Chapter 59: I Got You

POV: Carly

She did not know how long she stood there.

Long enough that the gym noise shifted from the specific sound of an event happening to the specific sound of an event wrapping up. Sneakers on the court. The band stopping mid-song. The crowd beginning to move.

She had not moved.

Her arms were at her sides and her eyes were burning and she was staring at the gym doors that Whitney had walked through and thinking about ten years. About the girl who had been there for every hard thing since they were twelve. About every conversation and every crisis and every moment she had been the person Carly called first.

Gone.

In a corridor outside a pep rally.

She heard him before she felt him. The quiet footsteps. The specific quality of the air when he was near that she had catalogued without planning to.

His hands came around her forearms from behind. Firm and steady and soothing.

She almost leaned back into him.

She caught herself and stepped forward instead and turned around.

He looked at her face.

His expression did something complicated. Something that was trying to be neutral and was not quite making it.

"You alright." He said quietly.

She laughed. It came out broken. "My best friend just told me she cannot be my friend anymore. So no. Not really."

He nodded slowly. "I know."

"Were you listening the whole time." She said.

"Yes." He said simply.

She looked at him.

He did not pretend he had not been. She appreciated that even through everything.

"She's wrong about me." He said. Not defensively. Just stating it. "I know you know that."

"I know." She said.

"And she's wrong to put the sins of one vampire on every other one." He said. "Including me."

"I know that too." She said.

He looked at her carefully. "But she's not wrong to be scared. Given what her father did."

Carly blinked.

He held her gaze. "People who have been hurt that way do not stop being hurt just because you find one exception to the rule. Her fear is real even if it's misdirected."

She stared at him. "Did you just defend Whitney."

He looked slightly uncomfortable. "I defended the principle. There's a difference."

"Sure." She said.

Something loosened in her chest. Just slightly. Just enough.

She wiped under her eyes carefully and looked at the ceiling and breathed.

"She's going to judge me for the rest of our time here." She said quietly. "She's going to tell the coven. They're all going to look at me differently."

"Probably." He said.

"You're terrible at comforting people." She said.

"I know." He said. "I'm working on it."

She looked at him.

He was standing in the corridor with his hands back in his pockets and his expression doing that thing she had stopped being able to resist. The soft version. The one that only came out in empty rooms and dark corners and the specific quiet spaces they had carved out for themselves.

"She said she's not going to tell Tommy." Carly said. "That it's mine to do."

He nodded. "When."

"Soon." She said. "I mean it this time."

"I know." He said. And it sounded like he actually believed her.

She looked at the gym doors. The crowd noise was fully shifting now. People were going to start coming through those doors in the next few minutes and she was standing in a corridor with red eyes and a lopsided ponytail and her supposed enemy and she did not currently have the energy to care about any of it.

"I lost my best friend." She said. Quietly. Just saying it out loud to make it real.

He stepped forward.

She looked up at him.

He opened his arms.

She stared at them for a moment. At him. At the invitation of it which she had not expected and which was more than she knew what to do with.

Then she walked into them.

His arms came around her and she pressed her face against his chest and the tears came properly this time. Not the polished kind. The real ones. The kind that had nothing to do with anything except ten years of friendship ending in a hallway and the specific grief of losing someone you thought was permanent.

His arms tightened.

She felt his hand moving slowly up and down her back and his chin dropping to the top of her head and she cried properly and let herself and did not try to manage it or time it or perform a version of it that looked acceptable.

He did not say anything.

He just held her.

She had not expected him to be good at this. He had not expected it either, she could feel the slight stiffness at the beginning of it. The careful deliberateness of how he positioned his arms. Like someone following instructions for something he had never done before.

But he stayed.

He held on and he stayed and the stiffness dissolved into something genuine and she felt his arms tighten further like he had made a decision about it.

She breathed.

In and out against his chest.

The gym doors pushed open somewhere behind her and a wave of students started filing out and she could feel the awareness of it but could not make herself pull away and he did not move either, just shifted slightly so his back was more toward the corridor and she was less visible in it.

Quietly. Without making a thing of it.

She felt that land somewhere deep.

She pressed her lips together against his chest and closed her eyes and let herself have thirty more seconds of this before she had to go back to being someone who had things together.

She felt his lips against the top of her head.

Just for a moment.

Then he said it quietly into her hair.

"I got you love." He said. "I got you. Let's get out of here yeah?"

She nodded against his chest.

He kept one arm around her as they turned toward the exit and she let him lead them out into the cold grey afternoon of Black River Falls where the fog was sitting against the fence line as always and the campus was beginning to fill with the noise of the day ending.

She breathed the cold air in.

He stayed close enough that their arms brushed as they walked.

She did not move away from that.

She thought about Tommy and the conversation that was coming and her coven and what Whitney was going to say and all the things that were now set in motion that could not be unset.

She thought about all of it and kept walking and let his arm stay against hers and told herself she was going to figure it out.

She was going to figure it all out.

One thing at a time.