But an ominous sound squawks from my back pocket. Darth Vader’s theme music.

“Fuck.” The moment isn’t just broken. It’s shattered into a million shards that cut me and leave me bleeding.

I grab my phone and open the email from Miranda.

There’s no subject line, she never bothers with subject lines, I’m not worthy of a subject line. I have to open the email to see what she wants. It’s a small act, but it sends a powerful message. She holds all the cards.

I click on the email. She doesn’t write my name.

It just says: package coming friday after 330 by courier specific time unknown return per usual

Which is bullshit. She knows the time. She knows it down to the fraction of a second, I’m sure. She probably has an advanced computer simulation program on how to blackmail most effectively and relies on the perfect combination of algorithms and data and past behavior and future predictions to determine exactly when, where, why and how to send me her next set of instructions. And she’s not going to tell me the time, never has, never will. Her whole game is for me to be on pins and needles waiting for the package while simultaneously keeping my mom from intercepting the package. She often sends them to my mom’s house, so she can torture me, make me scamper across the alligator pit.

I write back to Miranda, equally curt, but managing to capitalize and use periods: Message received.

I shut down my email and close my eyes. I feel Trey press his hand on top of mine.

I open my eyes and look at him again. I am twisted inside out. I could punch this brick wall now, split my knuckles open, and slam it all over again. I push my hands roughly through my hair and groan loudly in frustration. “I fucking hate her.”

“Me too,” he whispers. “I hate her for you.”

“I hate how she controls my life,” I say between gritted teeth.

I breathe out hard, wishing I could release all this coiled tension from my body. Trey is still leaning against the wall, and his gorgeous arms are on display, the art swirling down in lines, shapes, patterns that mesmerize me. His arms are strong, sculpted and muscular. I want them around me.

Fuck everything else in the world right now.

I step toward him, cup his cheeks. “I’m tired of waiting for you,” I say, shedding all my walls. He knows all my secrets and lies. He can know my truth. “I’m so tired of it,” I say softly, then I hold his gaze and trail my fingers along his jawline, from his earlobe, across his scar to his chin, watching the expression in his eyes shift from surprise to desire. To desperate want. I run my index finger across his top lip, and he closes his eyes briefly, his chest rising and falling, his breath catching. He opens his eyes again, watches me. I touch his bottom lip, and he nips on my finger, then flashes a quick grin that fades as he whispers, “I’m tired too.”

That’s it. That’s all. I can’t wait. I don’t want to. I’m sick of it. I need this contact with him. I need this moment. I need to know what it’s like again to have this kind of connection.

I kiss him.

Slow. Soft. But full of need. Full of hope. Full of my wish for this, us, him and me, to become more than just friends. I want him so badly, I want to return to our night, I want him to take away the pain again. I want his touch to remind me that there is good in the world, that two people can care and be close, and it doesn’t have to be a game, or someone using the other.

That there can be something real and true.

He groans as I trace his lips with my tongue. His lips part, and he lets me lead the kiss, lets me taste his mouth and his tongue. Then, in seconds, the kiss changes. He spins me around, and now my back is against the brick wall, and he threads his hands into my hair, running his fingers through the thick strands, all while kissing me deeply, his tongue sliding against mine, his breath tasting so good, his lips capturing mine. It’s a fiery kiss, full of months of pent-up longing, borne of a night when everything seems so far out of reach that sometimes you have to grab the visceral, the physical, to tie you back to earth. To make you forget all the ways your life is spinning beyond your control. He kisses harder, insistently, as if he can’t get enough of me, as if he needs to taste me, to drown in this kiss with me.

I lose myself too. I let go of the meeting, of the SOS to Cam, of Danielle’s words, of my mom’s insatiable need to hook me up, of the stories Miranda makes me write, of my past. I shed them all. They are vapor, they are nothing, I am new again.

I am no longer that person.

Layla is gone as I am at once lost and found in a kiss like this. A kiss that has nothing to do with power, or games, or control. A kiss that simply has to be. His hands in my hair, then roaming down my back, then grappling at my hips. And all the while we are in this together, we both want this, we both need this, there is no uneven distribution of desire, or money, or want. His lips consume me with desperation, and soon he’s traversing my neck, and kissing the hollow of my throat, and I gasp quietly.

“Oh,” I say, but for me that’s everything because I don’t make noise, I don’t vocalize, I don’t let on when I’m turned on.

“Fuck, Harley,” he says, and grabs my ass and pulls me against him, so I can feel how much he wants this too. He licks his way up my neck, and I melt inside with longing as his lips brush my earlobe. As if he’s about to whisper something. Maybe tell me how much he wants to taste me and touch me.

But then his hands are on my shoulders, and he’s no longer holding me close. He’s holding me back. I’m standing here panting, lost in some sort of crazed moment of lust, and he’s suddenly all cool and calm as he says, “But I can’t. I can’t go there. And I have to get the fuck away right now.”

He grabs his backpack and leaves, the screen door swinging with several creaks.

He’s gone.

And I’m alone in this ridiculously romantic courtyard in the middle of New York. Hot and bothered and utterly left behind. Like an idiot. Like a stupid fucking idiot.

My phone buzzes. I grab it in milliseconds, hoping it’s Trey.

But it’s Cam.

Missing things? Missing me? That can be fixed in an instant, sweetheart. Tomorrow night. Bliss Bar. 7 p.m. Be there.

Chapter Six

Trey

I slam the door to my apartment, lock it and slide the chain.

As if I can sequester myself. As if I can shut myself off from her, and stay inside my home, far, far away from Harley. Like I’m sealed up and safe again.

But the thing is this….

She has to go to SLAA.

She was forced to go.

She’s being blackmailed.

I chose to go. No one made me. No one forced me. I guess you could say Mr. Thompson did when he found me making out with his wife in the elevator at my parent’s apartment building. I run my finger across the scar on my cheek, and the pain echoes, even months later as I head to the cramped kitchen. I don’t think I realized just how strong he was. Or how mad he’d be, but when his fist connected with my face, I felt his college ring rattle through every bone in my body.

They make the rings damn solid at Yale University.

Yeah, it hurt.

When you’ve been pummeled by a man who’s six-five, two-hundred-forty pounds and wears one of those big-ass class rings, I guess that’s how you manage a self-imposed monkhood for a year. The ring sliced my cheek apart. I could actually see several millimeters of the meat under the skin right after it happened. My mom sewed me up that evening without a word. The scar would have been much worse if I didn’t have that sort of access to one of the premier plastic surgeons in Manhattan. She wasn’t happy with me but what could she do? I was twenty, and she couldn’t control me. She could have cut me off from college, but she wants me in school more than anything. Besides, in my family, we deal with the practical. We shut the door to rooms that aren’t used, we stitch up cuts, we take painkillers to numb the day, and we don’t talk about things.

I didn’t talk about my brothers. Because they didn’t talk about my brothers. So why would they want to talk about why I was spending so much time with the married women in the swank Upper East Side building where they lived? But I knew I had a problem, and the cut on my face was my rock bottom. I didn’t need someone else to find the bottom of addiction for me. I fucking found it, and I decided to get my shit together after I spent the better part of my teenage years screwing married women in my building.

I knew what I was doing was messing me up. Had known it for a long, long time. Not because the sex was bad. It was good. It was great. It was the stuff of legend.

But as I toss my backpack on the floor, grab a cold beer from the fridge, and turn up the music on my iPod so I can blast Remy Zero throughout my whole apartment, I am also reminded that it was hollow.

That I was so disconnected from all of them. I was ghosting through life, taking what I wanted, stealing what others had.

But the one night with Harley was the closest I’ve ever felt to right. Maybe that sounds crazy, but I felt like we were both in it together, that we weren’t chess pieces for the other person to move around. We’d showed our cards and there was no bluffing.

That’s the problem, I realize, as I drink my beer, and the band sings about falling to the ground.

She can’t operate like that, and hell if I know if I can either.

So if I get caught up in her, and I will, I fucking will, what happens to me when she realizes she’s not ready? What if I’m just a quick fix to her, and she turns around and goes back to Cam? Or ditches me? And then I’m worse off.

Back to all my old ways.

To all the afternoons in high school I spent tangled up with Cassie Fitzgerald in her penthouse, or Elle Windsor in her husband’s town car, or even the sexy trophy wife – Sloan McKay – of one of the biggest hedge fund manager’s in New York. All while he was busy pulling millions, I was taking care of his wife in the bedroom since he didn’t anymore. She was an artist too, a painter, and the only one I ever felt an inkling of a connection with, the only one who remotely seemed like more than a conquest. She moved out of the building quickly though, and I moved on to the next woman.

Such a rush. Such a thrill. They got what they wanted from me. From how I made them feel. From the high of being the young guy who could turn them on.

If I walked into a frat house and told my story, I’d have high-fives six ways to Sunday. If my friends knew they’d make a statue for me, give me the chair at the head of the table in the cafeteria, build an honorary wing in my name and ask for blessings before any date with a girl, praying to Trey Westin, patron saint of Has A Way with Women.

It’s the tale that gets passed down from one generation of frat brothers to the next. Only there was more to my conquests than bagging the hottest babes.

There always is.

They were a way to forget.

I rub my hand absently against the trio of sunbursts on my shoulder, one of the tats that I designed myself a few months ago. To remember. To never forget. Then I toast heavenward, a futile toast, and finish my beer. The coldness and the fizz roots me back to the moment. Shakes me out of the past, the memories. If I spend too much time there, I’ll never move on. I need to start over tomorrow. See my shrink. Sort this out. Go back to being friends with Harley again. Because I can’t stand not having her in my life.

Almost as much as I can’t stand not kissing her.

I turn my head and sniff my shirt, and fuck…I can still smell her on me. Her wild cherry smell lingers all over my shirt. Her intoxicating, sexy-as-hell scent from when she was all snug against me. I close my eyes, inhale, and I am right back to thirty minutes ago in the courtyard, remembering how she touched me, kissed me, ran her hands in my hair.

In seconds, I am rock hard again. This is what she does to me. This is all it takes.

She slides into my head, and I am turned on beyond belief. Wanting her. Wanting all I can’t have.

I put the empty bottle down on the coffee table, yank off my shirt, and inhale it one more time, so she’s filled all my senses. I head to the bathroom. I turn on the shower, adjusting the temperature all the way up. Then take off my jeans, leaving them in a heap on the floor, my boxer briefs next. I step under the water, wetting my hair, my skin, soaping up all over, then rinsing it off. I close my eyes as the water beats down hard on me, and then I say fuck it.