[Rulebook 01.0] The Rules of Love

by Cara Malone

  The Rules of Love

  Rulebook series, Book #1

  Cara Malone

  Copyright © 2017 by Cara Malone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  A Note from Cara

  The Rulebook Series

  Sneak Peek: The Rules of Engagement

  Before you go…

  One

  Max

  Social functions weren’t really Max Saddler’s thing. In truth, she would have rather spent the next hour in a dentist’s chair, or riding public transportation, or better yet, she’d rather stay in her dorm and watch Netflix. But she promised her best friend, Mira, that she would try to be more social and make a few additional friends in grad school, and so here she was.

  Tonight was her first official night of the program, not counting orientation and the day she came to the library just to wander around and familiarize herself with all of the classrooms, and her first class was scheduled to start in an hour and a half. First, though, there was the meeting that she swore to Mira she would attend.

  Mira was the acting president for the Granville Library Science Student Organization, or GLiSS, a professional organization meant to help librarians-in-training begin building a professional network for their career – at least, that’s what the organization’s webpage said. Max had read it many times in the past couple of weeks, trying to convince herself to attend one of its meetings despite the near certainty that socializing would occurring there. What finally convinced her was Mira’s promise that Max could throw her hat into the ring for president when Mira’s term was over at the end of the semester.

  In her entire four years of undergrad, and in high school before that, Max had never backed down from an opportunity to excel academically and to cement her position at the top of her class. Given that library school appeared to be something that was carried out mainly at night and on weekends and no one hung around the school much outside of classes, there were precious few opportunities for this, so Max was determined to be the best damn president GLiSS ever saw – even if it did include some social function responsibilities.

  So about ten minutes before the meeting was scheduled to start, Max left her apartment in the graduate dorms and walked across campus. Granville State University was bustling with activity on a Monday evening in early September – all the underclassmen looked so impossibly young and starry-eyed, coming back from their last classes of the day and heading toward the dining hall in big groups full of budding friendships. Max found it a little more palatable to observe this as a grad student than it was when she’d been in their place four years ago. She might have been their age, but she’d never been one of them – no matter how hard she tried, she could never escape the feeling that she didn’t really fit in.

  Now at least she had the luxury of being a graduate student, mildly irritated by the boundless energy of the undergrads rushing past her on the quad, like an old dog putting up with playful puppies. She didn’t fit in because she really wasn’t one of them anymore, and that was okay.

  Max headed straight for the library, a five-story brick cube that loomed taller than all the other academic buildings on campus, dwarfed only by the skyscraping undergraduate dorms. The first three floors were dedicated to the books – which Max had grown quite familiar with in the last four years – as well as the computer labs and reference librarians. The top two floors would be her home for the next two years – that’s where the library science department was housed, and where all of her classes would be held.

  She walked through the lobby and waved at one of the librarians sitting at the reference desk. She hadn’t managed to make a single friend except for Mira in her entire four years of undergraduate study, but she knew every librarian in the building by name and favorite book – it was a bit like making friends with the lunch lady, but Max always felt at home in any library she entered.

  “First night of classes?” The reference librarian asked, her voice echoing slightly through the tile-floored lobby.

  Tonight it was Maureen on duty (favorite book: To Kill a Mockingbird), and when she found out that Max had decided to become a librarian, Maureen had quite possibly been even more excited than Max herself. It made sense – she’d seen Max come to the library almost daily for four years.

  “Yep,” Max called back, enjoying the way her voice reverberated off the tiles until Maureen put a finger to her lips and gave Max a warning look. She reduced the volume of her voice by a few decibels and added, “I’m going to the GLiSS meeting first, and then I have Information Theory with Wilson McDermott.”

  “Have fun,” Maureen said with a smile as Max walked over to the bank of elevators. “Let me know how it goes.”

  “Okay, I will,” Max said as the elevator doors opened.

  She went up to the fourth floor, where there was a conference room for things like GLiSS meetings. Checking her watch during the ride up, she saw that there were only four minutes left before it was supposed to begin – she’d timed her walk across campus perfectly to avoid the need to stand around awkwardly with her fellow grad students and attempt the anxiety-inducing act of small talk.

  There were about a dozen people standing around the room when Max arrived, acting like they enjoyed asking each other about their hometowns and undergraduate degrees and the weather for god’s sake. No one particularly noticed her – which was exactly the way she liked it – and she looked quickly around for Mira. She wasn’t here, which Max was slightly irritated by but not surprised about. Mira was always busy and running in at the last possible second, so Max went over to the large oak conference table in the middle of the room and found a seat two chairs from the end. In her past observations, this particular spot was the best one for seeming like she was a part of whatever conversations were going on around her without actually drawing attention to the fact that she was on the outside looking in.

  She set her ragged old backpack – the same one she’d been carrying since high school – on the floor at her feet, then pulled out a brand-new notebook and a pen. Snippets of conversation floated through the room (I just got back from a summer abroad… My fiancée and I are trying to buy a house but it’s crazy timing right now… My undergraduate capstone was on gender studies and popular culture…).

  Max knew that Mira would have wanted her to insert herself into one of them – pick a subject she knew about and go introduce herself. But every time she’d ever attempted this in the past, people seemed to think she was bragging or being a show-off. She didn’t understand the difference between I just got back from a summer
abroad and I was at the top of my class in undergrad and now I’m getting a dual master’s degree in library science and user experience design. Everyone else seemed pretty clear on why one was categorized as ‘sharing’ while the other was ‘gloating,’ and Max found it was almost always best to just keep her mouth shut.

  She flipped open her notebook and wrote the date and ‘GLiSS – First Meeting’ at the top of the first page, and then checked the time again. The meeting was overdue to start by two minutes, but Mira still wasn’t here to call it to order. Max put her pen to the page, falling back on one of her oldest hobbies to fill the time until this limbo of waiting was over.

  Max looked around the room, observing the little pockets of conversation taking place, and she scribbled down every example of non-verbal communication she could find. It was like a scavenger hunt, searching for eye rolls and sighs and body language to decode the subtext running underneath all that small talk.

  There was the summer abroad conversation, taking place between two girls whose postures hinted at adversarial attitudes beneath their benign conversation. There was the guy trying to buy a house, who seemed not to notice the fact that the people standing with him were beginning to divert their attention elsewhere, looking around the room.

  And there was the gender studies talk.

  Wow.

  The girl at the core of that conversation – the largest group in the room by far – was strikingly beautiful, so much so that Max’s hand involuntarily scribbled the word onto the page along with all of her other notes. Wow. She was tall and lean, built like an athlete but with womanly curves that Max had a hard time not lingering on. Her skin was smooth and her dark hair stood out in delicate ringlets framing her face. Something inside Max stirred, urging, Go talk to her.

  Two

  Ruby

  Standing in the library conference room with a group of people gathered around her, Ruby Satterwhite felt better than she had in months. She’d almost forgotten how nice it felt – how energizing – to surround herself with people after the worst, most isolated summer of her life.

  If it hadn’t been for the start of grad school, and an excuse to throw herself into the process of packing up the room in her parents’ house to make the move to Granville, she would probably still be having the worst time of her life. But Ruby was more than happy to push all of that out of her mind now that she finally had something to distract her from a summer of heartbreak.

  She arrived at the GLiSS meeting a full twenty minutes early, in part because there wasn’t much in her small graduate dorm apartment to keep her mind occupied, and in part to make sure that she’d have enough time to meet all of her new peers. She’d been far too busy watching her life fall spectacularly to pieces to attend the orientation session over the summer, so this would be the first time she met anyone at all from the program.

  Unfortunately, it turned out that no one else was quite so eager to jump into graduate studies as Ruby was, and she spent the first ten minutes alone in the conference room before others started to trickle in. Once they did, though, she jumped up and started introducing herself, making an effort to speak to everyone and learn their names.

  “Hi,” she said with a wave to the second person to arrive, a girl in faded jeans and a top knot hairstyle who looked barely old enough to buy her own alcohol, let alone go to grad school.

  “Hey,” the girl answered a little timidly as Ruby walked with long, confident strides around the conference room table and extended her hand.

  “Ruby Satterwhite,” she introduced herself, and the girl took her hand to give it a somewhat limp shake.

  “I’m Lydia,” she answered, adding her last name after a beat. “Moore.”

  “Nice to meet you, Lydia” Ruby said, realizing that she was grinning at poor Lydia Moore with the same plastic smile she used to paste onto her face when it came to dealing with pledges and lower year sisters at her sorority. “I just graduated from Northwestern with a degree in gender studies. How about you?”

  “I went here for undergrad,” Lydia said with a shrug, although Ruby could see the familiar hint of irritation in her eyes that a lot of people got when she mentioned her school.

  Ruby immediately wanted to kick herself for having mentioned it – mentioning the more affluent aspects of her life, like the fifty-grand-a-year college, was always a coin flip between eliciting irritation or awe, and in Lydia’s case it turned out to be irritation. The only thing worse would have been adding the fact that Ruby had been the president of her sorority to really make it clear that she was bragging.

  Fortunately, new people were beginning to trickle into the room, and Ruby waved them over to where she and Lydia were standing, introducing herself again without the subtle bragging. Her fellow students were a mixture of new graduates like her and middle-aged people going back to school to start a second or even third career, and as she got to know each of them, Ruby was unsuccessful in wiping the plastic smile from her face. It was ingrained in her by now, and the whole event reminded her of rush week at Delta Zeta, anyway.

  Ruby was feeling more and more like herself. She made her way through the room, shaking hands and connecting names with faces, grinning broadly all the while. She enjoyed meeting new people, but she had an ulterior motive for this particular friendliness – it was a trick she’d learned while running for DZ president two years ago. The more people think of you as a friend – really, the more people think of you at all – the more likely they’ll be to put your name down when it comes to a vote, and that was exactly what Ruby was after.

  The current president of GLiSS sent out an email over the summer to all incoming students, letting them know about the organization, the dates and times of its meetings, and the fact that her term would be over at the end of the semester. She said there would be an election to fill her position, as well as a few other roles within the group, and that anyone who wanted to throw their hat in should do so during the first meeting of the fall semester.

  Ruby was all over this idea, eager to fill the numerous blank spots in her social calendar and start building her resume for after grad school. She’d even spent an entire afternoon crafting a list of campaign promises and talking points, not because she thought anyone would ask for her platform during the meeting but simply because it had been a good way to kill a few hours. It had allowed her to stop thinking about her ex-girlfriend and all the other sad aspects of her life.

  Now that the room was filling up, Ruby found herself sliding easily back into the persona of sorority president. She laughed and schmoozed and showed her pearly whites, and a crowd started to form around her like they always did when she was the most boisterous person in the room – she was never sure if this was a talent or a character flaw, but in any case it wasn’t hard to be the one people gravitated to in this particular room.

  Ruby had never seen such a steadfast group of introverts before. They mostly came quietly into the room, unwilling to sit because no one else had done so yet, and they all looked inordinately relieved when Ruby waved them over to join her growing group.

  In the ten or so minutes it took to fill the room, she’d met almost every one of her new peers, introduced herself and made a pretty good start on memorizing their names. It wasn’t even time for the meeting to start yet, and she was feeling pretty good about her shot at the presidency. In fact, there was only one person in the whole room who she hadn’t been able to talk to.

  Ruby didn’t see her right away because she entered so inconspicuously, but eventually Ruby noticed a girl sitting all alone at one end of the conference table, facing Ruby’s large circle of people and doodling periodically on a notebook that she kept close to her on the table. She wore a crisply ironed flannel shirt, her dark hair trimmed into a short, masculine cut that swept to one side of her forehead and accentuated the strong angle of her jaw. Ruby was surprised that this girl didn’t catch her attention the moment she walked in because she was clearly the most interesting person in the roo
m – at least when it came to appearances.

  The girl seemed to be watching everyone, her eyes flitting up from her notebook here and there but never lingering long. And then she caught Ruby looking at her.

  Her eyes were sapphire blue in a piercing way that made Ruby feel like melting into the floor. She was a sucker for blue-eyed butches, and this silent stranger was ticking off every one of her boxes.

  Their shared glance was brief and the girl looked away nearly as quickly as their eyes had met, going back to whatever she was drawing or scribbling into her notebook. Ruby found herself drawn to the girl, almost embarrassingly so – there was just something about her that was so very opposite from Ruby’s own nature, something that allowed her to slip unnoticed into the room, perfectly content to sit alone and occupy herself until the meeting started without the need to walk around and become besties with everyone else in the room.

  There was something else, too – the girl may have stopped looking after a second, but Ruby couldn’t tear her eyes off her. There was something utterly unaware about her, like she was completely clueless that she was having this effect on Ruby, and she might not care even if she did realize it.

  Ruby was about to break away from the group to introduce herself, but just as she opened her mouth to excuse herself, the current president burst into the room and called the meeting to order.