My Best Friends Brother

Chapter 122

Don't. Fucking. Follow. Me."

Eli is still stumbling over his words when I turn my back and walk away from him. I know he didn't mean to tell me, but if he wants to hold this shit over me then he needs to remember that I've got shit to holdover him too.

I don't even know when this started with him. I swear to fuck I was just a normal fucking kid and then all this stupid stuff just started happening in my head and I can't make it stop no matter what I do. I didn't even realise how bad it was until the night of that party.

Opening that door and seeing Eli pounding into Milo, or at least I guess what I thought was Milo, it fucking did something to me. I felt like my heart had been torn out of my chest I just didn't understand why.

It didn't really hit me until weeks later, we were all sitting in the locker room and the guys were talking about all the girls they'd hooked up with at parties and the only reference I had was Zoe. How I felt about that experience seemed so different than what they did with there's. Then Eli started gloating about his fucking perfect week and I was angry, so fucking angry, and then it hit me how much I liked him... How different I felt just being near him, nothing like being with Zoe.

Zoe. That was so fucked up.

After seeing the two of them together, I was walking around the place like a fucking zombie. I just kept replaying Eli's face over and over again in my head, just like I had been for months but now it was different. Whenever I saw him in my mind that night, now there was Milo's face right in front of it.

I walked into that bedroom just to clear my head and found Zoe crying her eyes out at the bottom of the bed. I should have just kissed her nothing more, well kissed her back, considering that she was the one to kiss me first. I don't know why I did it, now I look back on it I think maybe I was just trying to prove that I wasn't feeling so hurt by seeing two guys be so happy together like that.

Touching Zoe, being with her that way... It felt wrong. Then to add to it; I had to go and be a dick, making sure I got proof of it in case Milo ever decided to play Billy-big-bollocks again on me. I couldn't even let her touch me though, she tried but I knew it wasn't what I wanted.

Bollocks - fuck, his English fucking shit words are sticking. Like his music I can't stop listening too and his TV shows I watch just so I know what's happening in them when he talks, even if it's not with me...

I felt more spending one night sharing a room with Eli back at camp, not even being near him but just having him in the same room, than I did that whole time with Zoe.

There's something so fucking wrong with me.

The traffic zips past me as I walk through the gate on the other side of the park, glancing back and happy to see that I'm on my fucking own. There is no way I'll make it back on time if I walk the entire way, although I bet Dad is passed out by now anyway. It's not like he has work to go to any more...

I hate the fucking bus but it's my only fucking option right now, sliding into one of the threadbare seats and leaning my head against the cool glass as I try my best to stop feeling the tingling left on my lips by his.

There was a point where I thought that maybe this thing I had was for Milo, but the more time I spent with him the more I realised that it wasn't that way at all. What I really wanted was how close he is with Eli.

That night we watched Rocky after planning out the bio project, I tried to keep hating him but he's actually really fucking likable. Even if he does have too many abs and an ego bigger than his huge fucking arms. I was hovering above him that night, trying to lower the ice and all I could do was look at his lips. I wanted to take Eli's kiss straight from them. I wanted to know how it felt, just to have his lips on mine in one way or another, just once.

I don't want to feel like this, I've tried fucking everything but it just won't go the fuck away.

Dad says there are like these special camps defectives can go to, places where they'll fix you. If I wasn't so scared that he'd slit my throat the minute I told him I wanted to go, I would have left months ago. I know this isn't who I'm supposed to be.

How the fuck is Milo so okay with finding out this part about himself? The way he was with Josh outside, acting like what he was doing wasn't horrifying to all those people around him...

...How did he do it?

I guess it's easier if you just find someone that's worth doing it for. Eli sure as fuck isn't, he's just a fucking slut.

That Josh guy... He just seems to just know stuff though. That day at camp when I was ready to get Milo the fuck away from Eli, and have him shoved in a cell for good measure, Josh spoke to me and I swear to fuck he knew why I was acting that way.

He didn't come right out and say it, but the implication was there, and for once in my life I couldn't fucking deny it either. He actually made me feel like maybe I wasn't fucking broken, that there is no part of me to hate.

But he was fucking wrong. The only way to get rid of this shit from my brain is to claw it the fuck out of me. I'll use every blade I have, I won't fucking be this. I refuse to be this.

It's not far from the bus stop over to what used to be my home, now it's just my house. It stopped being my home the day we put my mum into the ground and my father decided to give up on being anything that resembled a human being.

My hands are still shaking from the cold as I twist the key in the lock, trying to stay quiet and keep my legs steady in case he wakes up. Waking him up never leads to anything good. However, it becomes clear I had nothing to worry about when I find him passed out, sprawled across the dirty couch and the glass bottles from tonight's self pity party coating the living room floor.

Mum would lose her shit looking at this place like this now. She always took so much pride in our house but now most of the wallpaper is torn from the walls, there's so many stains on the carpet that I couldn't tell you what colour it is anymore and there would never be a clean dish in this place if I wasn't here to wash them.

It's a mess, just like my life.

Grabbing the box from under the sink, I collect up all the glass bottles and turn him onto his side before he chokes to fucking death on his own vomit. I'd be lying if there were days when I said I'd never thought about just leaving him to fucking die but... He's all I've got left now.

I hate him. I really fucking hate him but he's my dad, I still remember what he was before she left us and I can't let that image of him go, even if it's been a lifetime since I actually saw him that way.

Quickly wiping over the coffee table, I try to pretend that the white powder coating his maxed-out credit cards and rolled up dollar bill is some kind of spilt sugar - he's been seeing the serpent's again then - before throwing one of the tatty old blankets over him and trudging upstairs.

Dad used to be someone that everyone really respected. He wasn't always this way. Before my mom got sick he run a car sales shop on the Eastside. He was doing really well for himself, Mom was talking about us moving over there and getting out of the Southside finally.

Then she got sick, the hospital bills took over and Dad's business went under. He was already breaking when his own brother was thrown in prison, he felt his family name was being dragged through the mud further and further whenever he left the house to see my cousin's face splashed on the front page of every newspaper.

After that he stopped being sad and just got angry. My oldest brother went to college and never came back, met a girl and had kids. I can understand why he doesn't want my father anywhere near them, so we just see each other twice a year when we can.

The twins always looked out for each other, they were the first co-captains in Westbrooke high basketball history and got scholarships to get them the fuck away from this place. They haven't been home in months.

So that just leaves me, alone here with no one to fucking support me and trying to deal with all the shit that's going on inside my head by myself. No wonder I'm so fucked up.

It doesn't help that I'm practically the spitting image of my mother staring back at my father every time he opens his eyes. He doesn't mean it when he lashes out, when we wake up the next morning neither of us ever say anything about it. I guess between his dad and his brother, this kind of treatment of your kids is just built into our DNA.

Although you'd think he would have figured out what could happen after what Victor did.

None of us are allowed to talk about him. It's hard to even think about him now.

Reaching into my bedside cabinet and trying not to slam the draw closed after because the thing is on its last legs, I pull out the crumpled image and lay back on the cold damp sheets as the wind whistles in through the crack in my bedroom window. I stare down at the single photo I have of the one person that always stood up for me.

My brothers always looked out for each other but I've always been the reject of the family; too small, too insignificant. Victor was the one that would check in on me, he was the one that would build Lego sets with his little cousin and push me on the swings. He was the one that showed me how to soak the bruises to make them go away quicker.

But now they just call him one thing.

Murderer.

With the anniversary coming up, Dad is on edge again that people will figure out that the evil Westbrooke high shooter is... was... our family.

I glance down at his photograph, the only one I managed to save before my Dad pretended the guy had never been born and destroyed the rest. It's so battered now that you can hardly make out his eyes anymore but I still remember them in my head so clearly.

He just wanted to play ball. Both of us just kids of men who wanted us to succeed where they failed, no matter the fucked up ways they tried to get us there.

At camp one of the guys told me that Josh's first boyfriend was amongst his victims. I don't think Victor even knew who he was, something in him just snapped that day. That's all people remember him as now, this psychopathic kid who walked into a school with a shotgun and took out everyone he saw.

If Milo and the others knew that he was my cousin, if he'd had his fathers last name instead of his mother's, I'm sure I'd be even more hated in that school than I already am.

They have a plaque at the front of the school with all the victims names on, his isn't there. Nobody cares that he was just a kid, a victim too in so many ways.

No one will understand what he went through, the things that made him that way. Not a single person is born evil.

But some people are born wrong.

Just like me.

Just like him.

My head spins, the rush of adrenaline that's been keeping me going to make it back home is quickly wearing off, now all I can feel is the alcohol pumping through my veins and the sickening feeling in my stomach when I think back on what I allowed myself to do tonight.

The bright light of my phone illuminates the room, slipping the photograph into the bottom of my draw first I pick it up to see a message from Eli. Just the sight of his name making me have revolting butterflies fill my body.

'Can you just tell me that you're home safe so I can stop walking around this fucking park trying to find you? I'm not going to say shit...  but we need to talk. Whenever you're ready.'

I don't want to talk. I don't want to think about him anymore. I just want to get the fuck away from this town and pretend I never heard the name Elijah Erickson again for the rest of my life...

...Even if I can never forget his lips.