Chapter 34 The Church
POV: Carly
She almost said no.
She had been almost saying no to Niko for weeks and then saying yes anyway and tonight was no different. He had texted her during dinner, something brief and deliberately vague, just a time and meet me at the gate and she had read it under the table while Tommy talked about practice and felt that pull in her chest that she was running out of ways to rationalize.
She told Tommy she had a coven thing.
She told Whitney she was tired and going to bed early.
She was getting too good at this and that scared her more than anything else about the situation.
He was waiting at the gate when she got there. No cigarette tonight which she noticed. Just him leaning against the iron with his hands in his pockets and that expression that meant he had already decided how the night was going to go and was reasonably confident she was going to like it.
She climbed over the wall without help this time.
He looked mildly impressed.
She pretended not to notice.
They walked fifteen minutes through the quiet streets of Black River Falls with the fog sitting low around their feet and the streetlights making everything amber and soft. She asked where they were going and he said you'll see and she said that's not an answer and he said no it isn't and she gave up and walked beside him and let the night do what it wanted.
The church appeared out of the fog like something from a photograph.
Old stone and arched windows and a heavy wooden door that had seen better decades. The mosaic glass in the windows still held their color even in the dark, the faint light from somewhere inside catching the reds and blues and golds and throwing them softly onto the ground outside.
She stopped walking.
"You're joking." She said.
"I found it last year." He said. "Come on."
Inside was exactly what she would have designed if someone had asked her to build a place for thinking. High ceilings. Wooden pews dusty and crooked. The mosaic windows running floor to ceiling on both sides throwing colored light across everything. Quiet in the specific way that places which have held a lot of history are quiet. Like the silence had weight and texture.
Niko moved through it like he knew every corner of it. Which she supposed he did.
"You come here alone." She said.
"Few times a week." He said. "Do homework. Draw. Think." He looked at the windows. "It's the only place I can actually hear myself."
She looked at him standing in the colored light with his hands in his pockets and his face softer than it ever was on campus and thought about all the versions of Niko Monroeson she had been carrying around in her head for five years and how none of them looked like this.
"You've never brought anyone here." She said.
He looked at her. "No."
She sat down on the floor because the pews looked structurally questionable and he sat beside her with his back against the wall and legs stretched out and pulled her notebook out of her bag before she registered what he was doing.
"Hey." She reached for it.
He held it above his head. "Just borrowing."
She gave up and pulled her knees to her chest and watched him flip through it with that focused careful attention he gave things he was genuinely interested in. He stopped on a page near the middle and his eyes moved across it slowly.
Then he started reading.
His voice in that space was something she was not prepared for. The accent wrapping around the words and the high ceiling carrying them up and around until they came back down changed. He read the passage about a man watching a green light across the water, reaching for something he could see but never touch, the way hope stretched itself across impossible distances without ever arriving.
She watched his face while he read.
He looked up and caught her.
She looked at the window.
He kept reading. The next passage about a first kiss. About a man understanding that once he crossed that threshold the world would become smaller and more perfect and more devastating all at once. That some moments collected everything that came before them and held it, compressed and permanent, like a photograph you could never stop looking at.
He finished and closed the notebook and set it in his lap and looked at the colored light on the floor in front of them.
"I like that one." He said quietly.
"I can tell." She said.
He turned a few pages without purpose.
She fidgeted with her fingers.
"Can I ask you something." She said.
"Depends." He said.
She rolled her eyes. "Have you ever been in love."
He went still.
Not dramatically. Just that specific stillness that moved through him when something landed somewhere real.
He looked at her slowly. "Why would you ask me that."
"Just making conversation." She said.
"That's a heavy conversation starter." He said. But there was something underneath the deflection that she had learned to recognize by now.
"You read a lot about it." She said. "All those quotes. You know them by heart. It's not a strange question."
He was quiet for a moment.
"No." He said. "I haven't."
"I don't believe you." She said.
His head turned toward her. "Is that so."
She held his gaze. "I think you're afraid to show people what a romantic you actually are. You read Fitzgerald in abandoned churches alone. That tells me something."
His jaw tightened. "I'm not afraid of anything."
"Except the truth." She said. "You think intimacy is a weakness. But it isn't. It could be the thing that actually lets someone in."
He looked at her for a long moment. She expected him to shut down. To stand up and end the conversation and flash back to campus without another word the way he did when things got close to the real parts of him.
Instead he picked up the notebook and turned it over in his hands slowly.
"Hm." He said. "Well if you've got me figured out then I've got you figured out too." He opened it to a page she had filled with quotes about love and longing. "You believe in this. You want it. The real version of it. Not the convenient version." He looked at her. "And you don't feel it for Lancaster."
She stiffened.
He watched her do it.
"We're not talking about me." She said.
"Why not." He said. "You started an interesting conversation. I'm just following it." He turned the notebook over. "You can't refute it because you know it's true. You're afraid of your own honesty."
She opened her mouth.
He shook his head. "It's always complicated or different with you. Every time."
She looked at the window and said nothing because he was right and she hated when he was right and she especially hated how easily he saw it.
"What's in the sketchbook." She said.
He went still again.
Different this time. She watched the shift move through him, something protective and private closing over his expression.
He opened his mouth.
The flashlight came through the hall before he could answer.
POV: Tommy
He had been looking for her for forty minutes.
Her coven meeting had ended an hour ago according to Sierra who he ran into outside the east building. Sierra had mentioned it casually, not knowing she was handing him information he did not already have, and he had smiled and said thanks and walked away and stood in the corridor for a moment doing the math.
Coven meeting over at eight thirty.
It was nine fifteen.
He texted her.
Tommy: Hey where are you
He waited.
The ticks went blue.
No reply.
He walked to the library. The study rooms on the second floor. The east courtyard where she sometimes practiced spells when she needed to think. The bench outside Degrassi Hall where she and Whitney sat on warm evenings.
Nothing.
He stood on the path between the residence halls with his hands in his jacket pockets and looked at the campus around him. The fog sitting low on everything the way it always did. The amber lights on the path making everything look warmer than it was.
She wasn't here.
He knew she wasn't here the way he knew things sometimes without being able to explain the knowing. The same way he had known something was off three weeks ago when she came back from the east lawn smelling like cold air and somewhere that wasn't this campus.
He took his phone out and looked at the blue ticks.
He put it back in his pocket.
He stood there for another minute.
Then he walked back to Silas Hall and sat on his bed and opened his playbook and stared at it without reading it and told himself there was a perfectly reasonable explanation.
There was almost certainly a perfectly reasonable explanation.
He just wished she would tell him what it was.
Author's Note:
Tommy walking every corner of that campus looking for her while she is sitting in an abandoned church listening to Fitzgerald is the kind of thing that makes me want to close my laptop and take a walk. He knows. He doesn't know what he knows yet but he knows. Drop a like and tell me in the comments, how long before Tommy stops waiting for a reasonable explanation?