Chapter 47 The Shower
POV: Carly
He suggested she join him.
She said no.
He did not push it. Just gathered his things from the drawer with that infuriating calm of someone who had made an offer and was perfectly comfortable with however it landed and disappeared into the bathroom without another word.
She lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the water start through the wall.
She was not thinking about the shower.
She was absolutely not thinking about the shower.
She sat up and looked at the bookshelf.
She lay back down.
She looked at the record player. The needle had reached the end of the vinyl and the room was quiet now except for the soft static of it spinning and the water through the wall.
She sat up again.
She stood up.
She stood in the middle of the room for approximately fifteen seconds doing absolutely nothing.
Then she grabbed her jacket off the end of the bed and walked to the bathroom door and knocked twice.
"Don't say anything." She said through the door. "Just. Don't."
A pause.
"Okay." He said. No smirk in it. No comment. Just okay.
She opened the door.
The bathroom was steamed and warm and a significant improvement on the cold room she had just been lying in convincing herself she was fine. She kept her eyes forward and her chin up and crossed to the far wall while Niko stayed on his side of the space with his back to her and said nothing because she had asked him not to and he was apparently capable of that when it mattered.
She appreciated it more than she was going to tell him.
She turned her back to him.
"Turn around." She said.
She heard the specific quality of silence that meant he was already facing the other way.
She shrugged off her jacket and put it on the hook. Her hands moved to the hem of her tank top and she took one breath and pulled it over her head and told herself she was a person who did things like this and it was completely fine.
Her heart was going at a completely unreasonable speed.
She reached for the towel on the rack and wrapped it around herself and turned back around.
He was facing the wall exactly as asked.
She almost smiled at that.
"Okay." She said.
He turned around.
His eyes came to her face immediately and stayed there. Not dropping. Not scanning. Just her face. She did not know why that hit her as hard as it did but it did.
She crossed her arms over the towel.
He looked at her arms crossed over the towel and then back at her face and said quietly. "You don't have to do that."
She did not uncross her arms immediately.
But she thought about it.
He moved to his side of the space and turned the second shower on and she thought about the church and the festival and the bus and all the versions of herself she had been discovering in his company and she slowly, deliberately, dropped her arms.
He was not looking at her.
She appreciated that too.
The water was warm and the steam was thick and she stood in the small space and let the tension of the entire day start to dissolve off her shoulders and thought about how strange and specific this moment was. How nothing about it felt wrong. How she had expected to feel exposed and instead felt something closer to the opposite.
She reached for his bar of soap from the rack.
"You know." She said. Talking to the steam. "When I pictured how this semester would go, this was not anywhere on the list."
She heard him laugh softly on the other side. "What was on the list."
"Homecoming committee." She said. "Coven finals. Graduating without any catastrophic incidents."
"And now." He said.
She thought about it. "Now the list looks completely different."
"Better or worse." He said.
She considered that honestly. "I genuinely cannot tell yet." She said. "Ask me again later."
"I'll hold you to that." He said.
The water ran and the steam sat around them and she washed her hair with his shampoo which smelled exactly like him and she thought she was going to have to live with that fact for the rest of her life.
She was almost done when she heard the humming.
Low and off-key and coming from somewhere down the bathroom corridor outside their shower stalls. Both of them went completely still at the same time.
Footsteps.
The bathroom door opened.
"Who the hell is showering at this hour? It's the middle of the night you absolute pricks." A male voice slurred loudly before the sound of a tap running filled the room.
Carly pressed herself against the back of the stall and covered her mouth with both hands.
She could hear Niko on the other side doing the very specific controlled breathing of someone who was furious and containing it by a thread.
The vampire at the sink took his time. Hummed something. Ran the tap. Hummed some more.
Carly looked at the ceiling.
She was going to laugh.
She was absolutely not going to laugh.
She was going to laugh.
She bit down on the inside of her cheek so hard her eyes watered.
The tap turned off.
The humming faded.
The door closed.
Silence.
She pressed both hands over her mouth and felt the laughter come anyway, shaking through her shoulders silently, and from the other side she could hear Niko's contained version of the same thing and that made it worse and she slid down the shower wall slightly with her hand over her face completely gone.
"That." She whispered between laughs. "Was the most stressful thing that has ever happened to me."
"He is a dead man." Niko said. Still laughing.
"You are not killing anyone." She said.
"Jury's still out." He said.
She pressed her lips together and pushed herself back up and turned the water off and grabbed her towel and told herself to get it together.
She was not getting it together.
She was still shaking with it when she heard him turn his water off too and she wrapped herself back up and took a breath and pushed the curtain back.
He was already out, towel around his waist, leaning against the opposite wall with his arms crossed and that expression. The real one. The one she had decided a long time ago she would do quite a lot to see more often.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
They both started laughing again at the same time.
It bounced off the tiles and filled the whole bathroom and she covered her mouth with both hands and he covered his face with one and neither of them could stop and she did not want to and she thought about how she had spent five years genuinely despising this person and could not currently locate a single trace of that feeling anywhere in her body.
It faded slowly into something warm and settled.
He looked at her with his hair damp and his face open and that specific softness that only showed up in the dark or in empty rooms.
"Okay." He said quietly. "Back to the room before he comes back."
She nodded and grabbed her clothes from the hook.
He held the door.
She walked through.
He followed.
Author's Note:
The random vampire humming show tunes at four in the morning while they pressed themselves against opposite shower walls trying not to laugh is genuinely one of my favorite things I have written and I will not apologize for it. Drop a like and tell me in the comments how hard you laughed because I need to know I am not alone.