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PROLOGUE

“Elio?” he called softly, his voice steady, easily rising above the chatter and the music that poured out of the speakers and flooded the room.

“Huh?” I blinked twice, looking over my shoulder at Jaxon. “Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”

Jaxon Mercer snort-chuckled and shook his head as he stepped closer. “I was telling you that Chicago is about four hundred and fifty miles from Pittsburgh,” he said.

My eyebrows twitched a little, not quite frowning. “Could I have that engraved?”

Jaxon punched my shoulder, sending a bolt of pain down my arm. “And guess what else is the same distance from here,” he said, his light brown eyes glimmering.

“If you make a circle around Pittsburgh that runs through Chicago, I imagine a lot of places would be the same distance,” I said, watching how long it would take him to roll his eyes.

Jaxon pinched the bridge of his perfect, straight nose and exhaled. “New Haven, Elio. I’m talking about New Haven.”

I suppressed a smile and shrugged like it was nothing. I knew that, though. I had known this fact for the better part of the summer. See, Pittsburgh sat in the middle, and it was the place Jaxon and I had called our home for as long as we knew what a home was. To the east, New Haven was about to hit it big; Jaxon Mercer was about to climb the ranks of the New Haven Storm football team. He would be the captain in no time, and he would give the Mercer name a new shot at glory. To the west, my new home awaited. Westmont University, Chicago, sat some twenty hours in the future.

Jaxon wasn’t happy with my reaction. He pulled on a little scowl and eyed me from under his eyebrows. “I thought it was interesting.”

“It’s a coincidence,” I said.

“It’s just so like us to move the exact same distance from home,” Jaxon said.

But in the opposite direction , I thought but didn’t say it. And it hadn’t been up to us. Chicago’s Westmont University was the only one that offered me a full scholarship. I’d applied to New Haven, but their hockey team was small and unimpressive, and their investments in the players were not so generous. Westmont provided housing, tuition fees, and even all my equipment. I would be a Steel Saint in just three days.

Jaxon had the luxury of choosing without having to worry about a scholarship. New Haven was both his parents’ alma mater, and as luck would have it, Ronan wasn’t their alumnus. I doubted Jaxon would have followed his older brother’s trajectory, so he succumbed to his parents’ wishes to study at their old university without the risk of shame over Ronan’s connections to the place.

“It’s a good party, Jax,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Jaxon said. “You hate parties.”

“Everyone else is having a good time,” I said. “I think that makes it an objectively good party even if I don’t like it.” And those were some harsh truths right there. Jaxon had insisted on throwing a goodbye party for both of us because he was leaving a week later, and having separate parties would have meant I wouldn’t come to his.

By default, the party was at Jaxon’s place. It was a big, modern house with a huge common room downstairs. Jaxon’s parents had hired extra help to prepare everything for the party—everything other than a single drop of alcohol—then picked up and left the house for the night. They were cool people if you didn’t step over the line.

Jaxon sent out invites to all our friends, letting me focus on a goodbye tour within my extended family. With the invites, he included a request for a bottle of alcohol from each guest. We were well supplied for the night, and there had only been one incident of puking so far. Lenny Crane had gotten sick from his second shot of vodka, but he made it to the bathroom in time to spare us all a terrible sight—and to spare Jaxon the thankless job of concealing the evidence before his parents returned.

I licked a splash of vodka, not seeing what all the rage was about, and tightened my hand around the glass. Somehow, the summer had gone by, and nothing had happened.

If you pressed me against the wall and put a knife under my throat, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what I’d expected.

But it felt real.

It felt like the entire summer was a missed opportunity. It felt like dense, humid days foretelling a terrible storm, except the storm never came, and the air only grew thicker.

Here I was, closing the longest chapter of my life, yet it felt unfinished.

Is this it? I wanted to ask the Big Guy. But they always told you that thing about mysterious ways and the bigger picture. I doubted he would have the time to get back to me on such short notice. I wondered if he was even there. My parents thought he was, but I was never so sure.

Besides, tomorrow was just another day for the remaining eight billion people on the planet. It was just my world that was getting turned upside down. New state, new city, new team.

New friends.

My heart clenched, and I blinked furiously against the stinging in my eyes. Had some of this terrible vodka gotten into them? I inhaled a steadying breath of air and avoided looking at Jaxon.

We’d known each other for four years, taking nearly all the identical classes in school. His parents had insisted on Jaxon going to a public school as a way to keep him on the ground. It would have been too easy to let Ronan Mercer’s wealth and fame inflate the young and impressionable Jaxon’s idea of who the Mercers were.

Of course, Jaxon’s life turned out to be hell halfway through that lesson. Ronan’s fame turned into infamy, and the students in our school showed Jaxon no mercy. But he had me because we were friends.

I didn’t walk away from my friends.

Parting ways with Jaxon was something I had spent the entire summer ignoring. If I didn’t look into its eyes, it couldn’t look back at me. But here it was, the final day, the final hour. The party swelled and relaxed, people grouping, pranks being pulled off, Summer kissing Lane, April flirting with Franklin, young people being young people. Half of them were only setting out to be seniors now. Our class had scattered already, parted back in June, but enough of us remained for one last hurrah.

Smugly, Jaxon bumped his shoulder into mine. “Made you suffer a party one last time.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” I told him. I lifted my arm and rested my elbow on his shoulder. He hated it when I did that. At six feet tall, he was four inches shorter than me, and I never let him live it down. But he didn’t push me away with a scowl this time.

We stood in relative silence for a few moments before I let my arm drop from his shoulder. Jaxon was annoyed by something. His eyebrows were moving lower, and his eyes were darkening. He wouldn’t look at me. Well, if he picked tonight to be annoyed with me, that was just shitty timing.

Seeing him like that made my skin crawl. The muddled instincts to reach out and assure myself that we were good and to turn away and give him a taste of his own medicine pulled me left and right, and I ended up not doing either of those things.

“Ah, fuck it,” Jaxon said, his voice tightly controlled. “Come.” He gestured to the hallway leading to the right from the living area. His bedroom was there. We’d spent countless long nights playing Seeds of Soulless on his gaming console, a game we settled on because we could decide whether to play the NFL or the NHL—the story of our lives, I figured.

Jaxon walked away from me and the party he had thrown for us both, but I hesitated. It felt important. It felt like this big thing I had been waiting for the whole summer still had a small chance of coming true. But what was it? We were counting down the minutes until the departure, and whatever this thing was, it couldn’t just happen. How could it happen when I didn’t even know what it looked like?

I followed Jaxon, not particularly caring to watch Lane thrust his tongue down Summer’s throat. She’d flirted with me just a few months earlier, but something had put her off, and no amount of trying could spark her interest in me again. Not that I was trying very hard. I was leaving this place, and Summer was starting classes at a community college in the city, perfectly happy to remain precisely where she was.

Jaxon waited for me in his bedroom. Unlike mine, his was almost a little studio. A single bed lay along the far wall on the left side, a desk pressed just against the nightstand between the two, a fuzzy, white carpet covered the dark hardwood floor, and a sofa was turned to face the TV and the gaming set to the right of the door. All it lacked was a door to a private bathroom and a kitchenette before Jaxon could declare his independence.

My best friend paced across the bedroom. “This sucks,” he said. And then, when it wasn’t enough, he added, “I hate it, El.”

I didn’t reply. The tempest within me was too volatile to allow myself to speak. I intentionally pushed down the welling thoughts of despair. No, it shouldn’t have ended like this. Whatever he was planning for me, couldn’t he have let Jaxon be a part of it? But my concerns were irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. The fact that we were about to move the exact same distances in opposite directions was unimportant to the universe, even if it felt like ripping my heart in half.

“We’ll see each other this Christmas,” I said lamely.

Jaxon rubbed his eyebrows, turning away. “I know. Of course. But it sucks anyway. We were…” He shrugged and went silent for a time. “We were supposed to go to college together.”

A sliver of annoyance passed through me. Yeah? And who had the freedom of choice? But that wasn’t fair. Jaxon had to walk a thin line. “We’ll talk all the time, Jax,” I said.

He looked at me over his shoulder. His eyes glimmered, and he dragged the corners of his lips into a smile. “You bet your ass we will,” he said, his voice a little rough.

“I’ll bet my life,” I assured him.

Jaxon swallowed and balled his fists, turning to me. “And we’ll do another trip together,” he said, repeating the things we had already talked about in the last few weeks in the face of the looming departures. “Like we did in July.”

I nodded. We had gone to Still Water Cove at the start of July, just the two of us. It was a graduation gift from Jaxon’s parents. Not that they had just decided to send their son with a charity case to a lovely retreat. They had offered Jaxon a monthlong trip to Italy, but he picked Still Water Cove under the condition I could come with him. It was still way cheaper—not something the Mercers needed to think about the way I did—so they caved in.

We’d spent ten days in a log cabin, talking late into the night, swimming at the crack of dawn, competing mercilessly in who could stay underwater longer or whose nosedive was better. I hadn’t gotten many chances to go on a carefree break in my life, so those ten days felt like being close to Heaven.

Jaxon had loved every minute of it. I had never seen him so happy. The last couple of years had been rough, and Jaxon depended on me more than ever. It was almost a full-time job to keep Jaxon distracted from the relentless wave of destruction his brother’s fall from grace had unleashed. But he seemed to have forgotten all about it in Still Water Cove.

Jaxon shoved his hand into his pocket. “This is stupid and sentimental and dramatic, but I got you something.” He stomped over and thrust his fist at me. When he opened it, two bracelets of braided brown leather sat on his palm in a tangle, each with a little metal plate and an engravement. “Here.”

“There are two,” I said.

“One’s for me,” Jaxon said, rolling his eyes and probably regretting opening his fist. I had learned this a long time ago. Jaxon didn’t put himself in situations where someone could say no to him. He didn’t ask people for things, and he didn’t offer things that might be rejected. If he invited you to the movies and you said you couldn’t come, he would blush furiously and stammer that it was just a dumb idea and that it didn’t matter.

I took one bracelet and examined the engraving on the plate. “Are these coordinates?”

“Still Water Cove,” Jaxon said. He lifted his chin a little and pressed his lips into a tight line, anticipating my reaction. “I got them that day when you were too hungover to get out of bed until the afternoon.”

I knew the day. It was the only day I was hungover. We’d had a few beers by the firepit the night before, but they didn’t sit well with me. I’d woken up with a pounding headache and a rotten mood. It might have been the third or fourth day, and it was the only time we drank in Still Water Cove.

“Jax, this is…” I couldn’t find the right words.

“Silly,” Jaxon supplied. “I know. You don’t have to wear it.”

I snorted. “Stop downplaying it, dumbass. I love it.”

He was stunned for a moment. “You do?”

“Of course,” I said. “That was the best trip ever. And this…it’s so thoughtful. Help me put it on.” I handed him the bracelet and pulled the sleeve of my hoodie up to bare my wrist.

Jaxon’s fingers trembled slightly as he brought his hands to my bare wrist, tying the leather strings into a moving knot that secured the bracelet just right. “Now me,” he said, thrusting his hand out. He wore a short-sleeved T-shirt, and his arms were mostly bare and defined. He already had a golden bracelet his parents had gotten him for his eighteenth birthday, but he didn’t see an issue with combining the two, so I tied the bracelet around his wrist and smiled.

“I didn’t get you anything,” I said.

“Oh.”

“What?” I asked. “I didn’t know we were doing gifts.”

Jaxon looked me up and down before his eyebrows shot up. “Give me your hoodie.”

“What?”

“I know you’re wearing a T-shirt underneath, El,” Jaxon said. “Even though it’s a million degrees out there.”

“What are you gonna do with my hoodie?” I asked.

“I’m not small,” Jaxon said, pretending to be offended. “Besides, that’s the one I wore all of last winter when I kicked your ass in Seeds of Soulless .”

“I won it back,” I reminded him, but I realized that this wasn’t a battle I particularly wanted to win. “Alright, fine.” I grabbed the edge of the black hoodie with a red and white paint splatter design and lifted it over my head. My T-shirt dragged with it until I was almost shirtless, but I got a hand free from the sleeve and separated the two garments, pulling the T-shirt down and taking the hoodie off. “There you go.”

“Still warm,” Jaxon teased, holding it to his face.

I snorted and shook my head. “Don’t be creepy.”

“Why? You scared?” He waved the hoodie at me like a weapon. “Scared of me, El?” He tossed the hoodie at me, snapping it back again. My teammates had danced that dance with wet towels too many times to count. I was practiced in the art of snatching such things from my opponents’ hands.

I grabbed the sleeve of the hoodie on Jaxon’s next attempt, wrapping it around my hand in one smooth move and yanking the hoodie and Jaxon toward me. My other hand grabbed his wrist, the left hand letting go of the sleeve and finding Jaxon’s forearm, trapping him inches away from me. “Who’s scared now?”

He let out a soft chuckle and stopped struggling. Instead, he looked up—how he must have hated having to look up—and held his breath. “I’m gonna miss you, El.”

I held him close for a few moments longer, looking into his eyes. His pupils were so big that I thought he must have taken something from someone at the party. But that wasn’t like Jaxon. He saw what that crap did to your life firsthand. Still, he looked high as hell. “Me, too,” I said, letting go of his arms.

He dropped them to the sides, then moved them to the front, holding my hoodie with both hands. “It’s just that we should have had more time,” Jaxon said. “You know?”

I nodded. In the distance, beyond the door of his room, the music shifted from upbeat dance tunes to a slow and rising swell of the cover of “Stand By Me” by Florence + the Machine.

“You do know,” Jaxon said softly, almost like it was a regret. This thick tension had no right to be here, filling the space between us. Not when we had so little time left. But there it was, making me jittery and anxious. “You probably always knew,” Jaxon said, trying for a conversational tone. “And I’m the coward, El. Hell, I never wanted to ask you for anything if I didn’t think you’d absolutely do it. So I didn’t. But now…fuck, it’s a mess, El.”

I was about to open my mouth and tell him he was rambling, but Jaxon tossed the hoodie to his bed and took a swift step toward me.

“I can’t always be the coward, El,” he whispered.

“Um…no?” I cocked my head, eyebrows rising in confusion. He was very close now, breathing through his mouth, his chest rising and falling steeply, his face a little red. Was he actually high?

“’Cause maybe there’s stuff that I didn’t think was possible, but I have to try. Right?” He was pleading now, almost like he needed to hear the affirmative answer in order to survive.

I nodded, my frown deepening. He was scared of going to New Haven, where he didn’t know anyone. Hell, I was scared, too. “It’s okay, Jax,” I said.

Something in his face opened up. The broody, terrified darkness lifted, and he opened his eyes a little wider. I could see the intense pulse in Jaxon’s neck, the vein throbbing so hard that it looked like his heart worked overtime. Fists still closed tightly, Jaxon stepped closer, his body pressing against mine.

What the hell?

I grabbed his right shoulder and his left wrist, gearing up to wrestle him like we sometimes did. We’d wrestled so much on the soft, lakeside grass in Still Water Cove. But what the hell was wrong with him? Now wasn’t the right time. However, as these thoughts swirled through my mind, the first second ticked away, and the next one followed.

Jaxon rose to his toes. My back slammed against the door. My head thumped against it, and the heat of Jaxon’s lips seared me when he pressed them against mine. His breathing was crazy now, hot air washing over my face furiously as he dragged his mouth over mine.

Staring at him in white terror, I froze. I gripped him still, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t push him or throw him off. My knees buckled, and I was absurdly grateful for his body pinning me to the door. I would have folded on the floor otherwise.

A small moan burst from Jaxon’s mouth, his lips parted over my mouth, and the warmth and wetness of his tongue brushing over my lips sent chills down my spine, settling right in my groin. As if fanned by some gigantic bellows, embers of something I hadn’t known had burned within me glowed to life. The flames were soon ever-reaching, and heat rose into my swirling head, ready to boil my brain.

Rising, growing, swelling like an immense tide, something opened within me. The kiss burned like a violent fire that would leave nothing alive in its wake. I thought of a volcano eruption, how lava slowly poured down the mountainside, how ash filled the sky and changed day into night, and how it destroyed everything in its way when it rained down. It would bury me like it had buried the honest, innocent people of Pompeii.

My left foot budged. I could move again. I had the control of some of my body. Worse, I had the awareness of all of it. I could feel what this kiss was doing to me in places it had no right to reach. I could feel myself hardening, and I could feel the hopeless, desperate sadness the kiss engraved on my heart.

After I could move my foot, I could move the rest of my body. Taking a step forward, I tightened my hand around Jaxon’s wrist, pushing him back with all my strength and weight. It was a heavy trod that pushed us into the middle of his bedroom, Jaxon on the tips of his toes, fighting to keep those sinful lips on mine as if his life depended on it.

My head turned, but it didn’t move back. Why wouldn’t it move back? My hand slipped from his shoulder to his chest, fist closing around his T-shirt. I wanted to push him away and stop this terrible thing, but my fist yanked him closer, slamming our bodies together.

Jaxon’s lips fell from mine for a moment when he inhaled a shaky breath of air. In an instant, he kissed me again. No , I wanted to cry. No. Don’t.

Don’t stop , a whisper added in the depths of my consciousness.

I didn’t even realize it, but a growl was seeping through my bared teeth, and I held him tighter, making him whimper in pain. His T-shirt tore on his shoulder, and he sank his teeth into my lower lip.

This has to stop , I screamed at myself. Stop. Now!

The pain I caused him, not even aware of it, made Jaxon bend his knees, but I leaned down, following him, my lip trapped between his teeth, pain howling through me. But I didn’t worry about the pain. The pain was a passing thing, something that would stop in a heartbeat or two. The rest…the rest would never go away.

And as I found the strength in myself to stop this, the door slammed open, and a girl squealed. She burst into a giggling fit, and I tore my head back from Jaxon, my lip stinging as if his teeth had cut it.

Summer held Lane’s hand in the doorway for one endless moment, two pairs of eyes on us. The space between two heartbeats stretched infinitely before Summer spun away and dragged Lane from the open door.

With my hands still on Jaxon, I turned to face him. The horror and hope warred in his eyes. Hope? Was he fucking insane? I went to push him away, but Jaxon lifted his free hand and held my left wrist tightly.

“Let me go,” I grunted, but Jaxon didn’t listen.

“Wait,” he blurted. “El, please…”

“Let go,” I yelled, tossing this way and that to no result. Trapped and humiliated, betrayed beyond my wildest imagination, I tossed my head back, then brought it down, my brow slamming against Jaxon’s nose, causing a nauseating, cracking sound.

Jaxon yelped, letting go of me and stumbling backward until he tripped over the desk chair behind his back. He fell on the floor, rolling to his side, one hand on his nose and blood pouring, dripping over the white carpet. “El,” he said, his voice nasal and strained.

“Are you fucking insane?” I demanded, not even caring how filthy the curse was. It felt right on my lips. It felt as right as…ah, dammit. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“El, please,” he whimpered like a hurt puppy. Like a coward. Begging, pleading, as if he hadn’t just ruined everything. As if he hadn’t just been the most selfish bastard in the world, ruining four years of memories, a friendship, and everything we had done for one another.

I was trembling. I fumbled for the bracelet, unable to untie it, so I ripped it off my wrist while Jaxon watched, something dying in his eyes.

Good , I thought. It should die. He killed everything else, anyway .

When the strings snapped, I balled the bracelet into a fist, then threw it at him. He was lucky it wasn’t a fucking stapler. And without another look at the wreckage I had left on the floor, I turned away and walked out of his room.

Summer was already holding April, basically shaking her, as I stormed into the living room.

“Summer,” I shouted. “It’s not what you think.”

The two girls giggled.

“ He kissed me ,” I insisted, aware that everyone already knew. Lane shot me a disgusted look, perhaps because he thought I was into that shit or perhaps because the sight in Jaxon’s room effectively cock-blocked him. Nothing was hotter than fresh, new gossip, especially when you were the first to know it. “I didn’t kiss him back. I’m not like that!”

But it didn’t matter.

I was never going to see these people again.

Not for Christmas. Not next summer. Never.

I hadn’t even paused, speaking as I walked, and I passed through the stunned crowd, killing them off in my memory. Every last one of them. They weren’t real. Not anymore. When next I blinked, they would all only exist in my imagination.

Yes. Jaxon, too.

I stormed out of his house, the smell of blood rising from my lip, its iron flavor thick on my tongue.

And I walked.

I walked away.