Chapter 73: Just Ours

POV: Carly

The drive took forty minutes.

She had expected him to tell her where they were going at some point during the drive. He did not tell her. He kept his arm around her and his lips close to her ear and said things she was not going to repeat to anyone and the town lights gave way to darker roads and darker trees and the fog sat against the windows the whole way and she stopped trying to figure out where they were going and just let it be unknown for once in her life.

It was harder than it should have been.

It was also kind of wonderful.

The car slowed and she looked out the window.

A building. Stone. Old in the specific way that meant intentionally maintained rather than neglected. Warm light coming from every window. The sound of something that might be music just barely audible from inside. A small sign above the door in simple lettering that she had to lean slightly forward to read.

An Italian restaurant.

Small. Quiet. The kind of place that had been here longer than most of its customers and had no interest in being discovered.

She looked at him.

"It's just outside Black River Falls." He said. "I found it about a year ago. One of my walks." He paused. "Nobody from school comes here. They do not know it exists."

She looked at the warm light in the windows.

"It's just ours." She said.

He looked at her with that expression.

"Yes." He said.

She squeezed his arm and he helped her out of the car and told the driver he would text when they were ready and put his hand on the small of her back and they walked through the door together.

Inside was everything the outside had promised. Low warm light. Small tables with white cloths. The smell of something extraordinary drifting from somewhere she could not see. A handful of other diners, all absorbed in their own evenings. A man at a piano in the far corner playing something slow and unhurried that she had not heard before and immediately wanted to hear again.

A woman in a dark jacket appeared and smiled at Niko with the specific recognition of someone who knew him and was pleased to see him.

"Mister Monroeson." She said warmly. "Right this way."

She led them to a booth at the back of the room that was separated from the rest of the dining space by a half wall of frosted glass. Private without being hidden. Their own corner of the room.

Carly slid in and looked at the candle on the table and the menu in front of her and the view through the window beside them of the lake across the road, its surface invisible in the fog but the suggestion of it there in the way the dark opened up beyond the glass.

She looked around the booth.

She looked at him.

"Are you surprised." He said.

She laughed softly. "I forgot this was meant to be a surprise. Yes. Completely."

He looked pleased with himself in the specific way he looked pleased with himself when he had gotten something right and knew it and was trying not to be obvious about knowing it.

She shook her head fondly and picked up the menu.

"This place." She said. "How does it exist and nobody from school knows about it."

"My father." He said. His voice shifted slightly on the word. The way it always did. "Victor assisted in building and funding this restaurant when it first opened forty years ago. He was the only one who believed in it when nobody else did. In return the family has always been accommodated here." He paused. "They also know what we are. The management has for forty years."

She looked up from her menu. "Everyone here knows you're vampires."

"The ones who matter." He said. "The staff turns over. New people do not always get the full picture immediately." He tilted his head slightly. "It is not something I advertise."

She looked at the room around them. The other diners. The pianist. The woman who had seated them now talking quietly at the front desk.

All of them here. All of them in the same building as a vampire. Most of them probably completely unaware.

She thought about what that meant and then she thought about the candlelight and the piano and his leg against hers in the booth and decided she was not going to think about it further right now.

He moved his arm around her shoulder and she leaned into him and the hostess brought menus and he ordered champagne without looking at the list and she watched his profile in the candlelight and thought that he was genuinely unfairly beautiful and she was not going to say that out loud.

"I really like when you call me your girlfriend." She said instead.

He looked at her.

She felt the heat in her cheeks and looked at the menu. "I know you said you were never a labels person. I just. I like it."

He was quiet for a moment.

"In the past." He said. "I was never with anyone I wanted to stay long enough to need one." He reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. His finger staying against her cheek for a moment. "You are something I have not experienced before."

She looked at him.

He looked back.

She kissed him.

Right there in the booth with the candlelight and the piano and the fog against the window and her hand on his jaw and his arm pulling her closer and she felt the kiss land somewhere deep and true and completely certain.

He was smiling against her mouth.

She pulled back and felt the smile on her own face and did not try to manage it.

She looked at the menu.

He looked at the menu.

The champagne arrived. Two flutes. The bottle buried in ice beside the table.

She picked hers up.

He picked his up.

They looked at each other.

"To new beginnings." She said.

"And all the chaos that follows." He said.

They drank.

The piano kept playing.

The fog sat against the window.

She stole a look at him sideways over her glass and found him already looking at her and looked back at the menu and felt so completely happy in this specific moment that she did not know what to do with it except sit in it and let it be what it was.

This was theirs.

Just theirs.

Nobody else had this.

She was going to enjoy every second of it.

POV: Niko

She had said it's just ours before he had finished saying it and he had not been prepared for that.

He had planned what he was going to say. Had the words ready. He had not planned for her to say it first with her face doing that thing it did when something landed exactly right and she was letting it.

He sat in the booth with the champagne and the candlelight and the piano and looked at the menu he had memorized over a year ago and felt something he had not felt in a very long time.

Content.

Not the performance of contentment. Not the managed version of it he had maintained across decades of being alive and not letting much of it register. The actual thing. Quiet and warm and sitting in his chest without requiring anything from him.

He thought about the drive. Her against his side and the fog at the windows and the forty minutes that had felt like both nothing and everything.

He thought about this morning. Her room. The record player. The sketchbook battle that had not been about the sketchbook at all.

He thought about standing at the gate at eight thirty two telling himself he was not panicking.

He had been deeply panicking.

He was not going to tell her that.

She was talking now. About the piano. About how she had never been to a restaurant that had a live piano before and had always wanted to. Her hands moving the way they did when she was genuinely interested in something. Animated and unmanaged and completely herself in a way he had learned she reserved for specific circumstances and specific people and he was one of those people now.

He was one of those people.

He looked at her face in the candlelight.

He thought about the first time he had drawn her. The cafeteria. The start of term. He had not been trying to draw her. He had looked across the room and his hand had moved and afterward he had looked at the page and felt something he had refused to examine for approximately two months.

He was examining it now.

She looked up and caught him.

"What." She said.

"Nothing." He said.

She narrowed her eyes. "You're doing the thing."

"What thing." He said.

"The looking at me thing." She said. "Where you look at me and don't say what you're thinking."

He considered that.

"I was thinking." He said carefully. "That I drew you before I knew you. That first week of term. In the cafeteria."

She went still.

"I did not decide to." He said. "My hand just did it. I looked at the page afterward and did not understand it for a long time." He looked at the champagne glass in his hand. "I understand it now."

She was quiet.

He looked at her.

Her eyes were doing something complicated and soft and she reached across and took his hand on the table and held it and did not say anything.

He did not say anything either.

The piano played.

The candle between them was warm and steady.

Outside the fog sat against the glass of the window and the suggestion of the lake was just visible in the dark beyond it and he thought that this was the thing all the writers he had read over the decades had been trying to describe and had only partially managed and he understood now why it had always felt slightly out of reach in the language.

Some things could not be fully captured.

They could only be sat inside and felt properly.

He was sitting inside this one and feeling it properly.

He squeezed her hand.

She squeezed back.

They ordered dinner and the pianist moved to something new and the champagne was very good and she made him laugh twice with things she said about the menu and he thought that this was the best evening he had spent in longer than he could currently calculate.

He was not going to tell her that either.

He was going to show her instead.

He kept showing her all through dinner and the second bottle of champagne and he was fairly certain she already knew.