A Borrower's Anthology

Education

A lesson in trust and understanding isn't always limited to humans.

...

Nicholas wasn't sure what Michelle was seething with, but her fingers hadn't stopped tapping at her table. Each time he paced by her archway, he would hear it, and it was beginning to whittle down at his nerves.

In all honesty, he hadn't anticipated the meeting would go as messily as it had. It could have been worse, but neither he nor Michelle were expecting the other to have made close contact with humans before the other. Had it been up to Nicholas, he wouldn't have met with either of the brothers to begin with; that had been more of Michelle's fancy for the longest time, but Darius had caught him in the right place at the wrong time. After that, there was no returning to what once had been.

As they'd stood and sat fidgeting in Darius and Philip's hands, it had been Michelle who had broken through stupefaction. "Can you give us a moment alone?" she'd asked.

After a minute of back and forth gazing, Philip had conceded. "Of course. Just let us know when you're done. That gives Darius a chance to finish what he needs to before he starts messing around again."

Not having to travel all the way back to their home's opening was nice, but Nick would have preferred staying with the humans if it'd meant he would have prolonged the inevitable. Now they were back in Michelle's room, and she'd not once looked at him. She shuffled between walking, tapping, and rearranging the pile of small coins decorating her room. Even when he'd left her to fetch his guitar to fix, check where their parents were, she had not deviated much from those three things. Leaned against her archway, Nicholas pinched the rubberband strings on his cardboard box.

"I'm sorry?" Nick offered, his voice as tentative as the step he made to peek at her side profile. "You're mad at me."

"I'm not mad at you," Michelle huffed. It took her a few more seconds of flipping the coins across the wooden surface of her desk before she faced him. Her expression was pinched, lips pursed and brows drawn together. "Why wouldn't you tell me?"

"I'm not out here trying to get all of us caught because I was reckless with one human. I didn't want it to get out of control, you know? Really, I didn't even know if Darius wouldn't say anything about me--about us."

"But that involves going to play guitar with him for--god, has it been weeks now? What, did he force you to do it?" When Nicholas shook his head, Michelle snorted. "When I talk about meeting the humans, I can't, but you can and then don't even tell me about it. I'm sensing some double-standards here, Nick."

"I was going to tell you! It just... I needed to wait for the right time. You say one thing but when you're really meeting the human, things can change, right?" he said then gestured to her and the wall behind them. "What about you and Philip? You met him. Were you going to tell me about it?"

"Yes!" Nick pinned her with disbelieving eyebrows, waiting until she'd broken her stare in a grunt. The coins became interesting to her attention once more. "Eventually! You're the one who always preaches to me about being seen, and humans, and I know it's taboo. I had to trust Philip too, but I was going to tell you. Honest. I just wanted to test how open-minded you would be about it. That's why I wanted to go out today."

"So when I thought Philip noticed us--he had, hadn't he?"

"He wasn't going to say anything. I told him no because you were with me. You think I wanted to freak you out in the open?"

"Then we were both just trying to do the same thing here, Mitch," Nick said and took another step past the threshold, entering her space. She looked at him. While a frown remained on his face, his tone was gentler when he added, "It's not a competition about who can meet a human first and live to see another day, miraculously. If it were up to me, I'd be living my life in bliss out of their sight. Things just happened."