Chapter 18 Tacos
POV: Carly
They had been at it for another forty minutes when Carly's stomach made a sound that was genuinely embarrassing.
She pressed her hand flat against it like that would help.
Niko looked up from his sketchbook.
She looked at her notes.
He looked back at his sketchbook.
Neither of them said anything for approximately ten seconds.
"There's a place across the street." He said it to the page. "Best tacos in Black River Falls. Probably the best tacos you've ever had in your life."
"I'm not hungry." She said.
Her stomach immediately disagreed. Loudly.
Niko set his pencil down.
She kept her eyes on her formula.
"Go out with me tonight." He said it the same way he said everything. Calm. Like it was the most reasonable thing anyone had ever suggested.
She looked up slowly.
He was already looking at her. Completely straight faced. Not performing casualness. Actually casual.
"I'm sorry?" She said.
"You heard me." He said.
"I have a boyfriend." She said.
He exhaled through his nose. "I'm not asking you to marry me. I'm asking you to eat tacos." He leaned forward slightly. "We've had a productive first session. We didn't kill each other. I think that deserves some kind of acknowledgment."
"And tacos are your acknowledgment of choice."
"They're very good tacos." He said.
She stared at him.
He stared back.
"Leaving campus without approval is an automatic suspension." She said.
He closed his sketchbook. "Jesus, McPherson."
"I'm just stating the rules."
"I know what the rules are." He said. "I'm asking you to break one. Just one. The taco one specifically." He held her gaze. "Do something that's just for you for once. Something that isn't on a list or color coded or attached to a responsibility."
She opened her mouth.
"I dare you." He said.
She closed her mouth.
He leaned back in his chair. "I'll even tell you something. About me. Something nobody else knows." He said it simply. Not as a manipulation. More like an offering.
She looked at him for a long moment.
The taco place across the street. Ten minutes off campus. Nobody would see them. Nobody would know. It was just food and she was hungry and it didn't have to mean anything beyond that.
She thought about her coven. Her mother. Four generations of McPherson witches who had never once sat across a table from a vampire and called it a normal evening.
She thought about the way he had listened to her walk through the formula without once making her feel like she was performing for him.
She shook her head slowly. "We can't." She said. "I can't." She picked up her bag and started gathering her notes. "It's not about the rules. You know it's not about the rules."
He was quiet.
"It would be a betrayal." She said. "To my coven. To my family. To everything I've been raised to believe about what you are and what we are to each other." She pressed her notebooks against her chest. "One decent afternoon doesn't change any of that."
Niko didn't argue.
That was almost worse than if he had.
He just looked at her with that steady expression and nodded once like he had expected exactly this answer and had asked anyway and she didn't know what to do with any of that so she walked toward the door.
"Carly." He said it quietly.
She stopped. Didn't turn around.
"For what it's worth." He said. "I wasn't playing a game."
She stood in the doorway for one second.
Then she walked out.
POV: Niko
He sat in the empty classroom for a while after she left.
Not brooding. He wasn't the brooding type, or at least that was what he told himself. He just didn't feel like moving yet so he stayed in the chair and looked at the space where she had been sitting and turned his pencil over between his fingers slowly.
The notes she had made were precise and color coded and she had organized them into a sequence that made the whole formula easier to follow than it had any right to be. She had explained it to him clearly, patiently even, without making him feel like he was supposed to already know.
He hadn't expected that.
He hadn't expected a lot of things about this afternoon actually.
He opened his sketchbook to the poster layout he had been working on and looked at it without really seeing it. His pencil moved to the corner of the page without direction and he let it go where it wanted, the way he always did when he was thinking about something he wasn't ready to think about directly.
He ended up drawing the curve of her handwriting from the formula page.
Just the shape of the letters. The way she wrote her capital letters slightly larger than necessary and underlined things twice when they mattered.
He stared at it.
The phone on the desk buzzed again. He turned it over.
His mother.
He set it face down.
He wasn't angry that Carly had said no. He had known she would say no before he asked. He had asked anyway because not asking felt worse somehow and he hadn't examined that too closely yet.
The part that was sitting with him was the way she had said it.
Not the rules answer. The other one. The real one.
One decent afternoon doesn't change any of that.
She was right. He knew she was right. He had grown up knowing exactly what witches thought of vampires and exactly what his kind had done to earn most of it. He had no argument against any of it that didn't sound like deflection.
He just kept thinking about the way she had stopped in the doorway.
One second. Maybe less. Before she walked out.
He picked up his pencil properly and went back to the poster layout and told himself it was nothing. She was his class partner and a pain he had gotten used to and she had said no to tacos and that was the end of it.
He finished the border detail on the layout and closed the sketchbook.
He sat there for another minute.
Then he picked up his phone and called his mother back.
She answered on the first ring.
He almost hung up.
"Nicholas." Her voice came through careful and relieved at the same time.
"I have five minutes." He said.
A pause. Then quietly. "Okay."
He stared at the window and the fog of Black River Falls pressing grey against the glass and listened to her start talking and told himself he was fine.
He was mostly fine.
Author's Note:
He called her back. He sat alone in that empty classroom and called his mother back and I don't know what to do with that information but I feel something and I think you do too. Drop a like and tell me in the comments, are you okay? Because I'm not.