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“Shit, lady,” he says, his hands going to my face. He runs his thumb over the stitches softly, and I lean into his touch. “You look badass.”

“Badass, huh?” I say, a tear slipping down one cheek. He wipes it away without comment.

“Thought it’d be worse, after everything I heard.”

“And you still came?” I ask, wondering what he could have imagined that looked worse than I do now, yet still brought him here in the dark of night.

“I’m here, right?” One hand slips under my cascade of hair to feel the bristles underneath. “What’s going on with this?”

“They had to shave a lot of my hair off,” I tell him. “Part of my scalp was just . . .” I stop talking as his thumbs brush against my lips, his forehead touching mine.

“Why’d you go and do that?”

I press back, our faces close. I want to tell him that I didn’t do it, Shanna did. Then I think of our names together at the glyph, my sister nowhere in between them. “I know where there’s an empty room,” I say, tugging on his hand.

He follows, but there’s enough hesitation to make me wonder if he was only being polite about my face. I slip through the door, kicking the rock aside and still holding his hand. We tiptoe through the darkened hallway, and I wave at Angela when she looks up from the station desk.

“Um, is this a good idea?” Isaac whispers.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I paid her off with Oxy.”

I find the room number Layla told me would be empty, a transplant patient who had come back to the cardiac center for her recovery time and shipped out before I showed up. We go inside, and I leave the lights off, leading him over to the bed.

“Listen to you, Sasha Stone,” he says, as I wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark. “A punk haircut and bribing people with drugs. What’s next?”

“This,” I say, and press myself up against him. He kisses back, his hands wandering under my shirt for a second before he pulls away. My body knows what to do because it’s done it before, but I’ve never been fully present in these moments with him. My skin wants to leap off my skeleton, wrap itself around him.

“Is this a good idea?” he asks again.

“I told you, I took care of the nurse. She’s on shift for the rest of—”

“No,” he cuts me off. “I mean this. You and me doing . . . this.” He tightens his hands on my body like he’s not sure what he wants the answer to be.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” I say, leaning in again.

“I won’t hurt you or anything, right?” he asks, pulling back.

“No, it’s okay,” I tell him, and then I’m on the bed and he’s with me.

We’ve never done it in a bed, and it’s different. All my hazy memories from Shanna are desperate, wind in our faces and dirt on our backs. But here and now Isaac is different with me, like maybe he knows it’s actually me, not her. He’s cautious and sweet, gentle in a way that changes how I respond. It’s not the crazy, grasping, defiant competition like it is for Shanna. It’s soft and kind and we lie together afterward, something new as well. I curl against him, the prickles of my shorn scalp probably tickling his chest, but he doesn’t ask me to move.

“This is nice,” he says, one hand toying with the hair I have left.

“Yeah,” I have to agree, even though part of me doesn’t want to. I feel like every time before this was for Shanna. But what I just did . . . that was for me. And I liked it. Sasha Stone liked having sex with Isaac Harver. It feels like graffiti in my mind, something I can’t unsee.

“So what’s the surgery tomorrow?”

“It’s called an LVAD,” I tell him. “Basically it’s like a pump in my heart they put in to keep me going until a transplant becomes available.”

“How long does that take?”

I shrug, my naked shoulder moving against his chest. “Depends. You’ve got to have the same blood type as the donor, and be roughly the same age and weight. Plus the heart can’t be far away, because it can’t have stopped working within the last four hours. So you have to hope that someone near your age, weight, and with your blood type within a certain mile radius dies, and agreed to be an organ donor when they got their driver’s license. Even if they did, their family still has to approve and agree.”

“That’s fucked-up.”

“Yep,” I agree. “I have a pager that will go off if a heart becomes available for me, and I get rushed to the hospital for the transplant. I’m supposed to wear it at all times.”

Isaac’s brow furrows. “At all times?” He lifts our blanket to peer underneath.