#davidkessler

Olivia didn’t reply for a few seconds, and Ludo rolled onto his side to look at her. “Ludo,” she said slowly, “you know he’s… he’s not very…” She trailed off, pressed her lips together, and sighed through his nose. “He’s awful. Really awful.”

“I know he’s kind of a pill,” Ludo said, “but he’s not that bad once you get to know him better. He’s just… I don’t know, abrasive. A lot of people don’t like him but that’s only because they don’t know him.”

“No,” Olivia said gently. “Some people are like that, sure, they come across like assholes but when you get to know them, they mellow out, right? But Ludo, he’s just an asshole all the way through. You cut him way too much slack.”

This wasn’t the first time he’d heard this from someone; it wasn’t even the first time he’d heard it from Olivia. The last conversation like this was with Gina, who he’d started dating about a year after Angelo got married. They broke up six months ago because Gina got a job offer all the way in Palo Alto and Ludo didn’t want to move with her, but he’d sensed the end was near before that anyway. On the subject of Angelo, Gina had been far less kind than Olivia; the conversation, only picked up once after a disastrous party for his mother’s birthday that ended with Angelo flying off the handle and storming out over some petty disagreement, had devolved into an argument. Ludo hated arguing with anyone about anything, but his family especially was a sore spot. At least if they were arguing about each other, about something one or the other had done, it was easier to just sit down and talk it through. Fighting about his family – about Angelo specifically, more often than not – always resulted in the endless kind of argument that Ludo hated the most, where nothing was ever solved because nothing could be solved; they were just arguing for the sake of it. He couldn’t change Angelo even if he wanted to, and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t change someone else’s perception of him either. “He’s my brother,” he told her plainly. “I can’t not cut him slack.”

“He doesn’t cut you slack,” she pointed out. “He’s terrible to you. I’ve never seen someone act like that with a person they’re supposed to love.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, that he doesn’t love me?”

“No, I didn’t mean that,” Olivia said, but there wasn’t enough conviction in her voice to entirely support it. “I just mean that he treats you like he doesn’t. He’s always pushing you around.”