Chapter 103: The Married Couple

A Few Days Later

Lily was waiting for me in the hallway when I came out of our room.

We walked to breakfast together every morning, so that part was normal. Then, she reached down and laced her fingers through mine. She didn’t say a word about it. She just started walking, and since she had my hand, I had to walk too.

[We’re doing this in PUBLIC???]

I braced myself the whole way to the dining hall. I expected gasps, whispers, maybe a teacher dropping a teapot. When we came in through the doors, a Knight Course boy looked up from his porridge, looked at our hands, and went back to his porridge.

Nobody else even turned around.

Lily walked me to our usual table. There was already a napkin on my chair, and a plate in front of it piled with the good sausages, the ones the kitchen always ran out of before seven.

"I came down early," she said, turning a little pink. "You always look so sad when they’re gone."

Before I could sit, she stopped me, reached up, and fixed my collar. She tugged it flat on both sides, smoothed it with her thumbs, and patted it once when she was finished.

"It’s crooked every single day," she said. "You fix mine all the time, and you never once notice your own."

I sat down very slowly. Two hundred people had just watched the heroine of my novel fix my collar, and all two hundred of them had gone right on eating their eggs.

Then, Marisol dropped into the seat across from me. She looked at our hands, which Lily still hadn’t let go of, and then she looked at me for a long time.

"You absolute snake," she whispered.

"Good morning to you too?"

"Don’t play innocent with me, Sakana." She leaned over the table, and her uniform, which was already tailored two sizes too flattering, did a lot of work while she did it. My eyes went straight down her collar. Lily squeezed my hand hard enough to pop a knuckle. She kept talking, and it seemed like Lily wasn’t hearing her. "The dresses, the Warden, jumping into the ocean in the middle of the night... I spent two months trying to figure out what the operation was, and this was your goal the whole time???"

"Marisol, that’s-"

"A commoner scholarship girl." She shook her head, amazed. "She has no title, no money, and no family anyone’s ever heard of, and you nearly died twice to win her loyalty. I don’t understand the angle yet, but I know there is one. When it pays out, I want a cut."

[Oh, no. She’s going to keep digging until she finds out Lily’s a princess, and then she’s going to think I’m a GENIUS.]

It was enough to giv me a headache.

Odette arrived next with a book under one arm. She sat down, opened it, glanced over the top of it at our hands, and turned a page.

"Finally."

"What do you mean, finally?!"

"Nothing." She turned another page. "I’m very happy for you. Please pass the salt."

Fenna came last with a tray of eggs, dropped onto the bench beside me, and hooked an arm around my neck.

"Congratulations! I heard it from three people before I even got to the kitchen, so I figured it was official." She let go and stabbed an egg with her fork. "So, is Lily sitting in on the litter negotiations, or do you want a separate meeting? I opened at five, but I’m flexible if she wants to carry some of them."

Lily’s spoon clattered against her bowl.

"L-Litter!?"

"Pups," Fenna said, and took a big bite. "Eh, don’t worry about it. We can talk numbers after class."

I put my face down on the table, right next to the sausages.

"Does anybody here think this is weird at all?" I asked the wood.

Marisol and Odette both said no. Fenna asked why it would be. Lily smiled, blushing.

[People, my reality is being upended and you guys think this is, what, to be expected!?]

I couldn’t believe it.

---

Lily was kneeling on the floor of our room with both hands over her face.

I was kneeling across from her, close enough that our knees almost touched, because she had sat down like that first and I didn’t know what else to do. It felt like we were about to exchange sacred vows, or possibly duel.

It had started two hours ago, in Archmage Lucen’s lecture on mana channels. Lily had been staring out the window for most of it, and Lucen eventually noticed. He stopped mid-sentence, folded his hands, and gave her that smirk of his.

"Miss Everdawn. Perhaps you’d like to tell the class what you want more than a basic understanding of your own magic?"

Lily jumped in her seat and blurted it out, with a determined face.

"I want to have sex!"

The whole hall went silent.

Then, some Knight Course boy in the back row said, "Good for you," and everybody lost it. Lucen tried to restore order by explaining, very slowly, that this was a lecture hall. Lily put her head down on her desk and didn’t lift it again until the bell rang. Afterward, she walked me back to our room without saying a word, locked the door, and knelt.

So, here we were.

"Lily?"

"I didn’t mean to say it out loud," she mumbled through her fingers. "I was thinking about it, and then he asked, and it just came out." The tips of her ears turned red. "We’re together now," she said. "And I don’t know how any of it is supposed to work. I read a book about it once, but the two of them just ’became one beneath the moonlight,’ and then it was morning, and they were eating breakfast."

[Oh, god. I think fifteen-year-old me wrote that exact sentence somewhere.]

I looked at her, curled up and red all the way down her neck, and something in my head clicked into place.

For three days, I had been panicking about being someone’s girlfriend. I didn’t know what to say at dinner, or whether I should hold her hand in the hallway, or what she was expecting when she smiled at me. Back on Earth, I’d spent my twenties married to a keyboard, so all of that was a foreign language to me.

Sex, on the other hand, I had plenty of practice with in this world.

My shoulders relaxed. My tail started swaying behind me all on its own.

I scooted forward on my knees until they bumped hers, then I took her wrists and pulled her hands down, very gently. She let me. Her eyes were wet and wide, and she wouldn’t look higher than my chin.

"Lily~" I said. "You told an entire lecture hall before you told me. Honestly, I’m a little hurt."

"I-I’m telling you now!"

"Are you? Because I don’t think I heard it. Say it again."

Her mouth opened and closed. She made a small squeaking noise.

So, I leaned in and licked her cheek, from her jaw right up to the corner of her eye.

Lily went completely rigid.

"Did you just LICK me?"

"Yeah, it’s a fox thing."

"Is it really?"

"I have no idea. I made it up just now." I tilted my head and brushed my nose against hers. "Do you want me to stop?"

She stared at me for a second. Then, she grabbed the front of my blouse with both hands and pulled me in.

[Oh shit.]

Her kiss was clumsy. She pressed too hard at first, her nose bumped mine, and our teeth clicked together. I cupped her jaw and slowed her down, and she followed me as soon as she understood. Her lips were soft and warm and tasted like the honey from breakfast. When I slipped my tongue against hers, she made a little noise in the back of her throat and pushed forward, and the two of us tipped over onto the floorboards with her on top.

I felt her weight settle across my hips. My skirt got very tight, very fast.

Lily noticed. She sat up a little, looked down at the bulge under my skirt, and then back at my face, and her whole face went from pink to scarlet.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that’s... That’s right, you..."

"Yep."

"Can I...?" She put one hand flat on my stomach, just under my ribs. Her fingers were shaking. She slid them lower, very slowly, over my navel and down to the waistband of my skirt, and I stopped breathing.

Somebody knocked on the door.

Lily froze with her hand halfway under my waistband. I froze underneath her.

"Everdawn," Serena said from the hallway. "It’s... time for your training!"

Lily looked at me. I looked at her. Neither of us moved.

"I can hear both of you breathing," Serena added. "Don’t insult me."

[How can she POSSIBLY hear that through a door?]