Avery grabs the shifter as she turns on the headlights. “I was thinking about going to the The Vibe. They’ve got some really good food and music and it’s not as rowdy as some of the other shit around here.” She drives onto the road, the wind sweeping through the roofless vehicle. “You guys are all twenty-one, right?” She specifically glances at me from over her shoulder and I almost laugh. That’s a first. Usually people think I’m older.

“I’m twenty-three,” I tell her, then just because, I decided to throw it back at her. “You don’t look old enough, though.”

“Twenty-two.” She winks. “But I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“I meant it as a compliment.” And now I’m flirting.

Quinton glances at me, arching a brow, like Really, you’re going to go there? Avery seems to enjoy it, still smiling as she turns around in her seat.

“What?” I ask him, playing dumb.

“Nothing.” He shakes his head, then leans toward me. “Be careful, man. Remember, she’s the person we’re building a house for and it’s not going to go over well if you hook up with her and bail out the next morning.”

I glance up front to see if Nova and Avery are paying attention, but they’re chatting about bands. Nova plays the drums and Avery plays the guitar and they both seem excited about this.

“Who said I’m planning on hooking up and bailing on her?” I ask quietly.

“You have that look in your eyes.”

“What look?”

He gives me an accusing look. “The one you get right before you hook up and then leave the girl two seconds later. I know the drill man. I used to do it too, remember.”

“Hey, maybe I’m planning on hooking up with her and sticking around for a while,” I say.

“In the four years we’ve been around each other,” he says. “I’ve never seen you ever once stick around.”

I want to tell him that’s not true. That I stuck around for Nova, even when we didn’t hook up. I almost do too, mainly so he’ll get pissed and I can go get high without worrying about him keeping an eye on me. But Nova and Avery are in the car and I don’t know Avery and Nova’s seen enough of the ugly in me for a while. So I keep my lips shut and I kind of zone out for the rest of the drive, thinking about Ryder. I feel bad for not going home, but not because of my mother. Ryder was a good sister. Things were easier when she was there. When I was younger, she saw me when I was invisible to everyone else in my family. I should have gone home, if nothing else, for her.

Guilt creeps up inside me and I want nothing more than to quiet it the one way I know how. I put my hand into my pocket and feel the plastic in the palm of my hand. God, what I’d give to pull it out now.

The sky gets darker as we merge into the heart of the small town, the buildings lining the sides of the roads lighting up the night with their signs and flashing lights. I start flicking my lighter restlessly, needing to light up, but I’m not about to do it somebody else’s car. So I wait until we’re parked, then I hop out and quickly light up, feeling my heart and thoughts still. Quinton lights up too, and then Avery surprises me when she asks to borrow my lighter so she can light up as well.

“Wow, I feel like I’m about to get cancer,” Nova jokes as we walk toward the front door with a cloud of smoke around us.

“Oh, do you want me to put is out?” Avery asks, bending down like she’s going to put it out on the ground. She’s got a nice body, leggy, a tight ass. She’s wearing a tight black dress with boots, the back of her dress low and revealing a tattoo of a tree, half dead, half flourishing. The flourishing half has leaves blowing away from it and below it the words: Carry me away, to where I can breathe, to where my soul can thrive again, to where I can be free to where I can live again. There’s more too it than that, but it goes below the dress. I’m curious what the rest of it says. I have my own tattoos with their own meanings and that kind of a tattoo has to have a meaning. Maybe it’s her life story. It makes me wonder if I can get under the dress to see if she was able to live again and why she thought she was dying.

“So do you have any of your own?”

I jerk from my thoughts and realize that Avery is standing to the side of me and Nova and Quinton have migrated to the front. “Any of my own what?” I ask distracted by how intense Avery’s eyes are up close—this girl has definitely been through some stuff.

She reaches around and touches her back. “Tats.” Her hand falls to her side. “I saw you staring at mine.”

“Oh.” I take a drag from my cigarette, thinking of what Quinton said about staying away from her and how I want to do the opposite at the moment. “A few here and there.”

Her eyes scroll over my body and she smiles, but it’s a ghost smile, masking this tremendous amount of pain her eyes carry. “Leaving it up to my imagination, huh?”

I’m not sure if she’s just being friendly or flirting, but I’m going with the latter because it gives me a good excuse for what I do next. “One on my ribs. One on my arm. The third one’s a secret.” I wink at her. “Maybe I’ll show it to you later.”

Her expression never wavers, making it hard to unravel her. And flirt. She ashes her cigarette before taking a drag off it. “Any of them mean anything?”

“They all do.” I arch a brow at her. “Yours?”

She nods, biting her lip. “All five of them.”

I want to ask her about the one on her back, but we’re approaching the line in front of the entrance to the place we’re going to and the crowd’s voices silence me.

“You guys wait here,” Avery says, walking back toward the front of the line with a finger held up. “I’ll be right back.”

As soon as she’s out of sight, Nova says, “Are you guys going to be okay with this place?”

Quinton glances at the door then back at her. “As much as I love you, you need to relax. We’ve been to clubs before, even after we got clean.”

I discreetly catch Quinton glancing at me, which means he’s worried about me, but isn’t going to say anything to Nova because it’ll only make her worry more.

“I should have told her no places with alcohol,” Nova mutters, frowning at the ground.

“Every place has alcohol,” I tell her, then playfully nudge her shoulder. “Would you relax? We’ll be fine.” I lift up my hand as if making a vow. “And I won’t drink. I promise.” I’ll just do the line in my pocket.

She still seems concerned, but gets distracted when Avery comes skipping back with a half-smoked cigarette in her mouth and three pink bands in her hand and one around her wrist. “Here. Put these on.” She hands us each a band, looking very proud of herself. “And follow me.”

“What about the line?” Nova asks as she puts the band on her wrist.

Avery pulls her cigarette out of her mouth. “I have connections.” She turns around to head to the front, giving me another once-over, looking like she’s trying to be nonchalant about the fact that she’s checking me out, but falters a little. It makes it really hard not to just grab her and kiss her. I’m not that kind of guy, though. I’m honestly not even sure when the last time I just made out with a girl was. I’ve f**ked a lot of girls, ones I didn’t know, ones that were high—I was high. I’m not even sure if I know how to just kiss.

We follow Avery to the front of the line and the bouncer lets us right through, giving Avery a kiss on the cheek as she walk by and muttering something about being sorry to hear about Conner. The name makes her expression falter, but she quickly recovers and plaster a fake smile on her face. Boy, she’s f**king good. It always takes me a beat or two to fake it. She must have a lot of practice. Why, though?

“Thanks,” she says to the bouncer, then opens the door and we follow her inside the club.

The lighting is low, like it is in most clubs. The music loud and bass throbbing. The air smells like smoke, sweat, and booze. There’s a dance floor that gives everyone an excuse to rub up against each other until they all become so horny they have to pair off and go back for a one-night stand. I know the scene. Lived it for a long, long time, and it makes me want to live it again. Maybe Nova’s right. We probably should have avoided places like this tonight.

We find a table in the back corner where it’s less noisy. Nova and Quinton sit down and Nova picks up a menu. I’m glancing around, looking for the bathroom, not because I have to piss, but because I need to do this line before it drives me insane.

“You want to come with me to get drinks?” Avery asks me. She has this accusing look on her face and I swear she knows exactly what I was just thinking. But how could she? No one possibly could.

“Sure,” I tell her, one single word that’s really f**king hard to get out.

“You guys want anything?” Avery asks Nova and Quinton.

“A water’s fine,” Quinton says, but I can tell it’s a little difficult for him to say it when we’re here in a room full of booze.

“A diet Coke,” Nova says, opening up the menu. Her gaze flicks to me for a moment and I can tell she’s wondering what I’m going to come back with.

“Relax,” I say to her, just so she’ll stop. “I’ll be a good boy. I promise.”

That gets her to smile.

I follow Avery to the bar area where she leans over the counter, trying to flag down the bartender. Her dress rides up and I get a glimpse of this unique flower symbol-type tattoo on the back of her thigh. That makes three I’ve seen. Only two more to go.

“Hey Benny, would you hurry your ass up,” Avery calls out playfully to the bartender, who glances over at her and grins.

“Keep your panties on,” he says as he pours some shots. God, it’s been a while since I’ve had a shot. “I’ll be over in a second.”

Avery laughs and then settles on a barstool, her eyes landing on me. “So are you going to sit down or just stand there?”

She’s got me thrown off a little. Very blunt. Very forward, or at least that’s how it seems. But like I said, there’s this look in her eyes like she’s trying to keep a lot of secrets buried.

I drop down on the stool and rest my arms on the countertop. “You come here a lot? You seem to know a lot of people around here.”

“Well, I should,” she says with a twinkle in her eyes. “Since I work here every afternoon from noon to five.”

I want to ask her why she’s in desperate need for a house, but I don’t want to make her uncomfortable, so I opt for option number two. “So what’s the tattoo on the back of your leg mean?”

She smiles at me again in this dark, mysterious sort of way. “You noticed that one, huh?”

I nod. “Yeah, while you were flagging the bartender down.”

She rolls her tongue in her mouth like she’s trying not to laugh. “When you were checking out my ass?”

I could deny it, but I don’t want to. “Hey, it’s a nice ass. It’s hard not to look at it.”

That gets her to laugh. “I knew it,” she says, shaking her head with a grin as she looks ahead at the mirror in front of us.

I lean forward to catch her gaze. “Knew what?”

She laughs a little more, amused with whatever she’s thinking. “That you were one of those guys.”

“Those guys?” I’m curious what she means.

She doesn’t answer right away or look at me. The song switches from this poppy, silly one to “All the Same” by Sick Puppies and I’m grateful because I hate club music.

Finally she looks me, slowly scanning me over from head to toe. “Blond hair, pretty blue eyes, a charming smile. You’re one of those guys who knows he’s hot and knows just the right thing to make a girl swoon or whatever.”

“Swoon?” I question, trying not to laugh. “Really?”

She shrugs. “Hey, I’m just saying it how it is. I totally hate the word.” She points a finger at me, her smile still there. “And I never do it. Ever.”

“So you’re saying that my blond hair, pretty blue eyes,” I wink at her, “and hotness aren’t affecting you at all.”

She shakes her head, eyes locked on me. “I don’t do pretty boys.”

“Who said I was a pretty boy? What if I’m a bad boy underneath it all?”

“I don’t do bad boys either.”

I lean in, catching her scent. It’s nice, some sort of perfume mixed with vanilla. “Then what do you do?”

She shakes her head, biting her lip again. “Nothing. Work. Go to school. Go home. That’s all.”

“So no guys?”

“Nope, no guys.” She seems pretty adamant about it.

I’m not sure what to do with this information. On the one hand it means she doesn’t have a boyfriend, but on the other hand it also means she doesn’t want one or any guy for that matter. Maybe she likes girls.

“I’m not a lesbian,” she says as if she can read my thoughts for the second time tonight. “I’m just not interested in dating, having a relationship, or f**king around for many, many different reasons.” All her humor vanishes and all I can see is pain. It’s almost overwhelming to look at and I want to look away but I can’t seem to bring myself to do so. So we end up just staring at each other, unable to look away, yet unable to find anything to say.

Thankfully, the bartender comes over and interrupts us. “So what are you doing here tonight on your night off?” he asks, leaning over the counter toward Avery.