Let me start off by saying I don’t hate my life. To someone from the outside, it might look like a bad life, but I don’t care. I know the truth. I have a roof over my head. I’m frying juicy steaks in the kitchen. My dad, Dan, isn’t abusive or in prison, which basically puts me at a huge advantage in comparison to the rest of the kids in my neighborhood. I have Ryan, who looks out for me, and, for the most part—albeit in an unconventional, fucked-up way—I feel loved.

Mostly.

But feeling loved doesn’t mean that I’m happy with my circumstances. It doesn’t mean I’m content with the street I live on that manages to taint every man, woman, and child that is unlucky enough to land here. It doesn’t mean that I won’t try to run away.

I live in Las Vegas, the city that sucks out your soul and spits out whatever’s left of you. Your job is to pick up the pieces and find out who you are.

I’m about to. Planning to. Soon.

I flip the steak, and the searing pan hisses in delight. Take two steps to my right. Stir the boiling pasta. Al dente, just like Ryan likes it. Walk over to the sink. Wash my hands. Look out the window, the screen is hole-ridden and the frame rusty and eaten by the scorching heat and age. Then I smile. I see Ryan kneeling on our yellow overgrown grass, in front of the cracked, bruised asphalt of the road, working on his Harley. As if he senses me, he lifts his gaze to mine.

Stern. Severe. A little on the psycho side. But, he’s my family nonetheless.

Ryan is not my biological brother. My mom, Mary, died in a car accident when I was two. I don’t remember her, and although I’m sad that I never got to know her, it’s my dad I truly hurt for. All I have left of Mary Julia Stringer is an old, beat-up camera from the nineties, and I hold on to it like it’s my lifeline.

I used to use my high school’s dark room to develop the film myself, but now, I’ll have to figure something else out. I’m autodidactic. Self-taught, if you will. That doesn’t come without a price, because I’m probably no good, but taking photos is what I love. Dad says Mom always had a camera in her hand. Funny how those things can be passed down without even knowing her or having her influence. It makes me feel connected to her.

A few years after she passed, my dad took another stab at dating. Enter Darla and ten-year-old Ryan. I knew Darla was bad for Pops, even at the tender age of five. She smelled like smoke and cheap perfume and always went out of her way to make me feel like a burden. But Pops seemed happy—at first, anyway—and I got Ryan. So, it wasn’t all bad. Over the next five years, however, things deteriorated, along with their relationship. Darla started skipping out on us for days at a time, and even flaunted other men in front of my dad. After more than a few knock-down, drag-out fights, Darla had finally bailed for good. When my dad found Ryan, who was only fifteen, packing his things up, he told him to unpack his shit and go set the table for dinner, and that was that. Darla was out, and Ryan was staying. When I asked my dad why she left, his response was something along the lines of, “Darla’s a whore. Don’t be like Darla.”

Duly noted, Dad.

The night Darla left was the first night I snuck into Ryan’s room. It was innocent, of course. I wanted to comfort him, even though he showed no signs of being particularly saddened by his mom’s absence. At first, he stiffened when he felt the bed dip under my weight. But my intuition had been right, because that night, Ryan held me and cried himself to sleep while I rubbed his arm and sniffled quietly. He never cried again, and we never spoke about it, but he still sleeps with me on occasion. Except now, it’s Ryan who sneaks into my room.

And it’s not innocent. Not anymore.

The years passed, as they always do, while Ryan still lives at home, neither my dad nor I want to see him leave. Maybe it’s because Dad is rarely at home. He makes the Las Vegas-Los Angeles route twice a week, and occasionally takes longer trips that have him on the road for weeks at a time, which leaves him very little time for actual parenting. Since sleeping by myself in this rundown house, in this horrific neighborhood is pretty much a death wish, I’m happy to have Ryan by my side. With his tall frame, bulging tattooed muscles, uniform of wifebeater and don’t-fuck-with-me expression plastered to his face, you’d have to be stupid to break into our house.

And it’s not the only reason I am happy to have him around. We need each other. It’s always been us against the world. Not that the world was particularly against us. It just didn’t care.

I start making the sauce for the pasta. Tomato. Basil. Olive oil. A shit-ton of garlic. I read the recipe somewhere on the internet after Ryan and I saw it on some cooking show that aired on one of the few channels we have.

Maybe it will make him crack a goddamn smile for once. He’s always been a bit of a ticking time bomb. The homemade, highly unpredictable type. But lately, I feel like he’s seconds away from exploding.

Tick, tick, tick.

For the rest of the meal prep, I’m on autopilot. I chop, stir, drain, flip, arrange every

thing on the plates, take out two bottles of Bud Light from the fridge, and set the table. Then I proceed to kick the whiny door and bang my fist against the screen a few times to draw his attention.

“Dinner’s ready,” I yell.

“Two secs.” I hear the clink of heavy tools dropping onto the concrete near the yellow grass he is kneeling on. His bike’s been fucked for two weeks now, and he can’t take it to the shop because he spent his last few bucks on bailing out his best friend, Reed. Not that having a broken-down bike has slowed him down any. The guy is never home anymore.

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“Steak’s getting cold. Get your ass inside or I’m eating without you,” I mutter and slam the screen door with a bang.

I wait for him, slouched on my chair in front of our plates, scrolling my thumb along the touch-screen of my phone—one of the three things that my dad makes sure we always budget for: the rent, the food, and my phone. Most kids would be pissed to have an older model, but I’m just happy this thing has internet capabilities. Ryan saunters in and collapses on the chair opposite me, not bothering to wash his dirtied, greasy hands.

I chance a glance at him. Ryan looks like a man. He’s looked that way for a long time now. His arms are ripped—not in the gym rat way, just in the way of a guy who does manual labor—and his body is big, wide, and commanding. Long, dirty blond hair that almost touches his shoulders, brown eyes, cut bone structure—the only good thing he inherited from his deadbeat real dad. Every time we hang outside the house together—which, admittedly, is not often these days—girls I went to school with throw themselves at him. He’s screwed half of them, I know, even though they’re underage. If I’m being honest, it seems to be half the charm about this guy. Other than the fact that he is inked from head-to-toe. It’s that slightly unstable, dangerous vibe he gives off. Every girl wants to be good until a bad boy whisks her off her feet and corrupts her.

And every girl hated the one who stood in their way. That’d be me. At least in their mind. Sure, Ryan would fuck them, but that’s all they ever got. He always stood a little too close to me, stared a little too long. They noticed. And they were ruthless. So, I was deemed the brother fucker. I didn’t really care. Ryan didn’t help matters by forbidding the entire male population of Riverdale to stay far away from me. He was out of high school before I even began, but he’s somewhat of a legend around here. No one in their right mind would willingly cross him.

“How’s the steak?” I ask, keeping my eyes on my own piece of meat as I slice it carefully.

“Juicy.” He laughs, his mouth full. From my peripheral, I see a trail of bloody liquid traveling from the corner of his lip to his chin, but he doesn’t make any move to wipe it. He takes another bite, his eyes honing in on me. “So, when are you going to turn eighteen?”

“You’re my brother,” I grind out. “Shouldn’t you at least pretend to know this kind of crap?”

“I’m a shit brother,” he retorts, his voice as dry as his steak is juicy. “And when asked a question, you fucking answer. It’s really that simple, Rem.”

That’s the part where I should probably mention—he calls me Rem. My name is Remington, and my friends call me Remi, but Ryan, much to my dismay, has been calling me Rem since day one.

“August sixteenth,” I groan. Ryan moves his eyes up and down my body as much as he can with the barrier that’s the table between us.

“What’s two more weeks?” he mumbles as he rubs his lower lip with his thumb, and it’s glistening with the olive oil from the pasta and the juice of the steak.

“Until what?” I ask, playing dumb. He knows I’m not dumb. In fact, he resents the fact that I want more out of life than my high school diploma. But his comments have become increasingly inappropriate over the past few months, and even though it’s flattering, sometimes alarm bells go off in my head.

“Until your big brother can show you just how much he loves you.” Ryan chuckles sinisterly. I let loose a nervous smile. I know Ryan wants to get me into bed, but more than that, he wants to own me. Own my thoughts, my actions, my body. He thinks he already does. In his twisted mind, he calls it love. Why wouldn’t he? It’s not like Ryan has ever seen a good example of it. Hell, neither have I. In his mind, he protects me, takes care of me, and he needs me. In a way, I need him, too. But, I just can’t ever see us happening. This—what we’re doing right this moment—is what the rest of my life would look like. Me cooking dinner, wishing I were anywhere else, and Ryan being perfectly content to work on his bike and get tanked with his shitty friends every night. No, thank you.

It’s not like the attraction is not there. I had a major crush on him when I was younger. I thought he hung the moon and the stars, making everything brighter in my dull universe, and I think I did the same for him. But if he were the one, it wouldn’t feel so freaking wrong every time his throbbing dick “accidentally” presses against my ass at night.

Getting up from my seat, I take our plates to the sink and saunter back with a new beer, cracking it open in front of him. When I do, he snakes one arm around my waist and grabs me in one swift movement so that I’m straddling him on his lap. I can feel the seam of his zipper grinding into my crotch. Not gonna lie—it feels nice.

“Hey,” he breathes into my mouth, always a whisper from a kiss, but never there. Where he wants to be.

“Hi.” I swallow visibly.

“So.” His hand travels into my inner thigh, and I feel something stiffen underneath me. I take a deep breath. The room is dark and dingy and small, cluttered with our old furniture, with our pasts. It’s not exactly romantic, but I can’t deny the heady feeling coursing through me.

“You a virgin, Rem?” he whispers into my lips again, and this time it could qualify as a kiss. A part of me wants it to. The other part begs me not to go over that invisible, fragile line that I’m straddling just now. “You saved yourself for me? Kept this untouched?” His fingers hover over my groin, barely touching.

“No.” The word comes out more like a groan. Never mind the fact that I’ve only done it twice. I don’t need to tell him who it was. He knows. Zach Williamson. Eleventh grade. The only guy I dated for more than two months before I got bored. We actually made it through a whole semester before I dumped his ass. I didn’t care that I’d given him my virginity. I wasn’t waiting for “the one”. To be honest, I’ve never really thought that one person putting their body part into another person was that big of a deal. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t have high hopes, because both times were pretty anticlimactic.

There’s something in Ryan’s already-hooded expression that becomes even darker and more severe, and for a minute, my heart beats faster for the wrong reason. Not because I’m excited, but because I’m unnerved. I wait, studying his expression carefully, before his hard stare turns into a half-assed, placid smile.

“Good,” he says and squeezes my butt a little too hard, indicating that he doesn’t think it’s good at all. “I don’t think you could handle me without a little practice, anyway.”