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and to all the Lunas of the world
I watched her back disappear into a dot. I was always sad to see her go.
But that’s what our parents said—that it wasn’t about her voice. It was about the world. I got it. I hated the world, too. We just hated it differently.
I only rode it so I could hang out with Luna. Same reason I colored. I loathed coloring.
Luna put my hand on her heart. I rolled my eyes, embarrassed. “I know. You’re here for me.” She shook her head and squeezed my hand harder. The intensity of her gaze freaked me out. “Always. Whenever. Forever,” she signed.
With our blood, she wrote the words Ride or Die on the back of my hand, ignoring the state of my knuckles.
I didn’t want to kiss her. I wanted to zip open my skin and tuck her into me. Hide her from the world and keep her mine.
“My heart broke, not because I was sad, but because it swelled so much at the sight of you, I needed more space in it,” he once told me.
Experience had taught me that time was good at two things: healing and killing.
The only bad thing about Knight was it felt like he held a piece of my heart hostage. So I always wondered where he was.
It was the first time I’d realized my best friend was…well, beautiful.
A heartbreak was a heartbreak. Pain was pain.
The hail faded into light rain, and my visibility cleared. His eyes were red-rimmed and tired. So tired. Tired because of me. Because I always got into stupid trouble he had to pull me out of.
“I didn’t see the car. I swear,” I signed. “You could have died,” he screamed in my face, pounding his scarred knuckles over his heart. “You could have left me.” “But I didn’t.” I used my hands, arms, fingers to reassure him.
“Thanks to you,” I signed. “You saved me.” “Remember always, whenever, forever? What happened to that bullshit? Where’s your side of the bargain?”
Knight buried his face in my hair, and I squeezed my eyes shut, imagining him doing it with someone else. Despite the chill, my blood ran hotter. Mine.
“Ride or die,” he whispered into the shell of my ear.
I started crying in his arms. I wasn’t a crier. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d wept since Val left. But I couldn’t stop myself. I knew, then, that ours would not be a happily ever after. He deserved more than a girl who couldn’t tell him how she felt. He was perfect, and I was flawed.
Maybe that’s why he didn’t trust me. Why he’d sneak into my bedroom that night—and every night, for the next six years—and wrap his arms around me, making sure I was really okay.
There were two Knight Coles. One was mine. The other everyone else’s.
“Moonshine,” he whispered. “You fill up the empty, dark space—like the moon owns the sky. It is quiet. It is bright. It doesn’t need to be a ball of flame to be noticed. It simply exists. It forever glows.”
He’d called me Moonshine every single day since. I called him nothing, because I didn’t speak. Maybe that’s how he knew, all those years later, that I’d lied—by omission. He wasn’t nothing. He was my everything.
Vaughn stared at him blankly, as if the answer were obvious. With his icy, pale eyes and raven black hair, he looked like a dropout from a Twilight movie—a vibe a surprising amount of girls dug.
I was captain of the All Saints’ football team, so I had that shiny quarterback title and shotgun rights. But Vaughn had the street cred of Dracula, and Hunter’s family was the fourth richest in North America, so suffice it to say, all our dicks were fool’s gold and had pussies in their cards tonight.
I was still reeling from Vaughn’s comments about Luna needing to go somewhere else. Somewhere far. The notion that I could forget her just went to show he’d never been in love.
Luna Rexroth was beautiful. Sure. But so were a lot of other girls. Difference was, Luna carried her beauty like it was something borrowed. Carefully yet casually, not making a fuss about it. She wouldn’t stand in line for anyone, anywhere. She’d stand out, glowing with quiet pride.
She always gave me that disappointed look. That you-can-do-better-than-this look. But I didn’t think I could. Because the best—her—was not available to me. She’d made it perfectly clear. Three times, in fact. Three kisses. All ending in disaster.
Luna Rexroth was going to be my girlfriend, then fiancée, then wife.
And so, I continued to slip into her room every night. I got it. She needed time. Time? I had plenty.
had a seahorse tattoo inked on my spine, hoping she’d get the underlying message: that she was my backbone.
It wasn’t a secret I’d chop heads and bring down the sun for Luna Rexroth.
My mom had said there were a lot of lids for every pot. But there was only one lid for this pothead. Luna.
“I love you, Knight Cole. More than anything. Maybe even more than myself. But I don’t trust you with my heart. And when you hurt me like this, I feel little and vindictive. So vindictive, you shouldn’t trust me with yours. Whatever it is, we need to kill it before it kills us, you understand? We can’t be together.” “But…” “Friends.” She’d mouthed the word. I almost heard it.
It didn’t bother me that Luna and Vaughn were tight. I trusted both of them. There was still a dull pang of pain every time she as much as breathed in the direction of a guy who wasn’t me, but I’d learned how to control it over the years. Mostly.
But usually I didn’t find out Mom was officially no longer a candidate for a lung transplant, which meant her team of doctors had basically given up on her. Today, I did.
When she wanted kisses, she got them. When she wanted friendship, she got that, too. What about what I wanted from her? What I needed?
“Because I have nothing to apologize for. If you’re here to pick a fight, wait till I’m done with the party. I’ll climb up to your room, and we can talk shit out. Oh, wait, that’s right. You don’t talk.”
“Forget it.” I took her hand and kissed her knuckles. I was a fool for Luna Rexroth—incapable of being mad at her, even when she deserved it.
There was no fucking way she was leaving, no matter what her dad wanted. She hadn’t even left the neighborhood for a sleepover without her family. Was it sick that I liked her frightened? Sheltered? Closed-off? Because it meant having more of her, and less competition.
I’d been shut down one too many times, and I needed her to throw me a bone with at least a bit of meat before I reassured her that, yes, I was the same pathetic bastard who had loved her from day one. That I wished I weren’t, but I was hers, whether I liked it or not. And fuck knows I didn’t like it anymore. Not for a while now.
Come after me, my heart begged. I need you. Mom feels like shit. I don’t know how long she’s got. I need you. I looked behind me. Luna wasn’t there.
I didn’t kiss girls in public. It was one of the many things I didn’t do in public to be considerate of a girl who couldn’t bring herself to tell me how the fuck she felt about me.
Besides, what was the point of staying? We were never going to be together. He was always surrounded by girls. Girls who were nicer than me. Who spoke with real words. Some of them even had great voices. Girls who wore makeup and trendy clothes and curled and flat-ironed their shiny hair. Girls who had sex with boys and knew how to use their bodies to seduce him.
“He pities you.” He let the word roll across the ground. It exploded between us like a smoke bomb, and I found myself coughing. “By the same token, you should show him mercy.”
I couldn’t believe what Vaughn was asking me to do. Except I could. I was frightened that if I let my guard down and truly let Knight in, he’d use me and dump me, and there’d be no escaping him, because he was everywhere. We’d grown up together, and our parents were best friends. Our families were tangled like a tight French braid, with no beginning, middle, or end. And if I stayed, it would be more of the same: us circling around one another. Always in the same universe, never on the same planet.
“Put yourself out of your misery.” Vaughn straightened up. His clothes were holed almost as much as his heart. “Because he never will.”
That night, Knight didn’t show up to hold me. To protect me. To save me. The moon shone, peeking back at me, asking why? I turned around, giving it my back, ignoring its invasive question. The sun will rise tomorrow, I reminded myself. It has to.
It felt like life continued without me, and my bubble hadn’t just burst… It had exploded all over my face.
Then there was a boy. An actual boy. With limbs and everything. A real boy. That noticed. Me.
Losing someone all of a sudden, like in a plane crash, or losing them piece by piece, like I did Knight. It was like feeling a once-warm body growing cold next to you in bed. Chills ran through my back. I wanted to throw up half the time I thought about him.
