“You taste like a bar floor that hasn’t been scrubbed clean in a month.”

I snagged the half-full carton cigarettes he had sitting on the breakfast bar that divided the kitchen from the living room and waved the box at him over my shoulder.

“I told you that you needed to quit. Stop acting like a spoiled brat. Yes, people you love being dishonest sucks, but you’re an adult now, so deal with it accordingly. You said your uncle took you in, believed in you, taught you a craft you clearly love, so focus on all that he did do and not what he didn’t do because you don’t know how much longer you might have with him. Man up, Nash. It’s how we deal with the things that hurt us most that defines us.”

I pulled the door open just as the pizza guy was getting ready to pound again and slipped around him. I heard a shuffle of bodies, male voices muttering to each other, and I was almost out the security door when I heard the neighbor’s sultry voice float across the hall.

“Honey, if you’re gonna have this much traffic on a daily basis, you need to invest in a doorbell.”

I paused just long enough to look over my shoulder. Both Nash and the pizza guy were staring at her in all her toned and glorious beauty. I rolled my eyes at the obvious display. Nash flicked his gaze in my direction and then back at the beauty queen.

“Who are you, exactly?” He sounded less discombobulated, less scattered.

“I’m your new neighbor.”

I heard him chuckle and it made me grind my teeth together as I pushed through the door.

“Welcome to the neighborhood.” I didn’t need to see him to know he was grinning at her, and that she was probably spellbound by all that dusky skin and ink barely concealed by his boxers.

It shouldn’t twist my guts up. It shouldn’t make me want to pull all of her fabulous auburn hair from her head and knee Nash in the balls so hard his future grandchildren would walk with a limp, but it did and that was something I absolutely didn’t want to think about. Not now, not ever.

It took me another full day and a half to pull my head out of my ass and stop acting like a lunatic. I was a mess. Torn up about kissing Saint, mostly because I didn’t regret it for a second but also because I knew better. In the haze of tequila and sorrow, I could still taste her, feel her pressed up against me, and it was the only good thing I could seem to recall in the last few weeks.

I would love to be able to say that Saint’s surprise visit had smacked me across the face with some much-needed clarity, but that wasn’t the case. After her hasty departure because I mauled her like a uncouth jackass, I finished off the bottle of tequila I’d been steadily working my way through before she interrupted me and passed out on the living room floor. The next day was more of the same, only at some point I had made my way to the couch and had managed to doze off using the pizza box as a pillow. Oh yeah, I was totally behaving like a responsible adult.

I cracked open an eye when the front door to the apartment swung open and heavy footfalls made their way over to where I was straight up wallowing in my own piss-poor choices and inconsolability. The only person who still had a key to the apartment was Rule. Obviously he was done letting me have a pity party for one and was tired of me ignoring all his phone calls. My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton and it took more than a minute for my hazy gaze to clear enough to meet his angry, pale blue eyes.

Rule knew me better than anyone. We were best friends for a reason. There was no judgment, no censure, and no disappointment from either of us, even when the situation sometimes called for it, like right now. We were a team no matter what, and the role we played in each other’s life was that of rock-solid support and more often than not official ass kicker of the other one when they needed it, which was clearly what he was thinking as he crossed his arms over his chest and lifted his pierced eyebrow at me.

“You look like crap.”

“Well, that’s accurate since I feel like crap.”

“It’s been a week. That’s as long as I’m putting up with this shit from you. Take a shower, go brush your goddamn teeth, put some fucking pants on, and we’re going to see Phil. Enough, dude. Yeah, that was a pretty nasty bomb you got dropped on you, but it doesn’t change the fact we all owe Phil more than we’re ever going to be able to repay in one lifetime. So get over yourself and let’s go.”

I grunted up at him and peeled myself up off the greasy cardboard. Yeah, I was a winner. I rubbed my hands over the shorn surface of my hair and waited for the room to stop tilting sideways. I didn’t know what to say to the man who had raised me. I had walked into his hospital room that night, taken one look into eyes that were the exact same color as mine, listened to him call me son in a voice that had no strength behind it, and turned around and walked right back out. It was a cowardly move, not to mention insensitive and shallow, but my head was spinning all around and I couldn’t find any solid ground to balance on. Phil did deserve more than that from me no matter who exactly he was in my life now; he had always been there for me, supported me when no one else would.

I shoved to my feet and promptly fell back on my ass. Rule reached out and put the hand that had the cobra head and his name inked across the knuckles on my shoulder to steady me. He shook his head, his spiky blue hair, making it sort of hard to take his look of reproach seriously.

“Just give me twenty.”

I would need that long to scrub the disgusting taste of stale booze and cigarette after cigarette out of my mouth.

Saint wasn’t lying, I did taste like a barroom floor. That was an entirely different mess I needed to try and clean up. I knew she only stopped by out of some kind of professional obligation, because she was nice and kind, and obviously possessed a huge heart. I knew she wasn’t particularly fond of me, but she had looked past her dislike and offered comfort and soft words when I needed them most, and in repayment I had acted like a jackass. I needed to apologize and see if I could minimize some of the damage. I wanted her to like me, wanted her to think I was an all right guy, and not just because I thought she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. It went beyond her awesome hair, rocking body, and soft gray eyes. I wanted her to like me because she had a way about her, a delicate kind of sweetness that I wanted to wrap myself all up in. It didn’t make much sense, but nothing in my life right now did.

I had vague recollections of Saint from high school, still pretty but slightly heavier and desperately shy to the point of it being painful. She was smart and in all the accelerated programs Brookside High had offered, so our paths generally never crossed. There had been a point in time when I recalled our lockers being side by side and I had tried to engage her, made it a point to smile and say hi, but beyond that we moved in different circles and I don’t think she wanted to slum with the likes of me. Still I remembered her hair and those eyes … even then the light gray was full of kindness and understanding. She wasn’t the kind of chick my teenage self tried to get lucky with, mostly because she was out of my league intellectually and even then radiated a class I didn’t understand. Rule and I had spent most of our teenage years screwing anything that moved and partying in ways that the older versions of ourselves marveled at now. We were a couple of unscrupulous horn balls, and girls like Saint Ford, then and now, were not the kind of girls that wanted to get tangled up with guys like us.

Only to everyone’s amazement Rule had settled down, was getting married in a few weeks to a bona fide society princess. She was just as smart, just as classy and beautiful as Saint, and she loved Rule with everything she had. Shaw Landon was any guy’s dream girl and Rule was the lucky bastard who’d landed her. Now he was going to make sure he got to keep her forever because he was putting a ring on her finger and changing her last name to his.