“Samantha!” I yell after her retreating form. “Fuck!” I look down at Connor and lower my voice. “Goddamnit, Anita,” I seethe at her. “You need to stop this shit. Stop fucking with my life.”

But Anita just flashes me a mouthful of graying teeth. “Should’ve just given me some money, Hawk. You woulda looked like a hero to your new fuck toy, and I woulda been on my way.”

“Goddamnit,” I swear softly to myself, and run a frustrated hand through my hair. “I’m not giving you more money, Anita. I know damn well you’re not spending it on Connor.”

She cocks her head and sneers. “You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

I can’t help but laugh in disbelief. “With my money? Oh yes I fucking do.”

Connor stands up now, and tugs at Anita’s shorts. “Mama, I hungry,” he says, right on cue. I’m not sure whether Anita put him up to this, or whether he’s really hungry, but I’m not gonna let a little boy starve just because his mom’s a piece of shit.

“Jesus Christ,” I groan. “Wait here.”

I go inside for a minute, and come back out with a peanut butter sandwich for the kid.

“What the hell is that?” Anita asks in disbelief.

I ignore her and kneel down in front of Connor. “You like peanut butter?” I ask him. He nods at me with wide eyes, and I hand him the sandwich. “Good. Here you go. It’s crunchy. The best kind.” Putting my hands on my knees, I stand up and face Anita. “I’m not giving you money. I’ll call DeWitt’s Grocery and have them put a hundred dollars on account for you. But this is the last time, Anita. Got me? The. Last. Time.”

Anita snorts in disgust. “Fuck you, Hawk,” she rasps.

“You’re welcome. Now leave.”

I don’t wait to see if she does. I go inside and shut the door, locking it for good measure in case she tries to follow me. After a few minutes, I hear the sound of her shitty car driving away.

Sighing with relief, I call DeWitt’s and talk the manager into letting me buy a gift card for Anita that they’ll keep at the service desk instead of giving it to her.

By the time I hang up, the good mood I was in earlier this morning has completely evaporated. I open the front door and take a seat outside on the front step. I blow out a breath and look at the fresh ink on my arm. Suddenly, I’m exhausted.

If I was a man who believed in signs, this would sure as hell be one of them.

Just when I’m starting to think this thing between me and Samantha could be more than just a good time, my past comes back to remind me that I don’t deserve her.

Anita Reynolds was always a spitfire — a fiery, sexy, hot mess of a girl. Even in junior high, the old biddies of Tanner Springs were already talking about her. Whispering about how she was bound to turn out bad one day. With her flashing blue eyes and her bottle-blond hair, even at only five foot two, she stood out in a crowd. Anita practically demanded to be noticed.

Anita was the second girl I ever slept with. She was a year ahead of me in school, and a year behind my brother Liam. Anita had been eyeing me in the corridors of our high school, making sure to wear clothes skimpy and tight enough that any sixteen year-old boy with raging hormones could hardly fail to notice. She would wander by my locker between classes, or just happen to be sitting a table over from my group at lunch. She’d been attracting the notice of the male population long enough to know exactly when one was taking an interest in her — and exactly what to do to lure him in.

Hell yes, I wanted Anita. Shit, any straight adolescent boy with a pulse would give their left nut to fuck a hot piece of ass like her. So I wasn’t exactly gonna waste a lot of time resisting when she made it clear she wanted me back.

I had just gotten my drivers license when we first hooked up. My first car was a shitty old Honda that barely ran and looked like hell. But a couple of days after I started driving it to school, Anita came up to me one day in between classes and asked me if I could drive her home that day.

Turned out, when we got to Anita’s house, the rest of her family was conveniently absent. She led me down to her basement bedroom, where I took her, the smell of sex mixing with the faint must of the old carpet. The next day, I took her home again, and the day after that.

Anita was the first girl I ever knew who was always up for sex whenever I wanted it. She would do pretty much anything in bed, which was a definite plus for a horny young kid who was dying to live out all his adolescent sexual fantasies. We fucked like rabbits for a solid month, and thank God I wasn’t stupid enough to ever risk it without a condom.

After a while, though, she started to get possessive and clingy, hanging out at my locker after class and demanding to know where I was whenever we weren’t together. She started picking fights with me to get me to react, to see how far she could push me. Even though I was still attracted to her, I saw the writing on the wall and decided I needed to end things with her — even though my dick definitely disagreed with me.

Anita didn’t take my brush-off lightly. She tried every trick in the book to get me back: waiting outside my car after school, calling me in tears late at night, sending me naked pics to remind me what I was giving up. When none of it worked, she started flirting with my friends to try to make me jealous. Finally, after a couple of months, she seemed to give up.

Then one day, I saw her talking to my brother Liam after school.

Liam was two years older than me, and at eighteen he was a senior in high school and just about ready to graduate. He was a little taller than me, and thinner, with the same dark blond hair and hazel eyes. Liam was also quieter and more intellectual than I was. He was really into music, and taught himself guitar at a young age. I don’t know what he would have ended up doing if he’d lived, but I’m convinced he could have made a pretty good go at being a professional musician, if he’d wanted to.

Liam was more shy with women than I was, by a long shot. I’ll never know for sure, but I suspect Anita might have been his first. At any rate, he fell head over heels for her, in the way a shy guy who’s never had sex before might for the first girl who lets him into her pants. Pretty soon, the two of them were joined at the hip and spending all their time together.

Summer came, and Liam graduated from high school. Our drunk-ass mother didn’t waste any time kicking him out of the double-wide the three of us lived in now that he was officially an adult. I didn’t relish the prospect of dealing with her shit all by myself for two more years, so I decided to go with him. The two of us got an apartment together above a pizza place downtown. I got a job delivering for the pizza place, and Liam started working at a window manufacturing plant the next town over.

As the months passed, Anita and Liam’s relationship started to turn sour. Liam had it bad for Anita. And Anita knew it. She tortured him the way a girl who knows how whipped her boyfriend is can do, just to prove to herself she had the power in the relationship. She’d pick fights with him that left him running in circles trying to figure out what he’d done wrong. She’d demand ridiculous displays of his love for her, and then shrug with indifference when he came through.

Pretty soon, Liam started to fear she was slipping away from him. He told me he worried that she might be cheating on him. By now, Anita was more or less living at our place — a fact I didn’t like, but didn’t know how to change. She’d walk around the apartment in the skimpiest clothes she could find to wear, especially when Liam was out somewhere. I knew she was doing it on purpose, trying to tempt me and drive me crazy. Though I always resisted the temptation, I’m ashamed to say her actions had their effect. Anita’s body was smoking hot, and the memory of what it felt like to fuck her was recent enough that I guiltily pleasured myself in the shower to thoughts of her more than I care to admit.

I never, ever would have touched her, though. She was Liam’s girl, and even if I didn’t like it, their relationship was none of my business.

Then, one day Anita announced she was pregnant.

Liam, the poor fool, was over the goddamn moon when he found out. I guess maybe he thought Anita wouldn’t leave him now that he was the father of her future child. Unfortunately, in the weeks after she told him the news, she became even more short-tempered and impatient around him than she had been before. She’d demand that he wait on her hand and foot, then complain that he was suffocating her.

My brother was in love, and bewildered, and was at a loss to figure out why he couldn’t manage to do anything right and make her happy. He would confide in me about it all on the rare cases that it was just the two of us at home, and I would listen, try to be sympathetic, and pretend I wasn’t well acquainted with her particular brand of bullshit. I was worried about him, though. A hundred times, I wanted to tell him to dump her, but now that she was pregnant I knew it was too late for that. Liam was a good, responsible guy. He never would have abandoned the mother of his child, no matter how bad things got between them.

Anita and I had never formally been a couple, and Liam never knew that we had hooked up. It felt like lying not to tell him she and I had a past, but I didn’t know how to say anything without upsetting him. So instead, I just pretended none of it had ever happened. I found myself wondering whether it was partly my fault he was in this mess. Maybe if I’d told him right away that I suspected Anita was trying to hook up with him to make me jealous, I reasoned regretfully, he would have broken it off with her early on and wouldn’t be saddled with a woman who clearly made him miserable.

School had started back up for me by then, and Liam had started working nights, and picking up extra shifts at the window factory to save up for the baby. One Friday night, Anita and Liam had a horrible screaming match of a fight, just as he was getting ready to go to work. Anita ended up storming out, and refused to answer Liam’s repeated attempts to get her on her cell. Finally, he had to leave for his shift, looking more defeated and alone than I’d ever seen him. Right before he left, he made me promise to call him as soon as Anita came back, so he’d know she was safe.

Since I was the only one of my group of friends not living with his parents, our apartment had become a frequent hangout to party on the weekends. When Anita returned hours later, it was to a full-fledged blowout. At least three dozen people were crammed into our small place. The music was blaring and the drinks and recreational drugs were flowing. I wasn’t happy to see her, but I was too drunk to care much. Not to mention, by then I had completely forgotten my promise to my brother that I’d call him when she came back.

Instead of disappearing into Liam’s room as I expected her to do, Anita went into the kitchen and came out a few seconds later with a plastic cup full of dark liquid.

“You sure you should be drinking that?” I shouted above the music.

“Back off, Kaden,” she yelled back testily. “It’s only Coke.”

I had my doubts, but I didn’t care enough to pursue it. Instead, I concentrated on drinking and having a good time, and after a while, I forgot about Anita completely.

By the time things started to wind down, I was seriously fucked up and tired as shit. I told my friends to stay and party as long as they wanted, then stumbled to my bedroom to sleep it off. I peeled off my clothes and threw myself into bed, and was instantly down for the count.

I don’t know how long I was out. But eventually I woke up in the dark to someone with long hair smelling like perfume getting in bed with me. I wasn’t one to resist an opportunity for sex when I could get it, and pretty much all the girls at the party were hot. So when whoever it was kissed me, I started kissing back. I wasn’t so drunk that I couldn’t get it up, and when she reached down and started stroking my cock I wasn’t about to stop her. Her mouth left mine, and then I felt her hot tongue lick a trail down my chest and past my stomach. When her lips wrapped around my cock, I groaned and fisted my hand in her hair. She began to suck, and I thrust my hips as slowly as I could, wanting to make it last.

“Anita?” The front door slammed out in the living room.

“Shit!” The girl going down on me pulled off and scrambled to sit up.

What the fuck?

I opened my eyes in horror to see Anita in the bed beside me.

A couple of light taps sounded on the door as it swung open. “Hey, Kaden, you awake?” Liam asked, his voice soft and apologetic.

The look on my brother’s face when he finally registered the scene before him is something I’ll never forget.

Thinking about it now, I stare down at the guitar tattoo on my forearm.

“I’m sorry, Liam,” I whisper.