009 | Transferred Back
579 Words
She read the messages twice.
Then she looked up at Caiden.
"Sora's back," she said.
His expression didn't change much. Just a small shift, the kind that meant he was recalibrating. "Back where."
"Inside. Hana says he transferred back." She looked at her phone again. "I don't understand. The journal said he left."
"He did leave. Three weeks ago." He paused. "I didn't know he was coming back."
She looked at him. "You knew he left?"
"Hana told me." He said it simply, like it was obvious. "She has my number."
Nora stared at him. "Since when does Hana have your number."
"Since the second week. She got it from your phone apparently." A beat. "She wanted a way to tell me things you might not remember to."
Nora didn't know what to do with that. The image of Hana quietly going through her phone, getting Caiden's number, texting him updates about her own life that she couldn't reliably pass on herself. It was practical. It was also the kind of thing that made her chest feel tight in a way she couldn't fully explain.
"What else has she told you," Nora said.
"Not much." He paused. "Enough."
She put her phone away. Around them students were filing through the gate, the usual morning crowd, nobody paying attention.
"The arrangement," she said. "I thought it was almost done."
"So did I."
She looked at the main building. Somewhere inside it, Sora was apparently back. She didn't know what his face looked like when he was sorry or when he was determined or which one he was wearing right now. She knew him only from two short journal entries written in the deliberate flat tone she used when she wanted tomorrow-Nora to keep her distance.
Sora texted again. Ignored it.
Sora at the convenience store. Walked the other way.
Past-her had been clear. She trusted past-her.
"I don't want to see him," she said.
"Okay."
"Not today. Maybe not for a while."
"Okay."
She looked at Caiden. "That means the arrangement keeps going."
He met her eyes. "I know."
She searched his face for something, she wasn't sure what. Reluctance maybe. Or calculation. Some sign that this was inconvenient, that he'd been hoping it was over.
There was nothing like that.
"Okay," she said.
They walked through the gate together and she stayed close to his side, not touching, just close, and she thought about Sora somewhere inside the building and then she stopped thinking about Sora because Caiden had shifted slightly so he was between her and the main crowd and she wasn't sure he'd done it on purpose but it felt deliberate and quiet and she filed it away to write about tonight.
They reached the main doors.
He held one open.
She walked through and stopped just inside, in the warm air of the entrance hall, and turned.
"The pen," she said. "Do you have it."
He reached into his pocket and held it up briefly. Then put it back.
She nodded and turned toward the stairs.
"Nora."
She stopped.
"Whatever happens today," he said. "You don't have to handle it alone."
She stood there with her back to him for a second.
Then she started up the stairs.
"I know," she said, without turning around. "I wrote that. About you. Last night." She paused on the step. "That was the thing I underlined twice."
She kept climbing.
She didn't look back.
But she heard him follow.
- Writer
