Disclaimer: I am not a writer for the television show "Life with Derek" so I most obviously do not own any of the characters. So please don't sue this girl, I have nothing to give you.
Oh and the song: "I'm Crazy for this Girl" belongs to Lifehouse, so I don't own that either.
Author's Note: This is an idea I've been playing with in my mind for a while, it's a one shot, but it'll be a long one I promise. I hope ya'll like it, we'll see how it turns out.
Currently:
Listening to: "Dangerous" – Ying Yang Twins.
Feeling: Hungry.
Thinking: That I should eat something soonish.
Derek
Derek was driving Casey to their high school, he could not believe it, it was the last week of their senior year. A huge part of him was excited to be out of high school, but a small part of him was sad.
He was going to be leaving behind a lot of his friends, and he wouldn't even be going to school in Canada, he had been accepted to the University of Vermont on a Hockey scholarship. He was happy about this; the sport that he loved was paying his way through four years of college unless, of course, he got kicked off the team, but that wasn't going to happen.
Casey sighed from the passenger seat next to him, "So where are you going to school, Derek?"
She had been asking him that all year, he had told no one except for his dad and Nora, and they had sworn to keep it quiet, "I told you already, Case, I'm not going to tell you. And it's not like you're telling me where you're going to school, so you have no right to get angry at me for not telling you."
She glared at him, "Don't call me Case."
He rolled his eyes, "After living with me for three years you should have realized that if I know that something is going to bother you I'm going to continue to do it just to get on your nerves."
Casey rolled her beautiful blue eyes, "Well… just stop."
Derek laughed, "Great come back… Case."
She hit him, "Derek!"
He just shook his head at her and pulled into the parking lot of the school, he parked in his usual parking space and got out of the car. He could have been nice and waited for Casey so that she wouldn't have to walk into the school alone, but since when had he been nice?
He was Derek Venturi, he wasn't supposed to be nice.
Casey just shrugged it off and walked over to her friend Emily, the two of them started talking about summer plans and soon they were holding on to each other to keep themselves from falling from laughing so hard.
"Dude."
Someone was trying to talk to Derek, but he was too busy watching Casey to notice.
"Dude!"
He still ignored the person that was trying desperately to get his attention.
A hand waved in front of his eyes, obscuring his view of Casey, "Derek!" someone yelled in his ear.
Derek spun around to see his best friend Sam staring at him, "Oh hey Sammy, what's up?"
"Not much, you?"
"Nothing."
"So it's the last week of school…"
"That's true."
"Are you going to tell her?" Sam asked, nodding toward Casey.
Derek followed Sam's nodded and glanced at Casey who was now signing someone's yearbook with a light smile on her face, "I don't think I can," he whispered.
"What?" Sam asked.
"I don't know if I can."
"Derek, you can not chicken out now, you've liked her for what? A year now? You told me that if you still liked her at the end of the year you would tell her. Why are you scared?"
"I'm not scared!" Derek said indignantly with a glare fixed at Sam.
Sam threw his hands in the air and backed away slightly, "If you're not scared, then why can't you tell her?"
Derek glanced back at Casey, her and Emily were whispering excitedly about something and Casey kept shaking her head, her hair falling into her eyes.
"I'm afraid that she'll reject me."
Sam laughed, "Derek, you are THE Derek Venturi. No one rejects you."
"She'd be the one girl that would. She wants and needs someone who is smart and caring, and not a complete jerk like me. She needs someone that she can have fun with, someone that does not annoy the hell out of her just to see her get angry because he thinks it's cute. She needs someone funny, but serious, someone who doesn't stand girls up, who doesn't cheat and lie. She needs the complete opposite of me, and she knows that, so give me one reason for why she'd say yes to me."
Sam gave a slight nod in Casey's direction, Derek looked up and his brown eyes met her blue ones, she gave him a small smile as a light blush crept its way onto her cheeks, "You never know until you try, dude."
Casey
"So have you told him?!?" Emily asked excitedly the second Casey walked over to her that morning.
"No Em, I haven't."
"Why not?"
"What am I supposed to say to him? 'Hello Derek, I know that you hate me and your sole purpose in life is to annoy the living hell out of me, but somewhere between telling you that you were the most disgusting human being on the planet and today I fell in love with you'? Somehow that doesn't seem like the most romantic way of telling him that."
Emily laughed, "You could always write 'Do you like me? Circle yes or no' in a note and give it to him."
It was Casey's turn to laugh, "And act like I did in the third grade? You can't be serious, Em!"
Emily laughed, "Okay, so I wasn't serious, but you don't have to be so serious when you tell him, make it fun, Derek likes fun."
The two girls spent the next five minutes describing funny ways of telling Derek that Casey liked him, it finally ended with the pair dissolving into a fit of giggles and having to hold on to each other to keep one another from falling on the ground.
Once they had stopped laughing the girls had to avoid looking at each other so that they wouldn't dissolve in another fit of laughter.
"Hey, um Casey, would you please sign my yearbook?" a boy that Casey didn't know asked her, but she was too nice to say no. She recognized the boy from her English lit class and she opened the yearbook and looked at the name written on the front cover so that she could pretend that she already knew him.
Randy,
This last year has been crazy fun! I am so glad that you were in my English class, it was great seeing your smiling face everyday. It's just too bad that we didn't get to know each other better, and for that, I'm sorry. Best of luck in the future, I'm sure you'll do great at anything you try.
Love,
Casey Macdonald.
The boy, Randy, read what she had written and smiled, "Thanks Casey, that's really sweet."
"Sure thing… uh… Randy." Casey said with a smile.
Emily waited until Randy had walked away to poke Casey in the side. Casey squirmed and let out a slight giggle, "Was it the generic response you've been writing in people's year books, Case?"
Casey nodded, "I've never said a word to that boy, it's weird."
Emily nodded and looked out into the group of students for a moment before poking Casey again, "Don't look now, but Derek is totally checking you out," she hissed.
Casey shook her head, "No way, he wouldn't do that!"
"See for yourself."
Casey looked up and her eyes met Derek's. She gave him a small smile and quickly looked away as she felt a slight blush come to her cheeks. There was no way that Derek was checking her out, he was probably telling Sam some joke about Klutzilla or something. She wasn't cute enough on Derek's standards to be worth a second glance.
"Come on, Em, let's go inside."
Derek
That girl drove him crazy! He often wondered how he had ever fallen in love with her when she seemed to spend her time trying to find ways to infuriate him.
There was a wrestling match on television that he really wanted to watch, but Casey was currently sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and the remote watching some chick flick.
"Casey. Remote. Now." Derek growled.
Casey just rolled her eyes and turned them back to the television, Derek sighed, he had tried being polite, now he was going to have to be rude and take the remote by force.
He stormed over to the couch and tried to force the remote out of her hand. Casey's grip tightened on the remote. She was not going to give up that easily.
Derek's grip tightened on the remote as well, but Casey was too smart for him. She rolled over and the two teenagers fell off the couch. She landed with an "oof" on top of Derek, and while he was almost happy to be in that position he wanted the remote.
Casey "accidentally" kneed him in a very uncomfortable area and he let go of the remote. She took off running up the stairs.
Derek growled and followed her up the stairs he tackled her once he reached the hallway, "You know, if you're up here, you can't watch your stupid chick flick anyway, so you might as well give me the remote," he reasoned with her.
She tried to respond, but she seemed to have trouble breathing. Derek realized that it was because he was resting all of his weight on her. He lifted himself up, and braced himself on one arm, he was still hovering over her, but she could breath now, at least.
Casey took a few deep breaths before answering, "This has nothing to do with the movie, this is just so that you can't watch your stupid violent show," she said stubbornly.
Derek growled before shifting his weight to his knees so that he was straddling Casey. She looked up at him with wide blue eyes. He smirked and began tickling her, "If you won't willingly give me the remote, I'll have to make you let go of it," he said.
"Derek!" Casey gasped as she tried to wriggle out of his grasp, but he wasn't going to let her get away with that. He continued to tickle her and after a moment she grabbed his arms, trying to make him stop, the remote lay forgotten next to them. His brown eyes met her blue ones and he slowly stopped tickling her.
Something about her was drawing him to her, she was so close, he could kiss her now and she would finally know how she felt about him, all he had to do was lean in a little further and…
"Derek? Casey? What are you two doing?"
Casey leaned her head back so that she could get a look at Edwin and Lizzie who were standing behind them in the hallway staring at them with alarmed looks on their faces. Derek had to think of a way to make this look less weird. He grabbed Casey's chin and made her look him in the eyes, "If you ever refuse to give me the remote again, I will make you regret the day you moved into this house," he threatened with a glare.
With this he grabbed the remote and got off of Casey. She glared back at him, "I already regret moving here," she hissed.
He just rolled his eyes at her and walked back to the living room.
"See, I told you nothing weird was happening, they were just fighting over the remote again," he heard Edwin whisper to Lizzie.
He smiled; he should get an Oscar for that performance.
Casey
Casey walked back into her room and sat down on her bed. But she couldn't sit for long. She got up and put a CD into her CD player and started pacing around her room.
Something weird had happened out in the hallway, even though Edwin has said that it hadn't. Casey was almost 100 positive that she and Derek would have kissed if their younger siblings had not walked in on them.
She didn't understand that because Derek certainly did not like her, so why did it seem that he was about to kiss her in the hallway out there. Casey didn't even think about herself, she had come to terms with liking Derek about four months ago. At first it had seemed weird, he was her step brother after all, but there wasn't much she could do about her feelings, and it wasn't like they were blood related or anything, so it wasn't incest.
And another weird thing was that when he had threatened her about the remote, his voice had sounded harsh and mean, but something about his eyes had said that he didn't mean what he was saying.
Casey sighed and took out her journal, this was something that she needed to write about, there were too many thoughts in her head for her to sort out on her own.
She was about to start writing when there was a knock on her bedroom door, "Door's open!" she called out.
The door opened and Derek stood there holding a yearbook. Casey stared at him questioningly, "Derek?"
He held out his yearbook, "Will you sign my yearbook, Case?"
She was taken aback for a second, but not too long. She leaned back and rummaged through her bag for her own yearbook, "Sure, but only if you sign mine as well."
Derek walked further into her room and they swapped yearbooks and then he left her bedroom without another word.
Casey opened up his yearbook to the blank back cover… it surprised her that he still had a blank spot in his yearbook, but she figured that it would be filled up with signatures by the end of the week.
She stared at it for awhile, trying to think of what to write, and then an idea popped into her head, maybe Em had been on to something. She turned the volume on her stereo up, so that she could hear the words of her favorite Lifehouse song and then she began to write.
Derek
Derek sat next door to Casey's room listening to the song that was filtering through her wall. He had not expected her to ask him to sign her yearbook so he was at a loss at what to say.
He didn't want to put some generic message; he wanted to write something that would stick in her memory, something that would make her like him. But he had never been good at poetry.
He sat there fuming for a while; this was so like Casey, to infuriate him without even knowing it. No other girl made him feel the way that she did. No other girl made him this nervous. No other girl actually made him want to be smart.
No other girl made him try as much as Casey did.
As he listened to the lyrics of the song filtering through his wall he knew what he was going to write.
The question was if he had enough guts to give her back her yearbook once he had written it.
He sighed, it was now or never, this might be his last chance to tell her, he put his pen down against the cover of the yearbook and began to write.
Casey
An hour later they met in the hallway between the two bedrooms and gave each other their respective yearbooks back.
Without so much as a smile Casey ran back into her room with hers, she didn't want to see the look on his face when he read what she had written.
Once she was safely back in her room she sat down on her bed and flipped through the yearbook. She couldn't find his message anywhere, finally she flipped to the back cover and what had been empty was now filled with messy boy writing.
Her eyes widened, he had written a whole page to her. Hopefully it wasn't full of things like "I hate you" and "You should die"; she wouldn't be able to handle that after what she had written to him.
After staring at it for a few moments she finally began to read.
Casey,
So I was sitting on my floor, staring at this blank page, trying to think of how to put what I want to say into words, trying to think of a way to make you like me the way I like you, and I couldn't. There was no way to explain how I feel about you eloquently enough to make you understand, I'm not a poet, if I tried it would come out as an unintelligent mess of words that don't make any sense to you and you would laugh and think that I was stupid which is not something that I want. But then, I heard the lyrics to the song you were listening to and they helped slightly.
I'll let the band that you were listening to be the poets for me:
"Would you look at her
She looks at me
She's got me thinking about her constantly
But she don't know how I feel
and as she carries on without a doubt
I wonder if she's figured out
I'm crazy for this girl
I'm crazy for this girl"
That's right, Case. I'm crazy for you. As wimpy as this sounds, and as unDerekesque, I love you. I think I realized it last year, during the school carnival, when we had to spend the whole evening working at that stupid face-painting booth together. You were so beautiful, and funny, and spontaneous, and outgoing. That night you showed me a part of you that I had never seen before. It was a new and utterly wonderful Casey. One that I wanted to get to know better, one that I wanted to spend time with, one that I could see myself dating.
Now, I know what you're going to say, "Derek this is incest!", "It will never work!", "I hate you", "What will our parents thing?", and "You're too stupid for me". And maybe all of these are true. But I had to let you know. I couldn't just let this go on. I don't care about any of those things (except maybe the one about you hating me); you make me want to change, Case. No other girl makes me feel the way you do – sometimes I want to kill you, I won't lie, but all you have to do is smile at me and all those feelings go away. It's so infuriating! No other girl makes me want to change. Case, you have to believe me, you are the only girl that actually makes me want to apply myself. You make me want to be a better person. (And I know that that is a cliché, over used line, but I don't care, in my case it's true.) Now that I've told you that, I guess all I can do is wait to see what your response is.
Derek.
Ps – if you really want to know, you can be the first to hear, I'm going to the University of Vermont on a hockey scholarship.
Casey's eyes widened and filled with tears that were threatening to pour out at any moment. She quickly dropped the yearbook and jumped off her bed running out of her room and into the hallway where she ran straight into Derek.
Derek
For a few seconds Derek just stared at the yearbook in his hand, almost afraid to open it. He sat down in his computer chair and opened the yearbook. He saw Casey's neat script filling up the whole back cover of his yearbook. He got a hopeful feeling in the pit of his stomach. If she was going to write something mean she would not have taken up so much space.
He excitedly began to read.
Derek,
What can I say? You know exactly how to make me angry, and you do it on a daily basis. And as much as I want to hate you, I can't. I've spent the last three years trying to convince myself that I hate your guts, and it worked for about two of them, but this year, that plan stopped working.
At first I thought it was just a crush, that it would go away sooner or later. Well it's later… much later, and it has yet to go away. I don't know, I struggled with it for a while, at first I thought that it would be incest, but that's wrong, I'm smart enough to know the definition of incest. Then I realized that it was more than just a crush. But you would never return the feelings, so I never told you, I know what you would do. You'd make fun of me. Don't you dare deny it. But you know what, I don't care anymore… you need to know.
I don't know how or when it happened, but somewhere between yelling at you, fighting with you, and trying to convince myself that I hated you I… I fell in lo - .. no... I fell in like with you. Don't get me wrong, you still infuriate me, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I look forward to our little fights; they make me smile, even if they make me cry to. I don't know why I'm telling you this, I'm doing something that is totally against my normal way of doing things, but I don't care. I'm taking a risk. And now I'll just have to wait…
Love yeah... that's right, Love (you have no idea how great it feels to be able to say that). Love Love Love LOVE,
Casey.
Ps – Do you like me? Circle yes or no.
Pps – I'm going to let you be the first to know, I received a full paid scholarship to the University of Vermont because of my grades and dancing, so that's where I'll be going to school next year.
Derek stared at what she had written before circleing one of the words and walking out into the hallway only to have Casey run straight into him.
Casey
After she recovered from running into Derek she stared at the yearbook that he was holding open in front of her. It was her message to him and one of the words had been circled.
Her eyes filled up with a new batch of tears as she saw that he had circled the word yes.
She threw her arms around him and kissed him full on the mouth, something that two days ago she would not have had the guts to do.
Derek smiled into the kiss and tried to deepen it, but Casey pulled back, "You're not stupid. You don't have to change! I like you just the way you are. You don't have to become a better person, because you're already too good for me," she cried, giving him a light peck on the lips between each sentence.
When she was done Derek smirked down at her and brushed her hair out of her face before pulling further away, "You've fallen in like with me, huh?" he asked.
Casey nodded.
Derek nodded, "I've fallen in like with you too."
Casey smiled, but shook her head and looked down at her feet, "I haven't fallen in like with you, I've fallen in LOVE with you."
Derek's smirk widened, "Same here, Case."
She looked up at him and kissed him on the lips again, "Are you really going to UVM?"
Derek bit back a smile and nodded, only Casey could ruin a romantic moment by talking about school.
She started crying again, this time he couldn't bite back the smile. He raised his hand to her face and gently wiped her tears away with his thumb, "You cry entirely too much, Casey Macdonald."
"You make me want to cry entirely too much, Derek Venturi!" she countered.
He laughed and leaned his forehead against her, "I'll only make you cry because you're so happy from now on," he whispered.
"Promise?"
He nodded, "I promise."
With that he leaned in to capture her lips with his again, but…
"About damn time," Edwin called from his bedroom door.
The two broke apart and Casey blushed slightly while looking down at her shoes. Derek laughed and leaned in, "He won't always be around," he whispered in her ear.
She smiled, "He better not be."
Author's Note: Okay and th-th-that's all folks! I hope you liked it! I know that Derek was a little out of character in this, but I hope it wasn't too bad, you've got to remember, love changes people! Please review! I'd love to know what you all thought of this one! Have an awesome day!
Love,
Corey.