The neighbor’s daughter thought I was some kind of a celebrity just because I didn’t have a Southern accent and owned a car. I wasn’t one to crush her fantasy, especially as she was eager to be my sex ed student.

I humored Owl when he taught me the Bible, because the alternative was brawling with him in the hay until one of us passed out. I think my folks wanted me to remember that life wasn’t all about expensive cars and ski vacations. Owl and his wife were like Low Income Life 101. So, every morning I woke up asking myself what’s two months in comparison to my whole fucking life.

There were a lot of crazy-ass stories in the Bible; incest, foreskin-collection, Jacob wrestling an angel—I swear this book jumped the shark by the second chapter or so—but one story really stuck with me, even before I’d met Rosie LeBlanc.

Genesis 27. Jacob came to live with Laban, his uncle, and fell in love with Rachel, the younger of Laban’s two daughters. Rachel was hot as fuck, fierce, graceful, and pretty much sex on a stick (as indicated in the Bible, though not in so many words.)

Laban and Jacob struck a deal. Jacob was to work for Laban for seven years—then he could marry his daughter.

Jacob did as he was told—busting his ass under the sun, day in and day out. After those seven years, Laban finally came to Jacob and told him he could marry his daughter.

But here was the catch: it’s not Rachel’s hand he had given him. It was her older sister’s, Leah.

Leah was a good woman. Jacob knew that.

She was nice. Sensible. Charitable. Cute ass and soft eyes (again, paraphrasing here. Other than the eyes part. That shit was actually in the Bible.)

She was no Rachel, though.

She was no Rachel, and he wanted Rachel. It was. Always. Fucking. Rachel.

Jacob argued, fought, and tried to talk some sense into his uncle, but in the end, he’d lost. Life was like justice, even back then. It was anything but fair.

“Seven more years of work,” Laban promised. “And I’d let you marry Rachel, too.”

So, Jacob waited.

And lurked.

And yearned.

Which, anyone with half a brain should know, only gratifies your desperation for your subject of obsession.

Years ticked by. Slowly. Painfully. Numbly.

In the meantime, he was with Leah.

He didn’t suffer. Not per se. Leah was good to him. A safe bet. She could bear his children—something Rachel, he would later find out—had difficulty doing.

He knew what he wanted, and it may have looked like her, and may have smelled like her, and fuck—maybe even felt like her—but it was not her.

It took him fourteen years, but in the end, Jacob won Rachel fair and square.

Rachel might not have been blessed by God. Leah was. But here was the thing.

Rachel didn’t need to be blessed.

She was loved.

And unlike justice and life, love is fair.

What’s more? Eventually, love was enough.

Eventually, it was fucking everything.

Seven weeks into my senior year, another looming calamity had decided to blow up in my face in spectacular fashion. Her name was Rosie LeBlanc, and she had eyes like two frosted-over lakes in an Alaskan winter. That kind of blue.

The what-the-fuck moment grabbed me by the balls and twisted hard the second she opened the door to the servants’ house on Vicious’s lot. Because she wasn’t Millie. She looked like Millie—kind of—only smaller, shorter, with fuller lips, higher cheekbones, and the little pointy ears of a mischievous pixie. But she didn’t wear anything overtly weird like Emilia. A pair of sea-starred flip-flops on her feet, black skinny jeans cut wide at the knees, and a tattered black hoodie with a name of a band I didn’t know plastered in white. Designed to blend in, but, as I’d later find out, destined to shine like a motherfucking lighthouse.

Inferno-red hit her cheeks and crawled down the edge of her collar when our eyes tangled, and that told me everything I needed to know. She was new to me, but I was a familiar face. A face she studied, knew and stared at. All the fucking time.

“Are we engaged in a secret staring competition?” Her recovery was immediate. There was something in the rasp of her voice that almost sounded unnatural. Too small. Too hoarse. Too uniquely her. “Because it’s been twenty-three seconds since I opened the door and you haven’t introduced yourself yet. Also, you blinked twice.”

I originally came there to ask Emilia LeBlanc on a date, cornering her like a frightened animal with nowhere else to go. She wouldn’t give me her phone number. A hunter by nature, I was adequately patient to wait until she was close enough for me to pounce on, but it didn’t hurt to check on my prey every once in a while. If we were being honest, though, pursuing Emilia wasn’t really about Emilia. The thrill of the chase always made my balls tingle, and to me, she provided a challenge other chicks hadn’t supplied. She was new meat, and I was an insatiable carnivore. But I wasn’t expecting to find this.