Feeling only marginally less intoxicated, Skylar couldn’t focus on the movie for the movements coming from the armchair in her periphery. To get her through the over-clothes fumbling of Ivan and Sasha, Sky, under the watchful eye of Kylan, drowned the last of her senses in another beer. A second horror movie on the television replaced the last one, this one centering on a young family and the new house they’d moved into that was apparently haunted.

As much as she wanted to, Skylar couldn’t get into the film. She was agitated, and the extra beer had only heightened the jittery, restless sensation.

Wordlessly, Sasha stood from Ivan’s lap, her eyes trained on him as he stood up after her. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where they were headed.

“’Night,” Sasha said as she slipped into the dark hallway, Ivan seconds behind her. Before stepping out of sight, he halted and said to Kylan, “I’ve, ah, ran out of…” His eyes skipped over to Sky, but whatever he’d been about to say, Kylan understood from those few, scattered words alone.

“Top drawer of my dresser,” Kylan said, eyes glued to the tv like he was watching it.

“Thanks, man.” In what Skylar determined to be a sympathetic glance, Ivan’s eyes idled on her for a second too long before he turned and went to his bedroom.

Condoms. He’d been looking for condoms. It was childish for Sky to hold wanting to be safe against Kylan, but wondering whether he’d broken into his stash roiled her stomach like the ocean battling a storm. Of course someone as good-looking as him was having sex. It just wasn’t with her. And what did she know about sex? For one, she was underage. And two, she’d never had it. She had absolutely no right to judge Kylan for wrapping up and being careful, but she was having great difficulty piecing together the face and body of the other person to complete the scenario. At seventeen, how many people could he have been with? Surely, it couldn’t be many. Despite how he acted, and the life he lived alone, with a friend rather than parents, he was still a boy. His meager age said so.

Now thoroughly disinterested in the movie, Sky stood up and told Kylan she was going to bed. Her nasty thoughts were giving her tummy ache.

In the privacy of his room, she dropped onto his bed on her back, savoring the cool sheets on her tender, sweaty skin. Lifting one arm, she dragged the pillow down the bed, positioning it beneath her head. The ceiling offered no answers to her problems, and the next thing she knew, she was peeling open her drowsy eyes as the door opened and Kylan walked inside, shrouded in darkness, blending seamlessly into it as though a natural part of the night.

Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, and blinking herself awake, Sky asked groggily, “What time is it?”

A feminine voice screamed through the walls, the harsh slap of skin ringing in Sky’s ears.

Walking over to the wall at the head of the bed, Kylan banged the bottom of his fist against it. “Keep it down!”

Skylar’s eyeballs stretched their sockets, mortified at what the hell was going on on the other side of that paper-thin wall.

She pulled herself up to sitting, peeling back the covers to climb inside. Her full bladder reminded her she hadn’t been to the bathroom, and she went and relived herself first, checking her weary reflection in the medicine cabinet above the sink as she washed her hands. Blonde hair had fallen free from her half up-do, the once bouncy waves lying limp over her bare shoulder. A piece at the front framed her right eye, the whites veined with pink from tiredness and liquor.

Sky dried her hands, pulled the cord to turn out the light, and padded across the hallway into Kylan’s room. He was already lying on the bed, the sight of his shirtless torso stealing Sky’s breath with the threat of never giving it back.

She climbed into bed, slipping beneath the sheets. Kylan still wore his jeans, lying beside her wide-awake and showing no signs of sleep coming easily or quickly. Tonight, for some reason, she couldn’t get back to sleep either. A door had been opened, the light on the other side too shiny and tempting to turn a blind eye.

Sky rolled onto her left side, facing Kylan. His head tilted, his gaze flickering over her face in the streetlight bleeding through the window. How many times had they lain like this? Sky struggled to sleep in her own house now without him. The only nights that counted were the ones she spent here, and that was the sad reality her life had been reduced to since Kylan found her in the underpass.

The sex noises from the other room continued to pound, the muted moans and hard slaps of skin a vocal reminder of the unseen, but most definitely heard, physical activities. For how long they’d been at it, Ivan must have taken at least a handful of rubbers. Either that, or his stamina was excellent. That went for Sasha, too. Sky had never heard anything like it before now.

Skylar didn’t have quite the same outlook on sex. She’d avoided it as and when she could, always sidestepping the topic with Declan whenever he brought it up, which lately, had become almost every day. He’d initiated it enough times Sky had lost count. But thinking about doing that same thing with Kylan didn’t make her shudder the violent way it did when confronted on doing it with Declan.

Kylan’s lips parted, his tongue wetting the lower one before he said, “Work.” He’d misinterpreted the reason Sky had been staring at him. “When I leave, I’m working. If I had any other choice, any at all, I wouldn’t go.”

Skylar didn’t need to voice the question to know that work at that time of night, in the neighborhood they were in, combined with the dark, urban clothes Kylan always wore, was the cash-in-hand type of work you didn’t require a fingerprint or a timestamp to punch in for.

A surge of fearlessness rushed over Sky, and that was the only explanation she could give for rising onto her elbow and eliminating another five inches of space dividing them on the bed. Staring down into his eyes, she tried to tell him what her mouth wouldn’t—couldn’t—say. She memorized his features. His almost-black hair slicked back from his face with gravity. The scar running horizontally through his naturally arched right eyebrow, a slash of silvery skin from an unknown injury at a time when Kylan didn’t even know who Skylar was. His eyes glowed like turquoise fire in the quarter moonlight that seeped into the room. That was what she loved the most: his eyes. But not just his eyes. The distinct way he looked at her. How he had this ability to make her believe, whenever his eyes met with hers, didn’t matter how fleeting, she was the start and end of the world and everything in between. There were days and nights he paid her next to no attention, but she was a sucker for those eyes and the power within them. She had no trouble admitting that to herself. Kylan said with one look more than a thousand flowery words could ever achieve.

A headboard banged against the wall, jolting Sky from the sugary confines of her own mind. When she glanced down at Kylan, his silver-turquoise eyes were smoldering, tendrils of lust snaking up her thighs from his searing-hot expression. This time, instead of banging on the wall to tell Ivan to knock it off, Kylan pushed himself higher up the bed, sitting with his back against the wall.

Sky watched his flat abs crunch under the exertion, the buttons on his ink-black jeans open, the waistband of his black boxer briefs showing.

“Come here,” he said evenly, his voice pure husk. He blinked, looking down at her.

Sky kept all surprise off her face, her pulse kickstarting the only physical display of nerves. She did as she was asked, getting up onto her knees, then as least awkwardly as possible, placing one leg over Kylan’s thighs so she was straddling him, her hands resting lightly on his abdomen. She’d never felt his bare stomach with her fingers before, and she implanted every muscle, indent, and crease to memory, in case she never got this opportunity again. Her dreams at night, but mostly during the day, were made of what was transpiring between them right now, right here.

“Where can I touch you?” Kylan asked. His palms framed her thighs like her legs were made especially for his hands and no one else’s. Her shorts had ridden up, nestled at the apex of her thighs. Kylan’s thumbs grazed the cotton edges, every sweep forcing Skylar closer to the steep edge of no return. Her breathing ran out of control, blackness seeping into her vision and almost blinding her. She couldn’t think at all, was barely managing to breathe right.

In a trembling voice one notch above a whisper, she said, “Everywhere.”