Chapter 98: Katy's Advice

POV: Niko

Katy stepped further from the door, pulling him with her down the corridor with a tilt of her head. Far enough that sound wouldn't carry through the gap.

He followed, which was humiliating and necessary in equal measure.

She turned to face him with her arms still crossed and her expression still doing that thing where it looked like she was tolerating him specifically as a favor to someone else.

"Look." She said. "I'm going to be honest, and I say this as someone who doesn't particularly enjoy being honest with you."

He waited.

"I don't know what happened tonight." She said. "She hasn't told me anything. All I know is that she left this building an hour ago looking for you, and she came back crying so hard she woke me up from a dead sleep. That's the version of events I'm working with."

His chest burned at the image of it. Carly's eyes on the football field, bloodshot and broken. He'd put that there. He was standing in a corridor at one in the morning because he had put that there.

"I'm obviously on her side." Katy continued. "I want to be clear about that. Whatever you did, I'm not here to defend it or minimize it."

"I'm not asking you to." He said.

"Good." She said. "Then hear me out." She uncrossed her arms, and the shift was small but it changed the energy of the conversation from confrontation to something more functional. "She's not going to listen to anything you have to say tonight. She's too far inside her feelings for any of it to land the way you need it to. You could have the perfect speech and it would bounce right off her."

He knew that. He had known it when he knocked. He'd knocked anyway because standing in a field doing nothing had become physically impossible.

"Come back in the morning." Katy said. "Before she starts getting ready for class. She's up around seven, so be here before that. It'll be an ambush and she's going to be confused and still upset, but not as far under as she is right now. There's a difference between hurt and exhausted and whatever she is tonight, and just hurt. She'll at least be able to hear you."

He looked at her carefully. "Why are you helping me?"

"I'm not helping you." She said, flat and immediate. "I'm helping her. There's a difference and I need you to understand that distinction clearly."

He nodded once.

"She really likes you." Katy said. The tone was matter-of-fact, not sentimental. "For reasons I continue to find baffling, but there it is. And I've watched her be genuinely happy lately in a way that she wasn't when I first moved in. I want her to have that back. Whatever version of it is still possible after tonight, I want her to have it." She paused. "She's going to want closure either way. It's just who she is. Give her the night and give her the chance to sleep on it, and come back when she can actually hear you."

He stood in the corridor and said nothing for a moment.

He thought about Carly on the other side of that door. He thought about the specific quality of her crying, the muffled sounds he'd heard through the wood before Katy opened it, and he thought about how he had never once been the cause of that sound in anyone's life and cared about it.

He cared about it so much it was doing something to his breathing that didn't make any sense given that breathing wasn't actually necessary for him.

"Fine." He said. The word came out rough. He ran one hand through his curls. "Fine."

He leaned back against the wall and looked at the ceiling briefly, then back at the girl in front of him who had every reason in the world to slam the door in his face and had instead spent five minutes genuinely trying to help the situation.

"Thank you." He said. "Katerina. I mean that. I will probably not say it again so take it as you will."

Her expression shifted into something that was almost offended. "As if I need your gratitude." She said. "Don't thank me yet. This might not work. I'm operating on two hours of sleep and a hunch, not a guarantee."

"Still the most hopeful I've felt all night." He said.

She rolled her eyes. "Don't make a thing of it. We are not friends, this changes nothing between us, I want that on record."

He almost smiled. "Understood."

She pointed a finger directly at his face, stepping forward slightly. He held his ground this time.

"And let me make one more thing clear." She said. "Carly is my friend. Which means I'm on her side no matter what comes out of your mouth tomorrow. If she talks to you and still decides you're not worth it, I back her completely. And if you do anything else to hurt her, that becomes a problem for you personally. Are we clear?"

He looked at her for a moment.

Genuinely impressed, somewhere under everything else.

"Crystal." He said.

She lowered her finger. Stepped back. Turned toward the door.

"You look like a mess, by the way." She said without looking at him. "Go sleep. Clean up. You want any shot at this tomorrow you need to not look like you've been standing in a field all night feeling sorry for yourself."

"I wasn't feeling sorry for myself." He said.

"You absolutely were." She said pleasantly, turning the doorknob. "Goodnight, Monroeson."

He watched the door close.

He stood in the corridor alone for a moment.

Then he said quietly, to no one, because there was no one there to hear it —

"I'm not giving up on her."

He meant it completely.

He turned and walked back toward Silas Hall, and the corridor was empty and the campus was dark and he had never in his long life felt less certain of anything or more certain of one specific thing at the same time.