All the Days of Her Life by Lurlene McDaniel Read Free Book Online

not Mr. Wonderful. He’s just a guy.” A guy who didn’t care, who’d never care about her, the way Jeff did, the inner voice reminded her.
    Once they returned to the party, they discovered Todd guzzling beer with a group of guys, oblivious of Lacey’s presence. Lacey stared in dismay. She certainly didn’t want to be in a car with a drunk driver.
    “The guy’s too smashed to take you home,” Jeff told her. “I’ll take you.”
    “You don’t have to—”
    “What will you do? Hitchhike? Call a cab?”
    Knowing she didn’t have many choices, Lacey nodded. “All right.”
    “Are you going to tell him you’re leaving?”
    She looked at Todd, at the beer oozing down his chin, at his arm draped around the shoulder of another girl. “He won’t notice. Let’s go.”
    During the drive home across the causeway spanning Biscayne Bay, she and Jeff didn’t speak. Once he parked in her driveway, she reached for the car door handle. He pulled her hand away. “Don’t beso skittish, Lacey. I’ll walk around and let you out. You’re not my prisoner.”
    When he took her to her front door, she stood for a moment, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot. “Thanks for the ride. I did need one.”
    “I hope you heard some of the things I said to you tonight.”
    “I know what I’m doing, Jeff. What’s right for you isn’t right for me.”
    “And I don’t mean anything to you, do I?”
    “You’re my friend.”
    “Big deal.”
    She couldn’t back down now. She couldn’t let him know how she really felt about him. It would ruin everything. “We were friends at Jenny House. We’re friends now. What’s wrong with friends?”
    He shook his head. “Because I don’t want to be your friend. I want more than that. Time is short for me, Lacey. I never know from day to day if I’ll have a bleeding episode, or if I do, if I’ll make it through. You’re wrong if you think I’ll settle for only being your friend.”
    “You’re
wrong. We
are
friends. If you go to the hospital, I’ll visit you. All you have to do is call me.”
    He pinned her with a hard stare. “You do whatever you want. You always do anyway. Like I said, I’m not holding you prisoner.”
    She watched him disappear into his car in the moonlight.
You’re not my prisoner
, he’d told her. She felt tears brim in her eyes. He was wrong about that.

Eight

    “W HERE’D YOU RUN off to Saturday night?”
    The question came from Todd, who’d cornered Lacey in the prop room Monday after school and before the start of play rehearsal.
    “I’m surprised you noticed,” Lacey said breezily, hoping to disguise the sense of ambivalence she felt toward him. She was still attracted to him, but she didn’t want him to think he could walk all over her.
    “I noticed all right.” He caught her arm. “And I don’t appreciate it. When I take a girl out, I expect her to stay with me and go home with me. Someone told me you left with another guy.”
    “And I expected you to stay with me at the party. I saw you hanging all over some redhead at one point, and I figured I’d been replaced.”
    “Well, you figured wrong. I was just dancing withher. But so what? You didn’t have any right to leave with somebody else.”
    Lacey gave him a frosty stare and pulled her arm free of his grip. Her knees were shaking, but she sensed that Todd was used to getting his way with girls and she didn’t want to simply be another trophy for him. “So sue me. I went home with a guy I already knew because you were
blotto
and I don’t ride in cars with
blotto
drivers.”
    “I had a few drinks. Maybe if you had a few, you wouldn’t be so uptight all the time. What’s the matter with you anyway? Don’t you know how to have a good time?”
    There was plenty she could say about why she didn’t drink—everything from “It’s illegal” to “I don’t like the taste.” Naturally, the foremost reason was her diabetes, and she’d
never
volunteer that information. “Why do