Chapter 44 I Slept With Aurora
POV: Carly
She did not move.
The cold air sat around them and the fog pressed in from the tree line and she stood on the grass in her pajamas at four in the morning and felt the words land on her one at a time like something physical.
I slept with Aurora.
She kept her face still.
She was very good at keeping her face still.
"It was after our conversation yesterday." He continued. Scratching the back of his neck and looking at the ground between them. "I went back to my room and she came up. She was saying how much she missed me, being with me and all that." He paused. "At first I wasn't in the mood but I needed the distraction and one thing led to another and." He stopped. "It happened."
Carly swallowed.
She felt her chest doing something she was not going to name or examine or acknowledge in any way.
"Okay." She said.
His eyebrows came together. "Okay? I tell you I slept with the girl you can't stand and all you say is okay?"
"What do you want me to say." Her voice came out even. She was proud of that.
"Something." He said. "Anything besides that."
"You want me to cry about it." She said. "Crumble on the ground. Make a scene."
"I want you to be honest." He said. "For once."
She felt the heat move up the back of her neck. "I don't have any claim on you Niko. What you do is none of my business."
He laughed. Short and dark and nothing like his real laugh. "Right."
He started pacing.
She watched him move in a small circle on the grass, pulling at his curls with one hand like he was trying to physically remove whatever was running around inside his head.
"You want to know why I told you." He said. Still pacing. Still not looking at her. "I told you because I wanted to hurt you." He stopped and faced her. "That was my goal. I wanted you to feel it."
She held his gaze.
"The whole time I was with her." He said quieter now. "I was thinking about you. The whole time." He looked at his feet. "I do that a lot lately. Think about you. Even when I don't want to."
Her throat tightened.
"Aurora is great." He said. More to himself than to her. "She's a good person. She's my friend. And I treated her like something disposable last night because she lets me and sometimes I feel guilty about it." He looked up. "But at least she wants me." He pointed at himself. The gesture almost desperate. "She actually wants me. And I used her to get back at the girl who doesn't."
Carly pressed her lips together hard.
She was not going to cry.
She was absolutely not going to stand on this lawn at four in the morning and cry in front of a drunk Niko Monroeson who had just told her he slept with someone else.
He kept going.
"Do you know what it's like." He said. "Watching you with Lancaster every day. In the hallways and the cafeteria and everywhere on this campus. Knowing he can touch you and be with you in public whenever he wants and I can't. That I'll never be able to because you won't let me." His voice dropped. "That I'm crazy about this girl and I can't tell a single person about it."
Her breath hitched quietly.
He was still pacing, slower now. Running one hand through his curls repeatedly like the motion was keeping him upright.
"So yeah." He said. "That's why I needed to come here. That's what I needed to say."
She stood there in the cold and the fog and the dark and felt every word of it sitting in her chest like something she had been trying to put down for weeks and could not.
She swallowed once.
"Well." She said carefully. "I kissed Tommy after. Earlier tonight." She paused. "And it wasn't great either."
He looked up at her.
She watched it move through his face. The initial flash of something that looked like jealousy. Then the recalibration as he processed the rest of what she said.
The corners of his mouth started to move.
Hers did too before she could stop them.
They stood on the lawn in the middle of the night and looked at each other and something shifted in the space between them. Not fixed. Not resolved. But honest in a way that the last twenty four hours had not been.
He laughed softly.
She laughed too.
"We're both a mess." He said.
"I guess so." She shook her head slowly.
He looked at her for a long moment. The gloss in his eyes from the scotch had not fully cleared but the rawness underneath it was completely sober.
"I'm not ready to say goodnight." He said quietly.
She looked at the dark building behind her. The amber path lights. The fog sitting on everything.
"Neither am I." She said.
He watched her face.
"Stay with me tonight." He said.
POV: Aurora
She had woken up alone.
She had known she would. Niko never stayed. That was one of the things about him that had never changed in all the time she had known him. He was there and then he wasn't and she had learned not to make a thing of it because making a thing of it only created a version of a conversation that went nowhere.
She lay in his bed for a while after she realized he was gone. The room was quiet. Marcel and Enzo had come back at some point in the night and she could hear one of them snoring through the wall.
She stared at the ceiling.
Last night had not been what she thought it was going to be.
She had gone to his room because she missed him and because he had looked wrecked in the lounge and because being there for him was the thing she did and she was good at it. She had told herself that was enough. That being the person who showed up was its own kind of value.
She had kissed him and he had kissed her back and somewhere in the middle of it she had felt it.
The absence.
He was there and he was present and his hands were on her and he was kissing her back but some essential part of him was not in the room. Was not even in the building. Was somewhere else entirely with someone she was becoming increasingly certain she could name.
She had felt it and she had kept going because stopping meant saying something and she was not ready to say it yet.
She sat up and pushed her hair back and looked at the empty space beside her.
She thought about the lounge.
About where his eyes had gone when he looked up from the ruined sketchbook.
She had her answer. She had probably had it for longer than she wanted to admit.
She got up and found her jacket and her bag and let herself out quietly without waking anyone.
The corridor was empty. The campus was still dark outside the windows.
She walked back to her room alone and sat on the edge of her bed and thought about what she was going to do with everything she now knew.
She was not angry.
That surprised her a little.
She was sad and she was tired and she was done pretending she did not see what was directly in front of her.
But she was not angry.
Not yet anyway.