Chapter 41 Aurora
POV: Niko
By the time he made it back to his room it was already dinner hour.
His phone had twelve notifications. Marcel. Enzo. Two from Aurora. One from Reba that just said are you alive which almost made him smile.
He replied to Marcel with fine and put the phone face down on the desk.
He dropped his bag on the floor and sat on the bed and pulled his sketchbook out and opened it before he had decided to open it. Habit. The same reflex he had developed over decades of needing somewhere to put things that had nowhere else to go.
He looked at the page in front of him.
Her handwriting. The formula she had worked through at the shared desk three weeks ago. He had drawn the shape of it without planning to and had not gone back to that page since and here it was looking back at him now.
He closed the sketchbook.
He needed to feed.
Not because his body was demanding it yet but because the specific restlessness sitting in his chest was the kind that got worse without blood and he already knew how this evening was going to go if he let it sit untreated. The anger would build. His control would slip. He would say something to someone that he could not take back or do something he would spend the next century wishing he hadn't.
He knew himself well enough to know that.
He was still sitting on the bed staring at nothing when the knock came.
He did not move for a moment.
Then he stood and opened the door.
Aurora was in the corridor with her bag over one shoulder and that expression she wore when she had already decided what the visit was about and was giving him the courtesy of pretending it was spontaneous.
She looked at him.
He looked back.
"So you're alive." She said. "That's good to know. I had money on it but Marcel was starting to get dramatic."
"I'm fine." He said.
"You keep saying that." She said. "It keeps not being convincing." She tilted her head slightly. "Are you going to let me in or are we doing this in the hallway."
He stepped back from the door.
She came in and looked around the empty room with those sharp green eyes that missed very little. Enzo and Marcel were still at dinner. The room was quiet and dim and it smelled like the cold air he had dragged in with him.
She turned to face him.
"You want to tell me what happened today." She said.
"No." He said simply.
"Okay." She said. "You want to tell me why you look like someone took something from you."
He said nothing.
She crossed her arms and looked at him with that patient expression she had developed specifically for him over five years of knowing him. The one that said she was not leaving and was not going to push and was simply going to stand there until he ran out of reasons to keep her at arm's length.
He sat back down on the bed.
She sat beside him.
They were quiet for a moment.
"I'm not asking you to talk." She said. "I know better than that." She looked at her hands in her lap. "I just don't like seeing you like this."
He looked at the wall.
"You haven't been yourself since the start of term." She said carefully. "And I've been trying to give you space because that's what you always want and I've been telling myself it's the thing with your family or the new semester or just one of your moods." She paused. "But I don't think it's any of those things."
He said nothing.
She looked at him sideways.
He kept his eyes on the wall.
"Babe." She said quietly.
He closed his eyes briefly.
She reached up and pressed her palm to his cheek and turned his face toward her and he let her because fighting it required energy he did not have and she was not the one he was angry at and she had never been anything other than honest with him about what she wanted even when he was not honest back.
Her green eyes were steady on his.
"Let me be here." She said. "You don't have to say anything. Just let me be here."
He looked at her.
She was beautiful. She had always been beautiful and he knew it and she knew he knew it and that had never been the problem between them. The problem was the gap between what she wanted from him and what he had ever been capable of giving and the fact that she had been standing in that gap for six months hoping it would close.
He had been letting her stand there.
That was not fair of him.
He knew that.
He also knew that he was sitting on a bed in an empty room feeling like something had been quietly removed from his chest and she was the only person who had shown up and he was tired and his hand ached faintly where it had already healed and he did not want to be alone tonight.
He dropped his gaze.
"Aurora." He said.
"Don't." She said softly. "Don't explain it. Don't apologize for it. Just." She moved closer. "Let me be here."
Her hands were on his chest now. Gentle and familiar. She knew his silences the way people only did when they had spent real time learning them and she was not asking him for anything except presence.
He should tell her.
He should tell her that the thing she was sensing was not going to resolve itself the way she hoped. That the gap between them was not closing. That he had spent the past several weeks discovering something about himself that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with a blonde witch who had just told him in a locked classroom that he would never be compatible with her world.
He should say all of that.
He looked at Aurora's face.
He said none of it.
She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his jaw. Light and unhurried.
He closed his eyes.
He was not going to feel better after this.
He knew that too.
But he was tired and raw and she was here and he was not strong enough tonight to do the right thing and the wrong thing and send her away all at once.
He let her stay.
POV: Aurora
She knew something was different.
She had known it since she walked through that door and looked at his face. Niko in a bad mood was something she could read in her sleep. The tight jaw. The short answers. The way he moved through a room like he was making calculations about every person in it.
This was not a bad mood.
This was something quieter and more serious than that and it had a shape she recognized even if she could not yet put a name to it.
She pressed her lips to his jaw again and felt him breathe and stayed very still and let him have whatever this moment needed to be for him.
She had been doing that for six months.
Being patient. Being present. Being available in whatever form he needed without asking him to define what any of it meant because she already knew asking would make him close off entirely. She had told herself that was fine. That it was enough. That eventually the distance would close on its own if she just stayed.
She was starting to wonder if she had been wrong about that.
She did not move.
She stayed where she was and kept her breathing even and listened to the quiet room around them and turned something over slowly in the back of her mind.
The lounge earlier.
The way he had torn those pages. Not from frustration with the sketchbook. From somewhere deeper than that. The kind of physical release that came from something emotional that had nowhere else to go.
She had watched his face when he looked up.
She had seen where his eyes went.
She had clocked it and filed it away and told herself she was reading too much into it because reading too much into things was easier than reading them correctly.
She pressed her lips together.
She was done reading it wrong.
She stayed where she was because tonight was not the night for this conversation. He was not in a state where it would land the way it needed to. She was not going to waste the most important thing she had probably ever needed to say to him on a night when he could not actually hear it.
But she was going to say it.
Soon.
She owed herself that much at least.
She rested her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes and told herself she was fine.
It sounded about as convincing as when he said it.