Chapter 101: Pep Talk

POV: Niko

He made it back to Silas Hall without seeing anyone worth explaining himself to.

Small mercies.

He went straight to the bathroom, not even stopping at his room first. He needed the shower more than he needed anything else right now, including blood, including sleep, including the cigarette his fingers kept reaching for on reflex even though the pack had been empty since Tuesday.

He turned the water up until it was just short of scalding and stood under it and let it hit the back of his neck and tried to think clearly.

Ten minutes.

She had given him ten minutes, which was ten more than he'd had any right to ask for and ten fewer than he was going to need to say everything that needed saying. He was going to have to be very precise. No wasted words, no detours. She was going to sit across from him in that courtyard with her walls all the way up and her patience at its absolute limit and he was going to have one chance at this.

He had spent a hundred and twenty years being very good at keeping people at arm's length.

He had absolutely no practice at letting them back in once he'd driven them away.

He stood under the water and thought about what to say and came up with nothing that felt like enough and kept thinking anyway.

By the time he got out and made it back to the room he felt marginally more human, which was ironic, and slightly less like the walls were closing in, which was the most he could reasonably hope for before eight in the morning.

He was pulling a clean Henley over his head when the door opened.

Enzo came in first, mid-sentence about something, Mauricio right behind him still laughing at whatever had been said. Neither of them looked at Niko immediately. They were too busy with whatever the conversation was.

He didn't hear it.

He didn't hear any of it.

What he heard was Carly's voice on the football field. You walked out on me. What he saw was Aurora's hand sliding up his arm and him not moving away. What he felt was the specific dead weight of knowing he had done the exact thing he had promised, to himself if not to her, that he would never do.

He was across the room before he had decided to move.

His fist connected with Mauricio's jaw.

Clean and hard and without any preamble whatsoever.

Mauricio went sideways, catching himself on the desk, more from shock than from the impact. Niko's knuckles stung pleasantly. He barely registered Enzo yelling something behind him.

He was already climbing on top of Mauricio, his fist moving again and again, not wild, just relentless, the way his violence had always been when it was driven by something real underneath it. Blood appeared at Mauricio's lip, then his cheek. He still hadn't properly fought back, either too stunned or too smart to try.

Enzo got both arms around Niko from behind and hauled him off by main force, which took effort.

"What is your actual problem!" Enzo said, still holding him.

Niko pulled free. Rolled his neck. Looked at Mauricio, who was straightening up with his hand pressed to his jaw and an expression of extreme displeasure.

"That's what I'd like to know." Mauricio said, spitting blood.

"You had no right to bring her there." Niko said. "You were supposed to have my back."

Mauricio looked at him. "Are you for real. You're blaming your mess on me right now."

"She shouldn't have been there. That wasn't your call."

"She came to me." Mauricio said, louder now. "She showed up at our door worried sick about you because you had been ignoring her calls for hours. She was scared something had happened to you." He gestured at himself. "You were too busy doing whatever the hell you were doing to give a damn, and I'm the problem?"

"Watch it." Niko said.

"Or you'll hit me again?" Mauricio took a step forward. "Go ahead. I didn't do anything wrong, and somewhere under whatever this is you know that."

Niko's jaw worked.

He knew it.

He'd known it before he threw the punch. He had thrown it anyway because the alternative was standing very still with everything he'd done last night and there was nowhere to put any of it and Mauricio had walked in at the exact wrong moment.

He took a step back.

Then another.

He sat down on his own bed, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, and stayed there.

The room was quiet for a moment.

He heard Enzo exhale. He heard Mauricio wipe his face with something. He heard the small sounds of two people deciding what to do with what had just happened.

"I fucked up." Niko said. Into his hands. To the floor.

"Yeah." Mauricio said. "You did."

No embellishment. Just the plain fact of it.

Niko lifted his face from his hands. He looked at the floor instead of either of them.

"She agreed to talk to me." He said. "This morning, outside her door. Ten minutes in the courtyard during her free period." He pressed his lips together. "But I'm starting to think she's already decided and this is just something she's going through before telling me formally."

Both of them rolled their eyes at the same time.

"You are actually stupid sometimes." Enzo said. "I say that with love."

Niko looked at him.

"I'm talking about you." Enzo confirmed. "Absolutely you."

Mauricio sat down on his own bed. He touched his jaw once, gingerly, then let his hand drop. "You're the most arrogant person I know in every single context except this one, and in this one you turn into someone I barely recognize. You're so busy doubting yourself that you can't see what's actually in front of you."

Niko said nothing.

"I'll be honest." Mauricio said. "I wasn't fully on board with you and Carly at first. I went along because you're my friend and I wanted to be supportive. But I was skeptical."

Niko almost laughed. "I know."

"You knew?"

"I know you both better than you think I do." He said.

Mauricio looked at Enzo briefly. Then back at Niko. "She proved me wrong. That's the thing. I had this whole picture in my head of how it was going to go and she walked into our common room and shook Enzo's hand and took the vodka bottle from Aurora's hand and proved every single one of my assumptions wrong." He paused. "And I've watched you for three years. You have never once looked at anyone the way you look at her. Not even close."

Niko kept his eyes on the floor.

"She's crazy about you." Mauricio said. "That's not nothing. That's not small. And the fact that she agreed to give you ten minutes when she has every reason not to is her telling you the door isn't closed. It's just not open the whole way yet."

Niko turned this over.

He thought about Katy saying the same thing in different words in a corridor at one in the morning. He thought about Carly's hands shaking and him pointing it out and her not even knowing they were.

He thought about ten minutes and what he needed to fill them with.

"I've never done this before." He said. It came out quieter than he intended. "Any of it. Apologizing. Explaining myself. Asking for something back that I broke." He exhaled. "I don't know how to do this."

"Nobody does the first time." Enzo said.

"You're going to go." Mauricio said. "And you're going to tell her the truth. All of it. Not the version that makes you look manageable. The actual truth." He looked at him steadily. "She can handle more than you think she can. She's been handling you for months."

Niko sat with that.

He stood up eventually. Grabbed his bag off the floor. His sketchbook from the desk.

"For the record." Mauricio said from across the room. "You're never getting another free shot."

Niko almost smiled for the first time in twelve hours. "Fair enough."

He walked out.

Author's Note:

He punched Mauricio before he'd finished deciding to and then had to sit there and hear the truth from him anyway and honestly Mauricio O'Neil is one of the most quietly decent characters in this story and he has been underestimated from the beginning.