“Are you okay?” He ripped his gaze from his reflection, giving me a sideways glance. I used two fingers to dab Clive Christian cologne on my neck.

“Are you?” I asked casually.

“Don’t dodge the question.”

“Ditto.”

“You’re infuriating.”

“I am yours,” I said by way of explanation.

He grinned proudly. I liked that look on Dad, the one that made me feel like I belonged in this world. In this house. In this family.

“I’m working night and day looking into experimental treatments.” He shook his head, referring to my mother. “She’ll be fine.”

“Do you actually believe that?”

“I have to, or I’ll go mad.”

“Don’t go mad. You’re already straddling the line of insanity.”

“Straddling is quite the feminine word.”

“Then you’re punching sanity in the face sometimes. Hard.”

“Much better.” He let out a sad laugh. He caught my gaze in the mirror. “Break up with Poppy yet?”

I passed him the cologne, rearranging my moussed hair. “She’s a little young for you, old man.”

More laughing, without the sad aftertaste.

This felt good, like old times.

“So you haven’t forgiven Luna for that guy yet.”

“She hasn’t asked for forgiveness,” I admitted, taking a step back from the mirror, wondering if I should confide in him.

Mom wouldn’t understand this part. I didn’t think any woman would. Dad might, although we hadn’t had talks like that in months. Still…

“I can’t stop thinking about them.” I dropped my hand from my hair. “I mean, about him…”

“Inside her,” Dad finished for me, turning around and leaning against the sink, eyes blazing. “You keep rewinding it in your head. How he touched her. How she felt to him. How he felt to her.”

“Stab me with your razor and get it over with.”

“I would, but what about the new tiles?” he deadpanned.

I pretended to scratch my nose with my middle finger. We had the same four-year-old sense of humor. He swatted the finger away, grinning with confidence.

“At the risk of sounding ancient…” he started.

“Here we go.” I rolled my eyes.

“Know what the problem with your generation is? You refuse to understand that love has a price. That’s what makes it significant, pungent, rich. It costs you anger, jealousy, heartbreak, time, money, health…” He stopped, snarling at his last word like a wounded beast.

I looked away. Watching my dad love my mom sometimes felt like watching a chest being shredded open, the heart still beating inside. It was too raw, too real.

“Food for thought—is she worth it? You have to pay your dues, you see.”

I snorted, thinking about what he was going through with Mom. “No one is.”

He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “When you refuse to pay your dues to love, sometimes the price goes up. There’s an inflation, and you end up losing more than you’d bargained.”

Don’t I fucking know it, Dad. I shook my head, thinking about Dixie. Don’t I fucking know it.

If you ever wondered how douchebags were born, this is the exact recipe: admiration that leads to false self-entitlement, multiplied by enough money to sink a battleship, divided by good genes and formidable height.

I was allowed to open my Christmas gift first, since I’d won the state championship earlier in the month, leading All Saints High as captain. It was on the night I took Poppy out for the first time. The night I’d had to finish an entire bottle of vodka to go through with fondling her. She’d tasted different than Luna, and smelled nothing like her. It was like making out with a bottle of Chanel No. 5—bitter and about as sexy as licking a fish.

As it happened, my gift was a blue-leather belted Ronde Solo De Cartier watch, with my varsity number—sixty-nine—(yes, they allowed it at All Saints High when your name was Knight Cole) in gold.

As I said, I wasn’t born a douchebag. It took hard work.

“We’re so proud of you.”

Dad and his best friends and business partners, my extended family—Vicious, Jaime, Dean, and Trent—squeezed my shoulders. Even Penn gave my arm a friendly punch.

“Thanks.” I secured the watch on my mammoth wrist.

“Man, you could go pro with your stats. Why the hell aren’t you trying?” Penn whistled, slinging his arm over his fiancée’s shoulder.

I threw a pointed glance at Mom, who was talking to her sister, Emilia.

“Yeah. Foot-in-mouth moment on my part. My apologies.” Penn winced.

After consuming three Marines’ bodyweights in food, hearing Daria and Penn going on about how fucking amazing they were (file under: jerks. The recipe for making them is different), Vaughn announcing that he wanted to study in Europe to a room full of people who let out a collective sigh of relief (file under: mega asshole. Don’t ask me how to make a Vaughn. Only his ruthless father is capable of that), and Luna working really hard on making herself extra-invisible (which only made my ogling more apparent), we all retired to the Rexroths’ drawing room with alcohol and dessert.

My parents, of course, had no idea just how intimately I was acquainted with alcohol at this point. Mom was busy not-dying, and Dad was busy helping her not-die. Plus, I’d always been a resourceful son of a bitch. I’d been able to hide, disguise, and downplay how drunk I was, in and outside of the house. I was a high-functioning shitfaced drunk at this point.

Luna, of course, was right. Even when I hid my alcohol breath, she could tell when I was intoxicated, because when I was, I was mean to her. I didn’t want to be. But staying sober, sharp, and present felt slightly worse than dealing with her disappointed gaze.

Luna tucked her legs underneath her butt and settled on the carpet by the fire. She nibbled on a cookie and cracked open a book called The Dark Between Stars. The doorbell rang.

“Who has the social audacity to drop in on Christmas Eve?” Uncle Vicious seethed in his usual diplomatic fashion as I stood up to get the door.

“Ask your son,” I told him.

I knew it was a dick move to invite Poppy and Lenora, but in my defense, it really wasn’t my idea, nor my doing. Vaughn had practically requested I extend an invitation to the sisters. Since he and I were still beefing about the kiss with Luna—which had occurred because he’d thought he was teaching me some fucked-up lesson, and I thought he was being a little pussy about it—I figured why the hell not?

He’d said he needed to talk to the younger Astalis about some internship she was about to steal from him. Didn’t know. Didn’t care. I just knew it was a good opportunity to cement the fact that I wasn’t heartbroken.

Because I wasn’t.

Fuck Luna.

Oh wait, someone else already had.

Awesome. The inflation on my love was clearly skyrocketing through the roof. But really, I cared more about the fact that I didn’t care than anything else. Confused? So was I. All I knew was Luna, once again, had managed to friend-zone my ass in the treehouse, and I’d taken it, again, because apparently, I had a side gig as her doormat. To make everything much, much worse, Luna was now flirting with people like Jefferson in front of me and kissing my best friend. And I shouldn’t care, but I did.