Chapter 102: Ten Minutes

POV: Carly

She was not going to be late.

She had made a point of it. She had managed her morning the way she always managed her mornings, with a list and a sequence and the specific controlled forward momentum that meant she didn't have to think about anything except the next thing on the list.

She had showered. She had dressed. She had eaten exactly half of the granola bar on her nightstand and acknowledged that was not enough and eaten the other half too. She had checked her coven assignments for the day and responded to three messages about the homecoming committee.

She had not thought about the courtyard.

She had not thought about the courtyard approximately forty times.

She was almost to her first class when she heard the commotion from the sophomore coven practice room. She kept walking. She made it four more steps.

She stopped.

She went back.

Three sophomore witches had managed to perform a binding spell incorrectly and were now attached to each other at the wrist in a triangle formation, one of them crying, one of them laughing in the particular hysterical way that meant she was also about to cry, and one of them yelling into her phone.

Carly unbound them in approximately ninety seconds.

She then spent seven minutes explaining, clearly and calmly and with what she felt was admirable patience given the state of her own life, exactly what they had done wrong and how to avoid doing it again.

She was three minutes late to the courtyard by the time she got there.

She saw him from the path.

He was already on the bench, sitting forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands loosely clasped and his eyes on the middle distance, and there was a cigarette burning between his fingers that she noted with a specific pang that he wasn't actually smoking. Just holding. Same as always.

His bag was on the bench beside him and his sketchbook was visible at the top of it and he hadn't seen her yet and she stood on the path for exactly two seconds and let herself look at him before she had to be someone walking toward him.

Then she was someone walking toward him.

He heard her before he saw her, the way he always did, and his head came up. The careful blankness of his expression when their eyes met told her he had been practicing it, had been working on something neutral so as not to push too hard right out of the gate.

She recognized the effort.

She sat down on the opposite bench. Not beside him. Across from him.

He looked at the gap between them and didn't comment on it.

"I'm not late." She said, setting her bag down. "I was briefly held up because apparently sophomore witches are physically incapable of a binding spell without gluing themselves together like idiots, and guess who has to fix it every time."

She wasn't sure why she was telling him this. It came out of her like something with its own momentum, the way things did around him, conversation that started before she'd decided to have it.

His mouth did something it almost immediately pulled back from. Almost a smile. Gone before it became one.

"And people say leadership is rewarding." He said carefully.

"Shockingly overrated." She said. "I'll make sure to mention it in my valedictorian speech."

She heard herself and stopped.

The air between them shifted, the brief familiar ease of their back and forth collapsing back into the weight of everything else, and she straightened up and looked at her hands in her lap.

"So." She said. "You wanted to talk."

He put the cigarette out. Set it aside. Clasped his hands again and looked at them for a moment before looking at her.

"Thank you for coming." He said.

"I didn't do it for you." She said.

"I know." He said.

She waited.

He took a breath he didn't need, which was the thing he did when he was genuinely nervous, and she had learned to read it and she read it now and it did something to her chest that she was not going to acknowledge.

"First." He said. "Did you sleep with her?"

His eyes met hers immediately and directly. "No. I would never. Nothing like that happened and it was never going to."

"You've told me a lot of things." She said. "You'll understand if I'm still skeptical."

His jaw tightened. "Carly, you can think whatever you want about the rest of it. But I will not sit here and let you believe I would cheat on you. That's the one thing I need you to hear clearly."

"Running to your ex instead of your girlfriend when things get hard is its own kind of cheating." She said. "Emotionally. Trusting her with what you wouldn't trust me with. That's what hurts. Not just what I saw."

He looked at the ground.

"I know." He said quietly. "I know that. And I'm not going to try to talk you out of feeling it."

She watched him.

He put his hands flat on his thighs and looked up at her and something about his expression was different from anything she'd seen on him before. Not the practiced unreadable version. Not the smirk or the wall or the specific controlled performance he maintained in most rooms with most people.

Just him. Unguarded and slightly terrified.

"I'm going to explain something." He said. "And I need you to let me get through it before you decide anything. Can you do that?"

She crossed her arms. "Ten minutes." She said. "You have nine left."

He nodded.

He started talking.