A/N: We earn our M rating in this chapter, folks!
fall
They're…kind of dating.
Kind of, because he really does spend most of his time at the lab (or the library, or the basement of Shoaker Hall), but Caroline spends most nights doing her own work sitting at his dining table, Milo sleeping contentedly at her feet.
(It doesn't help that Elena is officially back together with Shitty Damon, and he's always at their house, just sitting there in his shitty-ness while she projects as loudly as she can into the universe just how much he sucks.)
"Why do you dislike him so much?" Nik asks once and she had paused mid-chew to consider the question.
It turns out to be incredibly easy for her to answer; she has an entire list and she ticks off the reasons to him.
"One." She holds up her index finger. "He's a huge dick. To me, to Elena, to Elena's brother, to his own brother—he's just an ass. Two." She holds up a second finger and Nik looks like he regrets asking. "He cheated on Elena constantly in high school. Probably still does, but I don't have any proof and I guess that matters, or whatever. Three." A third finger. "The fact that he wasn't in school here was part of this place's appeal for her, so what does Damon do? Transfer as soon as Elena accepted her scholarship. Four—"
Nik holds up his hands in a halfhearted effort to quell the onslaught. He smiles a little at her and says, "I get the picture, love, but perhaps—"
She brandishes her fork at him. "Shitty Damon doesn't deserve any attempt at friendship or understanding," she cuts him off. "Not that there's anything to understand beyond the undeniable fact that he's just a jerk."
"So you've said," he notes agreeably. Caroline narrows her eyes at him, trying to decipher if he's placating her.
"Damon," she says slowly, "is a demon. Trust me on this. I've held Elena's hand so many times after that prick broke her heart, and she knows my stance on him." Caroline shudders dramatically. "I refuse to spend any more time with him than necessary." Milo whines from his spot at her feet, which reminds her. "Oh, and Milo hates him too. Surest sign of a sociopath."
"Sociopath," Nik repeats incredulously. "Seems a bit harsh, no?"
She sends him a dark, speaking glance. "You don't know Damon."
He seems to be biting back a wry smile over his coffee cup. "Sounds as though I don't want to."
"Don't worry," Caroline tells him seriously. "I'll protect you from him." She holds up her fork and thrusts it at him with mock-violence.
"My hero," he says dryly.
.
.
.
The first time they have sex is when Caroline starts to believe that she could really, seriously fall for this guy.
She's had maybe a smidge too much wine; not enough to impair her judgement, but enough to make her supremely brave, and he's just—so concerned for her. "Are you sure?" he keeps repeating, constantly pulling away from her insistent lips.
Finally, she yanks on the collar of his shirt and hauls him down to her eye level. "If you ask me one more time if I'm sure, I will end you," she threatens, though she ruins the effect by giggling a little at the end.
Nik seems slightly caught off guard at her promise of violence, but he recovers quickly (thank god) and rolls with it, pressing her against the counter. His hips pin hers and his hands start to roam, one sliding around her waist and the other into her hair. His thigh moves so that he's shifting her knees apart to make a place for himself between them and it's—
—so, so hot—
The hand in her hair moves down to her waist and before she knows it, he's moved her so that she's now perched on top of his granite countertop. "Mmm, cold," she complains against his mouth and he smirks.
"Give it a minute," he tells her, swallowing her reply.
Her dress is bunched up around her hips and Nik makes quick work of her tights, tossing them somewhere that is outside of her peripheral vision and therefore does not exist. She can only hope Milo doesn't find them.
Caroline's fingers grapple with the button of his jeans and if his mouth would let her breathe for just a second, she could undo the damn thing—
"Need a hand?" he breathes into her ear and she almost snaps at him, the button sliding free just in time.
"No, but it looks like you do," she sasses back triumphantly; his black boxer briefs leave nothing to the imagination and she reaches forward, reaches down to take him in her hand. The skin of his cock is velvety soft and he exhales into her neck as she strokes him once, then twice.
She's barely gotten a rhythm going when he moves his hand between her legs, fingers barely strumming her entrance. It makes her breath stutter and her hand pause.
"Caroline," Nik says, sounding as though she's going to kill him. Which, she figures she technically already threatened to once tonight.
"Sorry," she whispers back, trying to return her focus to the way he feels, but all she can think about is how his fingers keep circling around her and what his cock will feel like there instead.
"No, no," he groans, his nose sliding against her temple, "don't apologize, just—Caroline." He says her name that way again, and she can't help but smile a little bit. He must feel it because his free hand slides into her bra to cup her breast in retaliation, his fingertips swiping gently over her nipple until it peaks for him.
Then finally, finally his thumb finds her clit and she can't keep up, releasing him so that both of her hands can clasp his shoulders. He's good at this, she thinks hazily, because no guy's fingers have ever made her feel this way. Her hips are actually moving of their own accord, and he slides his pointer finger inside of her, then his middle finger and it's too much—
She gasps, loudly, into his neck, her knees pressing into the hardness of his sides. "Oh my god," she exhales and apparently that does it for Nik.
He scoops her off the counter top, kicks off his jeans and his briefs, and carries her bridal style into his bedroom.
Caroline can't help it; she giggles and says giddily, "Hey, I recognize this place!" She looks up at him and bats her lashes dramatically. "Home sweet home."
Instead of laughing, he kisses her and wipes all thoughts from her mind.
Gone are his shirt and her dress, then her bra. She literally has zero clue where her panties ended up.
He pulls a condom from the side table and she watches in fascination as he rolls it on before nudging her knees apart. "Caroline," he says seriously, leaning forward to cup her face in his hands. "Are you sure?"
And even though she had threatened to end him if he asked one more time, the look on his face is so—
She nods. "Very," she tells him before pressing her lips against his.
It's all the confirmation he needs.
The press of him inside her is slow, almost agonizingly so. "Nik," she whines, stretching his name out so that one syllable becomes three. She feels him smirk against her shoulder.
"Patience is a virtue," he mock-scolds, tongue dancing across her collarbone.
"And if someone's too slow, I'm going to leave here with mine intact," she retorts; that makes him laugh, the sound of it deeper than normal as it skates across her skin.
After what feels like an eternity, he's sheathed inside of her, but he doesn't yet move. They lay like that for several seconds, until he tells her softly, "You're beautiful."
It shouldn't make her blush, not when he's fully inside of her, stretching her open beneath him; but it does. She kisses him again instead of replying.
He begins to move, her hips rising up to meet his as they settle into a rhythm. His mouth trails down her sternum, leaving wet kisses between her breasts before he focuses his attention on one breast, catching a nipple in his mouth and sucking.
Caroline has to clasp a hand over her mouth to keep from letting loose a loud moan. Nik shows her no sympathy, doesn't slow down, the thrust of his hips matching the swipe of his tongue across the sensitive tip. "You are evil," she groans in tortured approval, her fingers lacing through his hair. She thinks she feels him fight back a laugh.
When the snap of his hips becomes too quick for her to match, he releases her breast with an obscene smack. His hands tighten around hers and she can feel her insides begin to clench in response.
He comes first but she isn't that far behind him, the heels of her feet digging into his lower back as the world whites out. When she returns to herself, they're both breathing hard, their panting echoing off the walls of his bedroom.
"You're beautiful," he repeats, pushing himself off of her and throwing away the condom before returning to pull her in close to him. Caroline loves a snuggler, and she scoots in so that his arms can fold easily around her, her legs twining with his.
"You're beautiful," she says to him with a cheeky grin that he returns before nuzzling the fine baby hair at her temple.
He falls asleep before she does, and she uses the quiet stillness to trace the outline of his face with her gaze: the way his brow slopes, the line of his jaw, the length of his eyelashes (so unfair, she thinks fondly).
In the dark she whispers to him, "I think I love you."
.
.
.
She really loves the way he says her name—Car-oh-line, his voice wrapping smoothly around each consonant.
She loves the absent way he plays with the ends of her hair when his arm is slung casually around her shoulders; as though this is the way they've always been and will continue to be.
She loves how he looks at her sometimes, when he thinks she isn't looking—like she is something to be treasured, to be protected. Like he can't quite believe his luck.
When a particularly nasty autumn bug makes its way through campus, he listens to her as she catalogues each symptom she's felt in the last twenty-four hours—"Or wait, can the germs live forty-eight hours on surfaces? Shit, Nik, I've definitely got it, I was in the athletic facility all Tuesday afternoon!" She wrinkles her nose and wipes the faucet handles with a vengeance. "I know for a fact that football players don't wash their hands. It's gross."
Her dramatics make him chuckle. Once her Lysol-ing spree is finished, they wind up on either end of his couch, him hyper focused on his laptop while she keeps sneaking looks at him from her book (A People's History of the United States).
"Sweetheart, I am not a physician," he reminds her patiently without looking up from the screen in front of him.
"No, but you might as well be." She gestures towards him with her highlighter. "Don't you know more about viruses than the average MD?"
Nik flashes a crooked grin at her and her heart melts at the sight of his dimples. "I wouldn't tell them that."
"Oh, really? Damn, let me cancel that billboard I ordered."
The laugh that escapes him starts low in his chest. It absolutely delights her.
(She wakes up the next morning the bug's latest victim; he takes the day off from his lab work and research to make her homemade chicken noodle soup, like his mother used to do for him when he was small, he tells her. He checks her temperature every hour and wraps her in the fuzzy blanket that drapes over the back of his couch. He tells her to go to sleep, he will be there when she wakes up.)
.
.
.
"I have to tell you something," Nik announces one night just as she's about to doze off, her head on his chest. His arm extends down the slope of her naked back, his hand coming to rest comfortably over her hipbone.
Caroline doesn't open her eyes but wrinkles her nose as though she's considering it. "Mm, nope," she decides, burrowing further into him. "This isn't a confessional, my friend. Save it for when the sun is up."
His fingers pull gently through her hair, and this, this part is what she had always enjoyed the most about relationships. The easy, companionable quiet in the arms of someone who wants to be there.
"I'm afraid I have to tell you now," he says, and his voice is tinged with the sound of genuine regret. It sends a frisson of fear through her. She sits up.
She's imagining the worst—he has a girlfriend, he has a wife, oh my god he has an entire family back in England—
"What is it?" she asks softly, her voice already sounding as though it might break.
Nik stares intently at her face as though memorizing the lines of it. As though he might not see it again for a long time.
"I knew who you were," he finally says, voice quiet. "When I found you asleep in my bed that night." He exhales, and she's more than a little confused but lets him work through whatever it is he's working through. "I remember when you moved in." His eyes are downcast now, avoiding hers. "You had on those zebra striped shorts, and you told your friend that was trying to help you with a box that you didn't need a man to carry your shit."
She knows the shorts he's talking about, remembers telling Tyler Lockwood exactly that as he'd tried to take a box full of winter coats from her; but she's still not sure what exactly it is he thinks he's confessing to.
"Okay?" she prods. "And?"
He still doesn't look up at her. "And that weekend there was a football game and when I saw that you were a cheerleader, I used the faculty system to look you up." He says it all in a rush and finally, finally meets her eyes.
Caroline blinks and waits for more. When nothing follows and he continues to look at her, expectantly waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop—
"That's your big confession?" she asks incredulously. "That you Googled me when we first moved in next door? Oh my god, have you seriously been torturing yourself over that?"
"It's not Google." He sounds briefly offended at her smear of the faculty listserv, or whatever. "There's quite a bit of information on that system, love," (and now he looks a little bewildered at how he has suddenly found himself defending the actions he had just thought disturbing enough to confess to her). "I found out your hometown, your major, your high school GPA."
"Mystic Falls, Virginia; history; and a 3.8 unweighted, 4.7 weighted," she recites dutifully, ticking them off on her fingers. "And now I've told you myself, so you can stop beating yourself up over something that's seriously silly." She leans forwards and kisses his lips. "Never forget," she says solemnly, "that you met me when I was just starting my career as a burglar."
Nik stares at her as though he can't quite believe she's real, before— "It was just some light breaking and entering, love," he points out before rolling over so that he's on top of her and kissing her soundly.
.
.
.
And yeah. She's such a goner.
.
.
.
The first photo in his apartment is the one of the two of them that she tacks to his fridge with one of her own magnets. "Who doesn't own magnets?" she grumbles with faux irritation.
In it, they're at a women's basketball game since she doesn't have to cheer at those, praised be (though if she thinks about it too hard, it's bullshit and kind of sexist); his arm is around her and her temple rests against his. He wears a closed mouth smile, while she's all toothy grin—it fits them, she thinks with some satisfaction.
But—
Her brow furrows slightly. "Hey, Nik," she calls out, wandering aimlessly in search of literally any other photos (with people, she specifies; he has plenty of landscapes) in his house. He grunts in response from somewhere within the bowels of the house. "Where are all your pictures of, like, people? Like, your friends and family?"
His silence puts her on edge.
It's not an oops, didn't quite hear you kind of silence; it's loaded and weighted down with a heaviness that she can almost feel pressing against her. Caroline pokes her head into the second bedroom, where he's sitting behind the desk. She knows from the look on his face that he heard her.
"Hey," she says again, softer this time, her long braid falling over her shoulder. "Everything okay?"
She can tell immediately that his smile is forced. "Just fine, sweetheart," he says, and she can also tell that this is a lie.
It's the first time Nik has lied to her.
(Well, not technically, but she doesn't count that stupid I Googled you when you moved in crap. Who wouldn't at least look up their new neighbor on Instagram? It's 2020, for God's sake.)
"You sure?" Come clean about what's bothering you. Tell me. I'm here for you.
"Of course," he says, and his tone indicates that the conversation is over.
She calls him out on it over dinner.
"You're not fine," Caroline says, careful to keep her tone conversational instead of accusatory. Milo's ears perk up all the same. "Tell me what's wrong."
For a long, apprehensive moment, she thinks he might dodge her again; might tell her it's all in her head. She isn't sure what her next move is, if that's the case.
But then he deflates, sitting back in his chair and pushing at his food with his fork. "I…don't have any photos of my family here," he admits with a long sigh. "We—we had a falling out. Years ago."
She waits for him to elaborate but nothing comes. "Do…you wanna tell me what it was about?"
Hesitation is etched into the lines of his body; she tries to lighten the mood. "Can't be worse than, horror of horrors, Googling your girlfriend." She flashes him a smile that immediately feels too bright.
He looks so—so tortured over it that she picks herself up out of her chair and walks over to him, settling onto his lap.
"Hey," she says soothingly, "families are complicated. I get it." Her hand comes up, fingers clasping carefully at the back of his neck, rubbing gently to relieve the tension in the corded muscles there. "I'm team you, okay? Whatever it is, I'm on your side."
Nik exhales heavily, his forehead coming to rest on hers. "I know," he says quietly. "I know, love."
It isn't until later, when she is snuggled up to him on the couch, the credits of the movie they had rented playing softly from the tv, that he opens up.
"My father and I never saw eye to eye," Nik says. His fingertip traces a path down her arm and she can feel the warmth of his touch through her sweatshirt. "He preferred my brothers." He shrugs a little. "Things…came to a head when I left for university."
Caroline, an only child beloved by both parents, says nothing, but sits up a little to peer encouragingly into his face.
"My youngest brother, Henry—" Nik exhales heavily. "He had leukemia. And Michael…our relationship was never anything special, but after that, it fractured." He shrugs a little and Caroline wants to wrap him in a hug so tight that breathing takes effort. "We fought about something, I don't remember what. Something inconsequential, most likely. It escalated, and he told me to not come back."
"Nik," she breathes, sympathy flooding through her. The look on his face breaks her heart and makes her want to put him up on her tallest shelf, where she can keep him safe.
"It was a long time ago," he assures her, though his gaze is unfocused and his eyes faraway..
"Yeah but still," she insists, "your dad shouldn't have said that to you!"
He's quiet for a long moment. "He is a very hard man to love," he says finally, "and I've never been sure he knew how to, himself."
Caroline blinks, her eyes suddenly feeling suspiciously wet. She looks down quickly so that he doesn't notice, but she isn't fast enough.
He catches her chin in his fingers. "Oh, none of that now, sweetheart," he admonishes her gently, fingertips stroking her cheek. "I certainly don't deserve those."
She thrusts her jaw at him defiantly. "I'll be the judge of that," she sniffs haughtily before stretching up to touch her nose to his temple. "What you deserve is a father that cares about you and loves you. I'm so sorry you didn't have that." She leans down to kiss him softly. "But you should know that I do. Love you, I mean."
The wrinkle in his brow clears, and he at first seems to have not heard her. But she sees the moment it registers—the tiny crinkle of his eyes, the hesitant, almost bewildered pull of his lips upwards. "Do you then," he says, his face very close to hers.
"Yep," she replies, popping the 'p' a bit for emphasis. "Have been for a minute or two. Figured I should let you in on the secret."
She will never, ever be over the way he looks at her-as though she is the sun, as though she is that around which his world revolves, casting the shadows behind him. "Secrets are meant to be shared," he agrees solemnly, his gaze flickering down to her mouth before returning to her eyes. "And in that spirit, I feel I must tell you—" he drops a kiss on her nose, "—that I love you, as well."
As he starts to thoroughly kiss her, Caroline briefly thinks that she should google if it's possible to die from too much happiness.
.
.
.
The crisp fall air has given way to the biting cold, and she excitedly pulls her cable knit sweaters and tall boots out of her closet.
"I never see you anymore," Elena complains mournfully, scratching Milo behind the ears. The dog sighs contentedly, his back-left paw thumping enthusiastically on the hardwood floor.
Caroline snorts. "That's a lie," she accuses playfully as she tosses another wool sweater into her duffel. "You see me every day at cheer practice."
"Yeah but that's like—cheer practice." Elena scoots closer to the edge of the bed. "So. Nik. You really like this guy, huh?"
She doesn't tell Elena that she passed like weeks ago. "I really do," she confirms with a small, beaming smile.
"Maybe we could do like, a double date or something? Don't give me that look, Care, I know you're not Damon's biggest fan, but he's really grown as a—hey, where're you going?" Elena follows as Caroline heads to rummage in the kitchen cabinets. "Seriously, Caroline. Damon's…really different now." She pauses and tilts her head, long brown hair slipping over her shoulder like silk. "Don't say anything, but he's going to therapy."
Caroline pauses in the act of pulling out the Grey Goose. "Really?"
Elena is twirling a lock of hair around one finger, a tell of her nervousness since at least the fifth grade. "Yeah. I think he's really trying to be a better person, you know?"
It's on the tip of her tongue to snark back, trying is one thing, doing is another, and we all know how Damon is with the follow through, but Elena's face is filled with hope. Caroline can't bear to dash it. "Fine," she groans in mock surrender, setting the Grey Goose back in its spot in the cabinet. "Set up the damn double date."
She'll figure out an excuse to back out later, she decides.
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tbc
A/N: "Don't touch your face," says the author as she touches her face.
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