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She’s in plaid pajama pants and an enormous T-shirt with a jacket pulled on over it, not zipped, and her hair in a knot on top of her head. She came straight out of bed; you can tell from twenty feet away. She stops at the end of the driveway.

I look at Koda. He’s by the mailbox with his phone still in his hand and a look on his face like a guy who knows exactly what he did and is going to defend it.

Then I look at Greeley. He’s looking at her, and something comes back into his face that I’d like to take out of him with my hands.

“Hi, Kylie,” he says.

She doesn’t answer him. She’s coming up the driveway, looking at me. I’m standing in the cold with Rafe’s arm still across my chest, my knuckles split, my mouth bleeding down my chin, and the front of my shirt hanging off me in two pieces.

I watch her eyes drop. They go to my side and stop there for maybe five seconds, which is longer than anybody has looked at it in three years except a burn surgeon, my mom, and, twenty minutes ago, a kitchen full of guys. In the cold, it’s gone purple at the edges. I get my hand up and pull the fabric across it. It doesn’t cover anything. I do it anyway.

“Nash,” she says.

And everything in me that’s been trying to get back through that front door for ten minutes stops trying. My hands are still shaking, and my back is still on fire, but something in me pulls up all at once, the way you pull up at the blue line when you know you’re offside.

“We’re going,” she says.

Rafe’s arm comes off my chest.

I look at her.

“Come on,” she says.

I look back at Greeley. He’s looking at me, and then he looks at her.

17

Come On Means Come On

Kylie

I hate that I know exactly what’s going on here. Declan is on his top step with a towel pressed to his forehead like everything is fine in the world, and Nash looks like he’s about to hurt somebody. I told him come on two seconds ago, and I don’t hear footsteps behind me. I don’t turn around to check. I look at the cars instead and don’t know if any of these cars are theirs. When I turn my head to ask, Rafe is already unlocking his car.

“Paige, we’ll meet you there,” Koda says because Paige drove her car.

When I finally turn, Nash is walking toward us. His mouth is split, there’s blood down his mouth, and his knuckles are open on both hands. His shirt is torn halfway and hanging off his shoulders.

On the driveway, for five seconds, I looked at his side, and I can’t stop seeing his scar. It isn’t a cut. It’s a whole stretch of him, from above his hip up into his ribs, where the skin looks like it was melted smooth and stretched back on. It’s shiny and too pale, pulled tight in some places and sunk in others, like the ground after something heavy sat on it for a long time. There’s a pattern in it, faint, like fine netting pressed into wax, and at the edges, it was a bruised purple. He pulled the fabric across it the second he saw me looking, so I make a point not to look down again.

What the fuck happened to you? I don’t say it. I don’t even let it get to my face.

“Get in the back with her,” Rafe says when Nash goes for the passenger door.

“No.”

Rafe steps in front of him and opens the back door. “Get in the back with her.”

Koda walks around to the passenger side anyway, and Nash doesn’t argue again. He gets in behind the driver’s seat, and I look at Rafe for a second, then hurry around to the other side.

Rafe starts the car. I let my eyes go to Nash’s hands. They’re shaking, and he’s rubbing them on his thighs like that might stop it. I don’t put my seatbelt on. I scoot to the middle seat, right up against his bouncing leg, and put my hand on his.

I expect him to pull away. He doesn’t. My hand is on his bloody knuckles, and he doesn’t wince. He squeezes. I keep my eyes forward.

“I got a few good hits on Croft,” Koda says to the windshield.

Rafe shakes his head.

“All this for a fucking spot,” Koda says.