Chapter 69: Her Room
POV: Carly
Saturday arrived the way good things arrived when you had been looking forward to them too hard.
Too fast and somehow also not fast enough.
She had spent Friday night in a low-grade state of anticipation that she was managing with varying degrees of success. She had done her homework. She had practiced two spells. She had eaten dinner with Katy in their room which had become a thing apparently, eating dinner with Katy in their room, and she was not going to examine that too closely because it was nice and she did not want to jinx it.
Katy had asked approximately eleven questions about the date and Carly had answered approximately three of them and Katy had filled in the rest with her own theories which were mostly wrong and entirely entertaining.
She had texted Niko at eleven.
He had texted back immediately which she filed away with all the other small things she was collecting.
She had gone to sleep.
She had woken up Saturday morning with the specific feeling of something good being close and had lain in bed for ten minutes just letting it sit there before she got up.
Now it was six in the evening and she was standing in front of the mirror in Degrassi Hall in the dress she had been deliberating over since Thursday.
Red. Simple. The kind of simple that required effort to achieve. It hit just above the knee and had a neckline that was not excessive but was not nothing either and she had spent twenty minutes on her hair which was down and curled in a way that looked like she had not spent twenty minutes on it.
She looked at herself.
She looked good.
She felt good.
She felt nervous.
Katy appeared in the mirror behind her.
"You look obscene." She said approvingly.
"Thank you." Carly said.
"He's going to lose his mind." Katy said.
"That is the secondary goal." Carly said.
"What's the primary goal." Katy said.
Carly looked at herself in the mirror for a moment.
"Having a good night." She said. Simply. Like it was the most obvious thing.
Katy looked at her for a second.
"Yeah." She said. "You will."
Carly picked up her small bag and her jacket and took one last look at the room that had been her sanctuary and her hiding place and the site of more complicated feelings than she could currently count and walked out.
He was waiting at the gate.
Not leaning against anything. Not performing casualness. Just standing there in a dark jacket over a white shirt with his hands in his pockets and his curls pushed back slightly and the multiple necklaces catching the last of the evening light the way they always did.
He saw her coming.
She watched his face do the thing.
The full version. Unmanaged and immediate and just there on his face before he could decide to cover it or not.
He did not try to cover it.
She walked to him and stopped and they looked at each other for a moment.
"You look." He started. Stopped.
She raised an eyebrow.
"Extraordinary." He said. Like the word was the only accurate one and he had taken a moment to find it.
She felt the warmth move through her from her head to her feet.
"You look pretty good yourself." She said.
He offered his arm.
She took it.
They walked through the gate together into the Black River Falls evening. The fog was sitting lower than usual tonight, softening all the edges of the town into something almost gentle. The amber streetlights came on as they walked and she matched his pace without thinking about it and felt his arm solid under her hand and thought that this was what it was supposed to feel like.
Being somewhere you chose to be with someone you chose to be with.
"Where are we going." She said.
"You'll see." He said.
"You're going to make me wait." She said.
"I am." He said pleasantly.
She shook her head. "You enjoy this."
"Enormously." He confirmed.
She almost shoved him and then remembered they were dressed nicely and restrained herself.
He caught the instinct and looked at her sideways with that specific knowing expression and she looked forward and did not acknowledge it.
They walked for fifteen minutes. Not to the bus stop. Not toward the taco place. Somewhere she had not been before. Further into Black River Falls where the streets got quieter and the buildings got older and the fog sat heavier around the base of everything.
He stopped outside a building she did not recognize.
Small. Stone. Warm light coming through the windows. A sign above the door in simple letters that she had to lean slightly forward to read in the dimness.
A restaurant. Old and quiet and clearly the kind of place that had been here longer than most of the people who ate in it and had no interest in being anything other than exactly what it was.
She looked at him.
"I found it last year." He said. "On one of my walks. It does not advertise. Does not have a website. Does not have a sign that lights up." He paused. "It does have the best food I have found in this town."
She looked at the warm light in the windows.
"Nobody from school comes here." She said.
"Nobody from school knows it exists." He said. "It is just ours."
She looked at him.
He was watching her face with that expression that meant he was checking if he had gotten it right and was fairly confident he had and was waiting for confirmation.
She squeezed his arm.
"It's perfect." She said.
He exhaled. Fractionally. She felt it through his arm.
He held the door.
She walked in.
Inside was exactly what the outside had promised. Low light. Small tables. The smell of something extraordinary coming from somewhere she could not see. A few other people scattered across the room, all adults, all absorbed in their own evenings. A man playing something quiet on a piano in the corner that she had not noticed from the street.
A woman showed them to a table near the window.
She sat down and looked at the fog outside and the amber light on the street and the way it all looked from in here and felt something settle in her chest that she recognized as the specific feeling of being exactly where she was supposed to be.
She looked across the table at him.
He was already looking at her.
"Thank you." She said.
"You haven't eaten yet." He said.
"Not for the food." She said.
He looked at her steadily.
"For all of it." She said. "For not giving up. For waiting. For planning this three days before I had the sense to figure out what I wanted." She paused. "For being someone I did not expect you to be."
He was quiet for a moment.
"You were always going to figure it out." He said. "I just had to not get in the way of it."
She looked at him.
He looked back.
"I like you Niko Monroeson." She said. Simply and completely.
"I know." He said. And the way he said it meant I like you too and he knew she knew that and neither of them needed to say anything more about it.
She picked up the menu.
He picked up his.
The piano played quietly in the corner.
The fog pressed against the window outside.
The amber light was warm and steady.
She looked at the menu and felt him watching her over the top of his and did not look up because she was smiling again and could not seem to stop and had decided she was completely fine with that.
This was their night.
Just theirs.
Nobody else's.
She was going to enjoy every single second of it.
POV: Niko
He had been to a lot of restaurants.
In nearly two centuries he had eaten in places that no longer existed and places that would exist long after he was gone and places that sat somewhere comfortable in between. He had eaten alone and with people he had since forgotten and in cities that had changed so completely since his visits that he would not recognize them now.
He had never paid this much attention to whether a place was right before.
He watched her look at the menu with her chin in her hand and her curls falling forward slightly and the warm light of the room doing something to her face that he was going to draw later.
He was going to draw everything about tonight later.
He watched her lips move slightly as she read. She always did that. He had noticed it in the library weeks ago and had noticed it every time since. A small thing. One of many small things he had been collecting without quite deciding to.
She looked up and caught him watching.
He did not look away.
She shook her head slightly and looked back at the menu and he saw the smile she was not managing and felt something warm and specific move through his chest that he still did not entirely have a name for.
He thought about the cafeteria yesterday.
About her walking across it.
He had turned around and she had been five feet away with her tray and her chin up and he had thought in that specific half second before his brain caught up with his eyes that he was imagining it. That the afternoon had been so weighted with everything that had already happened that his mind had produced her walking toward him as some kind of wish fulfillment.
She had been real.
She had sat down next to him and asked if anyone was sitting there like she had been doing it every day for years.
He pressed his lips together.
He thought about what she had said at the table. About trusting someone who understood all parts of her. About not wanting to lose him for good. About having waited too long already and not wanting to waste more time.
He thought about I want you Niko said in a room full of people who had opinions about it and her saying it anyway.
He looked at her across the small table in the quiet restaurant that nobody from school knew existed and thought that this specific evening had been something he had wanted without knowing he was wanting it for longer than he was ready to admit.
She was laughing at something on the menu now. Quietly. To herself. She looked up to share it with him and he felt the laugh before she said anything and felt the room contract to just this table and just her face and thought he understood now what all the writers he had read over the decades were actually talking about.
He had not understood it before.
He understood it now.
He leaned forward slightly.
"What." He said.
She turned the menu toward him and pointed at something and he read it and it was genuinely funny and he laughed too and she looked pleased with herself and he thought yes.
This.
This was what it was supposed to feel like.