Her door was 3W-02 and she got it open with one hand while the other stayed hooked in my belt loop, which meant she’d practiced this, which meant she’d thought about it, which meant I was going to be insufferable about it later.
The door swung. She walked me backward through it. It shut behind us with a click that felt heavier than the hardware justified.
Her room smelled like her, that lavender dryer sheet thing she used on her training gear mixed with the vanilla shampoo and something underneath both of them that I’d stopped trying to name three weeks ago. The blackout curtains were half open. Gold light lay across her dark grey sheets in a long bar and lit up the protein powder containers on her shelf, which she kept arranged by flavor, which was the single most Sloane detail in the entire building.
She got my back against the door and then she stopped being interested in the door.
The kiss went sideways fast. Her hands came up into my hair and pulled, not gently, and I made a sound against her mouth that I would deny under oath. She tasted like the cinnamon gum she chewed after conditioning. The Bond Resonance opened up between us like somebody had kicked a hole in a dam and everything she was feeling came through at once, unfiltered, no delay, and it was not complicated. It was want. It was the specific greedy want of a girl who had spent nine years across a kitchen table from me pretending not to look.
"Off," she said, tugging at my collar.
"You literally just told Petra we shouldn’t do this in hallways."
"We’re not in a hallway."
Fair.
Her hands got under the hem of my shirt and her palms were hot against my ribs, and my brain performed the calculation it always performed, which was that I had a strategy meeting Friday and a Crucible in two weeks and a fake Aspect registration held together by Percy’s insurance loopholes, and none of that mattered even slightly compared to the fact that Sloane Fitzgerald was biting my jaw.
I got a hand on the back of her thigh. Lifted.
She made a startled noise and then a considerably less startled one, and her legs came around my waist like she’d been waiting for the invitation, and I carried her the four steps to the bed and put her down on the dark grey sheets with her pink hair spilling out around her head and the gold light landing across her collarbone and the black choker sitting tight at her throat.
I leaned in.
Her hand came up flat against my chest.
"Okay," she said. "Down, boy."
I stopped. I did not stop gracefully.
"I’m sore."
Her cheeks had been flushed since somewhere around the doorway, and they went a full shade darker on the admission, which was the funniest part of the entire evening. This was a girl who had stood up in front of a room of eighteen-year-olds on the first day of Combat Operations and announced, without a single hedge, that she intended to end up the number one Hero in the country. She had said it at volume. She had not blinked. Half of 1-A still hadn’t recovered.
And she couldn’t get the word sore out of her mouth without going pink from the collarbone up.
"Sore," I said.
"Extremely sore." She said it like a diagnosis, like she was reading it off a chart. "Like, I did Steele’s core circuit this morning, the full one, the one with the weighted holds at the end, and somewhere around minute six I genuinely thought I was going to die. And not from the circuit."
She glared up at me from underneath me, which took real commitment given the angle and the fact that her hands had been under my shirt roughly nine seconds ago.
"You went five times."
"Six."
"That’s worse."
"That’s better."
"Not for me." She shoved my chest with the flat of her hand, and at eighty-one Strength that was not a gesture, that was a legitimate transfer of momentum from one body to another. I let it move me. Arguing with Sloane Fitzgerald about physics had never once gone anywhere useful, and the last time I’d tried it she’d put a hairline crack in the drywall behind my head to illustrate a point about follow-through.
I ended up sitting on the edge of the mattress with my shirt half untucked, one sock somehow missing, and my dignity somewhere in the dark under the bed frame alongside her sparring gloves and a phone charger she’d been looking for since Tuesday.
The gold light from the lamp on her desk caught the side of her face where she’d turned into the pillow. Her ponytail had lost the war about an hour ago.
I let out a breath through my teeth. Long. Slow. Theatrical in a way that had absolutely no chance of going unnoticed and was not intended to. The sigh of a man who had been personally and specifically wronged by the mechanics of the universe.
"Oh my god," Sloane said.
"I said nothing."
"You sighed."
"I exhaled. There’s a distinction and you’ll figure it out around November."
"Don’t quote me at me." She reached over and smacked my thigh, then left her hand there, which undermined the whole message. "It’s not a no forever. It’s a no tonight."
"So."
"So don’t make me say it."
"I’m going to make you say it."
"Lukas."
"Say the thing."
She pulled a pillow over her face and said something into it that came out muffled and furious and sounded approximately like tomorrow you can do whatever you want, and then she threw the pillow at my head. I caught it. Six months ago the original Lukas Belmont would have taken that pillow directly to the face and probably apologized to it.
"Fine," I said. I stood up, stretched, felt something in my shoulder pop that Demigod would fix by dinner. "Then we’re doing something else, because if I sit here looking at you for two hours I’m going to become a problem."
"You’re already a problem."
"A worse problem."
Her speaker sat on the desk next to a stack of Hero law textbooks with sticky tabs jammed in them at aggressive angles. I grabbed her phone off the nightstand, which she allowed, which was its own kind of statement, and thumbed through until I found something that wasn’t the hardcore gym playlist she used to make herself angry enough to run.
Guitar came out of the speaker. Slow. Some acoustic thing with a woman’s voice low in the mix.
Sloane sat up on her elbows. "What is that."
"Music."