Chapter 41 Late
Elias POV
He knocks on my door at eleven forty-seven.
Not tomorrow, like we agreed. Tonight. I can tell from the sound of it that it is him before I even get up. There is something in the cadence of it that I have learned without meaning to.
Ivy is asleep. I slip out of bed and cross to the door quietly and open it and there he is.
He looks hollowed out.
Not physically broken, not injured, not any of the immediately alarming things. Just the particular hollowness of someone who has been holding a weight by themselves for too long and has finally run out of places to keep it. His jacket is still on. His hair is less composed than it usually is at this hour. He has the look of someone who left his dorm without entirely deciding to.
"Hey," he says, quiet, aware of the hour.
"Hey."
"I know it's late."
"I know you know."
He lets out a breath that is not quite a sigh and not quite anything else. "Can I come in?"
I step back. He comes inside, moving carefully past the sleeping shape of Ivy, and we end up standing in the small space near my desk, the lamp making a soft circle of light, everything else in the room dark and quiet.
He tells me about the meeting.
All of it. Not the managed version, not the version he might have planned to give me tomorrow with the sharp edges rounded off. The actual version. The board. The donors. The six times the word distraction was used. The thing Carlisle said about fixable.
I listen without moving.
When he finishes there is a silence that feels like the space after a door has been fully opened and both people are standing on either side of it trying to decide what happens next.
"Say something," he says.
"I'm thinking."
"Okay."
I think about the word fixable. About what it implies. About the fact that a man in an office used that word about something that has nothing to do with a game or a scoreline and everything to do with who Noah is and who I am.
"Are you going to comply with it?" I ask. "The lower profile thing?"
His jaw tightens. "I told him I heard him. That's not the same as agreeing."
"But you nodded."
A pause. "Yeah. I nodded."
"Okay."
"Elias."
"I'm not angry."
"You're something."
I look at him. He looks back. In the low light of the lamp he looks younger than usual, or maybe more honest, which are sometimes the same thing.
"I need to ask you something," I say. "And I need you to answer it honestly."
"Okay."
"Are you going to ask me to be quiet again?"
The question lands between us and stays there.
I watch his face. He does not flinch. He does not immediately say no, which would have been the easy answer, the one that smooths things over and lets the moment pass without any real weight to it.
He is quiet.
He is quiet long enough that the silence becomes its own answer.
Not a yes. I do not think it is a yes. But not a clean, unhesitating no either. Something in between. Something that is still working itself out.
That pause costs him something.
I feel it happen, the way you feel a temperature change in a room, the way you know before you can explain how.
"Noah," I say, my voice still even, still quiet enough for the hour. "I am not going to be quiet. I have never been quiet. That is not something I am able to offer you and it is not something you should be asking yourself whether you want from me."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Yes." Firmer now. "Yes, Elias, I know."
"Then the pause needed to not happen."
He rubs a hand over his face. He looks at the floor. He looks back up at me with an expression that is tired and honest and does not ask me for anything, which is almost the most disarming thing about it.
"You're right," he says simply.
I believe him.
That is the strange thing. Even with the pause, even with the late-night knock and the hollowed-out face and the word fixable still sitting between us like an uninvited guest, I believe him.
"Go home," I say. "Sleep. Come find me tomorrow when it's actually tomorrow."
He nods. He moves toward the door. Then he stops and turns back.
"Elias."
"Yeah."
"Thank you for letting me in."
I hold his gaze for a moment.
"Don't make me regret it," I say.
He almost smiles. Not quite. But almost.
Then he is gone and the door closes and Ivy makes a small sound in her sleep and rolls over and the room settles back into quiet.
I sit on the edge of my bed and press my hands together and breathe.
The pause. That is the thing I am going to have to sit with for a while.
Not because it undoes anything.
But because it is honest in a way I needed to see.