The world’s gone dark.

Not literally. But everything feels dark without her here. There are days when I don’t bother turning on any of the lights in my cabin, or only the lights that I absolutely need to function. It doesn’t feel worth the effort.

Not with Ruby gone.

The days she spent here feel like some sort of wonderful, beautiful fever dream. I can’t believe I woke up to her every morning, my nose buried in her hair. I can’t believe I went to bed with my arms around her every night.

I can’t believe the things she let me do to her. The things she begged me to do to her, the way she’d cry out in ecstasy. The look in her eyes when she said Jax, I need you.

I needed her more, but I knew that all along. I knew that from the very first time she came to my road house, over a year ago, and I fell desperately in love with a girl I didn’t know.

Once the police vacate the crime scene, I clean everything twice, top to bottom. I don’t want the memory of that bastard in my cabin or in my life. I don’t want the memory of Ruby kneeling over him, terrified that she’d murdered a man by accident.

I want to remember the good parts. The parts when she was laughing and happy.

Last I heard, Viper is going to be okay. It sounded like it might take him a while, but Ruby didn’t kill him. She didn’t even come close, though I’m not sure she knew that at the time.

But we all got out alive. Or Viper did, at least.

It’s me that had his heart torn from his body.

It’s late afternoon about ten days later when there’s a knock on my door. I’m in the kitchen, making myself a half-assed fried egg sandwich. I’m not really hungry — I haven’t really been hungry since she left, because I haven’t felt much of anything — but I know that I need to put calories in my body.

I stand in the kitchen and do nothing. I figure it’s the police again, and they either want to look at something in the cabin, or they want to ask me another batch of annoying questions, or they’ve decided I’m a criminal and they want to take me in.

I practically stomp to the cabin’s front door, wishing that whoever it is would just leave me alone. I want to eat, sleep, stare into a fire, and occasionally go to work at the road house where the Iron Diablos watch me warily as I pour their drinks. There seems to be some sort of unspoken consensus that what Viper did crossed some sort of line, so no one’s come after me with a knife in the parking lot.

Yet, anyway. Maybe they’re biding their time, but good luck to anyone who tries something.

The knock sounds again, louder this time. I grab my plate and bring it to the front door with me, wondering for half a second what I look like and then deciding I don’t care.

“What do you want?” I ask as I swing the door open, revealing a single, small form standing on my front porch.

She doesn’t answer. She just looks at me, head slightly tilted to one side. She’s got the red coat on, the hood over her hair, snowflakes dusting her shoulders because I guess it’s snowing outside.

Seeing Ruby there knocks the wind out of me, like a punch to the gut, and I stare at her for a long moment, until she looks away.

“Just to say hi, I guess,” she says softly, her eyes roaming over my body. I’m wearing a t-shirt and old work pants — nothing to write home about.

“I just wanted to see how you were doing, but don’t worry—”

I’m on her in two steps. I toss the plate of food at a table on the front porch and I think it breaks, but I don’t care.

“Ruby,” I breathe, barely able to believe my eyes. “What are you doing here?”

She raises one eyebrow, slipping her hand over mine.

“I came to see you,” she says. “I…”

Ruby goes quiet for a moment, and we stand there in the silence right outside my cabin, the hush of falling snow all around us.

“I missed you,” she finally says, the simple sentence echoing through my heart. “I wanted to call, but apparently you don’t have a phone, and I didn’t particularly want to stop by the road house.”

“I hate the damn things,” I muse, tracing the outline of her lips with one thumb. “I used to have one, but people called me on it, so I ditched it.”

“You know that’s the point, right?”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

There’s another quick silence. My brain is going a thousand miles a minute, my stomach twisting.

She’s here. She came back, after I figured she was gone, after I thought there was no way that Ruby, young and perfect and beautiful, wanted anything to do with me.

But here she is, standing in front of me, face tilted up like she’s waiting.

“I’m going to kiss you now,” I murmur.

“Good,” she says.

I touch my lips to hers and it feels like fate, like it was always supposed to be like this. I’m gentle at first, afraid that somehow, she’ll run away if I don’t treat her like she’s made of glass.

But then Ruby grabs a fistful of my t-shirt and pulls me to her with surprising force, our bodies colliding with a heat I can’t deny. She opens her mouth under mine, her tongue seeking mine out, her fist on my shirt never letting go for a second.

It’s warm and wanting, needy and demanding. I feel alive like I haven’t in over a week, and all of a sudden, everything about our days together reawakens in me: Ruby, naked in my bed. Ruby, wet on the lip of the tub, me on my knees in front of her.

Ruby, sitting on my lap, saying she wants me to be her first.

“Come inside,” I murmur to her, our lips still tangled together.

She laughs softly, then captures my lower lip in her teeth, tugging on it.

“What?” I growl.

“Shouldn’t I be the one saying that?” she asks, her voice pure innocence.

That’s it.

I can’t take this anymore. I hoist Ruby over my shoulder, turn around, and haul her into my cabin.