Older Brothers

Chapter thirty-seven

"Khloe talks to you, but even though you were worried about her you didn't say anything to the rest of us. Whatever Khloe's going through we didn't know about it." Chase explained.

Charlie laughed. "It was obvious if you paid attention. Just because you never did —" Charlie said, but was cut off by Chase.

"I know I've been a jerk, but how was I to know she was going through this? We all know Khloe loves attention. You can't blame me for being wary." Chase continued.

"Look, Khloe seems to be very good at hiding things. We had no idea." Elliott said, seemingly trying to cut Elliott some slack.

The thing was, I was mad at Chase for ignoring me and treating me the way her did too, but I wasn't mad at Elliott for that. Elliott wasn't mean to me. I think he just didn't know what to do with me. And part of me was okay with that. My Dad relied on Elliott for a lot of things, I had to cut him some slack.

"But we shouldn't leave her alone in there, we should check to see if she's okay." Charlie argued.

"Look kid, I don't want to pressurise her. Okay?" Elliott said, sighing.

"And we don't want you in there. She needs to talk to all of us, not just you." Chase said.

I rolled my eyes, I had already opened up enough to him and he was the last person I wanted to open up to. I'm not ready to talk even more to him or any of them really. I had explained myself so much, yet so much of what was going on with me, I didn't know how to put into words.

"I'm the only one she trusts." Charlie said, I heard a tone of sadness to his voice

"We need to change that." Elliott said, seemingly agreeing with Chase.

"But why? Does it really matter? She can talk to me." Charlie argued.

"It does matter because whenever she talked to you in the past, it seems you missed something. You didn't see this coming." Chase said.

Was Chase insinuating that Charlie should have known?

"What do you mean?" Charlie said.

"Did she tell you that she was hardly eating?" Chase asked.

"No, but—"

"Then she may have been talking to you, but she wasn't opening up to you." Chase concluded, sounding arrogant.

He was critiquing Charlie's ability to see what was going on with my mental health when i hid it from Charlie just as well as I hid it from him. Hypocrite.

"Charlie, I just want to make sure we get the full picture of what's going on with her. I need her to come to one of us, rather than you so that we can talk to her and try and properly understand what's going on." Elliott explained.

"But I can do that." Charlie argued.

Chase sighed as if he was sick of this conversation. "No you can't. We're older than you, we're the better people to figure this out. Let us sort this out." Chase said

"Chase is right, Charlie." Elliott said. "I know you want to protect Khloe, but I can't have you hiding anything from us. I need to get her to open up to us so I can help her. Can you help us out with this one?" Elliott said.

Charlie sighed. "I should still talk to her. You may have good intentions, but I don't think you're approaching this good." Charlie said.

"We know what we're doing, Charlie. It's fine." Chase said.

"It's not going to work. She's not like that. You need to prove to her you're there for her. Show her you're not acting, not just be there for her when it suites you ." Charlie said.