23. Chapter 23 The Dorm after the Storm #2
"He likes to come and go as he pleases. He’s probably going to meet his pal, Ollie."
“He has a friend named Ollie?” she replied with interest.
“Yes, he’s another student’s familiar. He’s an otter. They are currently having a great time mapping the academy, which I’m sure is what they will continue doing tonight.”
“I see. I’ve never had a familiar myself. They are very interesting creatures.”
She stood in the center of the small room.
The door was closed behind her, Lucien between her and it.
The room was three paces from door to window and he could smell her now, the lavender undertone that he'd caught in her office weeks ago, the kind of scent that robes and classroom ventilation usually dispersed.
In a room this small with the window cracked and the door shut, it had nowhere to go. She smelled intoxicating.
Lucien sat on his bed.
“May I?” she asked.
“Of course, please. Where are my manners?”
Renvaya pulled out the desk chair and sat down.
She crossed her legs. The dress rode up her thigh, the hemline shifting from below the knee to mid-thigh, and the line of her leg from ankle to where the fabric gathered was a thing Lucien noticed and then continued noticing whether he wanted to or not.
He put his attention on her face. Her face was not easier.
"Valt Krenning has been suspended," she said.
"Effective immediately. Headmistress Elyndra's decision. He attacked a familiar with a combat spell in a crowded corridor while I was standing in the line of fire. Plenty of witnesses. His father has been notified. I think expulsion would have been on the table if you had not branded his familiar only days ago.”
"That makes sense. The headmistress knows how to play the game. How long?"
"The duration hasn't been set. He's been sent home. He'll return when Elyndra decides he returns." Her hands rested on her knee, the fingers of her right hand overlapping the fingers of her left.
"Understood."
"His sister's visit carried weight. Calith made a reasonable case for a lesser consequence, and she did it well. The Krennings can be rather convincing."
Lucien said nothing. He was listening. He was also watching her hands in her lap and the thin straps against the muscle definition that the robes had never let him see, and the effort required to hold both activities in the same head was more than it should have been for a man who'd spent centuries doing exactly this. The fact that she wore no bra didn’t help matters either, especially since the cool draft from the open window was making her nipples hard.
"Lucien." She used his name without transition, the formality set aside the way she'd set it aside in the corridor when she'd told him to stop.
"Your eyes went crimson in that hallway.
Full crimson, sustained, in front of everyone.
That's the second time I've seen it in person, and both times it happened in the same corridor. "
"I'm aware."
"You're aware." She looked at him. "The standing wave mechanism.
The corridor branding. The dining hall incident I heard about secondhand.
And now a second sustained crimson event in front of students and a professor.
" She held up her hand, four fingers extended.
"I can sit in hearings. I can testify. I can frame events in the best possible light.
But the accumulation is becoming difficult to explain, and the people who would need explaining to are not all as patient as I am. "
"I hear you."
"Do you? Because 'soon' was a promise, Lucien.
You said 'soon' to a restrained student in a corridor full of witnesses while I was standing ten feet away.
I cannot defend that. I can defend provocation.
I can defend a proportional response to an attack on your familiar.
I cannot defend a first-year student promising violence to another student in front of a professor who had just placed herself between them. "
"It won't happen again."
"Which part? The crimson eyes, the threat, or the part where I have to stand between you and a consequence I can't control?"
The question had earned its edge. He let it land.
"All of it," he said.
She held his gaze. Her right hand shifted on her leg and the hem of the cotton moved with it. Her fox tail hung off the side of the chair, the bushy red-brown length of it resting against the chair leg, the white tip on the stone floor.
She'd said everything she came to say. She had delivered the verdict, addressed the crimson, and warned him about the threat. There was nothing left that required her to be sitting in that chair.
She stayed.
"When you looked at Valt," she said, and her voice had dropped, not in volume but in register. The lectern was gone from it. "With the crimson in your eyes. I put a barrier between you."
"I remember."
"I didn't know if it would hold."
She had placed a wall of arcane energy between Lucien and a restrained student, and she was telling him she hadn't been confident in it.
"I wasn't going to hurt him," Lucien lied.
"I believe you. But in that moment, standing in front of your eyes, I was afraid you might." She looked at her hands. "I was afraid, and I asked you to stop, and you stopped."
"You asked me to stop. So I stopped. What you say matters a great deal to me."
Her ears went still. Both of them, at the same time, the constant rotation that he'd tracked across dozens of lectures freezing into a silence he'd seen once before, in the first class after the corridor snake incident.
She'd locked them down then to suppress what they would reveal.
She was doing it now for a different reason, or the same reason wearing different clothes, as his demon-girl would have said.
"That's the part I can't stop thinking about," she said. The words came out quiet. "You stopped because I asked you to. Not because of the barrier. Not because of the consequences. Because I asked."
Lucien didn't answer. There wasn't an answer that wouldn't cross a line, and the line was thin enough already with her sitting in his room in a sundress that showed her legs and her shoulders and her perky nipples through thin fabric. Their eyes stayed locked on each other.
"I should go," she said.
She didn't move.
"Thank you for telling me about Valt," Lucien said.
"That's not why I came." The words left her before she caught them, and she realized what she'd said and her mouth closed.
She stood from the chair, smoothing the dress with one hand, the fabric falling back to its proper length.
The motion put her within arm's reach of his bed, and she stepped toward the door instead.
Lucien stood and reached past her to open it. His arm crossed the space between them, lightly brushing her arm. The jolt of excitement almost knocked him back on the bed. He was sure that she felt it too.
She stepped into the corridor, turned, and looked at him.
The hallway was empty. The lamplight put a bar of yellow across her face and caught the auburn in her hair.
"Goodnight, Lucien."
"Goodnight, Professor."
She held his gaze for a second past the word, then turned and walked down the corridor. Her tail swayed behind her in the controlled arc he knew, and the green dress moved against her legs, and the light from each sconce caught her as she passed beneath them. She didn't look back.
Lucien closed the door.
The room was quiet. Corvath's pillow held the impression of his curl. The desk chair was pulled out from where Renvaya had sat, and the air held the faint trace of her, the lavender scent fading where she'd been.
He sat on his bed and looked at the empty chair.
A soft thud came from the windowsill. Corvath sat in the gap, a black shape against the dark grounds, his gold eyes catching the light from inside the room.
“For the love of the gods, you could cut the sexual tension with a knife.”
“You were eavesdropping? You little bastard.”
“Of course I was eavesdropping. A female professor came to a student’s dorm room in a dress that left nothing to the imagination and actually came in. Scandalous.”
He hopped down, padded to the pillow, and circled twice before settling into his curl. His nose went under his tail.
Lucien continued to think about Renvaya and her sundress. It wasn’t an image he would soon forget.