“You’re right. I don’t have time right now to argue with you.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Levi looked up at her, stricken. Cath fumbled for something else to say, but everything in her reach was wrong. “Maybe I should just stay here tonight.”
His eyes swept over her, more coolly than she would have thought possible. There were two deep lines between his eyebrows.
“Right,” he said, standing up. “See you in nine days.”
He was out the door before she could stutter out, “What?”
Cath wasn’t trying to pick a nine-day fight; she’d just wanted to escape from tonight—she didn’t have time to feel guilty about Fiction-Writing. Even thinking about that stupid story made Cath feel clawed up and open.
She lay down on her bed and started to cry. Her pillow didn’t smell like Levi. It didn’t smell like either of them.
He didn’t understand.
When the last Simon Snow book came out, it was over. Everything. All these years of imagining and reimagining. Gemma T. Leslie would get the last word, and that would be it; everything Cath had built in the last two years would become alternate universe. Officially noncompliant …
The thought made her giggle wetly, pathetically, into her pillow.
As if beating GTL to the punch made any difference.
As if Cath could actually make Baz and Simon live happily ever after just by saying it was so. Sorry, Gemma, I appreciate what you’ve done here, but I think we can all agree that it was supposed to end like this.
It wasn’t a race. Gemma T. Leslie didn’t even know Cath existed. Thank God.
And yet … when Cath closed her eyes, all she could see was Baz and Simon.
All she could hear was them talking in her head. They were hers, the way they’d always been hers. They loved each other because she believed they did. They needed her to fix everything for them. They needed her to carry them through.
Baz and Simon in her head. Levi in her stomach.
Levi somewhere, gone.
In nine days, it would be over. In twelve days, Cath wouldn’t be a freshman anymore. And in fourteen …
God, she was an idiot.
Was she always going to be this stupid? Her whole miserable life?
Cath cried until it felt pointless, then stumbled off the bed to get a drink of water. When she opened her door, Levi was sitting in the hallway, his legs bent in front of him, hunched forward on his knees. He looked up when she stepped out.
“I’m such an idiot,” he said.
Cath fell between his knees and hugged him.
“I can’t believe I said that,” he said. “I can’t even go nine hours without seeing you.”
“No, you’re right,” Cath said. “I’ve been acting crazy. This whole thing is crazy. It isn’t even real.”
“That’s not what I meant—it is real. You have to finish.”
“Yeah,” she said, kissing his chin, trying to remember where she’d left off. “But not today. You were right. There’s time. They’ll wait for me.” She pushed her hands inside his jacket.
He held her by her shoulders. “You do what you have to,” he said. “Just let me be there. For the next two weeks, okay?”
She nodded. Fourteen days. With Levi. And then curtains closed on this year.
“Maybe fighting him isn’t the answer,” Simon said.
“What?” Baz was leaning against a tree, trying to catch his breath. His hair was hanging in slimy tendrils, and his face was smeared with muck and blood. Simon probably looked even worse. “You’re not giving up now,” Baz said, reaching for Simon’s chest and pulling him forward, fiercely, by the buckled straps of his cape. “I won’t let you.”
“I’m not giving up,” Simon said. “I just … Maybe fighting isn’t the answer. It wasn’t the answer with you.”
Baz arched an elegant brow. “Are you going to snog the Humdrum—is that your plan? Because he’s eleven. And he looks just like you. That’s both vain and deviant, Snow, even for you.”
Simon managed a laugh and raised a hand to the back of Baz’s neck, holding him firmly. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. But I’m done fighting, Baz. If we go on like this, there won’t be anything left to fight for.”
—from Carry On, Simon, posted April 2012 by FanFixx.net author Magicath
THIRTY-SEVEN
“Cather.”
“Mmmm.”
“Hey. Wake up.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I have to go to work. If we don’t leave soon, I’ll be late.”
Cath opened her eyes. Levi had already showered and put on his gothy Starbucks clothes. He smelled like an actual Irish spring.
“Can I stay?” she asked.
“Here?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll be stuck here all day.”
“I like here. And anyway, I’m just writing.”
He grinned. “Okay—sure. I’ll bring back dinner.… You write all the words,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Give Simon and Baz my best.”