Chapter 63: Quickie*

The academy had six coaches lined up along the front drive and not one of them was moving.

They weren’t coaches in the sense of horses. I’d written them at seventeen as "big carriages that go by magic," which the world had generously interpreted as these long boxes hovering, through magic, about a foot off the ground. For some reason, however, one of them was tilted and drooping, so the faculty had to figure it out. Magical shit, stuff I had no clue about and didn’t really care for.

"They said an hour," said Reindl, walking up to me. She had her bag hugged to her chest. "That was an hour ago."

[Since when do we talk so casually?] I asked myself, raising a brow, but I wasn’t gonna shove her away. Everything with Perrin was a lost cause at this point, after all.

"They’ll say an hour again," said Odette. She was sitting on her trunk with her knees up, writing. "Clearly, they don’t know what’s wrong."

I couldn’t exactly blame them.

[Maybe I should have written some more detail into this magic system. Sorry, guys.]

"Do you think they’ll cancel it?"

"They’ve already paid the shrine."

Reindl hugged her bag tighter.

I stood off to the side of it all with my own luggage, which was one bag, because I owned like four things. Somebody’s spirit had gotten loose and was being chased along the hedges by three people from the Mage Course.

[Oh, this part.]

Suddenly, the scene came back to me, no manuscript required.

The coaches break down before the provincial excursion. Everyone waits. Lily gets bored and so does Cassian, so the two of them walk off toward the orchard on the east side of the drive to kill the time. There’s a low branch. She reaches for an apple she can’t reach. He gets it for her, hands it over, and their faces end up about four inches apart for one full paragraph before somebody calls his name and ruins it.

I vividly recalled writing that scene on the school bus. Nostalgia hit me like a tidal wave.

I turned toward the orchard.

Lily and Cassian were there. They were also about nine feet apart.

Lily had her hands folded in front of her and was looking at the coaches. Cassian was leaning on the fence with his back to her, looking at absolutely nothing, which was his primary hobby. Neither of them had spoken in the time it took me to find them. As I watched, Lily took two steps closer to the fence, and Cassian, without turning around, took two steps along it.

Then Lily gave up and started walking back toward the crowd.

I let out a long breath through my nose.

[Nine feet. There is an apple tree RIGHT THERE.]

The tree was in fruit. The branch was low. Everything I’d written was physically present on the site. The only thing missing was any interest whatsoever between the two people standing in front of it.

"That’s a neat orchard."

Marisol had come up on my left. She had her trunk with her, which was enormous, and which she had clearly been dragging one-handed to preserve the impression that it was light.

She took hold of my sleeve and pulled. I went, mostly because she’d have kept pulling.

She took me around the side of the first coach, into the gap between the vehicle and the hedge, where the noise of two hundred bored students dropped off to about half. She let go of my sleeve, looked back the way we’d come, and folded her arms.

"All right," she said. "We’re on the road for two weeks. Give me the plan."

"The plan?"

"Yes. The plan, partner."

"There’s no plan."

"There’s always a plan." She said it without any doubt at all. "Come on. Lay it on me."

She raised one eyebrow and waited me out.

[I’m not gonna convince her, am I?]

"Fine," I said. She straightened up. "You see Serena over there?"

Marisol leaned around the corner of the coach. Serena was standing apart from the crowd near the second vehicle with her arms crossed and six feet of empty gravel around her in every direction.

"I see her. What are we gonna do?"

She said that with a slightly odd tone.

[... Calm down, woman. We’re not gonna kidnap her or anything.]

"We can’t let Lily see her naked."

Marisol turned back to me.

"... That’s oddly specific."

"W-Well, that’s the plan!"

"... That’s the whole plan?"

"THAT’S THE PLAN!!!"

She thought about it. I watched her think about it. Her eyes moved off to the side, her mouth moved a little, and she ran the whole thing against everything she believed about me, which was extensive and completely wrong, of course. I was half hoping she would finally go "oh, this woman is crazy", and leave me alone... in this regard.

[If the sex could keep going, that would be nice.]

"The shrine lodging has communal baths," she said slowly.

"It does."

"Everdawn will be in those baths. Frostfall will be in those baths."

"They will."

"So... we need to manage a schedule, then?" She still looked like she wasn’t sure, but she was (unfortunately) going along with it. "Two weeks. Fourteen nights. You need Frostfall bathing on a rotation that never once overlaps with Everdawn, and it has to look like an accident every single time. Otherwise Everdawn starts asking why, and then it doesn’t matter what she saw, because she’ll have already worked out that there was something to see."

My brows raised.

[... She’s saying that because she has already worked out that there’s something to see. That’s so clever of her, it’s almost scary.]

I opened my mouth.

"That’s incredible," said Marisol. I closed it. "Well, alright. If this will further our interests, I’ll help make it happen. Or, prevent it from happening, I suppose may be the better wording here."

And then she dropped to her knees.

She went down onto the grass strip with both knees, put her hands on my thighs, and started working the fastening of my uniform trousers.

My tail went straight out behind me and hit the side of the coach.

"Wh-" I got a hand on her shoulder. "Wait. Marisol. Hold on. What are you doing?"

"Four hours of delay," Marisol said. "I think we could stand to improve our morning."

"We are outside!!!"

"Everyone’s too busy being bored. It’ll be fine."

"I-I don’t think-"

My complaint died the instant her mouth wrapped around my cock.

"Marisol-"

She hummed around it and looked up at me.

[She’s enjoying this. God, she’s something else.]

"You’re doing this on purpose," I said.

She came off me and made a popping sound with her mouth.

"Obviously." Her thumb kept moving. "You’ve been in a mood since the group sheet went up. This is a morale measure."

"That’s not what a morale measure- FUCK!"

She put her mouth back and took me deeper than she had any business taking me on the first try, and my tail hit the coach again.

Someone on the other side of the vehicle said:

"Did you hear that?"

My eyes went wide.

Someone else said:

"It’s the suspension. It’s been doing that all morning."

[Thank you. Thank you, whoever you are. You have no idea what you just did for me.]

I got my back against the coach panel, and I got my fingers into her curls. Marisol made an approving noise around me, which I didn’t appreciate, because it was a noise I now had to hear while pretending to be a person who was waiting for a bus.

Her rhythm was so slow. Deliberately slow. She was going to keep it slow for eleven minutes and I was going to spend those eleven minutes losing my mind.

I tightened my hand in her hair.

She looked up at me again. Her eyebrows went up, and she opened her mouth wider and did absolutely nothing else.

[Oh, you little-]

So I moved.

I pulled her down onto me and rocked my hips, and Marisol Vantecca, tea party terror of the OG novel, the girl who, in one scene, had once made a commoner cry over cutlery, took my dick and moaned around it. Her fingers dug into my thighs. She didn’t push back at all. She just held her jaw open and let me set the pace, and every time I bottomed out she made a small strangled sound that I was going to be thinking about for the entire coach ride.

"Quiet," I whispered.

She gagged, loudly.

"I said quiet-"

I fucked her mouth properly then, one hand fisted in her hair and the other braced flat on the coach, and my tail was going in every direction at once. Her eyes were watering. She was smiling around me anyway. Her nails were going to leave marks through my trousers and she knew it.

I felt it building at the base of my spine.

"Marisol, I’m-"

"Sakana, I’d like to..."

The voice came from my right and trailed off.

I turned my head.

Serena Frostfall stood at the mouth of the gap with her case in one hand. Her red eyes were open very wide. She was looking down at Marisol on her knees, at Marisol’s mouth, and at exactly what was in it.

Nobody spoke.

Marisol blinked, but did not remove me from her mouth.

Serena then quietly just turned and walked away.

[... Wonderful.]