Chapter 46 His Room
POV: Carly
He came back from the bathroom smelling less like scotch and looking slightly more human.
She was still at the bookshelf. She had gotten through approximately four spines without reading any of them.
He leaned against the doorframe and looked at her with his arms crossed and that expression that meant he found her genuinely entertaining and was not trying to hide it.
"You hungry?" He asked.
She turned around. "It's four thirty in the morning."
"That wasn't a no." He said.
She pressed her lips together. "I could eat."
He disappeared again and came back two minutes later with a packet of biscuits he had apparently been keeping in his desk drawer like a normal person and she sat on the edge of his bed and he sat on the desk and they ate biscuits at four thirty in the morning in his room while the Black River Falls fog sat against the window and neither of them felt the need to fill every silence.
It was easy.
That was the thing that kept catching her off guard about being with him. How easy it was. She had spent five years believing that everything about Niko Monroeson would be a confrontation and instead she kept ending up in moments like this one where she was sitting on his bed eating biscuits and feeling more like herself than she did in most rooms she actually belonged in.
She looked around the room again properly now that she had stopped being nervous enough to actually see it.
The scattered papers on the desk. Crumpled sketches that had not made the cut. She could see the edge of what looked like a detailed architectural drawing peeking out from under a textbook and wondered when he had done that.
The record player in the corner. She wanted to ask about the vinyls. What he listened to. Whether he played anything himself or just collected them.
The painter's kit against the wall with the blank canvases leaning beside it. She thought about the portrait she had almost seen in the sketchbook in the church before the security guard showed up and the question she still had not gotten an answer to.
She thought about a lot of things she had not gotten answers to yet.
"Can I ask you something." She said.
He looked up from the biscuit in his hand. "You're going to regardless."
"The sketchbook." She said. "In the church. Before we had to run. I was about to ask you what was in it."
He was quiet for a moment.
She watched him decide something.
He reached under the stack of textbooks on the desk without looking away from her and pulled it out and held it in his lap. Just held it. Not opening it yet. Like he was still deciding how much of a yes this was.
"You don't have to." She said.
"I know." He said.
He opened it.
Not to the beginning. Somewhere near the middle. He turned it so she could see and she leaned forward slightly on the edge of the bed.
Drawings. Detailed and precise and nothing like the casual sketches she had caught glimpses of before. A rooftop at night. The tree line of Black River Falls pressing against the campus fence in the fog. A window in the church with the colored light coming through it. A page of hands. A page of what looked like the inside of a very grand house that had something cold and wrong about it even rendered in pencil.
He turned another page.
She went still.
It was her.
Not one of her. Several. Different angles and moments she recognized and some she did not. Her face turned to the side the way she sat when she was thinking. Her hand around a pen. Her hair loose and falling forward over her cheek. One that she recognized immediately as the cafeteria, the very first week of term, drawn from the angle of the vampire tables across the room.
She looked up at him.
He was watching her face carefully.
"How long." She said quietly. Not accusatory. Just needing to know.
He closed the sketchbook slowly. "Longer than is probably comfortable to hear."
She sat with that.
She thought about the cafeteria at the start of term and the way she had felt his eyes on her before she saw him. She thought about the bleachers during cheer practice and the sketchbook that was always open in his lap. She thought about every time she had caught him looking and chalked it up to a vampire habit or a power play or anything except the simplest explanation.
"Why didn't you ever say anything." She said.
He looked at the sketchbook in his hands. "Because you hated me." He said. "And I was fairly certain you had reasons."
She looked at her hands in her lap.
"I didn't hate you." She said.
He glanced up.
"I was afraid of you." She said. "There's a difference."
He was quiet for a moment. Then. "What were you afraid of."
She gestured vaguely at the room. At him. At the sketchbook. At all of it. "This." She said. "Exactly this."
He nodded slowly like that was the most honest answer she had given him yet and he was going to hold it carefully.
She looked at the record player. "What do you listen to."
He blinked at the subject change. Then went with it. "Everything. Depends on the mood."
"Play something." She said.
He looked at her for a second. Then he got up and crossed to the record player and crouched down to flip through the vinyls. She watched him select one with the specific certainty of someone who knew exactly what he wanted and had known since she asked.
The needle dropped.
Something slow and warm filled the room. Not sad exactly. Just quiet and true and a little bit inevitable the way some music felt.
She lay back on his bed and looked at the ceiling and listened.
He stayed where he was by the record player for a moment. Then he came back and lay beside her on top of the covers and they both looked at the ceiling and neither of them said anything and the music filled all the space the words were not using.
It was the most peaceful she had felt in weeks.
She turned her head and looked at him.
He was already looking at her.
"You reek less." She said.
He laughed. That real one. She felt it in her chest the way she always did.
"High praise." He said.
She smiled at the ceiling.
"I'm glad you came." She said quietly. "Tonight. With the pebbles and everything. Even though it was four in the morning and you were drunk and you said something that made me want to scream."
He was quiet for a second. "I'm glad you came down."
She nodded.
The music played.
She closed her eyes.
"Niko." She said.
"Yeah." He said.
"You should shower." She said. "You still smell like a distillery from the neck up."
A beat of silence.
Then he laughed again and she laughed with him and the room was warm and the music was slow and the fog was outside and for the first time in longer than she could measure everything felt like exactly where it was supposed to be.