Chapter 36 The Grass Continued
POV: Carly
POV: Carly
She was on top of him.
That was the first coherent thought that formed after the laughter ran out. She was on top of Niko Monroeson on the front lawn of Black River Academy at nearly ten at night and his hands were on her hips and her palms were flat in the grass on either side of his head and neither of them had moved.
She should move.
She did not move.
His eyes found hers in the dark and whatever she had been planning to say dissolved completely. The colored light from the church was gone. The fog of Black River Falls wrapped around them softly. The campus was silent in every direction. There was nothing between them except the specific charged quiet that had been building for weeks and had nowhere left to go.
His hands on her hips were still. Not pulling her closer. Not pushing her away. Just there. Warm and certain and she felt them through the fabric of her dress like they were touching her skin directly.
She looked at his face.
The scruff along his jaw. The dark blonde curls pushed back from falling over the wall. His eyes that were doing that thing where the blue deepened into something she had stopped trying to name. The way he was looking at her with his features soft and completely unguarded in a way she had only ever seen in the church and in the library and in the dark.
He lifted one hand from her hip.
She watched it come up slowly and his fingers found a curl that had fallen across her face and tucked it back. Then his hand stayed at her cheek. His thumb moved across her cheekbone once and she felt it everywhere.
She was not breathing at a normal rate.
His eyes moved over her face the way they did when he was drawing something. Tracing every detail like he was committing it to paper even though his hands were empty.
"You're beautiful." He said it quietly. Like he had been holding it for a while and had simply run out of reasons not to say it.
Her lips parted.
He was still looking at her with that expression that made her feel like the most seen she had ever been in her life and it terrified her and she wanted to stay in it forever and both of those things were true at the same time.
She lowered her head.
Slowly. Giving herself every opportunity to stop. She was aware of every inch between them closing and aware of her own choice in closing it and aware that this was the moment everything either stopped or changed permanently.
She lowered her head and pressed her lips to his.
The sparks were immediate and real and nothing she had ever experienced with anyone else. His lips were soft and the kiss was soft and it lasted only a second before she lifted her head and looked at him and they both stared at each other in the quiet like they needed a moment to understand what had just happened.
His eyes were dark.
She kissed him again.
This one was different. More deliberate. She felt his hands grip her hips and pull her slightly closer and she let them and the kiss deepened and she forgot entirely that she was outside and visible and had somewhere she was supposed to be.
She forgot a lot of things.
His mouth moved with hers like they had been doing this for years and she moaned softly at the pressure of it and felt him respond to the sound and pulled him closer herself which surprised both of them. His hands moved to her waist and her fingers found his jaw and the kiss grew and she chased it without thinking about what she was chasing.
He rolled them gently until she was underneath him and she let him and the grass was cold through the back of her dress and she did not care even slightly. He settled between her and above her and his mouth found her neck and she tilted her head back and closed her eyes and felt everything.
His lips on her pulse point.
His hands moving carefully like he was aware of every place he touched and was making a decision about each one.
Her hands moving up his back underneath his shirt and finding cold smooth skin and feeling him react to that.
His voice low against her skin saying things that she would think about for a very long time afterward. How long he had wanted this. How she had been in his head since long before she had any idea. How beautiful she was right now in the dark with her curls in the grass and her hands on him.
She pulled him back up to her mouth.
The kiss got hungrier and she let it because she had been holding this back for weeks and she was tired of holding it and he was right there and it felt like relief and want and terror all at once.
Then Tommy's face appeared.
Not a thought. Not a warning. Just his face. His honest tired eyes asking do you even want to be with me. His voice saying I love you against her lips in the corridor after the game. His arms lifting her off the ground when they won.
She turned her head.
The kiss broke.
She pressed both palms flat against his chest and he lifted immediately. No resistance. He pulled back and looked at her and his expression shifted from wanting into something careful and concerned.
She sat up.
She moved out from under him and sat in the grass and pressed her fingers to her lips and stared at the ground in front of her and tried to find the air that had apparently left her body.
"Hey." He said softly. "What's wrong."
She shook her head.
He reached toward her face.
She flinched back. Not from fear. From the knowledge that if he touched her again she would not make the right decision.
"Don't." She said. "Please don't touch me right now."
He pulled his hand back.
She heard the shift in his breathing.
She shook her head again. "I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing with you."
She got to her feet and dusted the grass off her dress and pushed her hair back with both hands and kept her eyes anywhere that wasn't his face.
"This was a mistake." She said. "A horrible, horrible mistake."
"Carly." His voice was low.
"No." She said. "You can't do that. We can't." She pressed her fingers to her mouth briefly. "I have a boyfriend."
"Didn't seem that way a few minutes ago." He said. "And for the record we both kissed each other."
She scoffed and it came out wrong. Too sharp. She heard it and winced and couldn't take it back.
"Class partners." She said. "That's all we were supposed to be. I drew that line the first day and I crossed it and that's my fault, not yours, but it cannot happen again."
He stood up slowly. Brushed the grass off his jeans. His face had gone very still in the way it did when he was feeling something he had decided not to perform.
"You know it's interesting." He said. "Every single time we're together you bring up Lancaster. Every time. At first I thought it was just a defense mechanism, a way to keep your guard up with me." He looked at her steadily. "But now I wonder who you're actually trying to convince. Me or yourself."
Her throat tightened.
"Stop trying to psychoanalyze me." She said. "What happened tonight was an impulse. A moment of weakness. We got caught up and it escalated and it was wrong and I'm not one of your conquests."
He went very still.
"Conquest." He said the word slowly. Like he was testing how much it cost him. "Seriously Carly. Have I ever once given you a reason to think that's how I see you."
"It's not like you have a problem with Aurora." She said. "You're sleeping with her and kissing me and apparently that's just a normal Tuesday for you so what am I supposed to think."
She knew the moment it came out that she had gone too far.
She watched it land on his face. The hurt moving through his expression before he could cover it. Real hurt. Not performance. Not manipulation. Just the actual sting of someone reducing something real to something disposable and calling it self protection.
"I'm sorry." She said immediately. "That was. I shouldn't have said that."
"No." He said quietly. "You shouldn't have."
She wiped under her eyes quickly and looked at the gate. "This never should have happened. I don't know what's wrong with me lately. I'm not myself when I'm around you and I." She took a breath. "We're friends. That's what this is. That's all it can be. Can we just agree on that."
He said nothing.
"Niko." She said. "Please. Promise me this stays between us. That it doesn't change anything."
He looked at her for a long time.
She held his gaze even though it cost her.
"I don't really need more friends, Carly." He said it quietly. Not cruelly. Just honestly. And somehow that was worse.
She felt her stomach drop.
"I'm not going to tell you what you want to hear just so you can sleep tonight." He said. "What happened wasn't nothing. I'm not going to pretend it was." His jaw tightened. "But clearly you need me to so." He picked up his bag from the grass.
"Niko-"
He walked past her.
His shoulder caught hers deliberately as he passed, just like he had done in the hallway outside the headmistress' office all those weeks ago. Except this time it felt different. This time it felt like goodbye to something neither of them had officially named yet.
She watched him walk toward Silas Hall with his hands in his pockets and his back to her and she stood in the cold dark of the campus lawn with grass on her dress and her lips still warm and said nothing.
She had nothing left to say.
She stood there until he disappeared through the doors.
Then she sat back down on the grass because her legs made a decision without consulting her and she pressed both hands flat against the cold ground and breathed and told herself she had done the right thing.
She had done the right thing.
She kept saying it until it started to sound like something she believed.
POV: Niko
He made it to the corridor outside his room before he stopped walking.
He stood there with his back against the wall and his bag on the floor and his eyes closed and just breathed for a moment. Unnecessary breaths. He didn't need them. He took them anyway because it gave him something to do with his body while his head sorted through everything that had just happened.
She had kissed him.
She had kissed him and it had been everything he had been quietly building toward in his head since long before he was willing to admit it and then she had pulled away and reduced the whole thing to an impulse and called him a conquest in the same breath and he had walked away because the alternative was saying things he could not take back.
He pressed the back of his head against the wall.
He had been here before. Not with Carly specifically but with the general landscape of it. The part where you let someone in further than you planned and they use the access to remind you why you don't do that. He knew this territory. He had been navigating it his entire life starting long before Black River Academy and long before Carly McPherson showed up in his classroom and shoved him in the shoulder and laughed at things he said like it was completely natural.
He pushed off the wall and picked up his bag.
He was not going to do this.
He was not going to stand in a corridor and take inventory of all the ways tonight had gone wrong because that was exactly the kind of thing he had spent years refusing to do.
He opened his door.
The room was dark. Marcel and Enzo were out somewhere. He dropped his bag on the bed and sat down and reached under his textbooks for his sketchbook without thinking about it.
He opened it.
The last drawing was the church window. The way the colored light had come through it and landed on the stone floor. He had done it from memory the morning after he first found the building, before he had ever shown it to anyone.
He turned the page.
The next one was Carly.
Not a study. Not a quick sketch. A full drawing he had done three nights ago sitting at his desk at two in the morning when he couldn't sleep. Her face turned slightly to the side the way she sat when she was thinking about something she wasn't ready to say out loud. The curl falling forward over her cheek. The way her lips looked when she was about to say something honest.
He stared at it.
Then he closed the sketchbook and lay back on his bed and looked at the ceiling.
She had kissed him.
Whatever happened after that. Whatever she needed to tell herself to get through the night. That part was real and it was hers and she could not give it back no matter what she said on a lawn in the dark.
He knew what he felt.
He just wished he felt it for someone who wasn't so determined to talk herself out of feeling it back.
He closed his eyes.
The campus was quiet outside his window.
He lay there for a long time and did not sleep.
Author's Note:
He drew her at two in the morning three nights ago and didn't even realize what that meant until right now lying on his bed staring at the ceiling. And she is sitting on that lawn telling herself she did the right thing. They are both lying and they both know it and I cannot handle any of this. Drop a like tell me in the comments how you are feeling right now because I need to know I am not in this alone. Add us to your library because the fallout from tonight is coming and nothing at Black River Academy is going to be the same after this!