“Sorry, dude. How did your appointment go?”
Nash’s uncle Phil had opened the tattoo shop years ago on Capitol Hill when it mainly catered to gangbangers and bikers. Now with the influx of young urbanites and hipsters populating the area, the Marked was one of the busiest tattoo parlors in town. Nash and I met in art class in the fifth grade and have been inseparable since. In fact, ever since we were twelve our plan was to move to the city and work for Phil. We both had mad skills and the personality to make the shop bump with business so Phil had no qualms apprenticing us and putting us to work before we were both in our twenties. It was killer to have a friend in the same field; I had a plethora of ink on my skin that ranged from not-so-great to great that chronicled Nash’s evolution as a tattoo artist, and he could state the same thing about me.
“I finished that back piece that I’ve been working on since July. It turned out better than I thought and the dude is talking about doing the front. I’ll take it, because he’s a fat tipper.”
“Nice.” I was juggling the phone and the coffee, trying to open the door to the car when a female voice stopped me in my tracks.
“Hey.” I looked over my shoulder and the brunette was standing a car over with a smile on her face. “I really like your tattoos.”
I smiled back at her and then jumped, nearly spilling scalding hot coffee down my crotch as Shaw shoved the door open from the inside.
“Thanks.” If we had been closer to home and Shaw wasn’t already putting the car in reverse I probably would have taken a second to ask the girl for her number. Shaw shot me a look of contempt that I promptly ignored, and I went back to my conversation with Nash. “Rome is home. He got in an accident and Shaw said he’s got a few weeks of R and R coming to him. I guess that’s why Mom was blowing my phone up all week.”
“Kick ass. Ask him if he wants to roll with us for a few days. I miss that surly bastard.”
I sipped on the coffee and my head finally started to calm down. “That’s the plan. I’ll hit you up on my way home and let you know what the story is.”
I flicked my thumb across the screen to end the call and settled back into the seat. Shaw scowled angrily at me and I swore her eyes glowed. Really. I have never seen anything that green, even in nature, and when she gets mad they are just otherworldly.
“Your mom called while you were busy flirting. She’s mad that we’re late.”
I sucked on more of the black nectar of the gods and started tapping out a beat on my knee with my free hand. I was always kind of a fidgety guy and the closer we got to my parents’ house, the worse it usually got. Brunch was always stilted and forced. I couldn’t figure out why they insisted on going through with it every single week and couldn’t figure out why Shaw enabled the farce, but I went, even when I knew nothing would ever change.
“She’s mad that you’re late. We both know she couldn’t care less if I’m there or not.” My fingers moved faster and faster as she wheeled the car into a gated community and passed rows and rows of cookie-cutter minimansions that were built back into the mountains.
“That’s not true and you know it, Rule. I do not suffer through these car rides every weekend, subject myself to the delight of your morning-after nastiness because your parents want me to have eggs and pancakes every Sunday. I do it because they want to see you, want to try to have a relationship with you no matter how many times you hurt them or push them away. I owe it to your parents and, more important, I owe it to Remy to try to make you act right even though lord knows that’s almost a full-time job.”
I sucked in a breath as the blinding pain that always came when someone mentioned Remy’s name barreled through my chest. My fingers involuntarily opened and closed around the coffee cup and I whipped my head around to glare at her. “Remy wouldn’t be all over my ass to try and be something to them I’m not. I was never good enough for them, and never will be. He understood that better than anyone and worked overtime to try and be everything to them I
never could be.”
She sighed and pulled the car to a stop in the driveway behind my dad’s SUV. “The only difference between you and Remy is that he let people love him, and you”—she yanked open the driver’s door and glared at me across the space that separated us—“you have always been determined to make everyone who cares about you prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. You’ve never wanted to be easy to love, Rule, and you make damn sure that nobody can ever forget it.” She slammed the door with enough force that it rattled my back teeth and made my head start to throb again.
It has been three years. Three lonely, three empty, three sorrow-filled years since the Archer brothers went from a trio to a duo. I am close to Rome—he’s awesome and has always been my role model when it comes to being a badass— but Remy was my other half, both figuratively and literally. He was my identical twin, the light to my dark, the easy to my hard, the joy to my angst, the perfect to my oh-so-totally fucked up, and without him I was only half the person I would ever be. It has been three years since I called him in the middle of the night to come pick me up from some lame-ass party because I had been too drunk to drive. Three years since he left the apartment we shared to come get me—zero questions asked—because that’s just what he did.
It’s been three years since he lost control of his car on a rainy and slick I-25 and slammed into the back of a semi truck going well over eighty. Three years since we put my twin in the ground and my mother looked at me with tears in her eyes and stated point-blank, “It should have been you” as they lowered Remy into the ground.