“How much?”

He rattles off a four-figure number as he stalks closer.

“For that? Just for the girlfriend experience? Seriously? Where do you find these men?”

He shrugs and grins. “What can I say? When you are known for having the best, all the men pay top dollar.”

Cam is a foot away from me now and he leans in close, pressing a hand against the wall, half-pinning me. “You’ll do it, won’t you?”

“I have to think about it,” I say.

“C’mon. What do I have to do to convince you? You know you love it. You know how much you fucking love the way they fall at your feet. Even the freaks. You love all my freaks.”

He’s right. He knows he’s right. I love his freaks because they own their freakish ways. Because they know who they are. They might be fucked up fifty ways to Sunday, but they let themselves have their freak. In the most honest way. By buying it.

When you live with someone and she is a freak in front of you but paints her ways as normal, that’s how love becomes a filthy thing.

Maybe that’s the truth about love. It’s only for sale. It’s only an exchange.

“So you’ll do it,” he says and puts his other palm against the bookcase. Now I’m not half-pinned. I’m all pinned. But I’m not scared, because he’d never hurt me, never ever in my whole life, and there’s a part of me that’s still bewitched by his promises, that’s still drawn to all that we were together. “I’ll beg you if I have to, babydoll,” he says playfully. “I will, I swear I will. I will get down on my hands and knees for you.”

“Stop,” I tease. “You’ve never begged for anything in your life, Cam.”

“I’d beg for you though. Say yes.”

He wants what I have. My words, my yes, my no, the permission slip I was never allowed to sign with my mom is what Cam presents to me, always has, always will. Never changes. He is the rock. He is solid and steady and reliable, and he will always be there for me.

And I love him – a dirty and filthy, a true and pure kind of love.

But I also love what he gives me.

He lets me hold the cards for the first time. Holding them feels so good, so unusual, so fucking great. So I play them. “Tell me what the story is my mom is working on. She said she was working on a blackmail story.”

He twines a strand of my hair around his finger, and raises an eyebrow. “This file she sent over is for a congressman tip she’s looking into. But blackmail? Isn’t that your thing?”

“Yeah,” I admit.

He shoots me a quizzical look. “You don’t think she’s looking into something involving you?”

“No. How could she?” I say.

But then…

Could she? Could she somehow have heard Miranda is blackmailing a former call girl?

No. That would be too much of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?

Chapter Fourteen

Trey

I crouch down on the floor, wrist looped over the top of the sketchpad, like I’m cradling it, as I draw. A candle flickers from the scratched-up kitchen table that’s wedged next to the counter of my studio apartment. The flame illuminates the pages and all the crumpled-up, tossed-aside ones behind me. I am adrift in a sea of discarded drawings, a jumble of not-good-enough sketches.

Angels are littered behind me.

I’m no angel. I would laugh at me if I wore angels on my body. The sign of the hypocrite. Pages upon pages of wings have formed a towering pile by my side. How can I wear wings on my body after all I’ve done with it? Numbers, dates, names. I’ve tried them all, in every script imaginable. But they give too much away. They invite questions, and questions demand answers, and my life, my past, my brothers are not answers anyone can have or know.

They are mine, they stay with me, by my side. Always.

I outline a new drawing in a faded pencil. This one could live on my ribs, grow roots in my flesh. The candle burns until my hand is cramped, until my wrist hurts, until my knees are sore from digging into the floor for hours upon endless hours.

I’ve probably missed a meeting. I’ve probably missed everything. But everything is already missed.

I blow out the candle as my phone rings, and now her name is the only light in my home.

I slide my thumb across the screen and bring the phone to my ear, but when I open my mouth no words come out.

She says hello. She says my name. She asks me if I’m there.

But I can’t manage speech, so I hang up.

Don’t talk about it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t talk about it.

After Will died, I figured the house would feel like a funeral home. Hushed voices, sad music, the sounds of distance and longing echoing against the walls, the sad lament to our lives. My mom, my dad and I would trudge to the breakfast table, go through the motions, manage a spoonful of cereal, a bite of cold toast, we’d heave a sigh, a pat on the hand, some kind of we’ll-make-it-through gesture and then we’d be on our ways. Me to school. Them to the hospital.

Eventually, over time, we’d find a way to move on. I hunted for those ways. I tracked down a non-profit that planted trees to remember the dead. I printed out information online, brought it to the dinner table, and took a deep nervous breath, steeling myself.

“Maybe we could plant a few trees for Will, Jake and Drew.”

She cringed when I said their names. “Why would we do that?” She asked, as if my question made no sense.

“To remember them. Don’t you want to remember them?”

My mother glared at me with cold eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But I thought it would be nice. I thought it would help.”

She shook her head, huffed out through her nose. “No. There will be no trees.”

I tried to protest, but she held up a hand, then left the dinner table, her chicken salad untouched.

I looked at my father. “What did I do wrong?”

He sighed. “You didn’t do anything wrong. She’s just having a hard time.”

A hard time. That was a euphemism if I ever heard one. More like an ice age. Because that’s what she became.

The next morning, she locked the door to the room that would have been the nursery. But at dinner that night, I decided to try talking about them again. I’d received a sympathy card from one of my teachers. A drawing of a midnight blue sky with winking stars, next to words from The Little Prince.

I showed the card to my mom, then gulped nervously before I read the words out loud. “In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night.” I placed the card on the table. “I believe that. Do you believe that too?”

Something mournful flashed in her eyes. For the briefest of moments, I saw all her sadness well up, all her pain, and I swore she was about to fall apart. Maybe that’s why my dad reached over to her and gently laid a hand on her shoulder. But then her eyes went dark as if any remnants of light had been snuffed out.

“No. I don’t believe that,” she said crisply, and stabbed her pasta with her fork. She took a bite, then started rambling about a new clinical study she was undertaking on a better form of Botox.

She buried herself in work, in her patients, in fixing noses, tucking tummies, lifting breasts. Same for my dad. As for me, the message was clear. That was that. My brothers were gone. Dust off your hands, don’t discuss it, move on.

Jake, Will and Drew were not be mentioned. Their names were never breathed in the house again.

Harley

“Hi. I’m Layla, and I’m a sex and love addict.”

The meeting begins and I say the words of introduction, the words we all say, the words that make me cringe. Because I know what people think of love and sex addicts.

They think you screw everything in sight. They think you have zero control over sexual urges, you’re a bunny rabbit, a bitch in heat, you bark at the moon. They think you climb the walls, scale the fences to get your next fix. They think sex addicts are nymphos, porn stars, jokes.