“ ’Course I need you. You’re the love of my life.” It was meant to come out teasing, but my tone only sounded defeated.

“That was so depressing I can’t even roll my eyes,” she murmured. One of her arms suddenly flopped over my chest and tightened around me.

I lifted my hand to her forearm and squeezed back.

Her face was buried in my shoulder, muffling her voice. “I can always count on you for a bear hug when I need it most.”

My next laugh was louder, more genuine. “Is this your version of one of my hugs?”

“Shut up. You’re too big to bear hug, and it really doesn’t make it any easier when you’re lying on the floor.”

I squeezed her arm once more, and said, “Exactly what I needed, Grey.”

She released me and rolled back so her head was barely resting on my shoulder, and blew out a slow sigh. “It wasn’t one of your bone-crushing, breath-stealing hugs, but I tried.”

We laid there in silence for a few minutes as my turmoil mixed with her unspoken questions, filling the darkness above us.

I opened my mouth nearly a dozen times to say something I didn’t want to allow to leave my tongue. As if speaking the words would give them power, would make all of the chaos in my mind real.

“I said you didn’t have to tell me if you weren’t ready, but I know you’re ready. So this is me telling you that you have to tell me.”

Amusement tugged at my mouth for a second before it fell again. “She went on a date tonight.” The words finally tumbled out before I could stop them.

I felt Grey nod. “So I heard. And, no, before you ask, I don’t know who she went with. I found out after you did. But I also heard that you had a, uh—you had . . . you had time with someone of the opposite sex today, as well.” A barely audible gag sounded next to me. “Ugh, God. You, Graham, and Knox have me in a constant state of wanting to throw up.”

I didn’t respond, because at that moment, I was ready to find a wall again. My head needed something hard to come in contact with.

“Deac, tell me why it matters to you that Charlie went on a date tonight.”

“It doesn’t.” My reply was instant; the lie was thick on my tongue, and more than obvious to Grey.

“I’m almost positive I know the answer, but I think you need to hear yourself say it. So why does it matter?”

Christ, why did Grey have to know the three of us so well? Knox kept Harlow from Graham and me, but hadn’t been able to keep her from Grey. And I knew Graham and I were the same—we couldn’t keep shit from Grey because she already knew it anyway. She knew us better than we knew ourselves.

“I have no damn clue,” I said honestly. “I don’t understand it.”

“Not a whole lot to understand,” Grey murmured.

“It’s fucking Charlie, Grey. Charlie.”

“And?”

“She doesn’t talk to anyone.”

“She talks to me,” Grey countered.

“Well, she can’t stand me.”

“You are kind of obnoxious.”

I let her joke roll off without so much as a hint of a smile. “She would hide behind her books if she could.”

“You hide behind a never-ending line of women.”

That stung.

A comment that would normally have me feeling pretty damn proud of myself now made me wince.

“She’s young—she’s so fucking young.”

Grey snorted. “It’s not like she’s underage, Deacon.”

“It doesn’t matter. In my mind, she’s Jagger’s little sister. I remember her in elementary school and middle school and—”

“We all remember each other during those times.”

“And, again, she’s young. I gave Knox so much shit over Harlow’s age, and Charlie is . . . Charlie is . . . what, twenty?”

“Twenty-two,” Grey informed me. “Four years younger than you. It isn’t crazy.”

It was crazy, even if the age difference wasn’t. Because no matter what Grey said, it was still Charlie Easton.

“I think I’ve hated her for the last year and a half,” I admitted suddenly.

I felt Grey shift to look at me, but I didn’t meet her stare.

“How do you go from hating someone—from having that much anger directed at them—to this in a matter of days?”

Day. Hours, I mentally corrected.

Grey sucked in a breath, but it got caught when she tried to speak again. After a moment, she said, “First, why on earth would you ever hate Charlie?”

I finally turned to look at her. One of my eyebrows arched as I waited for her to understand.

It didn’t take long.

There wasn’t much that pissed me off; Grey knew that.

“Deacon, no. No . . . you didn’t—you told her, didn’t you? That’s what the two of you fought about, isn’t it?”

“I love you, Grey.”

And I meant it.

Grey was family. My baby sister even though I was an only child. She was one of the only females who weren’t blood that I would ever love.

“People can’t fuck with the lives of those I love, and expect me to be okay with them or what they did.”

“Oh, Deacon.” Disappointment coated her voice. “You can’t . . .” She trailed off; her head shook against my shoulder. “If you knew exactly what happened, you wouldn’t have ever been able to hate her.”

“Grey—”

“It was messed up, and she was old enough to know what she was doing. She knows that, I know that. But what Ben did to her, the way he messed with her mind with the things he said to her, and after all those years of her feeling the way she did.” One of Grey’s shoulders lifted. “She made a mistake, but it’s impossible to hate her for it knowing what happened to her—especially after.”

The anguish in Grey’s voice for a girl who had slept with her fiancé cut straight through me. As if I hadn’t already known that I’d pegged Charlie all wrong. As if I hadn’t already been rethinking everything I thought I’d known about her. Now I was hearing straight from Grey that I still had no fucking clue at all, that there was still so much I didn’t know about the girl who haunted me, waking or sleeping.

“Look, I already know I was wrong. In thinking that way about her, in saying it to her, all of it.”