Chapter 103: Not This Nikki
*/Third Person POV/*
And so, the silence stretched.
Kara lay on her side with her back to Nora’s half of the bed, blanket up over her shoulder, eyes open at the wall, doing the only thing left to a woman whose stiffened back had already testified against her in open court.
So, decided on the most dignified course of action her brain coughed up, and that was playing dead.
Behind her, Nora waited, and waited, sitting up against the headboard with her pillow in her lap, listening to her sister breathe until the breathing went so long and so even that a genuine doubt began to creep in.
[...No way. Did she actually fall asleep?]
Nora leaned over and squinted at the visible sliver of her sister’s cheek in the dark.
And she got nothing.
And that was the end of playing nice.
"Fine then..." Nora let out a big, weary, theatrical sigh as though she was taking up a heavy burden. "If you won’t pull your shit together, I’ll just go tell him myself once he’s back. After all-"
-Wosh-!
"You-!"
Kara shot upright so fast the blanket snapped clean off her shoulder, whipping around with her chestnut hair flying, eyes wide, face flushed all the way to her ears.
And Nora snickered. That was all. One small, satisfied, deeply evil snicker, from a girl who had not moved one centimeter and had never once intended to.
And Kara, upright in her own bed at two in the morning, face burning, hair settling back around her shoulders, watched the realization arrive in real time that she had fallen for it. Hook, line, and sinker.
Her eyes went even wider for one second, and then she dropped back down in a huff, yanked the blanket up, and put her back to her sister with the finality of a slammed door.
Nora looked down at the lump of blanket and chestnut hair beside her and couldn’t help letting out a sigh of her own. A real one this time.
Nora was only a year younger. One single year.
And yet in the last five minutes, the room had quietly rearranged itself so that she felt like she was the adult in it, sitting up straight while her big sister, the smart one, the one who read people like weather, sulked under a blanket like a teenage tsundere out of one of her own cursed novels.
"The world has ended, sis," Nora said to the ceiling, softly. "Even I understand the fact that any day could be our last."
But the blanket still didn’t move.
"Guess what I’m trying to say is..." Nora turned the pillow over in her lap, picking at the corner of it. "It doesn’t matter what his answer may be. You gotta let it out. I know there’s that harpy with him now... but you’ve been holding it in for three years, sis. Three whole years... You deserve to let it out."
She looked at the shape of her sister in the dark and softly spoke her last.
"And he deserves to know too."
The silence came back.
But it was a different silence now, and both of them could feel it. The first one had been a performance, but this one was a held breath, stretching across the dimly lit bedroom while the October slowly knocked at the tapped and curtained glass panes.
And then, into it:
"I don’t love him."
Kara’s voice came out quiet and flat and steady, from inside the blanket, without her moving at all.
"Not this Nikki."
The silence that followed was deafening.
Nora sat completely still against the headboard, lips parted around a reply that had died somewhere on the way out, staring down at her sister’s back.
Because there were exactly two ways to hear what Kara had just said, and Nora had walked in here armed to the teeth for the first one. The denial. The ’I don’t love him’. The tsundere classic, the thing you tease out of a stubborn sister with fake sighs and pee-based ultimatums.
But nobody had armed her for the second half.
[Not... this Nikki?]
Not a denial at all. A confession with a death certificate stapled to it. Her sister wasn’t hiding a crush on the man somewhere out there in the dark.
She was grieving one.
The one from three years of lunchboxes and bike rides and terrible novels traded across an apartment hallway. The boy from next door who ate her cooking like the world was ending years before it actually did, and who had been walking out that door since day one of the shit-show and coming back every single time with a little less of him behind his own face.
All the while, down inside the blanket, Kara lay with her eyes shut.
Shut the way you shut them at fourteen when the words are already out, and the room has gone quiet, and you would give anything, anything at all, to reach up into the air and take them back.
She had said it.
Three years of not saying it, to anyone, ever. Not to Nora, not to her diary, not even to the dark.
And she had finally said it out loud in her own bedroom, and the moment it left her mouth she couldn’t help but feel the strange sense of lightness, even though she never imagined she’d say what she just did.
Because it was true.
Both halves of it, at the same time, which was precisely the problem. She didn’t love the man with the accounting face who put bullets into things without so much as a twitch in his faint smile.
Nor could she stop loving the man he used to be, who was gone now.
Neither sister moved, one staring at the ceiling, and one hiding with her eyes sealed shut, as though she had suddenly become afraid of her own room... and of the confession sitting in the air where nobody could take it back.