Breaking the Rules: The Honeybees, book 1

by Archer, Amy

  Contents

  Title page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Epilogue

  A note from Amy

  Also by Amy Archer

  BREAKING THE RULES

  (The Honeybees, book 1)

  By

  Amy Archer

  Copyright © 2015 by Amy Archer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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  CHAPTER 1

  Just outside the restaurant, heart fluttering nervously, I gave myself a quick once-over in the reflective glass. This was it. This was the moment I was going to remember for the rest of my life. In just a few short minutes, Matt was going to ask me to marry him.

  We’d been talking about coming to Les Etoiles for dinner for years now, but it never seemed to happen: Matt was something of a homebody, and as a teacher I had a hard time justifying expensive meals out. But now here we were, and there could only be one reason for it. I could feel it all the way down to my bones: Tonight was the night.

  I looked as good as I could, I decided. My face was a little rounder than I would prefer, my eyes a little too far apart and blonde hair a little too flat, but I couldn’t change those things—certainly not right now. The dress, on the other hand, was perfect, a deep, sophisticated blue in a slightly shiny fabric that caught the light without being over-the-top.

  Taking a deep breath, I pulled open the heavy door and stepped inside. The restaurant smelled amazing, like sizzling meat and wood smoke and garlic sautéeing in butter.

  The hostess was a perfect specimen of woman, of course, tall and perfectly made-up and looking like she spent hours a day in the gym. I felt short, too fat, and too bubbly by comparison, but tonight it didn’t matter.

  “Welcome to Les Etoiles,” the woman’s velvety voice said while I glanced around the room, spotting Matt over by a window. “Do you have a reservation with us tonight?”

  “Actually, that’s my—boyfriend over there,” I said, and the hostess nodded as I went to join Matt. I’d almost gotten ahead of myself. I had almost said “fiancé.”

  “You look beautiful,” Matt said in greeting as I sat down across from him, glowing with nervous excitement.

  “You look nice too.”

  We ordered wine from the server, another perfectly groomed woman with the kind of body I’d always dreamed of. My own body was a bit thicker than I would’ve preferred, with small boobs and no waist to speak of.

  My brain went blank and I couldn’t think of a thing to say to Matt. He seemed nervous too. We ordered entrees, steak for him and chicken for me—he always got steak, and I always got chicken. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to eat, as wonderful as everything sounded, because my insides were so jumpy.

  “How was work?”

  “Fine.”

  We stayed on small talk until our meals came, and I wasn’t even sure what words my lips were saying. All I could think about was the moment ahead. When would it happen? Every movement of Matt’s, I wondered if he was getting the ring. Mrs. Sophie Campbell, I thought, trying on his last name.

  The perfect waitress brought out our food, and we began to eat in silence. I was used to silence with Matt, and at least this felt more comfortable than the awkward small talk. We’d been together six years, since the last semester of college, and sometimes I felt like we’d already said everything to each other that we needed to say. Matt kept to himself a lot anyway.

  The food was delicious, every bite cooked and seasoned to perfection, and the wine was making my cheeks glow contentedly.

  Finally, mid-meal, Matt put down his fork, took a nervous sip on his wine, and cleared his throat.

  My heart jumped. This is it, I thought. I put down my fork too, trying to steady my shaky breath.

  “Sophie,” he began, looking me in the eye. I smiled. “I’ve had such a great time with you these past few years. We’ve become adults together, we’ve helped each other transition from college to careers.”

  This was the most perfect night. Everything was at it should be. I glanced around the room quickly, trying to remember every detail, before landing back on his face. Matt was reserved, even with me, and I knew that talking about emotions was hard for him.

  “But…” he continued. But? But?! I felt alarm bells going off in my head. What was this but?

  “I feel like our relationship is not continuing to grow anymore. We’ve kind of stalled out in the past few years, don’t you think?”

  I just stared at him, mouth agape, no longer breathing. Stalled out? No, we’d become stable and steady.

  “Sophie…I think it’s time we move on. For both of us.”

  Time stood still for a moment, the room feeling silent and tight.

  Then I burst. “What?” I said, a little too loudly, and the couple at the next table glanced over at us.

  “Sophie—”

  “You what?!” I hissed, trying to control the volume of my voice. “You’re breaking up with me?” The anger and surprise won out over the hurt, but I knew it wouldn’t be long.

  Matt shrugged helplessly, which just made me angrier.

  “I— I—” I stuttered helplessly. There were no words. I was feeling and thinking so many things at once that it was impossible to order my thoughts into any sort of logical sequence. There was nowhere to start.

  “I’m sorry, Soph,” he said. “I just don’t feel like we’re going anywhere.”

  We’re not going anywhere because you refuse to move the relationship forward, I wanted to say, but the words caught in my throat in a jumble.

  “How could you?” I finally managed to whisper, knowing the hurt was evident on my face. And the moment the words were out of my mouth, I began to cry—not a quiet, dignified cry, but loud, blubbery sobs. I tried to hold back, but once the dam had burst it was no use. “How could you—” I got out between sobs, trying to ignore the uncomfortable stares from fellow diners “—do this to me? Here? Why?”

  “Sophie, there’s no good place for this,” Matt started gently, but I cut him off.

  “In public? At a nice restaurant?” It was hard to be indignant while falling to pieces, but I thought I pulled it off well.

  “Look, we’re not ending on bad terms,” he said, a bit too defensively. “I thought we could do one last thing together that we’ve been talking about doing for a long time. Do something nice as our last hurrah. Besides,” he added, sitting up a bit straighter in his seat and glancing surreptitiously around the room, “I thought that being in public would make it easier. We could have a nice, mature conversation without it turning…too emotional.”

  I could’ve punched him. “Too emotional?” I said, too loudly. “I’m sorry that our relationship is emotional to me.”

  There was so much left I wanted to say, but I’d been holding words back for years, holding my feelings in for years, and right here in one of the nicest restaurants in the city was not the place to change that. I already felt humiliated enough for one night, I decided. And as soon as I had the thought, all I
wanted was to get out of there as quickly as possible. I felt as though I were suffocating in all that wood smoke and butter and spice.

  The “nice girl” in me wanted me to be polite. Absurdly, it told me to stay through the end of the meal, or at the very least to say goodbye to Matt civilly before leaving. The nice girl in me told me to consider that maybe he was right, or at least that maybe we could have a mature conversation about this. It told me not to rock the boat, not to risk anything, not to say anything I couldn’t take back.

  But there was no more boat to rock, was there?

  He’ll change his mind, the voice told me. You have to be mature about this.

  With all of these conflicting voices in my head and all these years of being careful to do the right thing and think of others’ feelings, I pushed down the urge that I truly wanted to indulge: to scream at Matt and tell him to go fuck himself.

  But I also didn’t stay for the polite, mature conversation. Without another word, without another glance his way, I got up from the table, wiping what I knew would be mascara-infused tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand, and walked quickly out of the restaurant without looking at anyone.

  Outside, the wind stung my face. The day had turned chilly—how had I not noticed that before? My flowy blue dress felt laughably inadequate now, and I gave a quick glance back at the mirrored door of the restaurant to assess myself. How could I have stood here only a half hour before looking so different, so excited? How could I have been so stupid as to think he was going to propose?

  The person I saw in the reflection now was a completely different person from the one I had seen earlier. This person looked deflated, broken, and out of shape. I was as raccoon-eyed as I’d predicted, and somehow my hair had gotten completely messed up too, standing up on one side. Had I looked like that when he’d dumped me? How had I transformed into this person so quickly?

  I strode away from the restaurant, wanting to put as much distance between it and me as possible. My heart felt squeezed in my chest, the pain visceral and obvious throughout my whole body.

  How could he? I thought over and over. There had been no warning signs, nothing different at all about our relationship in recent months or even days. I combed back through our recent interactions, trying to find some hints I might have missed, times he might’ve been irritated with me and I hadn’t noticed, thinking that surely something must have been there to predict this.

  The day before, I had gotten home from work late. It had been back-to-school night, and maybe I had been distracted when I got home, my mind still on my new class of little ones and their parents, trying to decide based on these limited interactions who the problem kids would be this year—though I already had a good idea—and, perhaps more important, who the problem parents would be.

  It was my fifth year of teaching kindergarten, and for the first time this year I felt like I completely had a handle on my job. Everything felt familiar and comfortable, like I had reached a point where most situations had happened before and so I already knew how to deal with them. But they hadn’t yet happened enough times for me to get sick of them, as was the case for many of the older teachers I worked with.

  It felt good, this feeling of mastery over my career. In fact, for the first time, I had been feeling like everything in my life was finally settled. I’d been working to settle it for years, hating the feeling of not knowing what I was doing or where I was going, and now, finally, it felt like I was in the place where I’d always wanted to be. I had a career I enjoyed and was good at, a stable relationship, a comfortable home.…

  Except now, suddenly, I didn’t have two of those things. No more relationship. And probably no more home.

  Was there something in the interaction after work last night that had foreshadowed this? I wondered. Had Matt been upset that I’d still been caught up in work after getting home?

  He wouldn’t have said anything even if he had been, I knew, so it was impossible to guess. Our relationship had long before settled into a comfortable but not overly open one. I often didn’t know what he was thinking or feeling, and he didn’t know the same about me. But surely I would’ve known if something had been that wrong, had been brewing under the surface and had gotten big enough to break up over?

  I was walking as I thought, fast, and without paying attention to where I was going. Now, however, I brought my mind back to the present. Where was I headed at this moment? I didn’t want to go home; he’d be back there soon, and I couldn’t face him right now. But where else was there?

  Six years, I thought. Six years ended just like that. He acted as though it were a mutual breakup, with the “we’ve stalled out,” as though surely if I just thought about it I’d realize I agreed with him. Surely if I were rational rather than emotional, I’d see that he was right.

  Rationality over emotion was something I’d always liked about Matt in the past, but now I hated it. It had created a stability in our relationship rather than the ups and downs I saw in so many others’ romances.

  I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. Concentrate, I told myself. Just focus on right now. Where could I go? Matt and I were both homebodies, and I realized with a start that I didn’t even have any close female friends anymore. In fact, the last time I’d really had close female friends was back in high school, when I’d been tight with a group of girls who called ourselves the Honeybees.

  My parents lived in town, but I didn’t want to talk to them right now. My sister, January, was busy developing a perfume and planning her wedding, and I didn’t want to bother her. I enjoyed the company of a few of my coworkers, but we didn’t have the kind of relationship where I could go to them straight from a breakup. That was something that was supposed to be reserved for best friends. And best friends were not something I had.

  There were just no good options. Another restaurant, coffee shop, or bakery? It sounded miserable. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts and cry. I wanted to be somewhere secure and warm and comforting.

  The library, I finally decided. Maybe I couldn’t cry openly there, but it was the best I could do.

  I knew exactly where the closest library was, and it would be open for another hour. I started walking toward it with purpose, trying not to think about Matt. I tried to think about anything else.

  Outside the library, a black and white mottled dog was sniffing around some plants. I loved dogs, though I’d never had them growing up. This dog was beautiful, medium-sized and friendly-looking, though I had no clue what breed or breeds he may have been.

  “Hey there,” I said to the dog, and held out a hand for him to sniff. In a single movement, the dog glanced up at me, licked my hand, and returned his attention to the plants, which he was now trying to eat except that the leaves were too big to fit in his mouth.

  I laughed despite myself, and it felt good to laugh after trying to hold back from crying for so long. “Thank you,” I whispered to the dog, grateful for the opportunity to laugh.

  I glanced around then, trying to figure out who this dog was here with, but didn’t see anyone who was keeping an eye on him. And why wasn’t he on a leash?

  “Are you lost?” I asked the dog quietly, who again glanced at me as he tried to gnaw off a chunk of leaf. He looked unconcerned with my line of questioning.

  I stood there watching him, expecting his owner to appear at any moment, but no one did. He didn’t have tags or a collar around his neck, nothing that could help identify him.

  Then in a split-second decision, the dog lost interest in the leaf and trotted off down the street. I hardly hesitated at all: rather than heading into the library as I had planned, I followed the dog down the sidewalk.

  We walked past a small grocery and a stationery store, and when someone came out of a hair salon as we were walking by the door, the dog experimentally peeked in, ears perked, before the door shut again.

  “They don’t allow dogs in there,” I explained to him quietly, and he cocked his head toward me befor
e continuing his tour of the street.

  On the next block, we walked past rowhouses with more shops down below, and when the dog stopped to sniff and then pee on a telephone pole, I waited patiently for him to finish. “Where are we headed?” I asked, but the dog trotted along without answering, and I followed close behind.

  When the dog started out into an intersection when a car was approaching, though, I finally touched him. “Wait!” I yelled, grabbing him on both sides of his body to prevent him from darting into the road. My heart was pounding when I straightened up, hands still on his body.

  “You can’t do that!” I said. The dog promptly sat and began licking at his genitals with unconcern.

  “I don’t know what to do here,” I told him. “If I just leave you to wander around, you’ll probably try to go into the street again. But it’s not looking like any owner of yours is going to show up.”

  The dog glanced up at me and again cocked its head to the side, as though listening. I was grateful to have a distraction from real life for these few minutes. Talking to a friendly dog was much preferable to thinking about the painful humiliation I had just experienced—not to mention the huge life changes I was about to have to go through.

  The dog got up then and trotted away in a new direction, alongside the street it had previously tried to cross. I followed along obligingly. We passed a few people who gave me strange looks, assuming he was my dog and that I was walking him without a leash.

  He led me into a park, where he plopped down contentedly in the grass and looked up at me, tongue hanging out. On this side of the park were picnic tables and trees, and on the other, a playground surrounded by benches.

  “I’m not going to sit there,” I told him. “This dress—it’s new. I got it just for tonight.”

  He just stared at me, panting.

  Instead, I headed toward the nearest picnic table, glancing back at the dog to see if he would follow. He didn’t, and I felt a welling-up of sadness explode inside of me. Abandoned again.