Chapter 106: Not Wrong

POV: Georgia

He told me the one thing he was allowed to tell me, and it was somehow the most terrifying thing anyone’s said yet.

But that comes later. First there’s the phone.

It’s still buzzing on the wet gravel when I bend down to pick it up. The screen is lit with Bianca’s name. I hold it away from me like it might bite. The buzzing stops. Two seconds of quiet. Then it starts up again, harder, and a text slides across the top of the screen. I look away before I can read it. It’s not mine to read, and I’m not going to be the kind of person Darcy was.

I wipe the rain off the glass with my sleeve. I remember, suddenly, the way Bella’s shoulders used to tense whenever Bianca’s name came up, the way she’d change the subject or suddenly need to be somewhere else. I’d noticed it before and filed it away as nothing, twin stuff, too much closeness curdling into something prickly. Now I’m not so sure it was nothing.

I walk, slowly, to the Bellamy twins’ dorm, on the far side of the quad. The girl at the front desk is painting her nails and doesn’t look up when I say I found a phone. She tells me to leave it in the basket. I set it face down in a wire basket full of lost gloves and umbrellas, and the whole way out I can hear it buzzing against the metal.

Outside, the drizzle has turned into a thin, cold mist. I stand on the steps with my hood up and my hand pressed flat against my chest, right where the ache used to be. It’s still quiet there. But my stomach is in knots, because I keep seeing Bella’s face when that name lit up. She didn’t look annoyed, the way you look when your sister calls too many times. She looked like she’d been caught.

"You know, standing in the rain is only romantic in movies."

I jump so hard my cane skids on the wet step. Liam is leaning against the stone railing a few feet away with his hands shoved in his jacket pockets. His hair is damp and sticking up in front. He’s smiling, the easy, crooked smile he always wears, but it’s slightly crooked in the wrong direction, like it’s been put on in a hurry.

"How long have you been there?" I ask.

"Long enough to watch you glare at a basket of mittens." He pushes off the railing. "Also, I saw Bella run past me a few minutes ago. She was crying. She didn’t even see me, and I’m very visible."

"She dropped her phone."

"And you returned it. Of course you did." He shakes his head, like that’s a fact about me he’s still trying to understand. "Come on. You’re going to catch a cold, and then Mandi will blame me for it, and I can’t afford another one of her lectures."

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He just falls into step beside me, slowing his long stride to match my limp, and we head toward the covered walkway along the library.

For a while he talks. He tells me about a hockey drill that went wrong, and a freshman who tried to climb a vending machine, and a rumor that the cafeteria is switching to a new brand of pudding. I laugh in the right places. He’s very good at this. He makes it sound like the world is made of small, silly things, and nothing in it could possibly be dangerous.

But I’ve been watching him for weeks now, and I notice what I didn’t before.

He’s thinner. His jacket hangs differently on his shoulders. There’s a gray tint under his eyes, like Bella’s, only he hides it better. And the jokes come a half-second too fast, one after another, never leaving any gaps. When I was in the seats at The Fang, I watched him on the ice. He plays the same way he talks. He’s always moving, always filling the space, so no one has time to look closely.

We reach the walkway. The rain drums on the roof above us. Liam is in the middle of a story about the vending machine when I stop walking.

"Liam."

"Mm?"

"You don’t have to do that."

He blinks. "Do what?"

"The thing where you keep talking so I don’t ask anything." I say it gently. "You’re really good at it. But I think it’s making you tired."

The smile falls off his face. It doesn’t fade, it just drops, like someone cut a string. For one second he looks at me, plain and stripped down, and I see how worn out he is. It’s the face of a person who’s been holding up a heavy door for weeks and hasn’t been allowed to set it down.

"Georgia," he says quietly.

"I’m not going to push you." I tighten my grip on my cane. "I know you can’t tell me things. I figured that out. I just wanted you to know I’m not mad at you. About any of it."

He turns and looks out at the rain. A line of water pours off the edge of the roof and splashes on the stones. He doesn’t speak for a long time. His jaw works, and I can see him arguing with himself.

"I hate this," he says finally, his voice low and ragged. "You have no idea. Every day I look at you, and you’re trying so hard, and you’re so close, and I have to stand there and crack jokes about pudding."

"I didn’t mind the pudding."

A cracked, wet laugh escapes him. He scrubs a hand over his face. When he drops it, his eyes are shiny.

"I’m not allowed to say it," he says. "I want you to understand that. There’s a rule, and it’s not like a school rule. It’s older than that. It’s bigger than me." He takes a breath. "But there’s one thing I can say without breaking it. One thing. I’ve been going back and forth on it for days, and I think I can get away with it."

My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat. "Okay."

He turns and looks me right in the eyes. For once there’s no joke hiding anywhere in his face.

The word I’ve been avoiding for weeks sits in my chest like a stone, heavy and sharp-edged: werewolf. It sounds insane even inside my own head. I wait for him to say it, or to say anything.

"Whatever you’ve figured out," he says, "you’re not wrong."

The rain keeps falling. A bell rings somewhere far off. I stand very still.

"I can’t say more than that," Liam goes on, quickly, as though he’s afraid the words will be taken back. "But you’re not wrong. I need you to know that. You’re not crazy, and you’re not imagining it. You’ve been seeing it clearly this whole time."

For weeks I’ve been waiting for someone, anyone, to look at me and say that. I thought I’d feel triumphant. I thought I’d feel relieved.

I feel cold.

Because it means it’s real. All of it. The golden eyes, the claws, the circles in my notebook that collapsed into one, the word werewolf finally allowed to stand on its own instead of hiding behind safer ones. It isn’t a story I built out of coincidences and a bad night’s sleep. It’s out there in the world, and it’s been standing next to me at lunch the whole time.

My hand shoots out before I can stop it. I grab Liam’s arm, fingers digging into the sleeve of his jacket. He’s warm, too. Everyone here is warm.

"Then tell me what I’m right about," I say.

His whole body goes rigid under my hand. I can feel him shaking, a fine tremor, and he gasps once, short and sharp, as though he’s trying to lift something far too heavy.

"I can’t," he says, his voice breaking in the middle. "I physically can’t, Georgia. Please believe that."