Chapter 17- How long have you been keeping this?

The evening they got back.

Mira had gone home first, dropping Caelith outside her building with a long hug and a look that said she had more questions than she was asking and had decided to give it time. Zara had not needed dropping anywhere. She had simply gotten out of the car at a junction three streets from campus and walked without explanation, which by now felt entirely normal.

Which left Elias.

He pulled up outside Caelith's building and put the car in park and didn't move.

Caelith didn't move either.

They sat in the particular silence of two people who both knew a conversation is coming and were each waiting for the other one to start it.

"You want to come up?" Caelith said.

"Yeah," he said. "I think I probably should."

___________

She made tea because it gave her hands something to do.

Elias sat on her small couch with his jacket still on and his elbows on his knees and the expression of someone who had been rehearsing something and had just decided to throw the rehearsal out entirely.

Caelith set a mug in front of him and sat in the chair across and looked at him.

"How long?," she said.

No preamble. No easing into it. They had known each other long enough for that.

Elias picked up the mug and looked into it.

"Since the beginning," he said. "More or less."

Caelith said nothing. Let that land where it needed to.

"First week of first year," he said. "We were in the same intro seminar. You sat two rows ahead of me and you didn't talk to anyone and I remember thinking." He paused. "I remember thinking that there was something around you. Not visible. Not anything I could point at. Just a quality. Like standing near something that hasn't switched on yet but you can feel it's plugged in."

"That's a strange thing to think about a stranger."

"I know." He turned the mug in his hands. "But it wasn't the first time I'd felt something like that. It's sort of." He exhaled slowly. "It's a family thing. My grandmother used to call it the other sight. Nothing dramatic. Nothing powerful. Just an awareness that some people carry something and most people don't. And the ones who do tend to." He searched for the word. "Attract things. Or be attracted to things. Without knowing why."

Caelith looked at him steadily.

"So you got close to me because of that?."

It wasn't quite a question.

Elias met her eyes.

"Initially," he said. "Yes."

The word sat between them.

"I wanted to understand what I was feeling," he said. "I've spent my whole life noticing things I couldn't explain. And then you walked into that seminar and whatever you carry was the loudest thing I had ever felt and I." He stopped. "I wanted to know what it was."

"And Mira…."

"Mira was Mira from the first five minutes." Something in his face shifted, warm and completely unperformed. "That had nothing to do with any of this. She talked to me in the corridor because I looked lost and she thought that was unacceptable." A beat. "I didn't stand a chance."

Despite everything Caelith almost smiled.

Almost.

"So our friendship," she said. "Was it ever real?."

He leaned forward slightly. "Yes, I came close because I felt something I didn't understand. And then I got to know you. And getting to know you and Mira has been one of the best things that has ever happened to me." He held her gaze. "Those two things are both true at the same time. I know that's complicated. I'm not asking you to be fine with it immediately. But I need you to know they're both true."

Caelith looked at him for a long moment.

The thing about Elias was that he had never been easy to doubt. Not because he was charming, though he was, but because he was almost pathologically incapable of performing sincerity. What he felt showed up on his face whether he wanted it to or not.

She believed him. This made things a lot clearer. She had sometimes wondered what made someone that easily stood out amongst the crowd friends with someone like her , a loner….

"You should have told me," she said still a bit hurt and confused.

"I know."

"A long time ago."

"I know." He didn't argue it or explain it away. "I didn't know how. And then enough time had passed that it felt like the kind of thing that gets harder the longer you wait." He exhaled. "And then you started having a strange few months and I thought." Another pause. "I thought if I said something it would confirm that whatever was around you had gotten louder. And I wasn't sure I was ready to be right about that."

"Were you? Ready?"

He looked at her.

"No," he said honestly. "But watching you try to carry it alone was worse."

Zara had let herself in sometime during this conversation.

Neither of them had heard her. She was simply not there and then was, standing near the kitchen doorway with her jacket on and her arms crossed, which Caelith was beginning to understand was just her default state of existing in a room.

Elias turned and looked at her.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough," Zara said. She was looking at him with an expression Caelith had not seen on her before. Not suspicion exactly. More like recalibration. Like she was adjusting something she thought she had already measured correctly.

"You didn't clock him," Caelith said to her.

"No," Zara said. Flat and factual and carrying the faint edge of someone who found that mildly irritating.

"My grandmother said we read quiet," Elias said. "People who carry the other sight. We don't announce it.”

Zara looked at him for another moment.

"Useful," she said finally. Which from Zara was practically a compliment.

Elias looked at Caelith.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I still don't fully understand what you are or what any of this means. My grandmother knew more than she told me and she died before I thought to ask the right questions." A pause. "But I have some of her things. Notes. Books. Things I haven't looked at properly. Wasn't exactly ready. I'm a bit different from the rest of my family. I don't just have the sight.." He picked up his mug.

Caelith looked at him across the small warm circle of her lamp and thought about how a person could know someone for two years and still be surprised by them.

“No questions please”. Referring to the last words he just spat out”

"Okay," she said.

Then she thought of something.

"Elias."

"Yeah."

"The night at the beach house." She held his gaze. "When my eyes went grey. Did you already…..”

He pointed at her immediately.

"You mean the part where you bit Mira's finger and your eyes went grey." A beat. The corner of his mouth moved despite everything. "For a second there I genuinely thought you were a vampire."

Caelith stared at him.

"That was your first thought."

"I had several thoughts. That was the most coherent one available at the time."

Zara made that sound again. The one that lived in the same postcode as a laugh without ever quite being one.

Caelith pressed her hand over her face.

And for the first time since the beach house, something in the room felt almost light.

______

From tomorrow it's a chapter daily with the exception of Sunday which no updates still appears.

Please bear with me. This is a work in progress and I'm yet to complete it. I'm trying to balance writing and my daily life. Thanks for understanding