he had to press on. Not scratch.
“Is this some bad joke?” Bells asked.
“No joke. Chris came looking for me.” Chris thought Lucas had done something drastic after their talk that morning and was hiding in a corner in utter embarrassment. He was hiding in a corner somewhere in the building. More out of fear. “I think Daniel set me up on purpose.”
“Twice in two days? That would be a record. Wait...what does Daniel have to do with you missing a meeting?”
“I had his phone and still can’t figure out why or how. And then Lina called...”
"Oh, God!" Bells paused mid-pull on her badge. "You picked up a call from my mother?"
"I - well, in my defense - I thought it was my phone, and if your mother ever called my actual phone and I didn't pick up, I think I'd end up in the Hudson. I don't think it mattered. Pretty sure your mother thought I was Daniel. I couldn't get a word in edgewise.”
“Couldn’t? Or couldn’t?” Bella said. Her badge snapped back to her belly. “You couldn’t speak at all, could you?”
No. Exactly zero words were actually exchanged with Lina Astor during her tirade about the whole ‘Preston Warren debacle.’
“Your mother can freezer burn souls. We’re talking whole stadiums at a time. It’s freaky.”
There it was. Bella broke the bonds of Preston’s influence over her. He just needed that hold to crack a little more.
“Does my torture amuse you, Dr. Astor?”
Dimple in the smile. There was his Bella.
"Nope," Bella said. Her smile widened, and her teeth showing through made his heart skip a beat. "It's nothing. Go put your glasses on. Spares are in the bathroom."
Lucas caught himself rubbing his eyes. Clearly, Bells saw it too.
But he wasn’t done. “Classic deflection, Bells.”
“God! You were talking to my mother!” She slapped his sore shoulder and said, “You’ve been clenching your hands. You don’t want to rub your eyes. Go!”
Lucas scooped her off the counter, back onto his shoulder without preamble. She squealed again, battering his back playfully. He dropped her on the couch in a heap and moved to the bathroom, searching for his spare glasses.
Safely ensconced in her closet-sized bathroom, Lucas took out his spare contact case and solution from the medicine cabinet. His eyes burned, but he got the contacts out, then washed his face. Lucas was overheating. He couldn't do this.
Part of him took Chris’ annoying talk that morning to heart. Preston was stuck in Bella’s mind. Maybe it was time for him to tell her how he felt. See if she felt the same.
But Lucas ran through every scenario before, during, and after work. Most ended in Lucas losing Bells as a friend (either because she completely and utterly rejected him or broke up with him because they weren't compatible), his job, moving back in with his parents, and never working a managerial job ever again.
Actually, every scenario ended like that, eventually.
God, he could not tell her. What would Lucas be if he told her and they started dating? A rebound? Five years after the fact, but still...he'd be a rebound. He wouldn't be the rebound and lose her. And he certainly was not going to add to her emotional overload when Preston was busy freshly tearing open that wound he left with her.
No matter how much he wanted to finally tell her.
The door creaked open, Bella standing there in her rumpled scrubs, rumpled hair, bags under her eyes, holding out a cereal bar. Her eyes were red again; unlike her usual self, she stared at the bars in her hand. Not her head held high. Not exuding that Astor confidence in the face of everything.
“Found these in the cabinet.”
"Let me guess," Lucas said. He dried his face. Pawing around for the glasses case, Bella beat him to it and handed them to him. "You rushed out this morning? Didn't even know you had these?"
“Nope. I...”
“You’re a terrible liar.” Lucas brought back Bells’ old insult against him.
She lost that glow she got when she laughed for real and fiddled with the wrapper.
“Thank you,” Bella said, wobbly voice and all.
He pulled her in for a hug, resting his chin on her head. “Any time.” Damn the fact that the wobble was contagious.
“You look good, Holt,” she teased. The same thing she always said when he put his glasses on, but this time into his chest. Her voice, though, was growing steadier again.
And that was enough for his cheeks to grow hot. Thankfully, she was tucked in and couldn’t see his face.