Chapter 63: Aurora

POV: Aurora

She made it to the corridor before she stopped walking.

Not because she needed to. Because she needed a second where nobody was watching her face and this corridor was empty and she could afford one second.

She pressed her back against the wall and looked at the ceiling.

She was not going to cry.

She had cried exactly once in the past four years over a boy and had decided afterward that it was not something she was going to make a habit of. She was not starting now. Not in a school corridor at lunch hour because of something she had seen coming for weeks and had been choosing not to look at directly.

She had looked at it directly now.

She breathed.

She thought about sitting on his bed two weeks ago and feeling the absence. That specific quality of him being there and not being there simultaneously that she had been trying to name ever since. She had her name for it now. She had watched it walk across a cafeteria with a tray of tacos and sit down next to him and she had watched his face and she knew exactly what it was called.

She pushed off the wall.

She was not angry at Carly McPherson.

She wanted to be. It would be simpler. She could build something clean and specific out of anger and aim it in one direction and not have to deal with the rest of it.

But she had been honest in there. More honest than she had planned to be when she stood up. He had been thinking about someone else the last time they were together and she had known it in real time and had kept going because stopping meant saying it out loud and she had not been ready.

She was ready now.

She was furious at him.

Not because of Carly. Not because he had feelings for someone else because she had known that was possible and had been managing the possibility for months. She was furious because he had not told her. Because she had been the person who showed up every time without asking for anything in return and the courtesy of a conversation before a cafeteria ambush was not too much to have asked for.

She had deserved better than finding out like that.

She knew she had.

She started walking.

She thought about what she had said on the way out. The part about him being reminded every day of what he was. The part about one of them getting hurt.

She had meant it.

Not as a threat. As a genuine belief that she was holding onto because it was easier than believing the alternative. Easier than considering that maybe Carly McPherson had walked into something eyes open and decided it was worth it anyway.

Easier than admitting that the look on his face when she sat down next to him was the look she had been waiting for him to aim at her for six months and it had never come.

She stopped outside the doors to the east corridor and stood there.

She thought about five years of knowing him. About the friendship that had existed before anything else and had been the best part of all of it. About the way he laughed when something actually surprised him and the sketchbook he carried everywhere and the specific version of himself he only showed in very particular moments.

She had been one of those moments once.

She pressed her lips together.

She was not going to lose the friendship over this.

She was going to be angry for a while. She was allowed to be angry. And then she was going to have an actual conversation with him, the one he should have initiated, and they were going to figure out what came after this because five years was not something she was prepared to throw away over a witch with good timing.

But that was later.

Right now she pushed through the corridor door and walked toward the east stairwell and let herself feel all of it in the empty space where nobody could see it.

She had earned that much.