Starcrossed

having with his father and uncle.
    “I’m supposed to watch Helen tonight,” Jason said apologetically.
    “And I have my bike,” Helen said. She couldn’t bear to be with him alone.
    “I don’t care,” Lucas replied bluntly to them both. He stared down Jason for a moment, speaking volumes with his eyes, then turned back to Hector. “I need your truck,” he said with barely controlled anger. Hector nodded, glancing over at Helen and back at Lucas with something approaching sympathy.
    Lucas grabbed Helen’s hand and pulled her outside. He loaded her bicycle into the back of Hector’s SUV, held Helen’s door open for her while she got in, and drove out of the garage without a word. Once off the Delos property he pulled over into one of the many scenic park-and-gawk spots and turned in his seat to face Helen.
    “What’s going on?” he asked, angry and frustrated and frightened all at the same time.
    Helen didn’t have an answer for him.
    “Will you at least tell me what I did wrong?”
    “I already told you, you didn’t do anything,” Helen said to her lap.
    “Then why are you treating me like this? Look at me,” he pleaded, taking her hand. She stared at their linked hands like it was the first time she had ever seen anything like it.
    “What the hell is this?” she asked. She pulled her hand out of his with disgust. “You know what? I take it back. You did do something to me. You led me on.”
    Lucas’s whole face crumpled. Helen had had no reason to hope after what she had heard the night before, but for some reason there was a tiny spark still glowing in her that maybe, somehow, she had misunderstood. Or that he would change his mind. It went out completely when Lucas nodded.
    “I led you on,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut and clenching his fists so hard Helen thought for a moment he was going to rip the steering wheel off. His voice was harsh, almost a snarl. “You and I can’t be together, so just get it out of your head and move on.”
    Helen unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car.
    “Wait, please,” he started to say, almost as if he was in pain, but Helen slammed her door shut and cut him off.
    “Wait for what? For you to tell me that I’m a really nice girl but you’d never touch me? Thanks, I got that part already. Now open the back so I can get my bike,” she bit out. Her voice was foreign to her, so bitter and loaded with sarcasm that it sounded like someone else’s.
    “I promise I won’t say anything the rest of the way if you don’t want me to. Just let me take you home,” Lucas replied calmly. She hated that he was calm.
    “Open the damn door, or I’ll rip it off!” Helen yelled back.
    She knew she was making a fool of herself, throwing a tantrum in the middle of the road like this, but she couldn’t stop. Humiliation was leaking out of every pore and she needed to get away from him fast. She didn’t want to leave anything behind, either—nothing that would force her to come back to him later to ask for what was hers.
    She stood at the back of his car with her head down and her arms crossed tightly over her sore heart. She knew he was looking at her in the rearview mirror, so she angled her body away. Finally, he popped the back. She got her bike out and rode off without another word.
    When she got home she fell into bed without even taking her clothes off. She could hear Jason moving around on the widow’s walk as he settled down for the night, but she didn’t feel guilty about leaving him up there. All Helen wanted was to run as far away from the Delos family as fast as she could.
    She was on the edge of the dry lands, in a new place that she had seen from a distance, but had never thought she could reach. It was still rocky, but interspersed with the tufts of razor-sharp grass, there were tumbledown drums of mason-carved marble, a thousand Parthenons’ worth of scattered columns. There had once been an empire here. No longer.
    Far off, there was the promise of a river. Helen couldn’t tell if she could hear it, or if she felt the extra part per million of moisture in the air, but she knew there was running water nearby. She felt so dry and empty inside. Where was the river?
    As she searched, she looked down at the fallen architecture and read the names graffitied on its sides. Gracus loves Lucinda. Ethan loves Sarah. Michael loves Erin. For what seemed like days she ran her fingers over the names carved into the fragmented bones of ruined