Chapter 180: Class is in Session

Someone had taped a sheet of paper to the door of the video room behind the Apex locker room. It said PANTS in black marker, underlined three times.

Blair stood in front of it with forty worksheets hugged to her chest. She had spent the whole morning in the library making them. She had redone the second page three times, and nobody was ever going to know that.

She pushed the door open.

The room had a projector, a whiteboard covered in arrows that were supposed to be hockey plays, and three rows of folding chairs much too small for the beastmen sitting in them. There were twenty-two of them. She counted twice.

Daemus had taken the middle seat of the front row. He’d turned the chair around and folded his arms over the back, and he was looking at her as if she’d walked in carrying a birthday cake.

"Professor," he said gravely.

"Don’t."

"Professor," Hollis said from the second row, just as gravely, and the whole room picked it up.

Blair put the worksheets down on the desk so nobody would see her hands. Then she picked up the top stack and started handing them out, because that was what teachers did, and her feet seemed to know it even if the rest of her didn’t.

Hollis took his sheet, looked at it and went very still.

The Bison beside him was already writing. Hollis wasn’t. His eyes moved across the first line, stopped, and went back to the start. His pencil hovered over the numbers at the end of the problem, as if he could see them fine and everything in front of them was a wall.

Blair took the sheet back out of his hand.

He flushed to the tips of his ears. "I was getting to it."

"Then I’ll read, and you do the math." She read the first problem out loud: a bus, a depot, two different speeds.

"Seventeen," Hollis said.

It was seventeen.

The Bison stopped writing and stared at him. So did the row behind.

"Nobody ever read it to me before," Hollis said, to no one in particular, and bent over his sheet.

Kincaid had brought his Beast Economics textbook and balanced it on his knee as if it might go off.

"Compound interest," he said darkly. "Coach says if I don’t get compound interest, I don’t get the playoffs."

Blair thought about it. "How many shots did you take last season?"

"Hundred and twenty. Ish."

"How many went in?"

"Twenty-four." He said it with real pride.

"So what percent is that?"

Kincaid opened his mouth. He closed it. He counted on his fingers under the desk, which he clearly thought she couldn’t see.

"Twenty," he said slowly.

"That’s interest," Blair said. "Shooting percentage, with money instead of pucks."

Kincaid looked down at the textbook. "That’s it?"

"That’s the first page."

He stared at the book as if it had been lying to him all semester.

Something warm was rising in Blair’s chest. She kept her face very still so it wouldn’t show.

She was bending over Hollis’s sheet when the Bison leaned across to see hers. His shoulder came over her like a wall, and his breath stirred her hair.

Blair froze with her pencil in the air.

Daemus stood up. He carried his chair around the end of the row, set it down at the corner of Hollis’s desk, between her and the Bison, and sat back down in it.

The Bison leaned back.

Ten minutes later, Daemus got number four wrong.

Blair leaned over his shoulder and tapped the line. "Check your sign."

"Which one?"

"The minus. Right there."

He didn’t look at the minus. He was looking at her, much too close, and he was grinning.

"You did that on purpose."

She straightened up to give him a look. Under the edge of the desk, his hand found her wrist and closed around it, and his thumb settled on the soft inside where her pulse was.

He didn’t let go.

Blair turned to the room. "Number five," she said. "There’s a... a train leaves..."

His thumb moved, one slow stroke. She lost the train completely.

"You okay, Professor?" Hollis asked.

"Fine."

Daemus’s thumb did it again. Somewhere in the third row, someone snorted.

Coach leaned in the doorway, chewing his whistle, and looked at his entire defensive line bent over worksheets in total silence. He backed out again very quietly, he didn’t want to scare off a miracle.

* * *

The equipment room smelled of tape and old rubber. It was dark except for the strip of light under the door.

Daemus had pulled her in by the hand on the way out and shut the door with his heel. Now her back was against a rack of hockey sticks, and his mouth was on hers.

Slow at first, his lips coaxing hers open, then deeper, his tongue sliding against hers until she made a small sound into his mouth. His hands spread on her waist and pulled her up against him. She went up on her toes and wound her arms around his neck.

Behind her, the sticks rattled. One slid sideways and clattered to the floor.

Neither of them stopped.

His mouth went to her jaw, under her ear, down the side of her throat. She tipped her head back to let him. His hand slid under the hem of her sweater, warm on her bare stomach, and his thumb came to rest just under the edge of her bra. She arched into it before she could think.

"I’m going to fail algebra," he murmured against her neck. "On purpose. All of it."

"You’re already bad."

"Worse. So you have to keep me after class."

She laughed, and he caught it with his mouth.

Outside, a whistle shrieked.

"KRELIN! ICE!"

Daemus dropped his forehead to her shoulder and groaned.

"Practice till eight," he said. "Then film. Then I sleep at the house, because he wants us on the ice at five again and he’s trying to kill me." He lifted his head. His ears were all the way up. "I’ll text you. I have your number now. It’s very exciting."

He kissed her once more, hard, and went.

Blair stayed against the rack until her legs worked again. Then she picked up the fallen stick and put it back.

* * *

When she came back from the washroom that night, there were two new messages from Big Bad Boyfriend :D.

coach is trying to kill me

night bunny <3 <3

She smiled at the two hearts. Under his name, Kyana’s three messages sat where she’d left them, unanswered.

Then she saw a paper.

It lay on the floor just inside the door, folded twice. It hadn’t been there when she left.

Blair picked it up. Lined paper torn from a cheap notebook, the kind half of Dormitory G used. The handwriting was neat and round.

I know where they took the girl who slept in your room.

Midnight. The lake past the playing fields.

Come alone, or I won’t be there.

She opened the door. The corridor was empty in both directions. Somewhere down the hall a door clicked shut, and she couldn’t tell which one.

She closed her own door and read the note again.

Whoever wrote it had known she would come. That was the part she didn’t like.

Her skirt hung over the back of the chair. She took the other paper out of its pocket, the one Jack had given her with the girl’s name, and held it without opening it.

Don’t let them take me.

It was twenty past eleven.

Blair picked up the phone. She opened Daemus’s messages and typed Someone left a note under my door.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she deleted it, typed Goodnight, and sent that instead.

She put the phone in Heather’s desk drawer and went to find her coat.