Chapter 104: Space

POV: Carly

Three days.

That was how long it had been since the courtyard. Since she had stood in the cold morning air and watched him walk away with that quote sitting in her chest like something she was going to be carrying for a very long time.

Three days of going to class and running committee meetings and eating breakfast with Katy and doing every single ordinary thing her life required of her, and doing all of it with the specific background hum of his absence sitting underneath everything like a frequency she could not tune out.

She had asked for space.

He was giving her space.

She should have felt relieved. She had wanted this, had asked for exactly this, and she was getting it. He wasn't pushing. He wasn't showing up at her door. He wasn't sending messages that would make it harder to think clearly.

She caught sight of him twice on Thursday. Once crossing the courtyard with Enzo, his bag over one shoulder and his sketchbook under his arm, not looking in her direction. Once in the corridor outside the spellistry classroom, talking to Professor Swanson about something, his back to her. Both times she had felt the specific awareness she always felt when he was near, that shift in the air that her body had catalogued without her permission months ago and had not stopped registering since.

Both times she kept walking.

She was doing everything right.

It felt terrible.

She sat on her bed on Thursday evening with her grimoire open and unread in her lap and her phone face down on the nightstand and the record player on low — Whitney's record player, the one she had not returned and had started using herself without really deciding to — and she thought about what he had said in the courtyard.

All of it.

She had gone over it so many times now that the words had lost some of their initial weight and she could actually look at them clearly without the emotion getting in the way. The murders. The pattern with Aurora. The admission that he had used someone who cared about him because it was easier than facing himself. The thing about his family, the very edges of something she still didn't have the full shape of but could feel the presence of even from the outside.

She believed him.

She had believed him in the courtyard and she believed him now and that had not changed.

What she was still working out was what believing him was supposed to mean for what she did next. Believing someone and trusting someone were not the same country. He had told her the truth for the first time in the courtyard. The question was whether one truth, given under duress after a very bad night, was enough to rebuild what the very bad night had taken.

She did not know the answer to that yet.

She turned the record player up slightly and opened her grimoire to a page she had already read four times this week and tried to focus.

Katy came in at nine, dropped her bag, looked at Carly, and sat down on the end of her own bed facing her.

"On a scale of one to ten." She said.

Carly looked at her. "Seven."

Katy tilted her head. "That's an improvement."

"Yesterday was a four." Carly said.

"I know. I was there." Katy pulled her knees up. "Have you talked to him?"

"That's the opposite of space." Carly said.

"Space and radio silence are different things. You can have space and still send a single text." Katy said. "Just saying."

Carly looked at the grimoire.

"What does your gut say." Katy said. It wasn't a question exactly.

Carly pressed her lips together. She had an answer to that. She had had the answer to that since approximately one second into the courtyard conversation when he had started talking and she had recognized the specific quality of what it cost him and her gut had said something loud and clear and she had been arguing with it ever since.

She looked at the record player.

"That I probably already know what I want to do." She said. "I'm just scared to do it."

Katy nodded. "Sounds about right." She stood up and went to her own desk. "For what it's worth, the scared part doesn't go away. You just do the thing anyway."

Carly looked at her. "You sound like someone who's been through something."

Katy opened her textbook and did not look up. "Goodnight, Carly."

Carly almost smiled.

She looked at her phone.

She did not pick it up yet.

But she stopped arguing with her gut.