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.”
Her eyes zinged with fury, and she shook my touch off of her arm. “Why wait?”