“I didn’t know, Ry. I honestly had no idea Aston was going to break up with you. She’s been weird lately, but I thought it was because we were graduating, or maybe because Royce left last year and moved to New York. You know how close she was to her brother. She never mentioned anything about being unhappy with you to me. I promise I would’ve told you.” I could hear that she was starting to cry and it made me feel like shit.
I should’ve listened to her at the start when she said dating my buddy Royce’s younger half-sister was a terrible idea. We were all too close, our families too connected for it to end any other way than tragically. Aston had taken it hard when he decided to follow his birth mom to New York after she remarried. I knew it was an impossible choice for him to make because he considered Aston’s mom as his own, as well as his actual mom. He always called Poppy his bonus mom and never treated her with anything other than love and respect. He was also incredibly attached to his sister, regardless of them having different moms, so it’d been shocking when he made the call to leave.
Aston Wheeler was the daughter of a couple my mom and dad were extremely close with. All my best friends were actually in my life for the same reason. Their dad worked with my Uncle Rome, operating several custom car and motorcycle garages across Denver. And both Royce’s birth mom and Aston’s mother were ridiculously tight with my mom. Aston had been pretty sick when she was young, so her parents often turned to my mom, who just happened to be a doctor, for advice and guidance. My cousins Remy and Zowen, Royce and his sister, a couple of older kids we didn’t see as much named Joss and Hyde, and my dad’s coworker’s daughters Glory and Bowe, all spent a lot of time together with me and my sister growing up. We were a close group brought together by our parents, but we stayed together because we all genuinely liked each other and had various things in common. Not all of us lived in Colorado during the course of our friendship as our families grew and the world around us changed and expanded. But we always saw each other over the summer, during the holidays, and we made it a point to be present for any major life event of the others.
Some of us were closer, like me and Zowen, and Daire and Aston. Bowe Keller, my forever nemesis, and my cousin Remy were also super tight, even though the younger girl had lived in Austin the entire time we’d known her. It was fun to have a big network of diverse and interesting friends, but there were a few of us who rubbed each other the wrong way and had to work at playing nice with one another.
Well… really, that only applied to Bowe and me.
She and I were the nearest in age out of everyone, but that was the only similarity between the two of us. We never particularly got along, even starting from the time we were figuring out how to walk and talk. I always thought it was a good thing she lived in Austin with her folks, and I only had to see her a couple of times a year. Sometimes it was hard to pretend to be friends when we had been more than that—and less than that—over the course of knowing one another.
But today, I wanted her to be closer.
I wasn’t certain why I wanted to share my heartache with her. I just knew that I wanted to see her right now more than anything when my whole world felt like it was suddenly flipped upside down.
I blew out a breath and tried to reassure my sister, “I believe you. I know you wouldn’t stand by and let me be blindsided like that.” But I also knew she would fight to the death for Aston, so she had to be in a tough spot right now. “Just give me some space, okay? I’ll call Mom and Dad when I get where I’m going. Tell them not to worry too much. Let me catch my breath and calm down for a minute.”
My little sister sighed again, and I heard her knock something over—her sadness and frustration palpable through the phone. “You don’t have to run away from home in order to hide your emotions from everyone, Ry. As hard as you try to convince everyone otherwise, we know you’re human. Stop trying to force yourself to be so perfect all the damn time. You’re allowed to be sad and angry right now. You’re supposed to be upset when your heart gets broken. I know you don’t really know what losing feels like, but this is it, and you shouldn’t go through it alone.”
I did tend to strive for perfection, but obviously I missed the mark or I wouldn’t have gotten dumped so mercilessly.
I cleared my throat and tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, squinting as a semi-truck passed me on the opposite side of the road. “I’m only going to be alone for a little bit.”
She was correct when she said I was running away to hide my feelings.
That was something I always did.
But there was one person with whom I never put on the pretense of perfection, mostly because she saw right through it and never failed to call me out on my bullshit.
“Oh…. okay.” Almost instantly, my sister’s tone changed, and she seemed to be relieved. Like I said, we were super close, and she knew me better than I knew myself some days. It wouldn’t take her too long to figure out where I was going, even if the destination would be considered highly unlikely to anyone else. “Well, drive safe, and don’t forget to check in with Mom and Dad when you have time. I’ll try to hold them off for a little bit. For what it’s worth, I already gave Aston a piece of my mind. I even called Royce to ask him if he knew what was going on, but he is as clueless as me. About the college thing, and about you. I don’t know why she was making all those decisions in secret, but I honestly think she’s hurting as much as you are right now.”
Impossible.
Aston walked away, and I could hardly move. She took me down to my knees and left me breathless. When she walked away, she hadn’t bothered to spare me a backward glance. There wasn’t an ounce of the kind, caring girl in Aston who had me wrapped around her finger for so long as she ripped my heart out. I definitely didn’t recognize her. Worse than that, though, was that I didn’t recognize myself either. I wasn’t familiar with failure, so losing the most important thing in my world forced me to react in a way that was totally unlike me. I was behaving like the kind of people I tended to loathe.
Unreasonable.
Irrational.
Unpredictable.
The reason I disliked people who acted in such a way was because I never allowed myself the freedom to be so chaotic and carefree. I was jealous, and the envy ate away at me.
Fortunately, I had a thirteen-hour-plus drive to pull the frayed edges of my ego together and to slip back into my role of the golden boy who was unnaturally blessed.
I drove through the night and into the very early morning. I only stopped for gas and the occasional bathroom break. I silently cursed at how big and flat Texas was as the miles added up. I made a quick stop to shove a greasy, fast-food breakfast in my face when my stomach started growling. Because I was an athlete, I normally avoided anything that came in an oil-stained paper bag. But right now, the usual rules didn’t apply. I was alone, so I didn’t need to pretend to be perfect for anyone.
I took a moment to shoot a couple texts off to my sister and my cousin. Zowen was pissed it took so long for me to respond to him and warned that my dad had already shown up at his house looking for me. We were all home from school for summer break, so it made sense that my folks figured I would hit up my uncle’s house first when I disappeared. My Uncle Rome was even scarier than my dad when it came to discipline and order. He was the last person, next to my father, I wanted to come looking for me, especially while I was all caught up in my feelings. My uncle was a former military man who was now a successful entrepreneur. He didn’t take shit from anyone who wasn’t his pint-sized wife or his wild, mouthy firstborn. My cousin Remy was even more of a handful than my little sister and twice as rebellious. She was always in one kind of trouble or another, but she was probably the most loyal and passionate person I’d ever encountered in my life. Both Daire and I idolized her when we were growing up. Now, she was often the one we turned to when we needed help managing our relationships with our parents and general life advice. She was one of our group who left Denver relatively young when she ventured into the real world. I think we all expected as much from her.