I’d been watering the plants for forty minutes.
The fuckers drowned some time ago. If I wasn’t careful, we’d have a second pool in our front yard.
It had rained all of yesterday, and the field had been muddy as fuck during the game. But none of it mattered, because Luna was coming home tonight. I’d been watching the Rexroths’ empty garage for nearly an hour, hoping to catch Trent’s Tesla rolling in with his eldest child, to spot Moonshine getting out of the car so I could do the casual oh-fancy-seeing-you-here-it’s-not-like-I-fucking-waited-for-you-for-the-entire-semester-or-anything.
I’d never gone longer than two weeks without seeing Luna—even that had been a one-off vacation—and by fucking God, it had been a form of torture we should apply to child molesters. But not seeing her for months on end? That shit sucked the life out of me.
Her choosing North Carolina came out of left field. I’d been so unprepared, I’d spent the first month too angry to even acknowledge her absence.
Amazingly enough, everyone else seemed to be on board with this bullshit.
Vaughn had shrugged her decision off, and my parents reported she was doing great.
Great.
She was fucking doing great.
Awesome for her.
Not.
Me, I wasn’t doing so fresh. Luna was my center. My fuel. I was running on an empty tank. I’d self-destruct if it wasn’t for Mom. But I couldn’t do it to her. So I ran on autopilot, acting like everything was fine, but as soon as the weekend rolled around, I was all about drinking myself to death and popping whatever pills were available at parties.
Look, I was mad.
Okay, fucking furious, more like.
Luna had left. She’d just left.
I bailed on her ass one miserable night to show her that, in fact, it wasn’t cool to slap me because she was a Jelly Nelly, and she’d. Fucking. Left.
Like my biological mom.
Like Val.
Like the people we hated.
All right, Debbie Downer, time to shut down the pity party before the fun police throw you in the can.
“Just a sec,” I growled, answering Mom when I saw her face peering from the kitchen window.
She was probably wondering what kept me in our front yard. Come to think of it, Mom never called out for me. My bad. But she was here now, leaning against our doorframe, wearing a brown polka dot dress and looking beautiful with her hair twisted in a loose chignon. Rosie Leblanc-Cole offered me a pumpkin cupcake from an orange tray. I shook my head, turning off the hose.
“You are so transparent.” She dipped her finger into a half-baked cupcake, sucking the batter.
She loved half-baking shit. Lived for the batter. I liked that she liked imperfections. It made believing she actually loved me easier.
“Oh, yeah?” I tore my eyes from the Rexroths’ open garage to her.
Normally, I wouldn’t entertain that type of observation, but Mom had more leeway. I wish I could say it was because I was a good son. Truth was, it was because I was a guilty one. Not that I’d done anything overtly wrong, but with Mom’s situation and everything, being a shitface felt excessive and wrong.
“She’s going to be here any minute.” Mom grinned, calling me on my bullshit.
I dug through the pockets of my gray Gucci sweatpants. “Shit, Mom, I think I ran out of fucks to give.”
“Funny, you look like you’re full of them. Why else would you be standing here for four hours straight?”
Forty minutes, four hours. Who was counting? Not this asswipe, that’s for sure. Apologies to California were in order. I might have created a drought.
“Didn’t you tell me to take care of the front yard? Practically begged me, in fact?”
She didn’t need to beg. For better or worse, I was motherwhipped. I hated people who took their parents for granted. My thirteen-year-old brother, Lev, and I didn’t have that luxury. Lev was Mom and Dad’s biological child. I wasn’t. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sting, that I didn’t wonder if they loved him just a little more. That I’d become a quarterback for All Saints High just because I wanted to, and not because I’d wanted to continue my father’s legacy. That the clothes, rowdy reputation, and destructive smile weren’t calculated moves to look and feel like Dad.
That was the real kicker, by the way.
Fate had a twisted sense of humor, because I even looked like my adopted parents. I had the same green eyes as Dean Cole, the same shade of light, copper brown hair as Rosie LeBlanc-Cole. The loss of a parent was a concept I was familiar with, seeing as my birth mother had given up on me. So the idea of losing Mom was…yeah. Not a place I could ever let my mind go.
“What about Poppy?” Mom arched an eyebrow.
Man, Mom was on top of her shit.
“What about her?”
My parents showed up at all of my games. So did Lev, although he sat with Jaime and Melody Followhill because he had the hots for Bailey, their daughter. I didn’t have the heart to tell my little bro that falling in love with your best friend is trash. Akin to sentencing yourself to life in prison. I’d be better off never knowing Luna Rexroth existed.
“That kiss seemed real,” Mom pointed out.
I dropped the hose and headed toward her, to the door. “Hate to piss on your parade, but it wasn’t. I barely know Poppy, and sure, it’d be nice to catch up with Luna, but I’m not waiting for her ass to make a royal entrance.”
I tramped back into the house, peeling my clothes off on my way upstairs and throwing them on the floor. I didn’t want to admit how weak I was for Luna. It was pathetic. And unstoppable. I’d tried getting over her plenty of times, especially the last few months. I wasn’t such a saint that I’d enjoyed twiddling my thumbs and waiting for her to realize we were the real deal.
After taking a shower, I plopped on my bed and tried to ignore the fact that the light in her window was turned on. Instead of peeking into it (bad form), I checked the emails on my phone. There were a bunch from a few colleges I was considering—all close by. Being near Mom was imperative. That meant waving goodbye to college football, but that was a small price to pay. I was good at football—great, even—but my parents were more than capable of paying my way through higher education, and I didn’t want to take the space of someone who needed that opportunity. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to play ball. I did. I just didn’t want it enough to rob someone else of a chance to get out of their shitty ’hood.
I knew a thing or two about getting breaks when you needed them, as an adopted kid who’d hit the parents jackpot. Karma had a sick sense of humor.
“Hey, I know your birth mom sucks ass, but here’s an amazing, one-in-a-lifetime mother. But here’s the real kicker, boy—she’s a temporary mom. She’ll die in a bit. That’ll show you to appreciate people!”
Yeah, screw you, Karma.
In the ass. Sans lube. Sans spit. Sans everything.
I swiped my screen and three text messages popped up, one after the other.
Poppy Astalis: So, this is quite weird and oh so embarrassing, but…I’ve got a voucher for an ice cream place. Not that you need a voucher to afford ice cream. I don’t even know if you bloody eat sugar, being into sports and everything. But I don’t want it to go to waste, and Lenny is busy, and Papa is…well, you know, Papa. So I was thinking maybe…Oh, wow. I should NOT be sending you this message. LOL. Quite clear on that. This is silly. Sorry. But since you’re not going to read it…well, I quite like you. And I quite enjoyed Friday. More than I should have, actually. Okay. Bye.
Poppy Astalis: OH MY GOD. PLEASE IGNORE. MY SISTER SENT IT BECAUSE SHE SAID I NEEDED TO GROW SOME BALLS. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE IGNORE.
I snorted. I made a mental note to let Poppy down as nicely as possible. She wasn’t made of the same material as Arabella. She wasn’t into dating me for the social status or sordid story. Whatever the fuck Poppy saw in me, she genuinely liked it. That made her endearing, even if I thought she was high on the insanity spectrum (and maybe high in general) for seeing me as anything other than a manipulative douche with a hara-kiri streak.
The third message was from Luna. I took a deep breath and told myself it was just my best friend—who I’d spent every single day of my life with, short of the last few months.
Luna: Whenever you’re ready.
It was all the invitation I needed to jam my feet into leather Prada sneakers and head out.
The moon peeked through the clouds, shouldering past the last strains of sunset, and I thought, fitting.
“How do you like this baseball bat?”
Trent Rexroth opened the door, examining the paddle in his hand from all angles. Threatening me with heavy objects had been a running gag in our families ever since it became apparent I was smitten with Luna.
They used the word smitten because batshit crazy wasn’t cute. But everyone knew I was smitten with chicken wings and vintage Tumblr porn, not with Luna. With Luna, I was in fucking everything. Love. Lust. Obsession. Take your pick.
Not that I ever told her that.
Not that I was even sure she knew.
I waltzed into the Rexroths’ house, ignoring the baseball bat Trent swung playfully at random objects. He and I were cool. He and my father, Dean, were actually best friends. Trent had even coached my Little League team back in the day, and he’d introduced me to football. I stuffed my fists into the leather jacket over my hoodie (I didn’t do varsity jackets. Even as captain, they were fashionably insulting.) and followed him inside.
“How’s your middle finger?” Trent asked.
“Still working overtime, sir. Speaking of phallic gestures, Dad said to call him.”
Was I making small talk? I was. But why the fuck? Apparently, I really was on edge.
“Your dad can pick up the damn phone, then,” Trent retorted.
Edie, his wife, called from upstairs, “Language!”
I raised my eyebrows at Trent, and we both laughed as Racer, Luna’s seven-year-old brother, darted from the family room to the landing, thrusting his toy car in my face.
“Knight! Look! Look what my sister got me from Boon! There’s five of them, and it’s not even my Christmas present.”
“That’s awesome, bud. Your sister is a pretty cool chick.” I ruffled his curly hair, looking up at Trent in question.
There weren’t many guys as big as I was, but Trent was one of them. He pointed upstairs.
“Good luck.”
“Why would I need luck?”
“She’s a girl in her late teens. Luck can’t hurt, kid.”
I shook my head, trying to downplay my nervousness. I was pissed. Pissed at the four months we’d spent playing virtual hide-and-seek. Pissed at the slap I still felt on my skin. Pissed at North Caro-fucking-lina. And pissed that I’d kissed Poppy Astalis for the entire world to see. If Luna found out, she would think I’d been dipping my dick in everything that moved.
That wasn’t a true representation of how I’d spent the last four months, and I needed her to know that. Then again, I didn’t want her to know that, because it was so fucking tragic, my goddamn soul wanted to wedgie me.
I climbed up the stairs to Luna’s room and knocked on her door, pushing it open without waiting for an answer. She was sitting on her bed, her MacBook in her lap, and she looked up at me, exactly the same as I remembered her. With perfect gray eyes and that perfect tan skin and those perfect lips—and the slightly uneven teeth, the shit that took her from conventionally pretty to a breathtaking siren. My face broke into a smile, even though there was nothing remotely pleasing about the mess called our relationship.
“What if I wasn’t decent?” she signed, grinning.
“I was counting on it.” I ran my ringed tongue over my lower lip.
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“It’s never too late to rectify the situation.”
“You’re so bad.” She chuckled, shaking her head.
“You’re so good.”
“What’s wrong with being good?”
“Less easy to corrupt.”
Silence.
“Ask me again,” I said.
“What’s wrong with being good?” She rolled her eyes.
“Nothing,” I answered quietly. “Nothing is wrong with you, Moonshine.”
Immediately, Luna’s tight expression melted. She put her laptop on her bed and stood up, moving toward me.
I wrapped my arms around her and inhaled her shampoo, and skin, and entire being, squeezing my eyes shut and thinking, home. How could she feel like home? She went limp in my arms, and I felt her shaking. Sobbing. When she withdrew from me, her face was twisted in pain, but there were no tears. I frowned.
“What’s eating you? Please let it be me.”
She tried to laugh, but it died in her throat. “I need to tell you something.”
“That makes two of us. Ladies first.”
I wanted to tell her: You need to come back. Or maybe we can do the long-distance shit. I don’t care. But you slapped me, and that meant something. It meant that you care.
I also wanted to say, I know you don’t believe this could work, but not trying is no longer an option. For four months I’ve wanted to give you this ultimatum, but it felt weird to do it through Skype. But now you’re here, and I’m not letting you go before we sort this shit out.
Then I wanted to add, I kissed another girl in front of everyone, and it felt like cheating.
And to promise her, It meant nothing. She meant nothing.
Moonshine tapped her index against the side of her thigh, considering her words, when Edie’s voice pierced the silence between us from downstairs.
“Luna! Can you come down, please? Dad and Racer went to get Theo from camp, and I need you to help me choose Racer’s mini-car for Christmas.”
Theo was Edie’s brother. He was autistic, high on the spectrum. He split his time between a developmental center in Orange County and the Rexroths’. Luna hung out with him like a boss, and he loved her so much, he barely tolerated my being close to her. Luna offered me an apologetic smile and ran downstairs, leaving me in her room.
I paced between the turquoise walls. There was a blackboard behind her bed, with a lot of shit she scribbled on it. A couple unfinished to-do lists. Some pictures of her with Racer, Theo, Edie, and Trent. And me. There were some pictures of me. Including one of me licking Luna’s cheek with a mischievous smile while she was screaming her lungs out when we were on a roller coaster at Six Flags two years ago. Luna had been hell-bent on not buying the overpriced photo, but my indulgent ass had bought two copies and slipped one in with my Christmas card. Mainly, I remembered her voice when she’d screamed, how it had sounded in my ear.
Throaty and fun and sexy and…welp, shit. I had a hard-on now.
Think sad thoughts, Knight. Sad thoughts.
How about the fact that it was one of the very rare times I’d heard Luna? How she only produced sounds when she was hurt or surprised or really scared. (Which wasn’t very often, maybe once every few years. She was bad-ass like that.) See? Now the hard-on was under control. Half-mast, at best. I rearranged myself and continued exploring her board.
There were tickets to charity events she’d gone to, letters from selective-mute penpals all over the world, and pictures of rescue dogs she’d helped find homes for, with their new families.
I walked over to her queen bed and plopped down on it, noticing her phone flashing with incoming messages. I liked that she had friends at this new place, even though it drove me mad I wasn’t a part of that section of her life. I wanted to be everywhere. To be unavoidable, as she was to me.
Ping.
Ping.
Ping.
Ping.
So apparently, her college friends were clingy as all fuck.
Then again, Luna would do that to you, with her huge heart and warm smile. I glanced at her phone, knowing I shouldn’t, but feeling my self-resolve tattering.
Moonshine didn’t have any social media accounts. No Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest. She sent us weekly emails telling us how she was doing, sometimes adding pictures of her with her roommate, April. There’d been one picture of a dark horse. I remember being slightly jealous of Onyx, and wondered whether that meant it was finally time to seek professional help for my obsession. But how much did I really know about her life? Only what she was willing to share.
Plus, it wasn’t like I was going to open the goddamn messages. Just glimpse at her screen when the phone was still locked. All I’d have to do was tilt the phone. Fucking sue me for moving it an inch. As it happened, I didn’t even have to do that. The screen flashed with another incoming message before I touched it, ridding me of (almost) all of my guilt.
Josh: Is it crazy that I already miss you?
Josh: I can’t stop thinking about our night together.
Josh: Thank you for giving me your most precious gift. It meant the world to me.
Josh: On the plane heading south to see my parents. Send me pictures of your Thanksgiving table. I’ll do the same. Thinking of you. x
I’d have fallen on my ass if I wasn’t already seated.
I half-expected the floor to open up and swallow me into a black hole as my eyes traced the text messages over and over again. My jaw was clenched so tight, I felt my teeth crumbling to dust.
Who the fuck was Josh? Where did he come from? I hadn’t heard about any Josh. And I spoke with Edie and Trent almost every day. Luna gave him…what, exactly? Her virginity? Yeah, bro. No fucking way. That belonged to me.
Yet there it was. Plain and clear. He thanked her for their night together. For the precious gift she’d given him. I was going out on a limb here and guessing it wasn’t a gift card from fucking Target.
Luna had slept with someone else. Someone else named Josh. He’d touched her and kissed her and spread her legs and put his fingers in her…
I needed to leave.
That much was clear. Not because I didn’t want to demand the entire story behind Josh, but because I knew I was not in any condition to have a conversation with anyone other than a trained assassin, to get rid of Josh. Josh. With his fucking generic name. Josh.
Joshua.
Jesus.
Fuck.
Leave, Knight. Leave. Otherwise, I would lose my shit, and there was no way of knowing what I’d do. I would never hurt Luna physically. But I didn’t trust myself not to say something that would bury her. I didn’t trust myself not to tear her fucking house down, brick by brick, and ruin everything in her life like she’d ruined me. But I couldn’t go downstairs and dash out the door like some damsel in distress. She didn’t deserve to see the devastation on my face when I finally got the wake-up call.
Ring, ring!
“Hello, who is it?”
“Reality. Guess what, dumbass? Luna isn’t different. She just didn’t want your sorry ass that way.”
Feeling pathetic, and subhuman, and half-functioning, I did what I’d done a thousand times before: I opened her window and slipped out.
The words chased me all the way up to my room.
Miss you.
Can’t stop thinking about our night together.
Thank you for the most precious gift.
Slamming the door didn’t help. The text messages seeped through the crack. I could still see and feel them on my eyeballs. My phone started buzzing.
Luna: Knight?
Luna: Where are you?
Luna: Did you go back home? Why?
I paced back and forth, running my fingers through my hair, tugging at it until I felt chunks of it ripping out. Calm down, fucker. Calm down. My body was sizzling with adrenaline, and I knew once I crashed, devastation would take its place. But first, I was going to explode. And I couldn’t explode on her. No matter how much I hated her right now. How much I wanted to smash her fucking heart for doing that to mine.
A few minutes later, Luna put two and two together.
Luna: Oh God.
Luna: I’m so sorry.
Luna: I didn’t want you to find out like this.
Luna: What business did you have looking at my phone?
Find out? Find out what? That she had a boyfriend? That she’d moved on? That she was in fucking love? That while I’d been waiting and pining and agonizing for eight years—since age ten when Lilith Blanco slipped me a note asking to be my girlfriend, and I’d told her it would never be serious, because all the parts of me she wanted already belonged to Luna Rexroth—she was fucking another dude in college. I turned off my phone, stuffed it into my duffel bag, and threw my door open.
“No visitors,” I barked. “And no questions, either.”
Dad yelled at me not to yell. Mom coughed that I was her favorite psycho, and she was here if I needed to talk. Lev was in his room across the hall, probably with Bailey on the phone, listening to her bullshit ballerina stories.
She is friend-zoning you, bro. That’s where your dick goes to die. Break the cycle before Bailey finds herself a Joe or Josh or FUCK.
The doorbell rang on cue, and I heard Dad telling Luna I was under the weather.
Damn straight I was under the weather. I was so far down under the weather, I was in goddamn hell. It was hard to make out Luna’s reactions, because it was in sign language, but Dad kept telling her he was sure everything was okay, and I was a moody sonovabitch, and she should enjoy her time in Todos Santos and not worry about me.
Ten minutes later, I heard scratches outside my window. I was still standing with my back to it, staring at a wall, wondering if it was wood or concrete, and calculating the odds of breaking all my fingers if I punched it.
The scratches turned into knocks.
“Go away.” My voice was too husky, even to my own ears.
I didn’t turn around, because I knew if I did, I’d see her face, and she’d disarm me from my anger. She turned me down three times, slapped me for messing around with other girls, then slept with some douchebag. I had every right to be furious, and I was done being the understanding, designated BFF.
Good thing she didn’t get us friendship bracelets with hearts and unicorns. I’d probably wear that shit, too, just to see a smile on her face.
Another knock on my window.
“Not fucking interested. You’re mute, sweetheart. Not deaf. Even that isn’t real, though, right?”
I began to stuff my gym clothes into the duffel bag just to do something with my hands. What the fuck was I saying? I couldn’t even control the bullshit leaving my mouth. I already regretted it. It was a low blow, no matter what she’d done. As far as she could tell, I’d fucked the better half of the town, in several positions, so I got it—the hypocritical angle. Thing was, I didn’t care.
I didn’t want to be right.
I wanted to be mad.
Mad that Luna, the only girl I’d ever loved, had friend-zoned my ass, not because she had some mega-internal problem with getting it on with a dude, but because I’d gotten it all wrong and she didn’t even like me that way.
Surprisingly, she still went at it on my window.
I wasn’t completely in charge of my actions, or my thoughts, or my emotions, hence I did the dumbest thing in the world. I asked a question I wasn’t prepared to hear the answer to.
“Tell you what—you want to be indulged? For one fucking time, we’ll do it my way. If you didn’t sleep with anyone else, knock twice, and I’ll turn around and let you in. If you did sleep with Josh, knock three times, and do the honorable thing and let me have my fucking moment in private. Because I deserve it, Luna. I goddamn earned it.”
My back was still to my window when Moonshine knocked the first time. My heart, all embers, flared in flames. I fisted the strap of my gym bag and squeezed. Then came the second knock. I took a breath and looked down, noticing that my clenched fist was trembling.
Don’t knock again. Don’t knock again. Don’t, Luna. Don’t.
The third knock had desperation in it. An apology. A silent prayer.
I dropped the gym bag, squeezing my eyes shut.
She slapped my window a few more times, and I heard a rare yelp. She was a frantic animal, begging for help. I heard another slap, then another, then another as she tried to break the glass. I picked up the bag, walked over to my door, and closed it behind me.
For the first time in almost eighteen years, I knew Luna and I faced something I couldn’t fix. Something I didn’t want to fix.
I was fucking done.
