It was all crashing and colliding so loud and hard that I felt like I couldn’t see or hear anything else. I actively avoided going to the new shop and even harassed Rule into taking my shift that week so I didn’t have to see her. I couldn’t get on top of it and as a result I was drowning in the past and running away from the future. I was exhausted.

Even though I told her I would get her some drawings by the end of the week, I totally blew it off and now it was Thursday night and I was well on my way to getting absolutely shit-faced with my friend Zeb Fuller at the Bar. I also fully intended to take Dixie home because the quickest way to get over the idea of someone was to get into the idea of someone else. And even if Dixie wasn’t game to play surrogate lover, then maybe I would take the blonde that was eye-fucking me from the end of the bar home with me and her hot, brunette friend was totally welcome to join us. I smiled at her for good measure and saw her flush and turn to whisper to her friend.

I caught Asa’s eye; he was watching the show with a smirk and shrugged. I turned back to Zeb, who didn’t look half as impressed as the southern bartender did.

“What?” My tone was a little surly and a whole lot sloppy. I was chugging Jäger shots like they were water and I think they had finally caught up to me.

Zeb was a good dude. He had been a client first and then morphed into a friend after we spent several hours covering up the nasty jailhouse tattoos he had gotten over the couple of years he had spent locked up. The guy was an amazing craftsman. I was pretty sure he could build a house with nothing more than some Elmer’s Glue and some toothpicks, but life hadn’t always been a picnic for him and that being the case, I had wanted to help him out. I was the one that suggested Nash and Rule look into hiring Zeb as the contractor on the new shop, and much to my relief it had worked like a dream for everyone involved.

With all my friends being married, or having babies, or settling down with sexy nurses, I was on my own way more than I was used to be, so I had taken to calling Zeb when I needed a drinking buddy for the night.

Zeb lifted his Jack and Coke and just looked at me over the rim of it and told me “nothing” in a tone that clearly meant something.

I squinted my eyes a little and tossed back the newly filled shot Asa had placed in front of me with a lifted brow.

“What’s with the look, then?”

Zeb was a massive guy. I think he was even bigger than Rome, which was almost unheard of as far as I was concerned. He was as covered in ink as I was, and with his shaggy dark hair and scruffy face he was one intimidating bastard. I think I was lucky we were friends or else I might have regretted being a dick to him.

“I don’t know what’s more pathetic, the fact you are wasting your game on some random bar chick . . .” He grunted at me when I scowled at him. “Or the fact that you’re a grown-ass man trying to drink your girl problems away.”

I was twenty-five but felt like I had lived a hundred lifetimes from the moment the cops had showed up at the apartment door in the middle of the night to tell me my mom was dead. They had explained that she had taken a bullet when some punk kid tried to carjack her when she hadn’t moved fast enough to suit him. They put me in the system that night and I had never escaped. I had been a grown-ass man since that moment on, and Zeb was right, I should be man enough to face Salem and the way she had me tied up in knots.

“What do you know about it?” I sounded petulant and irritable.

Zeb rolled his dark green eyes and his normally unsmiling mouth twitched at me in unsympathetic humor.

“I know she’s about this tall.” He held his hand out to about shoulder height. “She has a figure that makes it hard to think and eyes and hair that were made to get lost in when the lights go out.”

I felt a muscle tic in my jaw as I leaned on the bar and asked Asa as he walked by, “You telling stories?”

He laughed at me and I wanted to lunge over the bar and choke him.

“Hey, she’s a fox and radiates hot sex and good times like it’s effortless. I was just sharing my appreciation of a pretty girl. It’s not my issue that you can’t seem to see her looking at you like you’re her favorite drink and we’re in a drought.”

Oh, I could see it all right. I just didn’t have the first clue as to what to do with it. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. After that kiss I had a pretty f**king clear idea where everything I was feeling toward Salem was headed, right into my bed, but I wasn’t sure I could handle that. Just her saying Poppy’s name had been enough to tame the raging hard-on kissing her had awoken and had done more to get my head out of my pants than any shock of cold water ever could.

Could I ever really have loved Poppy the way I thought I had if just the sight of Salem, the idea of putting my mouth on her, did more to wind me up than Poppy ever had? I don’t think there was really any way I would’ve been able to kiss Salem if all those feelings I had for Poppy in the past were really as important as I had always made them out to be.

I mumbled something that made no sense and picked up my beer.

“It not just some random chick that I’m trying to navigate around. I know this girl and she knows me.”

Zeb chomped on a piece of ice from his drink and I thought he looked like he could be out in the woods somewhere living off the land. He was the epitome of what a Coloradoan should look like. I thought we should maybe put him on the state flag to represent us all proudly. Yep, I was drunk.

“That’s your problem, Rowdy. You never want a chick to know you. You just want to hit it and quit it so you don’t have to put any effort into it.”

I growled a little and motioned for another shot. “I put effort into it once. More effort than any young man should, and it blew up in my face. I learned that lesson the hard way. No more effort . . . just a good time for me and a great time for her. Everybody wins.”

Zeb made a noise and nodded when Asa asked him if he wanted another round.

“One girl burned you a long time ago, so that means all girls are made of the same flammable material? Gotta say, I always thought you were smarter than that.”

I was getting annoyed. We were supposed to be brothers-in-arms—bros before ho’s—and all that noise. I didn’t ask him to hang out so he could shove logic and brutal clarity at me.

“You don’t understand.”

He rolled his eyes at me.

“No? I was engaged when I got arrested. I loved the holy shit out of that girl. She told me she would wait, that I was her one true love and even bars and time wouldn’t be able to keep us apart. It took a little less than two months for her to stop visiting, a little over six and she was engaged to a ski pro. She has two kids now and drives a minivan. You think that means all women are like that? That there isn’t one out there that would really wait if she loved me?”

We just stared at each other until he shook his head.

“I don’t. I think there are good women out there that will stand by their man no matter what. I think there is a woman out there that won’t give a shit I did time and she will love me anyway and be willing to see what I have to offer now. Sure, until I find her I have no qualms about doing easy—easy has its place and can be a good time. But when it gets hard, when the girl is worth it, I’m not scared to do the work.” He laughed. “I like doing the work, especially when it’s hands-on.”

The liquorish taste of the Jäger danced on my tongue as I tossed the shot back. I needed to stop. Things were starting to get wavy and I felt like if I let go of the grip I had on the edge of the bar I was going to slide off the bar stool and land on my face.

“There is only one first girl to hold your heart. That first sets the tone for everything and everyone that comes after.” I didn’t sound so sure about that anymore and it wasn’t just because of the booze.

Asa paused and leaned across from me on the other side of the bar and reached out across the expanse to flick me between my eyes. I swore at him and jerked my head back.

“You’re a dumb shit. There a million first girls for a million different first things. There’s the first girl you slow-dance with, and the first girl you go to bed with. There’s the first girl to give you a kiss, and then the first one you take home to your mama.” His amber eyes lit up with humor. “There’s the first girl you fight with and the first girl you fight for. There’s also the first girl you have to let go of. There’s the first girl you love, obviously, and the first girl to break your heart. There’s always a first girl, Rowdy, but there is also the girl that is going to come after her until you get to the last girl. The last girl is the one that really matters.”

I always told myself that Poppy had been my one and only but I wasn’t going to lie she wasn’t my first girl for most of what Asa said. Sure she had most definitely been the first girl to break my heart and she had done so spectacularly. The first girl I had sex with was Joanne Morse when I was fifteen. The first girl I had slow-danced with had been Megan Drake during homecoming the year I scored three touchdowns in one quarter. She was also the girl that had gone down on me for the first time. Once I figured out I could pine for Poppy but still get laid as long as I smiled at a girl and told her she was pretty, I had pretty much run through the entire available and age-appropriate female population of Loveless by the time I graduated high school. The first girl to take home to mama was never going to happen since my mama was in the ground and the girl that had given me my first kiss was the reason I was acting like a drunken idiot tonight. He was right: there had always been another girl after the first and I had never had a last girl yet.

“You guys suck. I just wanted to get drunk and get laid.” They both chuckled at me and I let my glassy eyes land on Dixie as she sauntered up to my side and put a hand on my shoulder.

“I am totally willing to help you out with the last part, Rowdy.”

I liked Dixie. I liked her as a person and liked everything she was working with that made her a pretty girl. She never asked for more than I wanted to give and we always had a good time when we got na**d together. She was a sweetheart, but right now, looking at her and the sexy anticipation in her eyes, I knew there wasn’t any way I was going to be able to go through with taking her home. My mind was on someone else and I didn’t want Dixie to be reduced to a drunken hookup because I was acting like the world’s biggest coward by avoiding the woman I really wanted to be with.

I covered her tiny hand with my own and pushed away from the bar with a lurch. “Not tonight, sugar. These two sorta ruined my mojo.”

There was no way I could drive, so that meant my SUV was staying in the parking lot and I was taking a cab to my apartment.

“Sorry.”

She just shook her head at me and smiled. “I always knew someday someone was going to catch your eye and you were never going to look at any other girl again. It’s the way all of you guys seem to be. As much as it sucks, I have to say it also gives me hope that a guy will look at me that way one day.”

She was turning my rejection into an act of chivalry. Man, she really was a doll.

Asa called me a cab. Zeb helped pour me into the backseat and the poor driver watched me in the rearview mirror all the way to my complex like he was afraid I was going to hurl all over everything I gave him a fat tip to make up for causing him to worry and stumbled into my lonely apartment.

I was really drunk. My head was spinning from booze and memories, so I did what I always did when I was that keyed up. I got out a sketch pad and some charcoal and I drew. I was pretty sure none of it would look like anything legible in the morning when I sobered up, but for the moment it made me settle, focus, and some of the things that were chasing me finally quieted down enough that I could shut my eyes and slump over in a blacked-out heap.

I JERKED AWAKE WITH a start the next day and sent the sketch pad falling to the floor as I scrambled to find my phone from wherever it had landed last night in my train wreck. It was on the kitchen counter next to a bowl of cereal I had poured but obviously never ate, and the Marked number was glaring at me as the Cramps’ heavy and psychedelic guitars rattled my fuzzy head.