Chapter 73: Puck’s Guilt

Georgia

He looks at me like the fall was his fault.

I have no idea why.

I’m in the common room on the first floor of my dorm, my braced leg stretched out on a spare chair. My textbook is open across my lap, but I haven’t read a single page in the last twenty minutes. The words keep sliding past me, refusing to stick, and eventually I stop pretending they will.

It’s easier down here these days.

Fewer stairs. Less time spent negotiating with my own body just to get from one place to another. I’m getting very good at planning my life around a knee that apparently has its own agenda. I’ve become an expert in doorways and thresholds, in the precise angle a cane needs to lean against a couch so it doesn’t clatter to the floor at two in the morning.

I hear the door before I see him.

And somehow, I know it’s him.

I don’t know how I know. I just do.

There’s this quiet, inexplicable part of me that seems to recognize him before the rest of me catches up. A faint tug low in my chest starts the second he’s close, like something inside me is a compass and he’s due north.

Then something stirs behind my sternum.

Faint. Warm. Reaching.

The same strange pull I felt the night of the fall.

It’s been quiet for weeks. I’d almost convinced myself I’d imagined it, that grief and painkillers had conjured something that was never really there.

Now it’s back.

I don’t understand it. I don’t try to. I’ve learned that trying to understand anything about Puck only leaves me with more questions than I started with.

"Hey," Puck says, his voice careful and quiet, as though he’s testing the word before committing to it.

He’s standing in the doorway with both hands shoved into his jacket pockets, shoulders drawn in like he’s bracing against a wind only he can feel.

He looks awful.

Not messy. Puck is never messy. But there are dark shadows beneath his eyes, deep enough that they almost look bruised. His jaw is tight, and the muscle jumps once before he forces it to relax. Even his hair looks like it’s given up, pushed back from his forehead in a way that suggests he’s been dragging his hands through it for hours.

"Hey," I answer, my tone flat with exhaustion.

I close my textbook because pretending to study suddenly feels stupid, a small performance neither of us has the energy for.

He crosses the room slowly. Not hesitant exactly, but close enough that I notice the careful way he places each footstep, as though the floor might shift beneath him.

He lowers himself into the chair across from me instead of taking the empty spot beside me on the couch.

He keeps his distance.

I notice.

I notice most things about him lately, whether I want to or not. It’s become a habit I can’t seem to break, cataloguing him the way I used to catalogue jump rotations, obsessively, instinctively.

His knee bounces once.

Twice.

Then he presses his palm against it and forces it still, the gesture so deliberate it looks almost painful.

For a while, neither of us says anything. The fire pops softly in the grate, filling the silence with something that isn’t quite comfortable but isn’t unbearable either.

His eyes drop to my leg.

The brace.

The cane leaning against the couch.

Something changes in his face.

I don’t have a name for it. I’m not sure I want one. Naming things makes them real, and some days I have enough reality to deal with already.

It’s too raw. Too immediate.

I look away and focus on the fire instead. Orange light flickers over the logs, and I decide that is a perfectly reasonable thing to stare at when a boy is looking at you like that, like you’re something broken he doesn’t know how to fix.

"How is it?" he asks eventually, his voice low.

Almost apologetic.

"Bad."

I don’t bother softening it.

I’m too tired to make things easier for everyone else. Tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the effort of holding myself together for an audience that keeps shrinking.

"The doctors won’t give me a straight answer about anything. It’s ligament damage. It’s severe. Apparently, that’s all anyone is willing to commit to."

I shrug.

Even that tiny movement pulls at the sore muscles in my hip. Apparently, spending three weeks walking wrong does wonders for the rest of your body. I’ve become a chain reaction of small betrayals, one joint compensating for another until the damage spreads like a rumor.

"So I limp around, do my exercises, and wait for someone to tell me whether I get my life back."

His shoulders jerk.

Just once.

His hands curl into fists on his knees before he catches himself and presses his palms flat against his jeans, as though physically holding himself in place.

"I’m sorry," he says, his voice rough and quiet.

"It’s not your fault."

I keep my voice gentle but firm.

I need him to hear that, need it to land somewhere beneath the guilt he’s clearly been carrying like a stone in his chest.

He doesn’t answer.

He just looks at me.

There’s so much hurt in his expression that for a second I wonder if I missed something. If someone died. If something happened to him that has nothing to do with me. The intensity of it startles me, makes my own pain feel suddenly small by comparison.

The firelight catches his face, making the shadows beneath his cheekbones stand out, carving him into something older and sadder than the boy I met at the start of the year.

He looks older than seventeen.

None of us should look this tired.

"Have you been okay?" I ask, softer now. "You look like you haven’t slept in three weeks."

"I haven’t."

He says it so simply that I almost laugh.

Almost.

"Because of me?"

My voice comes out smaller than I intended, and I hate how much I need to know the answer.

He doesn’t answer.

Which is, I guess, an answer.

His mouth opens like he’s going to say something. Something bigger. Something that has been building behind his teeth for weeks.

For one second, I see it.

Whatever he’s thinking is right there behind his eyes, close enough to touch.

Then his jaw tightens.

He swallows.

Gone.

"What?" I ask.

He looks away.

"Nothing."

"Say it."

"Never mind."

I shift on the couch, trying to find a position that doesn’t make my knee ache, and fail, as usual.

Puck watches me.

His entire body goes rigid, every muscle drawn tight like a wire pulled too far.

His fingers twitch against his knee, and for one second, I think he’s going to get up.

Maybe he wants to help me.

Maybe he wants to touch me.

I don’t know which possibility makes my stomach tighten more.

He stays where he is.

"You can say something," I tell him, a little more exasperated than I mean to sound. "You don’t have to sit there looking at me like I’m dying."

"You’re not dying."

The words come out too fast.

Too sharp.

"I know you’re not dying."

I blink, thrown by the force of his response.

"Then what?"

He looks down at his hands.

For a few seconds, he just turns them over, staring at his palms as though they might give him an answer, as though the truth is written somewhere in the lines he can’t quite read.

When he finally speaks, his voice is so low I have to lean forward slightly.

"I keep going over it."

"Going over what?"

"The whole thing."

He rubs his thumb over the side of his hand, a small, restless motion that betrays more than his words do.

"Where I was sitting. How long it took me to get down there. Everything I did. Everything I didn’t do."

He exhales and drags a hand over his face.

"I watched it happen, Georgia."

His voice cracks around the words, splitting open in a way that makes something in my chest ache in sympathy.

"I watched the whole thing happen, and I was just sitting there."

"So was everyone else."

I say it gently because I’m trying to make him understand, trying to hand him some small piece of absolution he seems desperate for.

"So were a thousand other people in that building. That’s what happens at a competition. People sit in the stands and watch."

"That’s not the same."

There’s an edge to his voice now.

Not anger at me.

Something else. Something that sounds almost like fear.

"Why isn’t it?"

He doesn’t answer.

He keeps staring at his hands.

And suddenly, I realize this isn’t about him not knowing what to say.

It’s about him knowing exactly what he wants to say and being afraid of where those words will take us. The realization settles over me slowly, like cold water finding every gap in my clothing.

I’m getting tired of that.

Every conversation with him seems to have doors I can see but can’t open.

I’m running out of patience for knocking.

"Puck."

He finally looks up, and the rawness in his expression nearly stops the question in my throat.

"It was my blade. Or my ankle. Or bad luck. Or whatever the doctors decide it was."

I hold his gaze, refusing to let him look away this time.

"It wasn’t anything you did or didn’t do from a seat forty feet away."

Something flashes across his face.

He looks at me so suddenly that I forget to breathe for a second.

There it is again.

That desperation.

That thing he keeps swallowing down, again and again, like it costs him something each time.

For one stupid moment, I think he’s finally going to tell me.

Whatever he’s been holding back.

Whatever he’s been trying so hard not to say.

"I should have been closer."

His voice is low.

Rough.

Almost pleading.

I frown, the words not quite fitting into any explanation that makes sense.

"Closer to what? You couldn’t have caught me from the stands."

He doesn’t correct me.

That’s what stays with me.

Long after he leaves, long after the door clicks shut behind him and his footsteps fade down the hallway.

Long after the common room empties and I’m alone with my textbook, my aching leg, and a fire burning down to embers.

He doesn’t tell me I’m right.

He doesn’t laugh and say it’s ridiculous.

He doesn’t say nobody could have done anything.

He just looks at me as though I’ve offered him mercy instead of stating the obvious, as though the words themselves are a gift he doesn’t feel he deserves.

And lets the words sit between us, unchallenged, heavy with everything neither of us is willing to say aloud.

Like the only thing I got wrong was thinking he couldn’t have.