But she no longer wanted me, and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself now.
It was my first time being rejected, and I could admit I wasn’t handling it well… at all.
I glanced down at my phone, which had been ringing and pinging with messages nonstop for the last several hours. I wanted to turn the damn thing off, but there was a part of me that refused to believe I’d been dumped, and I waited for each call to show my ex’s info. She never popped up on the screen, but my mom called no less than twenty times. My dad no less than ten, and my best friend, who also happened to be my cousin, was sending a text every fifteen minutes like clockwork.
I ignored them all, but eventually, the one and the only person I couldn’t ignore even if I wanted to called, and I finally caved and answered the phone.
“Ry Archer, where in the hell are you? Mom and Dad are worried sick about you.” My little sister’s voice was shaky and sounded like she’d been crying. She was normally a pretty tough cookie, but she tended to be overly dramatic and emotional about most things. Part of that was because she was a teenage girl. But a huge chunk of it was that she took after our father in pretty much every single way other than her appearance. She looked just like our mother, with her white-blond hair and pretty green eyes.
However, she was as reckless and rebellious as our old man. She was as outspoken and opinionated as he was. She was as bold and colorful as he was. She was fearless in everything the same way he was. And she felt everything in extremes the same way he did. Both of us grew up knowing without a doubt how much we were loved and cherished by our parents, but especially by our dad. The opposite was also true. Whenever we disappointed him or did something he didn’t approve of, we felt his displeasure down to our bones. It was a lot to balance, but luckily our quiet and mostly even-keeled mother kept our household and our father in check. I wished I took after her the way my little sister, Daire, took after Dad, but I was kind of the odd man out in our family.
I’d heard more than once from my grandparents and my uncle that my personality and behavior were almost a mirror image of my dad’s twin brother, who was no longer with us. It was a sore spot with my dad whenever someone made the comparison, but he didn’t deny that there were times I reminded him of his twin brother. No matter how much time had gone by since he lost his twin, my dad still very much missed his other half and felt his loss. Sometimes my mom told me stories about them when they were growing up, and I could sense the similarities. It sucked he had passed away so young for so many reasons. Only one of which was that I really had no one to relate to in my family. I was kind of the black sheep in a flock that was already pretty dark.
I sighed and squeezed the steering wheel between my hands.
I loved my little sister with everything in me. We were extraordinarily close and rarely kept secrets from each other. We were close enough in age that it had often been the two of us against the world no matter what. She was my favorite person and my most trusted confidant. But she was also my ex’s best friend. They were only a few months apart in age, and where one went, the other often followed. When I first started showing interest in my ex, my sister was totally against the idea of us being anything more than good friends. She told me she never wanted to be caught between the two of us. She never wanted to have to pick a side or have to keep something from either one of us. I waved off the concerns because I was sure my ex and I were meant to be. I’d grown up surrounded by true love and examples of young love maturing into happy, healthy, long-lasting marriages. I thought staying with my first love through thick and thin might be the only way in which I took after my parents.
I didn’t want to think that Daire knew what would happen to my relationship before I did, and she kept something so huge from me. Any way I looked at it, she had to know things were going south before I did.
“I’m going for a drive right now. Tell mom and dad not to worry. I’ll be fine.” I knew I would be. Eventually.
My sister sighed on the other end of the line, and I could hear her pacing around. She was the type who was constantly in motion. She never sat still, and her mind was always going a mile a minute. I knew if I didn’t convince her that I was okay, she would venture out aimlessly into the night trying to track me down, even though she had no idea where I was or how long I’d been in my truck.
“You’ve been driving for the last four hours? Are you even in Colorado anymore?” Daire’s voice rose sharply.
I looked at the clock on the dashboard and blinked when I realized how much time had passed. I was still in Colorado, but just barely. I was almost at the southern border. I didn’t have a plan when I climbed in my truck and started to drive, but subconsciously I started heading toward the one person no one would ever suspect me of turning to when I was hurting.
“Give me some time, Daire.” I wanted to close my eyes and make the world disappear until I could fully deal with the empty ache in the center of my chest. Since I was driving, that wasn’t an option, so all I could do was shake my head and blink my eyes, which alternately felt like they were hot with tears and dry as the desert. “I have to get my head on right before I try to talk to anyone, but especially you, about what went down today.”
She made a distressed sound, and I could clearly imagine her putting her brightly painted nails to her mouth. She always wore a bunch of rings and bracelets that clinked and banged together, making so much noise. My little sister was anything but subtle, and you could always hear her coming. She knew how to make an entrance, but she also knew when it was time to back down and fade into the background. She knew all my buttons and when to push them. I would always answer her when she called me, but I had limits to how much I would let her poke and prod me when I was hurt.
“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 with his mom last year when she 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 little sister was a terrible idea. We were all too close, our families too connected for it to end any other way than tragic.
Aston Wheeler was the daughter of my mom and dad’s extremely close friends. All my best friends were actually in my life for the same reason. 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. Aston’s dad worked with my uncle, operating several custom car and motorcycle garages across Denver. And both Royce’s real 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, a doctor, for advice and guidance. My cousins Remy and Zowen, along with me, my sister, Royce and his sister, as well as a couple older kids we didn’t see much, Joss and Hyde, and my dad’s coworker’s daughters, Glory and Bowe, all spent a lot of time together growing up. Not all of us lived in Colorado during the course of our friendship as our families grew and the world around us changed. But we always saw each other during the holidays and made it a point to be present for any major life event of the others.