Chapter 111 Back
Chapter 111 Back
POV: Carly
She texted him on Sunday morning.
Not a long text. Not a speech or an explanation or a summary of every thought she had processed over the four days of space. Just four words because four words was what she had and what she meant and anything more than that would have been performing something.
Carly: I'm ready to talk.
She sent it before she could deliberate further and put the phone face down on her desk and went back to the grimoire she had been failing to read for the past hour.
She had read the same paragraph six times.
She was not going to read it a seventh time. She knew this about herself.
She picked up her coffee instead and looked at the window and the Black River Falls fog outside it and thought about last night. The dance floor. The drawing. The two words underneath it. The one dance that had been exactly one dance and nothing else and had also been significantly more than that simultaneously.
I miss you.
She had said it out loud.
She had not meant to say it out loud. It had come out of her like something with its own momentum, the same way things kept coming out of her around him, and she had felt it land in the space between them and had not been able to take it back and had decided after approximately one second that she did not want to.
She missed him.
She had been missing him for four days while he was thirty feet away across the campus and it was a specific kind of absurd that she was done pretending she could keep sustaining.
Her phone buzzed.
She looked at it.
Niko: When and where.
She pressed her lips together.
She typed back.
Carly: Library. One hour.
She put the phone down.
She looked at the grimoire.
She closed it.
She went to fix her hair instead because she was not going to show up to this conversation looking like she had been sitting in her room failing to read the same paragraph six times on a Sunday morning, even though that was exactly what she had been doing.
He was already there when she arrived.
Of course he was already there.
He was in the back corner at the table they had used for their project in the weeks before any of this started, his bag on the chair beside him and his sketchbook open but not drawing in it, just sitting with his hands loosely folded on top of it and his eyes on the door.
He stood when she came in.
She raised an eyebrow at that. He sat back down.
She sat across from him.
They looked at each other.
"Hi." She said.
"Hi." He said.
She put her bag on the table and folded her hands on top of it and sat up straight in the way she always did when she was trying to maintain composure.
He looked at her posture and said nothing about it.
"I've been thinking." She said.
"I know." He said.
She gave him a look.
"Not because I was watching." He said. "Just because I know you."
She looked at her hands. "I've been thinking about what you said in the courtyard. And about the dance last night. And about everything in between." She paused. "And I've been thinking about the fact that I've been sitting in my room using the record player that isn't mine for four days and not being able to stop and what that probably says."
He was very still.
"I'm not interested in being cautious forever." She said. "I tried cautious. Cautious made me miserable for months and I was still going to end up here eventually, so." She looked up at him. "I'd rather just be here."
He looked at her.
Something moved through his expression that he was working to contain but not fully managing.
"I have conditions." She said.
"Of course you do." He said. Not sarcastically. Just knowing her.
"When something is wrong, you tell me." She said. "Not Aurora. Not Enzo. Me first. I don't expect to be the only person you talk to. I just want to be the first one when it's actually serious."
He nodded.
"And no more walking out mid-conversation." She said. "You can have space. You can ask for time. But you do not get to flash out of a conversation and expect me to be fine with it."
He nodded again. "Agreed."
She looked at him steadily. "I mean it. Both of those."
"I know you do." He said. "I'm not nodding to end the conversation. I'm nodding because you're right and I intend to actually do them."
She held his gaze.
She believed him.
She had believed him in the courtyard when he told her the truth and she believed him now and that had not changed and was not going to change.
She exhaled.
"Okay." She said.
He waited.
"So." She said. "We're okay."
He looked at her for a moment with that expression. Warm and careful and specific to her.
"We're okay." He said.
She nodded.
She reached across the table and put her hand over his.
He turned his hand over and held it properly.
They sat in the library at the table where it had started and held hands and did not say anything for a moment and the library was Sunday-morning quiet around them and it was, despite everything they had been through to get here, exactly right.
"There is something I need to tell you." He said.
She looked at him.
"Not right now." He said quickly. "Not in the next five minutes. But soon. Before Spring Break." He held her gaze. "It's something I found out at the banquet. Something about your mother and your family and our families together. And I should have told you already but I wanted to make sure we were in a stable enough place that I could tell you clearly and you could hear it clearly."
She felt the specific alert of something important approaching.
"Is it bad?" She asked.
He tilted his head. "It's significant." He said carefully. "Whether it's bad depends on what we decide to do with it."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"Okay." She said. "Before Spring Break."
He nodded.
She squeezed his hand.
He squeezed back.
She picked up her coffee with her free hand and looked at the library around them and settled into the Sunday morning quiet and thought that whatever was coming, whatever significant thing lived between now and Spring Break, she was going to face it in the same place she had faced everything else this semester.
Right here. With him.
That was enough for now.
POV: Katy
She knew before Carly came back to tell her.
She had known when Carly picked up her phone and read the response and went to fix her hair without saying a word. She had watched that sequence from her desk with her laptop open and the specific peripheral vision she had developed for monitoring things she was not supposed to be monitoring.
She put her headphones in.
She took them back out.
She turned in her chair.
"Go." She said to the room.
Carly had already left.
Katy looked at the closed door.
She thought about I'm not doing this for you, I'm doing this for her that she had said in a corridor at one in the morning to a vampire who had shown up outside their door in a blood-stained shirt, and about how true that had been and continued to be.
She was glad it was working.
She also still had questions she had not found answers to, threads she had been quietly collecting all semester that were starting to pull toward something she could feel the shape of even if she could not yet see the whole picture.
The faction review notice.
Whitney Salem's different reaction to the witch's call.
Zdravei Katerina in a corridor and the specific look on Niko's face when he said it.
Leona McPherson arriving at a school banquet for the first time in years at the exact same time as Isabel Monroeson.
She was not yet ready to say these things out loud to anyone.
But she was watching.
She always was.
She turned back to her laptop and pulled her headphones back on and let the morning do what Sunday mornings did.
She could think about it more tomorrow.
Author's Note:
She said I'd rather just be here and meant every word of it and I needed that moment so much after everything the past several chapters have put us through.