He’d been rubbing my legs the entire time, and I felt a little off kilter that I hadn’t noticed his touch until it was gone. It was bizarre. I’d seen my parents do it, little touches on the back or leg that the other didn’t even seem to notice, but I’d never reached that point with any of my boyfriends. I’d always felt their touch keenly, as if I was waiting to jump out of my skin at the lightest brush of their fingers. I knew him so little, yet it was almost like I expected his touch, feeling out of sorts when we weren’t connected. I told myself it was the situation we were in and tried to ignore the panic and guilt that flared in my belly.

I needed to get my shit together, but still felt like I was seeing and hearing things in a fog when Gram stood up and pulled me to the kitchen table. She was so much more comfortable in the kitchen that I didn’t protest when she sat me down and started puttering around. As she pulled ingredients for whatever she planned on cooking out of the fridge, she explained how she’d talked to Cody’s school that morning on the phone and was waiting for them to call her back with his flight information. My brother was coming home for the first time in months, and the thought of him walking into the mess I was in made me feel like ants were crawling all over my skin.

She was still talking to me in her no-nonsense voice, getting things done even though it felt as if the world was crashing down around us, when the men in the living room started migrating to the kitchen table. Exactly where I was sitting. My body froze, the hand scratching the invisible ants pausing with my nails still embedded in my skin until I felt a familiar hand at the back of my neck.

“Stop scratching, Sugar,” he whispered into my hair as he reached down to pull my hand away from my arm. He leaned down until his lips were close to my ear, and I closed my eyes as I felt his breath. “You’re gonna make your arm bleed. Nothin’s crawling on you, nothin’s itching. Keep those hands off your arms.”

I felt him stand up straight behind me, so I opened my eyes and stared at the table, trying desperately to keep my hands from scratching.

“Rose, I know you got a lot of shit—excuse my language—a lot of stuff going on right now, but we gotta figure out how we’re gonna keep Callie safe,” Asa rumbled behind me, sliding his hand across my neck as he sat down in the chair to my right. “She’s not safe here.”

“Well, you boys are here now, right? Your friend Poet here said we were fine as long as you were here,” Gram replied, turning from the biscuit dough she had on the counter to face Asa.

As they spoke, the men sat around the table, filling up three of Gram’s six white chairs until only the one closest to Gram was empty. The other three leaned up against the walls, watching the scene unfold with little expression on their faces.

“That is true,” the man across from me answered Gram, his accent startling me into looking up. When my gaze landed on his face, he was watching Asa and me with an expression I couldn’t decipher. “But we’re not from around here. Can’t stay here forever.”

“Asa—” I asked in a panic, swiveling my head to look at him.

The man across the table choked on his coffee at my outburst, his eyes shifting between Asa and me.

Both Asa and Gram started to reply, but the man waved his hand in the air as if to cut them off, and surprisingly, even Gram stopped speaking. I wasn’t sure what about him garnered such respect, but I could tell that he was the leader of the group. He had to be a little older than my dad, judging by the white beard that hung down his chest, but he definitely wasn’t as old as my Gram. There was something about him, though; something about the way he held himself, or the look in his eyes that told me he’d seen a lot of the world and very little of it was pretty.

“Before you start bitchin’, give me a chance to introduce myself,” he told the room before moving his eyes back to me. “I’m Poet. Sorry to meet ya under these circumstances, but not sorry to meet ya,” he said gently, and his face transformed into something so tender that I felt a lump form in my throat and had a hard time keeping my tears at bay.

“Now, I’m not saying that we’re going to leave you to the wolves here, darlin’. I can see that you and Grease have something going on and I doubt he’d leave ya even if I told him to. But he can’t stay here and neither can you.”

His words were like a bomb dropped in the middle of the room, and for a minute everyone was silent. I was trying to grasp the implications of his words, but I just couldn’t figure out what he meant. I couldn’t stay there? In Gram’s house? In San Diego? What was he trying to tell me?

Gram eventually found her voice, and when she spoke, it was harder than I’d ever heard from her before. “What do you mean she can’t stay here? She’s sixteen years old! Where else would she go?”

“I mean that it’s not going to be safe for her in San Diego. These boys don’t mess around, and they’re just enough of a pain in the ass that we have to keep an eye on them,” Poet replied calmly, not diffusing the tense situation at all.

“She’s mine,” Asa finally spoke up, his hand tightening on the back of my neck. “They won’t touch her if I claim her. Not if we make sure they know she’s off limits.”

The faces around the room showed shock as what he said sunk in, but I didn’t understand the weight of his words. It seemed as if I was the only one waiting for a punch line, or an explanation, because even Gram had an understanding look on her face as she watched Asa closely.