He takes me apart with his mouth again in the predawn quiet of my dorm room, slowly and precisely and with the quality of someone who has been thinking about doing it again and has decided to be thorough. My hands find his hair. He lets me hold on. Fucking me with his tongue.
My hands fist the strands of his long hair like I’m on a ride that I don’t want to end.
When I come apart, I don’t shake. My orgasm moves through me in a long, rolling wave that starts at the base of my spine and spreads outward. I press my face into the pillow, and I make a sound I have never made before. A sound that belongs only to him.
He tastes me, slow and deliberate, as if he is memorizing the ingredients for his favorite dessert.
Then he moves back up the bed, and he pulls me against his chest again, my back to him, his arm across my waist, and he is warm and solid and present, and he says nothing.
I say nothing.
We lie in the quiet morning, and I feel my own heartbeat slow and the warmth of him at my back.
I close my eyes.
Saint presses his mouth to the back of my head, once, very quietly, and then he is still.
I fall asleep.
I wake up alone.
The sun is up. His side of the bed is cool. On the pillow where his head was is a single folded piece of paper.
I pick it up.
You didn’t cry out this time.
— S
I hold it against my chest.
I look at the ceiling for a long time.
Then I get up, get dressed, and head to breakfast. I sit in the dining hall, and I think about what it means that the most seen I have ever felt was in the dark, without a single word about any of it.
I look at the note.
He stayed.
Saint
Ileave before she wakes because I am not ready for the morning version of this.
That is not cowardice; it’s calculation. There is a version of the morning after when everything that happened in the dark gets examined in daylight and found to be something smaller than it felt. I am not willing to watch those thoughts cross her face. I would rather give her the note and the space and let her arrive at it on her own terms.
Also, Valen has been calling since six fifteen.
I call him from the stairwell with my hand still warm.
“Tell me it is not Victor,” I say.
A pause that tells me everything before he speaks. “Victor moved on another girl last night. A second year from the south dormitory. No family connections, no lineage. Found disoriented near the east gate at two in the morning.”
My jaw tightens. “Condition.”
“Shaken. Not physically harmed. He is making a point, not a move. He wants us to know he can still reach them.”
“He is demonstrating range.”
