Chapter 67: Bench

POV: Carly

They landed in the east corridor.

The quiet hit her immediately after the noise of the cafeteria and she stood still for a moment just breathing and letting the silence settle around her.

Her legs were steady enough now. The worst of the exhaustion had passed into a more manageable version of itself. The nosebleed had stopped. Her head still felt slightly too full but that was clearing too.

Niko sat down on the bench along the wall and looked at her.

She sat down beside him.

For a moment neither of them said anything.

"You nearly brought the ceiling down." He said.

"I know." She said.

"With your brain." He said.

"I know." She said again.

"That was." He stopped. Looked at the corridor ahead of them. "Extraordinary."

She looked at him sideways. "You're bleeding from your ears."

He reached up and touched the side of his head and looked at his fingers. "Hm." He said. Like it was mildly interesting.

"Does it hurt." She said.

"Not anymore." He said.

She pulled another napkin from her pocket and held it toward him.

He looked at it.

"Take it." She said.

He took it. Did not use it. Just held it between his fingers.

She shook her head and took it back and pressed it carefully to the side of his head herself and felt him go slightly still at the contact.

"Stop." He said.

"I'm helping you." She said.

"I don't need help." He said.

"You have blood coming out of your ear." She said. "So."

He pressed his lips together and let her continue.

She cleaned up the blood carefully and he sat there and tolerated it with the specific expression of someone who was finding the whole experience more affecting than they wanted to admit.

She pulled the napkin away.

He looked at her.

"Thank you." He said quietly.

"You're welcome." She said.

They sat in the quiet for a moment.

"You threw the first punch." She said.

"I did." He said.

"I told you violence wasn't the answer." She said.

"And then you screamed so loudly you gave everyone in the room a simultaneous aneurysm." He said. "So."

She opened her mouth.

Closed it.

"That is different." She said.

"Is it." He said pleasantly.

"It was to stop the fight." She said.

"And my punch was to stop him from talking to you like that." He said simply. "Same principle."

She looked at the wall across from them and thought about that.

She had a response forming and then she thought about the specific moment Niko had moved in front of her. Before the punch. Before anything. Just stepped into the space between her and Tommy's words without making a production of it.

She let the response go.

"You can't do that every time someone says something awful." She said instead.

"I understand that's what you want." He said. "And I will do my best. But I need you to understand that when someone says something like that about you directly in front of me, my best has limits."

She looked at him.

He looked back.

"I know you can handle yourself." He said. "I have personally witnessed you handle yourself in ways that are genuinely impressive. But you cannot ask me to stand there and hear things like that aimed at you and do nothing. That is not something I am capable of." He paused. "I will throw a punch at every Tommy Lancaster who comes along if that is what it takes."

"That is a terrible policy." She said.

"Probably." He said. "It is still my policy."

She pressed her lips together.

She thought about no one has ever been that person for her before. About how she had spent years being everyone's everything and nobody's first priority and the specific disorienting feeling of being someone's first priority now.

"Thank you." She said quietly.

He looked at her.

"For stepping in front of me." She said. "Even if what came after it was a complete disaster."

"The punch was clean." He said. "Everything after was the disaster."

She almost laughed. "The punch was the beginning of the disaster."

"Agree to disagree." He said.

She shook her head and looked at her hands in her lap.

"Boyfriend huh." He said after a moment.

She felt her face do something embarrassing.

"I heard what you said at the table." He said. "Before I kissed you. All of it."

"I know." She said.

"You called me your boyfriend." He said.

"I know." She said again.

"In front of the entire school." He said.

"I was there." She said. "I remember."

He was quiet for a moment.

She looked at him.

His expression was doing that thing it did in the specific moments when he had decided to stop performing something and just let what was actually there sit on his face without covering it.

It was warm.

Genuinely warm.

She had not seen that particular version of it before. Not exactly. It was new and she was going to have to get used to it and she was completely prepared to do exactly that.

"I like it." He said. Quietly.

She felt it land in her chest.

"Yeah." She said.

He reached over and took her hand.

She let him.

They sat on the bench in the empty corridor with the burst light from the cafeteria still faintly audible as people cleared out and the Black River Falls afternoon light coming grey and steady through the window at the end of the hall and it was the most peaceful moment they had managed in days.

She did not want to move.

She moved anyway.

"I have to go to class." She said.

"You could not go to class." He said.

"I could." She said. "But I'm not going to."

He sighed.

She stood and straightened her skirt and fixed her hair and looked down at him still sitting on the bench with his elbows on his knees and his curls slightly destroyed from the fight and that expression still on his face.

She leaned down and kissed him quickly.

Pulled back.

His hand caught hers before she could go far.

She looked at him.

"I'll text you." He said.

"I'll text you back." She said.

He let her hand go.

She walked down the corridor and did not look back and smiled the whole way to class and did not try to stop it.

POV: Niko

He sat on the bench for a while after she left.

Not brooding. He was specifically not brooding. He was just sitting and thinking which was a different thing and he was going to continue insisting on that distinction.

He turned the napkin over in his hands.

He thought about the cafeteria. About Carly walking across it with her tray and her chin up and every eye in the room following her and her not caring about a single one of them. About her sitting down next to him and asking if anyone was sitting there like it was nothing when it was clearly everything.

He thought about what she had said at the table.

All of it.

He had kissed her before she finished because there was a point at which words were not the right response anymore and that had been the point. But he had heard every word and each one had landed somewhere specific and he was sitting on this bench turning them over one at a time.

She had said I want you Niko.

In a room full of people who had opinions about that and she had said it anyway.

He pressed his lips together.

He thought about Saturday.

He had been planning it for three days. Had thought about it carefully in the specific way he thought about things he actually cared about getting right. He was not a planner by nature. He operated on instinct and impulse and had done so for long enough that it had become indistinguishable from personality.

But this he had planned.

He had already secured the off campus passes from the office. Had already made the reservation. Had already thought through the details in the order that they needed to happen and felt reasonably certain that all of them were correct.

He was not nervous about it.

He was slightly nervous about it.

He pulled out his sketchbook and opened it to a clean page and let his pencil move.

He drew the corridor. The bench. The window at the end with the grey light coming through it.

He drew the empty space beside him where she had been sitting.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then he wrote the date in the corner of the page. The way she underlined things twice when they mattered. He had picked that up from watching her for months and did not examine what it meant that he was doing it now.

He closed the sketchbook.

Saturday.

He was going to make sure Saturday was exactly right.

He stood up and picked up his bag and walked toward his next class and thought that for a day that had contained a cafeteria declaration and a supernatural brawl and a witch nearly bringing the ceiling down with her brain he was in a remarkably good mood.

He supposed that said something.

He was going to let it say it.