Fortunate Son by Jay Crownover

Welcome readers, new and old, to the next generation.

If this is your first Jay book, I want to warn you that it is tied very heavily to the very first series I started writing back in 2012: the Marked Men series. I do my very best to write every single one of my titles to stand on its own. This is a full story revolving around all-new characters, so you don’t have to read the other books before this one to enjoy it. However, for a completely satisfying, full series experience, just know that there are several characters in this book who relate to an existing world. If you are curious about the all-powerful and engaging first generation of characters, you can find them all in the Marked Men and Saints of Denver series. I’ve also included a handy-dandy guide showing who belongs to whom and in which books you can find the original couples’ stories if you need a little road map of where to start.

If you’re a reader who has been kicking it with me from the very beginning and have been waiting to see some familiar faces again… you will not be disappointed. There are plenty of cameos from old favorites throughout. Keep in mind, this book is not about the parents, but about the kids. So, if you’re looking for a Marked Men or SoD sequel, this ain’t it. It’s something new that hopefully shows how far these characters have come, and how vastly different my writing and storytelling have become (in all the right ways!). I hope you’re willing to give the new generation a try and approach the them with as much enthusiasm and love as you showed their parents.

I also want to drop a very strong disclaimer about the timeline and setting of this book. It’s set in the theoretical future, some twenty or so years after the final MM/SoD stories. I’m not all-seeing and all-knowing. I’m not a deity or blessed with supernatural powers. I have no clue what the future is going to look like, so if I’m wrong, I refuse to be held accountable. It was already daunting to go back to a set of beloved characters and stories. There is a weight not to disappoint after such a long time. I can’t write a good book with a solid story while obsessing over what cell phones will look like in twenty years, or what style will be back in fashion in the years to come. I kept details around specifics vague for this reason. There are no brand names mentioned, no exact details about schools and businesses that didn’t already exist in the previous books. I typically like to build my literary world with all those nuances, but it wasn’t an option here. So, if you feel the need to contact me personally to say this story doesn’t seem futuristic enough, or you wished the setting looked different than in the original series to show twenty years of growth, I’m going to ignore you. Flat out. I will smash the delete button so fast, it’ll be like you didn’t even send me an email. Same about the nit-picky details of exact ages of the kids. I ballparked where I thought they would be age-wise within the existing continuity. I may have had to take a liberty or two by a few months or even years to make things work. I won’t apologize for it. And honestly, if that kind of thing is a dealbreaker for you a reader, that’s a you thing, not a creator thing. I respect your right to feel that way, but I understand that I can’t write to each and every reader’s preference. There is only one of me and so many of you, so the only person I know I can satisfy with my words and work each and every time is me, myself, and I.

I wasn’t trying to write science fiction. I was just doing my best to bring a book to life in a place that doesn’t really exist. You may think this disclaimer seems harsh or unnecessary, but I assure anyone taking the time to read this, that after nearly a decade of being a professional author, I know exactly what people will tear apart. Just trying to save them time and effort and save myself a headache.

I also want to warn that I will not be engaging with comments or concerns about who from the original series makes an appearance, or who does or does not have children in this new series. I released the family tree and already have readers who are upset by this and that. Listen, not every couple wants kids or is able to have kids. Some couples make the conscious decision just to live their best lives together, and some are emotionally destroyed by not being able to grow their families. I’ve always written to reflect real life and will not give any time to criticism for the creative choices I make. I know you love these characters and are invested in them wholeheartedly, but I created them. They came from my imagination. They were given life through my hands and heart. They exist because I gave my creativity and my time to share them with you. So, I respectfully ask you to recognize that, while you may have your wishes for what should happen with your favorites, at the end of the day it is my call, and I know best how everyone would really end up and what their paths in life look like. After all, I pulled bits and pieces of all of them from my own life and the people who have been in and out of it.

If you’re new, welcome to the circus and this ever-growing family filled with big hearts, bad-asses, brilliant minds, and lots of body modification.

If you’ve been here from the beginning, thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I hope you know I was only willing and brave enough to jump back into a book like this because of you.

Welcome back.

Love & Ink,

Jay

“I DON’T THINK we’re a good match.”

The softly spoken words echoed in my head for hours.

It wasn’t like the breakup came out of nowhere. The girl I was pretty sure I loved had been acting strange and had become more and more distant for weeks. I’d known her my entire life. We grew up together and had been the best of friends before falling in love. I knew her almost as well as I knew myself and could tell something between us was off, but I refused to believe the end of what we had was near.

I told myself she was just stressed out and worried about the fact we were soon going to different colleges and spending a lot of time apart from one another. Young love was already unreliable and tricky to navigate. When you added the hurdle of long distance to the mix, it seemed almost destined to fail. I tried to reassure her everything would be fine; after all, I was older than her and had already been in college for a year. Nothing changed between us while I waited not so patiently for her to finish high school. I foolishly thought she would apply and get accepted to my school so we could stay together. It never occurred to me that she was only going to apply to schools out of state. I was unaware that she had her heart set on leaving not only me, but also our hometown, for years. When she finally came clean and let me know she was moving to California in the fall, I was stunned but still optimistic that our relationship would survive. After all, she was my first love. I was willing to sacrifice and suffer whatever it took to keep her in my life.

Aston, unfortunately, didn’t feel the same.

I felt blindsided by both the breakup and the revelation that she was always planning to move halfway across the country. Suddenly, the adorable little girl who grew up following my every step and who had effortlessly stolen my heart with her sweet, cheerful, innocent demeanor seemed like a total stranger who never cared about me the way I cared about her.

It was easy enough to argue with her when she said we weren’t a good match.

It was impossible to fight against her when she told me she wasn’t happy being with me and needed a change.

I wanted to tell her we just needed some time apart. I had faith in my ability to change her mind and prove to her that we belonged together. But the look in her eyes when she ended things was definite. This wasn’t a rash decision on her part. It was something she gave a lot of thought to and she had clearly made up her mind.

She didn’t want to be with me anymore, and I was left adrift and discombobulated.

Heartbreak wasn’t something I had a lot of experience with.

I was the kind of guy who typically got what I wanted and excelled at whatever I put my mind to. I graduated at the top of my class in high school, got into my first choice of college, and was in the starting line-up of my first college football game. My parents had a wall full of trophies and accolades I’d earned over the years. They were always proud of what I’d accomplished, even though they had never pushed me to be perfect. All they wanted was for me to be happy, so they supported me regardless of how hard I pushed myself.

I was popular and well-liked among my peers. As one of the oldest members of my tight-knit inner circle of relatives and longtime family friends, I was often the voice of reason and the most responsible member of the group, even though we were all similar in age and life experience. I never had a problem getting close to members of the opposite sex, but there was only one I wanted to keep and call mine.

But she no longer wanted me, and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself now.

It was my first time being rejected, and I could admit I wasn’t handling it well… at all.

I glanced down at my phone, which had been ringing and pinging with messages nonstop for the last several hours. I wanted to turn the damn thing off, but there was a part of me that refused to believe I’d been dumped, so I waited for each call to show my ex’s info. She never popped up on the screen, but my mom called close to twenty times. My dad called no less than ten. And my best friend, who also happened to be my cousin, was sending a text every fifteen minutes like clockwork.

I avoided them all, but eventually, the one and only person I couldn’t ignore even if I wanted to called, and I finally caved and answered the phone.

“Ry Archer, where in the hell are you? Mom and Dad are worried sick about you.” My little sister’s voice was shaky and sounded like she’d been crying. She was normally a pretty tough cookie but could be overly dramatic and emotional. Part of that was because she was a teenage girl. But a huge chunk of it was that she took after our father in pretty much every single way except in her appearance. She looked just like our mother, with her white-blond hair and pretty green eyes.

However, she was reckless and rebellious just like our old man. She was as outspoken and opinionated as he was. She was as bold and as colorful as he was. She was fearless in everything the same way he was. And she felt everything in the same extreme way he did. Both of us grew up knowing without a doubt how much we were loved and cherished by our parents, but especially by our dad. The opposite was also true. Whenever we disappointed him or did something he didn’t approve of, we felt his displeasure down to our bones. It was a lot to take in and balance out, but luckily our quiet and mostly even-keeled mother kept our household and our father in check. I wished I took after her the way Daire took after Dad, but I was kind of the odd man out in our family.

I’d heard more than once from my grandparents and my uncle that my personality and behavior were almost a mirror image of my dad’s twin brother, who was no longer with us. It was a sore spot with my dad whenever someone made the comparison, but he didn’t deny that there were many times that I reminded him of his twin brother. No matter how much time had gone by since he lost his twin, my dad still very much missed his other half and felt the loss of not having him in his life. Sometimes my mom told me stories about the two of them when they were growing up, and I could sense the similarities in myself and my uncle. For so many reasons, it sucked he died so young, only one of which was I had no one to really to really relate to in my family. I was kind of the darkest sheep in a flock that was already mostly shades of black and gray.

I sighed and squeezed the steering wheel between my hands.

I loved my little sister with everything in me. We were extraordinarily close and rarely kept secrets from each other. We were close enough in age that it had often been the two of us against the world, no matter what. She was my favorite person and my most trusted confidant. But she was also my ex’s best friend. They were only a few months apart in age, and where one went, the other often followed. When I first started showing interest in Aston Wheeler, my sister was totally against the idea of us being anything more than good friends. She told me she never wanted to be caught between the two of us. She never wanted to have to pick a side or have to keep something from either one of us. I waved the concerns off because I was sure Aston and I were meant to be. I’d grown up surrounded by true love and examples of young love maturing into happy, healthy, long-lasting marriages. I thought staying with my first love through thick and thin might be the only way I might manage to take after my parents.

I didn’t want to think that it was possible that Daire knew what would happen to my relationship before I did. Or that she kept something so huge from me. But any way I looked at it, she had to have known things were going south before I did.

“I’m going for a drive. Tell Mom and Dad not to worry. I’ll be fine.” I would be. Eventually.

My sister sighed on the other end of the line, and I could hear her pacing around. She was the type who was constantly in motion. She never sat still, and her mind was always going a mile a minute. I knew if I didn’t convince her I was okay, she would venture out aimlessly into the night trying to track me down, even though she had no idea where I was or how long I’d been in my truck.

“You’ve been driving for the last four hours? Are you even in Colorado anymore?” Daire’s voice rose sharply.

I looked at the clock on the dashboard and blinked when I realized how much time had passed. I was still in Colorado, but just barely. I was almost at the southern border. I didn’t have a plan when I climbed in my truck and started to drive. Subconsciously, I started heading toward the one person no one would ever suspect me of turning to when I was hurting.

“Give me some time, Daire.” I wanted to close my eyes and make the world disappear until I could fully deal with the empty ache in the center of my chest. Since I was driving, that wasn’t an option, so all I could do was shake my head and blink my eyes, which alternately felt like they were wet with hot tears and yet still dry as the desert. “I have to get my head on right before I try to talk to anyone, especially you, about what went down today.”

She made a distressed sound, and I could clearly imagine her putting her brightly painted nails to her mouth. She always wore a bunch of rings and bracelets that clinked and banged together, making so much noise. My little sister was anything but subtle, and you could always hear her coming. She knew how to make an entrance, but she also knew when it was time to back down and fade into the background. She knew all my buttons and when to push them. I would always answer her when she called me, but I had limits to how much I would let her poke and prod at me when I was hurting.

“I didn’t know, Ry. I honestly had no idea Aston was going to break up with you. She’s been weird lately, but I thought it was because we were graduating, or maybe because Royce left last year and moved to New York. You know how close she was to her brother. She never mentioned anything about being unhappy with you to me. I promise I would’ve told you.” I could hear that she was starting to cry and it made me feel like shit.

I should’ve listened to her at the start when she said dating my buddy Royce’s younger half-sister was a terrible idea. We were all too close, our families too connected for it to end any other way than tragically. Aston had taken it hard when he decided to follow his birth mom to New York after she remarried. I knew it was an impossible choice for him to make because he considered Aston’s mom as his own, as well as his actual mom. He always called Poppy his bonus mom and never treated her with anything other than love and respect. He was also incredibly attached to his sister, regardless of them having different moms, so it’d been shocking when he made the call to leave.

Aston Wheeler was the daughter of a couple my mom and dad were extremely close with. All my best friends were actually in my life for the same reason. Their dad worked with my Uncle Rome, operating several custom car and motorcycle garages across Denver. And both Royce’s birth mom and Aston’s mother were ridiculously tight with my mom. Aston had been pretty sick when she was young, so her parents often turned to my mom, who just happened to be a doctor, for advice and guidance. My cousins Remy and Zowen, Royce and his sister, a couple of older kids we didn’t see as much named Joss and Hyde, and my dad’s coworker’s daughters Glory and Bowe, all spent a lot of time together with me and my sister growing up. We were a close group brought together by our parents, but we stayed together because we all genuinely liked each other and had various things in common. Not all of us lived in Colorado during the course of our friendship as our families grew and the world around us changed and expanded. But we always saw each other over the summer, during the holidays, and we made it a point to be present for any major life event of the others.

Some of us were closer, like me and Zowen, and Daire and Aston. Bowe Keller, my forever nemesis, and my cousin Remy were also super tight, even though the younger girl had lived in Austin the entire time we’d known her. It was fun to have a big network of diverse and interesting friends, but there were a few of us who rubbed each other the wrong way and had to work at playing nice with one another.

Well… really, that only applied to Bowe and me.

She and I were the nearest in age out of everyone, but that was the only similarity between the two of us. We never particularly got along, even starting from the time we were figuring out how to walk and talk. I always thought it was a good thing she lived in Austin with her folks, and I only had to see her a couple of times a year. Sometimes it was hard to pretend to be friends when we had been more than that—and less than that—over the course of knowing one another.

But today, I wanted her to be closer.

I wasn’t certain why I wanted to share my heartache with her. I just knew that I wanted to see her right now more than anything when my whole world felt like it was suddenly flipped upside down.

I blew out a breath and tried to reassure my sister, “I believe you. I know you wouldn’t stand by and let me be blindsided like that.” But I also knew she would fight to the death for Aston, so she had to be in a tough spot right now. “Just give me some space, okay? I’ll call Mom and Dad when I get where I’m going. Tell them not to worry too much. Let me catch my breath and calm down for a minute.”

My little sister sighed again, and I heard her knock something over—her sadness and frustration palpable through the phone. “You don’t have to run away from home in order to hide your emotions from everyone, Ry. As hard as you try to convince everyone otherwise, we know you’re human. Stop trying to force yourself to be so perfect all the damn time. You’re allowed to be sad and angry right now. You’re supposed to be upset when your heart gets broken. I know you don’t really know what losing feels like, but this is it, and you shouldn’t go through it alone.”

I did tend to strive for perfection, but obviously I missed the mark or I wouldn’t have gotten dumped so mercilessly.

I cleared my throat and tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, squinting as a semi-truck passed me on the opposite side of the road. “I’m only going to be alone for a little bit.”

She was correct when she said I was running away to hide my feelings.

That was something I always did.

But there was one person with whom I never put on the pretense of perfection, mostly because she saw right through it and never failed to call me out on my bullshit.

“Oh…. okay.” Almost instantly, my sister’s tone changed, and she seemed to be relieved. Like I said, we were super close, and she knew me better than I knew myself some days. It wouldn’t take her too long to figure out where I was going, even if the destination would be considered highly unlikely to anyone else. “Well, drive safe, and don’t forget to check in with Mom and Dad when you have time. I’ll try to hold them off for a little bit. For what it’s worth, I already gave Aston a piece of my mind. I even called Royce to ask him if he knew what was going on, but he is as clueless as me. About the college thing, and about you. I don’t know why she was making all those decisions in secret, but I honestly think she’s hurting as much as you are right now.”

Impossible.

Aston walked away, and I could hardly move. She took me down to my knees and left me breathless. When she walked away, she hadn’t bothered to spare me a backward glance. There wasn’t an ounce of the kind, caring girl in Aston who had me wrapped around her finger for so long as she ripped my heart out. I definitely didn’t recognize her. Worse than that, though, was that I didn’t recognize myself either. I wasn’t familiar with failure, so losing the most important thing in my world forced me to react in a way that was totally unlike me. I was behaving like the kind of people I tended to loathe.

Unreasonable.

Irrational.

Unpredictable.

The reason I disliked people who acted in such a way was because I never allowed myself the freedom to be so chaotic and carefree. I was jealous, and the envy ate away at me.

Fortunately, I had a thirteen-hour-plus drive to pull the frayed edges of my ego together and to slip back into my role of the golden boy who was unnaturally blessed.

I drove through the night and into the very early morning. I only stopped for gas and the occasional bathroom break. I silently cursed at how big and flat Texas was as the miles added up. I made a quick stop to shove a greasy, fast-food breakfast in my face when my stomach started growling. Because I was an athlete, I normally avoided anything that came in an oil-stained paper bag. But right now, the usual rules didn’t apply. I was alone, so I didn’t need to pretend to be perfect for anyone.

I took a moment to shoot a couple texts off to my sister and my cousin. Zowen was pissed it took so long for me to respond to him and warned that my dad had already shown up at his house looking for me. We were all home from school for summer break, so it made sense that my folks figured I would hit up my uncle’s house first when I disappeared. My Uncle Rome was even scarier than my dad when it came to discipline and order. He was the last person, next to my father, I wanted to come looking for me, especially while I was all caught up in my feelings. My uncle was a former military man who was now a successful entrepreneur. He didn’t take shit from anyone who wasn’t his pint-sized wife or his wild, mouthy firstborn. My cousin Remy was even more of a handful than my little sister and twice as rebellious. She was always in one kind of trouble or another, but she was probably the most loyal and passionate person I’d ever encountered in my life. Both Daire and I idolized her when we were growing up. Now, she was often the one we turned to when we needed help managing our relationships with our parents and general life advice. She was one of our group who left Denver relatively young when she ventured into the real world. I think we all expected as much from her.

Remy was a wanderer. A free spirit. She was also irrevocably in love with Hyde Bishop-Fuller, the oldest guy in our inner circle and the most reclusive and evasive. Unfortunately, Hyde had never returned her adoration, and when he enlisted in the military a couple of years ago, Remy really saw no reason to stay in any one place for too long. She left her shattered heart in Denver and never looked back. I missed her like crazy, and I knew Zowen worried about her endlessly, but she always seemed happy and as carefree as ever when she finally materialized. She seemed like she was finally letting go of her impossible love. I always envied her easy-going attitude. Nothing seemed to ruffle her feathers. Well, nothing other than Hyde.

I’d never been that relaxed and unaffected. I took myself far too seriously.

It was still early enough in the morning that I didn’t have to fight traffic when I pulled into Austin. It was hardly a surprise that the girl I came all this way to see was just getting home when I parked my truck at the end of her driveway. She didn’t even blink when she saw me climb out of the cab of my truck and make my way toward her.

Her black and purple hair was piled on top of her head in a messy ponytail, and her dark eye makeup was smeared around her honey-colored eyes in a way I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or not. She had on a pair of skintight, red leggings that looked like they were made of leather, and a pair of shiny black boots laced up to her knees. Her t-shirt had the logo of a band I was sure no one besides her had ever heard of scrawled across the front of it, and the bottom was chopped off so it skimmed her pierced belly button. I always thought she looked like she had just climbed out of the pages of a comic book, and today was no exception.

She’d been out of my league and way too cool for me ever since we were young. She was one of the few people in my life I’d ever allowed to intimidate me. She was also the only one I’d rejected before she could reject me, because in my teenaged mind I knew she eventually would. I knew she would figure out I was too boring, too predictable, too worried about what other people thought of me to stay by her side. Youthful passion exploded between us unchecked, but so did immature worries and insecurities. I hurt her before she could hurt me, and I had lived with the regret of that choice every day since.

Instead of walking into the cute, but tiny, mid-century modern home that sat just off South Congress Street, Bowe waited until I was standing directly in front of her before she crossed her arms over her chest and glared up at me.

I was waiting for her to demand an explanation as to why I was suddenly standing on her doorstep. I was ready for her to pick a fight. I’d spent the last hour of the very long drive bracing myself for her to rip me apart and ask all the questions I didn’t want to answer, and to turn me away without a second thought. After all, she made it clear she wanted nothing to do with me after that summer we ruined each other. She’d actively tried to forget about me, according to my sister and anyone else I asked.

Instead, I whispered, “It hurts so bad,” and almost immediately lost all the composure I’d tried so hard to build. I aimlessly made my way toward the girl who had declared herself my sworn enemy.

She didn’t push me away or make fun of my complete and utter breakdown.

No. She didn’t do anything I expected her to do.

Bowe Keller never did, which was why I never knew what to do with her or how to handle all the conflicting ways I felt about her.

All I knew was she was the one person I needed the most at this moment.