"No, Mom, it's really dead. I'm going to have to get it towed."

"So how did you get back here?"

"Tony gave me a ride."

A long pause. Amber could practically hear the wheels whirring in her mother's mind. The construction worker. The bas.e.m.e.nt. All those unanswered rings. Then a faint metallic sc.r.a.pe in the background as the curtain rings slid along the bar and her mother looked out the front window of her apartment. "He drives a blue truck," she said.

Oh, the disapproval in those words.

Amber knew she was supposed to be feeling something. Shame. Dismay. A twinge of what-have-you-done-young-lady? She'd just had s.e.x with a man whose house she'd never seen, whose parents and siblings she'd never met. Bad, bad Amber.

She felt marvelous.

"He sure does," she said.

"You invited him up?"

The bathroom door opened, and Tony came out, buck naked and completely unconcerned.

It didn't look so much like a cudgel when it wasn't standing at attention. It looked almost domesticated in its nest of black curls. Lovable.

Or maybe that was just Tony.

"Yep," she said cheerfully. "I invited him up."

"Amber, you need to be more careful. A man like that ... those Mazzaras aren't the best family, and-"

"Bye, Mom."

She hung up the phone, knelt down, and extracted the cord from the wall.

When she turned around, he was grinning at her in that way he had, and her heart somersaulted backward off a cliff.

Too late to be careful, she thought. Way too late.

She stepped into his body and wrapped her arms around him. He kissed her, and then he kissed her some more, and then she kissed him back and he grunted, and his ... his c.o.c.k rose where it pressed against her hip.

He would go. Later tonight, or in the morning, he would go, and he might not ever come back.

But he wasn't gone yet.

In the meantime, she would steal every intimacy she could get. Transgress every boundary. Take every stupid, doe-eyed risk, and hand him her heart and her body.

He couldn't break her. She could only do that to herself, and she'd rather get broken this way than spend her life safe and afraid.

"I think you had more perversions to teach me?" she asked.

He ran his hand down the gully of her spine. "Dozens."

She sank to her knees. "Let's start with this one."

When she wrapped her hand around him, he said, "Jesus, bunny."

"Don't call me bunny,' " she replied, and then took him in her mouth.

Chapter Eleven.

She fell asleep at around one.

Tony sat on the edge of the bed, looking out at the moon and trying to work up the will to leave.

If he stayed until morning, she would want to make him breakfast. She'd already fixed him pasta with homemade sauce from the fridge, something that had sausage in it and was nearly as good as his mother's, though she hadn't believed him when he said so.

He figured in the morning it would be bacon and eggs and Amber in that ugly pink robe, with her little satisfied cat smile, looking all mussed up because he'd spent half the night mussing her.

He wanted that. Too much.

She rustled under the blanket. "Tony?"

"Over here."

"It's dark."

"I know, honey."

"You want me to find you a candle?"

"No, I'm okay."

He was okay because the moon was out, but more than that, he was okay because he could hear her breathing. He knew that if he lay down, he could find her again and wrap his arms around her sleepy body and hold her.

What did that mean, that she could make everything feel like it was okay?

He kept trying to tell himself it didn't mean anything. It wasn't real. But he no longer believed his own bulls.h.i.t.

"Will you come back to bed?"

He didn't answer, and that was answer enough.

When the lump under the sheet shifted and sat up, he could see the shape of her face, the fall of her hair.

"Are you going?" she asked.

"I'm trying to."

A long pause. "Tell me why first."

"I already told you how I am."

Coward.

She pushed the covers off and crawled across the bed to him. When she got there, she sat cross-legged behind him and put her arms around him. "Tell me why you're how you are. What happened to you?"

He looked down at where her white hands crossed over each other in the center of his chest, right over his heart.

She trusted him.

It was like getting cut by a knife that was so sharp, it went deep, fast, and it didn't even hurt at first. You took your hand away, thinking you were fine, and then you saw the blood, and the ache started up.

Too late to stop it. Too late to do anything but bandage himself up and stagger through the aftermath.

"Please," she said.

He couldn't give her forever. Babies with big eyes and round cheeks. But he couldn't pretend not to owe her the truth.

"My brother Patrick and I ... You really don't know this already?"

So many people did. His old friends, everyone who'd gone to school with him and his brothers and sisters. Most of the folks he did jobs for already knew. It wasn't any fun, seeing his history on their faces, but it did simplify things.

"No," she said.

"I guess you're too young." All the Mazzaras had been out of high school before she even started. And maybe it made a difference that she lived in Camelot, not Mount Pleasant.

He took a deep breath. "Patrick and I used to run around together. He's fifteen months younger. I gave him his first beer, you know? We smoked weed for the first time together at one of those parties in the bas.e.m.e.nt of South Hall. You ever go to one of those parties?"

She shook her head, rolling her forehead back and forth on his back.

" 'Course you didn't. Well, we did. I dropped out of high school partway through my junior year. I was bombing trig for the second time, failing English, too, and I didn't see the point anymore. I wasn't any good at school. If I read for too long, I would get this dull pain behind my eyes, and the lines would start to swim around at the ends, so I couldn't get from the end of one line to the beginning of another."

Amber inhaled, sounding like she was about to speak.

"It's not what you think, dyslexia or anything like that. I got tested for all the learning disabilities, and I didn't have any of them. It's actually my eyes-or it was my eyes. This eye doctor I went to a few years ago figured it out. She called it convergence insufficiency,' and she says n.o.body tests for it as much as they should. Anyway, she did therapy with me and fixed it in, like, three months, but back in high school I had no f.u.c.king clue. I just knew I hated school, and I'd do anything to avoid having to spend all day long in a cla.s.sroom. So as soon as I could drive, I bought a car with money I'd earned working for my dad, and I started skipping all the time. I took Patrick along for company."

"Did he drop out, too?"

"Eventually he did. He was a better student than me. I was lucky to pull C's and D's, and Patrick got mostly A's. My mom was furious with me. She said I ruined his life."

Amber rested her cheek against his back and slumped against him.

"So we raised a lot of h.e.l.l is the short version. Patrick had an on-again, off-again girlfriend, and he got her pregnant. He was trying to straighten up and be a decent dad, but I kept pulling him out to the bars with me, getting him to be my wingman when I was chasing tail. Both of us were working for my dad by then, but we came in late for shifts, took off early. Gave him a lot of gray hair. Probably took ten years off his life, even before the accident."

She squeezed him tighter.

"Patrick and his kid's mom didn't get along. They fought a lot, even before the baby was born. But he loved that kid. Nicole was her name. He had his day with her on Sundays, and he never missed it, no matter what kind of crazy s.h.i.t I dragged him into the night before. Sometimes I went along. I liked her, too. She was a real sweetheart. We would take her to McDonald's, go to the swings at the park."

His hands were cold, and he'd broken out in a sweat.

That shiny cap of white-blond hair. Her stick legs in stretchy pink pants, and that round little-kid belly.

He used to lie on the floor, and she would sprinkle him with fairy dust. Kid magic.

"One day I'd had him out all hours drinking, and we were late picking her up. Patrick started arguing with Alicia. They were yelling in the driveway and giving me a headache, so I went to lie down in the backseat. When Patrick got back in the car, he was so mad, he went tearing down the driveway. Nicole was hiding behind the car."

"Tony."

"Ran her over. Killed her."

"Oh, Tony, no."

Her body on the gurney with a sheet over it.

The blood had ruined her hair.

His stomach heaved, and Tony swallowed convulsively. He kept breathing. It was always like this.

"They charged Patrick with aggravated vehicular homicide, which meant he was drunk when he hit her, but they dropped it down to negligent because his blood alcohol wasn't high enough to make the charge stick. I wouldn't have let him drive drunk. I swear to G.o.d, I was never that stupid. But he was tired, and that was because of me. We'd only slept a couple hours. He had a DUI on his record, so he did six months in jail."

She sniffed.

"Don't cry. It's done. It's been done for a long time. Crying won't fix it."

"How do you ... how do you even keep going?" The horror in her voice made him wince. "Her mother. Your poor brother. He must be-"

"He had a rough time. He's doing better now."

She moved to his side and kneeled, and he could feel her right beside him, looking at his profile. Searching his face for something. "What about you?"

Tony turned his head away. He hated this part. The sympathy. The bottomless f.u.c.king sympathy. So much harder to take than hatred or cold condemnation.

"It was worse for Patrick. A thousand times worse."

"But you think it was your fault."

"It wasn't me behind the wheel, but I was responsible. Her mother was responsible. All of us were out there, being a.s.sholes, not taking good enough care of Nicole, and it could've been me behind the wheel just as easy as Patrick."

His hands lay open on his knees, his fingers curling into fists and uncurling again, because he wanted to grab onto her, but he couldn't even look at her.

She couldn't fix it. n.o.body could.

"I didn't pay enough attention," he said. "I always had a problem with that-getting distracted too easy, not following through on school and other stuff. My dad gave me h.e.l.l for it. Whenever he had to clean up something I'd made a mess of, he'd say, It's gonna get you into big trouble one of these days, Anthony.' And he was right."