Murphy's Law (Havenwood #2) - Riley Hart Page 0,17

were together. That was Remy.

After six fucking years.

In my fucking hometown.

I’d wanted to punch him.

I’d wanted to fuck him.

I hated him because he’d hurt me. No one had ever had the power to do that before him, and they sure as shit didn’t after him.

I believed him when he said he hadn’t known I lived on the same street. The shock had been evident on his face, but that didn’t change the fact that he was there in the first place.

I wondered how his girlfriend, Brittany, felt about that. They’d been on again, off again over the years. I knew that shit because it was all over the fucking Internet all the damn time.

They must have been off at the moment, and damned if I didn’t question how all that worked. If he faked it, or if maybe he realized he was bi, when really, it shouldn’t fucking matter. None of it. We’d made our choices. We’d walked away. Well, I had, and Remy hadn’t done a damn thing to stop me.

Before

We were in a hotel…we were always in a hotel. Remy was hardly ever around. He was touring or writing or working with his label. It was incredible when I looked at where his career had gone, that his dreams had come true. No one deserved it more than he did. But it was killing me. This whole fucking thing was slowly eating away at my insides and had been for five fucking years now.

He’d fucked me tonight when he got to the room after a show. It had been wild and frenzied, hungry and needy, the way it always was between us. But where we used to lie in bed together afterward, where we’d talk and laugh and he’d play naked for me while I stroked his leg or his back and sometimes teasingly his cock, tonight he’d pulled on underwear when we’d finished, and was now sitting with his guitar on a chair in the corner.

It was like this more and more. Being together used to be ours, this place where it didn’t matter that I was Lawson Grant III. There were no expectations of me. And it was the place where Rem could simply be. Where he could be quiet if he wanted, or write if he wanted, and let music and pretty words spill out of him without feeling self-conscious. The place where he didn’t have to hide who he was, where it wasn’t about taking care of his family.

But when we were together now it felt heavy, like we were suffocating, and I was pissy with him, and he was defensive, and we didn’t talk the way we used to.

“Why do you love me?” I found myself asking. I didn’t know where the question came from, and had I said words like that in front of anyone other than Remy, I would have felt insecure. Hell, I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to hear me ask something like that, except him.

His fingers fumbled on the guitar strings. He stopped playing and looked over at me. He was thinner than he used to be, his eyes tired. “What do you mean?”

Remy’s question was annoying as shit, so I rolled my eyes. “I mean exactly what I said. Why do you love me?”

“Law…”

“Answer the question,” I said, my voice tighter than it had been.

He sighed. “Because being with you was the first time I felt like me…or that being me was enough or not weird. That it didn’t matter if I got lost in myself or obsessed about music or didn’t feel comfortable with the attention on me unless I was singing. Because you make me laugh and smile in ways no one else can. And because you’re the type of guy to see something in someone like me. You’re so fucking brave, Law. Hell, you hadn’t even realized you were bisexual before that first night, yet you were in it from the start. Because you laugh at my jokes, even though they’re dumb. Because you have your own dreams—that you’ve realized you want to cook and you think it’s a small dream and that it doesn’t matter, but you want it anyway. Because you love your family enough that you might not do it because you feel this obligation to continue their legacy. And because you send me songs you think I’d like, and because you always give change to homeless people when you walk by them, and you ask about my mom and my siblings