Rule

“Well, Pops, purple is found all throughout nature so I don’t know what you’re talking about, and as far as my clothes are concerned, I figure we’re all lucky I bothered to even put pants on, considering the condition Shaw found me in this morning. Now, if you’re both done criticizing every move I make, can I continue my conversation with my brother I haven’t seen in over a year, considering he nearly got blown up by a roadside bomb?”

Margot gasped and Dale shoved his chair back from the table. I let my head fall forward and rubbed between my eyes where a headache was starting to throb.

“One afternoon, Rule. One freaking afternoon is all we ask of you.” Dale stormed out of the room and Margot wasted no time bursting into tears. She buried her face in her napkin and I reached over to awkwardly pat her shoulder. I cut a look at Rule but he had climbed to his feet as well and was headed toward the front door. I shot a look at Rome, who just shook his head and lumbered to his feet. Margot lifted her head and looked at her eldest with pleading eyes.

“Tell him, Rome. You go tell him that this is not how you treat your parents. He has no respect.”

She pointed a shaky finger at the door. “You tell him that this is unacceptable.”

Rome looked at me, then back to his mom. “Sure, Mom, I’ll tell him, but I’m also going to tell you that you had no reason to lay into him like that. Who cares if he wants to wear jeans and have hair like a goddamn Smurf? What matters is that he’s here and he made an effort. Shaw took time out of her life, her busy schedule, to make that happen for you and Dad. You waited exactly three seconds before purposely picking at the scab, both of you.”

Margot gasped but Rome wasn’t done. “You and Dad need a wakeup call. I could have just as easily come home in a body bag instead of a cast. You’ve already lost one son; you need to appreciate the ones you have left, regardless of whether you agree with the choices we’re making or not.”

The tears came harder and she leaned her head on my shoulder. “Shaw loves coming to visit on Sunday; we should just stop asking her to bring Rule, because clearly he doesn’t want to be here. I’m done trying to make him be part of this family, it just hurts too much.”

Rome shook his head and both of us sighed. He followed his brother out of the room as I continued to pat Margot on the shoulder. This woman had been kind to me, treated me as a daughter when my own mother had no use for me, so what I was about to say to her came from a place of refusing to watch another family collapse in on itself.

“Margot, you and Dale are wonderful people and good parents, but you have to stop living in the past. I’m not going to come see you on Sundays anymore, not unless you figure out how to accept Rule for exactly who he is and love him anyway. I miss Remy and it was tragic how he died, but you are never going to turn Rule into him, and I can’t stand by and watch you continue to try. My parents have been forcing me into a mold that hasn’t fit me for years and I only wish I had enough will to refuse them the way Rule does.”

I climbed to my feet and had to fight back my own tears when she looked at me with shock and dismay.

“If Remy was here none of this would be happening. You and he would still be happy together, Rule would never have started acting so awful, and Rome never would have gone off and joined the stupid military.”

I had to take a few steps away because there was so much wrong with what she was saying that it nearly floored me. “Margot, Rule was always a handful, he just never bowed to your and Dale’s dictates. Rome was enlisted way before the accident. And I’ve told you a million times Remy was my best friend—we didn’t have feelings for each other like that. I think you need to consider talking to a professional because you’re rewriting history and, while you’re doing it, you’re losing a pretty terrific son.”

“You can’t honestly believe that? Rule is just as awful to you as he is to me and his father.”

I bit my lip and rubbed my temples harder. “He isn’t awful; he’s just harder to love. Remy made it easy for you guys, and Rule never has, but he deserves the effort, and until this family can see that, I have better ways to spend my time. If I wanted bickering and bitterness I would just go home. I love you and Dale, but I see what you’re doing to Rule and I will not be a part of it anymore. Rome was right; you need to appreciate the family you have and not spend your life comparing them to the family you lost. Remy was my whole world, Margot, but he’s gone and Rule is here.”

She crossed her arms and flopped her head down on the table. I knew there would be no getting through to her so I walked to the front door. I wasn’t surprised to see Dale leaning against the kitchen counter, watching me with serious eyes.

“She isn’t going to do well without you coming by. You’re an important part of this family.”

I tucked a few loose strands of hair behind my ear and gave him a rueful smile. “So is your son.”

“Margot isn’t the only one who needs to remember that, and you have to admit that hair is ridiculous.”

I laughed for real this time and walked over to give him a hug. “She needs help, Dale. Remy’s been gone for a while and all she wants to do is push Rule to take his place. That isn’t going to happen, we all know that.”

He kissed the top of my head and set me away from him. “I don’t know why you’re always defending that boy. He’s got a hot temper and a wild streak a mile long. You’re a smart, beautiful girl; you have to know how Rule’s story ends.”

“I don’t believe in skipping ahead, Dale. I read the book all the way through. Tell Margot to give me a call when she calms down, but I’m serious about Sundays. Until it’s an actual family gathering, until Rule stops being vilified for just being who he is and not who you want him to be, I’m not coming. This just hurts too much.”

“Fair enough, little girl, but if you need anything you know we’re just a phone call away.”

“I know.”

“You know he wouldn’t appreciate you falling on the sword for him.”

“Maybe not, Dale, but it’s my sword to fall on and even if nobody, including Rule himself, can see it, he’s worth it. I think so and I know Remy always thought so. You might want to try to remember that the next time he shows up with pink hair.”

I made my way to the driveway and paused when I saw the brothers with their heads bent close together. Rule looked mad and Rome looked sad. It was heartbreaking and impressive all at the same time. Rule saw me first and pulled away. They said something to each other in low tones and bumped fists. Rome pulled Rule into a one-armed hug and made his way over to me. I received the same treatment with the addition of a kiss on the cheek.

“I’m gonna put as many fires out here as I can over the next week or so and then make my way to the city. I’ll hit you up when I can.”

“Try to convince your mom to get some help, Rome, please.”

“I love you, little girl. You try to keep that jackass out of trouble for me.”

I brushed a kiss across his cheek in return. “I always do.”

“I didn’t know it was this bad, Shaw. I’ve missed so much by being away.”

“Families are like anything else, they take work, patience, and people willing to make it work. I’m so very glad you came home, Rome.”

I moved away after another hug and tossed my keys at Rule. “I have a headache. Can you drive back to the city?”

I normally never let him anywhere near my car; he has a lead foot and no regard for other drivers on the road, but I wasn’t going to make it. I felt the headache growing into a migraine and all I wanted to do was close my eyes, crawl into a soft bed, and pull the covers over my head. I got into the passenger seat and curled into a ball.

Rule didn’t say anything as he turned on the ignition and headed toward home. He left the radio off and didn’t even try to bother with forced pleasantries. I knew he wouldn’t apologize for the scene; he never did, so I didn’t even bring it up. I was drifting in and out of a little nap when Gabe’s ringtone started to trill from my pocket. I swore, which was something I rarely did, and turned the stupid thing off. By now my stomach was in knots and I was seeing spots in front of my eyes.

“He calls you now more than when you were dating.” Rule’s voice was low and I wondered if he had any idea how much my head was hurting.

“He’s a pain. I told you he didn’t get it.”

“Is it a problem?” I cracked an eye open because it was really out of character for him to show any concern for me.

“No. I mean it’s only been a couple weeks and I think he misses the idea of me more than actually being with me. I keep thinking he’ll get bored or find someone else and just go away.”

“Make sure you let somebody know if he becomes an issue. No girl should have to deal with that noise.”

“I will.” We lapsed back into silence again until he cleared his throat. I’d known Rule long enough to know he was working his way up to something and I just needed to wait.

“Look, I’m sorry about this morning. I’m sorry about a lot of Sunday mornings. You don’t need to keep seeing me at my worst; in fact, it’s not your job to see to me at all. I’m done with forced family fun time. It’s not doing anything but driving the knife in deeper, and I see that now. This drama has been building for years and it’s not fair that you’re still stuck in the middle of it without Remy to back you up. He loved you to death and I’ve done a piss-poor job honoring that.”

I was in too much pain to argue the semantics of my relationship, or rather nonrelationship, with Remy to Rule yet again. No one in the Archer family seemed to get that we were friends, best friends and nothing more. The legend of our relationship had turned into a monster that I just couldn’t combat, especially when the tiny amount of food I had eaten at brunch was suddenly crawling back up my throat. I lurched forward and grabbed Rule’s arm. It probably wasn’t the smartest move since we were going ninety-five on the freeway, but I was about to toss my cookies in a car that cost more than some people made in a year.

“Pull over!” Rule let out a string of curse words and hastily weaved around a minivan to the shoulder of the road. I got the door open and practically fell on my knees as I lost everything in a violent stream on the asphalt. Warm hands pulled my ponytail out of the way and handed me a ragged bandanna. When I could finally breathe again, I took the bottle of water he handed me and sat back on my heels while the world tilted in a bunch of different directions.

“What’s wrong?”

I sloshed the water around and spit it out on the ground away from the tips of his black boots. “Migraine.”

“Since when do you have those?”

“Since always. I need to lie down in the back.”

He pulled me to my feet with a hand under my arm and I realized it was the first time in years he had ever deliberately touched me. We never hugged, never brushed against each other, never high-fived or shook hands. We were strictly in a hands-off type of relationship, so my system almost revolted at the contact. I groaned as he practically shoved me back into the car. I am short, so stretching out along the backseat wasn’t a big deal. Rule got back behind the wheel and looked at me over his shoulder. “You gonna make it the rest of the way?”

I threw an arm over my eyes and placed a hand on my roiling belly. “It’s not like I have a choice. Just be ready to pull over again if I scream at you.”

He pulled back into traffic and was quiet for only a minute before demanding, “Does everyone know you get migraines?”

“No. I don’t get them very often, just when I’m stressed out or not sleeping well.”

“Did Remy know?”

I wanted to sigh but I just answered, “Yes.”

He muttered something I couldn’t hear and I felt him, rather than saw him, look back at me. “He never told me. He told me everything, even crap I had zero interest in hearing—he never shut up about you.”

He was wrong, so very, very wrong, but that was Remy’s secret and even though he was gone I still would go to my grave with it. There was a lot Rule and Rome never knew about their brother, things that he was scared to share, things he battled with on a daily basis. The fact that I had migraines and was irrevocably in love with Rule didn’t even scratch the surface.

“He probably just forgot about it; like I said, I don’t get them very often and when you guys moved to Denver and I still had to finish high school, he probably just forgot they happened because we didn’t hang out as much anymore. They’ve been worse the last few years.” I didn’t have to explain it was because Remy was gone and all the stress he balanced out for me was now my own to deal with.

“That seems like kinda a big deal to slip his mind.”

“Contrary to what all you Archers have stuck in your head there was a lot more to Remy than our friendship and what was or was not going on with me.”

He snorted loudly. “Yeah, right. Remy was a different person after he found you. He was always a good guy, always the best of all of us, but once you came along it was like he finally found his purpose. You gave him someone to care about without any of the bullshit baggage the rest of us had. You made him better.”

My heart squeezed so tight in my chest I thought for a second everything inside me was going to turn inside out. “Well, he saved me, so we made each other better.”

We fell into an uncomfortable silence again until the car stopped in front of his apartment complex. He turned in the seat and looked down at me. I peeked at him from under my arm. The blue in his eyes was all but swallowed up by the paler silver and gray. “Can you get back to University Park or do you need me to take you? I can have Nash follow us since he’s home from work.” It was a nice offer, one I was surprised he extended, but I had had my fill of Archers for the day, and the drive from Capitol Hill to University Park wasn’t that bad on a Sunday in the early evening.

“I’ll make it. It’s not that far.” I scrambled out of the back and had to lean on the door frame while he got out of the driver’s seat. We were standing so close I could see the pulse in his throat thumping under the hummingbird tattoo he had there. “Thanks, though.”

He exhaled and rubbed his hands roughly over his face. He took a step back and made sure I was looking him dead in the eye when he told me, “I’m serious about Sunday. Don’t show up here next week expecting me to play nice. I’m over it.”

I snapped a salute with two fingers to my brow and let my body collapse in the seat he had just vacated. “Message received. My services as chauffeur slash buffer are no longer needed, which means I probably won’t be seeing you around. Try to take care of yourself, Rule, seriously; somebody has to.”

I shut the door before he could say anything else and didn’t even wait until he moved away from the car to put it in reverse and pull away from the apartment complex. It was a short drive to my own apartment that I shared with my best friend, Ayden.

I had met Ayden freshman year when we shared a dorm room together. She was a chem major, worked at the same sports bar I did, and totally had the patience to deal with all my endless neurotic crap. Her family background was no picnic, either, so I loved that I could always rely on her to be there for me. She was also smart as hell and it had taken her exactly zero seconds to figure the reason my social life was boring and that I could never commit to any of the guys I dated was because I was hung up on Rule Archer. So when I came stumbling in hurting, with tears in my eyes, she put me to bed without questions and closed the blinds in my room while she fetched me some painkillers and a giant glass of water.

The bed depressed when she climbed up next to me as I kicked my peep-toe heels off and tugged my belt through the loops on my slacks.

“It was bad today?” Ayden was from Kentucky and her Southern drawl rolled over me like a soothing balm.

“He was with some skank again, he had a hickey the size of Alaska on his neck, my mortal enemy from high school hit on him at Starbucks, and it took Margot and Dale less than a minute to insult his clothes and hair and remind him he is not now nor will he ever be his dead twin brother. Luckily, this time they left out his job and disregard for manners, but he blew his top and stormed out. They’ve all decided it’s best we no longer come up on Sundays, making this the second family I’ve been a part of that can’t figure it out and just love and appreciate one another. To top it all off, Gabe has been blowing up my phone all day and I can’t think of anyone I want to talk to less. So yeah, it was really fucking bad today.”

She brushed a hand over my hair and laughed softly. “Girl, the situations you find yourself in.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Did you give him the key to his place back?”

I moaned a little and buried my head in the pillow. “No. I totally spaced out, but it’s not like I’m in any hurry to walk in on him and two girls at once again. Honestly I’ll be super glad to never have to see Rule’s pierced junk again.”

She snickered a laugh at me and rolled over onto her back so that she was staring at the ceiling. Ayden’s hair was as black as mine was blond and cut in a funky short pixie style. She had big whiskey-colored eyes and a heart that was pure gold. Besides Remy, she was the best friend I’d ever had. I loved her for not making me have to lay it all out for her to sift through—she just got it. While she might not understand how I spent my time equally loathing and loving a person who viewed me as nothing more than a nuisance, she never condemned or criticized me for it.

“That boy, he is a handful.”

“I don’t know, maybe the space will be good for me. Maybe time away from the whole family will finally give me the breathing room to kill the way I’ve always felt about him. I can’t spend the rest of my life walking away from other people just because they aren’t Rule.”

“Well, I can’t say I’m sorry to see Gabe go, but you do deserve someone who treats you amazing and loves you in all the right ways. You’ve earned it, because no one I’ve ever met in my whole life loves as freely and gives as much as you do. Seeing as those parents of yours might as well be carved out of ice, that’s just a damn miracle. You’re a good girl, Shaw, and at the very least you deserve a good guy.”

I folded my hands together on the bed and laid my cheek down on them. My head was slowly starting to stop throbbing and all I wanted to do was take a nap and maybe work on processing everything that had happened today.

Ayden was right; I did deserve a good guy. I knew what one looked like, knew what one acted like, in fact I had been best friends with the ultimate good guy. Remy embodied everything any sane girl would want in a boyfriend and yet I had never had those feelings for him, not once. I remembered clearly the first time he had taken me home with him. I was fourteen and having a really hard time fitting in with all the preppy, rich kids my first year of high school. I know now that image and brands mattered, but back then I just wanted to wear jeans and my hair in a ponytail. Remy had been sixteen and captain of the football team. He found me crying outside the girls’ locker room one day after a particularly nasty verbal beat-down from Amy and her crew. He didn’t make fun of me, didn’t ask questions or get all weird because I was a freshman and he was a junior. He just bundled me up and carted me home with him because I was sad and alone and he didn’t want me to be either of those things ever again. He told me he could tell by my eyes that I was a kind person, that I needed someone to look out for me, and from that minute on he decided he would be the person to do it. I remembered all the warm and fuzzy feelings that came with that moment, remembered the gratitude and overwhelming joy I felt at finally having someone see how worthy and deserving of unconditional love I was, but what I remembered most was everything inside me going upside down when Rule walked into the kitchen and tilted his chin at me and asked, “Who’s the chick?”

My heart stopped beating, my lungs felt like they were going to collapse, my skin was suddenly too tight all over my body, and I couldn’t form a rational thought or a coherent sentence. Back then I chalked it up to a silly teenage crush; all the Archer boys were good-looking and had qualities that made them larger than life. Every girl I knew had had the prerequisite infatuation with a bad boy at one time or another. Of course, they normally grew out of it when they realized the bad boy was just an ass and they deserved to be treated better. But as time went on and things changed, my feelings never did even though it was clear they were never going to be returned. Rule only saw me as Remy’s little tagalong; a spoiled little rich girl, and then as we got older, as Remy’s girlfriend. That sucked because I had never been any of those things and as a result I sabotaged relationships, turned down guy after guy simply because I didn’t want a good guy—I wanted the one who was damaged and blind to the way I felt.

I was a good girl. I was loyal and honest and I worked hard and invested a lot of time and energy in building a secure future for myself. I stayed out of trouble and went out of my way to try to be the polished and perfect daughter my parents wanted me to be, and the successful, driven woman the Archers had given me the confidence to be. What I never spent any time being was the person that I actually felt like I was. She was locked somewhere deep inside me, suffocating and still holding on to the hope that Rule would notice she was alive. It was exhausting, and in the vulnerable moments when I was brutally honest with myself, I had to admit I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep it up.

CHAPTER 3

Rule

It was a crazy busy week at the shop. I think mostly because we were right in the thick of tax refund time and people had extra money to spend. I was booked with back-to-back appointments all the way through Saturday and even went in on my day off to work on a guy’s sleeve I had started a few months ago. Nash was just as booked as I was. When Saturday night rolled around we were both ready to let loose and tie one on. Sunday morning went about the same as last week, only this time when I walked the girl to her car I didn’t have to worry about Shaw bursting in on a scene I didn’t want her to see. I called Rome to see when he was going to come to town, but apparently things at home weren’t any better after last week so he wasn’t ready to leave Mom on her own yet. I wanted to care, wanted to feel bad for her, but I just couldn’t muster it up.

I was getting ready to crack open a beer and plop in front of the flat-screen to relax and watch the game, when Nash came out of his room pulling on a hoodie and a black ball cap over his shaved head. He was a few inches shorter than me, built a lot stockier, but in all actuality was a hell of a lot better looking. He kept his black hair shaved close to the scalp because he had twin tattoos on the sides of his head. His bright, bright eyes looked more purple than blue and always stood out starkly against his much darker complexion. He didn’t have as much metal in his face as I did, just a hoop through the center of his nose and both ears sporting obsidian gauges. For whatever reason, he kept his hands and neck free of ink, which always made me laugh because of the stuff permanently marked on his head. We were a matched set, so when we went out together it was usually a given we wouldn’t have to come home alone. Nash was a much nicer guy than I was; he just looked several degrees more badass.

“Jet and Rowdy are at the Goal Line watching the game. They wanna hang out if you’re down.”

Rowdy worked at the shop with us and Jet was the lead singer of a local metal band we liked—they rounded out the group that Nash and I traveled in. Going to the bar to watch the game sounded a lot more fun than brooding on the couch by myself, so I put my beer back in the fridge and shoved my feet into my black boots.