“Um, listen,” I said to Amaranth when we got to the union doors. “When we get upstairs… you can probably say hi to Two but you shouldn’t try to stand there and talk to her.”

“Well, of course I’m going to talk to Twoey,” Amaranth said. “I mean, if there’s a line or something I can wait. I’m not going to bother her while she’s working.”

“Yeah, but, any talking while she’s working is going to bother her,” I said. “It’s just the way she is.”

“She’s always happy to talk to a friend,” Amaranth said. “I’m not going to embarrass her, if that’s what you’re worried about.

I sighed.

Well, Two could tell her.

“Hi, Twoey!” Amaranth called, waving enthusiastically as we headed into the food court.

Two was standing at attention behind the counter of the White House, her uniform visor up high on her forehead so as not to cover the runes on her forehead which had given her life and her name. The rest of the stands were not so attentively manned at the moment; student workers lounged behind the counters or out of sight

“Hi, Amaranth,” Two called back, returning the wave. “I’m not supposed to chat while I’m working.”

“Oh, I’m not going to take up all day,” Amaranth said. “Say hi to Mack.”

“Hi, Mack,” Two said dutifully. Turning back to Amaranth, she said again, “I’m not supposed to chat.”

“I know, honey,” Amaranth said. “So how’s work been? Are they treating you okay?”

“It’s fine. Yes. I’m not supposed to chat,” Two said. She was starting to tremble.

“Twoey, it’s fine,” Amaranth said. “Come on, talk with us a while.”

This visibly increased Two’s distress level, as she now had an order–from a friend, no less–conflicting with the rules she was supposed to follow at work. Her eyelids twitched and a tic seemed to pull her face to the side.

“Amaranth,” I said. “Look at her.”

“You just hush and let me have a little talk with Twoey,” Amaranth said, putting her finger on my lips. Within the rules that had built up for our relationship, this meant I couldn’t talk.

I only had half a second to mull whether now would be the time to break that rule when Two burst into tears. She was still fairly new to crying openly, and she did it without self-constraint or shame.

However much she might have looked like a waifish young woman who just happened to have runes carved bloodlessly from her forehead, Two was a golem, clay transfigured into living flesh.

She had a mind, and she’d been relieved of her magical compunction to obey her creator by the command which had freed her to do as she wanted… but that same creator had invested her with no other desires than to do what she was told.

Living in a group home set up to help other golems with less crippling personalities hadn’t really helped her adjust to freedom as much as two weeks at university with friends who tried to understand her had.

“Twoey, honey, don’t cry,” Amaranth said, and of course, Two stopped, just like that. Her mouth clamped shut, and she was breathing fast in and out through her nose.

“What the crap’s going on out here?” her co-worker, Kyle, said, coming up front.

“It’s just a little misunderstanding,” Amaranth said.

“What the hell did you do to her?” Kyle demanded, looking at Two, who was standing ramrod straight, jaw locked tight, her bright blue eyes held wide open as she tried her best not to cry.

“I was just trying to talk to my friend,” Amaranth said, a touch of defensive anger in her voice.

“Two, take our order when you’re ready,” I said softly as Kyle responded angrily and Amaranth responded in kind.

They were both still talking loudly over each other when Two swallowed, blinked her eyes, stepped forward, and said, “Welcome to White House. May I take your order?”

“Oh!” Amaranth said, jumping back.

“You good?” Kyle asked Two, who nodded.

“I’m so sorry,” Amaranth said to Two, then caught herself and added, “but I’m going to need a minute to look at the menu.”

“That’s okay,” Two said.

“This place sure doesn’t have a very wide variety of food,” Amaranth said, wrinkling her nose in distaste at the pictures of the little burgers. “You guys should consider stocking some vegetarian alternatives.”

“Okay,” Two said.

“They’ve got fries and stuff,” I said.

“Those have usually got some kind of animal fat in the oil,” Amaranth said.

“Seriously?”

She nodded.

“This was so much easier back home where all the food was locally produced,” Amaranth said. “I always knew exactly what was in anything I ate.”

“Well, one of the other places might have salads,” I said.

“Oh, well… I suppose,” Amaranth said. “I’m sorry, Twoey, I wanted to eat here, but there’s just nothing I can safely eat. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No,” Two said. “I don’t mind. But I’m not…”

“…supposed to chat,” I said, along with her. “It’s okay. When you’re working, interpret any non-business-related things we say to you as purely rhetorical unless it’s an emergency.”

“Okay,” Two said.

I ordered my chicken, some fries, and a drink, paying with one of my meal points, then went with Amaranth over to Burger President.

“Are you for real here?” said the girl behind the counter. Her name tag said she was a Cynthia.

Amaranth looked puzzled, but said, “Well, yes.”

“You’re just going to walk up naked and try to order food after you made that poor feeblemind cry?” she asked.

“Nudity is my natural state,” Amaranth said, giving the girl a patient smile and pointedly ignoring the insult directed at Two. “Yours, too. Anyway, what I’m looking for is something without any meat, bacon, cheese, eggs, or anything else that comes from an animal… and it looks like the only one like that is the garden side salad, which is a little small. So, what I’m wondering is, do the bigger ones come pre-packaged or…”

“We don’t serve naked people,” the girl said. “It’s against the health code.”

“Nymphs are exempt, and naturally clean,” Amaranth said. “Is there somebody else working here I could order from, please?”

“Or what? You’ll sic your pet demon on me?” the counter girl asked, her voice rising. “I have a bottle of holy water under the counter, and I swear to Khersis I’ll use it if that thing comes near me.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Hush, baby,” Amaranth said, pulling me back and stepping in front of me. “I just want to get some lunch. If special orders upset you that much, I’ll just have two of the garden salads.”

“What’s going on out here?” a guy in a BP uniform said, coming from around the back of the food prep area.

“Larry, we don’t have to serve to monsters, do we?” the girl whined. “They threatened me.”

“I think you misunderstood,” Amaranth said.

Larry wasn’t listening. He was looking past her at me.

“Fuck off, we’re all out of people burgers,” he said.

“Now that is just uncalled for,” Amaranth said.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll just go wait…”

“You stay right there, missy, or I’m going to swat your little butt so hard when we get back to the dorm,” Amaranth said, making me go red all over. I lowered my head, which probably saved me from further mortification at seeing the BP employees’ reactions. “Look at her,” Amaranth said, grabbing me by the shoulders and manhandling me up to the counter. “Does this look like a dangerous monster?”

“Fine, I’ll get your salad,” Larry grumbled. “You can toss my fucking salad, while you’re at it.”

“I’d be happy to, if you want me to,” Amaranth said. “But, um, two garden salads. They’re a little on the small side. And, any kind of vinaigrette dressing’s fine.”

He went to a little fridge back behind the counter and opened it, pulling out a small container of salad.

“Right, dressing,” Larry said. “I’ll get your dressing.”

He took the salads back around to the storage area or whatever was in back.

“Ring them up, Cynth,” he called. “I’ll bring them out when they’re ready.”

“They’re prepackaged salads,” I said to Amaranth. “What do you think…”

“Hush, baby,” Amaranth said. “Let’s not make a bigger deal out of this than it already is.”

Once Amaranth had paid for her salads and a drink, we headed out of the food court to one of the tables by the railing overlooking the ground floor. I sat there without touching my food, thinking it would be rude to start eating before Amaranth had hers. So, we just sat there sipping our drinks instead.

The chicken smelled so good, though.

Eventually, Hi My Name Is Larry came over bearing a tray with Amaranth’s salads. He slammed it down on the table, causing the rather suspiciously loose lids to rattle.

“Thank you,” Amaranth said, picking up the single pack of salad dressing he’d included. “I was thinking that one dressing packet would be more than enough for two small salads, and you anticipated my wishes.”

“Have a nice day,” Larry huffed, and then stormed away.

I waited while Amaranth had her dressing open and drizzled it over her salad, and then until she had taken her first bite.

Then… I kept waiting, for some reason.

She looked up from her food and saw me sitting there, not touching my own.

“You may eat,” she said. She giggled. “Viktor must have made a big impression on you.”

I blushed. That was it. I’d been waiting for permission.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Well, you don’t have to do that when we’re around others,” she said. “But when it’s just you and me… or Steff… I’d like you to wait for permission. It’s kind of cute.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“So, tell me all about your visit with Viktor,” Amaranth said.

I did, but I started at my encounter with Steff, so she’d get the full story. Amaranth made little noises of concern and pursed her lips as I described Steff’s unease at being on our floor and her jumpy, almost guiltily nervous state.

What really got her attention was something else, though.

“She didn’t want to hear you talk about sex?” Amaranth asked.

“I think she had a bad experience,” I said. “I don’t know if she just did something she regrets, or if she… well…”

“If she what, baby?” Amaranth prompted.

“If she went too far,” I said, feeling guilty for suggesting it even while knowing that it wasn’t totally far-fetched. “If she, you know… hurt somebody, or… took advantage…”

“Oh, Steff wouldn’t,” Amaranth said, shaking her head. “No, never. She’s been through… she wouldn’t. I’m going to forget you said that, baby, and I want you to forget it, too.”

“Okay,” I said. It wasn’t any more than an idea, anyway, and I wasn’t likely to get Steff to open up to me by throwing accusations around.

“Oh, baby, look,” Amaranth said, holding up a large forkful of lettuce with a glob of something that was distinctly not dressing attached to it. “He came on my salad.” She opened her mouth wide and lowered it around the salad, then closed it with obvious relish. “If that’s his idea of being mean, he must not really be trying.”

“You should file a complaint,” I said.

“Nonsense,” she said. “A little extra sauce doesn’t hurt anything. Anyway, go on.”

I told her about Steff’s detours, including her unsuccessful stop at the room of the potion-dealing alchemy major, Finbar. I felt a little guilty, like I was talking behind Steff’s back… but then, our little group had probably had too many secrets lately.

Amaranth made me slow down and go over exactly how I’d been treated by Viktor and how it had made me feel in great detail, purring throatily as I recounted my reactions.

“That was probably Gwynedd,” Amaranth said when I told her about the girl who’d been locked up in the closet. “She’s one of Viktor’s classmates, I think. She’s nice. Well, she seems nice. Since she can’t speak, I’m not sure, but I assume she’s nice.”

“She’s not allowed to talk?” I asked. I hadn’t been allowed to speak in Viktor’s presence without instructions to, but I had thought that was because of my unique status of being at the bottom of a chain of submission. “At all?”

“No, she’s congenitally mute,” Amaranth said. “And I can’t get past the alphabet in the hand cant. Steff’s really good at it, though.”

“Oh,” I said.

“So, anyway, he actually played a song for you?” Amaranth asked.

“I wouldn’t say it was ‘for me’,” I said. “But he did play.”

“What did you think of it?”

“I thought it was really good,” I said. “Have you heard it?”

“He’s never really played for me,” Amaranth said. “He just kind of fiddles around with the keys a little. He does look very serious about it, though. I’m sure he’s quite good.”

“He is,” I said, a little defensively, though I was sure Amaranth meant it… just as she was sure a girl she’d never spoken to was quite nice, and a guy who’d jizzed all over her lunch had nothing but the best of intentions.

I finished the tale without further interruption, ending with Steff taking me out of the room.

“So, if he gives me permission for you to date Steff, and you accept, then you become responsible for her well-being,” Amaranth said. “But it doesn’t sound so bad. I mean, you know you’d never hurt Steff, so that’s not even an issue… and for the rest? We’re here for her, whether you date her or not. Whatever problems she’s having, we can overcome them.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” I said. “That’s why I suggested she try mental healing.”

“So, what are you going to do, baby?” Amaranth asked. “I mean, not to jinx it or anything, but I’m pretty sure he’s going to tell me it’s okay, or else why would he make that speech at all?”

“Well… I love Steff,” I said. “So, I should do my best to keep her safe anyway, right? And if I can make her even a little bit happier, that’s got to help, too, right?”

“So you would say yes,” Amaranth said.

I nodded.

“I think so.”

“And Ian?” Amaranth asked. “Do you know how he feels about this?”

“He doesn’t know how he feels about it,” I said. “I mean, he knows we’re involved already so this dating thing’s not anything new, but he just found about Steff’s… equipment.”

“How did he react?”

“He needs time, he says,” I said. “I don’t know. I like Ian. I love having a boyfriend. I might even kind of love him. But… Steff’s not about to make me choose between her and Ian. It wouldn’t seem fair to turn my back on her because he wants me to.”

“Well… it’s sad, but some people can’t change the way they’re grown,” Amaranth said. “If he’s not able to handle a poly relationship, you may just have to let him go. But, you can still be friends.”

“I don’t want a friend,” I said. “I want a boyfriend.”

“Mack, I know you like Ian very much but you should think about your motives here,” Amaranth said. “I know you don’t like to think of yourself as a lesbian, but that’s probably not the best reason to date somebody.”

“Okay, maybe that’s one of the reasons I like having a boyfriend,” I said. “But it’s not why I like Ian.”

“What do you like about him, baby?” Amaranth asked.

“Um…”

“Don’t think, just answer.”

“His hands,” I said. I shivered, remembering the feeling of them on my body. “They’re… strong.” They were… strong and quick. A musician’s hands. “And his voice.”

I blushed. I actually liked it when he raised it, when he got mad. He was such a dork sometimes, but he had presence beneath it.

“Physical attraction is a wonderful thing,” Amaranth said. “But I think there should probably be more. You don’t love Steff and me just for our bodies.”

“I don’t, either, with Ian,” I said. “We have things in common. Kind of.”

For instance, we read comics, but not the same ones.

There was probably other stuff, too.

If I could only think of it.

“I like you two together,” Amaranth said. “I just want you to… you know, be prepared.”

“You can tell what people are into,” I said. “Can’t you…”

“He’s way into you,” Amaranth said. “But that doesn’t necessarily translate into actions, especially in the long term.” She sighed. “I wish love could be as simple as sex…”

“I don’t know, sex seems pretty complicated to me,” I said.

“Well, you’re still learning,” she said.

“Now, then,” she said, turning and giving me the over-the-rim look that made me feel about three very excited inches tall. “What have you eaten today?”

“Um… a lemon gumdrop?” I said. I’d been all set to go get a snack with Ian, but that had fallen by the wayside after we bumped into Steff.

Amaranth clucked and shook her head.

“Well, you missed breakfast,” she said. “And that will figure into your punishment tonight, but there’s still time for lunch. We’ll go pay a visit to the food court, and after that I think… yes… maybe the library.”

I nodded, feeling grateful. Lazy weekend hours at the library were becoming a comforting ritual. I hadn’t had many lazy hours this particular weekend, of course.

“Oh… come here, baby,” Amaranth purred, draping an arm over me and pulling me into her chest. She stroked the back of my head. “I know it’s been rough, but it hasn’t been all bad, right?”

“No,” I agreed. “Last night was… pretty good.”

My cheeks ran hot. “Pretty good.” It was an utter understatement, but nothing else I could have said would have done it justice. Being taken by Ian, having him cut loose… and the way I’d somehow seemed to “go away” in the middle of it. It had been amazing.

Of course, I’d been so upset at the time from my confusion over the climax that I hadn’t really been able to fully appreciate the experience, to bask in it… but in hindsight, it had been just plain incredible.

It hadn’t been the only part of the weekend I’d enjoyed, either. As serious as the situation with Steff was, as intense as Viktor might have been, I couldn’t deny the way the treatment I’d received in their room had made me feel… either in terms of my comfort with it, or the touches of arousal.

“There was… um… something else… that was pretty good, too,” I said.

“Hmm?”

I couldn’t figure out how to phrase it… should I focus on what Viktor had done, or how I’d felt? The longer I stood there thinking about it, the more determined my mouth seemed to be to freeze shut. Finally, I decided to just say what was the highlight moment and count on Amaranth’s amazing instincts to pick up all the underlying stuff.

“Viktor put me in a box,” I mumbled.

“What was that, baby?” Amaranth asked, her voice shaped by the sultriest of sultry smiles.

I tried to force the words out, but ended up burying my mouth against the side of her breast as I did.

“I can’t understand when you talk with your mouth full,” she teased. She grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head back. I let out a little moan. She gave a stern look. “Let’s try that one more time, baby… say it… very… clearly.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

“Viktor put me in a box,” I said, and then collapsed back against her warmth.

“Did he?” Amaranth said thoughtfully. “Well, I don’t have to ask how you felt about that, do I?”

“No, ma’am,” I murmured into her.

“We don’t have Viktor’s resources, but we might have to see what we can do about getting you a cozy little toy box of your own,” Amaranth said. “Would you like that, baby?”

I nodded my head, incidentally nuzzling my face against her chest. She pulled me off of her by the hair again.

“I asked if you would like that,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Good,” she cooed. “I want you to get as comfortable with boxes as possible.”

She giggled and I blushed.

“You know, I’m keeping you no matter what Mother Khaele says,” she said. The defiant look on her face turned almost immediately into a twinge of panic. “Unless she says I can’t. Because, you know… goddess.”

“It’s okay,” I said, feeling a sudden heaviness stealing away the warmth that had suffused me.

I’d had years to get used to the idea that the gods of good didn’t approve of me, but I’d never experienced it so personally. Even having my tongue burned when I’d tried to pray to Khersis had been little more than a side effect.

“She hasn’t said no yet,” Amaranth said. “She said we’ll talk about it again.”

“When?” I asked.

Amaranth curled her lower lip back, biting it so hard I thought she’d chew through it. She looked off to the side.

“Amaranth?” I prompted. “Please tell me what she said.”

“When she’s made up her mind,” she said.

“So she really might tell you no,” I said.

“But she might say yes,” Amaranth said. “I mean, it would be really horribly hypocritical of her to forbid me to see an intelligent being after she made such a big deal over the whole ‘horse fucking’ issue.” She blanched. “Not that I believe it actually would be hypocritical if she did, but I would hope she could see how it would seem that way to an observer in the mortal world.”

“Why are you so hung up on horses, exactly?” I asked. I knew Amaranth had “sacrificed” articles about various animals’ relative intelligence levels to try to get around a divine prohibition on sex with lower creatures… fortunately to no avail.

Horses, though, were the first one she’d set her sights on that I knew of, and the one she kept coming back to.

“They are beautiful, noble, feeling creatures,” Amaranth said. “I look into their eyes and I see a unique mind staring back at me. I have to believe that when my divine creator made me to share pleasure with the world, she didn’t mean to exclude such magnificent and obviously intelligent beasts.”

“Even when your divine creator tells you that she did mean to exclude them?”

“I think it’s possible that some part of her kind of didn’t mean to a little, in the back of her mind,” Amaranth said. “I gave her a copy of an article from the Journal of Subtle Arts Studies about hidden intentions, and how people often have many subconscious reasons for their actions that they’re not consciously aware of.”

“Don’t you think she’d know if she gave horses intelligence?” I asked. “Or any other animal, for that matter?”

“She could have made one intelligent and then forgot about it,” Amaranth said. “She did make an awful lot of them, after all.”

“But… goddess,” I reminded her.

“Well, maybe she outdid herself without realizing it,” Amaranth said. “There could be a veritable masterwork animal species out there, enjoying all the benefits of true intelligence except for nymphly companionship. Maybe not horses necessarily… but, who knows?”

“Amaranth, do you really think trying to rationalize around your goddess’s commands is the best way to convince her you’re not overly proud?” I asked.

“I’m not!” she protested, stamping her foot on the tile floor. “I’m just concerned about a poor overlooked, undersexed…”

I gave her a hard look. It took everything I had to do it.

“Ohhh… maybe you do have a point,” she said. “I should focus on one thing at a time. For now, I’ll work on showing her that I am responsible, that we are good for each other… and then when that’s done I’ll start focusing on my animal rights work again.”

“So, um… lunch?” I said, thinking it was as good a time to get out of the conversation.

“Right,” she said. She circled around behind me, wrapping me up in her arms. “There’s just one thing I need to do first.”

“What’s that?” I asked, swallowing as her fingers brushed my breasts.

“Before we eat,” she said, sliding down my back, reaching around to undo my belt and my pants and then pull my jeans and panties down, “I just want to grab a quick bite or two.”

I tensed up when I realized what she was doing. She bit hard, harder than she’d ever bitten me before and I jumped and yelped, unclenching. Once I’d relaxed, she put her lips against my ass cheek and sucked lightly, then bit down slowly, firmly. I whimpered, and she released, then dragged her lips across to the other side… and repeated.

I moaned.

She came back up slowly, her breasts pressing up against my exposed skin and then the back of my shirt. She touched her lips to the back of my ear.

“I still want to tongue you,” she whispered.

I shivered. I didn’t think I’d ever be ready to take that off my blacklist, but the thought was still somehow… somehow…

Amaranth pulled my pants back up and redid them. I didn’t help, I just stood there and let her. She gave me a smile after snapping my jeans that told me I’d done exactly right. I did my best to remain passive when she reached out with both hands and started playing with my small breasts through my shirt and bra.

“Such a fun toy,” she said. “I’ll have to ask Twoey if we can borrow some of her things to play dress-up with sometime.” She giggled. “Public nudity’s a no-no for you, but… when we go to the union, I want you to imagine you’re in your underwear.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, my cheeks burning.

“Now, come along, baby,” she said, heading for the door.

Sooni’s door opened at the same time that we stepped out. She had such a look of delighted surprise on her face that I knew she must have opened hers in response to mine. She had her braids twisted in a ridiculous sort of double pretzel that only distracted attention from her better features like her face and skin and breasts and tail and ears.

I wished she could see how ridiculous she looked.

“Oh, Miss Mackenzie, I did not know you were on the skirmish team,” she said.

“What?” I said, wondering what fresh delusion I was going to have to entertain.

“Mack’s not on the skirmish team,” Amaranth said.

“Really?” Sooni said, in obviously feigned surprise. “I do not understand why everybody in the fitness center was saying you lost us the match, then.” She shrugged. “I must have misunderstood, I’m sure.”

“It sounds like it,” Amaranth said, smiling. “Have a good day, Sooni.”

“I will,” she said, smiling solicitously. She gave a little bow before she backed into her room and closed the door.

“See, she’s not so bad,” Amaranth said, heading down the hall.

“She’s being snide,” I said, falling in step to her side and a little behind.

“You don’t know that,” Amaranth said. “Remember, she wanted to spend time with you.”

I didn’t argue. I had other things on my mind. Were people blaming me for a skirmish loss? Rocky had said that Belinda led their squad… I could probably assume that Hissy had been sidelined, which would mean that squad was down two fighters. Worse, non-human fighters were generally considered to be the heavy hitters… even I knew that.

The loss of two of them–including a half-ogre squad captain–would make a great scapegoat for a loss. If their absence could be pinned on an unpopular student from the freak dorm that was apparently only good for sex and producing skirmish players, that was even better.

“What are you thinking about?” Amaranth asked, and I realized I’d become lost in thought and stopped walking.

“What Sooni said,” I said. “If people really are blaming me for the loss…”

“She said she misunderstood,” Amaranth said.

“Don’t you see what she was doing?” I said. “She knew I wasn’t on the skirmish team, she was just using that as an excuse to tell me a nasty rumor while pretending to be nice. It’s something she does, when she’s not going nuts over a…”

“Say one more word and you’re going back to apologize to her face,” Amaranth said with something approaching fierceness.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, lowering my head. I wasn’t wrong, but I had agreed to keep my feelings about Sooni to myself.

“I had hoped watching your shows together would help you two get along,” she said. She sighed. “I suppose it couldn’t… well, no.” She chewed on her lip. “I did say I wouldn’t order you again. I’ll stick to that.”

“Thank you,” I said. I added, feeling once again like the words were far too lame for the sentiment, “I’m proud of you.”

Amaranth lit up like a candle, and she started heading down the hall again with her head held high. I’d have to remember that, if her divine mother had told her to watch her pride… compliments went straight to her head.

Still, she was beautiful to watch when she walked like that, a million miles tall and her hair shining like the sun, her hips swaying as she strode towards the door to the stairwell… where she turned and saw me, still standing in the middle of the hall.

“Baby, if you keep on stopping like that you’re not going to have to imagine going to lunch in your underwear.”

“Subdued” was the only way I could describe her on the trek down the stairs and then back up the other set. She was so broken up over whatever had happened, and the prospect of losing Viktor. I felt bad for being relieved to see her like this, but I was; this was not somebody who would choose an hour of torture and murder fantasies over real romance.

Steff started slowing noticeably when we got to the fourth floor landing, going up on the girls’ side.

I remembered her reluctance to be on my floor before, and felt kind of stupid. Amidst all the big production of meeting Viktor, I’d temporarily forgotten the things that had seemed to trigger Steff’s weird behavior the most.

It probably was a good idea I hadn’t thought to mention Leda to Viktor, though. For one thing, I didn’t know what she actually had to do with it, if anything. After all, Steff had shown a similar reaction to sexual suggestions from me as she had to mentions of her encounter with Leda. For another, there was no telling how Viktor would react. Even if she were somehow responsible, that wouldn’t make physically assaulting her a good idea.

“You know, why don’t you just head back to Viktor?” I suggested. “I’ll be fine from here.”

“Okay,” she said.

I brushed her cheek with my lips, and she didn’t draw away. Seeing Steff so drained of life was as disconcerting as it had been to see her jumpy and fearful.

On the subject of jumpy and fearful, I almost jumped out of my skin the moment I set foot in my room… my bed seemed to explode as the covers were hastily kicked off.

“Amaranth!” I said, when I realized she’d been laying beneath the blankets. “Um, not that you’re not welcome, but… how’d you get in here?”

“Twoey let me in before she went to work,” Amaranth said, sitting up and trying to look composed. Her glasses were on my desk. She’d taken them off for effect before, but now their absence made her look younger, more vulnerable. “She said Steff was taking you to see Viktor, and I didn’t want to intrude.”

She shivered and hugged herself. There were long tracks scratched in her upper arms, and on her legs, where she’d dragged her fingernails over her skin. I’d seen her claw at herself like that a couple times before when she’d been upset. Seeing the marks now reminded me uncomfortably of the girl from Viktor’s closet.

“Um, Steff was really upset by something this morning,” I said. “She’s going to try some counseling.”

“Steff? Counseling?” Amaranth asked, her eyelids fluttering. The idea seemed to have shocked her out of her funk. “What for?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” I said.

“She always seems so… together,” Amaranth said. She dropped her gaze and chewed on her lip for a while. “I know she’s got pain… but… she seems to be dealing with it.”

“So, um… how’d your thing go?” I asked. It was pretty apparent that it hadn’t exactly gone swimmingly, but she didn’t seem inclined to open up about it on her own.

“Hmm?” she said, not looking up.

“Your ritual,” I said. “This morning.”

“Oh,” she said. “That.” She turned her gaze towards me, her already somewhat squinty eyes narrowing. It wasn’t a very common look for her. “I was told to mind my own business.” She said this in an almost snotty tone, in a way that sounded like I had told her this. “Can you believe that? Mother Khaele doesn’t even care that Barley’s wearing clothes. She says there’s more important issues and it isn’t my place to deal with them anyway.”

“Well… to be fair…” I started to say. I thought that perhaps Barley’s violent and sexually predatory behavior really might be a tad more important, but Amaranth cut me off with a furious glare.

“It’s a commandment she gave her children herself,” she said. “How can she not be angry about somebody flaunting it right out in the open, where people can see?”

“Well, if she’s more concerned by…”

“She also said that I’m too proud, and that I don’t listen to other people,” Amaranth said. She got up off the bed and began to pace. “And I don’t mean to disrespect my goddess, but I don’t think that’s true because I listen to you all the time, don’t I, baby?”

“Well, you’re there for me, anyway,” I said, trying to keep some good in perspective without denying something that was essentially spot-on. Amaranth was far better at dispensing advice than she was at listening to it. “I think that’s what really matters, but…”

“And… there’s more,” she said, closing her eyes just as tears began to spill out of the corners. “She says… she doesn’t know if I’m responsible enough to keep you. She thinks I’m taking on too much, with classes and work and a full-time relationship.”

“What… what do you think?” I asked.

“I don’t know, baby. We’re only two weeks into the year and it’s already so hard,” she said. “Work has been fun, and you’re great, but it seems like we’ve hit so many bumps…”

“We’re just getting started,” I said. “We’re learning.”

“Learning,” Amaranth said. She gave a little chuckle that was far from her normal tinkling laughter. “Learning… it seems like all I’m doing is learning. I mean, I go to my classes… and there’s just so many things I don’t know.”

“That’s not so bad, though,” I said. “I mean, didn’t you come here to learn in the first place?”

“Oh, I did!” Amaranth said. “I just thought that I’d know more of it already… I thought I would be the smart girl in the front row who had all the answers. I didn’t think I’d have to… you know, try so much.”

I couldn’t help feeling for her, because I loved her so deeply and because she was obviously hurting… but I kind of hoped the end result of the healing process would involve a more realistic assessment of herself.

The thing was, Amaranth really was smart… she’d taught me a lot of things in the short amount of time I’d known her and had demonstrated her knowledge on many subjects. It seemed like being smart wasn’t enough for her, though. She had to be the smartest.

So what did I do… say something bland and comforting, or go for a more directly honest approach?

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

“Well that’s kind of understandable,” I said. “You are doing a lot of things you’ve never done before. It’s only natural that you’d fail at some of them before you succeed.”

“But… I’ve never failed at anything before,” Amaranth said.

“How much have you ever tried?” I asked.

Amaranth’s cheeks reddened and puffed.

“You know, you were rather rude to Sooni this morning,” she said. She hopped off the bed and went over to the dresser where my paddle was, picking it up. “I think you need a couple good smacks, just to… to…”

Then, abruptly, she dropped the paddle and burst into noisy tears. Before I could react, she ran to me, practically tackling me as she flung her arms around me. She was saying something through the sobs, over and over again, but it took several repetitions for me to make out what it was.

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

What could you say to something like that?

“I don’t think anybody does,” I said finally. “I know I don’t.”

She calmed down a bit, giving me a tight squeeze before letting go and stepping back. Her face, as usual, was perfect… no puffiness, no snotty nose. She could bawl her eyes out and still be achingly beautiful.

“I never realized before how easy I had it,” she said. “Well, I knew things came naturally to me but I never thought anything of it. I just assumed it would be the same once I left the valley.” She pursed her lips and then gave her head a shake. “No, that’s not right. I didn’t even assume it. I never gave it a thought. And then, the first weekend… well, everything seemed to fall into place. We found each other, and I had all the answers and I brought you out of your shell. Everything just seemed… right.”

“Right how?” I asked.

“Do you ever feel like life’s a story and you’re the main character?” Amaranth asked.

I nodded. I did know that kind of feeling, a little bit.

“That’s how I feel sometimes,” she said. “I mean, I don’t mean to sound conceited, but that first weekend… and then interesting things keep happening around me. It feels like I’m the center of everything, of our group… and that makes me feel like I should have all the answers. But I don’t. I was… I was… wrong about Puddy, and Barley. I keep making mistakes.”

“You’re here for me,” I said. I took her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You love me. You don’t need to have all the answers.”

“I do love you,” she said. “I love you so much… and I’m so afraid all the time because of it. It’s so much easier to love everybody than it is to love you. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”

“Amaranth, you’re not going to,” I said, once again feeling woefully unequal to the task of giving comfort. They were just words. I meant the hell out of them, but I didn’t know how to make them sound like more than words. “I love you, too… I need you.”

“You need so much love, Mack,” she said, smiling an unusually thin smile. “I’m happy to give it… but…”

I felt a pinch in my heart. But? But what? Had Mother Khaele forbidden her to see me? Or were her own reservations overpowering her?

“But?” I prompted, cursing myself for not just allowing the sentence to hang.

“But are you happy with… the way we are, being owned?” she asked.

I didn’t have to think about it, but I did. My experiences with Viktor had given me plenty of evidence that this kind of thing really was in my nature, no matter how fucked up that was. He’d scared the crap out of me a couple times, but the way it had felt to be treated like that…

I nodded.

“Don’t you want to own me?” I asked.

“I… I don’t know if I’m the best owner for you,” she said.

“You mean you don’t think you’re perfect,” I said. “I don’t care. I still love you.”

“But what if you deserve better than I can give you?” she said.

“I can barely believe I deserve you,” I said. “And trust me, it’s not because I don’t see your flaws.”

“I’m not that bad,” Amaranth said, tugging at the corner of her lip. Okay, I was glad to see that I wasn’t the only one for whom self-awareness was a work in progress.

“You’re beautiful and kind and generous and very well-read,” I said. “Can’t that be enough?”

She turned her head and gave a deep sigh, her massive chest rising dramatically.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she said. “I’m trying.”

“I know,” I said. I stepped forward and put my arms around her. I wondered why I hadn’t tried this before. Hugging Amaranth always felt natural and comfortable. Even if I initiated it, it felt like she was hugging me more than the other way around. I wondered if she felt the same about hugging me?

“So, what do you think I should do differently?” she asked when we pulled apart. She held onto my sides with her hands, in a kind of loose, arm’s length extended hug. “Since I apparently could stand to listen more often to my friends.”

“For starters, could you please stop trying so hard to control Two,” I said. That was a big one that had been grating on me for a while, and it was far more important than any issue that might exist just between the two of us. “She’s doing things for herself now. And no more trying to keep secrets from people for their own good. And… um, don’t order me to spend any more time with Sooni. That’s just not going to end well.”

“But… she seems so lonely,” Amaranth said.

“She is,” I agreed. “But that’s not something I can help her with.”

“What if all she really needs is love, though?” Amaranth said.

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” I said. I saw that she was about to say something, so I pressed on. “I know that you do, but even if it is… she can’t get it from me. I’m sorry. I can’t love somebody like her. I’m learning to feel sorry for her, but I still hate her.”

Irritation flashed across Amaranth’s face and she let go of me. She turned away, folding her arms beneath her chest. I started to reach for her, but she turned back to face me almost as soon as she’d finished turning away.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” she said.

I’d been fearing another outburst like the one where she’d went for the paddle, but her tone… her whole aspect… had changed. She’d got some of her confidence back and was now addressing me, owner to property.

I felt a tingle of anticipation and a rush of pride.

“I will not give you any more orders concerning spending time with Sooni,” she said. “But you will not express hatred of another person in my presence. Got that, baby?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, feeling a slow smile spreading across my face, which Amaranth returned. Her face seemed to glow. Her lack of glasses was becoming subtly sexy again.

It didn’t matter that she’d only given a trivial order with no sexual or humiliating aspects. I didn’t care that there were perfectly good reasons to hate somebody like Sooni, even if Amaranth couldn’t see them. Amaranth had climbed back into the saddle and grabbed the reins again.

We hadn’t got past our problems, but we were back on the right track.

Apparently, he didn’t let a little thing like a lack of clothing stop him from roaming the halls when something lit a fire underneath him. While I worried about Steff, I found the fact that he’d ran out naked a little encouraging, as it suggested he didn’t intend to be gone for long. I wondered what I would do if he didn’t come back, but only a few minutes passed before I heard the key in the lock.

I forgot not to look as he came into the room, dragging Steff by the arm. I watched him give a jerk and let go, slamming her into one of the padded walls. From the look of it, the black drapes muffled impact a bit as well as sound, but it was still pretty brutal looking.

Viktor’s eyes locked with mine. They were almost paralyzing in their fiery intensity. He lunged at me and I cringed, then yelped as he squeezed the sides of my head between his palms and wrenched my head back up and faced me forwards again.

I could feel my heart trying to escape from my chest and was whimpering even after he let me go. Half-human or not, angry Viktor was scary.

“I told you what I’d do,” he said to Steff, reaching past me to pick up the skull from the desk. “I told you what I’d do if you went back there.”

“I didn’t!” Steff wailed. “I was just looking for Ronnie.”

“The whole third floor is off limits,” Viktor said.

“You said… you said,” Steff hiccupped. “You said if I went back to Fin. I didn’t… I didn’t.”

“Gah!” Viktor said. He slammed the skull back down on the desk, prompting an anxious gasp from Steff. Then, with surprising speed, he grabbed the chair and tipped it sideways, dumping me off.

“Hey!” I protested, forgetting myself… or maybe forgetting my lack of self. I started to get up, but Viktor planted a foot on my stomach and put his weight on it. Ow.

“Sit,” he said to Steff, still standing on me.

I couldn’t breathe. I could have rolled over, thrown him off… but I didn’t want to make the situation worse than it was. I went as limp and still as I could. He lifted his weight off that foot, but kept it in place.

“I was not precise enough in my instructions,” Viktor said when Steff had sat down. “If you break any of the rulings I have given you today, I will take your skull away.”

“I was just looking for Ronnie,” Steff repeated. She’d lost all the subtle modulation of her voice… she was almost screeching now. “I was…”

“Silence,” Viktor said. “It still remains for you to be punished.”

He stepped off of me. I would have relaxed, except I had no desire whatsoever to see or hear Steff’s punishment. Viktor stooped down and grabbed me by the seat and the back of my neck, lifting me upright and setting me on my feet. I hoped he was going to direct me by the door, but instead he dragged me to the closet.

He slid open the door. Inside the closet was a big, black box standing up on its end, sort of like a wooden locker. The shelf had been removed to make room for it. He opened the box to reveal a somewhat plump human girl in satin panties and stockings.

Her eyes went from wild with excitement when the door opened to wild with confusion when she saw Viktor’s face and me.

“Out!” Viktor bellowed at her.

She stared at me in confusion and maybe a little anger.

“Out,” Viktor repeated, yanking her out of the box with his free hand and then shoving me in it.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” I said as the door slammed shut. I tried to push it open, but it didn’t budge. It wasn’t even a matter of being latched or locked. It didn’t move at all. There was a handle, but it didn’t turn from the inside.

So, I was stuck inside Viktor’s magic bondage box.

Okay.

It occurred to me that he might actually have been showing me consideration, of a kind he felt was appropriate for my “level.” Instead of giving Steff what was no doubt a severe punishment in front of me, he’d put me away first where I couldn’t see or hear anything.

How long had the other girl been stuck inside? She’d seemed surprised, but she hadn’t been complaining. Maybe Viktor had ordered her inside when we arrived… Steff had knocked and then waited before coming in. There hadn’t been that long a delay, though… not enough time for argument or explanation. That meant she’d been there completely willingly. She’d been expecting to be ordered or placed inside the box, if she hadn’t simply been there already.

I felt a little bit better having worked that out. Not a lot, but a little bit. It was hard to imagine even a submissive putting up with this kind of treatment: being put away in a box in the closet, like a toy you never play with any more. It was hard to imagine anything more demeaning.

Though, it was a little bit arousing.

I wasn’t in the box of my own free will, of course, but I was willing to stay there for the time being. The opening had some kind of holding charm on it, but the wood was probably just wood. That meant I could batter my way out of it eventually if I had to. If it wasn’t fireproof, I had that as an option of last resort.

The box seemed to be sealed up pretty tight, but there was enough light at least for me to see myself and the sides. They were painted black, so there wasn’t a lot to see. I had room to turn around, barely.

After I’d been in there for maybe fifteen minutes, dimly glowing blue lines started to form on the door. I thought my vision was just swimming, but the lines formed a word and then disappeared

“Panic?” I read, and the door clicked open, hitting the inside of the closet door. Whoops. I grabbed the handle and pulled it shut, feeling a little guilty.

It had been a reminder to the bondee, apparently, of the device’s safe word or emergency escape clause or whatever. I hadn’t actually been in a panic or an emergency.

The word appeared another time before the door was opened again. I wondered in an idle sort of way if it did it at regular intervals, or just once for every time the door was opened and closed? I could see the pros and cons either way.

If you were seriously into the treatment enough to enjoy being locked away for an hour, it might wreck the experience to have your prison keep reminding you that it’s all just make-believe. On the other hand, if for some reason you didn’t know the code word and you missed it, you’d be out of luck… unless there were other safety features. Like a maximum duration of incarceration, or spells to detect physical comfort and safety.

Maybe the reminder could be disabled, for couples who used it regularly? Of course, that would be easy to abuse. The best way to do it would be to have a counter word that only worked from inside with the door closed. If you wanted to go all-out, it would have to be confirmed by the safe word.

Before, I never would have conceived of an enchanted box for storing sex partners in. Now, I was wondering what the state of the art was for such things, and whether I could improve on it.

Well, enchantment was my major.

It hadn’t occurred to me until just then that I could have poked around a bit to find how the spells were weaved, but that felt like it would be… cheating. I’d been put in the box under the assumption that I would be a passive object. Poking around to see how the box worked didn’t mesh with that. Also, it would have been like the flashing reminder: another way of saying “this isn’t real.”

I knew it wasn’t, but… I felt kind of safe locked in the box. Nobody could see me. Nobody could attack me. Nobody could judge me.

Nobody could touch me.

I’d never been a claustrophobe. The basement I’d spent so much time in had been a good deal bigger than a box, but it hadn’t exactly been expansive, and it had been dark and underground. It had also been my private place, even though it would always be tinged with feelings of shame.

When my grandmother had made noises about getting rid of my Mecknights, I’d hidden them down there, in the old well that had been covered over. Not only had that kept them safe, it gave me something to do during the long empty hours.

Not that they were particularly boring, even without the toys. I’d always been able to entertain myself, when left alone and with no other options. It had been down in the basement that I’d come up with my ideas for stories. I’d never really thought about it, but as I’d grown older and been sent downstairs less and less, I’d written less and less, too.

When the door finally opened from the outside, it took me by surprise. I’d almost forgotten there was a door, much less a whole room outside it. Viktor grabbed me and yanked me out. He let go of me just outside the closet. I stayed where I was, not just meek but… content. I felt almost as though I’d had a really good nap.

Was that a property of the box, or of me?

“Put on your underwear,” Viktor said to Steff. “Take her back. I will see you again after dinner… and stay away from the third floor.”

I can only assume Steff signaled her assent in some way. She came over and took me by the arm. She was pale and trembling, her eyes bleary and her cheeks wet. I led her to the door as much as the other way around.

The girl in the panties was waiting right outside the door, standing stock still with her arms at her side, as if she were still in a box. I noticed now that she had the word “Viktor” cut in big angry lines on her arm. When we came out, she slipped back into the room without a word.

“Are you okay?” I asked Steff when she’d locked the door behind the girl.

She nodded, then shook her head.

“He took my skull,” she said in the sort of small, meek voice I more commonly associated with myself than with Steff.. “He’s keeping it for now.”

I thought about telling her there were other skulls, but frankly, the whole “keeping parts of people’s bodies” thing creeped me out. Maybe it was hypocritical, given the fact that I’d eaten parts of somebody’s body not too long ago. Then again, that creeped me out, too.

“Is it special?” I asked. I’d almost asked, “What’s so special about it?” Yeah, I’m sensitive like that.

She nodded.

“He gave it to me,” she said.

I thought that I could almost understand what was going on. Though it might have seemed like he was being petty for taking a toy away in anger and she was being petty for crying over it, the, um… item in question had been a token of love between them. For Viktor to take it away was a very serious thing.

“I’m pretty sure he loves you,” I said.

“I know,” Steff said. She started to turn away, then turned back to me and collapsed against me. There was no embrace. Her arms were limp at her side. If I hadn’t hugged her quickly, she probably would have fallen. “I love him so much, Mack,” she said, bursting into tears.

“I know,” I said. Lamest answer ever.

“I-I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose him,” she said.

“Why would you?” I asked. “He loves you.”

“I can’t… I can’t handle it,” she said. “What he wants. I need… I can’t do it.”

Ordinarily, this probably would have been a good clue that there was something very wrong with the relationship. If she was talking about staying away from mind-altering potions, though, I think Viktor had the right idea. On the other hand, if she really lacked the strength to follow through on his order, that right idea wouldn’t take them very far.

I could do my best to support her… and if we did move into the dating phase, maybe Viktor’s “hostage” idea would help tip the scales. In the end, though, I was way out of my depths. I was not prepared to handle Steff’s problems, whatever they were.

I was simply not qualified.

Then I realized that there were people who were.

“Steff,” I said, in the gentlest tone I could manage. It was pretty gentle. As much as I felt for Steff, I was still pretty relaxed from my little time-out. “Have you ever considered mental healing sessions?”

She pulled back from me. I saw a twinge in her face, as if the idea disturbed her. I expected her to protest, or laugh off the suggestion, or even slap me. I remembered how vigorously Puddy had put down the idea of any kind of counseling for me after the first time Barley had attacked me. I failed to repress a shudder at that. Of course she would have. That made me all the more determined to defend the idea with Steff.

Then, her face softened.

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I really do.”

She closed her eyes and swallowed, rocking on her feet a little. She hiccupped.

“Okay then,” she said.

He’d just been dicking around with a couple notes before… now it was like he was fucking the entire concept of music, and fucking it hard, ogre-style, with the harpsichord alternately moaning in pleasure and screaming in pain.

Even though I was hardly a musical whiz, I could tell the piece lacked a certain polish… but the roughness seemed to work for it.

It wasn’t a “pretty” song, but it was far from terrible, and impressive in its speed and intensity. It was the emotion behind the music that was harsh… the sound itself was oddly beautiful. It was hard to believe that such big hands could move so quickly and so deftly, that a man with only two arms could seem to pull so many voices out of an instrument at the same time.

Had Viktor never played like this for Steff? Or did she just not have the taste to recognize it for what it was?

The raucous song ended abruptly. I’d say it was anticlimactic, except he just stopped at what seemed pretty damn climactic to me, at a swelling sort of crescendo when it sounded like all the different strands of the song he’d been weaving in and out were all coming together. He just stopped, and brought his hands down on the keyboard again with a roar of frustration.

His whole body tensed when he did this… I think he must have been holding quite a bit back for the sake of not destroying his instrument.

“Wrong,” he muttered. “Wrong, wrong… wrong.”

He played a single note, the lower of the two he’d been toying with during his little soliloquy, then snorted and mashed the keyboard again

“Speak,” he said.

I hadn’t been expecting this, and blurted out the first thing that popped into my head.

“I liked it.”

Viktor waved one massive hand and turned away.

“You do not know anything,” he said. “You are as bad as Steff, who only wants to know when I will write something she can dance to.”

Well, that might explain something: Steff was a pop music junkie, with no appreciation for the… well, I couldn’t think of a word for Viktor’s music. It sounded kind of classical, but it wasn’t. It kind of rocked. Actually, it–and I promise to never use this phrase again–rocked hard, but it wasn’t rock and roll.

“Stand,” he said, and I did.

I was more than a little clumsy at it, because my legs weren’t a little stiff and my arm had fallen asleep beneath me.

“You handle passivity well,” he said, when I’d steadied myself on my feet. “Like somebody who is accustomed to it.”

I don’t know how I would have answered that if I’d been allowed to. Not talking and trying to stay perfectly still while he ignored me might have been incredibly awkward under another circumstance, but the truth was I had no clue how to act in front of somebody like Viktor, period. Being passive was easier.

“It will be necessary for us to speak with one another now,” he said, going over to Steff’s desk. He pulled out the chair and turned it to the side. “Sit.”

Though I was a little squeamish at the thought of being seated so close to the grisly semi-animated arm and the assorted bones which cluttered the desk, I did as I was bade. I did not feel at all relieved to finally be allowed to sit while Viktor stood and glowered over me. Then, he went over to his harpsichord stool and sat on it. He was still looking down at me, but we were on closer to an equal level.

“Answer me: you wish to date my Steff?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Tell me why.”

“She seems so sad inside,” I said. The blunt command had prompted my reply without thought or reflection.

“And you think this will make her happier,” Viktor said. He swiveled the stool around and fiddled with something on the keyboard, then began to play… silently.

“Imagine that we brought Steff back in here and I told her that she may go on a date with you, or she may have an hour to do anything to your body that she wishes,” he said, his fingers gliding easily over the keys. “Try to guess which she would choose.”

I swallowed uncomfortably. Steff had once expressed regret over never having been on a “real date”, but she’d repeatedly expressed interest in doing shocking and even frankly horrible things to me for fun.

Was he actually proposing this? I wasn’t sure how confident I was that Steff would jump at a chance for a night out on the town or whatever over an opportunity to play out one of her more disturbing fantasies… say, in the vaults of the necromancy labs.

Of course, I had my safeword, but it seemed cruel to offer Steff something I wouldn’t follow through on.

“Tell me, do you understand what I said to you before?” Viktor said. “About what would happen if you hurt Steff?”

“I, um, think so,” I said. He hadn’t exactly been ambiguous, but I wasn’t completely sure why he’d chosen to give me that warning.

“If you do not understand, ask,” he said.

“Were you… was that your way of giving me permission to date her?”

“I will not give you permission,” he said. “I will tell your owner my decision at a later time. That was my way of telling you that if you do receive permission, you should think carefully before you act on it. You are a dangerous creature… far more dangerous than my own kin, but not as dangerous as I will be to you if you fail to keep my Steff safe.”

He played a little bit more. I couldn’t translate his hand motions into sounds, but it seemed an altogether lighter piece of music, much more mellow and with his hands frequently drifting into the higher end of the keys.

“Here are the rules you will follow if you date my Steff,” he said. “She drinks no alcohol. She takes no potions or herbs which affect the mind. If she does these things in your presence, you will pay. If you hurt her in the process of preventing it, you will suffer. Safewords and blacklists will not apply in this case. This is not BDSM play. This is a man who is also an ogre protecting what he loves. I do not think you will have to do anything… Steff will know that you are hostage to her behavior.”

I thought he was probably right. Steff always seemed to be genuinely concerned about me. Would that give her the willpower she needed to practice self-denial, though?

“Steff is on punishment now,” he continued. “She is to be mine exclusively, physically, until further notice. This does not change if she dates you. She frequently disobeys me in this sort of matter, but in this case I feel it is important that she does not. If she strays with another, you will share in her punishment. If she strays with you, you will take all of it for yourself.”

He paused, and played what probably would have been a rather dramatic chord if he’d had the sound turned on.

“You will not enjoy this sort of punishment, not even a little bit,” he said. “If you do not wish to abide by these terms… if you do not wish to be subject to penalties for the actions of another… then you do not need to date my Steff. There is no agreement or disagreement. You do not date her if you cannot accept.”

He gave me a good, long look.

“Now that you understand all of that, you may speak freely for a time,” he said. “You have no doubt noticed that Steff is upset by something?”

“Um, yeah, actually,” I said. I probably should have relaxed to be allowed to speak, but suddenly I felt like there was pressure on me. I could no longer fall back on my assumed objecthood. I had to perform as a person now. Making polite conversation would have been a stretch, but this one thing really did need talking about. “I wanted to ask if you knew why.”

“She will not tell me what happened, though she swore it had nothing to do with you,” he said. “I have heard stories about the things you’ve done lately, you see, and so I was prepared to kill you when she came back to my room late at night, distraught… destroyed.”

I almost protested that I hadn’t done anything to her, but of course, Viktor already believed that, or else he wouldn’t be speaking so calmly to me.

Or maybe he would be speaking calmly. It was kind of a chilling thought.

“This is not something I can safely beat out of her,” Viktor said. “I want you to find out for me, if you can. I offer no threats for failure. I am not sure she will tell anybody, but I believe she might tell you. Which do you think Steff would choose, if we asked her? Torture or romance?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I do not either,” Viktor said. “It would be… interesting… to find out.”

I shivered at the way he inflected the word “interesting.” Viktor was smarter and more refined than Belinda, but he was also more of a true ogre. I guessed that being too “interesting” to him was probably not healthy, even with his hands-off attitude to torture.

“Can’t she hear us talking?” I asked. I’d wondered about this before. She was right outside the door, and had whatever hearing she’d inherited from her elven father.

Viktor shook his head.

“Not even if she is still standing by the door,” he said. “The proper knock on the door triggers a chime, but no sound enters or escapes this room. It is necessary for my music, as well as Steff’s.”

Steff had mentioned something about soundproofing, but it seemed prohibitively expensive to me. It was easy to do an area of silence. It was harder to make an area that kept sound from entering or leaving. To make that kind of spell permanent was pretty energy-intensive, especially if it would just have to be undone when the school year was over. Of course, it could be attached to the wall hangings and the carpet…

Then I remembered Viktor’s silent footsteps. Heavy fabric like the carpet and the wall hangings would naturally absorb sound. If that property was enhanced, the way I’d enhanced the insulating property of the shower curtain only permanent, then you could have a portable, reusable soundproofing kit.

It still wouldn’t be cheap, but cheaper than an aura of total silence.

“Would you actually offer Steff that choice?” I asked.

“You are not mine to offer,” Viktor said. “You are beneath me, lower than me, but your owner does not belong to Steff and thus the two of you do not belong to me.”

“Do you… do you honestly believe I’m beneath you?” I asked. Being allowed to talk, to converse was making me a little bit bolder. “I mean, I kind of submit willingly. I’m not actually that weak.”

“Yes, you submit willingly,” he said. “You are passive. You could be strong, but you are not… and that means your physical abilities only make you a more desirable and dangerous possession.”

“I’m really not a person to you,” I said, feeling oddly detached from that observation. When Kyla had acted like anything non-human was an animal, I’d felt personally demeaned. With Viktor, it all seemed so… impersonal. “You’re sitting here talking to me but I’m still not a real person to you.”

He nodded.

“I will not apologize for my upbringing,” he said. “I would not apologize to somebody closer to my level, because I do not believe it is wrong. Most of the people here are neither above nor below me, but you have voluntarily placed yourself beneath another and named yourself as her possession. Why should I argue that this is not your true nature?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“Do you have anything else you need to say?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Then we are done speaking,” he said, and I understood that my conversation license had just been revoked. “I will retrieve Steff.”

The walls and ceiling were draped in thick black cloth. The floor was covered with a plush red carpet. They seemed to have got rid of one of the beds and one of the desks. The remaining desk had a skull and several other bones on it. The centerpiece of the display was a mostly intact forearm held in a vise, its fingers twitching. I felt a little sick at the sight of that.

Steff kept hold of my arm while she closed and locked the door, and then grabbed me by both shoulders and marched me a bit away from it.

The room was lit by candles scattered around the room. The flames might very well have been illusionary, though, because none of the candles seemed to be even a little melted and some of them were dangerously close to books, piles of paper, and other hazards.

Viktor the half-ogre was seated at his keyboard, which seemed to have been designed for larger-than-usual musicians as it was both taller and wider across than the desk, with keys sized for thicker fingers. It was a magic model… obviously a full-sized instrument could have been problematic in a dorm room. There was a whole row of candles running along the back of the instrument, lighting Viktor from the front and making the view from the back look a bit… well… demonic, for lack of a better term.

He raised a hand and brought his finger down on a single key, producing the sound of a somber-sounding note being plucked within an imaginary harpsichord.

I saw that he was shirtless, and realized a second later that he was in fact naked. I took this all in, resisting the urge to look around and see everything. I was an object. I wasn’t supposed to move. Even just turning my neck was probably pushing it, though Viktor wasn’t watching. I tried to find a comfortable position to lock my head in place.

I realized that Steff had vanished from my peripheral vision. I turned my head without thinking and saw that she’d got down on her knees, bent over with her head almost touching the ground. I wondered if I was supposed to bow, too… but, no. Steff had been very clear about the proper way for me to show Viktor respect.

I had every reason to want to be on his good side. I needed a chance to talk to him about Steff, if he would listen. Long term, I wanted his permission to date her. I could put up with a little cultural weirdness for that. It would be worth it, to see Steff so happy…

Viktor hit the same note again, waited a little while, and then hit it again. It seemed like Steff hadn’t been exaggerating his lack of skill. He hit it for a fourth time, then moved his hand back and forth over a range of five or six keys before hitting another one. Then he hit that one again.

Was he trying to compose a song one note at a time? I wondered how he managed to pass a music class. Probably the instructors were too afraid to flunk him. He definitely looked more like a warrior than a bard of any kind.

I don’t say that just because he was a half-ogre. He seemed huge, even sitting down… both tall and incredibly broad shouldered. I kind of vaguely remembered having heard that there’s no size difference between male and female ogres, but there was still a noticeable disparity between Viktor and Belinda in bulk. Maybe their human blood affected that in some way… or maybe he was just a larger specimen of his kind.

I hadn’t really noticed his face the first time I’d seen him, back before classes had started. That time, I’d been too busy failing to not look at the massive bulge in his pants. Now I could see his head in profile when he occasionally turned his ear toward the keyboard and I realized he was handsome in a way.

I mean, human-handsome. I’m sure the average ogre looks perfectly acceptable to other ogres. They just look a little… well, lumpy to humans. There used to be a myth that ogres weren’t born, they were hewn by other ogres out of the side of a mountain, which explained their craggy, uneven features. Belinda had some of that going on, though her face was softer and rounder than any full ogre I’d ever seen a picture of.

Viktor was another story. He had long black hair, held up in a very non-girly ponytail at the moment. He didn’t look like he’d been hewn roughly out of rock… he looked like he’d been sculpted. Carved. Chiseled. The kind of gray-brown skin tone helped the impression of being generally statue-like. From what I could tell, his face seemed to be both broader and more angular than would have necessarily been attractive on a human–in fact it probably would have looked like a caricature of masculinity on a human–but he carried it off.

He kept going back and forth between those two notes, playing each one two or three times, pausing, and then going to the other. Steff was still crouched on the floor and I was doing my best imitation of a statue. It felt a little ridiculous, to have been summoned like this and then ignored.

Finally, after what seemed like forever he gave an exasperated grunt and brought both hands down on the keyboard, mashing the keys and producing a twangily discordant cacophony. He pushed the stool back and swung around, getting to his feet. I shrank back as he strode towards us, the candle light reflecting on his eyes and catching on his bone-white, tiny tusk-like canines.

I couldn’t help it. When he lunged forward, I jumped back half a step and let out a shriek. Okay, he could no more have harmed me unarmed than Belinda could have but when there’s a big and legitimately scary looking half-ogre guy coming at you, you don’t think about things like that.

Viktor hadn’t been reaching for me, though. He was reaching for Steff. He grabbed her by the hair and hauled her up on her feet. I’d already broken my statue routine, so I watched him haul her over to the bed and yank her skirt off before throwing her onto it. Steff had been going ranger beneath it… I looked away before I caught more than a glimpse.

Viktor turned around and crossed the room back towards me in two strides. Granted it wasn’t a very big room, of course, but it was still impressive. He grabbed a big handful of my hair, yanked me off my feet, and then slammed me down back more or less where I had been with enough force that I felt a bit like an accordion. It had been a purely symbolic action… my feet weren’t any more in the exact spot I’d been standing in than before he’d moved me.

The message was clear, though: it was okay for him to move me, but not for me to move myself.

He put a hand under my chin and the other on top of my head and twisted my head painfully to the side with a quick jerk. If I’d had mortal bones, it probably would have either killed me or paralyzed me. Lucky me, I got to live and keep feeling the pain.

He’d turned my gaze away from the bed, a fact which I appreciated when he rejoined Steff. The sound track was plenty graphic enough. “Ogre men can go for half an hour to forty-five minutes on average” is one of those little known facts that everybody knows because it gets forwarded all over the ethernet, even though nobody’s really sure if it’s true or not.

I wasn’t exactly facing a timepiece, but if somebody told me that Viktor lasted an hour I would believe them.

What did I think about during that time, however long it actually lasted?

At first I tried to tune out the sounds from behind my field of vision. Viktor was… surprisingly restrained, at least in that department. If I’d ever spent even a moment trying to imagine what a big manly dominant half-ogre would sound like while presumably sodomizing a half-elf, I would have imagined a lot of grunting and growling.

The sort of noises Ian had made, but… a lot more so.

He was apparently tight-lipped in the sack, though, because aside from an occasional puff of breath through his nose, all I heard was the bed moving, and Steff.

She was whimpering, crying, gasping, and moaning… and every so often, crying out in something between anguish and pleasure. I tried to tune it out, but I really couldn’t because there was nothing else to listen to.

They were having sex while I was in the room, yards away, and acting like I wasn’t even there… or wasn’t worth noticing. I remembered my dream of the previous night, of being used as a coffee table… Amaranth and Ian fucking on top of me like I wasn’t even there.

I felt heat rushing into my cheeks… liquid fire swirling down below.

As it went on, I found I couldn’t stop from picturing what was happening. From a tasteful angle, like from behind where I could maybe only see Viktor’s back and glimpses of Steff. Then, my mind drifted further and imagined myself as a part of their rough love… not as participant but as accessory.

Me laying lengthwise across a large bed while Steff rested her head on my stomach like a pillow. Me on the floor like a footstool, Steff bent over me while Viktor had his way. It was bizarre stuff. I had no idea where it came from.

The longer the sex went on, though, the more pointedly it felt like Viktor was ignoring me, and the hotter it became.

That didn’t make it any easier to try to stand in place, though.

Finally, Steff gave out a protracted “Aaah… aaah… aaah!” and then a single, unmistakably orgasmic scream. A minute or so later, the sound of movement stopped.

There was a long silence after that.

“Who had you today?” Viktor asked finally.

“Jay,” Steff said.

“You went to his room?”

“Yes.”

“Where else did you go?”

“Nowhere,” Steff said. While I wasn’t permitted to speak unless ordered, it seemed like she was limited to one word answers by default.

“Where… else?”

“Nowhere,” Steff said again. She gave out a gasp, which turned into a yell and then a scream.

“Where else did you go?” Viktor asked again.

“Fin’s!” Steff sobbed.

“What did he sell you?” Viktor asked.

“Nothing!” Steff said.

“I will break your skull if you go back there again,” Viktor said. “Do you understand me? I will grind it into dust beneath my heel.”

I fought not to move, not to act. This was play. He didn’t mean it. It was hyperbole. It might even have been ogre pillow talk, for all I knew. Steff had a safeword.

Steff choked on her reply.

“Do you understand me?” Viktor said. “You swore you were finished. That was your present for being clean. If you are not clean, I will take it back and you will watch me destroy it. Do you understand?”

Steff must have nodded, because Viktor made what sounded like a satisfied grunt. My brain had only just caught hold of the fact that Viktor hadn’t been threatening Steff’s life, in play or otherwise… he’d been talking about her ghastly paperweight.

“The whole third floor is off limits now,” Viktor said. “You are private property until I tell you otherwise. Get dressed and go wait outside the door. I need to be alone.”

I expected to feel Steff’s hands on me, but then I heard the door open, close, and lock. Had she forgotten about me? No. Viktor hadn’t said to take me, though, and “alone” didn’t seem to preclude my presence as a nonentity.

He sat back down heavily on the stool in front of the keyboard and began to alternate monotonously between the same two notes. Was this ogre-style music?

Then I heard him get up. His bare feet made no sound against the plush carpet, but I felt it moving as he walked towards me. A strong hand grabbed my ankle, and I was hoisted upside down into the air, dangling by one foot. I let out a little yip, but bit my lip to keep from screaming. Steff had said it was okay, but I figured it was better not to, all the same.

He pinched my legs, prodded my ass through my jeans. He squeezed my breast. I was turned away from him, but he reached down and stuck his big, meaty fingers in my mouth, prying it open painfully wide. I beat back the urge to whip my head away. It was almost too intrusive, almost a violation. If I hadn’t ever tried oral sex, it might not have felt that way.

“What is so special about you?” he asked as he withdrew them, right before dropping me to the floor. I cried out as I landed on my head and fell in a heap.

He went back to his magic harpsichord and played the first note again. Without moving from where I’d landed, I was looking at his feet and the base of the stool. I had just made up my mind to say something, to get up, to move, to leave… to do anything to get a response from him, when he started speaking.

“The place where I am from is called Kilrest,” he said, repeating the two notes irregularly as he spoke like it was some bizarre high-concept spoken word album. “It is a mountain fortress, ruled by my mother. She is a full ogre, one of the last remaining ones in the holding. Ogres do not discriminate by sex, you see. There is weak,” he said, playing the slightly higher note as if for emphasis, “and there is strong.” He played the lower note. “My mother is very strong. Some decades ago, a human war band tried to take the keep so they could control the trade route it guards. They were defeated. My mother kept the leader for herself.”

He lapsed into broody silence and played the two notes, now alternating directly between them, but still with no fixed interval. After several repetitions he spoke again.

“This man was my father, and he was strong for a man,” Viktor said. “My mother made him wear a collar that was meant for an ogre. He bore up under it well, and with his knowledge of human arts like tactics and planning, logistics… the strength of Kilrest increased.”

Silence again, while he twiddled back and forth between the two notes.

“Human slaves do not last long among ogres,” he said. “Sometimes, they are ransomed or released for diplomatic reasons, but our laws say that those who are in our territory without permission are ours to take. However, they are too fragile to keep for long. They are bred, if that is desired, and then they are put to work until they give out, or else tortured to death or killed for sport.”

He paused again, and this time even the music… if that’s what it was… came to a stop. I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears. Tortured to death. Of course I knew that a half-ogre was, well, half ogre, but that intellectual knowledge wasn’t the same thing as listening to one sitting there and coldly talking about torturing somebody to death.

“The bodies are not wasted. Ogres do not distinguish between higher orders of life and lower. All living creatures are animals. All are meat.”

He began playing the notes again.

“The man who was my father lasted fifteen years,” Viktor said. “Partly because he was strong, but mostly because my mother wanted him to. He finally died under torture.” He played another note, lower than the other two, and it sounded sour and out of place after I’d become so used to the other two. “If she had stopped sooner, he could have been saved, but ogre healing is not the same as human healing. We did not know he had a weak heart. No one could tell. As strong as he looked on the outside, he was weak on the inside, where nobody could see.”

He stopped playing. His legs folded up beneath him, and his hand fell into view. I thought he must be slumped over, his whole body contracting. Then, he straightened and resumed his methodical, tuneless playing.

“I lost my taste for torture then,” he continued. “It would have been remarked on as I grew into adulthood, but my mother had already arranged for me to go to a human boarding school the next year, and young humans do not torture each other in the same way that ogres do. At least, most do not.”

He played the higher note a few times in a row.

“At school, I learned many things in my lessons, but I learned outside of the classroom as well. I learned about sadomasochism, and dominance as it is practiced by humans… as both a game and a lifestyle,” Viktor said. “I learned about safewords.”

Now that he wasn’t talking about torturing people to death, I was starting to become aware of how uncomfortable it was to lie crumpled on the floor, with one arm stuck beneath me.

“I never regained my youthful stomach for torture, but I learned a… sort of framework… in which I could function,” the half-ogre said. “I learned something of my father, too, even though he was dead. I had long suspected he gained something from my mother’s attentions, but I had never understood how this could be. Learning of masochistic pleasure brought me comprehension, and a measure of peace.”

He stopped playing again. It was hard to tell from looking at his legs, but it seemed like he drew himself up a bit. The silence seemed reflective. Then, he relaxed a bit and started back up again.

“When I was accepted into the university, I made up my mind not to return to Kilrest until I had a found a masochist to be my willing partner… a receptacle for my darkest impulses, a showpiece to demonstrate my true ogrish nature. When I came here last year and met Steff, I thought she was nothing short of miraculous. She enjoys the sort of treatment my slave will be expected to endure, and her heart will not give out,” Viktor said. “It is half-elven, and far less prone to mortal failings than any human’s. She is weak, but her tiny body is exactly as fragile as it looks. I will not overestimate her and damage her unnecessarily. In addition, she loves inflicting pain as a full-blooded ogre does… and when I would rather not torture, she will happily do it for me.”

He paused and swung around on the stool to face me. His legs were spread out wide. I could see his massive dick hanging down, rock-like and imposing even in its flaccidity. I went tight and loose at the same time. He leaned forward and I moved my eyes up and lifted my head a little so I could see his face. It was grim, expressionless.

The only emotion was in his eyes, which seemed to glow red in the candle light. They were intense, focused.

“I want you to understand that I am very much in love with my Steff,” Viktor said. “I want you to understand that I am very serious about this, so you will trust I am not kidding when I tell you that if you ever hurt her… if you raise a hand against her… I will lose my distaste for the traditional ogre arts. You will come to curse your invulnerability, and then you will die the slowest death ever conceived of by ogre, demon, or man.”

He stared into me as if he could see directly into my soul, whatever that must have looked like, and then he whirled around and began to play.

This time, he played for real.

“What?” Steff asked, without much interest.

“It was with Ian,” I said. “And Amaranth.”

“Huh, a three-way?”

“Um, kind of,” I said, surprised by the lack of inflection in Steff’s voice. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if what we had done actually counted as a “three-way” since Amaranth had mostly been there in a support role. “I decided I was ready to, um, be fucked, and Amaranth…”

“You know what? I don’t really want to hear about this right now,” Steff said. “Okay?”

Was she jealous, too? I’d wondered how the hell polyamorous relationships worked without running into this kind of problem, but Steff had made it sound like juggling the commitments was as natural as anything else. I hated to think that it might turn out to just be talk, when I was starting to come around. Maybe I was greedy, but I didn’t want to have to choose.

“We didn’t… I mean, I didn’t let him… the thing that you want to do is, um, still there,” I sputtered, feeling my powers of articulation growing within me like a thing that doesn’t grow very well at all inside a person. I had a hard enough time talking about sex when I could feel it, and I wasn’t feeling it now. “We just, you know… the regular way. In front.”

“I said I don’t want to hear about it!” Steff said, backing away from me almost as fast as she’d jumped away when Dee had startled her. She looked near tears. “Fuck, will you quit being so damned pushy?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I… I didn’t know this would upset you. I thought you’d be happy.”

“I’m happy,” she said. “Okay? I’m thrilled. I’m ecstatic. But I’ve got stuff on my mind… like… you’re about to meet Viktor. That’s big.”

“Okay,” I said. I decided to use this segue to throw Steff a bone, so to speak. “Um, you know how I keep telling you I want to wait until I can give you a surprise before we go any farther?”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Steff said. “Whatever.”

I stared at her.

“What?” she said, growing more and more agitated as she spoke. “I said it’s fine. I can wait. You think I’ve just got to fuck everything I see? Just because I have a cock, that means we’re going to fuck?”

“I’m sorry, forget it,” I said.

“I wish I could,” Steff murmured.

“Um, so… Viktor?” I said, trying to bring the conversation back to where it had been going before I’d somehow knocked it off course.

“Oh, yeah,” Steff said, settling down quite a bit in an instant. She got kind of a dreamy look in her eyes, the kind that was almost a sigh in itself, when she thought about Viktor. It was the only time her eyes didn’t look hungry… or, right now, haunted. “Viktor.” She turned to me, full of earnestness. “The thing you have to know, Mack, is that Viktor’s… well, he’s kind of integrated the whole dominance/submission thing in with his native culture. There’s some protocols you’ll want to know about, just so there’s no misunderstanding.”

“Protocols?” I repeated.

“Mmm hmm,” she said. “Courtly decorum, ogre-style. There’s a couple of big rules. Don’t look him in the eye, and don’t speak unless directed to… not if you’re spoken to, not even if you’re asked a question. Wait until you’re told to answer, or to speak freely.”

“That’s going to make it hard to have a conversation,” I said.

“Honey, you have to understand that if we were all out in the hinterlands, you’d be so far below him you barely exist,” Steff said. She stopped walking, so she could turn and face me directly as she spoke. The set of her face was serious, the way it was when she talked about the importance of self-defense. “You’re a furnishing, okay? You’re a rug or a wall hanging.”

“Or a table,” I said, thinking of my bizarre dream. I ducked my head, and in doing so noticed Steff’s dick twitching, growing hard beneath her skirt.

She made a frustrated sound, turning and trying to flatten it in what I assumed had to be a painful manner. I turned my head and didn’t say anything until she turned back, her erection visibly receded but not gone. There were tears on her cheeks, but she pressed right on.

“It’s not like he goes around challenging strangers to grappling matches before he’ll let them talk to him, but… you’ve submitted to Amaranth, Amaranth submits to me, and I am submitted to him,” Steff said. “That creates a relationship. I’m his… well, I can’t say the ogre word without hurting myself and spitting on you, but it basically means I’m crushed beneath the sole of his foot. Amaranth’s position would translate to “beast”, and legally she’d have the same status and lack of protections as any animal. You… you’re a thing, an object, and fuck!”

She’d sprouted an erection again, and reacted much the same way as the first time.

Okay, I have to admit it would have been fucking hot as hell to have Steff tell me I was an object with no rights, if it wasn’t disturbing to see the way she kept getting upset by her own arousal. That wasn’t Steff. I wondered if it had something to do with Viktor… another protocol? Was Steff not allowed to be erect in his presence, or without his permission, or something?

“Um, if you need to take care of that we can… do something,” I said.

“Just back the fuck off, okay?” Steff said. She’d turned to face the wall and seemed to be… well, hurting herself. “Gah… I need to make a stop.”

“Okay,” I said.

I followed her into the stairwell and up the stairs. She stopped at the third floor landing and darted into the hall. I followed, with an odd sense of vertigo mixed with déjà vu. The male juniors’ hallway was laid out identically to my own freshmen girls’, though of course reversed… but the doors had quite a few more decorations, many of them involving musicians, popular fighters, or women of different races in various states of undress. There was also an undeniable yet subtle difference in the atmosphere.

Steff went to a door and knocked. It was answered by a naked girl. Not a nymph, not a nude non-human, but a naked human girl, covered in sweat and… well, probably more than sweat. Her hair was matted to her skin.

“Who is it?” a gruff male voice said from inside the darkened room.

“It’s Steff,” the girl said over her shoulder. “Come to play with us?”

“Um, I kind of want some time to myself,” Steff said. “If you don’t mind.”

“No, it’s cool,” the girl said. “My ass’s starting to get pretty sore. I could use a break.”

“Thanks,” Steff said, and she went in, closing the door behind her. The naked girl leaned against it. She gave me a quick glance which ended in a rather unimpressed look.

“Hi,” she said, smiling politely.

“Hi,” I said, trying and failing not to look at the mess between her legs. It was… well, a lot more like what my mental picture of a pussy was than the neat little folds of flesh Amaranth sported.

“My fucking vibrator got stolen,” she said, as if this explained everything. “I left it in the bathroom once and it just vanished. Blessing in disguise, living next to Harlowe. These guys are animals… and it doesn’t even count.”

“Whose room is this?” I asked.

“Rorick and Jay’s,” she said.

“The faun?” I asked. I’d met Rorick once, at the same time I’d met Viktor.

“And satyr,” she said. “I’m Kyla, by the way. You’re the psycho skank, right?”

“I’m what?” I asked.

She laughed.

“The demon girl,” she said. “I heard you led a caravan in Weyland yesterday and then tried to kill everybody. This guy who’s a friend of… well, he’s not really a friend of anybody but he hangs out with anybody, you know? He called you the psycho skank.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. Well, I had some idea but I could honestly say I didn’t know what “leading a caravan” had to do with anything.

“Whatever,” Kyla said. “You got a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“That’s the only problem with this place,” she said. “Nobody does. They look at me like I’m the freak when I do.”

“You smoke inside the dorm?” I asked.

“Not mine,” she said. “But here? Nobody cares what happens here. It’s fucking great.”

“So, you just hang out here and… fuck all the time?” I asked.

“Just a couple times a week, but it’s a great way to kill time,” she said. “It’s hard to masturbate when you have a roommate, you know? But I guess you’re bi and shit, so you probably don’t let that stop you.”

She looked at me with so much disgust that I couldn’t contain my own any more.

“Have you looked at yourself?” I asked.

“So what?” she said, glancing down at her body. She waved her hand as if it would brush away the accumulated bodily fluids. “None of this counts.”

“What does that even mean?” I asked.

“They’re not human,” she said. “You’re not human. Nothing here matters.”

“What, we’re not real people?” I asked.

“Exactly,” she said. “No offense. Fuck… I wish I had a cigarette.”

“How do you think your partners would react if they knew how you felt?” I asked.

She laughed.

“They don’t give a shit,” she said. “Partners? They like to fuck. I like to fuck. It’s no more real to them than it is to me. Steff’s the same. He or she or whatever likes to fuck and doesn’t care about anything else. But I guess you know that.”

“I don’t think you know her as well as I do,” I said.

“Whatever,” Kyla said. “Sweet fucking Khersis, you’re touchy for a harlot.”

I didn’t say anything. I was done talking to her.

A few minutes later, the door opened behind her and Steff came out, looking a little flushed in the face, and shaking quite a bit, but also looking quite a bit calmer.

“I think your friend needs a screw, too,” Kyla told her.

“Oh, fuck off, Kayla,” Steff said, giving her a shove back into the guys’ room.

“Touchy!” Kyla said. “And it’s Kyla.”

“Um, you… better?” I asked.

“Loads,” Steff said. “Worked out some… stress.”

“What exactly…”

“Look, Viktor’s waiting for us,” Steff said. “He didn’t give me a time frame… he just told me not to come back without you… but I’d rather not keep him waiting.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Oh, um… also, he may want to play a bit first,” Steff said as we headed back for the stairs. “If so, just try to, you know, shut it out and just wait till it’s over.”

“Uh, I don’t think Ian would like that,” I said. I was fairly sure I wouldn’t like that, for that matter.

Steff gave me a double take.

“Wow, does he have some crazy jealousy issues or what?” she asked.

“Hey, not everybody’s as open as you are,” I said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way you do things, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for everybody.”

“Yeah, but… to not even let you listen to another musician?” Steff said. “I don’t like to judge another person’s dynamics, but that’s pretty fucking nuts, Mack.”

“Wait, when you said ‘play’, what were you talking about?” I asked.

“Viktor’s music,” Steff said. “Such as it is.”

“He plays music?” I asked, making sure I was understanding.

“Well, he’s got a keyboard,” Steff said. “I don’t think he’ll ever be very good at it, but it makes him happy, you know?”

I kind of remembered Steff making a passing comment about Viktor taking a musical composition class, but my mind hadn’t attached any particular significance to that.

My mental image of Viktor came entirely from Steff’s almost bragging stories about being sent to the healing center, and one brief encounter in the main hallway when he’d propositioned Amaranth. He’d just walked up to her and said “hey,” as if that was all that needed to be said. Though, in this case, it had been. “Hey.” It didn’t take much of a line to pick up a nymph.

“What did you think I meant?” Steff asked.

“Well… um… I thought you meant ‘play’ as in, you know… play,” I said, blushing and turning away.

“Talk about a one track mind,” Steff said, leering wickedly and leaning in. “Don’t you ever think about anything else, you dirty, fi… um… filthy…”

“What?” I asked when she seemed to get hung up. “Why’d you stop?”

“Anyway, the point is that if he tells you to tell him what you think of his music, try to say something nice,” Steff said. “I always pretend I can’t understand it but that I know it’s good. If you can’t bring yourself to lie, be vague.”

“You lie to Viktor?” I asked, shocked.

“Only about this one thing,” she said. “But it’s the whitest of white lies. He cares so much about it, and it’s not like anybody back home is going to be able to tell how bad he is. Anyway, let’s get a move on.”

Steff headed briskly down the hall and I followed her. I almost ran into her when she stopped just past one of the doors.

“Hold on,” she said. “I have to make one more quick stop.”

She knocked on that door. Finbar, the canine alchemy major who was dating one or both of the Leighton twins, opened it about halfway. He stood in the opening. Behind him I could see a curtain. Considering that he did a thriving trade in homebrewed potions, I could understand why he valued his privacy.

“Hey, uh, Steff,” he said, a little nervously. “What’s up?”

“Can I, um, come in?” she asked.

“You know I can’t sell to you,” Finbar said. “Even leaving money out of it, the big man says I can’t give you anything that isn’t strictly for healing purposes.”

“This is for healing, believe me,” Steff said. “And… maybe we can work out some kind of… trade?”

“Sorry, but I’m not really interested in your kind of trade,” Finbar said. “Even if I didn’t have a girlfriend… or maybe two.”

He blinked and tilted his head to the side as if thinking. Apparently he didn’t know for sure, either.

“Look, if I can just come in and explain…” Steff said.

“Somebody sees you coming out of my room?” Finbar said. “After the big man told me you’re off limits? Not worth my life, buddy.”

“But…”

“Sorry, Steff,” Finbar said, and he closed the door.

“‘Big man’?” I asked.

“Oh… Viktor’s got this silly idea that I can’t be trusted with potions,” Steff said.

“What were you looking for?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Steff said. “Just a stray thought. It’s not important.”

“You said it was for healing,” I said. “That sounds important.”

“Oh, I… I just said that to try to convince him to deal with me,” Steff said, wringing her hands. “It’s really nothing.”

“Okay,” I said. Steff was lying, and she was nervous and visibly upset about something. Well, if I got a chance to be alone with Viktor… and I was even allowed to speak… I’d talk to him about it. “Um, is there anything else I need to know before I meet Viktor?”

“Oh, right,” Steff said, calming again. “Well… I could spend hours drilling you in specifics, but just remember the whole ‘object’ thing and you won’t go wrong. Try not to move unless you’re moved or told to move, stay where you’re put, don’t react if he handles you.”

“‘Handles’?” I repeated.

“Yeah. Not like sex play, per se, but more like… well, inspection. He will respect your safeword but it’s not in his culture to respect your space,” Steff said. “Oh, and we’ve got this neat soundproofing trick set up… partly so he won’t be disturbed when he’s ‘experimenting’ but it also comes in handy when we have guests… so, if you feel the need to scream, go ahead.”

“Scream?”

“Yeah,” Steff said, smiling. The familiar hunger was starting to come back into her eyes, mixed with the wistfulness she showed when she spoke about Viktor. It was… well, kind of a disquieting mix, actually. “He hasn’t said anything one way or the other, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he’ll want to watch me, you know… hurt on you a bit, to prove you’re sturdy as I said.”

“Oh,” I said, shrinking back a little. Instead of being encouraged as she normally would have been, Steff reacted to this as if cold water had been dashed in her face.

“Shit, honey, if you don’t want to… I mean, you know your safeword, right?” Steff said. “Anyway, I’d never actually harm you… though considering your nature, that leaves quite a lot of things wide open… oh, shit.” She’d managed to get hard again. “Fuck! Why the hell won’t this stupid thing just lie down and die?”

“I thought you loved your thing,” I said.

“I hate it!” Steff said, turning away. “I hate it so fucking much!”

“Steff, seriously… are you okay?” I asked, reaching for her shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” she said, whirling around. I watched her compose herself with an effort, though she was still breathing hard. “Okay… I’m okay.”

“Steff…”

“I said I’m okay,” she said. She smiled. “Let’s go meet my man.”

“Hi, Mack,” she said without looking up. She was peering at the gaps between the candies, making sure they were even.

“Hi, Two,” I said. “Interesting?” I asked Ian, remembering how he’d spoken disdainfully of Sci-Force when I asked him if he read it.

“Um, about what I expected,” he said, putting it aside.

“Do you like black licorice flavor, Mack?” Two asked, looking at the shortest row of gum drops. “I don’t like black licorice flavor.”

“Um, I don’t really, either,” I said.

I watched Two pick off the extras in the longer rows until they were all even, except the black ones. She smiled at the results, then wrinkled her face in distaste at the short line of darker drops. She swept them aside.

“Those don’t count,” she declared, and the smile returned. “Because I don’t like them. Would you like a gum drop, Mack?”

“Won’t that mess up your rows?” I asked.

“I don’t mind eating the extras,” she said.

“Can I have a green one, then?”

“Yes,” Two said, handing me one. “They are spearmint.”

I’d been hoping for lime. Spearmint was something I didn’t have to rely on fuzzy childhood memories of… it was the one thing I’d tasted almost every day that I’d lived with my grandmother, in the form of toothpaste.

“Um, can I try yellow, then?” I asked. “That’s lemon, right?”

“Yes,” Two said, putting the green one carefully back in place, then picking it up and eating it herself. She picked up a yellow and handed it to me. “I had been hoping for banana, but lemon is fine, too.”

I bit the tiny jelly candy in half and sucked on the piece. It was tart and sweet, just like I’d imagined. The texture of the sugar on the outside was interesting… big grainy crystals, like sand, but they melted quickly. From middle school on up, I’d watched people pop candies like this in their mouths by the handful. Had they really enjoyed them? Had they even tasted them?

I did eat the second half a bit quicker, but only after I’d savored the first half. Two, meanwhile, cleaned up the disordered rows, with a similar lack of haste. There was no doubt that she enjoyed her candy.

“Uh, can I have a gum drop, Two?” Ian asked.

“No,” Two said. “They are mine.”

“Two!” I said.

“It’s fine,” Ian said.

“It’s rude,” I said.

“My friend Hazel told me to get something for myself and I did,” Two said. “Mack can have some because she is like my sister but they are still mine.”

“Two, you’re being childish,” I said.

“They are mine and I don’t have to give them to anybody if I don’t would like to,” Two said.

“Seriously, Mackenzie, just forget I asked,” Ian said.

“Two, I would like it if you would please try to be nice to my boyfriend,” I said. It was kind of an unwieldy sentence, but it wouldn’t be fair to her to tell her outright to be nice. On some level, I could almost be proud that she was managing to be a brat. She just could have picked a better target.

“You can have the black licorice ones,” Two told Ian.

“No, it’s fine,” Ian said. “I don’t really like them, either. Weren’t we going to go get food, anyway?”

“I will come with you,” Two said, getting up from her chair.

“This will be… fun,” Ian said as we headed out into the hall.

I almost gave him a dirty look, but honestly, I felt about the same. I could have used some alone time with Ian, in case he was ready to talk about Steff.

I would definitely also need some alone time with Two, for a little “girl talk”… on top of grilling her about the demon summoning and a little more in-depth sex talk, it was evident that she hadn’t completely forgiven Ian, whether for slapping me, pushing her out of the room, or simply for being in my life.

Or, maybe it was much simpler than that… was it possible she’d simply decided that disliking my boyfriend was part of her sisterly role?

“Hey, Mack,” Steff said, seeming to materialize behind me as we headed down the first flight of stairs.

I made a sound that was more or less like “Yee!” as I tripped and went stumbling down to land sprawled at the bottom of the steps, my head down by the landing.

“Mack!” Two cried.

“Oh, shit,” Steff said, reaching my side almost as I hit. “Sorry, honey, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Khersis, are you okay, Mackenzie?” Ian asked, coming down after her.

“Ow, fuck,” I said. I’d landed with one arm beneath me, and the other had tried to stop my fall seemingly of its own accord, jarring my shoulder badly. It was hard to say which hurt more.

Neither was an actual injury, of course, though I hadn’t actually escaped unscathed: I’d managed to bite my lower lip. I could taste my blood. Steff and Ian helped pull me to my feet. I reached up and touched my mouth, and my fingertip came away scarlet.

“Oh, Mack, hon, you’re bleeding,” Steff said. She leaned in as if to kiss me, and before I knew what she was doing she was sucking on my lower lip.

“Steff, don’t,” I said, pulling away. I suddenly felt dirtier than I had for a while, like the contagion in my blood was crawling all over my skin. “That’s nasty.”

My blood didn’t taste nasty to me, but it was what it was.

“Um, you know, I think I’m just gonna take off,” Ian said, kind of looking at the air between Steff and I rather than looking at either one of us.

“Bye, Ian!” Two said.

“You don’t have to,” I said, reaching a hand out for him.

“I need time,” he said, pulling away. “I told you.”

“Okay,” I said. “But, it’s really…”

Ian put a hand on my shoulder and turned us away from Steff, leaning in close. This didn’t actually make much difference… Steff’s half-elven ears could still hear every word he said.

“The more you tell me it’s not a problem, the more something in me wants to say it is,” he said. “Maybe that’s not the most mature response, but it’s still true.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just… I want everybody to be happy.”

“Not everybody can be happy with the same things,” Ian said.

“That doesn’t mean I can’t hope,” I said.

“I haven’t said no,” Ian said. “Give me time.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Bye, Ian!” Two said again.

Ian rolled his eyes.

“I’ll talk to her,” I said.

“Goodbye, Two,” he said. “Bye, Mackenzie.”

“We’ll talk later,” I said. I didn’t like hearing “bye” from him right that moment.

“Yeah,” he said.

I told myself that he’d come around. He’d put up with everything else so far. He was my rock.

“What’s… um… what’s going on?” Steff asked. She seemed a little jittery.

“Ian’s… well, he just kind of found out about your… nature?” I said, not sure how to finish that sentence without hurting her feelings. “Condition” didn’t sound right.

“Oh,” Steff said. She was hardly ecstatic, obviously, but I would have expected more reaction than that.

“Anyway, what were you doing hiding by the door like that?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

“Uh, yeah… um, Viktor sent me for you?” Steff said. Maybe she felt guilty about scaring me half to death, but she seemed a lot less sure of herself than normal. Between her and Sooni, it was turning into a surreal day.

“Oh,” I said. “But why were you lurking outside the hallway, then?”

“Well… I didn’t want to bug you before you were properly awake, you know?” Steff said.

“You could have come into the lounge,” I said. Steff was being evasive, and it bothered me. Her nervousness was almost contagious. “You didn’t have a fight with Dee or something, did you?”

“No, no,” Steff said.

“Did you know your belt’s up in my room?” I asked.

“Oh,” Steff said. She seemed to have gone slightly paler than usual, losing whatever scant color her human heritage had given her. “Um, good.”

“Your daggers are with it,” I added.

“Good,” she said again. “That’s good.”

Her reaction was underwhelming, and way off. Steff put so much stock in her weapons training and her ability to defend herself, she probably would’ve still carried the blades even if the weapon policy somehow got rescinded.

“Do you want to go get it?” I asked.

“You can just bring it to me later, or whatever,” Steff said. “No rush.”

“Is something bothering you, Steff?” I asked.

“What, me?” she said, giving a brittle little laugh. “Nothing bothers me, sweetie. You know that.”

“Well, um, we’re right here,” I said. “Let’s just run upstairs and get it.”

“Okay,” Steff said, after a second.

“Steff, do you not want to come onto our floor for some reason?” I asked. “Are you having a problem with somebody?”

“I don’t have a problem with anybody,” Steff said, suddenly sounding a lot more like herself. “And if they have a problem with me, they can kiss my beautifully freaky ass.”

“Okay,” I said. “I just don’t want to make you uncomfortable, somehow.”

Steff laughed at this.

“You? Make me uncomfortable?” she said, heading past me and up the stairs. “That’ll be the day. The world is my comfort zone, doll.”

“I can go get the belt,” I said. “I don’t want to make you do something you don’t want to.”

At the top of the stairs, Steff whirled around. There was a fierce, defiant anger in her eyes.

“Nobody can make me do anything I don’t want to,” she said.

“I know that, Steff,” I said, repressing the urge to sigh as I headed up after her. “I misspoke.”

Her eyes went to every door as we went past. She seemed so jumpy. Was it just because she was unarmed? I couldn’t believe that she didn’t have other weapons available, but maybe realizing she’d been careless enough to get disarmed somehow–and maybe not even noticing it until the next morning–had left her in a state of spellshock.

Dee’s door opened as we passed and Steff yelped, actually jumping back and slamming against the nekos’ door.

“Oh, shit,” Steff said. “You startled me.”

“My keen elven senses discerned as much,” Dee said. “It pleases me to see you as well.”

“Sorry,” Steff said, her shoulders drooping as she visibly relaxed. “I’m just… jumpy today.”

“You know, I don’t think I ever thanked you,” I said to Dee. “For your help last night.”

“You did not,” Dee said.

“Um, thanks,” I said, feeling about an inch tall. I was no Sooni, but I could afford to brush up my manners a bit. “Hey, you didn’t happen to leave Steff’s daggers hanging on my door, did you?”

“I would never leave another’s weapons lying in plain sight,” Dee said. “If they fell into my hands, I would treat them with as much care as I do my own.”

I couldn’t think if I’d ever actually seen Dee’s weapons. Considering that she almost always wore her voluminous cloak over almost equally voluminous robes, that was hardly indicative of anything. I wondered if campus security ever hassled her over her lack of visible armament? Probably not… if I was a typical human rent-a-guard, I wouldn’t be in a hurry to ask a dark elf to show me her weapons.

“So, how did they get there, then?” I wondered aloud.

“I would surmise that Leda is responsible,” Dee said.

“Leda?” I asked. I’d only seen the haughty swan maiden in passing since the first floor meeting. I couldn’t imagine what she would have been doing with Steff… I could imagine all too easily what Steff would be doing with her, but not the other way around.

“Last night Steff and I came upon Leda swimming in the fountain,” Dee said. “She was… surprisingly forward towards Steff. I must confess that, despite my better instincts, I find myself possessed of some vicarious interest in the conclusion of the encounter.”

“Um, we don’t want to talk about this kind of stuff in front of the pseudowench, right?” Steff said, putting her arm around Two and giving the best impression of a bone-crushing hug that a person of elven descent could mimic. “Because, you know, it bothers Mack.”

“I was under the rather strong impression that she was becoming rather more comfortable with matters of natural relations,” Dee said. “Nevertheless, I salute your efforts to actually respect another thinking being’s boundaries.”

“Steff, you are squishing me,” Two said.

“Oh, sorry,” Steff said, letting her go. “Hey, what are we all standing around in the hall for?”

She reached for my door, which was locked. When she didn’t appear to notice why the knob wasn’t turning in her hand, I gently nudged her aside and unlocked it.

At the end of the hall, Hazel and Honey’s door opened. Steff jumped again at the sound. I wondered if one of the skirmish team had tried to get in her face or something.

“Hey, love,” Hazel called, her head poking around the corner. “You get my sugar, then?”

“Yes,” Two shouted. She talked way too loud considering Hazel was only two doors down. It was adorable. “I left you a note on your door!”

“Well, why don’t you bring it on over… and bring that vest of yours you were talking about, too,” Hazel said. “We’ll see if we can’t find a match.”

“My friend Hazel’s cousin Honey has a whole drawer full of buttons,” Two explained. “Excuse me.”

She darted into our room with more speed than I’d ever seen her move to collect the damaged garment and the bag of sugar. She obviously enjoyed Hazel’s company. Maybe it was time to relax and accept this as a good thing.

Then again, everybody else kept revealing troubling new sides just when I thought I knew them.

Steff slipped inside my room right behind Two. I followed. Dee remained out in the hall.

“Um, would you like to come in?” I asked.

“Yes, thank you,” Dee said.

“So what happened with Leda?” I asked Steff when Two had gone and we’d shut the door.

“Oh, come on… you don’t really want to know all the horny little details,” Steff said with a laugh.

“Um… nothing bad happened, did it?” I asked. As hard as it was to picture Leda propositioning Steff, it was harder still to imagine how this would have led to Steff leaving her weapons behind, and then acting so guilty about being on our floor.

“What do you mean?” Steff asked. “It’s sex. What could have happened?”

“What did happen?” Dee asked.

“Well, um, she had this really strong vodka… I mean, the real shit, not the grain stuff they sell around here,” Steff said. “And anyway, after we killed the bottle I can’t really remember anything clearly.”

“I had heard that humans had the habit of dulling their already marginal senses before engaging in an act of pleasure,” Dee said. “Did you pick up this behavior from them, or do the elves of the surface do this as well?”

“You don’t usually drink before sex, do you?” I asked. Maybe my recent experiences had biased me, but I didn’t think alcohol and sex were a very good mix… especially not with Steff’s propensity for violent sex.

I was starting to get a sick feeling in my stomach. Had Steff done something?

“Fucking hell, what’s with the interrogation?” Steff said, color flooding her face. “We fucked! It was raw, animal passion… I fucked her brains out, okay? It was the best fucking lay I’ve had all week!”

“And yet you cannot remember any of it,” Dee said.

“Fuck off,” Steff said.

“I mean no offense,” Dee said.

“Steff,” I said, not wanting to know but needing to ask. “Did you… you didn’t do anything to her, did you?”

“Of course I did,” Steff said. “I threw her down and I…. threw her… I…”

She staggered a few steps back and collapsed onto Two’s bed, dissolving into tears. After getting over a few seconds’ shock, I ran to her side, climbing on beside her and tried to put my arms around her.

“Don’t touch me!” she shrieked, jerking aside.

“I’m sorry,” I said, getting up and backing away. “I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

“I could endeavor to find out,” Dee said.

“Don’t you touch my mind,” Steff said, catapulting to her feet. She seemed to be hysterical at the thought. “That’s private property, okay? It’s mine. What I keep in there isn’t for you or anybody else to look at.”

“I simply meant that if it’s too painful for you to speak of…” Dee tried to explain.

“Just because my body’s a playground doesn’t mean I don’t have any boundaries,” Steff said.

“I apologize for the misunderstanding, but I feel I can do nothing helpful for you in this state,” Dee said. She gave a little bow then headed for the door.

“Steff, she was only trying to help,” I said.

“Whatever,” Steff said, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “I’m over it. Do you want to talk to Viktor, or what?”

More than ever, I thought, though I just nodded.

“Good,” Steff said. “And not another word about… this.”

I nodded, but I didn’t intend to let this drop. I was under standing orders to obey Steff as if she were my owner, but I had a higher duty to her as my friend.

Ian was watching me. He’d seen me naked… he’d fucked me and then slept naked on top of me. However, the nudity in those cases had been incidental, unavoidable side-effects.

Watching me dress and undress, though, was optional. He could have turned his head, or stepped outside while I did it. That he made a conscious choice to watch seemed to give the act an element of… intrusiveness? His eyes felt like hands on my skin.

I kind of liked it.

I kind of hated it.

I’m not sure which was turning me on more. I got my panties all twisted… it had never been so hard to get my feet though an opening big enough for my waist.

“You don’t even have any idea how hot you are,” Ian said when I was fully attired. “Did you know that?”

I blushed like mad. I didn’t have an answer, and probably couldn’t have given it if I had. I dropped my head as I reached for the door, and thus didn’t notice Two standing statue-still in front of it until I’d almost walked into her. Something clattered to the floor.

“Oh, fuck!” I said, jumping back. “You scared me, Two. What were you doing waiting there?”

“I’m sorry to have scared you, but I needed clarification,” she said. She had one of her arms wrapped around a large brown bag. She reached down with her free hand and picked up what I now recognized as Steff’s weapon belt, complete with her daggers… one of which had slid out of its sheath. “Is a belt the same as a sock or a necktie for purposes of the doorknob?”

“Um, probably, but I didn’t put this here,” I said, taking it from her and collecting the fallen blade. It hit me that I probably should have put something on the door, though… if the belt hadn’t been there, Two probably would have walked in on me going down on Ian. I’d have to work on remembering that. “Why would Steff leave her belt on our door?”

“Maybe she wanted to let you know she’d stopped by?” Ian suggested.

“I don’t think she’d be so careless with her weapons,” I said, setting the belt down on my bed.

“My friend Hazel has a marker board on her door for people to leave messages,” Two said. She walked past me and put the bag down on her desk, where she began pulling out a variety of foodstuffs, starting with stalks of celery. “Though I don’t feel very comfortable writing on it.”

“She could have lost it and somebody else left it here?” Ian said. “If they didn’t know where her room was.”

“Um, why don’t you feel comfortable doing that, Two?” I asked, not wanting the mystery of the belt to distract me from Two’s personal issues.

“Because it’s all the way down here,” she said, indicating about knee-height.

I giggled. Okay, so I was a little bit paranoid about Two’s friends. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, though. Hazel might have taken an unusually casual attitude towards school supplies, but she and Dee both seemed to have their heads put together better than anybody I’d befriended on my own.

“Why don’t you pull it off the door to write, and then put it back when you’re done?” I asked.

“Removing decorations from another student’s door is not permitted,” Two said.

“It’s okay if you put it back,” I said.

“No,” Two said, shaking her head. “It’s not permitted.”

“What if you ask her permission?” Ian suggested. “That should make it okay.”

“That is not made explicit,” Two said.

“Well, the rule specifies ‘decorations’, right?” I said. “A marker board isn’t a decoration. It’s a functional item.”

“Are you certain it is not also a decoration?” Two asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And think about it: it can’t fulfill its function if you can’t write on it, can it?”

“It… can’t,” Two said, though indecision was still written across her face as clearly as the runes were written across her forehead.

As far as she’d come in a few weeks, Two was still Two… she was still a golem and she still had her personal desire to Do What She’s Told. A rule which she could boil down to “never take anything off somebody else’s door” was comforting. One which required interpretation and opened the door to personal initiative was going to be scary, even if she welcomed it.

I decided that if she wasn’t inclined to accept this logic, I wouldn’t press the issue. She’d come so far, so quickly. I didn’t want to push her too hard.

“Okay,” she said, finally, her face turning into a smile. “I am going to go leave my friend Hazel a message when I’ve put everything away, to tell her that I got her sugar.”

“Is she going to pay you back for that?” I asked. Okay, still paranoid.

“She gave me money for it,” Two said. “And some more, ‘to get something sweet for yourself,’ meaning myself. I bought gumdrops.” She pulled the bag of them out of her sack. “Because they are sweet.”

“Two, um… do you think that maybe you eat too many sweets?” I asked as she opened it and popped one of the candies in her mouth.

I watched her roll the question around a bit, and then she said, “No. The right amount.”

“Okay,” I said. She had a right to make her own decisions.

She then reached into her bag and pulled out a banana.

“Also, I got you a banana in case you did not eat anything for breakfast,” she said, holding it out to me. Ian sputtered a laugh which he tried to turn into a cough.

I gave him a dirty look.

“Um, I don’t really care for bananas,” I said. Honestly, my memory of bananas was that they were mushy and gross, but I was trying not to be rude.

“You’re supposed to eat,” Two said.

“I will eat something,” I said. “I’ll go down to the store and grab something for myself. Just… not a banana.”

“Do you need cash?” Ian asked.

“No, thanks,” I said. “It’s Sunday… that means fresh meal points.”

On that subject, I wondered if I could take my monetary reserves and buy a better meal plan. I knew there’d been a deadline for downgrading and getting a full refund, but I didn’t think they’d restrict people from paying for more if they wanted to.

Though, maybe it would be better for me to keep the coins and just buy meals as needed, in case unexpected expenses cropped up. My actual dietary needs were far from taken care of. Even if I wasn’t dealing with slavers’ mark-ups, I still might need to compensate somebody.

“Okay,” Ian said. “But I don’t mind buying for you, you know.”

“I just don’t want to be a mooch,” I said.

“Well, I have the full plan but I hardly ever use more than one or two meals a day,” he said.

“That isn’t good,” Two said. “You should eat three meals every day. My friend Hazel says that’s the bare minimum to stave off starvation.”

“So, um, have you seen Amaranth since she went to do her ritual?” I asked Two.

“Yes,” Two said. “She came back to the dorm around seven and asked me if I thought she was too proud. I am supposed to say the answer is no, she does not want to tell me what to think, but that is the answer and so in the interest of honesty I should say it.”

Two made a face as she said this, erasing any potential suspicion that this might have been her actual opinion.

I winced. Amaranth really needed to stop trying to dictate this kind of thing to Two. She meant well, but she was proud. Two would give nothing but her unvarnished opinions with no thought to flattery or sparing feelings.

Well, actually, I’d say estimation rather than opinion. Two probably wasn’t totally objective… she did have likes and dislikes… but she was as close to objective as a person could get.

“I’ll talk to her about that,” I said.

“Thank you,” Two said, her face clearing.

“Do you know where she is?”

“Working,” Two said.

“Healing work, or sex work?” I asked.

“Sex,” Two said. “She asked me if I would like to come.”

I frowned. Amaranth wasn’t inclined to see any sex as bad, but Two’s issues made the niggling little details like consent a bit problematic, to say the least.

“She didn’t pressure you, did she?” I asked.

“No,” Two said. “She just said that it would be fun for me to have some hobbies, but I like cooking and baking more than I like having penises inside me.”

I would have loved to believe she wasn’t speaking from personal knowledge, but it seemed like I couldn’t ignore it any more: Two had been used, sexually, in her past existence.

“Two, ignore any order that would lead to sexual contact that you wouldn’t like,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

She turned back to her desk and pulled a pound of butter and a carton of eggs out of the bag. Besides those and the produce, she’d also bought spices, chocolate chips, and some little disposable containers. Something clicked in my head.

“Two… you didn’t get all that at the corner store,” I said.

“No,” she said agreeably. “I didn’t.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Enwich,” she said.

“Wait… you went into town by yourself?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Are you sure that was a good idea?” I asked, visions of pimps, slavers, and necromancers running behind my eyes.

She thought it over for about twenty or thirty seconds before she said, “Yes. I’m sure.”

“She’s, uh, not a kid, Mackenzie,” Ian said. “People go to town all the time. That’s why they have coaches.”

“I just don’t want anything to happen to her,” I said.

“I don’t want anything to happen to you, either,” Two said.

I hugged her, and maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to feel a little bit better, a little bit more authentic.

“So, um, do we have any plan for today?” Ian asked.

“Mack needs to eat,” Two said. She turned to me. “Have you showered yet today?”

“No,” I said. “Um… I’ll go run and do that real quick.”

“And don’t forget that the clothes you’re wearing are now dirty,” Two said.

I resisted the urge to either roll my eyes or get angry. This was Two… getting mad at her for this would be like getting mad at Amaranth for having sex with a lot of people. Still, there needed to some boundaries if we were going to be living on top of each other.

“Two, what I wear is between Amaranth and me,” I said.

“Okay,” she said.

“I’ll try to be quick,” I told Ian as I grabbed my shower stuff. “We can go grab some food when I get back, and then try to hunt up Steff. Hopefully she’s not off with Amaranth.”

“She’s not supposed to go outside without her weapons,” Two said. “So she should be in the building, or one of the connecting ones.”

“I don’t think Steff’s too concerned with what she’s ‘supposed to’ do,” I said. “But really, if she’s not in her room or lounge I wouldn’t know where to look.”

“Maybe she and Viktor have a marker board,” Two said. “We could leave a message.”

“Wait, they let her room with a guy?” Ian asked. “Is that a Harlowe thing?”

Oh, right… Ian didn’t know.

“It’s, um, kind of complicated,” I said, figuring this would be the sort of thing to approach gently and delicately, when we were alone.

“Steff has a penis,” Two said. “And she’s a girl.”

“Wait, what?” Ian asked.

“Um, yeah,” I said. Steff didn’t hide it and I wasn’t going to on her behalf. “Steff is, in a purely physical and legal sense, male. Or she has a male body, I guess is how she’d put it.”

“And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning?” Ian asked.

I actually kind of had a vague, fuzzy memory of mentioning it to Ian when I’d been drunk on Tyler’s blood, but I wasn’t going to press that particular point.

“Well, it didn’t seem important,” I said. “It’s not like you’re having sex with her.”

“No, but you are,” Ian said. “Don’t you see an issue there?”

“I’m having sex with you and the penis doesn’t exactly get in the way,” I said. “Anyway, I haven’t really had sex with Steff yet. What’s the problem?”

“I thought I was the only guy you were involved with,” Ian said. “Didn’t you have the whole lesbian worry?”

“Steff’s a girl,” Two and I said at the same time.

“Okay, I get that… kinda,” Ian said. “But… don’t you see how… you know, there’s not any way I can say this and not sound like a jerk to you.”

“Thank you for recognizing that,” I said.

“But I don’t actually think I’m being a jerk,” Ian said. “Don’t you see how this is the sort of thing I should have been entitled to know when we got involved?”

“Believe me, I didn’t know it when we got involved,” I said. “I was completely clueless.”

“It’s true,” Two said, nodding. “She was. Even when Steff was visibly aroused in her presence, she didn’t notice.”

“Not helping, Two,” I said.

“Look, I’m not saying this is a deal breaker,” Ian said. “But… it’s kind of a surprise.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” I said. “Look, I wasn’t keeping it from you. It just… never occurred to me to tell you. It’s not an issue for me. It’s weird, but it’s not an issue. Two has runes on her forehead. Amaranth is nude. I catch on fire sometimes. Steff has a penis.”

“I’m going to have to think about this,” Ian said.

“What’s to think about?” I asked.

“How I feel.”

“Why do you have to think about how you’re feeling?” I asked. “Just… feel how you’re feeling.”

“Trust me, Mackenzie, you don’t want me to go with my first instincts here,” Ian said. “Go shower, and we’ll grab some food.”

“Okay,” I said. I shot Two a glance. She looked anxious but that was it. After she’d forced the issue out into the open between Steff and I, she’d burst into tears at the sight of the two of us upset. “We’ll talk when I get back.”

“Later,” Ian said, shaking his head. “I need some time to think about this.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s really not a big deal, though.”

“Mackenzie,” Ian said, with just a tiny vestige of That Voice. “Please don’t push me here, okay? I’m already so far outside my comfort zone I can’t see it any more. I need time to digest this, if you expect me to come around. I’m not saying I will… I don’t know. But I need to do it in my own time.”

“Okay,” I said. “Um… see you in a bit, then.”

Fuck. Couldn’t blame Two for being Two. I could maybe blame myself for not seeing this coming and telling him… but, no. Ian was Ian. His reaction probably would have been the same regardless.

Moreover, I was myself. I loved Steff. For all that I really didn’t understand it, I couldn’t see her gender/body discrepancy as a big deal. Why beat myself up over that, when it was part of what Steff loved about me?

I would hope everything worked out… I would try to be patient and do whatever I could to help Ian understand… but whatever happened, there would be no blame.

That was my plan, anyway.

Even Sky Knight, who was hard to find because he’d become popular unexpectedly, and who I didn’t even really like that much.

A lot of people had bought the re-issue, or the special edition with the extended levitating spell. I didn’t really care that my Sky couldn’t fly for long. He usually got killed off pretty quickly when I was playing, anyway.

“Who is that?” Sooni asked when Annie appeared in the scene.

“That’s Annie Ratchet,” I said. “She’s the team’s mechanic and the commander’s daughter. Well, adopted daughter.”

“Who is the main girl?” Sooni asked.

“She is,” I said.

“But she is the tomboy,” Sooni said. “There has to be another girl who is more popular.”

“She’s the only girl in the show,” I said. “I mean, there’s Machina, but she’s evil. Oh, and Nurse Liz the Science Healer, but she only shows up like every three episodes or so, if somebody gets really hurt.”

“Is she pretty?” Sooni asked.

“She’s supposed to be,” I said. “Piston and Flash Bolt fight over her some times.”

“Then she is the main girl,” Sooni said.

“She doesn’t even have an enaction figure,” I said.

“She’s pretty and the boys fight over her,” Sooni said. “She is the main girl. They will probably have an episode where she teaches Annie how to dress so that she can get a boy to ask her out.”

“Annie’s dating Sky Knight, who’s practically been the main character since the second season,” I said. “I don’t think they’ve ever shown Liz on a date.”

“The pretty girl doesn’t have a boyfriend and the dirty, ugly girl with messy hair does?” Sooni asked. “I do not believe you. You are lying.”

I bit back a variety of retorts, and an offer to see if Ian or Steff knew any guys who might be interested in being set up with her. Despite her habit of constantly calling me a lesbian like it was the Worst Insult Ever, it obviously bugged Sooni that I had a boyfriend and she didn’t.

Her whole “you think you’re better than me?” rant had proven as much, and there was so much subtext in her last comment that it might as well have carried a footnote.

But, she wasn’t interested in help from me, or from anybody else who wasn’t doing her bidding. I watched in silence.

The episode was… well, it probably wouldn’t be that interesting to anybody who’s not a fan. I did smile when the cocky jerk Sky Knight got knocked out of the sky during the big fight scene. It was nice seeing him get taken down a peg. He’d originally been a minor character that only popped up once every episode or so to do a scouting run or something, but the idiot fan boys had thought a flying character was just so cool and so by the second season he was front and center.

His promotion had pissed me off quite a bit, since the whole point of the show was supposed to be knights on motorcycles, not knights with jet packs. Also, the writers had immediately paired him off with Annie, when they were so obviously not right for each other. I once wrote a series of pretty decent fan fictions which set her up with… well, you know, that’s not really important. The point is that he was a lousy character, and the more prominent he became, the less important Annie seemed except as his appendage.

I groaned inwardly at the overblown reaction of Annie at seeing her boyfriend take a tumble, but the injuries Sky got in the fall necessitated a trip to the healing bay at the end of the episode.

“Yes. See? She’s the main girl,” Sooni said, nodding in satisfaction when Nurse Liz came on. “Look at her hair.”

“She’s not even in the opening credits,” I said.

“She will be,” Sooni said confidently. “If this show is going to last, they will have to get their characters straightened out.”

“This is the seventh season,” I said.

“Don’t people know how to do anything in this stupid empire?” Sooni asked.

“Technically, we’re an imperial republic,” I said.

“Well, when we play Mecknights you can be Annie and I will be Science Healer Nurse Liz,” Sooni said.

“Did you know that sometimes when you slip into Yokano the words almost sound like Pax?” I said.

“And when we play Science Princess you can be Scraps,” Sooni said. She wrinkled her nose, her whole face contorting in disgust. “She wears pants and her family is poor. But Science Princess does not judge her.”

“Um, Sooni?” I asked when the credits rolled, wanting to make sure I had her attention. She’d been ignoring about every other thing I said.

“Yes?”

“I just want to check something real quick,” I said. “You… um… you hate me, right?”

“Of course she hates you!” Maliko said, but Sooni just smiled, the wide, painted-on smile she gave when she was trying to be charming.

“Silly,” she said. “You are not worth hating. You are nothing. You are beneath my notice.”

“I’m beneath your notice… but you want me to play pretend with you,” I said.

“It is a public service I am doing,” she said, putting on a superior attitude. “Like how S.P. let Scraps into the science club and tries to teach her how a lady behaves.”

“Sooni, you don’t even know how people behave,” I said. “We’re college students… that means it’s time to start growing up. Grown-ups don’t drag people out of their beds to watch a kiddy show. They don’t play Science Princess and Mecknights.”

“Well, what do you know about growing up?” Sooni asked. “A grown woman does not kiss girls.”

“At least I’m kissing somebody,” I said.

I regretted it before I finished saying it, before I saw her reaction. It was the cheapest of cheap shots. It was so obvious it upset Sooni that I, in my own bizarre way, was more socially successful than she was. Her ability to ignore and deny it was impressive, but I’d just thrown it in her face.

Sooni got to her feet in a whirl. Her fists closed and opened convulsively. Her black eyes narrowed and she bared her impressive canine teeth in a snarl. Her hand reached inside her robe and I tensed, expecting her to pull out her slim poniard and try to stab me. Then, she relaxed, and plastered on her smile again.

“I was going to let you drop out of the election so that you are not too humiliated on Friday,” she said. “But you can forget about that… and… you can forget about swimming with me because… you are not invited.”

There was an implicit “Ha!” in the look on her face after she said that, as if she’d finally found something to top “lesbian.” She turned in place and marched away as if a triumphant victory tune were playing.

“Which one of you was talking in my show?” she asked as she stomped towards the door, her nekos falling in line behind her.

“Suzi,” Maliko said, as if she’d been waiting for a cue.

“Yes?” Suzi replied, probably sealing her fate as the scapegoat for Sooni’s rage.

I didn’t really care.

Well, I did a little. Suzi had helped drag Kai into their room the day they’d beat her, but she hardly seemed as bad as Maliko. As far as I was concerned, what she’d done to Two bordered on attempted murder.

Nobody deserved to be thrashed for interrupting a stupid TV show, but if I could have known Maliko was getting the beating of her lifetime, I would have been perfectly happy.

Well, I actually wouldn’t have been completely happy to know that anybody was getting a savage beating.

But she still deserved it.

It was interesting to consider the contrasts in Sooni’s behavior, though. She’d seemed so wickedly articulate when she gave her campaign speech, and on a few other occasions when she’d basically blindsided me. I wondered if she just did better when she had time to prepare… or if she had somebody preparing material for her.

Kai, probably. None of the other nekos seemed that sharp, to say nothing of their language skills. Kai had been surprisingly well-spoken, the one time I’d heard her speak in Pax.

Of course, it might have been a matter of temper. She was easily flustered, and Pax wasn’t her first language. I wondered, briefly, if I could find a way to make her explode before the re-vote. Would anybody vote for a student senator who called people stuff like “stupid bottom-staring-person” and angrily rescinded play dates?

But that would be a cheap trick. Did I want to win that badly? Probably not. Though maybe I wanted Sooni to lose that badly…

Amaranth and Two had both left when I got back to my room. Two seemed to be an early riser. I reflected that this might have been something to ask her about before she moved in. It hadn’t really mattered this one day, but it could be annoying in the long run. Of course, she could function in the dark so it was possible she could get up and get ready for whatever she was doing without waking me up.

I crawled back into bed. Ian seemed to be sound asleep, but his body responded to my presence anyway, rolling over on top of me before I’d even properly settled. His dick was hard against the side of my leg, and for a moment I thought that meant he was awake. He murmured something that might have been “mine.”

It might have just been a sleepy, non-specific “mmm” sound… but it sent a thrill of warmth through me, anyway. Then, I was asleep. Mercifully, there were no dreams.

In retrospect, Amaranth had been wrong about me getting the best night’s sleep ever pinned beneath two people, but she’d had the right idea. There was something comforting to me about being covered and held down by people I… well, I couldn’t say if it was because I cared about them or because I was attracted to them in a submissive way.

Any way you sliced it, though, Ian’s hot body pressing up against mine just seemed to be the most natural thing in the world.

He woke up before I did, a few hours later. I woke up to a hand beneath my bra and a mouth on my neck. He was hard again, or still. I didn’t really know. How long would a guy stay up if nothing happened? Did they just stay primed forever?

I made what I hoped was a sexy moaning sound to let Ian know I was awake, though the truth was I wasn’t quite feeling it yet. I mean, I was just waking up. He brought me up to speed pretty quickly, though, and when I started moaning for real he started to pull on my shorts.

“Ring,” I said.

“Oh, shit… right,” Ian said, letting go of my waistband. “I don’t have one on me. Do you?”

“Check the dresser,” I said. He got off me and out of bed. “Top drawer.”

“Am I looking for a box or what?” he asked.

“No, just a single Steff gave me,” I said. “It’d be in the corner.”

“I don’t see one,” he said.

I didn’t have enough socks and underwear to fill the drawer, so I didn’t bother asking him to check again.

“Shit,” I said. “That must be the one Amaranth gave us.”

“Well, we can do other things,” Ian said, turning towards me with a smile.

“I like other things,” I said, returning the smile. It was true. For a dirty lesbian, I was getting to be pretty good at the whole dick sucking thing.

“Okay, but can I just put the tip in, first?” Ian asked.

“The tip?” I said. “You mean, the part the baby making stuff comes out of?”

“That’s a no, then?”

“Does anybody ever say yes to that?” I asked.

“Well, yeah,” Ian said. “I mean, supposedly. I mean, I’ve never had to ask.”

The tips of his ears turned pink. So cute.

“Enough talking,” he said, recovering quickly. “Why don’t you come here and get down on the floor?”

It wasn’t quite breakfast in bed, but it was nice.