Twenty #2
She returned to the residence hall vaguely intending to hunt down Charlon and see if he wanted a second round in the showers.
But she ran into Jehan, first; his room was on the same corridor, and he was standing in its doorway scraping with his penknife at the painted swirls around his nameplate.
Move-out for graduating scholars wasn’t for another two weeks. Clearly he was anticipating it.
“Moyna.” Jehan brightened. “Are you here for me? Are we going”—he lowered his voice—“corpse-hunting?”
“Yes,” Moyna decided, “and no,” and tugged him firmly into the room by a grip on his robe, kicking the door shut behind them.
It didn’t matter now that they were part of the same exam group. Their exam group was already fucked up in several interesting ways, thank you Ysabel Caudotte, and this was hardly going to fuck anything up further.
Or so she thought. But Jehan, though willing and exuberant as ever for the first minute or so, actually had the gall to stop just as their clothes were mostly off and they’d moved to the narrow bed and things were starting to get interesting.
“Wait,” he said breathlessly.
Moyna squeezed her thighs together and took the opportunity to tug a tangled lump of sheets out from underneath her hip. They hadn’t gotten as far as sheet-tangling yet. The sheets had been pre-tangled on her arrival.
“Waiting,” she said. Jehan, shirtless, was a reasonable thing to look at meanwhile.
“This isn’t fair to you.”
“Oh, Mathé’s blood, now what?”
“I’m thinking about someone else.”
“I really don’t care,” Moyna said, a heroic last effort to keep this going—but Jehan raised his eyebrows and all right, yes, she did, rather.
She didn’t demand romance from her partners, but she did want their desire.
Besides, she was now far too curious to proceed without investigating this further.
She gave a showier sigh than Jehan’s, to show him that she wasn’t too offended. “So. You’ve gone off me, have you?”
“You’re lovely and anyone would be honoured to fuck you,” said Jehan. “But I’m afraid”—he made a dreadful face—“ugh, all right. I’m in love.”
This was more distracting than him shirtless. Maybe even more than the actual act of fucking would have been.
“How long has this been the case?” Always the first question, when history-taking.
A groan. Jehan scrubbed at his face. Muffled: “Almost five years. Probably. Not that it matters.”
Moyna opened her mouth to ask the next question and then realised that she knew the answer: pattern recognition, all the facts slotting into place.
“Estiene?”
“You needn’t sound so horrified!”
“I thought you had taste!”
Nobody thought Jehan was sexually picky. And Moyna knew he’d found Estiene’s brand of glowering prettiness attractive enough to fuck him at least once, despite the man’s personality. But love was another thing entirely.
Jehan sat up and looked the way he did in the practice gym when he was about to slam someone into the mat. “You mean my taste for angry, prickly scholars who get ferocious in bed?”
Moyna’s face heated in mingled pleasure and annoyance; yes, that was a point scored.
“I didn’t need to know that about Estiene, and no, I meant nepotistic arseholes.”
Another groan. Point to Moyna. “You’re right. I should have fallen in love with you instead. That would have been so much simpler.”
“Sure,” said Moyna. “Because I’m such a warm and fuzzy person.”
Jehan laughed, and then went quiet, maudlin with—Mathé’s arse, thwarted love for Estiene Marcelle.
“Cheer up,” she said. “You’ll get over him while you’re fucking half the population of Mostau, I’m sure.”
“That’s the plan,” said Jehan. “Is there anyone you’re leaving behind, or trying to forget?”
“Hah,” she said, sour.
“What? There could be a secret club of pining second-years who will weep over your departure and fight over your library carrel. You could be nursing a doomed passion for Dean Brodier. I don’t know.”
In another mood Moyna would have laughed.
But today she was carrying, along with her prickles, the bundle of hurt and rage and dread from lunch.
And this topic reminded her that among many other things, she was angry about how her anthem-lark situation had shaped her into someone who’d never allowed herself to have those kinds of feelings.
Because that could lead to putting down roots.
Of course, her roots were down regardless. And she’d built a wall around her capacity to fall in love and was now terrified that when she got to Camar she’d either not be able to take it down, or else she’d take it down and find the capacity had all leaked out—dried up.
“I don’t want to leave the Blue City at all,” she said, abrupt.
Jehan left a silence. When she looked at him, the amber-brown eyes were regarding her with a gentleness that made her want to spit and scratch. “I know,” he said. “If it helps any, there are plenty of our cohort who also have to leave and don’t want to.”
“But,” Moyna began, then gave up. One fight per day was enough.
“Well, I refuse to entertain this self-pitying thing you’ve got going on,” said Jehan.
“It doesn’t suit you at all. Chin up,” he added.
“We’ll go to self-defence tonight and you can work out all the bad emotions properly.
Less messy all around than this.” A cheerfully obscene gesture between the two of them.
“And before then—did you want to try the bodykeeping room over dinner hour? There’ll be fewer people to see where we go, and the day staff will have gone home. ”
“You’re offering to miss dinner?”
“Please. I’ll grab something before. And after.”
“There’s a bread roll in my bag,” Moyna remembered. “You can have that, too. All right. Dinner hour makes sense.”
“And in the meantime,” announced Jehan, raising himself onto one elbow and casting a look at the floor, presumably searching for his shirt, “at the risk of breaking my carefree image . . . we should study. I don’t want to fail a second case.”
He was right about the self-pity. It wouldn’t help anything.
She said, rashly, “You know, I was thinking of failing the whole Grand Exam.”
“After today we’re all thinking about that,” said Jehan, and then caught her meaning. His eyes widened. “You— Mathé’s taint, Moyna, really? On purpose?”
Moyna shrugged.
“I hadn’t pegged you as that selfish,” said Jehan. He looked at her as if she were a diagnosis that no longer fitted all the facts.
“Selfish every way I turn,” said Moyna bitterly. “I know. And I didn’t, did I? Only the first—”
Too late, her brain caught on to what she was saying and to whom. What was wrong with her? Her friendship with Jehan was one of the deepest roots she’d put down; was she trying to drown it, out of pure stupid contrariness?
“Only the first . . . ?” he said.
Maybe he wouldn’t make the leap.
“It’s—nothing.”
But Jehan was too clever and knew her too well. His look ossified to outright betrayal. He pulled away as far as the narrow bed would allow.
“You had it, didn’t you? You knew it was hare fever and you didn’t say it.”
“Oh, it hardly mattered,” Moyna snapped. “You said it. One person can’t break an exam group that easily.”
The image of Alys clearly crashed into both of them at once. Jehan gave a derisive whistle. “How lucky we all are that the first case was diagnostics and not a five-body array, huh? You could have really fucked us all with a thorny broomstick, Scholar Apprice.”
Moyna was about to reply when there was the sound of footsteps outside in the corridor, and voices raised, and thumping. The thumping came on the door of Jehan’s room the next instant, and someone rattled the handle. The door opened to reveal Sab Lavalle.
“Oy!” said Jehan. “Wait for an answer, can’t you?”
Sab was not on the list of people Moyna would have chosen to see her topless, which she suddenly remembered was the case.
She scowled at him; Sab barely glanced at her, and she tried not to feel that this was somehow more insulting.
More doors were being knocked at and the sound of excited voices was growing louder.
“Oh, keep your shirt on, Fortier,” said Sab, breathless. “Or off. As you prefer. You wouldn’t have wanted to miss the news, would you?”
“News—” Jehan started, but Sab was already speaking over him.
“Estiene’s been arrested for murder,” Sab said triumphantly, and was gone.
Moyna and Jehan exchanged a look that lasted for a single shocked thump of Moyna’s heart.
Then, as one, they began scrambling for their clothes.