Chapter 13—Caught

Elara's POV

I had thought about the kiss the whole walk to school.

Not just the kiss, all of it, the garden and the quiet after and the way he had looked at me for that one long moment before turning and walking away, unhurried and certain, like he already knew he would see me tomorrow and was comfortable with that.

I had replayed it more times than I was willing to admit before I finally fell asleep, and I had woken up with it still sitting warmly somewhere in my chest in a way that made getting through breakfast considerably harder than it should have been.

I was thinking about it again now, sitting in class with my pen in my hand and my notes open in front of me, and somewhere between thinking about it and trying not to think about it I had apparently started smiling without noticing.

"You are staring at the new student Freya said, without looking up from her notebook.

"I am not staring," I said, looking back at my own notebook where I had written approximately four words in the last twenty minutes.

"You have been looking at him since Professor Aldric started talking and you have that smile."

"I do not have a smile."

Freya looked up then, slowly and deliberately, and looked at my face, and I felt my expression do the exact thing I had been trying to prevent it from doing which was confirm everything she had just said.

She turned back to her notebook with the satisfied expression of someone who had just won an argument without having to make a single point.

I pressed my pen to the page and stared at my notes and told myself very firmly to focus.

I lasted about three minutes.

On my other side Nyx leaned slightly closer without turning her head and said, very quietly, "You smiled at your notebook just now."

"I was thinking about something funny," I said.

"What was it?"

I had nothing. "It does not matter," I said.

Nyx said nothing further but I could feel the quality of her silence which was the silence of someone who had drawn a conclusion and was comfortable sitting with it.

The class continued and I genuinely tried to pay attention, writing notes that I would later discover made very little sense because half my concentration was occupied with being very careful not to look in the direction of the front left of the classroom again, which was taking up considerably more mental energy than simply looking would have. It was a problem of my own making and I was aware of that and it did not help even slightly.

After class Freya fell into step beside me in the corridor with the energy of someone who had been waiting patiently for this moment all morning and was now fully ready to commit to it.

"So," she said.

"No," I said.

"I have not said anything yet."

"You were about to say something," I said, "and the answer is no."

"Elara." She caught my arm gently and slowed us both to a stop near the water fountain where Nyx was already waiting with her bag on one shoulder and the expression of someone who had also been thinking about this.

"We are your best friends," Freya said, and her voice had dropped the teasing edge slightly, landing somewhere between genuine and still a little amused. "You can talk to us about anything, you know that, even things you are pretending are not happening."

"I am not pretending anything is not happening," I said, "because nothing is happening."

"Elara," Nyx said quietly.

"Nothing significant," I amended, which was not better and I knew it immediately.

"There is nothing to talk about," I said, and even as I said it I was aware of how unconvincing it sounded because I was also aware of the smile that kept threatening to reappear on my face without my permission.

"You like him," Nyx said simply.

"I barely know him," I said.

"That is not what I asked," Nyx said.

I opened my mouth and then closed it again because she was right, that was not what she had asked, and the honest answer to what she had actually asked was sitting somewhere just behind my teeth refusing to come out quietly.

"He is interesting," I said finally, which was the most controlled version of the truth I could manage.

Freya stared at me. "Interesting."

"Yes."

"Elara, you have been smiling at your notebook in the middle of a lecture."

"I told you I was thinking about something funny."

"You could not tell me what it was."

"I forgot," I said.

Freya looked at Nyx. Nyx looked at Freya. Something passed between them in the language they had developed over years of being the two most perceptive people I knew, and then they both looked back at me with expressions that said they were choosing to let me have this for now but that the conversation was not over, not even slightly.

"Fine," Freya said pleasantly. "You barely know him and he is interesting. Completely normal. Nothing to discuss."

"Thank you," I said.

"We will revisit this later," she said.

We started walking again and I pulled my bag higher on my shoulder and told myself the situation was under control and that my feelings were manageable and that I was a perfectly composed person who was handling everything very sensibly, and I almost believed it until we passed back through the corridor that ran alongside my morning classroom and I glanced through the open doorway out of pure habit.

Ravin was still inside, gathering his things from the desk slowly, and he looked up at exactly the wrong moment, or exactly the right moment depending on how you looked at it, and our eyes met through the doorway and I had not been prepared for it and my face showed that clearly before I had a chance to do anything about it.

He held my gaze for one second, and then the corner of his mouth moved in that quiet way it did, and he looked back down at his bag like nothing had happened, and I turned and kept walking and felt the back of my neck go warm.

"You just smiled again," Freya said from beside me.

"I am going to need you to stop watching my face."

"I genuinely cannot help it," she said, "it is so interesting right now, watching you fall for someone and stil being in denial about it.

I Iooked at her knowing she was right and i didn't have anything to say to that.