Now, I knew that when you’re left with no choice—you can handle it. It just hurts like a thousand bitches in heat.

“Moonshine. Can I get you a beer?” I blocked her way to the other girls in Vaughn’s kitchen with my huge frame, rolling my pierced tongue along my lower lip. Long gone were my five-eleven days. I was a little shy of six-three now, with the width of an industrial washing machine, hard and muscled head to toe.

These girls, they hated her. She’d hung out with Vaughn and me, the most popular guys in school, until she’d graduated. Spent summer vacations and trips to the Maldives with us and with Daria Followhill, the alumna Queen Bee of All Saints High. Luna was cool as shit by association, and fuck knows she tried hard not to be.

It didn’t bother me that Luna and Vaughn were tight. I trusted both of them. There was still a dull pang of pain every time she as much as breathed in the direction of a guy who wasn’t me, but I’d learned how to control it over the years.

Mostly.

Now, Luna flashed the girls behind me the middle finger. By their lack of reaction, they either didn’t see it or knew they’d never get away with answering her without feeling my wrath.

“What brings you to the lion’s den?” I brushed my scarred knuckle over her cheek slowly, watching in awe as goosebumps broke over her neck.

She took the beer from my hand, tilted it back to take a small swig, then pointed at me with the neck of the bottle. All eyes in the kitchen were on us, but I was used to the audience. Luna, not so much.

“Just make sure to bring him back in time for our round two!” Arabella barked, staking her claim on me tonight.

Her mini-dressed clones laughed like hyenas.

Luna gave her a hard stare, then pretended to shove her finger down her throat. I bit down a smile. Luna turned back to me.

“Spencers’ bedroom. Five minutes.”

The Spencers’ bedroom was soundproof, which was something Hunter and I gave Vaughn a lot of shit about. Didn’t make any difference that Baron was Vaughn’s dad—it still must’ve sucked to know someone was fucking your mom so hard she needed special walls not to wake up the neighbors.

Even though I couldn’t hear Luna’s tone, I knew she was pissed. I could read it in her delicate frown. Not that she had a case. Way I saw it, she’d rejected me—not once, not twice, but three times. What did it matter if I wanted to fuck every mouth in this room? We weren’t together.

“Wrapping shit and coming up.” I took a sip of my drink, turning around and slapping Arabella’s ass on my way to ask Vaughn for his parents’ bedroom keys.

I was being a little spiteful, but I gave myself some slack because of the extreme circumstances.

Right now, my breath was goddamn near flammable. Substance abuse ran in my family, so usually, I tried to limit myself to one joint and a beer at every party.

But usually I didn’t find out Mom was officially no longer a candidate for a lung transplant, which meant her team of doctors had basically given up on her.

Today, I did.

My mother was sick. Really sick. Rosie had cystic fibrosis. She’d been lucky to reach forty, let alone pass it by a few years. Recently, her treatments had become more intense, more frequent. She stayed at the hospital for longer periods of time. Sometimes weeks. Her lungs weren’t coping. The rest of her body wasn’t doing so hot, either. From the outside, she looked fine. Gorgeous. Vital. But inside, her liver and kidneys were collapsing. So was our family.

Frankly, I was surprised Dad hadn’t ripped out his own lungs and tried to shove them down her throat when he heard about it. It had sent me on a binge this evening, and I wasn’t completely in control of what I was doing. All I knew was I needed to numb the pain of Mom not getting her lung transplant and seeing her earlier, hunched over Dad’s office desk, crying.

Five minutes later, I pushed the bedroom door open, letting Luna in and locking it behind us. The Spencers had the wildest bedroom I’d ever seen. If Pimp My Ride and Buckingham Palace had a lovechild, it’d be this place. Royal navy drapes decorated floor-to-ceiling windows and a matching upholstered, California King bed filled the room. Everything else was in gold or deep, blood red, and there were self-portraits of the Spencer couple on the walls in sexy poses I was pretty sure we had no business seeing—the reason they locked this bitch whenever they weren’t home.

I watched Luna slump on their bed, looking up at the ceiling and making a snow angel on their sheets. She looked faraway. Spaced-out. Perching a shoulder against one of the posters of the bed, I watched her, already on the defense.

“Why do you give yourself to anyone who asks?” There was a snow globe of unshed tears coating her eyeballs when she asked this.

Interesting, coming from Luna, who’d gone to extreme lengths to ignore my antics with girls this past year, as well as the fact that there was a dick attached to me in general. I cocked my head to the side, inspecting her. I wasn’t an asshole—definitely not to her, and maybe not at all. But she was seriously overstepping if she thought she had a say in what—or who—I was doing in my spare time.

“Because I enjoy it.” I shrugged.

She gave me a you-don’t-look-like-you’re-enjoying-it glare.

“Jealous?” I smirked.

She rolled her eyes.

“There’s enough to go around. If this is a booty call, I’ll gladly pick up.”

No fucking way I was risking another blow to my ego—a fourth one—weeks before she started her college courses and could ghost me, even from across the street. I no longer had leverage on her. The All Saints’ hero everyone was afraid of but also admired had officially retired from protecting her at school. I needed to play my cards more carefully to keep her around.

“When did you become such a sexist jerk?” She narrowed her eyes.

“Right around the time I was born. It’s called being a guy.”

I was reducing myself to my reputation, something I knew she loathed. After all, she was the weirdo who wouldn’t talk. She knew that between the stigma and the person laid an open abyss, and in its depth, the truth.

“Don’t give me credit I don’t deserve. I work full-time for my dick and take orders directly from him,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood.

She snorted out a sarcastic laugh, shook her head, and swung her legs to the side of the bed, darting up and making her way to the door.

“Good talk, Knight.”

Whoa. Back. The. Fuck. Up. What?

She didn’t get to shut me down two thousand times and then get pissy when I tried to move on. Or pretended to, for that matter.

I clasped her wrist and turned her around so she faced me. “You came here to throw shit at me?”

There was some anger in my voice, and it made me furious with her. I tried so hard to accommodate whatever wish she had for us. When she wanted kisses, she got them. When she wanted friendship, she got that, too. What about what I wanted from her? What I needed?

“Because I have nothing to apologize for. If you’re here to pick a fight, wait till I’m done with the party. I’ll climb up to your room, and we can talk shit out. Oh, wait, that’s right. You don’t talk.”

“Shut up, dumbass. Shut up before you ruin eighteen years of friendship in one drunken night.”