Chapter 685 | The View From Behind Was Educational

Chapter 685: 685 | The View From Behind Was Educational

"Nobody saw anything," I agreed, because my options were limited and my position was worse.

The floorboards pressed cold through my shirt, radiating a specific kind of discomfort that suggested they had not been replaced since the building was constructed sometime during the Eisenhower administration.

The radiator made a sound somewhere between a death rattle and a metal detector going off in an airport, resettling in its moorings after absorbing the kinetic impact of Ophelia’s backward trajectory.

The window had been left open by someone who did not pay the heating bill, and November was pouring through it with the relentless dedication of an ocean tide filling a hull breach.

Somewhere under the desk that had Dralun’s name on it but smelled exclusively like old coffee and disappointment, Ophelia’s phone was buzzing with a notification that the universe could hold indefinitely as far as she was concerned.

Ophelia stayed exactly where she was for approximately three seconds longer than the situation required or could justify.

Her weight distributed across my chest and stomach like someone had dropped a very opinionated sandbag on me, velvet bunching in folds between us that were expensive to dry clean and absolutely going to require dry cleaning after this.

One of her knees had come down braced against the inside of my thigh, which was its own conversation I was not going to have right now. The broken garter strap was still loose and tickling my hip through my pants like a piece of trailing moss.

Her breath came fast and shallow against the side of my collar, audible over the radiator and the wind both, and I could feel her heartbeat through the structural rigidity of the corset. It was doing double-time at a tempo that did not match her voice at all.

"You’re still lying on me," I said.

"I’m processing."

"You can process standing up."

"Processing requires a flat surface." She lifted her head another inch, which brought her face close enough that I could see the full extent of the damage. Her eyeliner had smeared down one side like someone had taken a charcoal pencil to her face mid-sprint, and her drill curls had collapsed into aggressive, lopsided spirals that looked more like bedsprings than hair. "If you tell anyone about this, I will make you so depressed you won’t leave your room for a month."

"I’ve seen what your bats do. I believe you."

"Good." She planted both hands on my chest and pushed herself upright, her thighs bracketing my hips in a way that the interface absolutely noticed and logged. The notification pinged in my peripheral vision, and I dismissed it without reading because some numbers did not need to exist in my conscious awareness.

Ophelia stood. She smoothed her skirt down over the tops of her stockings, reattached the broken garter with a snap that made her wince, and retrieved her phone from under Dralun’s desk by dropping to her hands and knees and crawling halfway under it.

The view from behind was educational in ways that would cost me points later.

She backed out with the phone clutched to her chest and her face still burning. "You didn’t see that either."

"I saw nothing. My eyes are decorative."

"Minus fifty points for lying about your eye functionality." She sat back on her heels and scrolled through whatever she had managed to capture. Her expression shifted from mortified to calculating to something that looked dangerously like satisfaction. "I got the neck rub."

"Congratulations."

"The video is blurry because someone couldn’t hold me still."

"Someone was holding you still. You launched yourself backward like a startled cat."

"That’s victim-blaming, and Mr. Stitches will be filing a report." She stood, brushed off her knees, and walked to her desk with her chin lifted at an angle that suggested the last three minutes had not happened. The parasol remained on the floor where it had fallen during the fire. She picked it up, opened it, and positioned it between herself and me like a shield.

"I’m going to edit this video and post it on the account. Grandma’s tart intervention is content gold. The hand-holding is content gold. The neck rub is content platinum." Her thumbs were already moving. "If this doesn’t get Dralun into the top two hundred by Christmas, nothing will."

"You’re running his social media as a matchmaking campaign now?"

"I’m running his social media as a documentary of his previously unknown emotional range." She glanced up over the rim of the parasol. "The baby daddy comment is getting its own reel. I already have the music picked out."

"He’s going to kill me."

"He’s going to kill you slowly," she agreed. "But the engagement numbers will be worth it."

I pulled myself off the floor, brushed the dust from my back, and checked the time. Five forty-seven. The bus back to campus ran until nine, which meant I had options, and Dralun was currently occupied walking a housekeeper and her daughter home to a blue building on Ninth Street that he had apparently been fixing stoops across from for years without noticing.

"I’m heading out early," I said.

Ophelia’s thumbs paused. "Early? You still owe me a latte from this morning, and you haven’t finished the raccoon report, and Mr. Stitches has questions about your commitment to this organization."

"Tell Mr. Stitches I’ll bring two lattes tomorrow."

"Two lattes is bribery."

"Two lattes with extra shots is investment in workplace harmony."

She made a noise that was half scoff and half consideration. "Oat milk. Lavender. If you forget either of those things, I will find where you sleep and I will station a bat outside your door, and every time you try to leave, you will feel sad for no reason."

"I live in a dorm with twenty other students."

"Then they’ll all feel sad. Collateral damage is not my concern."

I grabbed my jacket from the back of my chair and shrugged into it. The nephew boots clunked against the floor as I walked toward the stairs, and the sound was still too loud, still not quite broken in, still carrying the weight of someone else’s abandoned career path.

"Lukas."

I stopped at the top of the stairs. Ophelia had lowered her parasol enough that I could see her face, the smeared makeup and the loose curls and the grey eyes that were watching me with something that did not fit into her scoring system.

"The dinosaur hoodie thing," she said. "With the kid. Carmen, the mom."

"What about it?"

"That was good." She lifted the parasol back up before I could respond. "Forty points. Don’t let it go to your head."