“All right, love.”

That’s all he says, yet somehow it’s the perfect thing. In this case, however, the perfect thing makes me cry all the harder. I don’t want to be comforted. I don’t deserve it. “I was supposed to be there. First babies almost never come early. I Googled that shit.”

“I need more to work with. Who had a baby?”

“Ginger.” Just her name brings on a fresh wave of tears. “She wasn’t due for another month. And I’m here in this rainy-ass country. When I should be there.”

He begins rubbing circles on my back with his big hand. “It does rain a lot.” For some reason, that startles a laugh out of me, but it’s far too tempting to bury my face against his neck and keep crying. I haven’t cried in a long time, not even over Evan, and I can’t seem to stem the flow of emotion. “You couldn’t have predicted it,” Shane says quietly, almost to himself.

I wipe my eyes on Shane’s hard shoulder and pull back shaking my head, even though he can’t see me. “You don’t understand. It’s our job to predict what the other will do. We’re both impulsive, and we can’t communicate worth a damn. Predicting is our how we operate.” My head falls back on my shoulders. “I couldn’t even get this one thing right. The one time she actually needs me, and I’m missing in action. God, I’m so fucking sick of not getting it right for people that matter. She was there for me through everything. She saved me.”

He’s silent a beat. “Saved you from what? Tell me, Willa.”

I laugh bitterly, hating the sound but unable to stem it. “I can’t.”

“Bullshit. Give me something.” He lays his rough cheek against mine, the gesture undermining his harsh words. Letting him stay there feels risky, yet oddly natural.

“Why do you want to know? Just so you can understand where your initial judgment of me went wrong?”

“I have a need to know. Beyond that, I don’t have an explanation.”

I take a deep breath and tell the first story that comes to mind. “Ginger bought me my camera when I was twelve. A Christmas present. She probably had to save the entire year to afford it. It’s not the best one, but it’s mine.” I squeeze my eyes shut, unable to believe what I’m revealing, but Shane’s heat combined with the dark is so inviting. “Ginger had to buy the same camera five times from a pawn shop in Nashville because our mother kept selling it to buy heroin.”

Shane doesn’t say anything, but his circling hand grows firmer on my back, massaging my suddenly tired muscles.

“Ginger never told me. Just kept buying the damn camera and leaving it in our room, under a pile of clothes or in the back of the closet we shared, teasing me about misplacing things. One night, she was working at the bar. Mom came home, high out of her mind, with two men I didn’t recognize. They tore my room apart looking for that camera to pawn it again. But Ginger had taken it with her to work that night just in case my mother came home. So it wasn’t there.”

Shane’s hand goes still on my back. My voice has gone hollow, almost unrecognizable. This could be my default voice for talking about Valerie. I wouldn’t know, because I try to avoid talking about her whenever possible.

“Drugs did funny things to her mind. She wasn’t thinking rationally, just knew she needed her fix. Otherwise she would have realized pawning your child wasn’t possible. She did her best to convince the owner to hold me for just a few hours, kind of like collateral on a loan. Thankfully, the owner kept Ginger’s number handy so he could call her whenever my mother came in to pawn the camera. My sister came and got me. We didn’t see our mother for a while after that.”

Shane curses under his breath and pulls me closer, enveloping me in his contradictory scents of smoky and fresh. “Ah, love. I’m sorry.”

I nod, but he’s pressed so close it seems like I’m nuzzling him. “That’s just one time out of a thousand I owe her for. I don’t know anything about babies, but I was going to help. This was my chance to pay her back for saving me.”

Shane pushes my hair back from my face. “Willa, I understand guilt. More than you know,” he adds quietly, giving me the feeling that I’m not the only one hurting here. His voice sounds rusty, as if he hasn’t flexed his compassion muscle in a while, making it all the more meaningful. “I don’t know your sister, but I do know you’re not the type who needs rescuing. I reckon she’d say you rescued her, in return.”

“Huh…thanks,” I say on an exhale. Even if I don’t entirely believe him, I appreciate him saying so. From what I’ve learned about Shane, warmth and understanding don’t come easy to him. Being that he doesn’t especially like me, I’m sure saying the words were twice as difficult. When neither one of us speaks for a stretch of time, the darkness starts to feel closer. I become aware of every tingling point of my body that connects to his. My knees, my arm, my cheek are all warmer than the rest of my body. Our breaths sound like waves rushing between us, and the longer we go without speaking, the deeper those breaths become. Something he said before comes back to me, though, and I need to voice my curiosity. “Why are you guilty, Shane?”

Shane’s hand curls into a fist at the outside of my thigh. “Too many things, Willa.” His head turns just slightly, and I shiver when his lips brush my earlobe. “I’m not a nice guy. Not like—”

I kiss him. I don’t know what compels me to do it. If it’s the fear of hearing Evan’s name right now, allowing his ghost to intrude on this oddly endearing moment in the pitch-dark. Or if it’s just Shane and I’ve finally reached my limit on resisting him. As he sinks into the kiss with a groan and my head goes light, I know it’s the latter. It’s all Shane.

Just as I’m about to pull him closer to deepen the kiss, he breaks away. “I shouldn’t kiss you when you’ve been crying.”

“Yes, you should.”

“Yes, I should.”

His lips seal hard over mine, the force of it tipping my head back. We breathe shakily into one another’s mouths at the initial contact. We’ve barely started and I can’t draw air into my constricted lungs. I quickly decide air is overrated when his tongue nudges my mouth open and he starts to take. My sanity, logic, and reservations become indistinct as his fingers burrow in my hair and my mouth is mastered.