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She turns from me and Graham shoves off the doorway as she walks by. She mutters another apology as she passes him, but Graham doesn’t move his steely gaze from mine.

“Stella,” I call out to her when she’s passed Graham and he’s still glaring at me like he wants my head on a pike.

“Yeah?”

“No worries. It’ll all work out.”

Because I’m going to make it so, I just have no clue how to do it yet.

She gives me a sad smile and heads down the hallway.

Graham steps further into my office and shuts the door. “I thought, since you were too big of an ass last night to get the story from Cara, that I’d stop by here today, tell you what happened, because I’m really not too fucking happy Cara showed up at my house last night, after spending hours telling me how awesome you are, only to be such a damn wreck she was almost as upset as she was the day Jimmy died. She’s been my friend a long time, and I get you two are connected now, and always will be, and I don’t really care if you’re pissed I’m here, but I need to clear this shit up so you two can move on.”

Goddamn it. “How is she?”

“Broken, is how she referred to herself this morning.”

Jesus. My chest burns. He’s not pulling any punches and I respect the hell out of him for it. “Want a seat?”

“Not really. I don’t have a lot of time, so I’ll just get right to the point. Last night, Cara’s parents, who are even bigger assholes than my parents, maneuvered a situation where both of our families figured they could get everything they wanted. I came out to my folks a few months back and we can just say that they’re less than pleased at the idea. So, unfortunately, they told Cara’s parents. Cara’s parents had already met you and my folks might be pissed that I’m not the perfect kid they want, but Cara’s are worse. They got together, figured both of us had had enough time to have our tantrums, and we needed to grow up.”

My hands ball into fists until my knuckles ache. I’mreallynot liking where this is going. When he doesn’t continue, I tilt my chin, silently telling him to continue. I’m too pissed to speak and last night taught me a lesson: when I do that, I screw up.

“So anyway, they figure, Cara’s knocked up and pregnant, and me, well, I’m never going to give them a child or get married or have whatever it is they want me to have—”

“Your parents are dicks.”

“Yeah. My dad is, Mom’s okay, but she doesn’t have much of a backbone to stand up to him. But that’s not really the point. Last night, Cara and I get ambushed and I got us the hell out of there. See, Cara and Jimmy and I, we all grew up together. I’ve known them my whole life, and up until I told my parents, only a couple guys I dated while in the closet and Cara and Jimmy know I’m gay. But after Jimmy died and Cara moved out, she quit calling me and taking my calls, so last night when I figure out the reason they wanted our families to get together for dinner is because they expect us to get married—two problems solved for them— and there was no way in hell I was having that conversation with our parents and Cara without talking to her, so I got us the hell out of there.”

Yeah…about as bad as I expected.

Ice chills my veins and sends a shiver down my spine and it’s all I can do not to shove my fist through a wall.

“And the pictures?”

“Yeah, see, that’s where you’re really the biggest asshole on the planet.” He holds out his forearm and I see the script on his arm.Be you. Be true.It’s vaguely familiar, but I’m too focused on what he says to give it more than a passing glance.

“Jimmy was the cheerleader of our little trio. The perfect son, loved his life, but he loved his friends and his sister too. And when we were teenagers, he used to tell Cara, ‘Be you, honey. Be whoever you need to be and be happy.’ And me, he was always telling me I had to be true to myself because he wouldn’t be friends with a hypocritical asshole. Eventually, the three of us, we shortened that to this.”

Shit fucking damn.

“I get it,” I say, clenching my teeth together. Fuck, I’m not cold anymore. I’m burning up. Fury is boiling over, red sparking the edges of my vision.

“Actually, you don’t,” Graham says, “because you did this tattoo. You inked me with Jimmy’s words before I got the courage to come out. But the last thing I didbeforeI came out, was come here and sit in your chair. It was Jimmy’s words, but it was your hand inking them into my skin that gave me the courage to do it.”

“You’re shitting me.” I press the palm of my hand into my chest, a lump larger than Texas building in my throat.

“Nope. And I think you get it now, because last night, whenever those pics were taken, by whoever, they didn’t know that the reason she was smiling at me and had her hands all over me was because she was looking at me, telling me how much she loved you. She said it must be fate that we’re all connected in a way that goes deeper than anything we could have imagined. And when she told me she loved the ink, I told her she loved you, and she got all fucking goofy smiley at me and said she did.”

She loves me. She’s not falling in love with me, she might have been before last night, before seeing her brother’s words inked into her friend’s arm by a gun I held in my hand, but she learned that and she loved me.

“I love her,” I say, teeth aching so bad they might snap right out of my gums, and I don’t even give a shit if this guy believes me. “I fucked up last night, and I know it. But I had shit in my head about how Stella and I grew up, how she deserves better than some guy from the slums and a drug-addicted mother and I saw her with you, the kind of guy she deserves, having a drink while she’s pregnant and I didn’t think.”

“You didn’t.”

Damn. This guy. I’ve got him beat by about fifty pounds and six inches and he’s not intimidated by me in the least.

“I’ll make it right.” I have no idea how, but I will. I’ll bleed myself dry figuring out how to make this right.