Chapter 588 | You Have a Lot of Bites for One Boy

Chapter 588: 588 | You Have a Lot of Bites for One Boy

Blair turned her head very slowly toward Belle, and the table under her elbow started to smoke. I put my hand flat on the wood next to hers because Belle had already sent me two invoices for scorched furniture this week, and the heat coming off her skin made my palm sting through the Euphoric Feedback passive. Blair stared at my hand for a full second. Then she moved hers into her lap, and the smoke stopped.

"You carried me down a public path," she said to me, low enough that it stayed at our end of the table. "Four hundred people have now voted on whether I stole your clothing."

"Four hundred and twelve," Belle said.

"I wasn’t talking to you, Fox."

"You were talking near me, which counts." Belle tilted the laptop slightly so Blair could see the poll. "For what it’s worth, I voted gift. I think you deserve a little dignity in the numbers."

Blair looked at the screen, and then at the bleach spot on her own cuff, and then back at the screen. Her ears went the color I had privately named Davenport Red, and she tugged the blazer sleeve down over her knuckles until the grey disappeared. Under the table her knee pressed a little harder against mine, which I filed in my head under evidence that she had stopped running and forgotten to tell her face.

I was trying to decide whether to tease her or eat my hash browns when the doors opened again, and the heat at our table dropped off a cliff.

Misato walked in first. Her lime green ponytail was pulled tight again, and her captain’s hoodie was zipped to her chin, but her shoulders sat lower than I had ever seen them, and her green eyes kept flicking to her left. A small woman walked beside her, barely reaching Misato’s shoulder, in a navy housekeeping uniform with the Davenport crest stitched over the pocket in silver thread. Her black hair was cut short and threaded with grey, and she had the same sharp jaw as her daughter, softened by thirty years of smiling at people who never smiled back. She carried a canvas tote bag on one arm and an umbrella on the other, though the California sky had not seen a cloud in a week.

Blair stood up so fast her chair scraped across the floor, which drew the attention of every table within twenty meters. She stood beside me with her hands at her sides and her chin raised, and the bottle of mineral water started to bubble where she held it.

"That’s Misato’s mother," Naomi whispered to me.

"I figured that out from the umbrella," I whispered back.

Keiko Ayame walked straight to our table and stopped in front of Blair. She looked up at the heiress of Davenport Industries for a long moment without saying anything, and Blair stood there and took it with her jaw locked and her ears burning. Then Keiko reached into her tote bag and pulled out a pair of flat black shoes with soft rubber soles, the kind that housekeepers wore to walk on marble for twelve hours.

"You were barefoot on the concrete," Keiko said, holding the shoes out. Her English carried a gentle Osaka accent and absolutely no room for argument. "Misato told me. You will catch cold, and then you will cough on everybody and pretend you are fine."

Blair stared at the shoes. Her mouth opened, then closed, and the bubbling bottle went still in her hand. "I’m wearing heels, Ayame-san."

"Today you are wearing heels. Tomorrow you will run uphill without them again, because you have done that since you were nine." Keiko pushed the shoes into Blair’s hands and closed Blair’s fingers around them with both of her own. "Thank you for the contract. I read it on my phone. My eyes are bad, so I read it twice."

Blair’s voice came out small. "You weren’t supposed to see it before breakfast."

"Then you should not sign things at midnight." Keiko patted the back of Blair’s hand twice, the same way someone might pat a child who had finally stopped crying. "You did a good thing, Blair-chan. Your mother should have been here to see it."

The entire table went silent. Jordan lifted his head off the wood. Belle’s fingers stopped moving on the keyboard, and Naomi put her fork down on her plate without making a sound. Blair stood there holding a pair of housekeeping shoes against her chest, and her ice-blue eyes went wet at the edges, and she didn’t wipe them because a Davenport did not cry in a dining hall. Steam rose off her shoulders in a thin curl that smelled like her expensive moisturizer.

Misato stood behind her mother and stared at the ceiling with her arms crossed tight, and her jaw worked like she was chewing glass.

I reached under the table and put my hand on the back of Blair’s knee, light enough that only she would feel it. She didn’t look down. Her breathing changed, though, going slower and deeper, and after four seconds she sat back down in her chair with the shoes still in her lap.

Keiko turned to me next, and I realized too late that I was the next item on her agenda. Her dark eyes moved over my face and down to my throat, where Addison’s mark sat on one side and Naomi’s sat on the other, and then over to the faint purple ring on my shoulder that the collar of my shirt did not quite hide. I knew exactly whose teeth had made that one, and from the way her eyebrows climbed, so did she.

"So you are the boy," Keiko said.

Misato made a noise that sounded like a kettle being strangled. "Mama, please don’t do this here."

"I am only looking at him, Misato." Keiko tilted her head, studying me the way a mechanic studies a car with too many dents. "He has a lot of bites for one boy."

"He gets into a lot of fights, ma’am," Belle said, completely deadpan.

"I can see that." Keiko reached out and tapped one finger against Misato’s mark on my shoulder, hard enough that I felt it through the fabric. "This one is my daughter’s. She bites when she is happy."

Misato put her face in both hands. Behind her, two Sapphire girls at the next table had stopped eating completely, and one had her phone halfway out of her pocket before Belle glared her into putting it away.

"I’m glad she’s happy, Ayame-san," I said, because it was true, and because lying to a woman holding an umbrella in a drought felt like a bad idea.

Keiko looked at me for a long moment. Then she pulled out the empty chair at the end of the table, set her tote bag on the floor beside it, and sat down with her umbrella across her knees.

"Good," she said. "Then you will get me a cup of green tea, and you will sit down, and you will tell me what you are going to do about my daughter."