I pulled my head from around the corner and leaned back hard against the stone of the station behind me. It was cold and I felt that cold instantly start seeping through my sweater.

At the same time, I didn’t feel it.

I didn’t feel anything.

“You take care a’ her, man.” I heard Colt demand, losing some of the pissed from his voice.

“You know me better than that,” Merry returned, still fully pissed. “I get you. I get you’re lookin’ after her. But you know what she and me got, so when you calm the fuck down, you’ll understand that this is a kick in the teeth you wished you didn’t deliver because I’m gonna take care of her and you fuckin’ know it.”

He would.

He’d take care of me like he took care of me by not sneaking out of my house and making me feel like a stupid slut.

Merry would take care of me.

Just not the way I wanted.

Never that.

He could kiss me how he’d kissed me. He could move inside me, his eyes locked to mine, watching his work build, watching it explode. He could sit on the side of my bed and brush his lips along my cheek, wrap his hand around my neck, and tell me he’d call me.

But he’d never give me what I wanted.

I forgot.

I forgot I wasn’t the kind of girl who got what she wanted.

Not once.

Not in my whole fucking life.

Yeah, I’d forgotten that.

And as I walked down the side of the station to the sidewalk, heading toward J&J’s to get my car, passing a garbage bin and tossing the coffee and muffins in it, I reminded myself of that fact.

Slicking another thick, strong coat on that layer of hard I’d built around me, I reminded myself again.

And I did it in a way that I’d never forget it.

Not again.

Not ever again.

Until the day I died.

Chapter Two

Ironic

Cher

I drove home because, caught up in visions of life actually not sucking for once, I’d stupidly not taken my grocery list with me.

And as I drove to my and Ethan’s rental—a crackerbox house on a street that was full of tiny crackerbox houses—I knew that, even if it wasn’t yet ten in the morning, my shit day was about to get shittier.

This was because Trent’s beat-up, piece-of-shit car was at the curb in front of my house.

Ethan’s dad.

He’d bailed on me the day after I told him I was pregnant.

I’d been cautiously excited. He had his problems, but I was young, stupid, and misread the situation (not unusual back then and, apparently, now), thinking I saw a decent guy underneath him smoking anything he could get his hands on—pot, meth, crack, whatever.

When you were young, you could go crazy, do stupid shit, then pull your life together, or that’s what I’d thought. And people bounced back from that all the time; I’d thought that as well. If they were in too deep, they found reasons to get clean; I’d thought that too.