“Close your eyes,” I tell her. Part of me wants to leave her here, but I also don’t want to leave her alone. She holds my hand tight and closes her eyes as she follows me toward where Dad is, and I watch as the tears still fall down her face like she already knows something bad has happened.

  I gasp when I get to the scene because it’s not just my dad on the floor. There’s another man and a woman, both on the ground, surrounded by blood. I’m frozen in the spot, but I force myself to because we have to call for help, and I know how to call 911. I go to move toward the counter, but I don’t feel Halle coming when I tug on her hand, and when I turn around, her eyes are wide open, and she’s staring down at her father’s lifeless body.

  Then…she loses it.

  “DADDY!!” she screams at the top of her lungs and drops to her knees, crying for him to wake up. She does this all through my call to 911, and when the police arrive shortly after, she’s still wailing and begging for him to wake up.

  I don’t even remember what happens next. Everything is a blur. I remember crying—a lot of crying. Halle is what I heard someone call hysterical. Nothing anyone says can calm her down. We talk to the police because we were the only people in the store, and we watch as they load Dad and the other man and woman into the ambulance in black bags with their faces covered. Halle screams Daddy over and over again, and then my mom shows up, and she’s hysterical now, too. We’re both in her arms, and even while all of this happened, Halle still hasn’t let go of my hand.

  She doesn’t let go on the way to the hospital, or when we talk to a lady who tells us it’s okay to let out however we’re feeling, and that she would be in touch with Mom next week about something called “therapy,” whatever that is. She didn’t let go of my hand on the way home or that whole night. We both slept in the bed with my mom, Halle’s tiny body between us. I didn’t sleep a wink, and I don’t think my mom did either, but Halle slept with one hand wrapped in mine and one wrapped around a teddy bear that was a gift from Dad on her last birthday. She’d cried herself to sleep, muttering something about Daddy and coming home.

  This went on for days until one night, after Halle drifted off to sleep, I heard my mother’s quiet voice. “She hasn’t talked very much. Is she talking to you?”

  I turn my head toward my mother, who’s staring at the ceiling. It’s not pitch-black because Halle doesn’t like sleeping in the dark. I don’t either. So I can see the tears on my mom’s face, and it makes my heart hurt that she’s so sad. My grandparents are here, staying in one of the guest rooms, as well as my aunt and one of my dad’s brothers. So the house is full, and I can hear noises of them shuffling around, cleaning and cooking, and doing what my grandma says is “what you do” when someone dies.

  I can’t believe I know someone who died. It just means…they’re gone? Forever? He was just here. How can he just be gone?

  Remembering she asked me a question, I answered, “That she misses him. And…she asked me not to leave her.”

  She lets out a breath and rubs her forehead. “Would you be okay with her living with us?”

  Doesn’t she already live here? Would she leave? Are we leaving too? “What do you mean?”

  “I mean…I would take care of her. And I just wonder…if you’re okay with that. If I don’t, she’d go away and live with someone else. Maybe relatives or another family altogether.”

  “What other family?” I frown because Halle is a part of my family. Did she want to go somewhere else? Somewhere without me?

  “I don’t know.”

  “So we wouldn’t know where she is?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “No. I want her to stay with us.” I squeeze Halle’s hand, hating the feeling that she could be ripped away at any moment.

  “Okay,” my mom says, then turns to her side away from me and lets out a sniffle. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t protect you from this, Sebastian, but…you did so well. Protecting Halle and keeping you both safe. She’ll never forget that.”

  Even then, at five years old, I hoped she would.

  Present Day

  I’m lying behind her with my chest pressed against her back as my body curls around hers protectively. I have a hand resting against her bare stomach as my other hand plays with hers. I press a kiss to her shoulder and then another and another, trailing up the slope of her neck until I get to the W behind her ear. I kiss it gently, and she shivers. “It feels like a lifetime ago,” she whispers. “Yet I still remember every second of those ten minutes when everything changed.” I press another kiss to her neck and hold her tighter against me, hoping she feels my heartbeat against her back. “I think about something happening to you sometimes, and it feels like I can’t breathe.” She lets out a shaky breath. “You’re so far away. Sometimes I can’t even feel you.”

  “You can because I can always feel you.”

  “Wild…”

  I press another kiss on her shoulder. “Saint.”

  “I think…” I can hear the nerves in her voice. “I think we should try…”

  “Try…?” I question even though I know what she’s going to say.

  She spins around in my arms and gives me a look that I’ve never been able to say no to. A look that’s soft and vulnerable and somehow so fucking sexy. “You and me. Us. This.” Her face is so close to mine that I can feel her breath on my skin.

  “It’s not that simple.” I fucking wish it were.

  “No, but we’ve dealt with tougher things.”

  I swallow nervously, hating that this is the one thing in the world that I haven’t been able to give her when I vowed to give her anything she ever wanted. “Baby, we’ve talked about this.”

  “Yes.” She pulls out of my grasp and sits up on the bed. She turns on the lamp on her side table, illuminating her naked chest and her shoulder-length dark waves that I made bigger from pulling on them while my dick was in her mouth. “But we are older now, and I want to make sure that we are really willing to accept the fact that we don’t get to be happy because we are worried about what people will think.”

  I prop myself up on one elbow. “You were three years old when I met you.”

  “It’s not like you were twenty! You were four years old yourself, Sebastian,” she exclaims. I want to joke that her argument sounds like some of the books she reads, but I refrain.

  “My mom raised us as siblings.”

  “We’re different. We weren’t raised in the normal way. Being raised normally doesn’t usually include a dark fucking cloud in the form of a gruesome tragedy hanging over them. We have trauma.”

  “That doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want. It’s like that one therapist said, ‘trauma is an explanation for our actions, not an excuse or an absolution of guilt or wrongdoings,’” I repeat in a mocking tone, knowing she hated that particular therapist.

  “Fuck that guy,” she growls before she rolls her eyes. “Wild, why are you fighting this so hard? If I showed up tomorrow with a boyfriend, you’d be ready to lose your shit.” I tense because she’s right, and she gives me a look indicating she knows about the mounting tension I was suddenly feeling in my bones. The tension that Saint and I had spent the past two hours working out of me. “A lifetime is a long time, Wild,” she says. “It’s only been twenty years, and I sometimes feel like I’m a hundred.”

  I know this feeling well. The effects of death and grief were so consuming that they had the power to age your soul.

  Tears flood her eyes as she plays with the blanket in her lap. “I miss you… every day. My heart aches every second we’re apart. And I know you feel the same.”

  I sit up against her headboard and let out a sigh. “I do.” I drag a hand over my face. “I want a fucking cigarette.”

  “You told me you quit.” She frowns, and when I look at her, I notice her eyes trailing all over my chest, and then she moves to straddle my lap. “Are you smoking?” she whispers as she drags her fingertips over the HSJ for Halle St. John I have over my heart.

  “No,” I tell her. “I quit. Just sometimes…the craving hits me. Usually, it’s when I’m thinking about this.” I point back and forth between us.

  She lifts one of my arms and looks at the new ink on my rib cage. I have a tattoo of Saint Michael on my back, but this is a new one where he’s standing atop Satan, preparing to drive a stake through him.

  “This is new.”

  I nod, and she stares at it a little longer before she drops her eyes even further to the roman numerals marked on my hip. “X VII MMXVI.” Her eyes dart up to meet my gaze. “What date is that?”

  I meet her curious gaze, and a slight grin pulls at my lips as I think about the significance of my tattoo. “Tomorrow’s date but in 2016.”

  “Why?” she asks, and I put a hand over my heart in mock offense.

  “And here I thought women always remembered the night they lost their virginity.” It was also the night I lost mine. Eight years ago. The night Halle and I crossed that line for the first time.

  She can’t even stop the smile from finding her face before she leans down and drags her lips over the inked skin. “You know, I don’t know how you think you have a prayer at being with any woman but me because how the hell are you going to explain the shrine to me that you’ve made of your body.” She runs her fingers over the letters. “What is this, like ten?”

  “Probably more.” I move her slightly so she can see the addition to my thigh tattoo. I grab her jaw, forcing her gaze back to me. “For the record, I don’t want any woman but you…” I know I’m going to hurt us both with the next part of this statement. “I just don’t know that I can have you either.”

  She lets out a sigh before letting her eyes drop to my thigh, and she narrows them as she traces her fingertips over the ink she’s never seen. “I knew something was different here, but I was a little busy getting my mouth reacquainted with your cock.” It twitches in response, and she giggles when she sees the tattoo, embedded in a sea of others, with the words love you fiercely in her handwriting. It’s how she’s always signed any cards or notes to me.

  This new tattoo is written just above “For Saint Only” in block letters, the first tattoo I ever got with a fake ID when I was seventeen. The inside joke being that my thigh would always be her seat. I still remember the look she gave me when she saw it for the first time. She then proceeded to ride my thigh for an hour, rubbing her sexy little clit against my bare skin and coming all over it.

  “Wild…”

  “I told you I can always feel you.”

  “Any others?” she asks.

  I slide my hand into hers, and she looks it over, confused. I’ve had a full sleeve down to my hand for years, so she’s probably struggling a little to figure out what’s new even though she knows all my tattoos pretty well. “Good, maybe it’s not as noticeable as I thought.” I chuckle thinking about the tattoo I got when I was hammered with one of my friends a few months ago. I lower all of my fingers but my ring finger, and she gasps when she sees a small H on the side.

  She runs her finger over it. “You tattooed an H on your ring finger?”

  I put a hand over my eyes and burrow myself into her blankets. “I was drunk as fuck with Alex. I made him swear not to let me get any more tattoos for you when I’m that intoxicated.”

  She snorts. “That will go over well, I’m sure.”

  Alex is my best friend who also lives in Seattle and is the only person who knows about Saint and me. Well, knows that I’m still in love with her all these years later.

  She’s still straddling me, so I take a minute to run my finger over the tattoo on her hip that says “keep me wild.” I love the secret meaning behind it, and I still lose my mind whenever I see it. I’ve given her so many hickeys in that exact spot like an extra type of branding. She doesn’t have nearly as many tattoos as I do, only five in total. Three dedicated to me and two for her father, one of which matches one that I also have—a set of angel wings set over his birthday. She also has my initials—SJW for Sebastian Joseph Wilder—on the inside of her wrist, and she rubs her thumb along the skin in the same way I do mine in times of stress.

  “Should we talk about what that means that you did that?” She gives me a look, and the words are on the tip of my tongue that she’s the only woman I can see myself marrying, but I don’t because our lives just aren’t that fucking simple. It doesn’t seem fair to say something out loud that will probably never come to fruition.

  I rub my thumb over the tattoo as she gets off my lap and lies down next to me. I follow suit so we’re facing each other, and her leg instantly slides between mine. She moves closer to me, tucking her body against me. “Twenty years tomorrow,” she murmurs.

  “Yeah.” I clear my throat, trying to rid the emotion from it.

  “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Me too, Saint,” I tell her before I press my lips to her forehead.

  Ten Years Prior

  Halle: 14 years old

  Sebastian: 15 years old

  I stand in front of Wild’s door, my hand hovering near the knob because I never knock, but something stops me. He’s been acting weird lately, almost like he doesn’t want to be around me as much anymore. I bite down on my bottom lip to stop it from trembling because I don’t know what I’d do if he suddenly wanted to stop hanging out. Wild is my best friend and the only person I can talk to, especially about tomorrow.

  The anniversary of my father’s death.

  My heart aches at the memory, and before I know it, tears are flying down my face, and I’ve taken a step back from the door.

  I’ve also recently started to develop a sort of crush on him, so now I’m feeling a little rejected that he’s not paying me as much attention anymore. It’s my freshman year in high school and Wild’s sophomore year. I can see all the female attention he’s getting, especially after this summer, when it seemed like he grew a foot and gained even more muscle from football. I grew up this summer too, sprouting boobs I never had before and even shapelier legs from tennis. I’ve gotten some attention from the guys at school, too, and one even asked me out, but Wild shut that down before I even had a chance to say no, thank you. Something about, “Stay away from my sister or I’ll beat the shit out of you.”

  Is it weird that I swooned just a little?

  Ugh, no. Stop it, Halle. He’s your stepbrother.

  But it doesn’t stop the butterflies that erupt in my stomach every time he walks into the kitchen in the morning without a shirt or when he brushes past me in the bathroom while I’m washing my face.

  The door opens, and he looks surprised to see me there. Then my face is in his hands, and he tilts it upward so I’m staring into my favorite eyes. “Why are you crying in front of my door?”

  “I-I’m not.”

  He gently drags his thumbs over the apples of my cheeks to wipe my tears and smiles at me. “Looks like you are.”

  “I…tomorrow.” I can’t tell him the real reason behind the sudden tears, so I go with the obvious answer.

  He pulls me in for a hug and rests his head on top of mine. He’s almost a foot taller than me now, and even taller than his mom, Sara, too. “What do you want to do tomorrow?”

  We’ve never gone to school on October seventh, and tomorrow will be no different.

  I shrug, still relishing the comfort of his arms around me. “I don’t know. I wasn’t sure you’d want to hang out with me.”

  “Who else would I hang out with?”

  “I don’t know…” I pull away from him and look up into his eyes. Eyes that I’ve loved for so long. They’re gray with traces of blue, and sometimes when the sun hits them just right, they have flecks of green. I’ve never seen eyes like his before, and I spend more time than I care to admit thinking about how pretty they are. “It seems like you’ve been avoiding me lately.” I wince, hating that I feel this way or that I care that my stepbrother has been keeping to himself.

  He rubs a hand behind his neck and winces. “Saint, that’s not about you.”

  I sniffle and do my best to blink the tears away. “It feels like it.”

  “I know it does,” he admits, “and I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?”

  I want to tell him yes because I would forgive him for anything, but I want to know why he’s been distant. “Can you tell me why?”

  “It’s just…a guy thing.”

  I frown and scrunch my nose. “What does that mean?”

  “Something you as a girl wouldn’t understand,” he says with a hint of sarcasm, as if to say, obviously.

  “Try me.”

  “No.”

  I huff. “You’re being a jerk.”

  “Because I don’t want to tell you something?”

  “We tell each other everything!” I exclaim. At least I thought we did.

  “Not this.”

  “I don’t like secrets between us.”

  “I’m not crazy about it either, but it’s for the best. Believe me,” he says with a wince.

  I twist my mouth in confusion because I wonder if it’s something he’s embarrassed to tell me. “I won’t…judge you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I know you won’t.” I’m curious what he could be hiding from me, but my thoughts are interrupted by footsteps on the stairs, and then Sara is walking down the hall toward us. It isn’t lost on me that Wild takes a step back to put space between us, and I briefly wonder what that’s about.