“I had my reasons Rule.”

“And those would be?”

“For me to know. Look I didn’t ask you for anything after, I don’t expect anything from you so can’t we just get over it?”

“No we can’t.”

I reeled back a little bit and frowned at him. “What? Why not? We’ve known each other forever; this is just a thing that happened.” I flipped my wrist in a way I hoped was dismissive and went stock still as he grabbed my hand in his much larger one. I stared fascinated as the tattooed digits linked with my own.

“See this thing that happened,” his voice dropped a few octaves and I was suddenly acutely aware that the coffee shop was full and that for whatever reason we had garnered enough interest from the fellow patrons that several nearby tables were watching our interaction with rapt attention. “It wasn’t just some insignificant event that we can just ignore, believe me I tried. I went out Friday and met a smoking hot redhead.” I felt my face fold into a scowl as I tried to pull away from him. He smiled at me and used my trapped hand to pull me even closer. “Sadly it took maybe five minutes to realize that I was trying to use one girl to get another off my mind so I thought Saturday I would try for a blond or maybe a brunette, hell maybe both because my head was all twisted up by a chick it shouldn’t be.” I tugged on my hand but he just pulled me closer still so that he was practically whispering in my ear and that I was almost sitting on his lap. I had to use my free hand to brace myself on his hard thigh. It was way too intimate, way too familiar to touch him this way when I was trying to put distance between us and he was telling me about trying to take other girls to bed. “So Nash and I went out and there were redheads and there were brunettes and there was even a super-hot chick that looked kinda like Pink but you think any of them did it for me? No, Shaw not one because they weren’t fucking you and ever since you walked out on Sunday all I’ve been thinking of is you. Now why is that?”

His words made me shiver from the inside out. “Because it was new, because we have history and it makes it harder for you to keep me faceless and nameless, I don’t know Rule.”

He lifted a hand and ran his thumb across the rise of my cheek. I made my breath catch and my heart start to trip over itself.

“Whatever the reason it matters Shaw. It matters a lot.”

“What are you trying to say Rule?”

“I don’t know, all I know is other girls aren’t you and that isn’t cutting it for me so I think we need to figure out what’s going on between us.”

I shook my head a little and a silver flare lit up his pale gaze. “I’m not going to be one of many. Like I said I had my reasons for letting things happen the way they did, but if you think I’m signing up to be a bed filler because no one else is fitting the bill right now you are sadly mistaken. I know you Rule; I’ve known you since you first figured out girls were more complicated than boys and you’ve never wanted to put the work in.”

The feather light sweep of that thumb across my cheek almost had me melting into a puddle at his booted feet. “So this time I will, we’ll hangout, do shit together, I mean we’ve known each other forever but I honestly don’t really know anything about you. Come on Shaw what do you really have to lose?”

Not my heart because he already had it even though he didn’t know it. “So you want to like date?”

He laughed. “I’m not really the dating type but I swear that while we’re trying to figure out what’s going on that I’ll keep it in my pants. No screwing around, no other girls. I owe it to you and to me to see what’s here or if it was just a fluke.” He sounded so sincere; he looked as serious and as determined to make me believe what he was saying as I had ever seen.

I cleared my throat and bit my bottom lip a little. Sure it was what I had dreamed of, Rule suddenly realizing I was a girl and wanting to be with me. Granted in my fantasy that always came with his profession of undying love and devotion, but in reality his curiosity and a promise to at least feel things out was probably as good as I was ever going to get. I didn’t know how much I trusted him, but I had always, always wanted him and it just wasn’t in me to turn that down when it was being offered up on a silver platter.

“If we do this; hangout, spend time together your parents, my parents, Rome none of them are going to like it very much.”

“Who cares?”

I guess I did but I always was the always the only one to worry about that stuff.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

I breathed out a soft breath and as it whispered across his mouth he briefly closed his eyes so I did the only thing that was left to do, I leaned forward and pressed my lips to his. It wasn’t the same desperation as it had been the last time, there was no panic that he would change his mind, no years upon years of pent up desire and frustration, there was no regret that it was only going to be a one night thing Just the sweet press of my lips against his and the soft bite of that lip ring into my lower lip. Kissing Rule would always be uniquely different from kissing anyone else, there was just something about it that put it in a class all its own. I felt his lips turn up into a grin as audible sighs from several of the tables around us were heard. He pulled back and tapped a finger on the tip of my nose.

I sat back in my chair and cleared my throat. “Well then.”

He barked out a laugh. “Yeah, at least that part of it seems to be a no-brainer.”

I shifted in my seat and motioned absently to the work still sprawled across the table between us. “As nice as this little visit was I have to finish this presentation.”

A quick flash of disappointment blazed across his eyes but he hid it behind that easy grin. “When do you work this weekend?”

“I work all weekend, but I’m first out Saturday night, I just have to be in by ten on Sunday morning.”

“Busy girl.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“So this hanging out thing might be harder than I thought?”

He said it light heartedly but I knew Rule, he was an instant gratification kind of guy. If my tight schedule made it hard for us to spend time together I had no illusions that he would wait around for me to get free, he would move on to something easier and more manageable.

“I’ll be out around ten on Saturday and usually I’m out by seven on Sunday, the Sunday shift is optional I just picked it up because we stopped going to Brookside and I figured I might as well make a little extra money.”

“My buddy Jet is playing at Cerberus this weekend, why don’t you grab your roommate and come hangout Saturday night?”

“What kind of music is it?” Cerberus had a pretty rowdy reputation in town. It was located in the warehouse district and had been shut down more than once for one thing or another. It wasn’t the kind of place I would normally consider spending time, in fact it was the kind of place I normally avoided at all costs just on the off chance I would run into someone I knew and they would rat me out to my parents, but if I was going to commit to trying to spend time with this boy that I had wanted forever, then my horizons were going to have to expand.

“Metal.”

I snorted a little. “Ayden is from Kentucky, she likes Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood. I don’t know that I could wrangle her into that.”

“They’re actually really good, they went on tour with a pretty famous band last year, besides Ayden seems like a pretty cool chick I bet she would go just to be your wingman. If she doesn’t come just come alone, I won’t leave you hanging.”

“What about Rome?”

“He has to go to Fort Carson for the weekend. He has to set up meetings with his VA counselor. He’s having a rough time since he isn’t healing as fast as he thought he would be.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I’m not going to hide this from anyone Shaw, if you want to play those kind of games maybe you need to rethink whether this is something you really want to do or not.”

I grabbed his forearm and let the tips of my fingers dig into the body of the snake that was marked there. “No, I’m not going to hide, just don’t make me look like an idiot Rule. This matters.”

“It matters to me too, Casper.” He climbed to his feet so that he was towering over me. He bent down and pressed a soft kiss to the crown of my head. “By the way you look good in jeans. Come to the show Saturday.”

“Alright.” I watched him walk out of the coffee shop and it wasn’t lost on me that so did every other girl in the place. I stifled a sigh and ruefully shook my head. I went to flip the top of my computer back open when the girl sitting directly across from me caught my eye. She was a little bit older than me, had long dreadlocks that were a startling ocean blue and she was staring at me in open envy. I had to blink a little bit because I was so used to being the one that looked at the girls crawling out of his bed like that. She gave me a sheepish grin.

“You’re going to have your hands full with that one.”

Considering I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure what we were doing I had no doubt she was right. It wasn’t like he asked me to be his girlfriend or even on an honest to God date, he just said he wanted to hang out and spend time together, that wasn’t defined or clear and I didn’t even know what that meant to him. I appreciated that he told me he was willing to keep it in his pants, that he was aware that whatever was happening between us was important enough to try and figure out without the complication of other girls involved, but I was acutely aware that old habits tended to die hard and Rule was not known to practice restraint. I huffed out a breath. “You’re telling me.”

The girl laughed a little. “He actually tattooed a giant lotus flower on my friend’s leg; she spent all three sessions trying to get him to ask her out on a date. I guess I can tell her he has a girlfriend so it’ll make her feel better.”

I picked my coffee back up and tried to get my head out of the Rule fog that it had descended into and tried to move it back to good college student mode.

“I’m not his girlfriend.”

“Really? It sure looked like it.”

“We’ve known each other a long time, it’s complicated.”

She winked at me and gave me a saucy grin. “Oh honey when they look like that and exude that kind of do-me, do-me it always will be.”

Well there it was. If a perfect stranger could plainly see after literally only five minutes of watching us together that it was always going to be a battle to keep things with him on the level what chance did I have of making anything between us work? With that depressing thought I went back to assisted suicide and tried to cheer myself up.

Chapter 7

Rule

The club was packed. Enmity was a pretty big local draw for metal heads and punk-rockers, plus Jet had been in the scene since he was just a kid so he had a solid local following from just being around for so long. Some crappy wannabe Slayer band was opening up for them and already doing their warm up, they were followed by an all-girl punk band so the show was supposed to run late which was good because it was well past eleven and I couldn’t stop looking at the display on my phone to check the time. Every time I did it Nash rolled his eyes and Jet laughed at me, granted they were doing a bang up job of polishing off a bottle of Patron between the two of them so I didn’t take it personally but I had sent Shaw a text over an hour ago to verify she was going to be here and I hadn’t heard a thing back.