player ♚ lrh

39 - regret

Luke swore they were 19 again.

His head was spinning. They'd had this conversation before, in the same place and in the same company, all of which he remembered very clearly. He couldn't forget it if he tried, for he'd once been asked that same question by the same boy who faced him now.

The only difference was the girl.

"Is it true?" Calum's voice was sad, and much quieter than usual, as if he were afraid of the answer.

Luke had just woken up. His head pounded with a sharpness much like the burn of the tequila shots he slammed the night before. His neck was sore and his throat was scratchy with last night's regret.

He wasn't at all in the mood.

"Calum?" He ran a hand through his unkempt hair, groggy with sleep and irritation. "The hell are you doing here?" he grumbled.

He didn't remember much from the night before, but he certainly recalled his friend leaving in the midst of their feud. He planned on them talking it out that day, but certainly not fresh from a hangover and clinging to distant memories of what exactly had ensued.

But Calum didn't answer the question, and he wasn't asking about their fight. In fact, he seemed to know something that Luke didn't.

"Luke, please," his voice cracked. "Just tell me it's not true."

The parallels were obvious. But there in the present, Calum Hood held no pity, and no reservations about his assumptions. There was only anger—and hate—this time around.

He was lucky Cole and Michael were there to hold him back.

"The hell are you doing here?" Caught completely off guard, it was the only thing Luke could get out. Fuck it, he thought. If he was going to be forced to have this conversation again, he could at least be consistent. Even still, Luke knew he was only delaying the inevitable.

Calum knew. They all knew. And now, he was struggling to keep the past from merging with the present.

If he were capable of uncovering any humor in his situation, Luke would've almost dared to find it funny. Or, at the very least, ironic, for there he was, trapped in one room with everything—good and bad—that encompassed his past self, whilst everything to do with his present self remained unaware in a different room, just behind a wall. It was terrifying.

And yet, all he could think about was Elise.

He thought about what she might say, how she might look, and how she might feel once she realized the cat was out of the bag—something they still had yet to discuss.

It wasn't like Luke was scared of Calum. He wasn't. He couldn't give less of a shit what might happen to him physically; it was the emotional part that fucking terrified him. He only cared about how Elise felt and that in turn was the scariest part of it all, for he had no idea what laid ahead for them.

He could've laughed, humorlessly, for they had been having such a lovely evening, too. How fucking naive.

Calum, on the other hand, didn't find his dodgy answer even remotely amusing.

"Are you fucking serious?" He spit. They both knew the question was rhetorical this time around. "That kid told us, Luke. He told us about you and Elise,"

Wincing, Cole put a hand on the seething boy's shoulders, attempting to catch him as he stepped forward. "Mate—"

"Don't fucking touch me, Cole," Harshly, Calum shrugged him off, burning eyes coming off of Luke's for the first time to land on the other boy. He was in no mood to be held back. "You don't get to do this again,"