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Pete knew I needed that trust from him, especially today. Trust that I wouldn’t say I wanted something unless it was true, that my need for him inside me was real. He shifted, keeping his lips fused to my neck, and adjusted our bodies the way he wanted them. Cold air hit my bare back. I shivered, but before it became too much, he eased me back down and hooked my leg over his hip. It was still the only position I could bottom in, but I’d gotten much better at it. Pete captivated me when he lay over me in just the right way. The contours of his body molded to mine, and I felt safe—protected, even. Instead of fear, I only felt him.

He let his hands roam over me, moving lower and lower as he scraped his teeth along my neck. He pumped my dick in a slow, heady rhythm, and his slick fingers drove me to the point of combustion, until I couldn’t take anymore. “Pete,” I warned breathlessly, “I need….”

He knew, of course he knew. I heard rustling, and a few seconds later, he pressed inside me. I squeezed his hand in a death grip as he eased into me. It still hurt, and it probably always would—Pete was a
big
guy—but I liked the pain. I accepted it because I knew what it meant.

“Breathe now, Ash,” Pete said quietly.

I arched into him. He pulled out and thrust forward again. The sensation was instant and incredible. I threw my head back and moaned. “Again. Do it again.”

He chuckled in my ear. It was a good sign if I was incoherent from the start. With his hand still tightly twined in mine, he set a steady rhythm, and burning pleasure began to build in my belly. He whispered gentle encouragement in my ear as heat and pressure wrapped around my spine. His voice had always grounded me, even when I was so far away from him that he thought I was gone forever. It rumbled through my body and touched every part of me his cock couldn’t reach.

I couldn’t take it for long. I came suddenly, with a soundless scream. Pete cupped my face, and with a long slow roll of his hips, I was undone. He watched me with wide eyes, and with a final thrust, he bit down on my shoulder. He held still for a long moment as his release pulsed inside me. His moan was almost silent, but the protruding veins in his neck gave him away.

He rolled off me, pulling me sideways into a tight embrace. I went slack against him, feeling boneless and content as my head lolled on his shoulder. Both of us gasped for breath, but me more than him. My lungs had been irrevocably damaged by my prolonged battle with pneumonia. Pete laid his hand on my stomach; his palm was warm on my belly. I absorbed the feeling and let it seep into me until I felt his fingers curl up and begin to trace idle patterns.

Lazily, I opened my eyes. “Whatcha drawing?”

His answering grin was amused. “You’re back, then?”

“Was I gone?”

He rubbed a slow, soothing circle over my abdomen. “For a little while. You okay?”

I hummed at his touch and noted I’d somehow ended up on my back with the comforter pulled up over my waist. “I’m good,” I said drowsily. “What time is it?”

“It’s still early. You should go back to sleep. You’ve got a long day today.”

The hazy postcoital fog began to clear from my brain as I remembered the reason I’d been awake in the first place. I checked my nerves as they flared again. “Do you think it’s too late to back out?”

Pete chuckled. “No, but I don’t think Ellie would let you off that easy. What are you worried about, bad memories?”

“No,” I said honestly. Being homeless in Philadelphia was tough, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever lived through. “It’s just… shit, I don’t know. The plane?”

“It’s normal to be nervous about flying, Ash, but it’s only a couple of hours. You’ll be okay.”

I eyed him as he stretched out beside me. He was beautiful, relaxed, with his eyes closed and his sex-mussed hair. I didn’t want to waste the precious moment by freaking out. I took a deep, steadying breath. “It’s no different than going on the train, right?”

“Right.”

He slid his hand up my stomach and rubbed my chest. I sighed quietly, resisting the urge to drift back to sleep. If Ellie had her way, we’d be gone for three days. Barring the black period more than a year ago, it would be the longest I’d ever been away from him. “What are you going to do while I’m gone?”

“Work. Mick’s got a field trip to pay for, so he’s up for some overtime.”

He trailed his fingers up my arm and traced the raised ridge on my wrist. I didn’t miss the gesture. The scar bothered him, almost more than anything else. It was like he held himself responsible for the damage I’d done to myself. Not that I remembered doing it. I had little memory of the weeks I’d spent on the streets of Chicago. The only recollection I had of any clarity was falling down an embankment by the docks. It felt like I’d lain at the bottom for days, staring at the litter in the dead grass, too tired to try to get back up. Perhaps I had.

Pete nudged me gently. “Don’t pout. It’s only one double shift, and I’m going to play pool with Joe on Sunday.”

I glanced up in surprise. Over the past year, Joe had been with me every moment Pete couldn’t. Night shifts, day shifts… dark hours when Pete just needed a break. Joe had seen me through some black moments, moments I sometimes thought I wouldn’t come back from. At times, he’d been the only thing standing in the way of me doing something really fucking stupid.

Fratele meu, pentru totdeauna….

It meant “brother mine, forever,” in Romanian. Joe had promised to finally tell me what it meant to
him
when I got back to Chicago. Then, maybe, I’d be able to do something for him. He had, after all, given up on returning to his girl in Seattle to literally save my life.

Despite everything Joe had done for us, though, Pete had yet to bond with him. Maybe it was because they rarely spent any time together, but Pete didn’t seem to get Joe. It was like he couldn’t figure him out. And I didn’t get
that
. Joe was easiest person to be around, and he laughed all the time. How could that be bad?

Pete rolled his eyes at my raised eyebrow. “Don’t give me that look. He usually plays with Charlie, but he’s away. I figured I owed Joe some of my time after all we’ve had of his.”

I leaned over quickly and kissed him. I wanted to tell him I loved him, but as usual, the words got stuck in my throat. Pete didn’t seem to mind. He said hearing it once was all he’d ever need. I could live with that if he could.

F
ACT
: I didn’t like flying. I could now cross it off my bucket list, but only to add it to the long list of things I hated. I’d taken the train the first time I’d made the journey between the two cities, and my journey from Texas had been as a stowaway on the back of a truck, but neither of those ways to travel had shit on the airless claustrophobia of a plane cabin.

Takeoff and landing weren’t so bad. I was mildly fascinated when I could see the plane actually moving, but the long stretch of nothing in between sucked. Boredom never worked for me, especially in enclosed spaces.

These days, though, I was better at dealing with it. Perhaps because the rational side of me knew I couldn’t get off the plane until it landed, it wasn’t as rough as it might have been. I spent the whole flight pretending to be asleep and trying to figure out what I was doing on the damn plane in the first place.

There was no logic to Ellie’s insistence that I accompany her to Philadelphia. She had school friends and a few cousins there, but I had nothing and no one, and my life on the streets wasn’t something I felt a need to revisit. Her vague explanation made no sense. She was up to something. I was as sure of it as my convoluted mind would allow me to be, but when we landed at the airport, I was still none the wiser.

Being back in Philly felt strange. It didn’t feel real at first. I’d never been to the airport, or the neighborhood our hotel was in. Fuck, I’d never been to a hotel at all, and watching Ellie buzz around the apartment-sized room was just weird. Even the shower had three heads. What was up with that?

For the first two days, I followed Ellie around the city. I saw some places I recognized, and even faces I thought I knew, but the purpose of our trip wasn’t revealed until the final day.

It was midmorning when Ellie led me to a part of the city I used to know well. It was a lively street, a heady mix of food vendors, musicians, and beggars. On the sidewalk, in a spot I’d often used myself, a young street artist carved faces out of wood. I watched him for a while. He was quick and skilled, with nimble fingers and a fascinating flair, but his face disturbed me. There were lines on his skin, lines too old for his youthful eyes. With my clean clothes and my full belly, it was hard not to wonder what had brought him there.

Beside me, Ellie nudged my ribs. She bit her lip and pointed across the street. I followed her gaze. “I don’t understand.”

She sighed, like she’d told me a hundred times already. “Look again, Ash,” she said quietly. “It’s her.”

It’s her. It’s her. It’s her.

No. It can’t be her. She doesn’t exist.

A few days after Pete broke down over my child services file, he appeared outside the shop. I hadn’t been back at work long, so I’d assumed he was just checking up on me until he’d walked me to the diner at the end of the street and pulled a crumpled page from his pocket. Unbelievably, there was still something he hadn’t told me.

My sister was just a year older than me. I’d never met her because she’d been taken into care before I was born, but according to the list of personal effects Pete showed me, I’d carried her picture for years. It disappeared when I was about nine, but Dr. Gilbert thought it was possible I’d recreated the child in some of the sketches I drew.

I didn’t believe her. How could that baby girl be my sister? And how was it even possible that I
had
a sister? My mom was just a kid herself when she had me.

That damn fucking file. I’d formally requested it, but I couldn’t stand the sight of it. It seemed it held the key to every little part of my soul. I couldn’t even look at it. Pete read me the parts that mattered. Apparently, my mom had another baby before me, when she was just sixteen. Social services took my sister when she was just a few days old, because Mom… and when they found out my mom was pregnant again and still doing… they made arrangements to take me too. In her own twisted way, my mom had wanted me, so she ran away just before she had me… all the way to fucking Texas. I guess it was kind of ironic that I ran all the way back to Philadelphia as soon as I had the chance.

I felt conflicted for a while after hearing about all that. I’d been on my own for so long, knowing there was someone out there who was biologically a part of me was truly terrifying. It was the one thing I really couldn’t handle. I told Pete to throw the file away; I wouldn’t even let him tell me her name.

Pete being Pete, he did just that, but Ellie didn’t know about any of that. She didn’t know anything. She came back to America at the start of the summer and did exactly what she’d done since the moment I met her: she made me laugh when I’d forgotten how, and she never asked any questions.

“How did you know?”

She met my eyes nervously. “I found a page of your file in my dad’s desk drawer. It was all crumpled and I thought it was trash. I know it was wrong of me to look, and to bring you here without telling you why, but I knew you wouldn’t come if I told you.”

“How did you find her?”

“You can find anyone if you know where to look,” Ellie said. “I found her online.”

I kept my eyes stubbornly on her as my fingers itched for the phantom cigarettes in my pockets. I hadn’t smoked since my brush with pneumonia, but, fuck, I wanted to now.

Ellie took a step closer to me. She pried my hand out of the fist it was in and gripped it tightly in her slender fingers. “Ash, she’s been in Philadelphia her whole life. Maybe that’s why you came here.”

She was wrong. I hadn’t chosen Philadelphia as my home. It was simply the place where I’d run out of both money and the will to keep going. I’d sat down on the sidewalk at the train station, put my head in my hands, and didn’t really move for six months. The years that followed had me moving around a bit more, but not much. Philadelphia was just a place to lose myself. It could have been anywhere.

Ellie found my other hand and squeezed them both. “Look at her,” she said. “Please, Ash.”

Reluctantly, I let her turn my body back in the right direction. The streets were crowded and busy, but I was instantly drawn to the girl. She was leaning against the side of a building, a cell phone pressed to her ear with one hand, car keys dangling from the other. She was laughing and her eyes twinkling. Even from across the street I could see they were blue. Blue eyes, blonde hair, but the similarities ended there. The girl was
beautiful
. There was no way she was related to me.

“See?” Ellie said softly. “You look like twins.”

Abruptly, the spell was broken. I snapped my eyes away from the girl and turned my back on her. “We should go.”

Ellie was disappointed. I could see it in her face, but it wasn’t enough to change my mind. I couldn’t deal with this. Not now, not yet. Maybe not ever. I’d spent my whole life haunted by my past and indifferent to my future. It had left me too messed up to live in the present and too divided to know who I was. Pete was the anchor that kept me from sliding away into nothing, and suddenly, I couldn’t be away from him any longer. The pull in my chest for him was too strong. I wasn’t angry with Ellie for bringing me here, or even for interfering in something that was best left alone, but walking up to a strange chick in the street and telling her I was her brother? It just wasn’t me.

None of it was me, because Philadelphia wasn’t my home. For the first time in my life, home was where my heart was, and I’d left my heart in Chicago.

G
ARRETT
L
EIGH
lives in a small commuter town just north of London with her husband, two kids, a dog with half a brain, and a cat with a chip on her shoulder. She’s twenty-nine, and now she’s reached that milestone, she intends to stay there for the foreseeable future. Garrett has been writing just about her whole life, but it’s been about three years since she decided to take it seriously. According to Mr. Garrett, it was either give the men in her head a voice or have herself committed.