Chapter 61: Is There Someone Else
POV: Carly
She spent thirty minutes in the bathroom.
Not crying this time. Just breathing and fixing her makeup and looking at herself in the mirror and having the specific internal conversation that came with having just done the right thing in the worst possible way.
She had done it.
It was done.
She pressed her hands flat against the sink and looked at her reflection and thought about Tommy's face when he walked away and let herself feel the weight of that for exactly sixty seconds.
Then she straightened up.
She combed her fingers through her hair. Reapplied her lip gloss. Smoothed her skirt.
She thought about lying in Niko's bed last night. His arm around her waist and the quiet and the soft kisses and the specific peace of fifteen minutes that had felt more honest than months of anything else.
She thought about what she wanted.
She knew what she wanted.
She took a breath and walked out.
The cafeteria was loud and full and buzzing the way it always was at lunch. Every table occupied. Every faction in its corner. The specific organized chaos of Black River Academy at peak hour.
She got in line.
She got tacos.
She looked across the room.
Tommy's pack table. Tommy was not there yet which meant he was still processing somewhere. She noted that and moved on.
Her coven table. Whitney was there. Laughing at something. Looking up once and their eyes met for half a second and then both of them looked away.
The vampire table.
Niko was at the end of it picking at his food without eating it. His friends talking around him. Aurora across from him. Enzo beside him. Mauricio at the far end.
There was an empty seat next to Niko.
She looked at it.
She looked at him.
He had not seen her yet.
She thought about every time she had looked at that table from across the room over five years and felt nothing but hostility toward everything it represented. She thought about every rule she had been raised on and every reason she had been given for those rules and what she had discovered when she finally looked at those reasons clearly.
She thought about a church with colored glass windows. A bus in the fog. A festival with strings of lights. A wall she had climbed over twice and would climb over a hundred more times.
She thought about I got you love said into her hair in a corridor.
She picked up her tray.
And she walked across the cafeteria.
The room did not go silent immediately. It was gradual. Like a wave moving outward from where she was walking. She felt it more than heard it. The conversations dropping. The heads turning. The whispers starting behind her and spreading.
She kept walking.
Head up. Pace steady. Eyes on the seat next to him.
She watched Enzo stop talking mid-sentence and look past Niko. Watched Mauricio follow his eyeline. Watched Aurora's expression shift into something unreadable.
Watched Niko frown at the change in his friends' attention and turn around to see what they were looking at.
She was five feet away when their eyes met.
She watched his face do something she had never seen it do before.
Complete. Utter. Blankness.
Not the controlled kind. The actual kind. The kind that happened when something caught you so off guard that the performance had not had time to load yet and what was underneath it was just pure unfiltered reaction.
His eyes were wide.
His mouth was slightly open.
She almost laughed.
She reached the table and stopped and looked at the empty chair beside him.
"Is anyone sitting here." She said.
The cafeteria had gone quiet enough that the question carried.
Niko stared at her.
She raised an eyebrow.
He blinked. "Uh. What."
She kept her face as straight as she could manage. "I asked if anyone was sitting here."
He shook his head. Once. Barely.
"Thanks." She said and pulled the chair out and sat down and put her tray on the table and tucked her hair behind her ears and picked up her taco and took a bite.
The cafeteria noise was still reduced to approximately thirty percent of its usual volume.
She chewed.
Looked at him sideways.
He was still staring at her.
She swallowed. "How are you not eating right now. I'm starving." She said.
He said nothing.
She held out the second taco. "Want one. I got enough for two."
He shook his head again like a person operating on a significant delay.
She shrugged and put it back and kept eating and felt the eyes of the entire school on the back of her head and decided she did not care even slightly.
She had done harder things than this in the past two weeks.
She could eat a taco.
POV: Niko
His brain had stopped working.
That was the only explanation he had for why he was sitting completely still with his mouth slightly open watching Carly McPherson eat a taco at his table in the middle of the Black River Academy cafeteria in front of every single student currently present.
He had felt the shift in the room before he turned around. Had felt it the way he felt most things, that specific awareness. He had turned expecting something ordinary.
It was not ordinary.
She had been walking toward him with her tray and her chin up and that expression she wore when she had made a decision she was not going to unmake. The whole cafeteria tracking her movement and she had not looked at a single one of them.
Just him.
He was fairly certain he had stopped breathing entirely which was not necessary but happened anyway.
She had sat down.
She had asked if the seat was taken like she was asking about the weather and then she had just. Started eating.
He looked at the side of her face.
She glanced at him. "You're staring."
He closed his mouth.
She almost smiled. He could see it trying to get out and being suppressed with significant effort.
He leaned slightly toward her. "What are you doing." He said it low and careful.
"Eating lunch." She said.
"Carly."
"I know what you mean." She said. She set her taco down and turned slightly to face him and her eyes were nervous and bright and certain all at the same time. "I talked to Tommy this morning."
He went still.
"It's done." She said quietly.
He looked at her face.
She looked back.
He thought about the last several weeks. Every time she had pulled back. Every time she had said it was a mistake or I don't know or we can't. Every time he had watched her walk away and stood in empty rooms processing it and told himself he was done and then not been done.
He thought about the passage he had recited in the quad with a tear he had not let fall.
He thought about her walking across a cafeteria full of people who were all watching and choosing to keep walking anyway.
He put his hand over hers under the table.
She exhaled.
He heard it.
She was rambling now. Something about labels and what he had earned and the people in her life who knew the real her and he let her go because she had been holding it and she needed to let it out and every word of it was landing somewhere in his chest that he did not have a name for yet.
She said I want you Niko.
He stopped her.
He leaned forward and kissed her.