THIRTY-SIX
Cath had been writing for four hours, and when she heard someone knocking at her door, it felt like she was standing at the bottom of a lake, looking up at the sun.
It was Levi.
“Hey,” she said, putting on her glasses. “Why didn’t you text? I would have come down.”
“I did,” he said, kissing her forehead. She took her phone out of her pocket. She’d missed two texts and a call. Her ringer was turned off.
“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Let me just pack up.”
Levi fell onto her bed and watched. Seeing him there, leaning against the wall, brought back so many memories and so much tenderness, she climbed onto the bed and started kissing his face all over.
He grinned and draped his long arms around her. “Do you have much writing to do?”
“Yeah,” she said, rubbing her chin into his. “‘Miles to go before I sleep.’”
“Have you shown anything to your professor yet?”
Cath had just started to bite his chin and she pulled away, looking at the teeth marks. “What do you mean?”
“Have you been turning stuff in piece by piece, or are you waiting until the whole story is done?”
“I’m … I’ve been working on Carry On.”
“No, I know,” he said, smiling and smoothing his hand over her hair. “But I was wondering about your Fiction-Writing project. I want you to read it to me when you’re done.”
Cath sat back on the bed. Levi’s hands didn’t leave her head and her hip. “I’m … I’m not doing that,” she said.
“You don’t want to read it to me? Is it too personal or something?”
“No. I’m not. I’m just … I’m not going to do it.”
Levi’s smile faded. He still didn’t understand.
“I’m not writing it,” she said. “It was a mistake to say that I would.”
His hands tightened on her. “No, it wasn’t. What do you mean? You haven’t started?”
Cath sat back farther, stepping off the bed and going to pack her laptop. “I was wrong when I told my professor I could do it—I can’t. I don’t have an idea, and it’s just too much. I’m not sure I’m even going to finish Carry On.”
“Of course you’ll finish.”
She looked up at him sharply. “I’ve only got nine days left.”
Levi still seemed confused. And maybe a little hurt. “You’ve got twelve days left until the end of the semester. And about fourteen before I go back to Arnold, but as far as I can tell, you’ve got the rest of your life to finish Carry On.”
Cath felt her face go hard. “You don’t understand,” she said. “At all.”
“So explain it to me.”
“Simon Snow and the Eighth Dance comes out in nine days.”
Levi shrugged. “So?”
“So I’ve been working two years toward this.”
“Toward finishing Carry On?”
“Yes. And I have to finish before the series ends.”
“Why? Did Gemma Leslie challenge you to a race?”
Cath jammed the knotted power cord into her bag. “You don’t understand.”
Levi sighed harshly and ran his fingers through his hair. “You’re right. I don’t.”
Cath’s hands were trembling as she pushed them through the arms of her jacket, a thick cable-knit sweater lined with fleece.
“I don’t understand how you could throw this class away twice,” Levi said, frowning and flustered. “I have to fight for every grade I get—I’d kill for a second chance at most of my classes. And you’re just walking away from this assignment because you don’t feel like it, because you’ve got this arbitrary deadline, and it’s all you can see.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” she said.
“You don’t want to talk at all.”
“You’re right. I don’t have time right now to argue with you.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Levi looked up at her, stricken. Cath fumbled for something else to say, but everything in her reach was wrong. “Maybe I should just stay here tonight.”
His eyes swept over her, more coolly than she would have thought possible. There were two deep lines between his eyebrows.
“Right,” he said, standing up. “See you in nine days.”
He was out the door before she could stutter out, “What?”
Cath wasn’t trying to pick a nine-day fight; she’d just wanted to escape from tonight—she didn’t have time to feel guilty about Fiction-Writing. Even thinking about that stupid story made Cath feel clawed up and open.
She lay down on her bed and started to cry. Her pillow didn’t smell like Levi. It didn’t smell like either of them.
He didn’t understand.
When the last Simon Snow book came out, it was over. Everything. All these years of imagining and reimagining. Gemma T. Leslie would get the last word, and that would be it; everything Cath had built in the last two years would become alternate universe. Officially noncompliant …
The thought made her giggle wetly, pathetically, into her pillow.
As if beating GTL to the punch made any difference.
As if Cath could actually make Baz and Simon live happily ever after just by saying it was so. Sorry, Gemma, I appreciate what you’ve done here, but I think we can all agree that it was supposed to end like this.
It wasn’t a race. Gemma T. Leslie didn’t even know Cath existed. Thank God.
And yet … when Cath closed her eyes, all she could see was Baz and Simon.
All she could hear was them talking in her head. They were hers, the way they’d always been hers. They loved each other because she believed they did. They needed her to fix everything for them. They needed her to carry them through.
Baz and Simon in her head. Levi in her stomach.
Levi somewhere, gone.
In nine days, it would be over. In twelve days, Cath wouldn’t be a freshman anymore. And in fourteen …
God, she was an idiot.
Was she always going to be this stupid? Her whole miserable life?
Cath cried until it felt pointless, then stumbled off the bed to get a drink of water. When she opened her door, Levi was sitting in the hallway, his legs bent in front of him, hunched forward on his knees. He looked up when she stepped out.
“I’m such an idiot,” he said.
Cath fell between his knees and hugged him.
“I can’t believe I said that,” he said. “I can’t even go nine hours without seeing you.”
“No, you’re right,” Cath said. “I’ve been acting crazy. This whole thing is crazy. It isn’t even real.”
“That’s not what I meant—it is real. You have to finish.”
“Yeah,” she said, kissing his chin, trying to remember where she’d left off. “But not today. You were right. There’s time. They’ll wait for me.” She pushed her hands inside his jacket.
He held her by her shoulders. “You do what you have to,” he said. “Just let me be there. For the next two weeks, okay?”
She nodded. Fourteen days. With Levi. And then curtains closed on this year.
“Maybe fighting him isn’t the answer,” Simon said.
“What?” Baz was leaning against a tree, trying to catch his breath. His hair was hanging in slimy tendrils, and his face was smeared with muck and blood. Simon probably looked even worse. “You’re not giving up now,” Baz said, reaching for Simon’s chest and pulling him forward, fiercely, by the buckled straps of his cape. “I won’t let you.”
“I’m not giving up,” Simon said. “I just … Maybe fighting isn’t the answer. It wasn’t the answer with you.”
Baz arched an elegant brow. “Are you going to snog the Humdrum—is that your plan? Because he’s eleven. And he looks just like you. That’s both vain and deviant, Snow, even for you.”
Simon managed a laugh and raised a hand to the back of Baz’s neck, holding him firmly. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. But I’m done fighting, Baz. If we go on like this, there won’t be anything left to fight for.”
—from Carry On, Simon, posted April 2012 by FanFixx.net author Magicath
THIRTY-SEVEN
“Cather.”
“Mmmm.”
“Hey. Wake up.”