Till Death Do Us Part {Completed}

Chapter Eighteen - Life Confessions

            The ride to the party was silent.

I hadn’t exactly been expecting fanfare and bubbly conversations, but Lucas was unusually quiet. Normally he had the radio on or we were chatting about something or he was humming to himself, but now the whole interior of the car was silent, and the tension felt like it was pressing in on me from all sides. It was majorly awkward, and I twitched uncomfortably in my seat, feeling the need to fill up the tense silence with useless babble, even though this was probably a time when I should be staying quiet and letting Lucas dwell in his own thoughts.

“So, did you enjoy prom?” I asked, keeping my tone light, as if I weren’t contemplating sending him to jail and ensuring a life of misery.

Lucas was silent for a second as he took a turn off into a quiet suburban street, before he nodded. “It was great.” His voice lacked any real enthusiasm, though.

“Psyched about getting Prom King?” I continued on, even though I knew I should just shut up. I hated silence, but this was way too much for me to handle. Even if I planned on exposing him in an hour, I still wanted to have a civil conversation and act as normal as possible before my life changed. I didn’t want him to suspect anything before we got to the party, and being all gloomy would not help me in that department.

“Totally,” was Lucas’s intelligent reply.

I sighed and leaned back in the warm leather seat, clasping my hands formally on my taffeta-covered knees. “Okay, what’s up with you? Why are you suddenly so quiet and depressed?”

He sighed in return, his strong jaw clenching. “I just think you’ve been acting really weird lately, and I’m not sure how to act around you.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling offended. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked snippily, turning to throw him a dark glare.

He shrugged, but he seemed a lot darker and unstable now. “One minute you’re all somber and mourning Finn’s death—a guy you didn’t even know—and the next you’re all happy and chipper and asking me if I enjoyed getting a freaking crown? Sorry for being a little confused, Lacey. I’m just trying to figure you out, that’s all. I mean, I know girls are supposed to be confusing, but your mixed signals are beginning to give me whiplash.”

“Sorry for caring about him!” I replied peevishly, ignoring the second half of his comments. I knew that girls were hard for boys to figure out, but has he ever tried attempting to read a boy? That’s an impossible task, and he was being awfully hypocritical by complaining to me about mixed signals. After all the hot and cold flushes I’ve been getting on the ‘Lucas-is-a-murder’ front, I was the equivalent of both sides of the equator. Maybe I had been a little obvious about Finn. But I’d only wanted to spook Lucas. But a thought was dawning on me, that maybe I’d taken it too far and tipped him off. If so, I was most definitely screwed. “He’s an eighteen year old boy who died, Lucas! Your best friend. I was doing it for you.”

He paused for a moment, as if he were trying to puzzle that out and figure out if I were being honest. As if he hadn’t considered my admission before. Honestly, neither had I, but I’d sprouted it out in the heat of the moment, and it seemed like a pretty plausible excuse, so I was going to stick to it, even if it killed me.