The Last Graduate Page 43

I didn’t. In fact, mortifyingly I kissed him first, and then it was all up, because I’m starving, and I do like cake, and after I’d taken the first bite I wanted another, and another after that, and I put my hands under his shirt to press them flat against his warm bare back, and it was so good to be this close to someone, only it wasn’t just someone, it was Orion, and he shivered all over and put his arms around me and I could feel how strong he was, the muscles moving under his skin that he’d built over years of fighting all the very worst things that come out of the dark. His mouth was all warm and wonderful and I can’t even describe how good it felt and how much better it made everything. I was one of those poor stupid freshmen longing inside the gymnasium fantasia I’d made, only this was real and I could really have it, inside and after we graduated and forever, and the rest of my dream along with it—a life of building and creation and good work, and every prophecy of evil and destruction could go fuck right off and I could start the rest of my life right now, and I wanted to, so much I couldn’t stop, couldn’t want to stop.

So I didn’t. I just kept kissing him and running my hands all over him and breathing in time with him, our foreheads pressed together making a warm private space between us to catch our breath in, full of gasps. Orion had a hand all tangled up in my hair, moving around like he wanted to feel the strands running over his fingers, tightening his grip and relaxing in small bursts, his own breath coming out in hard panting raspy gulps, and it felt so good I laughed a little into that open space between us and reached down to grab the bottom of his shirt.

He gave a convulsive shudder and jerked back, pushing me to arm’s length, and crackled out, “No, we can’t,” in a rawly agonized way.

I’ve been mortified in all sorts of awful ways in the course of my life, but I think that might possibly have been the worst. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to; that would’ve been all right. But he wanted to just as much as I did, and he’d nevertheless managed to stop himself, and I hadn’t, like some undisciplined yahoo grabbing at the shiny treat that I knew perfectly well would lead to complete disaster. He even heaved himself off the bed in the next moment, all but levitating to the other side of the room.

“Right you are,” I said, and fired myself out the door and into the still-lightly-toasted corridor at once.

Precious was right on the other side of my door when I shot it open, so frantic she was leaping almost as high as my waist. I caught her right out of the air and said furiously, “Will you stop? Nothing happened, no thanks to you.”

I slammed the door hard behind me and slumped onto my bed. Precious crept up my arm to my shoulder and sat there silently until I finally admitted, “No thanks to me, either,” as bitter as rotten squash. She crept closer to my ear and rubbed the lobe with the tip of her little nose and made a few comforting squeaks as I put up my hands to rub away a few leaking tears.

Orion didn’t even have the bare decency to avoid me the rest of the day. In fact, he spent all of lunchtime casting pathetic looks of desperation and longing in my direction, exactly as though I’d been the one who’d fired him up only to cruelly leave him hanging. Nobody made a peep about it in my direction, but I could tell they all assumed that I had done just that. When I complained to Aadhya about it that afternoon, she told me—with a total lack of sympathy—that no one was spending that much time thinking about my love life, but what did she know?

“You should just be grateful he saved you from yourself, anyway!” she added.

I glared at her. “And who was just asking me for all the salacious details?”

“That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have thrown a bucket of cold water on your head if I’d been in range. What were you thinking? Do you even know when your last period was?”

I really couldn’t argue with her especially since no, I had no idea when my last period was or when the next one was due. Thankfully, that’s one thing magic is good for; whenever the first signs show up, you brew yourself a cup of nice go-the-fuck-away tea—an easy alchemical recipe every wizard girl can brew in her sleep—and that’s the end of it. Some of us do have to keep a sharp eye on the timing, because theirs starts with blood spotting, and you don’t want mals to get a whiff of that. But my first symptom is a nice sharp whanging cramp in the midsection, completely unmistakable, and it arrives with a good five hours’ warning.

Unfortunately, one thing magic is not good for is avoiding pregnancy. The problem is, if you deliberately do something that you are conscious and deeply terrified might cause pregnancy, the magical intent gets confused. Protective spells are about as reliable as the withdrawal method. Science is much more reliable, but then you have to either invest some of your very limited induction weight allowance to bring in condoms or pills and then use them properly, or get an implant or an IUD before you get inducted and cross your fingers that nothing goes wrong with it over the four years you’re hopefully going to be in here before you next get to see a gynecologist. I didn’t see the point. Or rather, I hadn’t seen the point four years ago, when I’d been reasonably sure no one was going to talk to me, much less date me.

“It’s just—” I stopped squabbling and sat down on the floor of her room in a thump and said, “It was just so nice,” and maybe that sounds stupid but I couldn’t help my voice wobbling. Nice was what we didn’t have in here. You could manage desperate victories and even dazzling wonders sometimes, but not anything nice.

Aadhya sighed out a long deep breath. “Well, forget it. I’m not getting eaten by a maw-mouth because you got yourself knocked up.” I sat up with my mouth open in low-blow outrage, but Aadhya just looked at me hard-faced and serious, and she was right; of course she was right. I’d already been screwing around excessively without making it literal, and if I kept on, I’d very likely end up with something even less helpful than a pewter medal.

We didn’t know what we were going to find when we got down to the graduation hall, and in some ways that was worse than knowing it was going to be the same terrible horde of mals that seniors had faced every year for a hundred years and more. We couldn’t even guess based on the early accounts of the days when the cleansings had been running, because the school had been brand-new then, and the only mals had been the first squirming pioneers to find their way through the wards. Now there were century-old infestations and colonies buried deep in dark corners, ancient maleficaria rooted into the foundations, generations who’d never lived outside the machinery. Maybe there had been enough survivors of the cleansings to start a sudden population explosion in the available space, like the oncoming wave of amphisbaena, and we’d be dumped into a ravening horde of recently hatched and starving mals, so many of them and so small that most of our strategies wouldn’t apply, just like that horrible mass we’d accidentally lured with Liu’s honeypot spell only ten thousand times worse.

Prev page Next page