It was nighttime when Holden woke up, but the apartment maintained a dim glow of ambient light from the Main Street lamps beneath his window, even in the middle of the night. He’d never purposely live in a place where the nights offered a pure, black darkness. Not willingly, anyway.

“Gris?” he ground out, trying not to move.

“I’m here,” she said, and his eyes focused on her standing up at his kitchen table and walking across the room in bare feet.

She was beautiful.

She was so fucking beautiful it made his eyes burn.

She’d taken her sweatshirt off. All she had on was a pair of jeans and a white scoop-neck T-shirt. Her hair was back in a ponytail, and he didn’t know if she wore makeup or if she was just naturally stunning, but he’d be willing to bet on the latter. She’d been a tall, skinny girl, but she must have stopped growing at some point, because she was definitely shorter than his six feet by several inches, but still trim. And now the slight adolescent curves that had so intrigued him a decade ago were filled out and womanly—the swell of her breasts, the gentle curve of her hips—and even with four stab wounds, three bruised ribs, two black eyes, a broken nose, a fractured cheek, and a concussion, Holden’s body reacted, his dick stiffening, even though he had no business thinking about Griselda in that way.

She squatted down beside the couch, her face a few inches from his, and he could smell the fresh, clean scent—like soap or laundry detergent—that clung to her skin, and he knew that when he closed his eyes to die, that was the last memory he would reach for: the sweet smell of Griselda on the night he found out she was still alive.

“How you feeling?” she asked, her voice low and gentle as she offered him a glass of water.

He struggled to sit up a little. “Good. Yeah, um, better.”

She held the glass to his lips, and he took several deep gulps before lying back down with a soft groan.

“Holden . . .,” she said, giving him a look.

“Everything fucking hurts,” he admitted, wincing. When he looked at her face, though, it was impossible not to grin. “Except my heart.” He paused, spellbound by the sight of her so close. “But even my heart hurts a little.”

His eyes dropped to her lips, and he watched as they tilted up a little. “Why’s that?”

“Because I missed all of this. I missed ten years of . . . You . . . are so beautiful.”

“Aw, look who got smooth.” She laughed softly, placing the glass on the floor, and he knew that if the room had been brighter, he would have seen a pink blush color her cheeks.

“I hate to say it,” she continued, still grinning at him. “But you don’t look so good.”

“Yeah, well. Didn’t know you were coming. No time to pretty up.”

“How often do you do it?”

“It?”

“Fight like that.”

He heard the censure in her tone and looked away from her, up at the ceiling, shrugging his shoulders defensively. “From time to time.”

“I’d think you would have had enough of being beaten up,” she said, picking up the glass.

“I don’t do it to get beaten. I do it to win,” he muttered.

She sighed, heading back to the kitchen with the empty glass, and Holden watched her: the gentle sway of her hips, the silent touch of her little feet across the carpet. The last time he’d seen those feet, they’d been cut up and bleeding, the Shenandoah rinsing them clean.

“You want something to eat?” she asked.

“I don’t have much.”

“You have all the basics,” she said. “My grandma used to say—”

“—hot dogs, apples, milk, cereal. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

She leaned her elbows on the kitchen counter. “I wondered if you’d remembered that.”

“I remembered,” he said softly. I remember everything. I’ve lived on memories of you for ten years.

“So what’ll it be?”

He shifted on the couch, the spike of pain in his chest wound making him wince. “I think I have some soup too? Up in the cabinet?”

“Yep,” she said without checking. “Tomato or chicken noodle?”

“I don’t care which. You don’t mind heating it up?”

“Nope,” she said, pulling his saucepan from the drying rack. Since Holden never left anything in the sink, and she was familiar with the small stock of food in his cabinets, he assumed she’d made herself some soup too.

“How long was I out?”

She opened the cabinet next to the stove and took out a can of soup, pulling on the metal tab to open it. “Um, a few hours. Three or four?”

“You ate?”

“I did. I hope you don’t mind.”

“What’s mine is yours, Gris.”

She stared at him for a moment, then turned her back to him, pouring the soup into the pan. He was hungry, but he wished she’d leave it for now.

“Come talk to me while it’s cooking.”

She gave it one last stir, then turned to face him, crossing the room to stand behind the easy chair across from him, which still felt way too far away.

She pulled her bottom lip into her mouth, looking at him like she was trying to decide something. Finally she said, “While you were asleep, your, uh . . . your girlfriend, Gemma, stopped by.”

“Oh yeah?” Fuck.

“Mm-hm. She was, uh, upset to find me here. Said you should call her so that you two could discu—”

“G-Gris, listen—”

“Holden,” she said, her eyes sad, “I don’t want to disrupt your life.”

Well, I want you to. My life was shit until a few hours ago. My heart only started beating again when I saw you walking up the stairs toward me.

Risking the pain of sitting up, but wanting to face her, he braced himself on his elbow, carefully lowering his feet to the floor, then leaned on the back of the couch trying to keep his chest and stomach as flat as possible.

She quickly stepped around the chair and sat down next to him on the couch. If he’d have known that trying to sit up would make her rush to his side, he would have tried it as soon as his eyes had opened.

“You okay? Move slow,” she said, putting her hand on his arm.

He panted lightly from the pain, turning his head to the side to look at her and covering her hand with his. She sat a few inches away, on her knees, her body facing him, that clean scent so fine and so welcome it was almost making him light-headed.

“You smell good,” he said, staring into her blue eyes.

She flinched, her eyes darting to his neck for a moment before sliding back up to his face. She lingered on his lips—only for a split second—but he noticed, and it made his breath catch as his skin flushed with heat, chased by shivers.

This girl. This girl. God, what she does to me with just a look. The thought made his head race, only stopping when it acknowledged that she already had someone in her life who got to do more than look—he got to touch her, be with her, give her pleasure. Holden’s lips tightened.

“W-who were you with last night?”

She pulled her bottom lip into her mouth again, holding it between her teeth as she stared back at him. This was something he didn’t remember her doing when they were kids, but it was one hundred fucking percent distracting, and he prayed she wouldn’t drop her eyes to his lap, where his dick twitched and swelled.

“Um. Jonah.”

“And who is Jonah? College boy? B-boyfriend?”

“We live together,” she said, holding his eyes but pulling her hand away.

Well, if he needed something to deflate things, finding out she lived with fucking Jonah was the perfect pin.

“Married?”

“No,” she said quickly.

“Engaged?” He flicked his eyes to her bare fingers.

“No,” she said, shaking her head for emphasis. “It’s not like that. We just live together. He didn’t go to college. And frankly . . . I don’t know if he’s my boyfriend anymore.”

He lifted his eyes back up to hers, peripherally noting the way her breasts moved up and down with her short, shallow breaths, and desperately trying not to drop his eyes to stare at them. “Why not?”

She searched his eyes, scanning them carefully, as if looking for answers to unasked questions. Her lips parted, but the soup suddenly boiled over, hissing and spitting, and she jumped up to take care of it without answering his question.

***

Griselda’s heart galloped as she padded across the crappy brown carpet back to the kitchen, relieved for a break from the intensity of their conversation. With her back to Holden, she took a deep breath, finally filling her lungs, and flicked her tongue over her dry lips. When he stared at her like that, she could barely think.

She turned off the burner and took the clean, dry bowl she’d used from the drying rack beside the sink. Lifting the soup from the stove with a solitary pot holder, she filled the bowl and placed the pot in the sink to clean later.

She could feel his eyes on her from the moment she left the couch. Turning back to him, she asked, “Do you want to eat over there or at the table?”

“Here, if that’s okay. I have a little table,” said Holden, pointing to a folding table leaning against the wall by the TV.

She set up the table in front of him, then went back for the soup, swearing she could feel the heat thrown off by his steady gaze. It was discomfiting, making her feel nervous and excited, too self-aware and too aware of him.

After she placed the bowl and spoon before him, she made the safer—and yes, spineless—choice to sit in the easy chair instead of beside him again. As he’d slept, covered with the blanket, she hadn’t studied him closely, but now, seated across from him, she allowed herself to explore him with her eyes as he leaned forward to take a spoonful of soup.

His burnished blond hair was still thick and unruly and too long in the front, where two rogue curls dipped over his forehead as he leaned forward to blow on the soup. His chest was firm and sculpted with muscle, and though his abdomen was hidden by the collapsible table, she checked out the tattoos on his upper chest as he placed his lips on the rim of the spoon. An angel had been inked just below his neck, and her unfurled wings spread across the length of his body, from shoulder to shoulder. The light was too dim for Griselda to make out the details, but she knew in her gut that the angel was somehow connected to her, and her heart clenched with the certainty that grief had been its designer.

She slid her eyes from his right shoulder to his upper right bicep, which bulged slightly with defined muscle tone, and found four black roses. Under the first two she read “Cory and Will,” a red banner under their names with the date “11.14.99.” His parents. He’d only told her the story once, but she’d never forget it.

Holden had spent the night at his grandmother’s house so that his parents could have a date night for their tenth anniversary. When his grandmother drove him home the next day, the smell of gas in the small apartment was unmistakable, and his parents were dead in their bed from carbon monoxide poisoning. One of them had turned on the stove to make dinner and gotten distracted—dinner was never made, and by morning they were gone.

The third of the four black roses read “Gran,” with a red banner noting the date “2.4.01.” His grandmother, and guardian, who’d died of a heart attack only fourteen months after his parents’ deaths, leaving Holden utterly alone in the world.

And finally, under his grandmother’s rose, a final black rose dripping with two drops of bright red blood that read “Gris,” and the date “6.12.04.”

Her breath caught as she jerked her eyes to his face, only to find him watching her with such steady, unspeakable sorrow, such unfathomable tenderness, it made her face crumple. Her neck bent forward, her chin resting on her chest as two huge tears plopped into her lap.

“G-Gris,” he whispered, his voice soft and broken. “I thought you were dead.”

“I know,” she sobbed, reaching up to smear her tears with her fingers, but unable to stop them from falling.

“Stop crying, Gris. P-please stop crying, or I’m going to have to get up and walk over there to hold you, and damn it, as much as I’d like to do that, it would hurt like hell to move, so please . . .”

She sniffled loudly, taking a deep, ragged breath before looking up at him. “I’ll stop. I’m okay.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding as he drew his spoon back through the soup, watching her with haunted eyes. He sipped the cooling soup, then swallowed. “I’ll change it.”

“The rose?”

“Your rose,” he said. “I’ll have it colored red and cover up the date.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“The angel is you too, Gris,” he said, placing his hand over the angel’s face, over his heart. Then he twisted his right arm to show her the tattoo of her face and their initials. “And you already saw these.”

Her eyes still welled, so she blinked quickly a few times and took another deep breath. She jerked her chin toward another tattoo that peeked out from the inside of his left arm. “What’s that one?”

He raised an eyebrow, purposely turning the arm inward as he took another sip of soup. “N-nothing.”

Intrigued, Griselda leaned forward. “Holden? What is it?”

“Ten years is a long time to be stupid,” he said, staring at his soup bowl.

“You don’t want to tell me?”

“Not really.”

“Will you anyway?”

He put the spoon in the bowl, looking up at her with a conflicted expression, then turned his arm outward, showing it to her. It looked like a bunch of haphazard tally marks to her—four lines crossed through, another four crossed through. He stared at her face as he twisted his arm, and she counted over eight bunches, then nine, then ten, seeing countless others before raising her eyes to his.

“What does it mean?”

“It means I was lonely,” he whispered, his face defensive and challenging as he stared back at her.

Her lips dropped open, and she sat back in her chair, holding his eyes, her stomach lurching as she realized how many women he’d been with, how many times he’d been touched and held and loved . . . by someone other than her. It knocked the wind from her lungs, and an uncomfortable lump rose up in her throat.

“Oh.”

He didn’t say anything, just stared back at her, unapologetic, unsmiling, uncertain.

“I see,” she said, her voice breathy as she finally exhaled.

Telling herself she had no right to judge what he’d done to cope with the misery that had been his life, she still couldn’t help how much it hurt. She wished it didn’t, but it did. God, it hurt so much.

“How many?” Her eyes flicked to the tattoos. “Total?”

“I stopped counting.”

“Why count at all?”

“It felt . . .” He shrugged. “C-comforting.”

He didn’t blink, and his face didn’t shift expression. He didn’t explain further. He just stared back at her, letting his truth sink in.

Finally she broke eye contact with him, looking out the window as she took a deep breath, her tongue darting out to wet her lips nervously.

Griselda had lost her virginity in her third post-Holden foster home, at the age of seventeen, and slept with four other boys in quick succession. She’d been looking for a connection, for a safe haven, for belonging, but she never found it. She found only disappointment and an aching, intense loneliness for what she wanted and couldn’t have. Just short of getting a bad reputation, she graduated from high school, and once she started working for the McClellans, Griselda cleaned up her act, emulating Sabrina McClellan, concentrating on work and swearing off of men.

Until Jonah.

Jonah had bulldozed his way into her apartment, into her bed, into her life, and to her everlasting shame, she’d allowed him to stay.

“Why isn’t he your boyfriend anymore?” Holden asked, as though he could read her mind.

“Jonah?”

“Yeah.”

“Because I called him on your phone while you were sleeping and told him I wasn’t going home with him. I told him to leave without me. I said I was staying here for a little while.” She swallowed past that big lump in her throat, wondering if she’d been foolish to make such a rash decision for her life. Would Holden mind that she wanted to stay? Could she bear it if he asked her to go?

Holden didn’t say anything, and she bit her bottom lip again. It was getting raw from so much biting, but she couldn’t seem to help it. Releasing it self-consciously, she reached up and ran her finger over the irritated skin, before adding, “He didn’t like it.”

Holden’s eyes were wide and searching, resting on her lips, then skating back up to her eyes, his breathing ragged and audible. The spoon fell from his fingers, clattering to the bowl and splashing a bit of red soup onto the cheap folding table.

“You’re staying?”

“Just till I know you’re okay,” she said softly, feeling embarrassed, because he had tally marks and a girlfriend. They barely knew each other as adults, and he certainly hadn’t invited her to stay.

“You’re staying,” he said again, his voice less tentative but still giving away little.

Her cheeks heated up as she looked away from him, bracing her hands on her knees to stand up and get moving. “I don’t have to. Listen, if you don’t want me to stay, I can—”

“G-Gris,” he said sharply, a fierce edge to his voice.

She cut her eyes to his.

“I want you to stay.” He paused, as though trying to figure out what else to say. “I want you to stay.” His eyes glistened as he stared at her, and he blinked several times. His voice broke as he repeated one more time, “I w-want you to s-stay.”