ChaoticArmcandy

  A bell, tolling dully.

  I woke abruptly and sat bolt upright. The gray light of dawn. The bell had fallen silent. How many times had it pealed? I looked up at the tiny slit window above me, trying to gauge the hour. Was I te to—

  No, no. I slumped in relief. A memory flooded back of Jaques, scheduling me for a ter shift today. But there had been something—

  I stiffened again. Mi! She’d been expecting me to visit yesterday, and I hadn’t. Instead, I had stumbled back to my sleeping cell after visiting Aralia st night, feeling weak-kneed and wrung-out, and sunk into a dark, dreamless sea of sleep.

  I scrambled out of bed and slipped into a clean set of clothes. The amount of undry I had accumuted in only two days would have been intimidating for a poor student, but if there were an unexpected perk to having no clothes of my own, only staff uniforms, free undry was it.

  My face heated, thinking of the mess I’d made in my underwear st night.

  Aralia’s raised eyebrows, the astonished delight in her eyes at the sloppy wet sound I'd made peeling myself off her. The wet patch on her trouser leg.

  I shuddered a little, melting all over again as I remembered how she’d looked over my red-faced mortification with a satisfied smirk.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, my breast welling with giddy relief and etion. I had found entirely unexpected allies, here. I had faced Aralia Cordivar and she’d promised me protection, and then seduced me.

  Not that I was compining. I shook my head, still unable to believe that any of this was really happening. And Mi and Roxa…oh, right. I needed to get going.

  I lurched out into the basement corridor and headed for the third floor, taking the long way around Jaques’ office so as to avoid the bustle of shift change. It was still so early that the hallways were completely empty and I was able to make it to Mi’s door without seeing a soul.

  Roxa opened at my tapping. My eyes widened and I felt blood rushing to my face at her advanced state of undress, even as she reached out, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me inside.

  “Good morning,” she winked into my wide-eyed blush, before turning and muttering something under her breath at the door that made a ward fsh. “I was just warming up.”

  “Hi Ellie! Come over here, sit down. Do you want tea?” Mi jumped up from the couch to start the kettle.

  “Yes, thank you!” A smile slipped out of me like a bubble. “Hi.”

  I sat, nervously smoothing my dress over my knees. Roxa went into a low stretching lunge and I tried not to stare.

  “I’m gd you came!” Mi chirped, bancing a mug of steaming tea on the armrest for Roxa, handing me another, and sitting down with a third one for herself.

  We both sipped and idly watched Roxa limber up, as lithe and nonchant as a big cat.

  “How have your st couple days been?” Mi asked.

  “I’ve been working hard,” I said honestly, showing her a few blisters and raw spots on my hands. “But everyone has been really sweet to me so far.” I couldn’t help my lips from curving happily as I said it.

  “I’m going sprinting,” Roxa announced, shrugging into some more modest garb. “See you in a bit, my sweet little dumplings.” A wink and a grin.

  Mi rolled her eyes and waved, as the door closed.

  I coughed to cover my flush. Being called a sweet little dumpling by anyone at all was something I was still woefully unprepared for. “How about you?”

  Mi sighed and I watched the serious little frown line between her eyebrows furrow. “Troubled. We’ve made a very powerful enemy here, one I think we should warn you about.” She hesitated. “Her name is Penelope Caul, and she’s the House Prefect here. Have you heard of her?”

  I bnched and nodded. Even before Jaques’ warning, I’d known of the Stormcroft Prefect. Mi watched me carefully.

  “What have you heard?”

  I sucked a deep breath. “She’s very popur. I’ve heard the way the other boys—um.” I stumbled and tripped over my slip, instantly regretting it. My face heated rapidly, my gaze dropped to my p. Shame battered down the doors of my heart and flooded in, caustic and burning. I silently winced, cursing myself, and tried to recover. “I mean, I’ve heard the way boys talk about her.”

  Mi must have noticed my slip, how could she not? It had been so thoughtless, so clumsily automatic, so stupid of me. Of course she would discount me as a girl, now. I had just discounted myself. Self-loathing boiled in my stomach.

  Mi’s slim hand slipped around mine and squeezed. “Ellie,” she said patiently. “You’re very obviously not a boy. Just so you know.”

  I gnced up, eyes and heart widening with stunned gratitude. “Really?”

  She nodded firmly. “Listen, to be perfectly honest, I honed in on you the minute I first saw you, in the courtyard outside the dining hall.”

  I stared at her, sck-jawed. “You remember that?”

  Mi snorted. “Of course I remember that! You were such a shy little hatchling, then.” Her smile glowed in the soft light. “Seeing you now, in this form, fills me up with so much joy and wonder I could sing.” She shook her head appreciatively. “What you’ve done is so brilliant, and so brave. In my city of Opali, there are many, many tea girls—those you call kuffa here—and all of them would be so proud of you.”

  “Me?” I squeaked, blushing. “But I-I don’t know what I’m doing?”

  And what’s more, I wanted to blurt, I was so...broken. So complicit and so….infiltrated by the doctrines of social hygiene—for so, so, so long I’d hidden and suppressed myself just the way they’d intended, and I couldn’t bear the toxic shame and self-loathing they still held me hostage with.

  Mi waved away my concern. “And yet,” she grinned. “You did do it! Look at you!” She ughed in astonished delight, as if I’d pyed a trick on the world and gotten away with it.

  I felt doubly flustered. This girl that I’d had a massive crush on for so many months was telling me such sweet things and she’d just told me about others who were like me, and yet not like me—kuffa that had never been poisoned by social hygiene, never had the sanitary doctrine of Man and Woman stuffed down their throats. She’d said they would be proud of me—for what, I couldn’t imagine. Still, a small, secret glow lit up in my breast.

  “Mi, please, tell me about the tea girls,” I begged. I was about to say more when Mi looked at me with such sudden, naked regret on her face that I hesitated.

  “I-I wish I could tell you more, Ellie.” She paused, and bit her lip. Her liquid dark eyes ached. “Perhaps you can meet them yourself, one day.”

  “Go to Opali, you mean?” I felt immediately enchanted by the idea. “Yes! I mean, that would be...wonderful!”

  She smiled at me, a little sadly. “I would love to bring you there, and share my home with you. You would be so welcome to stay with me.”

  My heart soared. “And I wouldn’t have to hide, there?” I tried to imagine such a pce.

  “Stealth was—” Mi hesitated fractionally. “To an Opali tea girl, it would be unimaginable. Not to be witnessed by all of your people, as you choose to become yourself…?” She shook her head. “It must have been so hard for you, here, forced to be only what they wanted you to be. As if you were a block of wood for the carving, with no need to blossom.”

  I made a small, stunned noise, from a throat so tight it ached. Having that acknowledged was stirring an intense surge of grief, building pressure right at my vocal cords, trying to get out. But I had just cried and snotted all over Mi’s shirt the day before and I flinched at the idea of putting even more onto her—I desperately didn’t want to drive her away.

  Mi saw my face. “Oh, shit, Ellie. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to bring all that up for you.”

  “No, it’s true.” I took a deep breath and shook my head. “I think I...might have left them behind. Everyone, I mean.” My voice trembled like an over-tightened wire and I almost couldn’t get the words out. “From my, um, life.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut as an exquisite wave of armed loneliness soaked deep into me. “I cut them away,” I said miserably, almost choking.

  “Ellie,” Mi said gently, “come here.”

  I let her pull me in, and didn’t resist as she guided my head into her p. The hot tears came then. I felt her stroking my hair gently as I shook.

  “You must remember that you are bmeless,” Mi murmured. “The fault lies squarely upon the whole apparatus of social hygiene.” She hesitated, then added, “Mourn what that has cost you, rage at what they have done to you, but never compromise your own becoming.”

  My body clenched harder and harder, my heart wringing itself like a sponge, my mind washing up on the shores of a vast grief. Inside, though, I was loosening—and in the intimate presence of another girl’s witness, for what felt like the first time in my life. I felt so open to her, so vulnerable.

  A leap of sudden crity raced through me, a random wisp of thought about alchemical unbinding—the encounter of something fixed or stuck or rigid with a mysterious matrix of possibility, a field of transformation that could be sought out and coaxed into tipping over, until thing-ness was turned into else-ness.

  The sense it made rang inside me like a clear bell chime.

  The calcified consteltion of pain, knotted memory and contorted armor inside of me softened infinitesimally, becoming just a bit more pliable, opening—

  “You are not alone anymore, okay?” Mi brushed her fingers softly through my hair.

  I stared up at her through red-rimmed eyes, shivering, her words imprinting on my raw nerves as if they were being etched there by an powerful solvent, instead of sound and air.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long,” she added, and the waters surged up in me again, so that I squeezed my eyes shut to keep even more tears from spilling out.

  Who the fuck was this girl? How was she able to see inside me this way? Usually being perceived at all by another person made me stiffen inside and subconsciously writhe away, but this? This was like drinking pure validation and acknowledgment from a source that my unthinking bones felt to be safe.

  It was so tempting to let it in, to believe her, but my shame gathered an instant counterattack—she didn’t understand how bad I actually was—how hopelessly poisoned. She couldn’t hear the awful, terrible thoughts that whispered in my head. No, this support she was offering wasn’t for me—couldn’t be for me. I knew I didn’t deserve it.

  I pulled myself back up and swiped the tears away with the backs of my hands, sniffling. “Thank you. But—the tea girls wouldn’t be proud of me, Mi. They couldn’t be—the junk I’ve absorbed, growing up here—it’s in me, in a way that isn’t safe to be around. I would just bring it with me.”

  She watched me, dark eyes steadily tracking my face.

  I swallowed. How could I make her understand? “My roommate, he was treating me the worst ways that boys treat girls, on purpose, because he—he could tell I wanted that. I actually liked being treated like that by him—I couldn’t stop wanting it. I still can’t. ” I flushed and looked down at my p. “I think there might be something really broken and wrong inside me.”

  Mi slipped an arm around me, and I exhaled, a-tremble with relief that she still wanted to touch me.

  “I know exactly what you mean when you say you’re afraid there’s something wrong inside you,” she whispered seriously. Her eyes pulsed with a soft power that drew my attention like a lodestone. “But I promise you that having a desire for sex, even wanting to be a very particur way during sex, is not something that can be wrong with you.”

  I drew a breath to protest, but she shushed me with soft finger on my lips. “Girl, no. Listen to me. Sex can be a way to take the fangs and cws away from something that hurts, a way to turn something that was too much or that was far too lonely into something exciting, instead. It’s an important way to survive, and heal. It’s a kind of agency we have, not a shameful thing at all.”

  We. She’d said we and that implicit extension of belonging calmed my thrashing loneliness more than anything else. I exhaled a long, loosening breath and tentatively nodded at her. My mind was a-swirl with meanings that were all rich and strange and new, but I had no idea how to make any of it sensible.

  Mi’s face softened as she watched me visibly struggle to process everything. “Don’t try too hard to wrap your pretty little head around it all at once,” she said, winking.

  I twitched and grinned shyly back at her as a little jolt of pleasure forked through me. “Okay,” I breathed, sinking back into the cushions.

  Mi lifted her arm and went back to softly stroking my hair, for which I was almost overcome by helpless gratitude.

  I hung onto her warm eye contact as if it were a life raft, and just rode the waves of feeling. With each smooth petting sensation, there was another tiny shift of energy in my heart, as if another fragment was returning, reattaching, clicking into pce. You make perfect sense to me, whispered the vernal pools of her eyes, and I sighed again, exhaling in relief, as her gentle, rhythmic touches slowly pieced me back together into an internal coherence.

  When Roxa came panting back, we were sunk in a kind of nguid cuddle together, with Mi’s legs id across my p, and her hand tracing zy pattern in my hair. Roxa smirked at us as she began to stretch, and I smiled squishily back.

  “So, this is maybe the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said, going into a long lunge with her hands on her hips.

  “Thanks, we’ve been practicing,” I answered cheekily, surprising myself.

  “Ha! And she talks back, too. So. Not just a pretty face, hm?”

  I floundered for a witty retort, but—

  “Let’s not make that big of an assumption, just yet,” smirked Mi, raising an eyebrow at me.

  I blinked, a smile breaking onto my face. She was teasing me, and I found that I absolutely loved it.

  Roxa switched up her lunge and winked at me. “I was afraid that I’d ruined my chances with you by coming off as too intimidating.”

  I flushed in pleasure at the suggestion that Roxa wanted a chance at anything with me, tried to push down my rabid imagination about what that would look like, and attempted to summon something halfway coherent to respond with, all at the same time.

  “Doesn’t seem that way at all, does it?” observed Mi dryly.

  “So tell me this, was I too rough with you, the first time we met?” Roxa’s eyes glittered. “Or not rough enough?” That fox grin.

  I was flooded with the memory of Roxa grabbing my neck, over the stockroom counter, and felt myself go beet-red. “No, you were fine, it was fine!” I said, too quickly. “I mean, um—”

  “Oh, so just the right amount of rough?” asked Roxa innocently. “I hit that sweet spot for you?”

  A flutter of heat in my pelvis. My eyes widened as I realized I hadn’t taken the hepatic this morning. “I—um, y-yes...” I stammered, and trailed off, blushing under Roxa’s lingering stare.

  Mi looked back and forth between us, one side of her mouth crooked in a half-smile.

  “If you want, we can try that part where I grab you by the throat again,” offered Roxa, looking gleeful at this new opportunity to tease. “I’ve been practicing more tely,” she said, eyeing Mi meaningfully.

  Mi stuck her tongue out at Roxa, and turned to me. “She’s an unrepentant brag. You just have to give as good as you get with her.”

  Roxa arched an eyebrow at Mi, a slight hint of danger contained therein.

  “Buut what if I like it so much that I just go limp and unconscious all over again?” I offered, smiling shyly at Roxa. I wasn’t at all used to this level of openness around sex, but I’d grown up with an older sister who was a born prankster, and I was starting to rex into the teasing banter.

  Roxa burst out ughing. Mi looked interested.

  “Um, cute,” chortled Roxa. “That was me, though? I knocked you out. With sorcery. Remember?”

  “Ellie,” said Mi slowly, “Did you just make a joke?”

  I shrugged happily. “Yes?”

  Their delighted giggles bubbled over and I lowered my eyes, cheeks glowing and a smile of pleasure growing on my face, listening to my new friends ugh and ugh.

  ChaoticArmcandy