I grabbed his shoulder and twisted him around. He scowled.
I shook my head, frantic. “I didn’t see the car. I swear,” I signed.
“You could have died,” he screamed in my face, pounding his scarred knuckles over his heart. “You could have left me.”
“But I didn’t.” I used my hands, arms, fingers to reassure him.
My lips trembled. This was about so much more than us. This was about Rosie, his mother, too. Knight didn’t like people disappearing. Not even for a few days, to get better in the hospital.
“Thanks to you,” I signed. “You saved me.”
“Remember always, whenever, forever? What happened to that bullshit? Where’s your side of the bargain?”
He repeated my promise to him all those years ago, his voice dripping disdain. I opened my arms for a hug, and he stepped into it, melting into my body. We molded, like two distinct colors mixed together into something unique and true—a shade only we could paint with.
Knight buried his face in my hair, and I squeezed my eyes shut, imagining him doing it with someone else. Despite the chill, my blood ran hotter.
Mine.
I wasn’t only thinking it. My lips moved, shaping the word. I could almost hear the word. I tightened my hold on him.
“Ride or die,” he whispered into the shell of my ear.
I knew he meant his promise.
I also knew how unfair it was, because I didn’t know if I could save him if I had to.
If someone like Knight would ever need saving. Knight was a normal kid. He talked. He was athletic, outgoing, and oozed confidence. Edie had said he was so handsome, modeling scouts stopped Rosie at the mall and thrust their business cards in her hands, begging her to let them represent him. He was funny, charming, well-heeled, and rich beyond his wildest dreams. The world was his for the taking, and I knew one day he would.
I started crying in his arms. I wasn’t a crier. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d wept since Val left. But I couldn’t stop myself. I knew, then, that ours would not be a happily ever after.
He deserved more than a girl who couldn’t tell him how she felt.
He was perfect, and I was flawed.
“Promise me.” His lips touched my temple, his warm breath sending shivers down my body.
Shivers that felt different—like they filled my lower belly with lava. Promise him what? I wondered. I nodded yes anyway, eager to please him, though he hadn’t completed his sentence. My lips moved.
“I promise. I promise. I promise.”
Maybe that’s why he didn’t trust me.
Why he’d sneak into my bedroom that night—and every night, for the next six years—and wrap his arms around me, making sure I was really okay.
Sometimes he smelled of alcohol.
Sometimes of another girl. Fruity and sweet and different.
Oftentimes, he smelled of my heartbreak.
But he was always making sure I was safe.
And he always left before my dad knocked on my door to wake me up.
For the next six years, before jumping through my window, Knight would drop a kiss on my forehead in the exact same spot where shortly thereafter Dad would kiss me good morning, the heat of Knight’s lips still on my skin, making my face radiate.
I’d see him in school, his cocky swagger and whiplash-witty comebacks making girls drop their guard and panties. Tossing his shiny, thick mane as he showed off his pearly whites and endless dimples.
There were two Knight Coles.
One was mine.
The other everyone else’s.
And although he always spent recess with me, continuously protected me, forever treated me like a queen, I knew he was everyone’s king, and I only reigned in a small part of his life.
One night, when the moon was full and peering in at us through my window, my Knight kissed the sensitive skin beneath my ear.
“Moonshine,” he whispered. “You fill up the empty, dark space—like the moon owns the sky. It is quiet. It is bright. It doesn’t need to be a ball of flame to be noticed. It simply exists. It forever glows.”
He’d called me Moonshine every single day since.
I called him nothing, because I didn’t speak.
Maybe that’s how he knew, all those years later, that I’d lied—by omission. He wasn’t nothing. He was my everything.
Knight, 18; Luna, 19
“She’s not here. You can tuck your vagina back in, Cole.” Hunter Fitzpatrick yawned, flicking a red Solo cup against some tool’s head.
Said douchebag turned around from his conversation with a sophomore cheerleader, ready to talk smack. As soon as he saw that it was Hunter, he bit the inside of his cheek, glowering.
“Ew. Why so constipated?” Hunter growled in the Joker’s why-so-serious voice.
Downing the last of my fifth beer of the night, I pulled my gaze from the front door, tucking the empty bottle into the back pocket of some girl’s jeans. She turned around and laughed when she saw it was me.