I stretch my arms out to either side, palms flattened on the balcony railing. Tension corkscrews up my spine and digs into the muscles of my shoulders. I heave a deep breath, waiting for a calm that isn’t coming. That never comes when Fiona’s close.

“Justice.”

I stiffen, but don’t turn to face her. I look up instead at the starless sky. I smell her before she joins me at the rail. The jasmine oil she put on this morning has melted into her skin. I love the way it smells at the end of the day, the floral notes softened and rounded by the hours. I make myself ignore how good it feels to be this close to her again.

“Fi, I don’t want to talk right now. Not about Barkley. Not about anything.” I force the words out, hoping she’ll leave. Hoping she’ll stay. Not knowing what to hope for. “Go back inside.”

She steps into the space beside me, turning to look at me, even though I refuse to face her.

“If another girl had hurt you the way I did, I would have tracked her down and pounded her into next week.”

I glance down at her and know she means it.

“But I’m the one who hurt you.” She looks like she’s at the bottom of a well with no idea how to crawl her way out. “And I can’t beat myself up anymore. I just…I need you too much.”

I trap my self-control between my fingers on the rail, afraid it will skitter away from me. If I say what is seething inside of me, I’ll hurt her more. If I don’t, I might explode.

“I can’t take this artificial version of you, Justice,” she says. “Of us. I need something real.”

“We had something real.” I study her for as long as I can before looking back to the sky. “You didn’t believe in it, so you trashed it with Barkley.”

“I thought it was for the best, Justice, we were—”

“You thought?” I face her, hardening every part of me that wants to go soft at the tears standing in her eyes. “Everything has to be on your terms. It’s always about you.”

“Is it, Just? Because from where I stand, it’s always about you. It’s always been about you.”

Her lips move for a second without any sound. Like the words won’t come out, and then they rush out like a landslide.

“You think you were the only one whose heart was ripped out? Only for me it was self-inflicted.” She beats a fist against her chest. “I turned a gun on myself, but I did it because I didn’t want to lose you. You were the only family I had, and I didn’t understand what I was feeling. Didn’t think I could trust it to last, and where would that have left me? Where you left every other girl once you got tired of her. So I did something stupid. I was seventeen, and I made a mistake. I lost you anyway. And I’ve missed you every day, and I want you back. You’re all I have left. Please, don’t shut me out.”

I could have sworn I was tough enough to hold out against her. That the sight of her with Barkley again tonight and the memory of her in that bed five years ago had nailed my anger to the floor, completely immoveable. But she moves me. Her words, her tears, rip my anger up from the root and leave me nothing to hold onto. But her.

So I do. I pull her close and let her cry on my shoulder, for how long I don’t know. Long enough for the sky to start weeping, too, shedding the first few drops of rain.

I force myself to pull back and peer down into her face, watching the rain mix in with the tears still streaking her cheeks. She stands there looking so much like the girl who came to our house when she was twelve years old. Face wet with tears from a nightmare her first night in this house. We came out to this very balcony and star gazed until Fiona fell asleep. She stands in front of me now looking just as lost and alone as she did that night.

“Let’s get inside before it starts pouring.” I tug her through the door and back into my bedroom.

The papers she strewed on the floor remind me of our confrontation. My anger from earlier has faded, but the walls held onto every word we screeched at each other, and her broken confession still rings in my ears. She said a dozen things in that weepy tirade on the balcony, but there was one thought my torn up heart clings to like an oak tree in a tornado.

Fiona wants me.

Don’t get ahead of yourself, Kenner. She may not know what she’s saying. That may not mean what you think it means. Take this slow.

I push the hair back over her shoulder like I’ve done a million times before. She catches my wrist, flipping it over to inspect the cursive writing etched into the skin.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about this tattoo. It’s new.” Voice still wet and husky with tears, she traces the tattoo with her fingernail.

A cluster of goose bumps awaken on my skin under her touch.

“I got it at the end of the semester,” I say carefully. “Right before I came home for the summer.”

“It’s Latin, right? What’s it mean?”

Should I tell her the truth?

“It’s ad astra per aspera,” I finally answer. “To the stars through difficulties.”

We’ve never been able to hide much from each other. The truth is probably written, not only on my skin, but my eyes probably blurt it like a kid who can’t keep a secret. Fiona is my star. My solar system. My galaxy. The heavenly body that holds me in thrall. I’ve always known that somehow, someday, I would find my way back to her. I hadn’t even acknowledged to myself until this moment the truth of what I’ve written on my body.

I see the understanding of it settle in her eyes. The tension falls away from her shoulders. The wide bow of her mouth relaxes. She traps my eyes with her stare, raising my wrist to her mouth, laying a soft kiss on the ink there. I grit my teeth against urges I’ve been fighting since I was seventeen years old and started seeing Fiona as more than a little sister. I tug my wrist, but she doesn’t let go, opening her mouth wide and hot against the air-cooled flesh, tracing the script with her tongue.

All-too-familiar desire spikes my blood. There’s a lot we need to talk about before this happens. Should this happen?

Fiona continues, her kisses making an odyssey up my arm and to my face. She licks at the stubble on my jaw and chin, pulling my bottom lip between hers. My mouth falls open and I pull her top lip between mine greedily for a few seconds before stepping away, fucking knees weak from the taste of her.

“Fi, you can’t just cry on my shoulder and everything is forgiven and forgotten,” I say, closing my eyes and running a hand across the back of my neck. “Now I’m the one who can’t trust this. What if it’s just an emotional response to your mom’s death?”

Pain twists her features when I mention Lillith. She lowers her head, a sheaf of hair falling forward on each side, hiding her expression.

“I’ve been dealing with my grief, Justice. This isn’t that.”

“Then what is it?”

I’ve misinterpreted things before. Once I thought she was coming around; accepting that what we could be was worth risking what we had always been. Next thing I knew she was in bed with Barkley.

“I was scared we wouldn’t work,” she says, head still lowered. “So I pushed you away.”

“And how do I know you won’t push me away again?”

“I won’t.” She studies her flip flops for a moment, pleating her brows. “Is it that…is it that you don’t want me anymore?”

A dry, weary sound impersonating a laugh rattles in my chest.

“A day hasn’t gone by in five years I haven’t wanted you, Fi.”

Her lips curve in the tiniest smile before she looks at me, the question in her eyes before it makes it to her lips.

“Then what’s stopping you?”

I sit down on the bed and drop my head into my hands, elbows on my knees.

“I want all our cards on the table before we go any farther.” I look up at her, just a few feet away. “You have to be sure, and I don’t think you know what this would mean.”

“Then tell me what it would mean.”

The words boil in my belly like a hot spring. A geyser I’ve been tamping down since the moment I rushed off to Stanford.

“It would mean no going back. It would mean you are absolutely, unequivocally mine. No one else’s. No more games. Not my sister. Not my friend. Mine.”

She veils her eyes with her long lashes, and I want, more than I want the breath trapped in my lungs, to know what she’s thinking. My heart takes a break from beating while I wait for her response. I’ve put myself out there before and she sliced me open. What kind of fool am I to do it again?