out a hard breath through her clenched teeth and her emerald-colored eyes sharpened with an anger that I was surprised to see burned as hot as mine. “Maybe you should have asked me before deciding what I deserve, Rule. Maybe I liked the you that flips out over stupid shit. Maybe I miss the you that is passionate enough about me, about my safety, to risk going to jail over my psycho ex, and I sure as hell never asked for you to be a better boyfriend. In fact, the boyfriend you’ve been the last week has done nothing but make me confused and sad.”
I don’t think either of us realized that we had raised our voices or that we now had a captive audience. In fact, it took my mom making a noise low in her throat like a wounded animal as she wobbled on her heels to get our attention. She was looking from me to Shaw with huge eyes, and had a hand pressed hard into her chest. My dad looked far less surprised, but worried about my mom as usual.
“What did you just call him?”
Shaw looked at my mom, then back at me. She sighed and answered softly like she was afraid the news would shatter the woman before her. “Rule and I have been seeing each other for a little over a month now. I told him to stop acting like he needed to be someone else to be a good boyfriend.” She turned to look at me and I could see her doing some kind of internal warfare with herself. Finally, she sucked in a deep breath and turned back to my mom. “I’ve been in love with him since I was fourteen, Margot.”
I went still at her confession and felt everything inside me turn to jelly. She loves me. This perfect, wonderful, kind young woman loves me and had for a long time. I didn’t know where to put that because my mom started blinking back tears, and for the first time that night turned her attention to me.
“It’s not enough that you took Remy’s life? You had to take the girl he loved from him, too?”
Stunned silence landed on the table like a ton of bricks. My instinct was to push away from the table and storm out of the restaurant, but I couldn’t because Shaw clamped a hand over mine on her leg. My dad and Rome both leapt to their feet in outrage. “Margot!” “Mom!” Voices were raised and the other patrons in the restaurant were starting to pay all kinds of attention to the scene we were making, but I was too stunned to care. I heard Shaw say my name, felt my brother put his hand on my shoulder, but I just wasn’t there. At least I wasn’t there until Shaw climbed to her feet, put her fingers in her mouth, and let out a whistle that had us all looking at her in shock. She put her hands on the table and leaned forward so that she was talking directly to my mom, but she made eye contact with all of us.
“Everyone shut up.” She pointed a finger at my mom and narrowed her eyes. “Listen to me, Margot, and for once you need to hear what I’m saying. I loved Remy, still do, but we were never in love. He knew how I felt about Rule and at times both encouraged and discouraged it, but at the end of the day he agreed that we don’t necessarily get to choose who we fall in love with.”
She took a deep breath and I watched her chest rise and fall. She was struggling with something, something big, if the flush on her face and the way her hands balled into fists were any indication.
“Remy had secrets. I know you boys were close, that you all loved and respected each other, but Remy was different from the two of you and he just didn’t know how to tell you. He thought that maybe it was best for everyone to just let all of you assume we were a couple because of how hard Dale and Margot were on Rule—and all he did was tattoo himself and wear his hair all crazy.”
She turned so that she was fully facing me and I saw she had tears in her eyes and that her bottom lip was trembling. I wanted to wrap her up in a hug and make it all better but even in the emotional shell shock I was experiencing, I knew her words were about to change my world forever.
“I promised him and I owed him so much. I swore on my life I would never tell anyone.” She let her gaze skip around the table and land on all of us. “But he would want his family healthy and whole more than he would want me to keep his secret.” She took a deep breath. “Remy was gay. He was my best friend, my surrogate family, but he was a homosexual. He was involved in a serious relationship with a guy named Orlando Fredrick that he met his last year playing ball. That was the real reason he moved to Denver after school. Lando goes to DU as well.”
Disbelief, foreign and cold, snaked up my spine. Rome let out a string of nasty words and my mom started bawling in earnest. Shaw turned sad eyes in my direction and I looked at her like I had never seen her before.
“No way. He would have told me.”
She shook her head, sending white and black hair sliding across her shoulders. “He wanted to, but he was worried you wouldn’t understand his desire to keep it quiet. He was scared you would push him to come out. It was never about worrying how you would react, he just knew it would kill Margot.”
“We were twins, goddamn it. He would have told me.”
“Rule.”
I pushed away from the table and glared down at her. “This is bullshit.”
Rome got to his feet as well and I noticed he was also looking at Shaw with hard eyes. “You don’t need to make up lies about the deceased to try to fix things for Rule. That’s desperate and uncalled for, Shaw.”
Tears trailed down her face as she looked back and forth between us. She opened her mouth to say something but was cut off by my dad clicking his spoon against the side of his champagne glass.
“All right everybody, sit down and shut the hell up.” He cut a hard look at my mom and pointed to the seat she had vacated moments before. She looked like she was going to faint, and about as happy to sit next to Shaw as she did when I stopped by a few weeks ago. I sat back down grudgingly but, surprisingly, Rome was the holdout. He hovered by the back of his chair until my dad glared at him and pointed. “Ass in the chair, soldier.”
Shaw was crying next to me and now instead of wanting to comfort her, all I wanted to do was get as far away from her as possible. My dad cleared his throat and crossed his arms on the table.
“Things in this family have been in shambles for a long time. There has been too much dishonesty and too much subterfuge for everyone’s sake and I’m done trying to sweep it all under the rug just to keep my wife happy, because she isn’t. None of us are.”
He rubbed a hand over his chin and suddenly he looked a hundred years older than he actually was. “Margot, don’t pretend to not know that the way you’ve been treating Rule these last few years is cruel and uncalled for. I lost my son the same as you and I’m done watching you try to turn his twin into a stranger or someone who hates us. He’s a good boy; he works hard, loves his family, and clearly has qualities that are good enough for our girl to appreciate. I’m finished freezing him out. We both know Shaw has been in love with him since she was a kid. We saw the way she watched him, the way she defended him, and don’t think for one second I didn’t notice that’s why you were always trying to shove her in Remy’s direction.”
He heaved a sigh that seemed like it came all the way from my youth and looked at me and Rome. “Shaw isn’t lying to you, boys. Your brother was a homosexual. He might not have wanted your mother and me to know about it, but teenagers are crap liars and he wasn’t exactly as discreet as he might have thought.” He slid a sideways look at my mom while Rome and I gave each other shocked looks. “Margot thought it was a phase; that’s the main reason she was so eager to welcome Shaw into our home and family. At first she was convinced you were going to change him, make him like girls or, more specifically, like you, but like I said, it was pretty obvious your interest was in Rule. After a while, we just adored you so much and saw how much love you were missing and
