Beauty from Pain (46 page)
Authors: Georgia Cates
Tags: #romance, #adult contemporary, #m leighton, #samantha young, #georgia cates, #down to you, #on dublin street, #beauty from pain, #beauty series, #up to me
“Well, I can’t say I’m
sorry to see Gabe go, but you do deserve someone that treats you
amazing and loves you in all the right ways. You’ve earned
it, because no one I’ve ever met in my whole life loves as freely
and gives as much as you do. Seeing as those parents of yours might
as well be carved out of ice, that’s just a damn miracle.
You’re a good girl, Shaw, and at the very least you deserve a good
guy.”
together and laid my cheek down. My head was slowly starting
to stop throbbing and all I wanted to do was take a nap and maybe
work on processing everything that happened
today.
Ayden was right, I did
deserve a good guy. I knew what one looked like, knew what
one acted like, in fact I had been best friends with the ultimate
good guy. Remy embodied everything any sane girl would want
in a boyfriend and yet I had never had those feelings for him, not
once. I remembered clearly the first time he had taken me
home with him. I was fourteen and having a really hard time
fitting in with all the preppy, rich kids my first year of high
school. I know now that image and brands mattered, but back
then I just wanted to wear jeans and my hair in a ponytail.
Remy had been seventeen and captain of the football team. He
found me crying outside the girl’s locker room one day after a
particularly nasty verbal beat down from Amy and her crew. He
didn’t make fun of me, didn’t ask questions or get all weird
because I was a freshman and he was a junior, he just bundled me up
and carted me home with him because I was sad and alone and he
didn’t want me to be either of those things ever again. He
told me he could tell by my eyes that I was a kind person, that I
needed someone to look out for me, and from that minute on he
decided he would be the person to do it. I remembered all the
warm and fuzzy feelings that came with that moment, remembered the
gratitude and overwhelming joy I felt at finally having someone see
how worthy and deserving of unconditional love I was, but what I
remembered most was everything inside me going upside down when
Rule walked into the kitchen and titled his chin up at me and
asked, “Who’s the chick?”
My heart stopped beating,
my lungs felt like they were going to collapse; my skin was
suddenly too tight all over my body and I couldn’t form a rational
thought or a coherent sentence. Back then I chalked it
up to a silly teenage crush, all the Archer boys were good looking
and had qualities that made them larger than life and every girl I
knew had to have a prerequisite infatuation with a bad boy at one
time or another. Of course, they normally grew out of it when
they realized the bad boy was just an ass and they deserved to be
treated better. As time went on and as things changed my feelings
never did. It was clear they were never going to be returned,
Rule only saw me as Remy’s little tag along, as a spoiled little
rich girl, and then as we got older as Remy’s girlfriend.
That sucked because I had never been any of those things and
as a result I sabotaged relationships, turned down guy after guy
simply because I didn’t want a good guy, I wanted the one that was
damaged and blind to the way I felt.
I
was
a good
girl–I was loyal and honest and I worked hard and invested a lot of
time and energy in building a secure future for myself. I
stayed out of trouble and went out of my way to try and be the
polished and perfect daughter my parents wanted me to be, and the
successful driven woman the Archers had given me the confidence to
be. What I never spent any time being was the person that I
actually felt like I was. She was locked somewhere deep
inside of me, suffocating and still holding on to the hope that
Rule would notice she was alive. It was exhausting, and in
the vulnerable moments when I was brutally honest with myself, I
had to admit I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep it
up.
Please check out
http://jaycrownover.blogspot.com/
for more information about Jay Crownover and how to
purchase
Rule
.