Chapter 16 Brontë
POV: Carly
She arrived early.
Obviously.
Three textbooks, two notebooks, her grimoire tucked safely at the bottom of her bag and every pen she owned color coded and ready. She took her usual seat, spread everything out the way she liked it and told herself today was going to be productive and professional and completely uneventful.
She had been telling herself things like that a lot lately.
The classroom filled in around her gradually and she kept her head down and her pen moving and did a very convincing impression of someone who was not listening for a specific set of footsteps.
She heard the laughter before she saw them.
High and bright and coming from the doorway.
Carly looked up before she could stop herself.
Niko was leaning against the door frame in a white Henley with his hands in his pockets and Aurora pressed against the threshold beside him. Her back against the door, both hands flat on his chest, laughing at something he had said with her whole face. Her thigh was settled between his and she was wearing that specific expression that girls wore when they wanted someone to know they had something worth having.
Niko wasn't pulling away from any of it.
He wasn't exactly leaning into it either but he was smiling. A real one, not the controlled version he usually deployed. It made him look younger somehow. Less like something to be cautious of.
Carly looked back down at her notebook.
She was not going to analyze that.
She was absolutely not going to analyze that.
She wrote the date at the top of her page and underlined it twice and told herself she was thinking about the truth serum formula.
She was thinking about Aurora's hands on his chest.
She pressed her pen harder against the page and wrote INGREDIENTS in block letters.
Aurora said something that made Niko dip his head slightly toward her and whatever his response was made her laugh again and push herself closer into him using the excuse of a student trying to get past them in the doorway.
Amateur, a voice in Carly's head said before she could stop it.
She immediately cancelled that thought and was embarrassed that she'd had it.
She looked up one more time.
Niko turned his head and found her watching.
His expression shifted. The easy smile didn't disappear exactly but something behind it changed. That reset she had started to recognize. Like he was adjusting something.
She looked away first.
Her face felt warm and she was furious about it.
Professor Swanson's voice cut through the room calling everyone to take their seats and Carly heard Aurora say something at the door before the sound of her footsteps retreated back into the hallway.
She did not look up to watch Niko come in.
She was very busy with her ingredient list.
His presence settled into the seat beside her and she caught the faint smell of whatever soap he used and hated that she noticed it.
"Brontë." He said it as a greeting.
She exhaled slowly before looking up at him. He was already looking at her with that expression that lived somewhere between amused and something else she couldn't categorize.
"You said no pet names." He held his hands up innocently. "Never said anything about novelists."
She stared at him for a long moment.
"Sit down." She said.
He was already sitting down. He gestured to the fact that he was already sitting down.
She looked back at her notes.
He sat back in his chair and she could feel him watching her profile for a moment before he opened his own notebook. She waited for another comment. Another prod. Something to deflect.
It didn't come.
She glanced sideways.
He was actually writing something. Not sketching. Writing. His handwriting was sharp and slightly slanted and she could not read it from this angle and was not going to try.
Professor Swanson clapped her hands at the front of the room.
"Good afternoon. Today is the first of three days I'm giving you to work on your projects in class. The rest of the time is yours to manage so use today wisely." She walked the length of the room. "If you're not already sitting with your partner, move now. Get to it."
The room erupted into movement and chatter and the scraping of chairs.
Carly and Niko stayed exactly where they were.
She organized her notes into the order she had decided on this morning and laid them out between them on the desk. He leaned forward slightly to look at what she'd put down and she waited for a comment.
"Good start." He said.
She looked at him.
He looked back. Completely straight faced.
"Don't do that." She said.
"Do what."
"Be agreeable. It's unsettling."
The corner of his mouth pulled up. "I'll try to be more difficult."
"Thank you." She said and looked back at her notes.
She heard him laugh quietly beside her and something in her chest did a thing she was going to ignore entirely.
She picked up her pen.
He picked up his.
They started working.
It was strange how quickly the strangeness of it faded. Ten minutes in and they had settled into something that almost resembled a rhythm. She would write something, he would read it and either nod or push back with a question, she would explain, he would either concede or argue and they would land somewhere in the middle. It was efficient in a way she hadn't expected and she was not going to say that out loud.
"Can't read?" She said when he squinted at the Latin on her ingredient list.
"Fluent actually." He said without looking up. "Multiple languages since I was a boy." He glanced sideways at her with a satisfied expression. "But I appreciate the concern."
She pressed her lips together and looked back at her page.
"I know nothing about witch spellwork though." He added honestly. "So you're going to have to walk me through the process."
"Obviously." She said.
He tilted his head slightly. "Was that an agreement or an insult."
"Both." She said.
He smiled at his notebook and she pretended not to see it.
At the front of the room Professor Swanson was making her rounds between the partner pairs, pausing to listen and occasionally offering direction. When she reached their desk she stopped and looked between them with an expression that was doing its best to stay professional.
"Progress?" She asked.
"Significant." Niko said pleasantly.
The professor looked at Carly.
"We've agreed on the spell type and started the ingredient list." Carly confirmed. "We'll need to discuss the demonstration format but that can wait until Thursday."
Professor Swanson looked between them one more time. "Good." She said it like she meant something broader than just the project and moved on to the next pair.
Carly turned back to her notes.
Niko was already looking at her.
"What." She said.
"Nothing." He said. "You just surprise me sometimes."
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Picked up her pen.
She was not going to ask what that meant.
She was not.
"The truth serum needs a binding agent." She said instead. "Something to anchor the effect so it doesn't wear off in under an hour. I have two options but one requires an ingredient I don't have and getting it means going to the supply room after hours."
"And the other option." He said.
"The other option is easier but less effective." She said. "It'll work but it won't be impressive."
Niko looked at her. "So we go after hours."
"We'd need permission."
"Or we don't." He said it simply.
She gave him a look.
He gave her one back that said he was completely serious and also completely unbothered by her look.
"I'll think about it." She said.
"That's basically a yes from you." He said.
"It is not."
"It's not a no."
She turned back to her notes before he could see that he was right.
POV: Aurora
She watched the door close behind him from the hallway.
The corridor outside the lecture hall was emptying out as the last few students filtered into their classes and Aurora stood with her back against the wall and her arms crossed and told herself she was just waiting for Sienna who was always late and whose class was on this floor.
She was not standing here because of the look on Niko's face when he glanced across the classroom before he sat down.
She had seen it though.
The way his expression did that thing. That reset she knew better than anyone. The adjustment he made when something caught him off guard and he needed a second to recalibrate.
She had followed his eyeline before the door closed.
Blonde curls. Blue eyes. Already looking back down at her notebook like she hadn't been looking at all.
Aurora pressed her lips together.
She thought about what she had said at the door. The joke she had made that made him laugh. The way she had leaned into him because she could and because she liked the way it felt and because there was a part of her that had been doing small things like that more frequently lately without fully examining why.
She knew why.
She just hadn't said it out loud yet because saying it out loud meant having a conversation she wasn't ready to have with a person who wasn't ready to have it either.
She pushed off the wall.
Sienna appeared at the end of the corridor, already apologizing from twenty feet away.
Aurora smiled and fell into step beside her and let the conversation carry her down the hall.
She was fine.
She was absolutely fine.
She just needed to pay closer attention.
Author's Note:
Aurora standing in that hallway putting pieces together that she is not going to like when they fit. And Carly sitting next to Niko for forty minutes and calling it professional. Sure. Drop a like and tell me in the comments, whose POV hit harder for you today because I genuinely cannot pick.-J