“I don’t know. I told you, I had to leave in a hurry. Can I borrow a couple hundred bucks?”

“No. I’ve only been out for a week, I have two bucks in my pocket. But even if I had more, I wouldn’t give it to you. I’m not paying for your fix.”

“You’re a little shit. I should have had an abortion, but your fucking father was too cheap to front me the cash. Guess you take after him.”

Then she hung up.

No mention of the fact that I was in jail for protecting her. She obviously didn’t think it was a big deal to have someone take a knife and carve her up like a steak. No mention of the fact that we hadn’t spoken in five months.

I tossed my phone down on the cushion beside me and struggled to keep from exploding. It wasn’t anything new, and she didn’t hurt my feelings, not exactly. I knew that she lashed out to cut when she didn’t get what she wanted. It was what she’d always done, and it was what an addict did when they were desperate for their drugs. But it still made me furious, that she could just pop up whenever she wanted and disrupt my life. She was like a bleach-blond tornado who tore through my trailer park a couple of times every season.

Robin put her hand on my knee. Her face was concerned. “Are you okay?”

I shook my head. “No. I need to do push-ups or punch a wall or something. I feel like my head is going to explode.” I was flexing my fists compulsively, and my knee had started bouncing up and down in agitation. “I should be used to it, but it just pisses me off that she has the nerve to ask me for money for drugs. I don’t think that keeping me in food and Levis gives her the right to guilt-trip me.”

The anger pulsed inside me, and I debated whether to stand up and box it out or drop to the floor and push it out.

But before I could do anything, Robin’s hand turned my face toward her. “Hey, look at me. You’re entitled to feel angry. What she does is wrong. Don’t act like it’s a failing on your part to be mad at her.”

I let out a quick breath. She was right, I knew she was right. But years of bottling shit up made me all too aware of when I couldn’t keep it in anymore. “You don’t understand . . . the anger I feel, it’s like I’m a pop can that’s been shook up, and if I don’t pull the tab I’m going to explode. It feels chemical.”

“You’re right, I don’t understand. But I do know that the way your mother treats you is appalling and unfair, addiction or not. She doesn’t deserve your loyalty, but part of the reason that I love you is that you will still give it to her, no matter what she does. I really admire that.”

I froze, stunned by what she had just said, both by how vehement she had been that my mom sucked and the other part . . . the part that made my nostrils flare and my chest to tighten. “What do you mean, you love me?” She must mean generically speaking. Not love, as in love love. Just more like the way when you care for someone.

But she gave me a smile, and her fingers brushed over my chest and gripped my T-shirt. She looked up at me from under her long eyelashes, expression sheepish. “I know it’s probably pathetically soon to say something like that, but this, what I feel, it’s so strong and real, it has to be love. And if I love you, it only seems right that you know that, whether you think it’s insane or not.”

Girlfriends had told me them loved me before, but I never believed them, because they didn’t. And I figured that if I was so sure I knew when a girl didn’t actually love me, I would be sure of it when she did love me. But for a second those words hung there, between us, while I tried to absorb what they meant. While I tried to remember this moment, to capture it and own it. “It might be a little insane that you love me, I’m not going to lie,” I murmured, capturing her neck with my hand and pulling her mouth toward mine. “But what’s not insane at all is that I love you. Because you’re probably the sweetest, most amazing girl I’ve ever met. I don’t deserve you.”

“Yes, you do,” she whispered. “You deserve everything you’ve ever wanted, Phoenix.”

When she looked at me like that, her big brown eyes shining with emotion, expression wide open and honest, I could almost believe her.

“What I want is you.” My hand was shaking, and this time it wasn’t from anger, but from something else I couldn’t really define in any words that made sense. I just knew that I had basically jumped off a fucking cliff and there was no net.

Because I was in love with Robin. Like real, hard-core, all-consuming, how-the-fucking-hell-did-this-happen love.

“Really?” she asked, and her vulnerable uncertainty nearly undid me.

My anger was completely gone, replaced by an urgent, possessive need to show her how truly and deeply I had fallen for her. “Yes, I love you. God, so much.”

I kissed her. Hard. “Let’s go to your room.” Maybe sex wasn’t the best way to express my feelings, but I didn’t know the right words, and I felt caged, contained. Too much emotion.

But she didn’t seem to think it was weird. Robin stood up and reached for my hand.

The second we were in her room, she tugged at my shirt, lifting it up to expose my chest. I finished the job, yanking it over my head. Then I pressed her against the door I’d closed behind us and lowered my mouth to hers. She tasted sweet and delicious and like mine, all mine. I crowded her with my body, kissing her hard and sliding my hands all over her. She had the most perfect curves, the most perfect lips, the most perfect response to my touches.

Emotion, passion, made my movements aggressive, sharp, my blood running thick and hot, thoughts scattered in all directions as I pulled up her dress so I could feel the warm heat of her skin.

“Can I?” I murmured, moving up her thigh.

“Yes,” she whispered, head falling back to expose her neck to me.

That she didn’t even question what I was asking for made me love her even more. This was it, the real thing, the end of the line for me, the moment that made everything else that came before it unimportant. Robin loved me, and that was all I needed to know.

Listening to her heavy breathing, her soft cries as I touched her, her knees falling apart, I fumbled in my jeans for a condom, knowing this had to happen, right here, right now, against this door.

“Oh, God,” she said, eyes going wide with shock, when I lifted her hip to rest on mine and pushed inside her.

She didn’t even know the half of it.

“This okay?” I asked, even as I moved. She was just so tight, so hot, I couldn’t believe how amazing it felt, how perfect we were.

“Yes,” she said, and her voice was breathy, eyes half closed. “It’s good, so good.”

That’s what I was talking about. “Hold me,” I said, “so you don’t slip. Dig in hard, I like that.”

Robin’s fingernail scraped across my back, pressing into my flesh, and the sharpness matched the intensity of my emotion perfectly. I came inside her, gritting my teeth, enjoying the way she squeezed her inner muscles onto me in some instinctive chick voodoo that had me feeling like I’d do anything she wanted, now and forever.

Not wanting her to lose the momentum, I pulled out and dropped down in a squat so I could finish her, her hands in my hair, her shocked exclamation when my tongue touched her almost as satisfying as my orgasm. She couldn’t see the smile I didn’t prevent from spreading across my face as I slipped a finger inside her, tongue still working the swollen button in front of me. There was something about that sound she made, that little moan that was a whole octave higher than her natural voice, that drove me crazy. She was so damn sexy.

“Yeah, babe.” But she didn’t really need my encouragement. She was already there, yanking hard on my hair as she shuddered through her pleasure.

Leaning back on my heels, I wiped my mouth and stared up at her. “I want you to remember that forever,” I told her. “Because I will.”