My parents exchanged worried looks, frowning. They’d been a tremendous help with raising Luna ever since I’d moved from Chicago, where I’d managed an FHH branch, back to Todos Santos, selling a healthy percentage of my stocks to Jordan Van Der Zee, along with a piece of my soul in the process.

“Why don’t you go ahead and get some rest?” My mother rubbed my cheek, forcing a smile on her sweet face. “Dad and I will take Luna back to our place for a sleepover. She’s been dying to help Dar build that spaceship for weeks.”

The spaceship.

My dad was a dreamer. An inventor. He built shit that never worked. He wasn’t really building a spacecraft, obviously. What he was building was a healthy relationship with my daughter, using empty batteries, carton boxes, superglue, and old matches that had gotten soaked in the rain and were no longer usable. He was building what I couldn’t even set the fucking ground for. A healthy, fun relationship with my daughter.

Or the awkward looks she was getting.

Or shouldering the burden that came with being different.

It bothered me because those differences were the things that people would blame me for if her mother ever came back into her life. Luna’s differences were what Val would exploit. So yeah, it made me resent them.

“You don’t have to do it,” I said, not really arguing with her. I could use the night off. I wasn’t even going to call Sonya or Amanda. Straight to fucking bed for me. Maybe watch a stupid action movie and order greasy food I’d never allow myself to eat on a weekday. My six times a week strength training didn’t go well with junk food, but sometimes even grown ass men allow themselves a little pity party.

“Please.” Mom jerked me into a hug. She was so much smaller than my six foot four body, it was funny to think I’d come out of her. It was also funny because Trish Rexroth was one of the most gracious people I knew and I was a Shithead with a capital S. “We love Luna and want to spend every chance we have making her happy. And anyway, I was planning on baking that apple pie, and your dad’s sugar level is sky-high. She’ll be doing him a favor eating the majority of it. Right, Dar?” She turned to my dad, who was arguing—legit quarreling—with a four-year-old boy over what the face paint they’d been using on the kids was made of.

I smirked. “Okay.”

I said my goodbyes to Luna, my parents, and Sonya and climbed into my black Tesla. I called a Korean Barbecue place on my way home, ordering every other dish on the menu, and drove in circles for a while, enjoying a different type of silence. Not loaded with words or tension, but loneliness and selfishness, two things you learn to crave as a parent. If someone would ask me quietly, on their last breath, if I wanted to be a father, and I knew my admission would never leave their mouth, I’d say the truth. I’d say, no. Because it was too hard, too heartbreaking, and too fucking all-consuming to be Luna Rexroth’s dad.

And still.

And still. I loved my daughter hopelessly, desperately, urgently. Which only made my inability to help her all the more soul-crushing. The idea that she’d given up on people, or maybe even worse—on her life, before it even started infuriated me. I wanted to show her that the world was a beautiful, frightening place worth experiencing. That peasants could be crowned kings if they worked hard enough, and how her daddy was living proof of that.

There was a wooded reservoir squashed between Orange County limits and Todos Santos which I’d especially loved as a teenager. It was a little on the wild side. Large, remote, and a total money pit to local councils. No district wanted to deal with it, especially as it used to be the city hall of Todos Santos before it got all fancy and relocated to a downtown zip code with enough fountains and swans to be mistaken for Monaco. Since it was technically not a part of any city, it got neglected and forgotten. But only by the adults.

A lot of kids came to the reservoir to have sex, get drunk, and generally be assholes, which was most teenagers’ favorite pastimes. Back when we were in high school and Vicious’ parents were at home—which was rare—we’d meet there for our weekly fights, in which we’d defied each other.

I decided to drive there on a whim, knowing the Korean place took a lifetime to get their takeout orders made—especially one as large as mine. A trip down memory lane would remind me I hadn’t always been this old, this bitter, this fucked-up.

I drove by the old benches, the lighthouse standing in the lake, sandwiched between the hiking trails. I rolled my window down, inhaling the perfume of nature. Freedom. Youth. Pure air. A small smirk curved on my face, and I almost relished the feel of it.

Almost.

The person to wipe the smile off was the last I was expecting to see, even though it made perfect sense for her to be there.

Edie Van Der Zee.

I heard her before I saw her, and even when I did see her, it was through bushes and fog, shadowed by the night. In fact, I only recognized her because her wild, wavy blonde, out-of-catalog hair was cascading down her bare shoulders and because of that throaty, hoarse laugh. She was wearing a loose ROXY top, little shorts, and her unlaced Dr. Martens. She looked so much like a kid I wanted to punch myself in the balls for imagining her writhing under me while I’d pounded into Amanda the other night. Edie’s legs were still curveless, two straight toothpicks. Not very different from Luna’s.

You’re fucking disturbed.

She stood in front of two guys and a girl who were sharing a bench, sitting on the back of it, because they were such fucking rebels. Not.

I only wanted to slow down so I could hear what they were laughing about, but ended up stopping completely behind a wall of wild bushes when I realized my black car blended perfectly with the night. This was the point where I should have probably acknowledged that I’d crossed a hard line of some sort. I was stalking my employee, my teenage employee, late in the evening. But I chose to dismiss the level of creepiness I was exhibiting by pointing out to myself that A—I hadn’t actively sought her out, I’d happened to bump into her. And B—if she was in some kind of trouble and I turned my back on her, I’d never forgive myself.

Far-fucking-fetched, but I’ll take it.

One of the guys, who was wearing a hoodie in the middle of the summer and deserved to die a slow death for this alone, stood up and sauntered over to one of the reservoir’s most iconic symbols—the old town’s city hall. It was deserted, decaying, and made out of sandstone. Big, boasting of empty rooms, and last time I was there fifteen years ago, every one of them had been occupied with a couple or a threesome getting lucky on dirty mattresses or sofas that had been dragged into the place and were probably contaminated. My teeth clenched as he threw his arm over Edie’s shoulder, hooking her by the neck and jerking her toward him for a forehead kiss.

“C’mon, Gidget. We haven’t fucked in forever and all the new girls at the beach are too vanilla,” the tool said as they zig-zagged toward the entrance. Gidget? And why did his choice of words grate on my every nerve? I used the word fuck as a verb, adverb, noun, and a simple decoration in every other sentence. If I could marry it, I most likely would. Yet I hated that it left his mouth, and hated it even more that it was directed at her. Mostly, I loathed that the tool was wearing a hoodie so I couldn’t even see the goddamn face I was about to smash with my fist.

“Wait, let me get a blunt from Wade,” Edie’s husky voice murmured and she jogged in the other direction, toward the losers on the bench. Was she really going to screw some asshole in an abandoned building? I wasn’t buying it. Then again, what the hell did I know about this chick? Oh, right. She was a pickpocketing, self-centered liar who’d ditched my daughter’s party to hang out with pot-smoking idiots. And she was a teenager. Of course, she was going to fuck him in an abandoned bastion. And, of course, she wasn’t vanilla.

My dick stirred in my pants and I did the unthinkable, cupping it with my fist and squeezing hard. My way of saying it was never going to happen. She wasn’t even my type. Too small, too blonde, too sweet-looking, though at this point, I knew she was nothing like her looks. Girl had some serious baggage.

In my desperate plea not to jerk off, I failed to remember my headlights were still on. Her friends on the bench craned their necks to see what—or who—was lurking behind the bushes. I needed to do something. That something was to get the fuck out of there.

Then again, I was always the bastard who did stupid shit, preferably with the most poisonous woman in his locale. Why stop now?

Instead of U-turning and leaving, I hit the accelerator, my car speeding silently—justifying its 170k price tag—and slammed the brakes when Edie’s ass was directly in front of my window, mere feet from the doors to the city hall.

“Van Der Zee,” I roared. She whipped her head around so fast I thought her spine was going to snap. I leaned sideways and popped the passenger door open.

“Get in the car.”

Her mouth fell open and for a second, I wanted nothing more than to shove my tongue into it. Instead, I pushed the door open wider, growling.

“Now.”

The tool she was about to spread her legs for was now directly in front of me. He had a neck tattoo, droopy green eyes, and a lip ring. He looked like a fucking Blink182 reject. Only taller. And probably more muscular. Not as big as I was, but certainly the kind to pocket enough panties to open a Victoria’s Secret store. My kind.

He waltzed over to my car and parked his elbows on my fucking windowsill like he owned it. Ballsy. He was going to say goodbye to those balls if he wasn’t careful.

“And may I ask who the fuck you are?” He lit a blunt coolly, puffing the stream of smoke directly into my face. He was playing the game I’d mastered when I was eighteen. The one where you push until something snaps. But I was thirty-three now and could crush his neck, and future, without blinking. I tried to remind myself that I didn’t want to do any of those things to him. That he was just a hoodie-shelled teenager. A peacock trying to fart some extra pretty feathers to impress his lady friend.