As soon as we turned a corner, I jerked my hand from Fenris’s. He paused to look down at me.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“No. I’m angry.”
He studied me for a moment, his smile slowly growing.
“I don’t see what’s funny.”
“You said you took your meal to go; I’m trying to be your Happy Meal.”
I snorted an involuntary laugh then swatted his arm.
“I don’t have time for your humor, Fenris. Why does it feel like everything is happening to me? Why can’t everyone just leave me alone?”
“Even me?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I know you’re trying to help, but what you did last night was the opposite of helpful. I told you there’d be more pressure on us, and look at what happened in Self-Discovery. You saw that room. That’s only the start. I just know it.”
“Breathe, love sponge. Remember, you’re the one in control.”
I arched a brow at him.
“Love sponge? Really?”
“Given Eras’s argument, I thought it was fitting.”
“Hardly.” I sighed and shook my head at Fenris while thinking of what Eras had said. “I think it’d be better if you and I stayed away from each other for a while.”
“Are you breaking up with me?” Fenris placed a theatrical hand over his heart.
“We weren’t ever together, Fenris.”
Adira appeared beside us again.
“Is everything all right?”
I said, “Yes,” at the same time Fenris said, “No.”
“I see,” she said. “It’s not necessary for you to go to your next class. You can return to the room that I created for you.”
I looked at Fenris and gestured to Adira in a silent, “you see what you did?”
“If you would excuse us, Adira,” Fenris said smoothly. “We resolve our differences best without an audience. It leaves room for us to fully expose our more passionate emotions without reservation.”
“Of course.”
She disappeared, and I narrowed my eyes at Fenris.
“You’re as impossible as she is.”
“But I’m way more fun.”
Throughout the rest of the day, the taste in my mouth was like a slow toothache. Its awfulness crept up on me, turning me more sour by the moment until Fenris teased me out of my mood.
While his good humor helped keep me sane, it wasn’t really resolving the root cause of my irritability. I couldn’t live the rest of my life with Piepen in my mouth.
“You’re frowning again,” Fenris said. “You’re supposed to be coercing me.”
