the hating game ; lrh

fourteen

LUKE USHERS ME TO his car a few blocks away and helps me inside, turning the heating system on once he climbs in beside me, though he doesn't begin driving.

"What happened?" He asks, voice all soft and gentle again, as if I'll break if he speaks too loudly.

"He just..." I run through the events of the night in my mind, contemplating what exactly I should and shouldn't tell Luke. Why was I even telling him anything? Luke was supposed to be my enemy. But would enemies pick you up in the middle of the night? Would they hug you when you're upset? "He was so different."

"How so?" Luke asks, and for some reason that I could not find I felt compelled to tell him.

"The way he acted, mainly," I explain. "His friends were... awful. And I went upstairs to have a break from it all and he followed me up, and..."

"And what?"

I look up at him, at those blue eyes that I suddenly felt more trusting about than I ever had, and it's like the words tumble from my lips. "We were kissing and he started to try and take my dress off... and I tried to stop him, and he wouldn't... and..."

"Rory," Luke's expression quickly shifts from empathetic to concerned and even angry as I speak.

"Nothing happened," I assure him, pushing my hair back from my damp face. "I told him to stop and he called me a prude and got mad when I called him out on it. So I left."

Luke watches me in silence for a moment, his jaw tight and his expression hard. "Fucking asshole," he finally says, shaking his head in apparent anger.

All of a sudden I feel as though I've overreacted to the situation at hand. Nothing actually happened between us, and it wasn't particularly clear that I was trying to stop him from undressing me -- perhaps Ashton misread the situation. That kind of thing happens a lot, right? There was no need for any fuss to be made about the night. It was something I simply wanted to forget about and move on from.

"I think he was just really drunk," I blurt out, wiping up my tears and fixing my hair for the umpteenth time.

"Rory," Luke casts me a concerned glare, shaking his head very slowly at me. "It doesn't matter if he's stumbling drunk or completely sober. That kind of behaviour is not acceptable."

"I mean, I've never seen him act like that before," I continue, doing my best to offer Ashton the benefit of the doubt. After all, he had always treated me with the utmost respect.

"Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it's never happened," Luke says, and as much as I didn't want to admit it I knew that he had never been so right about anything before.

I nod silently, unable and unwilling to say anymore about the night. All I wanted now was to go home to my own bed and sleep. I sit back against the passenger seat, letting my hands untangle themselves from one another and allowing my body to relax.

"Why do you care so much?" I blurt the words out before I can manage to think them over or control them.

Luke's hand drops from where it was about to start the ignition and he turns slightly to face me. His expression appears somewhat nervous, and I know almost instantly that I've caught him off guard -- in fact, I even managed to catch myself off guard.

"I don't," is his immediate answer, though I shake my head to instantly deny the proposal.

"That's not true," I tell him. His blue eyes flick up to me, warning and wary. "You wouldn't have come all the way here in the middle of the night if you didn't."

"Even I wouldn't leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere," Luke quips, a dramatic scoff escaping his lips in an attempt to dismiss the claims.