"Oh no. Oh no, Belmont, I scratched you, I never scratch people, I’m so careful, I’m always so—"
"I’m fine."
"You are not fine, that’s a neurotoxin, you’re about to feel like the worst version of yourself, you’re going to want to lie down on this floor and stop existing—"
"Maribelle."
"—and it lasts forty minutes and you’ve got Aspect Development at one and Dravid takes attendance and I am so sorry—"
I took her chin.
Just two fingers under it, tilting her face up, and I let her look at me and see that my pupils were normal and my breathing was normal and that whatever she’d expected to be happening to my central nervous system was not happening.
Her mouth opened.
"You," she said.
"Yeah."
"You should be on the floor."
"I know."
"Nobody resists it in two seconds. My instructor at Saint Ambrose was a Rank C with an eighty-two constitution and he needed a chair." Her eyes had gone very wide, the pupils still dilated from the proximity or the panic or both. Her tail came up off my thigh and curled around her own leg the way Rina’s did when she was frightened, that instinctive retreat that said something in her was processing threat faster than conscious thought could negotiate with it. "Belmont, what are you?"
Six days ago I’d have deflected. I’d have said something about clean living and a good breakfast and let her decide whether to be annoyed, and she’d have laughed and filed it and moved on, and the whole thing would have cost me nothing. She would have gotten a joke and I would have gotten a deflection and neither of us would have had to exist in the version of this conversation that actually mattered.
I looked at the girl who had come down the hall to ask me whether I’d been cruel to Petra Lang, and who had put money on my hand-holding, and who had told me she didn’t do the kind of gossip that ends up in somebody’s file.
"Something the paperwork doesn’t cover," I said.
Maribelle’s breath came out unsteady, and her tail twitched against her leg in a way that suggested she’d stopped processing what to do with her body and was just letting it respond on instinct now.
Her hand flattened on my chest, right over the four fading lines, and she pressed down like she was checking for a heartbeat she no longer trusted. Her hips were still where they were, pressed into mine, thigh against thigh, and neither of us had done anything about that for a while now. I wasn’t sure either of us knew what doing something about it would have looked like. The hallway wasn’t offering options.
"Okay," she whispered. "Okay, that’s, that’s a lot, and my brain is doing something and my body is doing something else and they’re not talking to each other, and I don’t know which one I’m supposed to be listening to right now."
"Which one’s winning."
"Don’t ask me that right now."
"I’m asking."
"I know you’re asking!" She hit my chest with the heel of her hand, more reflex than anything intentional, and the impact rocked her forward and she gasped into my shoulder. "Hah—god. God, this hallway is a bad hallway. This is a bad hallway and I’ve walked it fourteen times and it’s never been like this, and I don’t know why this one’s different, and that’s really unfair because I was having a perfectly normal morning before you decided to exist in it this way."
The trait sat somewhere behind my eyes doing absolutely nothing except being extremely satisfied with itself. Musk didn’t have opinions about fairness.
"Maribelle."
"Mm?"
"There are four minutes until the bell."
That did it. She came off me in one motion, and it was athletic and it was fast and she was retying the knot in her shirt with the practiced efficiency of a woman who has repaired an outfit in a bathroom before. By the time she looked up again the bright thing was back on her face like she’d never taken it off, all the cheer and volume exactly where it should have been, the girl who flirted with everyone and made it sound easy.
Except her hands were shaking.
"Right! Yep! Bell. Classes. Institutional structure." She smoothed the skirt down. It did not go down very far. It hadn’t gone down very far before, but now I had context for why that mattered and I was managing that context with considerable focus. "So we’re not talking about this."
"We’re not talking about this."
"Great. Perfect. Love that for us." She pointed a nail at me like she was underlining something important, registered what was still on the nail halfway through the motion, and put the hand behind her back instead. "But we are talking about it later. Because you owe me an actual answer about the thing you’re not talking about right now, and I’m very patient until I’m not, and I don’t ask for things twice."
"You’ll get one."
"When?"
"When it’s safe." The words came out flat. Simple. The kind of statement that doesn’t elaborate because elaboration would require lying about timelines I didn’t have.
Maribelle Kennedy went still one more time, and this time the stillness had weight. I watched her recognize the shape of the sentence. I watched her turn it over in her head, comparing it against something I couldn’t see. I watched her decide something about it that shifted the quality of her expression in ways I couldn’t read, except that whatever she’d just decided was something I was going to have to account for later.
"That’s what you told her, isn’t it," she said quietly. Not a question. A statement delivered at conversation volume with all the bright performance stripped out of it. "Petra. Last night. That’s the tone I heard through the window when you said whatever you said that made her go quiet like that."
The bell went off above us, and the corridor filled with the sound of forty doors opening at once, and she was already three steps down the hall with her blazer over her arm and her tail swinging when she called it back over her shoulder, bright as anything, loud enough that at least six people heard.
"Cover up your collarbone, babe! You look like you lost a fight with a cat!"