Rule (5 page)

“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 nonrelarionship 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 I had eaten
for 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 the way
and handed me a ragged bandana when I could finally breathe.  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 hi 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 was short so stretching out along
the back seat wasn’t a big deal.  Rule got back behind the wheel and look at me
over his shoulder.  “You gonna make it the rest of the way?”

I threw and arm over my eyes and
placed a hand on my rolling belly.  “It’s not like I have a choice.  Just be
ready to pull back over 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 the
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 and
the fact 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 hangout 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 tattoo he had there of a humming bird. 
“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 chauffer slash buffer are no longer needed, which
means I probably won’t be seeing you around.  Try and 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 her
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 pulled the blinds in
my room closed while she fetched me some pain killers 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 smoothing 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 or never will 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 its best we
no longer come up on Sunday making this the second family I’ve been a part of
that can’t figure it out and just love and appreciate one another and to top it
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 it 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 on to 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 ever had and I loved her for not making me have to lay it
all out for her to sift through.  She just got it and while she might not
understand how I spent my time equally loathing and loving a person that 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 that 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 and 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 and laid
my cheek down.  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 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 thirteen and having a really hard time fitting in with all the
preppy, rich kids my first year of high school.  I knew now that image and
brands mattered, but then I just wanted to wear jeans and my hair in a
ponytail.  Remy had been seventeen and captain of the football team.  He found
me crying in the girl’s 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 titled his chin up 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.  Of
course 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 and every girl I
knew had to have a 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
as things changed my feelings never did.  It was clear they were never going to
be returned, Rule only saw me as Remy’s little tag along, as a spoiled little
rich girl and then as we got older as Remy’s girlfriend, which 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 that 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 and 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 of me, suffocating and still
holding on to the hope that Rule would notice she was alive.  It was exhausting
and on 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.

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 that had extra money to spend often wanted to spend it on ink.  I was
booked with back to back appointments all the way through Saturday and even
went in on Monday night to work on a guy’s sleeve I had started a few months
ago because I just didn’t have any room in my schedule to fit him in.  Nash was
just as booked as I was, so when Saturday night rolled around we were both
ready to let loose and tie one on.  Sunday afternoon went about the same as
last week only this time I walked the girl to her car and 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.