“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.
I was antsy and ill-tempered partly because I was navigating uncharted territory and undeniably because this whole monogamy thing was new to me. I was used to scratching an itch when I felt it, used to appealing to baser needs and letting my carnal instinct drive me, behaving not because someone asked me to but because I wanted to was entirely new to me and the side effects sucked. I was horny and irritable, plus I was sick of playing phone tag with her, I had no idea how busy Shaw’s life was. The girl was bouncing from class, to work, to volunteer stuff all day long. When I saw her before on the weekends I had just assumed she had free time and was choosing to spend Sunday’s with my folks, clearly that wasn’t the case. Every minute of the girl’s day was planned and orchestrated, it made the fact that she had sacrificed a lot by refusing to see them until they opened their eyes more clear.
“Chill out. If she said she was coming than she’s coming.” Nash shoved an elbow in my ribs making me jostle the phone I was glaring holes into. I shoved it back into my pocket and picked up the beer I had been nursing for over an hour. I caught the eye of a smoking hot blond that had been scoping me out under the radar since we walked in the bar and had to do a quick mental rundown of why I thought spending time with Shaw and figuring out how she had got my head all twisted and turned was a good idea when easy as pie was right in front of me. The blond gave me a smile that all but screamed “I want you to take my pants off with your teeth” and I almost choked when beer went down the wrong tube.