Chapter 96: Don't Follow Me

POV: Carly

The cold hit her the second she was outside.

She didn't stop walking.

She didn't know exactly where she was going. Her feet just moved, carrying her across the grass toward the dormitories with her arms crossed tight over her chest and her jaw set and her eyes fixed somewhere ahead of her that wasn't anything in particular, just forward, just away.

The image kept replaying.

His face buried in that girl's neck. Aurora's hand sliding up his arm. The gap between them closing. Him not moving away.

She crossed her arms tighter and kept walking.

She felt him before she heard him. That specific awareness she'd developed over the past weeks, the way the air shifted slightly when he was near, the particular quality of presence he had that she had stopped being able to ignore months ago.

She walked faster.

"Carly."

She didn't stop.

"Carly!"

She heard him break into a jog behind her and felt his hand close gently around her arm.

She yanked it away so hard her shoulder pulled.

"Don't touch me." She said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. "Don't ever touch me again."

A beat of silence behind her. Then his footsteps again, keeping pace with her without grabbing her this time.

"Carly, I know how bad that looked. Please let me explain."

She laughed. It wasn't a happy sound. "So you can tell me more lies and I can be the idiot who believes them again? No. I'm done with that."

"I have never thought of you as an idiot." He said. "Please don't say that."

"Well that's exactly how I feel." She finally stopped.

She turned to face him.

She wished she hadn't looked at him. He was still in the blood-soaked shirt, the dark stains across the front of it, his mouth cleaned but the evidence of the night written all over him. Looking at him right now was making the nausea worse, not better.

"I feel like a joke." She said. Her voice cracked slightly on the last word and she hated it. She blinked hard. "I feel completely humiliated. You told me not to worry about us. You told me there was nothing to be insecure about. And then not even a week later every single thing I was worried about gets confirmed right in front of my face."

His expression was open in a way she didn't want it to be. No wall, no performance, just the full weight of what she was saying landing directly on him. She almost wished he'd get defensive. It would have been easier.

"How could you do this to me." She said. "After everything. After my coven, and coming out publicly, and Whitney, and all of it. I thought we were finally in a good place. I thought we were actually—"

She stopped herself.

Put her hand over her mouth briefly.

Breathed.

"Sweetheart—"

"Don't." She said. "Don't call me that right now. Don't."

He stopped.

Ran a hand through his hair. The gesture she knew meant he was barely holding the pieces of himself together.

"Nothing happened." He said. "I know what you saw but nothing happened between me and Aurora tonight. I swear to you."

She looked at him steadily. "You don't have to sleep together for it to count as cheating, Niko. I think you know that."

He flinched.

"And honestly?" Her voice was shaking now and she couldn't stop it. "What you did is worse than if you had. Because you walked out on me. You made a promise and you broke it. You were hurting tonight and instead of coming to me you went to her. Again. Like you always do."

"That's not—"

"Isn't it?" She cut him off. "Every time things get hard you go to Aurora. Every single time. I've watched it happen. I've let it happen because you told me there was nothing there, and I believed you, and I was wrong to."

"You weren't wrong." He said. "Carly, please listen to me—"

"I left you voicemails." Her voice broke on it. "Did you know that? I was so worried about you I left you actual voicemails. I thought something had happened to you. I nearly lost my mind in that room waiting to hear from you and the whole time you were there with her."

The specific misery on his face told her the voicemails had landed somewhere. She didn't care right now.

"I know." He said quietly. "I know. I'm sorry."

"You're sorry." She repeated.

"Yes. I am. Genuinely. Not for what I am, not for feeding, but for walking out on you tonight. For not coming back when I said I would. For going there instead of coming to you." He said. "I was angry and overwhelmed and I didn't want to talk about it with you yet—"

"But you were ready to go be with her."

"That's not—" He stopped himself this time, jaw working. "Carly, I wasn't going to her the way you mean. I wasn't choosing her over you. I was falling apart and I went somewhere familiar because I didn't know how to let you see me like that."

She stared at him.

"You didn't know how to let me see you like that." She said slowly.

"No." He admitted.

"So you went to Aurora instead." She said.

He didn't answer. Which was its own answer.

She nodded once, short and tight. "That's what I thought. You shared something with her tonight, emotionally, that you refused to share with me. And I have been standing here for weeks trying to be someone you could actually talk to. Trying to be that person for you. And it doesn't matter, because the moment it's real, when something is actually wrong, you go to her."

"Carly—"

"What is it?" She said. Her voice was quiet now, which was worse somehow than the shaking had been. "What is it about her that you can't shake? What does she give you that I don't? Because I need to understand, because I clearly missed something. Was what you told me about not wanting anything real with her actually true? Or was being with me what made you realize what you actually want?"

"Stop." He said. His voice cracked slightly on it. "Stop talking about yourself like that. Stop."

He stepped toward her and she didn't step back and he took her face in both hands and she let him even though she had told herself she wouldn't. His thumbs were on her cheeks and his eyes were on hers and his face was doing the thing she had only ever seen it do for her.

"You coming into my life was the most unexpected thing that has ever happened to me." He said. "In almost two centuries. Nothing has made me feel more whole. I don't want to be with anyone else. What I have with you is real and it is the only thing I care about keeping." His voice was raw in a way she had never heard it. "I don't give a damn about her. I care about you. Only you."

She wanted to believe him.

She wanted to so badly it scared her.

But wanting to believe someone and having reason to believe them were two different things, and right now one side of that equation was significantly stronger than the other.

She took his hands gently from her face and stepped back.

"You have a very interesting way of showing someone you care about them." She said. "And if I was truly the only thing that mattered, we wouldn't be standing in a field at midnight having this conversation."

He said nothing.

"I don't want to hear any more explanations tonight." She said. "I can't. The wounds are too fresh and I'm too angry and I'll say things I can't take back and I don't want to do that." She pressed her lips together. "So I need you to let me go. Tonight."

His face broke in a way she had never seen it break before. Not anger, not withdrawal. Just broken.

"Carly." He said. Almost a whisper.

"Don't follow me." She said, her voice steady even though her eyes weren't. "Don't text me. Don't call me. Just — give me tonight."

She held his gaze for one more second.

Then she turned around and walked toward Degrassi Hall with her arms around herself and her eyes burning and the sound of the Black River Falls wind filling the silence where his footsteps weren't.

POV: Niko

He stood in the middle of the field and let her go.

He watched her walk away from him, the blonde ponytail from the banquet half fallen out now, her cheer uniform still on, his jacket no longer around her shoulders. Smaller and smaller in the distance until the fog swallowed her completely.

He didn't move.

He didn't follow.

He had done enough damage tonight without adding that to it.

He stood there for a long time with the cold around him and the specific weight of a night that had gone wrong in every possible direction pressing down on every part of him. Shoulders. Chest. The back of his throat. Somewhere behind his eyes in the way that meant if he were capable of it he would be crying.

He wasn't capable of it.

He stood in the field and thought about her voicemails.

He thought about her standing in that doorway looking at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before and never wanted to see again.

He thought about her hands on his cheeks in the corridor at the banquet, warm and steady, saying it's me, talk to me, and him pulling away anyway.

He had been so convinced he was protecting her by keeping his worst moments away from her. He had genuinely believed he was doing her a kindness by not letting her see him like that.

What he had actually done was show her exactly what she was worth to him in the moments when it was hard.

He had shown her she was worth less than the familiar thing. Less than the comfortable pattern. Less than Aurora, who had never once asked him to be anything he wasn't, which was the problem he had been trying not to look at directly for years.

He pressed both hands to his face.

He stood in the cold of Black River Falls at one in the morning and thought about all of it and felt every single second of it.

He had called himself a screw up inside his own head a thousand times before. He had meant it with a certain amount of detached observation every other time.

Tonight he meant it all the way down.

He lowered his hands.

Looked at the fog where she had disappeared.

He was going to fix this.

He didn't know how yet. He didn't have the words yet, and the words needed to be right, and he needed to earn the right to say them before he did.

But he was going to fix this.

He had to.

He turned and walked back toward Silas Hall alone and the campus was quiet all around him and the only sound was his footsteps on the wet grass and the wind coming off the Black River Falls tree line and somewhere behind his ribs, the specific ache of something that had nothing to do with hunger.

Author's Note:

Don't follow me. Give me tonight. And he let her go. He stood in that field and let her walk away and did not follow and I think that might be the most painful thing he has ever done.