Chapter 40 Both Sides of the Door
POV: Carly
She did not move for a long time.
Her back against the classroom door and her hands pressed against her eyes and the corridor empty in both directions. The building was quiet at this hour. Nobody passing. Nobody to see her standing here with her face falling apart in a hallway outside a locked classroom.
She dropped her hands.
Her reflection in the dark window across the corridor looked back at her. Red eyes. Hair coming loose from where it had been pinned back. Dress slightly wrinkled from being pressed against a door by a boy she had just told she did not want.
She looked away from her reflection.
She pressed her lips together and felt the specific ache that came from holding back something that wanted out badly. Not just the tears. The whole truth of it. The version of this she could not say to anyone because saying it out loud would make it real and real things had consequences she was not ready for.
She wanted him.
She had wanted him for weeks and the wanting had grown past the point where she could pretend it was just curiosity or proximity or the specific thrill of doing something she was not supposed to do. It had grown into something that had her own name on it. Something that was specifically hers and specifically about him and had nothing to do with rules or categories or the list of reasons it could not work.
She knew all the reasons it could not work.
She had just recited every single one of them to his face.
She pressed the back of her head against the door.
Tommy was good. Tommy was consistent and familiar and had been there before any of this started and deserved better than what she had been giving him for weeks. She knew that. She had always known that.
She also knew that knowing something and feeling something were two different countries and she had been trying to live in both at the same time and it was tearing her in half.
She wiped under her eyes quickly.
She picked up her bag from where she had left it against the wall and straightened her dress and pushed her hair back and made herself look like someone who was fine.
She was getting very good at that particular performance.
She walked back toward the main building and did not look back at the door.
POV: Niko
He heard her footsteps leave.
He stood in the middle of the empty classroom and listened to them fade down the corridor and then there was nothing. Just the hum of the building around him and the cold air and the specific silence of a room where something had just happened that could not be undone.
He sat down on the edge of the nearest desk.
His hand had stopped bleeding. The skin already knitting back together the way it always did. By tomorrow there would be nothing there. No evidence of the wall or the glass or any of it.
He wished the other things healed that efficiently.
He sat there for a while.
He had known what she was going to say before she said it. He had seen it coming from the moment she walked into that corridor after him with that expression she wore when she was doing the right thing at the cost of the thing she actually wanted. He had seen it and he had pushed anyway because something in him had decided that if she was going to say it she was going to have to say it clearly and look at him while she did it.
She had.
Tommy being a werewolf still makes him more compatible with my world than a vampire ever could be.
He turned that over slowly.
The rational part of him understood it. He had spent centuries understanding exactly what he was to people like Carly McPherson. The enemy. The cautionary tale. The thing you were raised to fear and keep at arm's length regardless of what it did or did not do to deserve that. He understood the framework she had been built inside and he had understood it before he ever asked her to step outside it with him.
He had asked anyway.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
That was the part that was sitting with him. Not what she had said. What he had done. He had looked at the framework and decided she was worth the risk of it and then handed her everything he had and watched her hand it back and he had nobody to blame for that but himself.
He lowered his hands.
He looked at the empty classroom around him. The same kind of room they had sat in together for weeks. The same kind of desk she had perched on while she mixed the truth serum formula and chewed her pen cap and bounced her leg when she was anxious. He knew what her anxious leg looked like. He knew what her real laugh sounded like versus the one she produced for other people. He knew she underlined things twice when they mattered and cried at Fitzgerald quotes when she thought nobody was watching.
He knew her.
That was the problem.
You could walk away from someone you did not know. You could decide they were not worth the cost and file them under experience and move on. He had done it a hundred times over a hundred years with a hundred people who had not managed to get past the wall he kept.
She had not gotten past it.
She had simply found the part of it he had built wrong and walked through without him noticing until she was already inside.
He stood up.
He picked up his bag and his ruined sketchbook and walked to the door and stopped with his hand on the handle.
He stood there for a moment.
Then he opened the door and walked out in the opposite direction from the one she had taken and kept walking until the building was behind him and the cold air of Black River Falls was around him and the fog was sitting low on everything the way it always was.
He walked until he reached Silas Hall.
He went inside.
He was going to be fine.
He was going to be completely fine.
Author's Note:
Both of them on opposite sides of that door knowing exactly what the other was feeling and walking away in opposite directions anyway. This is the specific kind of pain that only this story can produce and I am not handling it well. Drop a like and tell me in the comments, which side of the door hurt you more?