Chapter 103: KEEPING AWAY

POV: Georgia

I started avoiding the one person who might actually tell me the truth, because I was afraid of what telling me would cost him.

I don’t figure that out right away. For two days after I write the word in my notebook, I tell myself I’m just being careful. I take the long way to class. I eat breakfast early. When I see a tall figure with dark hair at the end of a hallway, I turn around.

My cane clicks against the stone floors the whole time, loud as a clock counting down to something I can’t name.

By the third day, Mandi notices. She doesn’t say anything at first. She just watches me over the rim of her coffee cup while I check the dining hall doorway for the fourth time in one meal. Her eyes narrow slightly, the way they do when she’s cataloguing evidence instead of eating her toast.

"You’re doing it again," she says, her tone flat with suspicion.

"Doing what?" I ask, my voice too quick to sound innocent.

"Looking at the door like it owes you money," she says, arching an eyebrow.

"I’m not looking at the door," I say, a little too fast.

"Georgia." She sets her cup down with a decisive clink. "Your fork has been in the air for a full minute," she says, her tone edged with dry amusement.

I put the fork down. My eggs are cold. I push them around the plate and don’t answer, because the honest answer is that I don’t know what I’m doing. I only know that my stomach tightens every time I think about Puck, a small fist closing somewhere beneath my ribs.

Alexa slides into the seat beside Mandi with a tray and a small, careful smile. She doesn’t ask either. She just looks at me for a second, the way she always does, like she’s reading something written on my face in very small print. Then she turns to Mandi and starts talking about a chemistry quiz, her voice light and breezy, and I’m grateful for it.

I should be ready to ask Puck everything. I have the notebook. I have the circles. I have the word, written small and final in the middle of the page, and I haven’t crossed it out once. Every instinct I own says to walk up to him, put the notebook on the table, and make him look at it.

The thought keeps circling back no matter how many times I push it away.

I chew on it through the rest of the morning, through a history lecture I don’t hear a word of. Walking back to my room at lunch, I cut across the quad and catch sight of Darcy near the fountain, deep in conversation with two guys I don’t recognize. He isn’t smiling. His hands move in short, clipped gestures, and when one of the guys starts to argue, Darcy says something low that makes him go still. I don’t hear the words, but I recognize the shape of the moment - someone being reminded of a rule.

Darcy’s gaze flicks up, finds me across the courtyard, and holds there a beat too long before he turns back to his conversation like I’m not worth the interruption. I keep walking. My cane finds every uneven stone in the path, and I don’t look back, but the knowledge sits cold in my chest the rest of the way to my room: whatever I’m circling, he’s circling too, and he isn’t being careful about hiding it anymore.

It isn’t until I’m sitting on my bed that night, staring at the wall, that the answer finally surfaces.

I’m not afraid of him.

I think about his hand on my arm that first day, careful and precise and shaking. I think about the handprints he bent into the steel railing at The Fang, and the way he held himself back at the Classic while Liam had to physically hold him down. I think about the note I found under my water bottle. *You’re better than you think you are.*

He has never once hurt me. Not once. He has been trying so hard not to.

I pull my knees up, wincing when the bad one protests, and wrap my arms around them. The truth comes out slowly, one piece at a time. Every time Puck has almost told me something, he has stopped. Every single time. Mandi flinched like she’d hit a wall. Liam said *I can’t, I physically can’t,* his voice cracking with something close to panic. Bella crumbled, folding in on herself like paper held to a flame. There’s a rule here, a big one, and everybody is bound by it, and I don’t know what it does to the people who break it.

If I walk up to Puck and ask him what he is, I’m not just asking a question. I’m asking him to do the one thing his whole world has taught him he can never do. What if it costs him his family, his place here, his father’s trust - what if it costs him more than I can see.

I think about Mandi’s face when she said *Please don’t ask me that again,* her voice breaking, her eyes full of grief. Whatever the Veil is, it has teeth. And I would be the one pulling the trigger.

I’m so tired of being the person who takes things from people. My mother took my childhood and called it love. Darcy took my trust and called it charm. I refuse to be one more person who takes something from Puck Hale just because I want to know.

That’s what the distance is. It’s not fear. It’s me trying to protect him from my own questions.

I fall asleep that night still holding my knees, the lamp still burning, my notebook shut tight on the nightstand like something that might escape if I left it open.

The next day, I make myself go to the dining hall at the regular time.

I tell myself it’s because avoiding him isn’t a plan. I can’t hide for the rest of the year. I’ll sit with my friends, eat my food, and see what happens. That’s all. No notebooks. No questions.

Mandi is already at our usual table, waving me over with a bread roll clutched in one fist like a tiny flag of surrender. I lower myself into my seat, hook my cane over the chair, and keep my eyes on my tray.

"Finally," Mandi says, her tone teasing, nudging a plate of fruit toward me. "I was starting to think you’d transferred schools without telling me."

"Ha," I say, my voice dry. "Very funny."

"I try," she says, grinning around a mouthful of roll.

It lasts about forty seconds.

I feel it before I see it. That old, strange prickle runs across the back of my neck, the one I felt the first time I looked at him across this exact room. My head turns on its own, like something has hooked it and pulled.

Puck is sitting at the hockey table, near the windows. Liam is next to him, talking with his hands, doing his usual thing, his laughter booming loud enough to carry across half the hall. A couple of other guys are laughing at something. Puck isn’t laughing. He’s holding a fork, but he isn’t eating. His plate is full, untouched, the eggs gone cold the way mine did yesterday. ℯ

I stare, because something is different, and it takes me a moment to work out what.

Before, whenever I looked at Puck, I saw a puzzle. The burning skin, the snapping pens, the eyes that flash gold. He was a locked door and I was a girl rattling the handle. Everything about him was a question.

Now I see something else. His shoulders are low and a little rounded, like he’s been carrying something heavy for a long, long time and has forgotten how to put it down. There are shadows under his eyes, deep ones, the kind you get from weeks of bad sleep. His jaw is tight even when he’s sitting still. He looks like a person who has spent every day holding something back with his whole body, and he’s running out of strength.

He looks tired.

Not mysterious. Not dangerous. Just tired, and so much younger than I’ve been letting myself think.

My chest aches, a dull, strange pull right behind my sternum, like a string has been tied there and someone has given it a small, deliberate tug.

I should look away. I know I should. My body doesn’t listen.

As if he heard that thought, Puck lifts his head.

His eyes find mine across the whole length of the room. I wait for him to flinch, or to stand up and leave like he did the last time. I wait for myself to drop my gaze and hate that I did.

Neither of us moves.

The noise of the dining hall drifts away. I can still see Liam’s hands moving and Mandi’s mouth shaping words, but they might as well be underwater. There’s only Puck, and the plain, steady way he’s looking at me.

It isn’t hunger. It isn’t confusion. It isn’t the wild, burning thing from the hallway at the party.

It’s recognition.

He sees me. I see him. And for the first time since I arrived at Rosethorne, neither of us is pretending we don’t.