The other thing is… look… I haven’t known how to tell you this, and I still don’t, but… I’m not selling drugs or anything like that. Don’t freak out. I started stripping, okay? I didn’t tell anyone. I barely told Kyra a year ago. I couldn’t keep it a secret any longer. I make enough money to pay for most of my school expenses, and I only have to work a few hours a day. My roommate is a stripper too. I’m just doing it until I graduate.

I dated this older guy for a while, and he was the reason why I got the apartment I was at. We split up and things got weird, and… to make a long story short, it was him who got into my apartment that night. He was jealous over my new boyfriend, but I got a restraining order now and I’m moving out when my lease is over in January.

You always do the right thing, and I didn’t want you to get mad at me. By the time I knew I had to say something, it had been too long and I don’t know how to fix any of this anymore. Lies always spiral out of control, even if you don’t mean for them to, huh?

I love you, Luna. I’m sorry for fucking up so much and lying to you and just being a shitty sister, but I want you to know everything.

Please don’t be mad.

Love, Thea

P.S. You should know Rudy went to your house and job on his own. Dad didn’t send him there. He said that Rudy overheard me telling him about getting broken into and got the idea to try and get away with it. Dad had asked me to check with you that one day to make sure you were okay. He had a feeling Rudy would try to do something. I should have warned you, but now I have to live with that too if it makes you feel any better. I’m really glad you’re okay. Lily told me all about it. Not that it means much, but I’m sorry.

That’s what I’d gotten.

So I was going to blame my sister’s kind of passive-aggressive note on why I slept like shit.

I was still mad. Me. Who was rarely ever mad. But how could she think I would give a single crap about her stripping? I wouldn’t care what she did.

Why couldn’t she just call me? Why couldn’t she just tell me? I wasn’t scary. I understood, I guess to a certain point, but it still just felt like BS.

What I was, was mad.

And that was what I was going to blame as the reason why I lost it.

Then again, maybe it was finding Ripley bent over the engine of a Corvette he was restoring and getting a great view of his butt that might have been the icing on the cake.

Maybe it was the six red roses cut short and sitting in a glass bowl-like vase that were the icing on the cake. They were beautiful. But they were too beautiful. And when I really took in the vase and saw that it was spotless, without a single fingerprint on the glass, and imagined Rip carrying something super delicate in his hands and then wiping it down with maybe his shirt or a rag before leaving it there for me to find it….

I lost it.

It was that simple.

I barely remembered dropping my bag and things on the floor and heading back out to the main floor to find the man who had left my gift there.

“Rip!” I called out, knowing exactly where he was.

There was no lapse in response. “Yeah?” he responded from the furthest end of the floor, still looking at something inside the Corvette.

My coffee was sitting in a mug with the poster of the Rocky Horror Picture Show on it.

That hadn’t existed in this building before. Had he bought it… for me?

I sucked in a breath, eyeing it until I was right beside him before I forced myself to look over and say, “Rip,” I started, not even realizing I’d forgotten the “mister” part, “you can stop now with the flowers, all right?”

He didn’t look up as he asked in that congenial, soft voice, “You didn’t like ’em?”

“It isn’t about whether I like them or not—”

He still didn’t glance over as he cut me off. “You liked them then?”

“You know I do. They’re beautiful—”

“You don’t like them in your room anymore?”

I blinked. “No, I like them there—”

“So…?” he asked, still busy doing whatever it was he was doing.

I didn’t glance at his butt.

I didn’t.

“So then, you don’t have to keep buying them, okay? I told you already, I’m over what happened, if that’s why you’re doing it.”

Now that had him straightening, his head just barely missing the hood of the Corvette.

“You can stop. I get that you’re trying to make it up to me, but you’ve done enough. It’s just messing with my head and confusing me, and I would rather you stop now than stop a month from now or six months from now or a year from now when you decide you don’t want to do it anymore, okay?”

That had him turning around slowly to meet me. He waited until he was fully facing me, that giant body tuned into mine, as he said, “I’m not trying to make anything up to you. I told you that already.” He set down the wrench in his hand and took a deep breath, watching me closely. “I’m getting you flowers because I want to. Because you said nobody has ever given them to you, and I’m not about to let anyone else do it. This isn’t some boss shit, baby. This doesn’t have shit to do with Cooper’s. This is Luna and Rip. This is me trying to get you to give me a chance. Understand me?”

Oh hell. He was being serious. Luna and Rip.

He was trying to… what? Win me over? I wasn’t being delusional. Just stubborn. And scared.

You only miss the shots you don’t take, Lenny had texted me. Was that what I was doing? Not wanting to take a shot because I didn’t want to miss? Was it so bad to want to protect myself from getting hurt?

I wasn’t sure, but some part of me must have been because I asked, “You’re not?”

His smile grew slowly. “No, baby, I’m sure as hell not.”

“Why?” I asked him as slowly as his smile had grown.

“Because.”

My heart was beating fast. When did it start beating so fast? Damn it. “You don’t get to just decide all of a sudden you want me to… to…” What was I going to say? Have a crush on him? I had no experience on how to talk to people, men specifically, without sounding worse than a teenager. “You don’t get to decide all of a sudden that you want me to like you—”

“This isn’t me wanting you to like me. That’s not what I want. That’s the smallest part of what I want, Luna.”

For some stupid reason, I took a step back and bumped into the car right beside the Corvette. “What do you want then?”

Rip took a step forward, and then his hand came up toward my face. The backs of his fingers grazed my cheek… and they stayed there, just touching my skin, just barely. “I want what I should’ve been taking from you from the moment you started being sugar sweet to me. From the first time you went out of your way to make me feel good... made me feel better than anyone has for the first time in a long fucking time.”

He licked his lips, and I watched every second of it as his hand stayed exactly where it was. On my cheek.

His fingers trailed down my jaw and lingered on the side of my neck. “You calm me. You know that? You do to me what all that jewelry you wear does for you. Just looking at you makes me feel better. And not just fucking better but better. Different. Like you look right through me and my bullshit and you know what’s in there better than I do.”

I stood there with my mouth open, not knowing what to say.

“Lady at the flower store said orange means admiration.”

My brain and nervous system decided all I was going to be capable of doing right then was blinking and, even then, that seemed almost like too much for me to handle.

Because… excuse me?

“Pink’s happiness… gratitude… appreciation. Those purples are desire… love at first sight… Yellow is affection. Red is love. I owe you a couple of white ones, but I was going to wait a while more because I know I fucked up.” He dropped his hand. “But I’m not going anywhere. Not today. Not tomorrow. I thought you were the most beautiful fucking girl I’d ever seen when you walked into that tiny-ass office three years ago being all cocky and shit. And I think about that girl every single night as I go to bed, Luna. I know I’ve walked away from some shit in my life, but the last thing I want… last thing I could handle is going through you not talking to me anymore. You spoiled me, Luna, and I know I’ve been a real piece of shit a lot. I know you deserve better than somebody like me. I’ve told myself that a thousand times but it hasn’t changed a single thing. I fucking miss you, and my greedy ass needs you around.”