the Trouble with Hate is...

by Elizabeth Stevens

“Well, we know we move well together; it just makes me think even more that we should do this Latin assignment together. You know, I think we could do really well together.”

  I smiled, hoping it would give me some time to think; I’d have to chorie a Latin dance for my module anyway. With helping Casper, Luke would be a massive advantage. Any of the other kids in my class would be more work. Luke would at least work with me not against me. But, working with Luke would be working with Luke…

  “What do you think, Lani?” he asked, so adorable that I really didn’t think I could say no.

  My heart fluttered and I grinned like an idiot. “Sure. Let’s do it.”

  He gave me a huge smile. “Awesome. Shall we meet Monday lunch and get started?”

  I nodded. “Sure, that sounds great.”

  Luke and I danced for a while, until Bec dragged me away and I gave him an apologetic smile. As she pulled me into a corner, I saw Casper slipping into Nick’s bathroom with that Megan girl.

  “Wow,” I breathed and Bec followed my gaze.

  “He was with her last time, wasn’t he?”

  I smirked. “Don’t tell me, Casper Drake has started doing seconds?”

  Bec’s eyebrow rose as she looked at me. “Casper Drake does whoever and whatever he feels like whenever and however he feels like it.” She snorted. “No, actually, he does whatever and whoever is closest and easiest. That this girl–”

  “Megan.”

  “–Megan is idiot enough to sex him up more than once… Well, that’s her bad.”

  I huffed a laugh. “Yeah, no. I don’t think she’s thinking that’s her bad…”

  “Well, she’d be wrong.”

  “What did you want?”

  “What?”

  I sighed. “Did you pay attention to who I was dancing with?”

  Bec looked back from where she dragged me, then back to me. “Oh, right. Sorry, my bad. No, I…” An even wider smiled broke over her face. “Marc’s parents aren’t home tonight…”

  I blinked. “Okay, and?”

  She grabbed my arm. “And, Marc’s parents aren’t home tonight…” Her eyebrows danced around a little and I finally worked it out.

  “Okay, and why do I need to know this?”

  Her smile became more of a rueful smirk. “Well…what do you think?”

  “What am I supposed to think?”

  Bec looked at me like I wasn’t terribly helpful. “Well, should I or shouldn’t I?”

  I looked around the room, only realising I was looking for Brett partway through my sweep. “I, uh, don’t know, babe. If you want to…yes…?”

  “You don’t sound terribly sure about that.”

  “What am I supposed to say?” I asked. “It’s so not up to me. If you want to go home with him, go home with him. I’m not going to even suggest you can’t or shouldn’t.”

  Bec was almost bouncing on her toes, and I didn’t think I’d ever seen her quite so excited before. “Yeah?”

  I gave her my best smile, not sure why I was suddenly feeling so antsy. “Yeah, babes. But, let me know how it goes, yeah?” I gave her a smirk and winked.

  She grinned so hard I thought she was going to become the joker. “Totally.”

  Then, she surprised me by hugging me and kissing my cheek. That, in itself, should have warned me how much she liked this guy. I mean, I’d known Bec almost our whole lives. I’d seen her like very few people; want to sleep with a fair few, yeah, but actually like them? Not so much.

  Maybe I should have been more discerning in my advice. Maybe I should have thought about the potential consequences. But really, it was Bec’s life; she should have been able to do whatever she wanted, and I wasn’t going to think to tell her otherwise.

  Chapter Nine

  Casper

  Something woke me and I didn’t know what it was.

  I rolled onto my back and sighed, trying to remember where I was up to in a very nice and entirely unwholesome dream about–

  “Lani!”

  I half sat up and my brain took another moment to meander its way to the next dot.

  Blinking away sleep, I reached for my phone and unlocked it. It was about two on Tuesday morning. And, there was a new text from Lani.

  “Oh, thank fuck,” I sighed, glad my half-asleep brain had realised it was Lani’s ringtone it had heard, rather than it was Lani it had been dreaming about…

  Because that wasn’t going to get awkward…

  I scrubbed my hand over my eyes, waiting to properly wake up and tried to focus on the message on my phone.

  Lani: SOS up bathrom

  Well, if anything was going to wake me up, it’d be that.

  I jumped out of bed, grabbed a pair of pants, and was over the balcony in seconds. Lani had, thankfully, left her door unlocked so it was a small matter of slipping through her bedroom and over to the upstairs spare bathroom. Well, I mean, I assumed that’s what she’d meant. But, with an SOS, you don’t really have time to waste with getting your spelling right. So, she could have been anywhere.

  The light was on, so my guess seemed right. I grabbed the doorframe to halt my progress along the hallway and my stomach plummeted out of my arse.

  “What the actual fuck?” I asked in a whisper.

  Lani looked up from the vanity cupboard. Blood was splattered across her cheek, her t-shirt and her arms. My heart threatened to join my stomach on the floor as I momentarily thought it was hers. Her eyes were wide and I hadn’t seen her that scared in a long time.

  “I can’t move him,” she said, her voice shaking. It didn’t seem to be the only thing shaking.

  I wasn’t surprised by her state or statement, to be honest.

  Brett was practically lying in the toilet bowl, vomit down his front and blood seeping steadily from his arm. I hadn’t seen a cut that deep on him in a long time.

  “Ah, fuck, mate…” I sighed. “How long’s he been like this?”

  Lani shrugged. “I texted as soon as I found him. I’m trying to find the damn Betadine and I…” What had started in a rush, petered to a stop and she took a hitched couple of breaths.

  I knelt down beside her, cupped her cheek and turned her to look at me.

  “I’m here, Angel. It’s all right, I’m here. We’ll sort it, yeah?”

  She looked at me, her eyes the sort of glassy I hadn’t seen them in three years. God, my heart was breaking enough that Brett had done this to himself. But, I felt it shatter painfully at the look on her face.

  Then, the anger set in.

  Anger that Brett would do this when Lani was the only one home to deal with it.

  I pulled her to me and we landed in a heap on the floor with her in my lap and I held her tightly. I felt her tears on my shoulder, but she took another couple of hitched breaths, then a deeper one.

  “We need to…sort him out,” she said slowly.

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  She pulled back slightly and wiped her eyes. “I can…” She took another deep breath. “Him first.”

  I tried to give her a reassuring smile. “Okay.”

  She nodded once and we helped each other off the floor.

  Fuck, I didn’t know what to address first. My brain kept telling me to look after Lani, even as it told me she’d be fine; she was just shocked, we both were. I knew all too well the surprise of finding Brett bleeding on the bathroom floor and feeling like you were alone.

  I ran a shaky hand through my hair as I tried to think straight.

  “Okay, shower. Clean him up, then bandage him up. Yeah?” I asked as Lani stood by my side.

  She shivered, but nodded. “Will he need stitches?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But, we’ll call John and Georgie in the morning and see what they think.”

  She nodded again and I didn’t blame her lack of original reaction at this point.

  I knelt down and grabbed the bottom of B
rett’s t-shirt.

  “Cas…?”

  I looked up at her for a moment.

  She looked confused, unsure, just so damn lost that I had the mad urge to leave Brett to his own miserable devices and just make sure the girl in front of me was okay. But, none of that was fair. Brett wasn’t at fault here; he was doing the best he could even if we didn’t understand any of it. And, Lani would have ripped me a new one if I’d tried any of it.

  She was wringing her hands. “Do you… I mean… You…?”

  I sighed. “If you want to skip this part, I totally understand.” I said it slowly so she’d get exactly what I mean by that. But, clarification was apparently needed.

  “You’ve done this before?”

  I nodded without taking my eyes off her.

  “Did–” Her voice caught, but she tried again. “Did they have to do this for Jonny?”

  I closed my eyes against the pain, then forced them open again so I could look at her. “Jonny didn’t have me, Angel.”

  The fuck if I knew who Jonny really did or didn’t have and if Brett was actually better off with me. But, Lani needed reassurance she wasn’t going to lose another brother.

  It had been mere months since we’d really worried about Brett. Lani wasn’t exactly a relaxed young woman, but she’d been the most relaxed I’d seen her in years and I knew that was because Brett had looked on the up.

  Now?

  Now she looked far worse than someone had pissed in her beer.

  She looked far more broken than I’d ever felt.

  I shuffled across the floor and took her hand. “Lei, this isn’t so bad. I promise it’s worse than it looks. Okay? I’ll get him in the shower and bandage him up, get him into bed and come see you, okay?”

  She visibly pulled herself together. “No, I’ll stay.”

  I wanted to make some quip to break the tension, but even I knew it wasn’t the time. So, I just nodded and proceeded to get Brett out of his t-shirt. Oddly, there was zero weirdness with Lani and me getting Brett naked and putting him in the shower. It was methodical, it was necessary, and there was far more going on here than any ingrained angst about nudity.

  I stood in the shower with Brett barely conscious while Lani stood outside and helped me wash him. We even had a nice moment where she accidentally slapped me in the face with the face washer and my flicking water out of my face splattered her. I don’t know if Lani was as affected by the moment as me, but – just as my heart constricted over Brett – I felt that small piece of hope; I was reminded that life isn’t over if it’s still shit.

  Finally, Brett was clean and I was wrapping him in a towel while Lani got together all the medical gear. Not that it was much. Neither of us had done that first aid course adults kept telling us we should do, but we knew enough that we needed Betadine, Sorbalene, gauze and a bandage.

  I steadfastly ignored the fact it looked like this wasn’t his first cut in a while.

  Once his wound was as sorted as we could get it, we got him to his room, got him in some clean pyjamas, and got him in bed.

  I put my hand on Lani’s back as she leant over him. I had a moment where I felt like we were some bastardised couple looking in on our kid, but the image was squashed when Brett chuckled drunkenly in his sleep.

  “He’ll be okay, come on.”

  She huffed. “I know. Just checking the bandage.”

  “For what, Doogie?” I asked.

  I felt her shrug as she leant into me slightly. “I don’t know. Bleeding or something.”

  I nodded. “And?”

  “I don’t know!” She gave a self-depreciating laugh. “But, there hasn’t been much bleed-though. Is that even a thing?”

  “Sounds like it might be,” I answered. “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up and back to bed.”

  She sighed and nodded and let me lead her back to her room.

  She paused in the door to her en suite, looking at me intently.

  “What?” I asked, already halfway out the balcony door.

  She looked me up and down. “Will you come back?”

  I looked down, not quite convinced she’d meant what it sounded like she’d meant. When I looked at her in question, I was almost sure she blushed.

  “I know you need to get changed. Those pants are soaked. And, the bl– But…” She took a deep breath. “I mean, it makes sense that you’re closer… For Brett…”

  I tempered my smile, because it wouldn’t do to look like a smug bastard in the face of her actually acting like a human being for a rare moment in her seventeen years of existence. No, that wasn’t fair. Lani had been as human as they came until three years ago.

  I shook water out of my hair. “You, uh, want me to come back when I’m changed?”

  She paused before she nodded and I knew how much that alone was costing her.

  I’d known this girl her whole life, I’d held her hours after she’d been born and apparently declared I loved her at the age of two – honestly, not a lot had changed. So, I knew Leilani Granger inside out. She needed the comfort, even if she wasn’t willing to admit it.

  And, what was I if not a Drake, standing in front of a Granger in need? The answer was simple, even if the rest of it was fucked.

  I nodded as I raked my hand through my wet hair. “Yeah, no worries. I’ll be back in a sec.”

  She nodded as well. “Okay. Sensible.”

  “Yep. Sensible,” I agreed.

  She gave me a small smile and disappeared into her bathroom and I jumped my way into my room, got dry and warm and changed. She was still in the shower when I got back into her room in a new pair of pyjama pants – pants were bad enough, who was going to bother with a top? – so I climbed into her bed and lay down.

  It was eerily weird lying in Lani’s bed while she was in the shower and knowing her brother was a goddamn fuck-wit only at the end of the hall. God knew I loved him like he was my own brother, and it made me feel so helpless and angry that there was nothing I could do to help him. But, we were what we were and I was too scared to push him. He’d got better once, who was to say he wouldn’t get better again?

  Lani finally emerged from her bathroom in a towel.

  “No looking. I’m going to get changed,” she warned.

  I nodded and was very good and even put my hand over my eyes. I didn’t remove it until I felt the bed shift as she got in.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Yeah. All good.”

  It wasn’t the first time we’d shared a bed and I wasn’t feeling super weird about it except for the fact that I knew how she felt about being touched. And, to be honest, I’d been stretching her physical contact limits for the last week. So, as much as it felt weird, I kept to my side of the bed like a good boy.

  Not that I’d shared a bed with any girl but her or Emma when I was younger.

  We lay there with an awkward silence between us for I didn’t know how long.

  “Cas?” I finally heard her say.

  “Yeah?” I answered, staring at the ceiling.

  “Can you…? Uh, can you…?” She sighed heavily, then tapped my arm. “Hug me, yeah?”

  I didn’t have to hide my smile because it was too dark to see and she was facing away from me anyway. I rolled over and pulled her back against my front, draping my arm over her waist.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  She actually wriggled back into me. “Yeah.”

  I couldn’t say it didn’t feel ridiculously right. There didn’t have to be anything sexual in it, and I wasn’t convinced there was. But, we’d had a rough night and fuck it if I wasn’t going to take comfort in someone who meant the fucking world to me.

  The fact that Leilani Granger was actually taking some comfort from someone in the form of physical interaction was also cause for celebration. But, I wasn’t going to be the one to mention it and ruin the moment.

  e

  After I’d called Jo
hn and Georgie – who understandably decided to come home from their trip that night – Lani, Emma and I pulled into the school carpark.

  “You two are quiet this morning,” Emma noted.

  Lani looked to me. “Yeah, just tired.”

  “Because that usually stops Cas,” she scoffed.

  “You know me, Em. I’m unpredictable,” I answered.

  She gave a small laugh. “That you are, Cas.” And, she swung out of the car.

  When the door was closed, Lani sighed. “Oh, thank God.”

  I nodded and subconsciously reached for her hand. “She wasn’t going to ask about him. The most she’d expect is he’s hung over.”

  “He probably is.”

  I kissed her hand. “Yeah, well, he was breathing fine and Mum’s going to keep an eye on him.”

  “What did she say about the hospital?”

  “He doesn’t need stitches, he probably threw everything up, and she’ll let us know if anything changes and she needs to take him.”

  Lani sighed. “Okay. Okay, good.”

  “Hey, Granger?” I started, wanting to lighten the mood and see that smile.

  “Yeah, Drake?” she asked, distractedly as she looked out the window.

  “We slept together.”

  She looked at me quickly and laughed in surprise. “What!”

  I grinned at her. “We totally slept together.”

  Pulling her hand from mine, she tried her best to hide her smile. But, not even gnawing on her bottom lip could prevent an appearance from that perfect Lani Granger smile.

  “We didn’t sleep together, you idiot. We just…”

  “Slept together,” I finished for her with a cocky grin and got out of the car.

  “You, Casper Drake, are an arse,” she said, getting out of the car, too.

  “You, Leilani Granger, are in denial,” I replied. “I’m fantastic.”

  She scoffed. “And, I wouldn’t have you any other way, you weirdo. I’ll see you later.”

  “Ciao, Lani!”

  She shook her head as she walked away and flipped me off. I saw Bec walking towards her, and she joined in on the flip without even having the slightest idea what I may or may not have done this time. But, despite, the events of the wee hours of the morning and the usual annoyance that Bec made me feel with her judgemental arse, I was feeling pretty good. Actually, I was feeling amazing. I couldn’t not smile, and I was extra pleased it pissed Bec off more.