The Marked Men Series Books 1–6: Rule, Jet, Rome, Nash, Rowdy, Asa. Jay Crownover
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highway in the direction of Brookside.
“Where are we going?” I knew Ayden was curious but when I woke up this morning and Rule had been so cloyingly polite and kind there were two things that I knew I had to accomplish today. The first was done and the second, well I wasn’t sure, but I felt like the second might end up being even more painful.
“I just need to swing by and see an old friend really quick.”
“In Brookside?”
“Just outside. Let me just get through it first and then I’ll explain.” I drove silently through the mountains until we got to the small cemetery on the outskirts of Evergreen, listening to Dawes play melancholy songs that fit my mood perfectly. I had always thought it ironic that Remy was buried so far out of the city on such a quiet piece of land, when he had been so buoyant and so full of energy and life. I parked in the visitors’ lot and pulled on a pair of gloves and a hat because I wasn’t sure how long I was going to be, and it was even colder up here at the higher elevation than it was in the city.
“I’ll leave the keys so you can run the heater and mess with the radio. I’m not sure how long I’m going to be.”
Ayden’s amber gaze was liquid with sadness and understanding. She gave me a quick one-armed hug and shooed me off. “I’ll be fine. You take as long as you need. You can spring for a hot-stone massage if it takes you too long.”
“Deal.” That’s why I loved this girl.
My boots crunched on the snow as I made my way to the back of the lot where the gravestone sat so cold and sterile, just one more shade of gray on the barren winter landscape. There was a bright spray of red roses lying on top of the stark white plot and it made me smile. Remy loved red, loved things that were vibrant and eye-catching, anything that suited his personality. Not caring that the ground was frozen and covered in snow I knelt down and traced his name with a gloved finger. Tears immediately filled my eyes. I moved my hand along to glide over the huge horseshoe that both the surviving Archer boys had insisted go on their sibling’s headstone. Turned upward, it was said to keep all the good luck in. Rome liked the symbolism, and Rule liked that it was a visual representation that tied the two of them together for eternity.
“Hey, handsome. I’m sorry it’s been so long since my last visit but things have been … intense.” I laughed humorlessly. “I have a feeling if you were here you would be laughing your ass off at everyone and shaking your head at all of us. I miss you so much and every single day I think it would make things so much better if I could just call you, that you would make sense of everything and keep it all together. Doing this is a million times harder without you.”
I was crying in earnest now and couldn’t really see the headstone clearly anymore. I flattened my palm over his name and concentrated on taking deep breaths in and out. “I’m sleeping with your brother, and if you thought I was a silly lovesick fool before, you should see me now. I’m freaking out because he’s being too nice. I know, only I would worry about my boyfriend being too nice, but we both know Rule and something is up. He won’t talk to me about it. By the way, how weird is it that I’m calling Rule my boyfriend? My heart turns over every time I do it and sometimes I feel like my entire world is in his eyes and yet he still closes me out, still shuts down and makes it so very hard to just love him. If you were here I would make you pull it out of him and he would tell you because he always did.”
I sighed and let my head fall forward. “I wish you had told them, Rule and Rome. I wish you had trusted them enough to let them in like you did me. Your mother has gone off her rocker because Rule still refuses to be your carbon copy, and as a result your family is in tatters. Maybe if everyone knew, if you had tried to let them know everyone deserves to be loved no matter how they choose to live their lives, it wouldn’t be like this. Your dad is coming around but still trying to keep Margot out of the loony bin. And Rome, poor Rome is just a giant Ping-Pong ball trying to protect everybody and make everything okay but he has no one to help him. He needs you to be the mediator like you always were.”
My knees were freezing and my pants had long since soaked through. My teeth were chattering and I had quickly learned that supercold weather and nipple piercings were not exactly a great combo.
“I have a crazy ex who is in turn stalking and harassing me; it’s making my life hell. My parents are convinced I should marry him and move to Cherry Hills. Rule hates him and there’s a good chance if the ex keeps it up he’s going to murder him and it just makes things that are already complicated even more awful. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you had been around you would have seen through all Gabe’s polish and shine to the tarnish underneath and I wouldn’t have ended up in this situation in the first place. I miss having you protect me from myself. Your brother is all about keeping me safe and I think he really honestly cares, but he’s so busy keeping me safe from everyone, himself included, that I don’t think he sees that I can be my own worst enemy. He keeps talking about messing things up between us and I don’t have the heart to tell him that he can’t ever mess up bad enough to make me stop loving him. There is a good chance that, like everyone else, he’s going to see what I have to offer isn’t all that great and want more than I can give. It’s so convoluted and twisted I can’t even believe we’ve gotten as far as we have.”
I laughed a little, real laughter this time, and a couple standing by a grave a few feet away gave me a dirty look.
“I got drunk on my birthday and threw myself at him. I was terrified the entire time he was going to turn me down, to claim that he was taking advantage of me because I was drunk, but it happened and I totally gave up the V-card to your twin. Somehow I know you would find that hysterical and never let me live it down. You were right. I was always just waiting for him to get with the program and now that he has, well, let me just say the program is amazing and I have a hard time seeing a future without it or without him.”
I pressed a kiss to the stiff leather of the glove and placed it on his name. “Every day, Rem, every single day something reminds me of you, makes me think of things I want to tell you, makes me want to cry because of what happened to you. Every day I miss you and right now when I need you more than ever, I try to make decisions, try to go in a direction that I know would make you proud, would make you smile for me, but it’s hard.”
I stayed for a few more minutes until the tears were nothing more than icy trails on my cheeks, then climbed to my feet. I rested a hand on the top of the gravestone and said a final good-bye while trying to regain my composure. When I got into the car, Ayden had hijacked the radio and Lady Antebellum was twanging it up. She turned it all the way down as I got behind the steering wheel and peeled off my gloves.
“Everything okay?”
I nodded and held my frozen hands over the heater, wishing I had one big enough to dry the legs of my jeans. “Yeah, it’s just sad. I miss him a lot. We used to talk every single day, sometimes for hours and hours. I feel lost without him. So much of the time I think he’s the only one who would make sense of how hard it is to get a handle on Rule. They were very different, but still essentially the same at the core, good men with a strong sense of self and loyalty.”
“It’s obvious you cared deeply for him, so why didn’t the two of you ever hook up? It seems like it would have been an obvious match.”
I smiled ruefully and headed back toward the city. “Because we didn’t feel that way about each other. He knew I was in love with Rule. At times he encouraged it, at times he tried everything to talk me out of it, but he knew it, and for the most part respected it. As for Remy, he was in love with someone else, someone very unlike me. Remy was the life of the party; he had a million friends and everyone wanted to be around him all the time, but he was really private when it came to his love life. Rome and Rule burned through girls at a rate that is honestly alarming, but Remy played it close to the vest. I think he let people believe we had a thing going because it kept them from asking questions he didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want the comparison to his brothers, and his parents loved me so it was just easier for him to play along than deal with the hassle.”
“That doesn’t seem like it was very fair to you.