Chapter 99: The Almost-Confession

POV: Georgia

She gets closer to the truth than anyone has, and then the walls she can’t control close the door again.

We’re still sitting on the floor when she says it the second time. The light outside has gone fully gray now, the sun long since dropped behind the trees, and neither of us has moved to turn on a lamp. The dark presses in around us, soft and heavy, filled with the hum of the dorm’s old radiator and the distant thud of someone’s bass two floors down. Mandi’s breathing has slowed from the crying, but her eyes are still swollen, still fixed somewhere past me, like she’s looking at something only she can see. I notice how small she looks folded into herself like this, how different from the girl who used to steal my hairbrush and laugh too loud at her own jokes. That girl feels very far away tonight.

"What do you mean," I ask, my voice barely above a breath. "All of it."

She doesn’t answer right away. Her hands are wrapped around her own knees, and I watch her knuckles whiten and then loosen, whiten and loosen, like she’s working up to something and losing her nerve over and over. The moonlight catches the wet tracks on her cheeks, turning them silver. I want to reach out, to smooth her hair back the way she’s done for me more times than I can count, but something tells me to let her find her own way to the words, however long it takes.

"I wanted to tell you so many times," she admits, her voice cracking on the words. "Back when you first asked about the howling. I almost told you then. And after the Classic, God, after the Classic I almost told you a hundred times. I’d start the sentence in my head and then I’d just, I’d stop myself. I got so good at stopping myself I don’t even think about it anymore. It just happens."

Hearing her say it aloud, the weight of all those almost-confessions, makes something in my chest ache. How many nights did she lie awake in the bunk above me, holding this in, while I slept three feet away, oblivious?

"Tell me now," I plead, reaching toward her without quite touching. "Please."

She closes her eyes. When she opens them again, something in her face has changed, something looser, more exhausted than afraid, like she’s simply run out of the energy it takes to keep holding the door shut.

"My family isn’t just rich, Georgia," she confesses, each word dragged up from somewhere deep. "We protect something. Something bigger than money."

I go very still. I’ve heard this exact sentence before, weeks ago, in this same room, and it stopped in the same place it’s about to stop now. A chill moves down my spine, slow and deliberate, like a finger tracing my vertebrae one at a time. I wait, my whole body leaning slightly toward her, every muscle tensed.

"And Puck - "

She stops.

It isn’t like before. Before, it looked like choking, like something physically closing over her throat and cutting the words off at the root. This time it’s worse, because I can see her trying to fight it, really fight it, her whole face straining against whatever is holding her back. Her jaw locks, hard, the muscle along it standing out sharp under her skin. Her eyes go wide, wet, desperate, fixed on mine like she’s trying to push the rest of the sentence across the space between us through sheer will alone. I’ve never seen her look so trapped. This is a different kind of fear, older and deeper, the kind that lives in the body rather than the mind.

*Say it,* I think, my nails biting half-moons into my own palms. *Please.*

"Mandi." I keep my voice as soft as I can manage, though my pulse is roaring in my ears. "Mandi, it’s okay. Just, just try."

Her mouth opens. I watch her throat work, the same way I watched it weeks ago, except this time there’s a sound underneath it, a thin, strained hum, like a word trying to force its way out through a space too small for it. Her hands come up to her own throat, pressing there, the same gesture as before, except harder this time, more desperate, her fingers digging in like she could physically pry the words loose if she just pushed hard enough. A faint rasp escapes her, something between a cough and a moan, and then nothing. The sound lodges itself in my memory, raw and wrong, nothing like any noise a person should make.

Tears are streaming down her face again, fresh ones, falling faster than she can wipe them away. One drips off her chin and lands on the back of her hand, and she flinches like it burned her. I flinch too, an answering jolt of helplessness twisting through me, because I understand now that nothing I say or do will matter against whatever force has its hand wrapped around her voice.

"Puck what?" I whisper, my own throat tightening in sympathy, like whatever is choking her might reach across the space between us and choke me too.

I reach out and rest my hand lightly on her wrist, careful not to grip, afraid that anything more might break whatever fragile thread she’s fighting along right now. My heart slams against my ribs as I wait for the rest of the sentence to come. Somewhere outside, a dog barks twice and falls silent, and the radiator clicks and hisses, and none of it means anything, and all of it feels like it might.

"Breathe," I urge her, gentle, coaxing. "Just breathe, okay. We don’t have to finish it tonight if you can’t."

But she shakes her head at that too, fierce and frustrated with herself, like stopping now would be its own kind of failure. There’s a stubbornness in her I recognize, the same stubbornness that used to carry her through triple axels she had no business landing. It guts me to watch that same strength turned against an enemy she can’t see, can’t name, can’t fight with anything her body knows how to do.

It doesn’t come.

Mandi shakes her head, slow and helpless, her whole body trembling with the effort of a battle I can’t see and she can’t win. Her lips keep moving, shaping words I can almost read if I squint hard enough, almost, but no sound comes out at all. Just silence, and her mouth working around it, and tears falling steadily down a face that has given up trying to hide anything from me tonight except the one thing she can’t give me no matter how much she wants to. I sit with her in that silence long after her lips finally stop moving, my hand still resting on her wrist, because leaving feels like abandoning her in the middle of a fight, even if I can’t see the thing she’s fighting, even if all I can offer is the fact that I stayed.