LOGAN
Logan spent the entire morning attempting to forget his morning by sitting in the very front of his lecture halls and forcing himself to scribble down every single thing the professor said, even if it was common sense. The constant mush of words and facts crowded his brain, leaving no room for any other thoughts.
It worked. For a while.
During his break, he climbed the library steps to the fourth floor, where students only sat if they wanted complete silence. Ordinarily, he enjoyed the chance to do his work in peace, but today, it was only making the chaos in his head louder.
Olivia had heard him. Of course she had heard him. With his luck, how could he have expected her not to hear him? He'd closed his door but shit, that hadn't stopped her. He knew she hadn't exactly had a normal life the past two years and she wasn't going to let go of old habits so soon, but her snooping still made him pissed.
Logan ended up leaving the library earlier than he intended and going to the university gym. He was no bodybuilder - he hardly knew how to use the machines - but after randomly wandering through the equipment and weights for an hour, at least his mind was exhausted.
By the time he got to her school, one hour later as usual because she always seemed to be having detention these days, his mind was a little quieter and he felt like he could face his sister. So what if she yelled at him again? So what if he could hardly express happiness to his siblings, much less have a conversation about deeper feelings?
He had put himself back together more times than he could count, more times than he cared to remember. Whatever happened, in the end, he would make himself come out the other side this time too because he had started this. He had been the one with the unkind words.
He sat on his bike in the parking lot, glaring at kids who stopped to stare. One of the braver girls actually waved at him, and he pulled out his phone and pressed it to his ear to avoid giving her any sort of wrong signals.
When the crowd cleared a bit, he saw Olivia sitting on the curb, her arms folded up across her knees and her head against her arms. Her backpack lay limp by her side.
"Olivia!" he called, but she didn't look up, too far for his voice to reach her. Logan cursed under his breath, kicked the stand down for his bike, and prayed he wouldn't have to talk to anyone as he walked over to her. Thankfully, the few kids who did pass him gave him a wide berth.
Olivia didn't look up until he reached the curb and called her name again. She suddenly jumped up at his voice and stumbled in her haste.
Logan had to grab her to stop her from tripping over the curb. "Olivia, I've literally been waiting for so long and - what the hell?"
He stopped ranting when he saw that her face was red and tears were threatening to spill down her cheeks. His whole body went rigid and numb. "What - why are you crying?"
When she didn't answer, he whipped his head around, looking for the source of her misery. He couldn't see the boy that usually did detention with her. Logan's grip tightened on Olivia and he unconsciously pulled her a little closer as he considered that it was that boy's fault that she was crying. He should've warned him to stay from his little sister.
"Did someone say something? Was it that guy who's always smoking? I'll hurt him-"
Olivia shook her head. "It's no one," she said tearily. "It's nothing."
"How the fuck is this nothing?" he said angrily.
Her expression crumpled. "I just didn't know if you would come to pick me up," she said, her voice breaking.
Logan was completely caught off guard. He let go of her arm. That was what she was worried about? He thought maybe she was annoyed at him for what she heard, but never, ever did he think she would think this about him.
"Olivia, what - shit -" He strained to form a coherent thought. "No, I wouldn't do that to you."
Her bottom lip trembled. "I don't know, it was so bad this morning," she whispered.
Logan awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck as an ashamed redness rose up his face. "I was really mean last night too, wasn't I?" He looked down at his feet and shoved his hands in his pockets. "I know what you heard last night. I didn't - I didn't mean it like that."
He took a deep breath, and when she didn't say anything, he forced out, "I'm not going to lie, of course it's hard for me to do this. I've never done this before."
He shuffled on his feet and licked his dry lips. He tried to imagine Blake's easy stream of words, the way he always knew what to say. But he wasn't Blake. And this was turning out to be harder than he imagined.
"It's hard," he managed. "But I wouldn't ever think to give you to someone else. I would never, ever think of it. I couldn't."
There was a stretch of silence. Logan swallowed the lump in his throat when she wouldn't look up at him. He forced himself to keep talking, to fill up the empty, awful silence between them because he had started this, and he was going to fix this.
"Elijah and Blake - they've learned to tell people mushy things. I, um..." He rubbed his jaw and turned his head to the side. "I can't...do that anymore. But I shouldn't have said you're a problem. You're not a problem. You're my sister. And I would never think that you don't belong here."
And then Olivia suddenly burst into tears.
Logan stared at her, completely bewildered and beyond panicked. His lungs were suddenly so constricted it hurt to breathe. His chest hurt.
He had said the wrong thing.
And he had fucked up, again.
"Olivia, the fuck is the matter-" he said, his voice wavering with anxiety.
"I just - I just thought you would really-"
"Why would I ever -"
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean that I would live anywhere but here - "
" - I know - "
"But I just miss Elijah -"
" - it's okay -"
"And I don't understand why I'm still dragging you all through this mess -"
"Okay, that's enough," he said. "Come on, this is not your fault."
But no matter what he said, her tears wouldn't stop. Her shoulders shook, her silent sobs nearly tearing his heart apart. He didn't know what else to say. He didn't know what else to try.
Except one thing.
Logan clenched his fists and steeled his nerves and forced himself to be a man.
"Do you...need a hug...or something - or - ugh, fuck," he grumbled as he tripped over his words. How the hell did Blake and Elijah do it?
But Olivia didn't seem to care that he had no idea what he was saying. Without a second's hesitation, she threw her arms around his waist and hugged him tight, fingers clenching into the back of his jacket. She pressed her face into his chest and Logan felt a sudden warm, mushy feeling grip his heart.
Shit, he thought, completely caught unaware by that warm feeling.
What on earth was he supposed to do now? And she was much smaller than Blake. It always felt so easy hugging his little brother, but now he had no idea what the fuck to do with his arms.
How the hell was he supposed to hug her? How had he hugged her when they were in the bar basement before she was shot? He couldn't remember anything except just wanting to hug her and then hugging her. Why the fuck was this so hard?
He hesitantly put his arms on her shoulders and held her as best as he could remember for a while until her sobs gently reduced to hiccups. He didn't move his arms until she slowly pulled her face away from him. She rubbed her eyes on her shoulder and sniffed.
"Better?" he asked.
She unclasped her hands from his shirt and wiped her nose with her sleeve. "Yes."
He rolled his eyes. Even he knew it was a crap hug. "Okay, now tell me the truth," he said.
"The truth is, you are really awkward at this," she teased. Her face grew a little more serious. "But all things considered, it was a nice hug."
"All things considered?" Logan scowled. "What the hell does that mean? It was perfectly fine."
Her bottom lip trembled a bit. "Yes," she said quietly. "You're right. It was perfect."
And suddenly, for one wonderful moment, Logan felt that everything was going to be just fine because he wasn't an absolute fuck up and he had made his little sister smile, and because at least in this moment he had done things right.
He looked down at her smile and the angry, itching pressure under his skin died down until he could take in the gentle warmth of the sun on his skin and his shoulders relaxed.
For a moment, he felt calm. For a moment, the world's problems weren't his. For a moment, he felt normal.
"You do know they all think you're my boyfriend, right?"
His perfect bubble burst.
He snapped his gaze to where she was looking. A couple of students were not very secretly staring at them and whispering. "What the fuck - I fucking hate living with civilization," he growled vehemently, his expression contorting in disgust. He threw up his hands. "How is this civilized?"
"I don't know, but they're pretty hung up over it."
"What kind of crap is this? You guys are just a bunch of teenagers!" He dragged a hand down his face, his mushy mood vanished. "Let's just go."
He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her away from the unabashed stares of the students, muttering, "How the hell do you even go to this school? God, these kids are crazy." He jammed her helmet on her head and slid his own on. "Why do I have to get this treatment if Elijah never did?"
Olivia was laughing behind him, and Logan felt his anger dissipate a little at the fact that she wasn't crying anymore. He would much rather that she laugh at his expense than cry ever again.
"Why are you so worked up?" she giggled.
"Because it's stupid how everything has to become some stupid gossip like this."
Logan started the bike and when the engine began to hum beneath his fingertips, he felt a bit calmer. He turned around in his seat.
"You know," he confessed. "When I was fourteen, I tried my damned hardest to convince Elijah we should go out and get a cabin and live in the middle of nowhere so we could just get away from this sorry excuse for society."
Olivia laughed. "Are you serious?"
"I was dead serious. Mostly it was because Elijah was about to turn eighteen and I just wanted to be as far away from dad as possible."
At the mention of their dad, Olivia sobered up, and Logan immediately wished he hadn't brought him up. Their dad was a weird subject for them. He didn't want her to know anything about him, but he also didn't want to tell her any lies.
Olivia chewed her lip. "I mean, when you put it that way, that's understandable."
"Well, clearly Elijah didn't think so because we never moved," Logan snorted. He waved a careless hand towards the school building behind them. "But now, it looks like we're really going to have to do it."
She stiffened behind him at his words, her body rigid against his back. He looked over his shoulder.
"What's the matter?"
She fisted the fabric of his shirt where her arms were wrapped around his waist. "Nothing."
Logan groaned. "Olivia, really with the nothing again?"
"It's nothing."
"If you say that one more time, I swear I will throw you off this bike."
"Can we - can we not talk about it right now?"
He didn't want to talk about it later. He wanted her to spit it out. He wanted people to stop telling him things were nothing and fucking say it to his face because despite what Elijah thought, despite what they all thought, he could handle it. He wasn't made of glass.
But when she pressed her face into his back, he realized that it wasn't him she was trying to protect from nothing. It was herself, and she was just trying to avoid facing it.
He sighed and gunned the engine. "Fine. We can talk about it later."
*****
When they got home and Logan finished locking the bike, he found Olivia still standing behind him, chewing on her lip.
"Did I not give you the keys, or-"
She shook her head. He was confused about why she was standing there instead of opening the apartment's main door like she usually did. He picked up his backpack and stood in front of her, unsure.
"Well, are we going inside or-"
"Wait," she said.
Logan didn't move. "Okay."
They stood there for a few moments. He watched emotions churn in her eyes, her mouth tightening as she decided.
Hesitantly, she said, "Let's - let's do something."
He lifted an eyebrow. "What do you want to do?"
She took a deep breath and rocked back and forth on her feet. "Promise not to laugh?"
Logan found her request a bit ridiculous, considering he hardly found the urge to laugh even at the dumbest of Blake's jokes. "Why would I laugh?"
When she gave him a look, he sighed. "Alright, I promise."
Olivia clasped her hands together so tight her fingers went white. "Let's promise that we'll try really hard not to fight anymore."
Logan's heart sank. They really had been fighting a lot. It seemed that all they did was scream at each other. Either they were at each other's throats or apologizing for unkind words.
He didn't want that. He wanted his baby sister again. The one who always slammed into him first, before Elijah or Blake, to give him a hug, the one who kissed his cheeks a dozen times before letting up, the one who shrieked with laughter and clutched at his arms when he spun her around.
He wanted that easy knowledge that in her eyes he was her hero, that no matter what happened she would trust him completely.
That had been years ago. He had been young, eleven years old, naive. She had been five, sweet, unburdened. Now, they had missed nearly a decade of each other's life and it felt like everything was always out of control, permanently ruined.
She was giving him a chance to fix that.
"I know we fight all the time," Olivia continued, her words honest and blunt but earnest and hopeful at the same time. "We're not nice to each other. But I want to be nicer. I don't want to fight."
He realized he was clenching his fists so tight that his palms were aching from the force of his nails. It physically hurt to hear those words, but they were necessary. He took a deep breath and let go.
"Me neither," he said quietly.
To his surprise, she reached out and took his hand. He reflexively cringed but then forced himself to stay still as she squeezed his fingertips.
"If I'm doing something to annoy you, you have to tell me. I'll listen," Olivia said.
"Okay," he agreed. "And if I say something mean, tell me it's mean. Don't let me get away with it."
She gave him a crooked smile. "I never do."
She released his fingers and backed away a little. Wordlessly, she took the keys from her pocket, and together, they went inside.
Yesterday I saw my finger underneath the bandages and truly, surgeons are artists. It's amazing.
And then the nurse SQUASHED my finger so hard while she was rewrapping the bandages and I thought all my stitches were going to pop open.
How did you like this chapter? Did it go how you thought it would?
Next update is FRIDAY as I got a smaller splint for my finger and I can type again :)
For next time: a bit of a shorter chapter but Angel's going to tell Olivia some things...