Rule. Jay Crownover
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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.
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