Baby LeBlanc was a shitty student, with C minuses for miles, but I didn’t know it back then. She didn’t want to study. She wanted her sister to be saved.

I took Millie for an ice cream, this time not looking back.

I took Millie when I should have taken Rosie.

I took Millie, and I was going to kill Vicious.

Present

What makes you feel alive?

Condensation. For it reminds me that I still breathe.

I MEAN, I GUESS THIS is classified as talking to myself, but I’d always been this way.

The voice that always asked the elusive question seemed to have been implanted in my brain, and it wasn’t me. It was a man’s voice. No one familiar, I don’t think. He always made me remember that I still breathed, which wasn’t necessarily something I took for granted. This time, my answer floated in my head like a bubble that was about to burst. I pressed my nose to the mirror in the elevator of the glitzy skyscraper that I lived in and blew air from my mouth, creating a thick cloud of white mist. I pulled away, staring at my doings.

The fact that I was still breathing was a huge screw-you to my illness.

Cystic Fibrosis. I always tried to get all the details out of the way when someone asked. All people needed to know was that I was diagnosed with it at the age of three when my sister, Millie, licked my face and said I tasted “really salty.” It was a red flag, so my parents had me checked. The results came back positive. It’s a lung disease. Yes, it is treatable. No, there’s no cure for it. Yes, it affects my life immensely. I’m constantly on pills, have three physiotherapy sessions a week, an indefinite amount of nebulizers, and I will probably die in the next fifteen years. No, I don’t need your pity, so don’t give me that look.

Still clad in my green scrubs, my hair a tangled mess, and my eyes glassy with lack of sleep, I inwardly prayed that the elevator would finally close and carry me to my apartment on the tenth floor. I wanted to undress, dip into a hot bath, and lie in bed, binge-watching Portlandia. And I wanted not to think about my ex-boyfriend, Darren.

Actually, I really wanted not to think about him.

Violent clicks of street-corner high heels echoed in my ears, seemingly out of nowhere, growing louder by the second. I twisted my head to the lobby and stifled a cough. The elevator’s door had already started to slide shut, but a feminine hand with red-hot fingernails slipped through the crack at the very last second, pushing it open with a high-pitched laugh.

I frowned.

Not him again.

But sure enough, it was him. He barged into the elevator, reeking of alcohol that I suspected would intoxicate a mature elephant to the point of death, armed with two women of the Desperate Housewives variety. The first one was the genius who compromised her arm to catch the elevator—a chick with velvet-red Jessica Rabbit hair and cleavage that left nothing to the imagination, even if you were extremely resourceful. The second was a petite brunette with the roundest ass I’ve ever seen on a human being and a dress so short, you could probably perform a gynecological exam on her without having to remove any clothing.

Oh, and then there was Dean ‘Ruckus’ Cole.

Tall—perfect size for a movie star—with moss-green eyes, almost radioactive in their sparkle and bottomless in their depth, disheveled, deep brown sex hair, and a body that would put Brock O’Hurn to shame. Sinfully sexy to the point you really had no choice but to look away and pray your underwear was thick enough to absorb your arousal. Seriously, the man was so outrageously hot, he was probably outlawed in ultra-religious countries. Luckily for me, I just so happened to know Mr. Cole was a world-class jerk, so I was mostly immune to his charm.

Mostly being the operative word here.

He was beautiful, but he was also a mess of epic proportions. You know those women who want the fucked-up, gorgeous, vulnerable guy they could fix and nurture? Dean Cole would be their wet dream. Because there definitely was something up with this guy. The notion that people in his immediate environment didn’t see the flashing neon warnings—his drinking, excessive pot-smoking, and raging addiction to everything sinful and fun—saddened me. Yet, I recognized that Dean Cole wasn’t my business. Besides, I had my own problems to deal with.

The HotHole hiccupped, punched the button to his penthouse five hundred times, and swayed in the small space the four of us shared. His eyes were feverish, and he wore a thin coat of sweat on his skin that smelled like pure brandy. A thick, rust-eaten wire twisted around my heart.