Chapter 100: Outside Her Door

POV: Carly

The alarm went off at 6:15 and she hit it with her fist before she was fully conscious.

She lay there afterward with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling fan turning slow overhead, and waited for the specific mercy of not remembering.

It didn't come.

Everything came back in the first thirty seconds. The banquet. Isabel. His face at the door of that room. Aurora's hand on his arm. The football field. Her own voice saying don't follow me and meaning it completely and also not meaning it at all simultaneously, which was the part that made her feel the worst.

She stared at the fan.

Both her roommates were still asleep. The room was grey with early morning light coming through the curtains and completely quiet and she lay in it and felt the specific weight of a day that hadn't started yet and was already exhausting.

She was dehydrated. The kind of dehydrated that came from hours of crying, where your head ached and your throat was dry and your eyes felt like they'd been turned inside out. The glass on her nightstand was empty. She'd finished it at some point in the night without remembering doing it.

She sat up slowly.

She was not a coward. Carly McPherson was not weak.

She repeated it until it felt like something other than a performance.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat there for a moment, bare feet on the floor, and breathed. She grabbed the empty glass and stood up and moved toward the door as quietly as she could, which was not very quietly because Degrassi Hall's floors had never once cooperated with anyone who needed them to.

She turned the handle and opened the door.

She stopped.

Niko was on the floor of the corridor directly across from her door.

Back against the wall, head tipped back against it, one leg stretched out and one knee bent. Eyes closed. Still dressed in the same clothes from last night — the blood stained shirt, the black jeans, the boots. His face was clean, which meant he'd wiped it at some point, but the shirt was the same and his curls were the same and he looked, in the specific stillness of someone actually asleep, exactly like the version of him she'd catalogued without meaning to over the past weeks.

Peaceful. Innocent. Capable of nothing.

She stood in the doorway and looked at him and felt everything she had been trying to not feel come back at full volume.

Did he stay here all night.

She looked up and down the empty corridor. Nobody. Not yet. It was early enough that most of Degrassi Hall was still unconscious, but that wasn't going to last long and he was very clearly a vampire on the wrong side of campus at an hour that would require explanation.

She looked back at him.

She did not want to wake him up.

She also could not stand here indefinitely.

She was trying to figure out which of those two problems to solve first when his eyes opened.

Not the slow, groggy opening of someone drifting into consciousness. Just — open. Present. Already on her face like he'd been aware of her standing there before he was technically awake.

His ocean eyes found hers and held them and she felt the specific thing happen in her chest that she had been feeling since October and had stopped being able to pretend was something other than what it was.

She tightened her grip on the empty glass.

"You're awake." He said softly. His voice came out rough with the specific texture of someone who hadn't used it in hours.

"Niko." She kept her voice low, glancing up and down the hall again. "What are you doing here. Did you actually sleep here all night?"

He stretched his arms above his head slowly, the joints in his shoulders popping. "I must say, I'm genuinely surprised I fell asleep at all. Not exactly a habit of mine."

"You could have been caught." She said. "I could have gotten in trouble."

His lips shifted into the ghost of something. "Still worried about the rules regardless of everything else. I've always found that charming about you, even when it annoyed me."

"Don't." She said. Her voice came out flat and she meant it to.

He stopped.

His expression adjusted, the almost-smirk retreating back into something more careful. His eyes moved over her face and she crossed her free arm over herself without meaning to, suddenly aware she was in a tank top and shorts with no bra and her hair everywhere and her eyes still swollen from the night before.

He noticed the arm crossing.

His jaw moved.

He looked away briefly then back.

"Carly—"

"Why are you here." She said. Not cruel. Just tired.

"Why do you think."

She looked at him on the floor of the corridor outside her room at six in the morning in yesterday's clothes and felt something pull at her chest that she was not ready to deal with.

"I need you to leave." She said, stepping past him into the corridor. "Before anyone sees you."

"Carly, stop." He was on his feet immediately. "Please. I know you've decided to hate me but you have to let me explain."

She turned. "Hate you?" She said. The laugh that came out was the broken kind. "Do you have any idea how badly I wish I could hate you? Hate at least requires some kind of care. I would give anything to not care about you right now."

His face moved through something she didn't want to name.

His eyes closed briefly. His hands balled at his sides.

"Please." He said. "Don't say that."

"Why?" She said. "Because it's hard to hear someone who's supposed to care about you actually say that they're hurt?"

She heard how it landed and felt it herself in the same instant.

He looked at her steadily. "You're shaking."

She looked down at her hands.

She was.

She hadn't noticed.

He took a careful step toward her and she took one back without planning to. He stopped. Put his hands up slightly, a gesture she recognized as I'm not pushing, I'm just here.

He exhaled. "I know you don't want to see me. I know you have every reason not to. But you're still standing in this corridor instead of going back inside, which tells me something."

She pressed her lips together.

"Ten minutes." He said. "Give me ten minutes. Not now, not here. Whenever you're ready today, whenever you have a free moment. Ten minutes and I'll say everything I should have said already. And if you hear all of it and still want nothing to do with me, I'll respect that." He held her gaze. "But please give me the chance to say it."

She looked at him.

She thought about the football field and the voicemails and Aurora's hand on his arm and the specific way his eyes had looked when he'd said her name from that couch, like the sight of her had broken whatever state he'd been in.

She thought about ten years of always wanting more than she'd been given.

She thought about the way his arms had felt in the corridor after the pep rally, holding her without making it about anything except that she needed to be held.

She was so tired.

"Fine." She said. "Ten minutes. My free period. The courtyard."

His face shifted. Just slightly. Just enough.

"Ten minutes." She repeated, pointing at him. "I mean it."

"I heard you." He said.

"Good." She said. She looked down the corridor one more time. "Now go before someone from my coven walks out and I have to explain why you're in our building."

He nodded. He picked up his bag from beside where he'd been sitting, which she hadn't even noticed until now, and straightened up. He looked at her one more time with that expression she had catalogued and would continue cataloguing against her better judgment.

"Thank you, Carly." He said.

She didn't answer.

She went back inside and closed the door behind her and stood with her back against it and breathed.

She gave herself thirty seconds.

Then she went to get her water.