Chapter 51: Regret

Georgia

I wake up with his name in my mouth and Darcy’s number in my phone.

The ceiling of my dorm room comes into focus slowly, the same water stain shaped like a comma that’s been there since September. For one merciful second I don’t remember anything. Then it all comes back at once.

The gala. The dress Mandi picked out like she was arming me for battle. The overheard conversation in the hallway I wasn’t supposed to hear, Puck’s voice low and urgent as he told Liam I was beneath him, that I deserved better than his world. The way I walked back into that ballroom and threw his own words back at him without giving him a single chance to explain.

"Say something," I whispered, my voice cracking down the middle.

He just stood there. His eyes went gold and desperate, his jaw working like the words were physically stuck behind his teeth, and he said nothing at all.

And then Darcy. Darcy’s arm, easy and warm, guiding me toward the door.

"Do you want to leave?" he asked, smooth as poured honey.

"Yes," I said, before I’d even finished thinking it.

I sit up so fast the room tilts.

My phone is still in my hand, screen dark, but I don’t need to unlock it to know what’s waiting there. I do it anyway, because apparently I hate myself this morning. One text from Darcy, sent at 1:47 a.m., twenty minutes after he dropped me at my door.

*Had a great time.*

Four words. No punctuation problems, no typos, nothing wrong with it at all. It should make me smile. Instead my stomach does something slow and sick, like I’ve eaten something that disagreed with me hours after the fact.

*Why does this feel wrong.*

Darcy was charming last night. He was easy where Puck is hard, simple where Puck is a thousand locked doors I don’t have the keys to. He laughed at the right moments. Being near him didn’t make my skin feel like it was catching fire. He didn’t warn me to stay away from him in one breath and then look at me like I was the only person in the room in the next.

That should have been a relief. For weeks it felt like one.

This morning it just feels like a mistake with good manners.

I get up, because lying here replaying it isn’t helping, and pace the narrow strip of floor between my bed and Mandi’s. She’s somehow still asleep, one arm flung over her face, snoring softly in a way she would deny to her grave. I envy her. I envy anyone who isn’t currently reliving the exact moment they watched a boy’s face go from wanting to say something to deciding not to.

I still don’t understand what that silence meant. I’ve been turning it over since I opened my eyes, trying to fit it into a shape that makes sense. Either he had nothing to say, which means the hallway conversation was exactly what it sounded like, or he had everything to say and couldn’t. I hate that I don’t know.

The scratches on people’s arms. The full moon curfews nobody explains. The howling everyone insists is coyotes, even though coyotes have never once made my skin crawl the way that sound does. The heat that comes off him like a fever. All of it circles back to the same unanswerable question that’s been living in the bottom of my notebook for weeks now.

*What is Rosethorne hiding.*

I don’t know. I still don’t know. Last night, standing in that ballroom, I decided his silence meant I never would.

Except now, in the flat gray light of morning, that decision doesn’t feel like clarity. It feels like running.

I open my phone again and pull up his contact. My thumb hovers over the screen, and before I can think too hard about it I start typing.

*I shouldn’t have said what I said last*

I delete it. Too much, too fast, no idea where it’s going.

*Can we talk about last night*

Delete. That one sounds like I’m about to accuse him of something, and I already did enough of that at the gala.

*I’m sorry I*

I stop halfway through, staring at the cursor blinking at the end of the sentence. Sorry for what, exactly. Sorry for confronting him with words I overheard and had no context for. Sorry for leaving with Darcy in front of the entire school. Sorry for wanting, more than anything right now, for him to have chased me out that door instead of just watching me go.

I delete that one too.

On the fourth try I keep it simple. Four words, the same number as his, like some kind of answer I didn’t mean to give.

*Can we talk?*

My thumb sits over the send button. I can feel my own pulse in my fingertip, which is a stupid thing to notice but I notice it anyway. All I have to do is press down. It’s not an apology. It’s not an accusation. It’s just a door left open a crack.

I don’t press it.

Instead I lock the phone and set it face down on my nightstand, hard enough that Mandi stirs and mutters something unintelligible into her pillow. I sit on the edge of my bed with my knees pulled up to my chest, the way I used to sit at competitions before I skated, back when the only thing I was afraid of was falling on the ice.

Outside my window, Rosethorn Forest is a dark green smudge past the dorms, quiet in the daylight the way it never quite is at night. I look at it for a long time. It doesn’t offer anything. It never does. Just sits there, holding whatever it’s always held, daring me to come find out.

I pick my phone back up. Open the text again. Read it one more time.

*Can we talk?*

I don’t send it.