I haven’t looked at another girl since she left. Not one. She’s all I think about. When girls like Trish touch me and say let’s go with their eyes, I can’t imagine anything that might make me want to go. Or remember what made me want to go in the past. All I can think about is Emily.

I look toward the door where Ford, one of the other bouncers, is barring the entrance. Bone, our resident thug, is in the doorway and Ford knows that if he comes within five feet of me, I’ll try to kill him with my bare hands. My younger brother, Pete, is going to get himself into trouble hanging out with Bone. I caught them together talking in the street a few days ago, and I don’t like it. Bone is trouble, and I told him last week to stay the f**k away from my family. Pete doesn’t seem to understand what kind of problems Bone attracts.

I take a step toward the doorway, but Matt is suddenly in front of me, getting between Bone and me. It’s not worth it, he signs.

Would be to me, I reply. I’ve been trying to catch that bastard alone ever since the last time I saw him with Pete. Our little brother suddenly has a phone, and he suddenly has money in his pocket. The boy has a job, but he’s not making enough money to pay for the things he now has. And he puts every dime he legitimately earns into the family kitty to pay the bills.

He’s scum. My hands fly wildly as I talk, drawing the attention of several people around us.

I know, Matt replies. We’ll take care of it, but we don’t need to do it here. He looks me in the eye. You know he’s packing.

One more reason to keep him out of here.

Matt shakes his head. Not tonight.

Dammit. Ford moves to the side and admits Bone when the owner of the club walks over to force the issue. He glares at Ford.

Ford’s a good friend, and he knows how I feel about Bone. All things considered, I don’t want to put Ford into Bone’s line of fire, either, so I’m glad he let him through just for that reason.

Bone smiles at me, looking directly into my eyes as my gaze follows him across the room. Then he slides into a booth and breaks eye contact.

A fight begins at the front of the bar. I clap my hands together to get Matt’s attention. He’s not working tonight. He’s not strong enough for bouncing yet, but he’s here as a wingman of sorts.

I see it, he signs. The big one is drunk.

The big ones always fall the hardest.

And they’re a bitch to pick up off the floor.

Matt laughs. I’m so f**king glad he’s getting back to normal.

I’ll take the little one if you’ll take the big one. He cracks his knuckles and grins at me.

You’re such a pussy, I sign. And you can’t even claim chemo did it to you because you were a pu**y before you got sick. I grin at him.

He shrugs his shoulders and smiles unabashedly back at me. It makes me so happy to see him like this. I watched him deteriorate last fall to the point where we thought he wouldn’t pull through. He still might not, but we have hope.

At least I can get some pu**y if I try. He looks down at the crotch of my jeans. Your dick, however, is going to rot off from lack of use.

I can’t help it if I’m a one-woman man.

He claps a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. When do you think she’ll be back? I need to thank her.

She wouldn’t want any thanks. I shrug my shoulders. I wish I knew.

Matt points toward the fight, which is about to escalate into a full-out brawl. The little guy is dumb enough to shove the big guy. He falls into a woman behind him, and then her boyfriend starts swinging.

Now, Matt says.

Now. I f**king love this part of the job. It takes four of us. Matt, Ford, another bouncer, and I all jump into the fray and quickly have it under control. But the big man is on the floor with his eyes closed. He has a smile on his face. He’s murmuring something, but I can’t read his lips.

I think he’s singing? Matt says, his eyebrows arching in question. Girl you make my speakers go boom boom?

I laugh. People look over as noise bursts from my throat, but I don’t care. Laughter feels good. Emily taught me that. Help me get him up.

Matt takes one arm while I take the other, and we hoist him onto his wobbly legs. His girlfriend, who is pretty unsteady herself, says, “We need a cab.”

Matt and I haul him out to the cabstand and throw him into a taxi. The girlfriend gets in behind him. I feel bad for the cab driver who will have to throw his big ass out on the sidewalk.

I dust my hands off. At least it’s done.

Snow is falling on us, and I brush my hand across my hair. Suddenly, Matt tenses beside me. What? I ask.

He smiles, claps me on the shoulder and says, Take the rest of the night off. Then he points behind me.

I turn around and freeze. My lungs refuse to do their job, and I stand there, not breathing, not moving, trying not to feel anything. But there she is. Emily is standing on the sidewalk looking at me.

She shifts from foot to foot, looking nervous as hell. Snow is falling on her hair, and she’s not wearing a coat. Surely she can afford a coat. Her family is worth billions. Her dark-blond hair, so unlike the black hair with the blue stripe she had when I met her, falls down to the middle of her back, and she has it tucked behind her ear. She’s not wearing clothes from around here. She’s full-on Madison Avenue right now.

But the best thing about it is… she’s mine.

Matt says something to her, but she doesn’t speak to him. She doesn’t break eye contact with me, and I feel like there’s an invisible tether between the two of us.

I look at Matt to tell him I’m going wherever she goes. He grins. I guess we won’t have to worry about your dick dying from lack of use after all.

I’ll see you later.

I doubt it, he says. But he’s still grinning that goofy smile. I want to go and hug her, but I guess you get first dibs.

And last dibs. And all the dibs in between.

He waves to her and signs the word later.

She nods, throws him a kiss with the tips of her fingers, and then starts toward me. Her boots leave footprints in the snow, and I force myself to stay still. I tuck my hands in my jeans pockets to keep from grabbing her.

Hi, she signs.

I can’t stand it any longer. I reach for her so quickly that she startles, but she’s reaching for me, too. I haul her against me, needing to feel her heart beating against mine.

Her breath brushes my ear and f**king tears sting my eyes. I tuck my face into her neck and breathe in the scent that is uniquely hers. She wraps her arms around my waist, and her hands slide into my back pockets. We stand there in the snow like that until I feel dampness on my shirt. I tilt her face up to mine so I can look at her.

“I’m so glad you’re home.” I use my voice because I don’t want to take my hands off her.

“Me, too,” she says. A lone tear tracks down her cheek. I wipe it away with the pad of my thumb.

“You’re back?” I ask.

She nods, turning her head to kiss my palm.

“For how long?”

“Always.” She smiles. God, she can undo me with that smile.

“Promise?” My heart is pounding in my chest.

She nods and draws a cross over her chest. “I swear it.”

“What about your father?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t want to talk about my father right now.”

“I’ll never survive it if you leave me again.” I swallow the lump in my throat.

“Can you come home with me?” she asks.

If I take her home right now, we won’t get to talk at all because I’ll be all over her. “Let’s go get some pie,” I say instead.

Her face falls. “You’re mad at me.”

“I love you like crazy, girl. How could I be mad at you?” I drink her in from the curve of her lips to the way her eyes look almost black in the darkness of the night.

She squeezes my hands. “Is Matt all right?”

I nod. “Thanks to you, yes.”

She exhales, and it’s like a balloon has been emptied inside her. “What do we do now?” she asks.

“Pie,” we both say at the same time. I take her hand in mine and lead her to the diner where we had our first meal together. Pie is safe. Pie is good. Pie will buy me enough time to be sure she still loves me as much as I love her.

Emily

“I guess I don’t have to ask you if you ate today,” Logan jokes. When we first met, he felt the need to feed me all the time. Food was scarce, but I always made do.

“I’ve been too nervous to eat today,” I admit, laying a hand on my stomach, which is suddenly growling. I’m glad he can’t hear it.

“Why nervous?” he asks as he slides into a booth. Sometimes Logan forgets that he’s not signing and uses the minimum number of words possible. It doesn’t bother me.

I open my mouth to tell him how scared I was that he hated me when Annie, the waitress, comes to the table and asks, “Do you need a menu?”

Logan shakes his head and motions to me. He’ll have what I’m having. “Two pieces of apple pie and two root beers.” I say.

She nods and cracks her gum at me. “You look awfully familiar,” she says, her eyes narrowing at me.

Logan takes a napkin and pulls a Sharpie from his pocket. He’s never without something to write with. He very slowly writes the words my girlfriend. It’s slow enough and the letters are spaced far enough apart that I can read them. Then he points to me.

Annie’s eyebrows lift. She twists her mouth into a look of incredulity, but then she shrugs and walks away.

“Why didn’t you talk to her?” I ask. “You do have a voice.”

“I don’t talk to everyone.”

“Mmm hmm,” I hum. “Sometimes I think you like your silent world.”

“I like it just fine as long as you’re in it.” He takes my hand in his and swipes his thumb across my skin. He flips my arm over and looks closely at my tattoo. He looks up at me. “You already knew you were going to leave when you got this.”

I knew these questions were coming. And they have to be answered. “I had already called my Dad and told him I would come home if he would take care of Matt. Yes.”

He drags his finger from my wrist to my inner elbow, and the hairs on my arms stand up as he traces the letters of his name. It’s not a dainty tattoo. It takes up my entire inner forearm. “You called your dad from the hospital that day when they said there was no hope for Matt.”

I nod. “They said he could have a chance if he had enough money. And I had access to enough money.”

His brow crinkles. “Why didn’t you just tell me? You let me wake up alone, and you were gone.”

“Would you have let me leave?”

He drags a hand down his face as though he’s tired. “I don’t know.”

“I didn’t want to argue with you about it. It was Matt’s life or my freedom.” I shrug. “I chose Matt’s life.”

His blue eyes bore intently into mine as he leans forward and cups my neck in his hand. He pulls me toward him. His breath touches my lips ever so gently, and then his mouth slides across mine. I don’t know what I expected, but this isn’t it. He licks across the seam of my lips, and I lift up to press myself closer to him, hopping up on my knees so I can lean across the table. His tongue is a velvet rasp against mine. When he pulls back, I’m breathless.

“Don’t leave me again,” he says.

“I won’t.”

He squeezes my neck, kisses me really quickly, and sits back. I want to go and sit on his side of the table so I can touch him, but he won’t be able to see my lips if I do that. I tap his arm so he’ll look at me. “I want to show you something.”

He raises his eyebrows, and he waggles them playfully. “You had better be ready to show me everything.”

I choke. I’ll show him that later. “Ask me something in sign language.”

When I left, I was a novice at speaking his language. I could follow some things, but not everything. I took a class while I was gone. Now I’m pretty good at it.

He narrows his eyes at me and starts to sign. I started classes at NYU on Monday, he says.

I start Julliard next Monday.

He grins.

Not bad. You practiced?

I took a class.

His mouth falls open. For me?

No, dummy. For me. He grins at that. “Dummy” is a term of endearment in his family. There are a lot more words they use, and none of them flattering, but they love one another like crazy.

My brothers want to see you, especially Matt.

I nod. I want to see them, too.

I take his hand in mine and flip his wrist over so I can see my tattoo on his skin. It’s something I’d drawn when I’d felt hopeless and lost. He put it on the inside of his wrist, and then he added a keyhole so I’d have a way out. It sort of goes with the key on my arm. I drag my finger across the one he wears. It’s beautiful. Just like him.

He shifts in his seat, adjusting his fly. I raise my eyebrows at him. “Something wrong?” I ask. I use my voice because I don’t want to let his hand go.

“Aside from the fact that I’m horny as hell, no.” He laughs as heat creeps up my face. “Let’s talk about the snow or the frozen river or I’ll never be able to get up from here.”

Annie sets two plates of pie and two root beers between us. Logan grins at her. I tell her thanks, trying to distract myself. There’s something I need to ask Logan. I don’t have any right to the answer, and I shouldn’t even care, but I need to know.

He tilts my chin up with a crooked finger. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Logan,” I begin. I take a deep breath. “I left you. And I’ll understand if you moved on. I just want to be sure that you want me now, from this moment forward. Whatever you did or whoever you saw when I was gone is none of my business.” Tears sting in my eyes. I’m forgiving him for whatever he may have done and doing a really poor job of it.