Chapter 559 | Monsoon Davenport

Chapter 559: 559 | Monsoon Davenport

I made it out of the room and four steps down the hall before I found out Cross was a prophet.

Blair stood against the wall opposite the door with her arms folded under her chest and her bag at her feet. The poster beside her head advertised the Emerald House chess club, and one corner of it had turned brown and curled up like a dead leaf. The air around her shoulders shook in thin waves. Her red hair lifted off her neck in her own heat, and the scar along her throat showed pink above her collar.

"What did she want?" Blair asked.

"Three thousand words on the forehead."

"Monroe, she winked at you in front of fifty people."

"I’m aware of that, Davenport. I was the target of the wink."

"You were in there for nine minutes." She pushed off the wall. "I counted, because I had nothing better to do while standing in a hallway like an idiot waiting for you."

"You could have gone to lunch."

"I could have, and I didn’t, and if you mention that to Fox I will cook your tongue."

The ninth ring flared hot behind my eyes. It had been flickering on and off since the ferry, and right now it burned white and ugly, like a fuse somebody had lit at both ends.

◆ DEVOTION UPDATE ◆

Blair Davenport: 41% → 43%

Status: ???

The question marks looked very tired of their jobs.

"You’re doing it again," Blair said. "You get that stupid look when your brain goes somewhere else."

"Maybe I’m thinking about you."

"You are thinking about her chest, Monroe, because I watched you look at it twice during the tide lecture."

"Three times," I said, because honesty is a policy I pick up when it’s funny. "You missed one."

Blair grabbed my tie. She did it fast and hard, and she yanked me sideways into the dead-end alcove between the drinking fountain and the janitor’s closet. My back hit the wall. Her fist stayed wrapped around the silk at my throat, and her knuckles were hot enough that I smelled the fabric start to scorch.

She was shorter than me by a good five inches, so she had to tip her head back to glare. Her blazer was buttoned to the throat. Her blouse under it was buttoned to the throat too, because the Davenport family considers an open collar a moral failing. None of that helped at all, since the buttons strained across her chest every time she took one of those furious breaths.

"Let me be very clear about the bet," she said through her teeth. "If we finish in the top five, I belong to you for the semester, and if I belong to you, then nobody else gets to wink."

"That’s not in the contract, Davenport."

"I’m adding it to the contract now."

"Are you jealous of a professor?"

"I am jealous of nothing, I am a Davenport, we don’t do jealousy, we do acquisitions." Her voice cracked on the last word. Her eyes dropped to my mouth and stayed there for a full second, and her face went from red to a color that doesn’t exist on the chart. "Stop looking at me like that."

"You’re the one looking at my mouth."

"I’m assessing a threat."

"How does it look, then?"

She kissed me instead of answering, which is how Blair answers most things now.

It went nothing like the cave and nothing like the ferry. On the ferry she’d kissed me like she was trying to prove a point. Here she kissed me like she’d already proven it and wanted her prize, and her mouth was hot enough that my lips stung under the Euphoric Feedback passive. Her free hand slid under my blazer and flattened against my ribs over the leopard scars. Her fingers spread wide. She pulled me down by the tie until I had to bend, and her tongue pushed into my mouth without any of the textbook stiffness she’d brought into that crack in the rock.

I got one hand on her waist and pulled her in until there was no air between us. She made a small sound into my mouth, high and surprised, and her hips pressed forward against mine before her brain could catch up. The fabric of my shirt started to smoke where her palm sat. I didn’t care, and the graft behind my sternum cared even less, because it was busy throwing a parade.

Blair pulled back an inch to breathe. Her ice-blue eyes had gone dark at the centers, and her lipstick had smeared across her bottom lip. She looked furious about all of it.

"This doesn’t count," she said against my mouth.

"You keep saying that."

"I’ll keep saying it until it’s true."

"That’s going to take a while, princess."

Her nails dug into my ribs. "Never call me that again."

"Your ears just went red when I said it."

"They are red because the hallway is warm."

The hallway was very warm, and I noticed that a little late. The little white disk in the ceiling above us made a sharp click. A red light came on beside it, and then every sprinkler head in the east corridor of Theory Towers opened at once.

Cold water hit us like a dropped bucket. It soaked my hair and ran down the back of my collar, and it turned Blair’s red bob dark and flat against her skull in about two seconds. She stood there with her hand still fisted in my tie and her eyes squeezed shut. Steam came off her shoulders in thick white clouds. The water hissed where it touched her neck.

An alarm started wailing somewhere above the ceiling tiles.

"Monroe," Blair said, without opening her eyes, "I’m going to kill you."

"You set off the sprinkler, Davenport, and that’s on your record."

"You made me set it off."

"I was just standing here getting assaulted."

Her soaked blouse had gone see-through across her chest, and I could see the white lace bra underneath it in very high resolution. Blair opened her eyes, followed my gaze straight down, and then looked back up at me with the face of a woman measuring the distance to the nearest exit and the nearest murder.

Footsteps squeaked around the corner at the end of the hall. Two students came jogging through the indoor rain, and one of them held a laptop over her head like an umbrella.

Belle stopped dead at the mouth of the alcove. Her blue braid dripped onto her shoulder, and her amber eyes went from my scorched tie to Blair’s blouse to the sprinkler. Naomi skidded to a stop behind her with her staff case clutched to her chest and her pink eyes huge.

"Oh my god," Belle said, and she sounded happier than I’d heard her all semester. "I’m naming this tab Monsoon Davenport."