“Well,” Star says, hands on her hips as she surveys the mess in front of us. The living room is now a maze of paths and mountains of stuff, so while we can navigate it, it isn’t exactly welcoming. “The way I see it, the sofas are good news and bad news.”

“So, par for the fucking course, then,” I say, because every time we seem to catch a break, we get blasted with another setback. I have no idea how we’re going to get this done by the end of the summer, if we ever get it done it all. We’ve only just gotten the backyard done, and all we’ve managed to do inside is carve out these paths and get the worst of the trash out of the living room. We haven’t even touched the kitchen yet, other than to snag utensils and steal canned goods when we can manage to reach them. We’re a month in and we’ve barely made any progress at all.

Long story short, we’re fucked.

I groan and scrub my hands through my hair. It’s fucking scorching in here. Again. It’s even worse than it was outside, and that’s saying something. “What’s the good news?” I ask, because we could really use some at this point.

“The good news is that this means the piles in here aren’t as high as we thought they were,” she says. And that makes sense. The sofas take up a lot of space so they push everything else up closer to the ceiling. Okay, that’s not so bad. That actually means there’s a lot less shit in here than I originally thought. That’s . . . something.

“And the bad news?” I ask, because I know it’s coming and I figure I might as well get it over with.

Star sighs and kind of rolls her neck. It’s like she’s trying to work the kinks out of it. It makes her hair dance around her shoulders and draws my eyes like a magnet to the glistening skin above the neckline of her shirt. Part of me—a huge fucking part of me—starts hoping that the heat will continue to rise and that she’ll strip down to her bikini top like she did the other day. I wince and tamp that thought down as fast as I can, before the heat pooling in my belly can turn into anything real.

Do not perv on Star, I remind myself for the thousandth time since I met her. She’s hot as hell, but she’s also your kind-of boss. And she’s the only person in this town willing to take a chance on your stupid ass. Don’t blow it.

She runs her hands through her hair, pulling it up off her damp neck and piling it up into a messy bun on the top of her head. Then she lets it go, and it falls like a black tidal wave down her back. I swallow. Hard.

“The bad news,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest as she surveys the mountain of stuff in front of us. “Is that there’s no way the sofas are going to fit in either of our cars, not unless we strap it to the roof and drive insanely carefully, and I can’t afford another Dumpster. Not yet, anyway. So I have no idea how we’re going to get them out of here.”

Shit.

She’s right.

We’ve been jockeying stuff to the dump between my car and her mom’s old station wagon ever since they hauled away the Dumpster when it filled up. And that had been nothing in comparison to this, it had only held the stuff from the backyard. This was a hell of a lot more. I have no idea how much the Dumpster cost her, but judging by the look on her face when she got the bill, well . . . we weren’t going to be getting another one any time soon.

Fuck.

I turn to her to ask what the plan is, but the instant I open my mouth the sound of a car horn fills the air, cutting me off. And it’s the loudest, longest fucking car horn I’ve ever heard, and I turn away from the sound with a wince. But as I do, something flashes through my memory, and I feel my body freeze. All at once, I’m back there, the night of the accident. And all I can hear is the sound of the guy I killed as he honked his car horn frantically. I can see it, hear it. It plays over and over in my mind. The sound. The lights. The pounding of my heart as I realize I’ve lost control of the car. The screech the tires make against the asphalt as I try to stop, but go careening toward him despite everything.

Shit.

I squeeze my eyes shut and shove the heel of my hand into my eye socket, trying to block it all out.

“Ash?” Star’s voice cuts through me like a knife and I pull in a deep breath and hold it until my chest starts to burn. Then I let it out slowly, trying to calm the beating of my heart. I drop my hand back to my side and open my eyes. She’s staring at me, her confusion plain on her face. But there’s more there. Shit, I think. I scared her.

“Ash?” she says again. “Are you okay?” She steps closer to me, lays a hand on my arm, and I force myself to nod, to focus on the feel of her skin against mine, clasping onto the feeling like an anchor to hold myself in the here and now.

“Yeah,” I say, nodding shakily. I hate what this does to me, the flashes I get. “Just…” I blow out a breath. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here, what I’m supposed to say. All I’ve ever been able to do is wait it out, and eventually the sounds and the images fade back into half-forgotten memory. I look down at her, and I realize with a jolt just how close she’s standing. She’s right in front of me, looking up at me with those big brown eyes of hers.

Fuck, I think. I could just reach out and touch her. Six inches. That’s all it would take. I could just lean forward, close the distance between us and kiss her. I’m moving before I know what I’m doing, and Star’s eyes flicker from mine down to my mouth and back up again.

And the car outside blasts its horn again and I jerk away.

“Jesus Christ,” I say, pulling back and trying to get my muscles to unclench before I get pulled under again. “What the hell is all that honking about?”

“I have no idea,” she says, stepping back. I let myself mourn the loss for an instant, then shake it off. I shouldn’t be kissing her, anyway. I shouldn’t even be thinking about it. She gives me one last once-over with her eyes, making sure I’m okay, and then turns away. I watch as she starts navigating the path we cleared to the front door, and then I follow. I want to find out what the hell is going on out there.

Star jerks open the front door and together we step out onto the porch. Bruiser, who decided that the single sofa we managed to get cleared off now belongs to him and has spent the last hour napping on it while Star and I surveyed the rest of the mess, is now hot at my heels. He’s sniffing the air, his ears folded low, like all of the survival instincts he picked up over the past five years are suddenly on red alert, and he’s waiting for an attack.

He might have the right idea, I realize when I lay eyes on the truck. I take an instinctive step back when I see it.

It’s this huge shit-kicker pickup, old and blue and rusty around the edges. It looks like it must belong to some kind of gigantic redneck that goes by the name Bubba.

Beside me, Star stands frozen, and all at once all the muscles in my body have tensed back up again and I feel like I’m about to head into a brawl. Beside me, Bruiser growls low in his throat, and I reach out and grab him by his collar, holding him back. Whatever is about to happen—and something is going to happen, of that I have no fucking doubt—I don’t want Bruiser to be the one to start it.

The truck’s passenger door swings open suddenly, and Bruiser barks at the movement and lunges forward. I look down and jerk him back before he can make a break for it. Then I look back up, and I freeze.

What the hell?

I watch as a plump brunette hops out of the cab of the pickup. She’s got a smile on her face so big that she looks like she could light up the night sky with it. There’s a slam and a figure emerges from the other side, rounding the nose of the truck and heading for the front path. It’s a dude, but he’s far from the bible-thumping, squirrel-shooting redneck I’d been picturing. This guy looks more like a Mormon or something. His dark hair is all neatly cut and styled, and he’s wearing a pair of khakis that I can see from here have been ironed. Not to mention the dress shirt he’s wearing that he’s actually tucked into the pressed khakis.