“You okay, Sugar?” he asked me quietly. Once I nodded my head, he leaned down and kissed the spot between my eyes slowly. “Okay, I’m gonna sit over by your Gram so your brother can sit here. You need me, you just rub that spot between your eyes, and I’ll get you the fuck outta here. Okay, baby girl?”

When I nodded again, he swept his hand back down my throat and moved to the other side of the table. He was so gorgeous; I couldn’t help but watch his movements, but when Cody sat down next to me I had to stop myself from cringing in guilt at the train of my thoughts.

“Hey, sister. You okay?” he mumbled, his eyes sliding between Asa and me.

“Yeah—” I cleared my throat and tried again. “Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry,” I told him, my eyes locked on his face. It seemed like every time I didn’t see him for a few months, his cheeks became more chiseled or he had just a little more scruff on his face. He was growing into a man, and I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with that.

He opened his mouth to speak when Gram interrupted him, her voice rising above the noise of pots and pans clanging as she searched for the one she needed. “Poet and Asa, Callie is under the impression that those men were there for her. Apparently they were calling her by name. You boys want to explain that to her?”

If I hadn’t turned to look at Asa when Gram started talking, I wouldn’t have noticed the color leach out of his face before he stood abruptly from the table. “Callie—”

“Grease, sit your ass down,” Poet called with no inflection in his voice, and it was scary, because Asa immediately sat.

“Girl, none of this was your doing. If anything, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Why did people keep saying that to me? “We had business with Jose—the man who had you at the house. When Grease went to take care of that business, Jose decided to be a dick. You with me so far, darlin’?”

I nodded slowly as I waited to hear the rest of the story. I needed to know.

“When Grease took you outta that house after—well, let’s just say they put more importance on you than they should have.” I flinched at his words, and that little movement had Asa on his feet again.

“What the fuck, Poet?” he roared. “Watch what the fuck you say!”

Cody reached down and grabbed my hand as we watched the men across the table stare each other down. The tension was so thick that even the guys in the living room had turned toward us and were watching with wide eyes. A few of them were shaking their heads.

“Grease, I’m telling it like it is. No disrespect to your woman—” he stopped and turned his head to the living room as a couple of the guys made noises of astonishment. “Like I said, I wasn’t being disrespectful. Now, sit the fuck down and show me some goddamn respect before I fuckin’ drop you.”

He was calm. He never raised his voice or gave any inflection to the words he was using.

It made his little speech infinitely more terrifying.

“Like I said, Calliope, they thought you were important to Grease, so they were using you to get to him,” he finished with a nod.

I tried to act calm even though my insides were quivering. There was more to the story that I didn’t understand, but I’d honestly heard enough. I was trying to sort through the memories of that night and the new information I was just given, but Asa’s voice pulled me out of my reverie.

“Fuck, Callie. I’m so sorry, Sugar—I thought you knew. If I thought that you were blaming yourself I woulda set you straight right away. It was my bad, darlin’, I fucked up when I took you outta that house.” He sounded weary as he confessed to me, and he wasn’t even looking at my face, but at the table in front of me.

I squeezed Cody’s hand once in apology before pulling away and standing up. Gram had stopped all movement at the stove and was watching me out of the corner of her eye as I walked toward Asa. When I stood behind his chair, I ran my fingernails through the hair at the side of his skull and tilted his head back like he’d done to me just minutes before.

“So you fucked up by saving me from being raped?” I asked him gently, playing absently with a piece of hair that had fallen out of the messy ponytail at the back of his head.

He reached his long arms behind him, wrapping his hands around the backs of my knees and squeezing them gently before he replied. “No, baby. I’d do that again. I’d do that a thousand times. But I should’ve known; I should’ve seen that shit a mile away and known to stay with you until it blew over.”

“I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I was grounded. I shouldn’t have even been out at all,” I told him flatly, trying to ease the guilt I saw in his eyes.

“You’re sixteen, Callie. I know my life hasn’t been the most normal, but even I know that sixteen-year-old girls go to parties without their parents’ permission. You did nothing wrong, Sugar.” He squeezed the backs of my legs in emphasis.

The look in his eyes was sincere, and I knew that he believed what he was saying, but I couldn’t let it go.

“I shouldn’t have been there, Asa,” I whispered while curling my body down and around his—forgetting for a moment that there were others in the room with us. My eyes filled with tears, and one slowly ran off my cheek and onto his lips. “If I would have just stayed home—”

He cut me off by letting go of my legs and standing from his chair. As soon as he was facing me, his hand came to my cheek, but before he actually touched me he must have remembered the people watching us because he grabbed my hand and turned to Gram.