i like how i wrote this. sorry for being MIA. love y'all!!!

9. Olivia Ross (Something Bad)

We get to book club ten minutes after we're supposed to be there, because on the way over Luke decided to take a swig of his flask while he was driving my car. Now, I am fully aware that Luke is not an alcoholic, because I would never date an alcoholic and my parents would never let me date an alcoholic. Luke is, however, a master at handling his liquor. He "lubricates" quite often, trying to hide it like I won't notice. I'm very observant, though. I can't tell when he's drunk and when he's sober because Luke is essentially the same in both states, but sometimes he forgets to eat a mint after he's done with his whiskey. Regardless, drinking while driving is a whole new level of reckless than I am willing to accept.

The moment I realized what he was drinking—WHILE DRIVING MY CAR—I of course snatched it right away. Which caused Luke to swerve the car, nearly hitting a pedestrian.

"Liv, what the hell?" was Luke's response to my act of selflessness in the name of safety and legality.

"Luke, do not drink while you're driving! Especially while you're driving my car! It's illegal and dangerous!" I retaliated.

"You distracting the driver by grabbing something out of his hand is more dangerous!" Luke argued back.

We went on like this for five more minutes until Luke found parking. But then when he did find parking, he locked the doors and wouldn't let me out until I gave him back his flask. I refused to give him back the flask, because that would be condoning his unacceptable behavior. In reaction, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and began smoking it, in my car, with the windows rolled up! Lividly, I tried to take away his cigarette, but to no avail. It was a mess.

Luke knows how much I hate it when he smokes. We pretend that he's just a casual smoker, only smoking in high-stress situations or when someone offers him a cigarette on a street corner at midnight. But that's not the truth. Luke smokes when he wants to smoke, and the sad reality is that he wants to smoke quite often. It's a habit he can't kick (no thanks to nicotine), and often he'll use it against me. Like in the car. I took away one vice, so he just whipped out another. The first kills his liver, while the second poisons his lungs.

We eventually manage to get out of the car, after I propose that I'll give him his flask back if he puts out the cigarette. Because my powers of persuasion have always been subpar, this arrangement does not come to fruition, making me wish that I had been an active member on the debate team in high school. What happens is that I end up giving Luke his flask back and he keeps his cigarette. We leave the car. He smokes. But I fume.

Only when we get to Paige's does Luke put out his cigarette. He tosses it to the ground, steps on it, and out it goes. I don't even comment on his littering, because we're so close and I don't need Luke to storm away when the threshold is within our grasp.

We enter the store, stride to the very back, and go into the room where everyone else is already meeting. Emily has taken control of the club, as she often does, leading a guided bonding activity, presumably to stall until Late Liv & Luke show up.

"Olivia!" Emily greets. "So glad you're here. Luke, how are you?"

Luke holds up his thumb, curving in the other fingers attached to the hand.

Emily nods enthusiastically. "Awesome! We were just talking about our weekends. Sit, sit!"

So we sit, sit. I beside Liz and Luke, and Luke beside Ari and me.

Natalie Perry starts speaking, elongating her vowels: "Uuuuuuuh, so aaaaaaas I waaaaas saaaaaayyyyiiiiiing, I haaaad a shoooooot thiiiiiis weeeeeek wiiiiiith aaaaaaa reeeeaaaaaally coooool braaaaand. Theeeyyyy're, liiiiiike, suuuuuper iiiiintoooo aaaaaaniiiiiimaaaal weeelfaaare aaaand stuuuuuuff." In my head, Natalie always takes forever to speak, which is odd, considering in comparison to someone like Ari who chooses her words like she's shooting her last remaining bullets, Natalie speaks superfast. But she has this lax drawl that makes everything she says sound longer. Which is doubly strange, because I read once that she grew up here, in Massachusetts, just like me. (I do not elongate my vowels—if anything, I expunge them).

After Natalie is Mason Grey, who I'm always surprised to see. Natalie has an international face, but she doesn't have the same star quality that Mason has. He lights up a room. I don't even like his music that much—or at all, really—but you can just tell that he owns the room. In part, his face is to blame. He always looks airbrushed, as if he's the glorified After picture on an acne campaign. But to equate Mason Grey to anything acne-related is relatively blasphemous. Maybe a tooth paste ad. His teeth sparkle.

My best friend Piper went through a Mason Grey stage. She's still in recovery, so when I told her that Mason himself was in my book club, she just about fainted after insisting that I was lying. Since then, she has tried to get me to disclose the location of our meetings, but I've refused, not wanting to ruin the routine we have down or bring any extra negative attention my way.

"I'm almost done with filming," Mason says under his breath, like it's no big deal. He's texting (or at least typing) when he speaks. Mason is always on his phone.

"Not to steal Ari's or anything, but we went to the beach one afternoon and saw the sun set," Eric says, all passionate-like. I almost swoon. Eric definitely wins for best boyfriend. Luke sucks at the moment, Mason is a relatively horrendous human being, and Dylan is forgettable. Oliver would be in the running because of his Ivy, but he's too young and too manic. But Eric is supreme. And his jawbone is unparalleled.

"The sunset," muses Ari, "was idyllic."

Then it's Luke's turn. I hold my breath, praying to a g-d that I don't believe in that Luke won't alienate us further with what he chooses to share. "I worked on a gutted house. We did their lighting." I exhale because I think that's all he'll share. But in true Luke fashion, he doesn't stop there: "I also downed a few eight-packs and tried this awesome new blend."

I blanche, mortified.

Luke's rebellious streak is one of the reasons that I fell in love with him as a teenager. I thought breaking the rules was sexy. But then he broke too many rules. He dropped out of a world-class university. He got a blue-collar job. He moved into a dilapidated apartment by himself at nineteen. And now he openly shares his drinking and drugging habits with our book club. The "bad" has lost its appeal.

"Olivia?" Emily prompts.

I recover from my shock and say, "Uh, I went on a nice bike ride with a friend."

"Awesome!" says Emily. "Liz started, so I guess we should probably discuss the book now..."

Oliver poses a question.

I try to follow the responses, but I can't help but scrutinize Luke. Every time he twitches my skin just about screams. Even if he were in a straightjacket, I'd probably wince every time he moved his neck. Everyone else—save for Mason, but Mason is Mason, so he can do whatever he wants—is so well behaved. They all participate in the discussion, or if they don't, then they listen respectfully. Except for Luke.

Luke bounces his knee up and down at the speed of light. He'll sneak sips from his flask. He'll get up to stretch or take a walk. When he takes walks, I hold my breath until he comes back, in part because I'm not sure he will come back. (Fortunately for me, he has yet to not return). Sometimes Luke will whip out his lighter and just play with it, flicking on the flame and then immediately extinguishing it. When he plays with his lighter, my heart stops, because Paige's Turners happens to be an enormously flammable locale. Worst of all, though, is when Emily or someone else asks Luke's opinion. He'll say, "Hmmmm...What?" And then upon learning what, he'll say, "Oh, I didn't do the reading. Sorry." His honesty kills me.

I'm surprised that we've both made it this long in book club without getting kicked out or blown up. In retrospect, I should've said no to Emily when she called me, asking to join this couples' book club. But it's hard to say no to Emily Albert, especially when I wouldn't have been able to keep my sanity during my brief stint at sleep-away camp without her. (It's always comforting to befriend someone who hates something almost as much as you do). So I said yes to book club, which was entirely my fault.

What was also my fault was thinking that Luke Daniels would be okay with going to weekly book club meetings, sitting in a room with intellectuals (or intellectual wannabes like Natalie Perry or Liz) for an hour or so to discuss a book he would never read on his own accord. This was the same Luke Daniels who has never read a single book that he did not want to read, starting way back in seventh grade with To Kill a Mockingbird, as the story goes. I figured that Luke would go along with book club for my sake, putting up with the people and maybe even checking out the SparkNotes on the book so that he didn't appear to be such a blatant outlier. But that did not happen.

While at the beginning Luke tried his hardest to put up with book club for me, as the summer progressed, he stopped trying. In part, his stopping may have had something to do with the current status of our living situation: together.

During the year, I live in a dorm (this upcoming year, I'll live in an apartment in the spring). I go to school. I see Luke sometimes in the evenings, or on weekends. We are not constantly with each other. In the summers, I live at home with my parents. But this summer, I didn't want to live at home with my parents. So I asked Luke if I could move in with him, just until I go to Europe at the end of August. He agreed, probably assuming that the only side effect of having me move in would be an exponential increase of sex. What neither of us foresaw was the constancy.

Though it pains me to admit, Luke Daniels and I are not cut out to live with each other. At least, not at this point in our life. He has been living alone for almost three years, and he has a routine and he knows how to take care of grownup things like paying the water bills and taking out the trash. Enter Olivia Ross, a rising college junior with no prior experience of living alone without an RA. There is no one telling me what to do and I don't really have any obligations. Living with Luke is like having complete freedom, but it's caged and it's terrifying.

Luke is great at living on his own. But I will attest to having slightly hindered his lifestyle this summer. It always just feels like I'm stepping on his toes (and not just because his apartment is so small that most of the time I do step on his toes). He'll get back from a day at work, and I'll want to talk because I haven't seen him all day, and he'll just want to sit out on his micro-balcony, sipping on a beer in complete and utter silence. Even sleeping is a nightmare. Before, when I would just visit him at his apartment, we slept fine together. But now it's every single night and it's just an amalgam of incompatibility.

We're both very passive aggressive, too, so the issues are never discussed. We just go on like there are no issues, which in turn creates more issues. I think that Luke is secretly holding his breath until I'm gone. Then he'll be off the hook for six months. He can drink as much as he wants, there won't be anyone shrieking objections when he pulls out his bong, and he won't have to put up with my "crazy." He needs the break. We both do.

This summer wasn't the beginning of our problems. It's just that this summer put all of our problems under a magnifying glass, amplifying them until they bubbled over into a pool of passive aggression.

In theory, I love Luke with my entire being. In practice, I love the concept of Luke. I like having someone constantly there for me who won't disappear just because I do something a little crazy. Luke always forgives me. We're too far in for him to do anything but forgive me. I think that we're too far in in general.

Luke needs his freedom. I know that he needs his freedom. I'm the one who's preventing him from experiencing freedom to its fullest extent. I feel guilty about that, but I know that he's also partly to blame for that. Luke could've broken up with me any time over the past four years. But he's stayed with me, which is kind of insane when you think about how different we are. I'm glad that he hasn't dumped me because I don't want to let him go. But like that cheesy saying, if you love something, set it free...

Book club ends and I haven't gleaned anything from the group about this week's reading. When I was doing the actual reading, I wasn't fully focused because as I was trying to read Luke was sitting at his sad excuse for a kitchen table, doing something highly illegal that involved substances and fire. But the book has essentially lost its appeal for me by now. I've read Danish books before, and this one is not among the best.

As an avid reader/booklover/bibliophile/whatever you'd like to label me, I identify as a bit of a book aficionada. I have read libraries in multiple languages, and I have explored so many fictional and factual realities. I love books and I love the experience of reading. Unlike Luke, I will read a book even if it's bad or even if I don't particularly want to read it. Because even bad books or books in which I'm uninterested tend to have something to say about the world. I like learning about the world; I like reading.

I say goodbye to whom I need to say goodbye to and I smile at Emily and wave at Oliver. Then I take Luke's hand, gripping firmly, and lead him out of the store, down the street, and over to where the car is parked. He moves to open a door, but I don't let him. Instead, I stand my ground and pull him back in front of me.

"We should stop this," I say.

"What part?" he asks.

"All of it," I reply.

"Are you sure?" he wonders.

"No," I admit, "but we need to."

He smiles.

I set him free.