Rule (Marked Men #1)(11)

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 f**king 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.