Chapter 595 | Ask Me Properly

Chapter 595: 595 | Ask Me Properly

The library’s fourth floor was where research went to die. It was all dark wood shelves and green-shaded lamps and the smell of old paper, and on a Thursday morning before ten it was empty except for one Emerald girl asleep on a pile of chemistry texts by the window. The reference stacks sat at the very back, two long rows of shelves that ran floor to ceiling with a narrow aisle between them barely wide enough for one person.

Blair was waiting at the end of the aisle with her back against the shelves.

She had taken her blazer off. It hung folded over one arm, and without it she stood there in her yellow uniform shirt and my grey crew neck layered underneath, the sleeves of my sweater pushed up to her elbows. She’d undone the top two buttons of the shirt. The burn scar ran pink and glossy from her collarbone down out of sight. Her red hair was a mess at the back where she had been running her hands through it, and she held herself so straight that I could see the effort of it in her shoulders.

"You’re late," she said.

"I’m early. You said six minutes, and it took me four."

"I said six minutes so you would arrive in four." She lifted her chin. "I needed you to be early."

I walked down the aisle toward her. The shelves were close enough on both sides that my shoulders brushed old encyclopedias as I passed, and the dust smelled like a hundred years of nobody reading anything. She didn’t move. She watched me come the whole way, her hands flat against the shelf behind her, fingers spread on the spines of a set of gate atlases from 2031.

I stopped a foot away from her.

"What did you say to Fox?" I asked.

"I told you in the dining hall." Her jaw worked. "I’m not repeating it."

"You told me you meant it. You never told me what it was."

Blair made a frustrated noise and looked at the ceiling. The air around her went warm, then hot, and a smell of scorched paper rose from the shelf behind her shoulder. She pulled her hand off the atlases fast and looked at the faint brown print she’d left on the spine of volume nine.

"I am going to be billed for that," she muttered.

"Belle will invoice you."

"Fox can choke." She pressed both palms against her own thighs, over her skirt, like she was trying to keep them from touching anything else that could burn. Then she looked straight at me, and her ice-blue eyes had that cracked look again from the cave, the look of a girl standing on a cliff she’d built herself. "I told her I wanted you to look at me like you look at Love."

The words landed in the narrow aisle and stayed there.

"I watched you in Cross’s class," she went on, fast and low, before I could say anything. "You read that essay about me in front of forty people and you meant every word of it, and Love moved my notebook so it wouldn’t catch fire, and Ayame’s mother gave me shoes. Nobody has ever given me shoes, Monroe. My father buys me shoes. That’s different."

"I know it’s different."

"I don’t know what to do when people are kind to me." Her voice cracked on the last word. "I don’t know what to do with my hands."

I reached out and took both of them.

They were hot enough to sting, and I held on anyway, and the Euphoric Feedback swallowed the pain and turned it into a warm current that ran up my forearms and into my chest. She stared at our hands. Her fingers twitched once, then closed around mine.

"Start here," I said. "Hold on to something that won’t burn."

Blair laughed, a wet broken sound, and then she pulled me forward by both hands until my chest bumped hers.

She kissed me first.

It wasn’t the cave kiss. It wasn’t the ferry or the sprinkler hallway either. It was slower than all of them, unsure at the start, her mouth soft and careful like she was asking permission from her own body. Then she tilted her head and pressed up on her toes in those ridiculous flat shoes, and the uncertainty burned off fast. Her tongue slid against mine. She tasted like French mineral water and something hotter underneath, cinnamon and smoke, and I made a sound into her mouth that I would deny in court.

She let go of my hands and put them on her waist herself.

I took the hint. My palms slid around the curve of her hips, over her skirt, and I pulled her flush against me until she gasped into the kiss. Her body was softer than I had imagined under the uniform and the armor and the eighteen years of posture training. Her chest pressed against mine, full and heavy through two layers of fabric, and I felt her heart going like a war drum behind her ribs.

The seventh ring was screaming.

Blair pulled back an inch. Her lips were swollen and her lipstick was ruined and her eyes had gone dark at the centers, pupils blown wide enough to eat the blue. She was breathing hard. One hand slid up from my shoulder and touched Misato’s bite mark on the left side of my throat, then moved across to Naomi’s on the right, and her mouth twisted.

"You’re covered," she said.

"I’ve had a busy week."

"I hate it." She traced Naomi’s mark with one fingertip, and the skin under it went warm. "I hate that they got there first."

"There’s room."

Her eyes snapped up to mine. Something hungry moved behind them, and her fingers drifted down to the third button on her shirt, the one sitting right above the pale edge of black lace, and she stopped there with her thumb on it.

"Fox said you always ask first," Blair whispered. "Out loud. Every time."

"Fox is right."

"Then ask me, Monroe." Her thumb pushed the button halfway through its hole, and her voice shook. "Ask me properly, and I’ll say yes."