Chapter 45 Both a Mess
POV: Carly
Stay with me tonight.
She stood there and let it sit for a moment.
Every reasonable part of her brain lined up its arguments. The housing rules. Tommy. Her coven. The fact that it was four in the morning and she had class in five hours and was standing on the lawn in her pajamas outside the vampire dormitory talking to a drunk boy who had just told her he slept with someone else twelve hours ago.
She had a very thorough list.
"I can't." She said.
"You can." He said simply.
"Niko we could both get suspended."
"We've done worse." He said.
She thought about the wall. The church. The festival. The bus. All the things she had told herself she would not do and then did anyway because he asked and because some part of her had stopped being able to say no to him somewhere along the way without fully noticing when it happened.
"My roommates will notice." She tried.
"Whitney won't be up until seven." He said. "That's almost three hours."
She looked at him.
He looked back. Patient and certain the way he always was when he had already decided how something was going to go.
"Only sleep." He said. "I mean it."
She raised an eyebrow.
"Scout's honor." He raised two fingers in a salute that was slightly off center from the scotch.
She pressed her lips together to keep the smile from getting out.
She looked back at Degrassi Hall one more time. The dark windows. The quiet building.
Then she looked at him.
"You have to set an alarm." She said. "I need to be back by six thirty."
His face did something she had not seen it do before. Something genuinely relieved and bright that he did not try to cover with a smirk or a comment. He just let it be there for a second and she filed that away with all the other small true things about him she had been collecting without meaning to.
He raised his hand to his forehead in a lopsided salute. "You got it, boss."
She shook her head and he fell into step beside her and they walked toward Silas Hall in the dark with the fog around their feet and the Black River Falls night quiet in every direction.
She looked at the building as they got closer. The unfamiliar architecture. The different layout of the windows and the doors.
"I've only been here once." She said.
"I know." He said.
"You never invited me in that time."
"I know." He said again.
She glanced at him sideways. "Why not."
He was quiet for a moment. "Because some things take longer to be ready for than others." He said. Simply and without performance.
She looked at the building and did not say anything back and let that be enough.
He held the door.
She walked in.
Silas Hall at four thirty in the morning was quieter than she expected and stranger than she expected and more normal than she expected all at the same time.
The corridors looked like corridors. The doors looked like doors. It smelled like any other building on campus, old wood and cleaning products and the faint cold that came with being close to the Black River Falls tree line.
She had built it into something more ominous in her head over five years and walking through it now with Niko beside her felt like being let in on a secret that turned out to be less dramatic than the rumor.
They moved quickly and quietly. He knew every corner and every camera angle the way she had come to expect from him. She stayed close and kept her footsteps light and followed his lead without question.
His room was at the end of the second floor corridor.
He opened the door and reached inside to flip the light on and she stepped through and stopped.
She did not know what she had been expecting.
A bed. A dresser. A desk covered in scattered papers and crumpled sketches. Movie posters on the wall. A bookshelf that took up most of one wall with more paperbacks than she could count. A record player in the corner with a stack of vinyls beside it. His painter's kit propped against the wall with blank canvases leaning beside it.
It was very Niko.
She walked to the bookshelf immediately because she could not help it and heard him laugh quietly behind her. She ran her fingers along the spines and felt herself relax in the specific way she always relaxed around books. Her eyes caught the worn copy of Wuthering Heights and she pulled it out.
"I thought you weren't a Brontë fan." She said.
"It's a classic." He said from behind her.
She turned with the book in her hand and raised one eyebrow at him.
He shrugged. "Don't read into it."
"I'm absolutely reading into it." She said.
He shook his head with that small real smile and she put the book back and kept looking.
"You can tell a lot about a person from what's in their room." She said.
He came to stand beside her. "And what does mine say."
She pretended to think about it. "Dark angsty artist with a tortured soul. Trying to conquer his demons before they conquer him."
She felt him go slightly still.
She looked at him.
His expression had shifted. Not upset. Just landed somewhere real.
"I didn't mean it as an insult." She said quietly.
"I know." He said.
They stood at the bookshelf together for a moment and she could feel the weight of the day sitting between them. Everything that had been said and not said and done and not done.
"Now." He said, clearing his throat and moving away from whatever that was. "About sleeping arrangements."
She tensed slightly.
"It's a generous bed." He said. "And I have an unreasonable number of pillows."
She looked at the bed. Then at him.
"You said only sleep." She said.
"And I meant it." He said. "You can take the bed and I'll take the floor. No argument."
"You're not sleeping on your own floor." She said immediately.
He gave her a look that said he had been expecting exactly that response.
She crossed her arms. "Don't look at me like that."
"I'm not looking at you like anything." He said pleasantly.
"We can share." She said. Then felt the heat in her face and looked at the bookshelf. "It's a big bed. It'll be fine."
He said nothing.
She looked back at him.
He was doing his very best not to smile and losing the battle.
"Don't." She said.
"I'm not doing anything." He said.
She pointed at him. "That face. Stop making that face."
He pressed his lips together.
She turned back to the bookshelf and picked up another book to have something to do with her hands and heard him move toward the bathroom to clean up and told herself this was completely normal.
Two people. One bed. Completely normal.
She was absolutely fine.
Author's Note:
She walked into Silas Hall. She is standing in his room at four thirty in the morning holding his copy of Wuthering Heights and telling herself she is absolutely fine. She is not fine. None of us are fine. Drop a like and tell me in the comments what you think is going to happen next?