Luke's already gone when I wake up on Sunday morning. He's probably at home explaining himself to Liz who gets upset when he stays out all night and doesn't call. I guess that's the upside to having only one parent around: it's one less person to lecture me whenever I screw up, which as a teenager, is bound to happen from time to time.
From what I've heard from my dad, my mum was the wild one when she was younger while he was the boy with perfect grades and a blonde comb-over. Sort of like that whole, good girl meets bad boy thing, I guess, but in reverse.
Alfie's sitting on the lounge reading a book when I get out of bed. The TV isn't on, making my footsteps loud in the silent house. I feel sort of sad that he has to wake up to such a quiet house, I wonder if it would be different if mum was still around.
"What are you reading, kid?"
He holds up the cover so I can see the cover. The Mortal Instruments, the title reads, plastered over one of those covers that gives me the impression it's a fantasy-type book. "Mr Wales gave it to me," he explains, still not looking away from the pages. "He told me it's a series for older kids but I'm not like most nine year olds."
"Is it any good?" I wish I actually enjoyed reading outside of school so that I could relate to him more but the only things that I choose to willingly read are tumblr posts. Sometimes I feel bad that I don't read books first to make sure they're appropriate for him. Which reminds me that I still have to talk to Dad or Finn about that whole nude magazine thing that happened at school the other day.
"It's cool," he finally looks up, closing the book. Within seconds, one version of Alfie disappears and his younger, more kid-like counterpart surfaces. "Can we have pancakes for breakfast?"
Alfie smiles, his teeth all uneven and gappy - this is something else I never thought I'd have to know at seventeen: how much the tooth fairy pays per tooth - and there's no way I can say no. "Sure, bud."
While I cook, Alfie sits on the stool at the end of the kitchen bench, telling me everything that Finn did wrong when he was babysitting last night: he didn't check the bath water before I got in, then he gave me soft drink and he didn't even make me brush my teeth!
"That's just what big brothers do," I justify, pouring some of the pancake mixture into the pan. "They only know how to do the fun stuff."
Alfie looks at me skeptically, "When does Finn ever do fun things with me?" He sounds so sad that I promise to take him bowling next weekend. And I try extra hard not to burn his pancakes.
As I'm plating up the pancakes, the doorbell rings and Alfie rushes to answer it, "Make sure you check who it is first," I call out after him, adding two strawberries and a swirl of syrup to the pancake on top of the stack so that it resembles a smiley face. I'm sitting it down on the table when he and Luke walk into the kitchen.
"See, pancakes are the kind of thing I missed out on when I didn't have a girlfriend," Luke says, taking a pancake from the plate next to the stove.
Thankfully, Alfie is already at the dining table shovelling half a pancake into his mouth so he doesn't notice that I swat Luke's arm with the spatula. "Come on, that's no way to treat your boyfriend, Ruby," Luke laughs, taking another bite of the pancake.
"Are you still drunk?" I whisper. "I thought you'd be over this stupid plan once you sobered up."
"It's a great plan," he's opening the fridge now, taking out the carton of orange juice and then two glasses from the cupboard next to the fridge. "And I spent my morning brainstorming some guide lines for us."
He takes a glass of juice over to Alfie, who beams at him with a full mouth of food. The two of them get along so well, it kind of makes up for the fact that Finn can sometimes be a bit of a jerk to our younger brother.
"Don't I get a say in these guidelines?" I whisper again when he's close to me again, pretending for a moment that I'll actually go along with this idiotic plan.
"What did you have in mind?" he asks, leaning against the kitchen counter.
"How about no mentioning this fake relationship in front of you know who?" I'm talking as quietly as I can so that Alfie doesn't hear.
Luke frowns, "Okay. Anything else?"
"I'm not actually going along with this." My eyes roll as I wash up the fry pan that I cooked the pancakes in.
"Yes you are."
"No, I'm not."
"Why not? We pretend to date, we get Calum to notice you, we pretend to break-up and then you two can run into the sunset or whatever it is that happens in your Calum fantasies."
"That's never going to work, you idiot."
"It might."
There's something about the way Luke is smiling at me right now, with his eyebrows raised, and I'm thinking about how monumental grade twelve is and how much I want to have my chance with Calum, and even if this plan doesn't work, it wouldn't hurt anyone. Right?
Even if it doesn't change anything, Luke and I can just stage our breakup as planned and finish off the rest of our last year of school like nothing happened.
And so as I watch Luke bite into another pancake, I find myself nodding and saying, "Okay."
YOU ARE READING
Hoodwinked | Calum Hood AU
Fanfiction"That's never going to work, you idiot." It's her senior year and Ruby has vowed to tell her long-term crush, Calum Hood, exactly how she feels. But when things don't go to plan, she skeptically takes on the help of Luke, the boy next door, who beli...
