Chapter 513 | The Emotional-Threat-Level Assessment

Chapter 513: 513 | The Emotional-Threat-Level Assessment

Misato held my gaze for three more seconds, her thumb still pressed against the bite mark on my throat. Then she withdrew her hand, straightened her posture, and became Captain Ayame again with the same speed she used to summon clones. The transformation was seamless. One second, a woman who wanted to drag me into a supply closet. The next, a professional who would assign me extra laps if I mentioned it.

"Monterey clearance won’t file itself," she said. "And you need to eat something."

"I can think of some delicious things to eat."

"Get out of my conference room, Monroe."

I got out of her conference room.

The hallway outside smelled like floor wax and someone’s burned microwave popcorn, a combination so aggressively normal that it hit different after spending a month dodging interdimensional leopards and kissing women in collapsing caves. Students moved past in clusters, Ruby kids heading toward the simulation complex, a pair of Amber second-years carrying textbooks thick enough to use as weapons. Nobody gave me more than a glance. The burger clip fame had settled from a full boil into a simmer, which meant I could walk thirty feet without someone asking me to sign a t-shirt with my own face on it.

Naomi waited at the end of the corridor near the stairwell, her back against the wall and her staff case propped beside her. She’d pulled her pink and black hair over one shoulder, and the shell necklace sat in its permanent spot against her collarbone, catching the overhead light in tiny flashes. Her pink eyes found mine the moment I rounded the corner.

"Blair left angry," Naomi said.

"Blair left complicated."

"Is there a difference?"

"About three hundred degrees Celsius, give or take." I fell into step beside her and we headed toward the stairs, our arms brushing the way they always did, a frequency our bodies had established sometime around week two and refused to abandon. "She scorched the doorframe."

Naomi’s mouth twitched. "I saw. Mr. Chen from maintenance is going to submit another work order with your name on it. That’s the fourth one this month."

"One was Jordan’s fault."

"One was Jordan’s fault," she agreed. "The other three were women expressing their feelings about you through property damage."

"That sounds like a you problem. You’ve never burned any furniture."

"I blew up three simulation chambers during orientation." She paused on the landing between floors, turning to face me with the particular expression she wore when she’d been saving a sentence for the right moment. "Jace."

"Naomi."

"You kissed Misato this morning."

I stopped walking. Naomi’s face held no accusation. She stood on the step above me, which put her at eye level instead of her usual angle of looking up, and the sun through the stairwell window turned her brown skin gold and her pink eyes incandescent.

"I was going to tell you," I said.

"I know." She reached out and adjusted my collar, the same gesture Misato had used five minutes ago, and I wondered whether there was a secret manual these women passed around. "Belle told me at seven forty-two this morning. She’d noticed the lip-print residue on your neck that matched Misato’s."

"Of course she does."

"Addison sent a voice note at eight fifteen calling you a greedy bastard with good taste. Aurora responded with seventeen clapping emojis and the words ’told you so’ in capital letters." Naomi’s hand stayed on my collar, her fingers warm through the fabric. "You have a very efficient information network that you don’t actually run."

"I’m aware."

"And everyone in that network knew about Misato before you said a single word to me. Which is annoying, because I’m supposed to be your girlfriend, and instead I found out from a spreadsheet that Belle keeps on her phone organized by date, name, and what she calls emotional-threat-level assessment."

Guilt hit me somewhere beneath the graft. The familiar kind, the strain that came from running too many connections on a system designed for one but forced to accommodate seven. I opened my mouth to apologize and Naomi put two fingers against my lips.

"I’m not done." Her voice carried a current that reminded me she could blow holes through trees at Gold tier. "I spent two hours this morning being angry. Then I spent an hour being sad. Then I watched you run formations with eight people who can barely stand each other, and I watched Blair Davenport follow an instruction from Misato Ayame for the first time in recorded history, and I watched Jordan Wayne complete a drill without complaining, and I watched all of that happen because you were standing in the middle of the field holding it together."

She removed her fingers from my mouth.

"And then I watched Misato walk back from the tree line with you, and she was smiling. Actually smiling. Not the drill-sergeant smirk she gives when Jordan eats dirt. A real smile. The kind that reaches her eyes and makes her look twenty instead of forty." Naomi’s hand dropped to my chest, right over the graft, and the silver-pink ring in the back of my skull pulsed so hard my teeth ached. "So I’m done being angry. Because Misato has spent nine years being somebody’s tool, and this is the first time I’ve seen her look like a person. If you did that, then you did something good. And I’m not going to punish you for doing something good."

The stairwell was empty. Just us and the echoes and the gold light falling across Naomi’s face. A door opened two floors up and footsteps receded in the opposite direction.

"You’re too good for me," I said, and I meant it in the way that I’d stopped bothering to hide.

"I know." She kissed me, soft and certain, and I tasted brown sugar boba and the specific warmth that had become my anchor in every dark room and collapsing dimension over the past six weeks. "But I’m keeping you anyway, so you’ll just have to live with the guilt."

"I can handle guilt."