Chapter 75: Silence

POV: Carly

The car was warm and quiet.

She had her cheek against the window and watched the Black River Falls trees move past in the dark and the fog sitting against the glass and thought about the evening. All of it. In order.

The booth. The champagne. The piano. Him saying I drew you before I knew you and her not having words for it and taking his hand instead.

The waitress. The threading. The conversation after.

She was not angry.

She had checked for anger the way she always checked. Methodically. Going through it and looking at each piece and deciding what it actually was instead of what it presented itself as.

What she actually felt was complicated in a way she did not yet have clean language for. Not anger. Not fear. Something more like the specific unsettled feeling of being reminded that the person she was sitting beside was not a version of a person she had encountered before and was not going to be made simpler by liking him.

She liked him enormously.

That did not make him simple.

She had known that. She had known it going in and had chosen it anyway and she was not regretting the choice. She was just sitting with the full weight of it for the first time in a well-lit moment rather than a candlelit one and it was heavier than the candlelight had made it feel.

She breathed.

Outside the trees kept moving.

She was aware of him on the other side of the seat. Not touching her. Not saying anything. Giving her the space she had not asked for and apparently needed and had somehow already learned to read in her without her telling him.

That was the thing about him that kept catching her off guard.

How much he saw without being told.

She kept her cheek against the glass and watched the fog and thought about all of it and let it settle into whatever shape it was going to settle into without forcing it.

By the time the Black River Academy gates appeared through the windscreen she felt steadier.

Not resolved. Just steadier.

The car stopped.

She thanked the driver and got out into the cold and felt the mist immediately on her bare arms and remembered too late that Katy had said a jacket would ruin the look.

She wrapped her arms around herself.

Something settled over her shoulders.

His jacket. Warm and heavy and smelling like him. She pulled it closed without looking at him and heard him fall into step beside her as they walked through the gates.

She looked at the clock above the main entrance.

"Five minutes to curfew." She said.

"I did say we would make it." He said.

She almost smiled.

They walked slowly through the quiet campus. The fog sitting low across the grass. The path lights making amber pools in it. No other students visible at this hour.

He stopped.

She stopped beside him.

He turned toward her and his hands went into his pockets and he looked at her with that expression. The one underneath all the others. The one she had learned was the real thing.

"I do not want to end tonight badly." He said.

"Neither do I." She said.

He exhaled. "I should have told you before. About needing to feed. I did not want it to be a thing but not telling you made it a bigger thing and that was not fair."

She looked at him.

He was not performing the apology. It was just there on his face and in his voice with no architecture around it.

"Thank you for saying that." She said.

He nodded.

She stepped closer. "Can I say something honestly."

"Always." He said.

She looked at the path lights. Then at him. "I grew up being told what you are means something specific. That it is fixed and certain and cannot be anything except what it has always been." She paused. "And then I met you. And you are not fixed or certain and you are not what I was told and I am still learning what that means." She held his gaze. "Sometimes I am going to need a minute to catch up. That is not me leaving. That is just me being honest about where I am."

He was very still.

"Okay." He said quietly.

"Okay." She said.

He reached out and tucked the jacket more securely around her shoulders and his hands stayed there for a moment.

She looked up at him.

"The threading." She said. "I do not love it. I want you to know that. I am not going to pretend otherwise."

"I know." He said.

"But I also understand it is part of what you are." She said. "And I meant what I said. I am not asking you to be something else. I just need the honesty."

"You will have it." He said. Simply. Like a fact.

She believed him.

She reached up and straightened his tie which had come slightly askew at some point during the evening and felt him watch her hands do it.

"You know what I thought about the whole limo ride." She said.

"What." He said.

"This morning." She said. "In my room. With the record player and the sketchbook and you pretending to draw."

Something shifted in his face. Warm and specific.

"I was not pretending." He said.

"You were absolutely pretending." She said.

"I was drawing." He said. "I was also aware of everything else simultaneously."

"What were you drawing." She said.

He looked at her steadily.

She already knew.

She pressed her lips together.

"The best date I have ever been on." She said. "In case you were wondering."

His smile came slow and real.

"Good." He said.

She kissed him.

His arms came around her and she felt the cold of him through the jacket and kissed him properly in the middle of the empty campus with the fog around their feet and the amber lights and the clock ticking toward curfew and not caring about any of it.

He kissed her back with everything and she felt it from her head to the silver heels Katy had insisted on and thought yes. This. Complicated and good and exactly right.

She pulled back.

Both breathing slightly unsteadily.

She fixed his tie again which the kiss had undone.

He watched her hands.

"Walk me back." She said.

"Obviously." He said.

POV: Niko

He had been watching her the entire limo ride.

Not obviously. He was not obvious about things when he could help it. But he had been tracking her from his side of the seat. The cheek against the glass. The arms around herself. The specific quality of her silence which was different from the silence she used when she was comfortable and he had learned the difference.

She was processing.

He knew she was processing and he knew what she was processing and he had sat on his side of the seat and given her the space and not touched her and not said anything and it had been one of the more difficult things he had done recently.

He had wanted to touch her.

He had sat on his hands metaphorically and looked out his own window and thought about all the things he was not going to say.

I have been doing this for nearly two centuries and I have never once considered stopping because there was never anything worth stopping for and now there is something worth stopping for and I do not know what to do with that yet.

He had not said any of that.

He had given her the space.

Now they were standing in the middle of the campus with her hands straightening his tie for the second time tonight and her face doing the thing it did when she was decided about something and the decision was landing softly rather than heavily.

He looked at her.

She had said I am not leaving. That is just me being honest about where I am.

He was going to hold onto that for a while.

He had spent a very long time building a life where things that were said to him did not have enough access to actually land anywhere. Where words bounced off the surface and he catalogued them neutrally and moved on without letting them find purchase.

She had said I am not leaving and it had landed somewhere very deep and very specific and he was going to have to think about what that meant about the state of the wall he had been maintaining for decades.

Later.

He was going to think about it later.

Right now she was walking beside him through the fog toward Degrassi Hall with his jacket around her shoulders and her heels clicking quietly on the path and her arm through his and the campus was completely theirs at this hour.

He thought about the drawing he had done this morning.

He had been drawing her the whole time. Not one image. Several. Different angles of her on the other side of the bed. The way she held her book. The way her legs were tucked underneath her. The specific line of her shoulder when she was focused on something.

He had been drawing her since October and he was going to keep drawing her and he had stopped pretending that was something he was going to stop doing at some point.

They reached Degrassi Hall.

She stopped at the door and turned to face him.

She slid his jacket off her shoulders and held it out.

He took it.

She looked at him for a moment.

"I'll text you when I'm in my room." She said.

He nodded.

She kissed him once more. Brief and certain. Then she turned and went inside and the door closed behind her and he stood in the fog outside Degrassi Hall with his jacket in his hand and the specific warmth of an evening he had planned carefully and that had been better than he planned and had also been harder than he planned and had ended exactly right.

He stood there for a moment.

Then he put his jacket back on and walked back through the campus toward Silas Hall with the fog around him and his hands in his pockets and thought that complicated and worth it were not mutually exclusive.

He had known that abstractly for a long time.

He was starting to know it specifically.

That was new.

He was going to let it be new for a while.