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“Good, you’re packing.” I look up to find Casper standing in my open doorway. Thick arms crossed over his chest as he studies me. “I told you to come home.”
“You could’ve warned me.”
“You wouldn’t have listened.”
“No, I wouldn’t have.” There’s no point in lying to him or myself. Nothing was going to stop me from checking on Freddie with my own eyes. “Still, would’ve been nice to know what I was walking into. But then I’m not one of you, am I?”
“What?” he asks me, looking perplexed at my statement. “You’re my baby sister.’
Turning back to my chest of drawers, I gather the rest of the clothes I’ll need. “Then why don’t you ever back me? I mean, since I’m your flesh and blood…why not me? It should be me you back…when is it going to be me? When are any of you going to pick me above everything else?”
A serious expression purses his lips as his brows draw close together, as though he’s giving my question real thought while he comes to stand in front of me.
“Look at me, Georgina,” he tells me after a beat, using a finger to lift my gaze to his.
“No.” Batting his hand away, I refuse to let him see me cry. Instead, I spin to go into the en suite and gather myself.
Casper’s too fast though. Before I can get away from him, he intercedes my path, and holding my face between his hands, he asks, “I remember a time when the only thing you cared about was your dancing, and you were so happy. You had the most genuine smile. You were happy,” he repeats like somehow that statement alone is going to make everything better. “What happened? How can we fix it?”
The way he says it almost makes me believe that all this is going to be a problem of the past. Things are going to be okay. Except, then I remember that I’m exhausted. I’ve been holding on for so long, and my grip is slipping. My hope is diminished.
“What happened…” I muse, asking the question while I try to think of the answer for myself. “What. Happened.” It’s not all that hard to see, but I don’t think he realises how deep I’ve fallen, and now I can’t find the surface anymore. I’m drowning, and I don’t know how to swim anymore.
“Georgie…”
“You pushed him into my life, and now I can’t let him go. I can’t unlove him, Casper, not even when I know he’ll never openly return any of my feelings. How can that be fixed? How can you fix something that has never been whole?”
“You don’t,” he tells me simply.
“You can’t. It’s like a puzzle with a missing piece…pointless. Worthless. It’s a heap of shit, isn’t it?”
The expression on his face sobers some more, making my chest constrict so tight around my insides that I can’t even feed my tears the oxygen they need to form.
“That’s not what I meant.” Taking my hand, he leads me back to where my packed bags are sitting on the bed and grabs the bigger one, nodding for me to take the other. “When something is broken beyond repair, you break it into a million fucking pieces and you make it into something new.”
Casper pauses outside my bedroom door, releasing my hand as I ask him, “How do I break Freddie? How do I fuck him up beyond what he already is?”
A dark chuckle vibrates from him as he smirks, looking at the photo hanging on the wall. It’s one of us and Arabella when we were younger. We used to spend part of our summers in Spain, and it was genuinely the best time I recall ever having. It was one of the few times I didn’t feel like an outsider.
“It doesn’t even matter anymore because I’m leaving,” I tell him as he drops my bag to the floor and takes the photo off the wall. “I’m going to do the two weeks at the academy, and then I’m going to the audition in New York.”
“You should go and do all those things. But you asked me to pick you, and I think that if I push you to go without pointing one crucial thing out that I’ll be hurting you in the long term because there is one thing wrong about what you said…”
He stares at the photo for the longest while, and the glint of his grin softens, morphing into a wistful smile.
“What did I say that was wrong, Casper?”
“Actually, it’s more what you didn’t say and what you don’t realise right now.”
“Which is?”
“I might have brought him into your life, but I’m not the reason he hung around. You are, and as much as I want to break every single bone in his body for hurting you…”
“You can’t because he’s your friend and—”
“It would be pointless because he wouldn’t care about what I do to him.” Casper studies me with a pinched frown. He’s looking for something that will tell him how to go forward. From the way his expression softens and his stare relaxes, it’s obvious that he’s not going to give me the anger I crave right now.
I want to look into his eyes and find what I’m feeling in them, but pity is all there is. It’s fucking useless though. There’s nothing I can do with it.
