The Damages by Genevieve Scott

Author:Genevieve Scott [Scott, Genevieve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2023-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

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It got easier to be around Lukas. We started sleeping together after a month or two, and although I wasn’t exactly sure if he was my boyfriend, he had a lot of the qualities I searched for on dating sites—cute, nonembarrassing clothes, no boring job at a mutual fund—so I took a break from dating sites. I still admired his easy confidence, the way he seemed to belong wherever we went. He took me to buy a Christmas tree that we carried to my apartment because he remembered my When Harry Met Sally poster and said that he always liked that scene. When I brought Lukas to my neighbour’s party, I got more unsolicited praise for him than for anything else I could remember. “He’s so tall!” my neighbour exclaimed, as if that were the most enviable trait to have found in a boyfriend. At dinner once, we bumped into the toe-shoe guy, and I felt smug about Lukas’s hand on my elbow. I liked to tell people that Lukas and I were old friends from Canada, and I’d let this trail off on a winking note like, But who can say where it will go from here?

It was a story that worked. But, in the end, Lukas hadn’t really been a friend. After he wrote about my moral degeneracy, I didn’t have a single friend at Regis. But I was prepared to overlook this in 2006. Being with him was like an invitation to reinvent myself, to finally become the person I’d wanted to be. I even had some tremor of an idea that our sordid history would be the thing that could make us work as a couple. He knew I had done some asshole stuff. But I knew that he could be an asshole, too. There was balance and comfort in that.

And Lukas was looking out for me now. He helped me get a lucrative contract in the communications office of the college. On Valentine’s Day, he gave me a vintage mixer and a frilly retro apron. He got us tickets to see Billy Joel in Las Vegas and emailed me a picture of us after the concert with the note: “I love this one. You look beautiful!” The impact of this was huge. For so long, “You can look good” still felt like an accurate assessment of my attractiveness. I let myself think that my ship was finally coming in.

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