4. Chapter 4 #2
I eat a hit to get inside — a real one, ribs, it's going to be spectacular tomorrow — and once I'm in there I'm not leaving.
Shoulder, hip, both hands on one arm. She tries to reset the distance because everything she knows depends on distance, and I don't let her have it, and I ride her all the way down to the mat and put my weight where it needs to go.
She holds out longer than I expect.
Then her palm comes down twice on the floor. “You got lucky, bitch,” she whispers.
I let go and sit back on my heels and I am breathing like a broken machine.
The arena makes a noise. Somebody says my name. I can feel Torres smiling.
"Miller."
Voss.
"Yes?"
"Your left guard is still terrible."
"I won ."
"I noticed," he says, and walks off to shout at somebody else.
Natasha is on her feet before I am. She wipes her mouth with her wrist, picks up her wraps, and goes, and the look she gives me on the way past is the one I'll be thinking about later.
Soren hands me a towel without comment.
Leadership and Governance is on the second floor of the history building.
I arrive four minutes late, sweating, with a split lip, a bag over the shoulder that hurts and a set of ribs that have started to ache.
Professor Celeste Faris is standing at the front in dove grey with her hair up, and looks at me the way you'd look at something tracked in on a boot.
Nobody at this academy has ever had to be told that Natasha is her daughter.
You can see it from the door. Same jaw. Same trick of going completely still before speaking. Natasha inherited the face and about a third of the discipline, and I have now, in the space of one afternoon, been put on a mat by one of them and marked late by the other.
Oh , I think, sitting down. Right. That's where she gets it.
Faris starts the moment I'm in a chair, without acknowledging that I've arrived.
"You have been given five categories," she says. "You will spend this year believing they are five different subjects. They are not. Each of them is the same subject applied at a different distance from the person it affects."
Sophia writes that down. Sophia never writes anything down.
She takes us through the term. Over two centuries of governance since the war. The structure of the Council and where it came from. The places where House law and local custom fit together and the considerably larger number of places where they don't.
It is, I have to admit, more interesting than last year, when we spent nine weeks on founding myths.
It also lines up with my rotation so neatly you could use it as a ruler.
"Miss Miller," she says, as the room empties. "A moment."
Sophia makes a face at me from the door that I will be dealing with later.
Then it's the two of us, and Faris is putting papers into a case, and I don't wait.
"You did this."
"Which part?"
"The recommendation."
"I was one of four faculty consulted. So — a quarter of it, approximately."
"I want it changed."
"There's nothing to change. It's advisory."
"Then what's it for ?"
"To tell you what your teachers think." She closes the case. "You appear to have received the message. Which suggests it worked."
"I'm not going to govern anybody."
"That may not be entirely your decision."
Fuck that.
"See, that's the part I don't get." I put my bag down, because apparently we're doing this.
"You're the one who stood in Falken's office and said nobody had proved anything.
You wanted birth records. You wanted the boring answer.
You were the only person in that room who wasn't already halfway to crowning me. "
"I was."
"So how do you get from prove it to she should learn to run a country ?"
"Because they are unrelated questions."
She turns and gives me her full attention, which is a thing I would honestly rather she didn't do.
"I do not know what you descend from. Nobody does.
What I know is that a great many powerful people believe you might, and that belief has already changed where you sleep, who writes to you, and how many people look up when you cross a courtyard.
" A small pause. "Influence is not a title, Miss Miller.
It is the ability to affect other people's lives whether or not you intended to. You have some."
"I don't want to affect anyone's life."
"That is not a qualification. That is a preference." She lets it land. "You object to inherited authority. I remember your essays."
"You gave me a seventy-one."
"You survived it." Something almost moves at the corner of her mouth. "You spent an entire year arguing that rank should never substitute for competence. If rank is being handed to you, I would have thought competence would suddenly interest you enormously."
I open my mouth.
And then I close it, because — damn it.
Damn it.
She's used my own essay on me.
"That's not fair."
"It's entirely fair. It is simply inconvenient." She picks up the case and walks out.
By the time I get back to the residence I have been vertical for eleven hours and I am beat.
The suite is full, because of course it's full. Declan is telling the story of Soren going down and it appears to have grown considerably. Renzo has produced biscuits from a location he refuses to disclose. Sophia is on her couch delivering a legal opinion about whether Natasha can be sued.
Torres is in the kitchen doorway with a bag of ice wrapped in a tea towel, and when I come in he doesn't say are you all right, he just holds it out and tips his chin at the couch.
I sit. He sits on the arm and puts the ice against my mouth himself, because I am doing it wrong.
"Ribs?"
"Ribs are a tomorrow problem."
"Ribs are a right-now problem that you'll notice tomorrow."
"That's what I said."
The door opens without a knock.
"Soren said you might have a shiner," Luke says.
He's still in his coat and he crosses the room and takes my chin between two fingers and turns my face toward the lamp to look at me.
"Hmm," he says.
"Don't."
"I didn’t say it."
"You've got a whole face happening."
"I'm proud of you and I hate it," Luke says. "Both things are true. It's uncomfortable. Let me have my minute."
And then Freya stands up.
She closes her book, puts it under her arm, and says, "Right," to nobody in particular.
"We're not going anywhere," Sophia says. "Jessica fought today—"
"Sophia."
"I have questions about the elbow—"
"Sophia," Freya says, "we're going."
She takes Sophia by the wrist. Declan is up before he understands why and Renzo is up before Declan, because Renzo is never the last person to work anything out.
Sophia looks between the three of us, and I watch it arrive, and her entire face changes.
" Oh, " she says.
"Out," Freya says.
"I'm going. I'm going. I want it on the record that I'm being extremely gracious about this."
"Noted."
"I'm being so gracious—"
The door shuts.
And then it's quiet.
Properly quiet. Nobody in the corridor. Nobody downstairs. The fire ticking. Rain on the long windows.
For the first time since April, it's the three of us in a room with a door that closes.
Torres is on the arm of the couch with the ice in his hand.
Luke has gone still.
Nobody says anything for a second, and I can feel both of them. Not words, not pictures, nothing like that. Just the two of them wanting, running underneath my own wanting, close enough that I genuinely cannot tell which part of this is mine.
"So," Torres says.
"So," Luke says.
"Okay," I say. "If one of you doesn't touch me in the next ten seconds I'm going to lose my entire mind."
Torres puts the ice down on the table.
"Four months," he says.
"Too fucking long," I agree.
"Bed," Luke says, taking off the coat. "She's got injuries."
"I’m fine," I say, "I don't have a hip replacement —"
Torres picks me up.
Not slung, not carried — he just stands, and lifts, and I get my legs around his waist and my hands in his hair and my mouth on his, and it's months of a phone against my ear turning into nothing at all for the second time in two days.
He kisses me and his hand spreads out under me. He walks us into the bedroom without once letting go of my mouth, and I hear the door click behind us, which means Luke is already there.
Torres sets me down at the end of the bed.
Luke's hands come from behind, sliding under the hem of my shirt, flat on my stomach, and he puts his mouth against the side of my neck.
"You fought well today," he says, into my skin.
And Luke gets my shirt off over my head.
Torres kneels.
Just goes down onto his knees on the rug in front of me and starts undoing my pants with his eyes on my face, and Luke's hands come up my ribs, careful on the left side, and take my breasts, and I stop having a plan for the evening.
The jeans go. Everything under them goes.
"Hold her," Torres says.
"I've got her."
He puts my leg over his shoulder.
And then his mouth is on me and I make a sound I would be embarrassed about if I had anything left to be embarrassed with.
Torres licks into me like he's been thinking about it forever.
Flat of his tongue, then the point of it, then his whole mouth, one hand hard on my inner thigh and the other going up to grip my hip.
He's not careful. He's not slow. He's making noise about it, and every one of those noises goes straight up through me.
Luke's got my back against his chest, holding all my weight so my knees can do what they want, and his mouth is at my ear.
"He called me once. July." His thumb rolls over my nipple and I jerk. "Ten minutes. Nine of them were about you."
"Luke—"
"I didn't mind."
"I'm going to—"
"Yes," Luke says.
Torres puts two fingers in me and curls them and doesn't let up with his mouth, and I come standing up, shaking apart between the pair of them with Luke's arm locked across my waist holding me on my feet.
I sag. Luke takes it.
"Okay," I manage.
"Okay?" Torres says, wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist, looking obscenely pleased with himself.
"Get up here."
"Say please."
" Get up here. "
He gets up.