I pulled out my phone.
We spent forty minutes on the contract. ra drafted the structure and I punched the language until it didn’t have any give in it. The final version had four points.
One: Cheon Hae-Won receives accurate information about the nature and function of Ro D’Angelo’s Essentia, provided directly by the above nad party, in a single designated eting of no more than one hour.
Two: upon receiving said information, Cheon Hae-Won agrees to maintain complete confidentiality, including but not limited to NEA reporting, disciplinary committee filings, and verbal disclosure to any third party.
Three: Cheon Hae-Won agrees to actively support the adaptive-type classification cover story in any official capacity her role as class representative requires her to perform.
Four: both parties acknowledge that this agreent constitutes mutual knowledge of an unregistered ability, and that any breach by either party creates proportional legal and academic exposure for both.
Four sentences. Clean. No softening language. No out clauses.
"She’s going to hate this," I said.
"She’s going to sign it," ra said. "She wants the answers more than she wants the leverage."
I sent the docunt to the printer in my office and leaned back against the couch. The apartnt was quiet in the way it got at this hour, the city noise dropping off below us until the only sound was the faint hum of the refrigerator and ra shifting her weight on the cushion beside .
"This was good thinking," I said.
She made a small pleased sound that she imdiately covered by looking at her phone.
"Don’t get smug," she said.
"I’m always smug. You’d be concerned if I stopped."
She was smiling. She was trying not to be, but it was there, pulling at the corner of her mouth where the beauty mark sat. I had developed what I could only describe as a specific and unreasonable relationship with that beauty mark in the last forty-eight hours.
"You’re staring," she said, without looking up from her phone.
"I live here."
"That doesn’t justify staring."
"I disagree."
She set her phone down and turned to look at fully. Her hair was down around her shoulders, still faintly damp from the morning’s shower, and she had changed out of her uniform at so point during the afternoon into the oversized black sleep shirt that did what it did, which was exist at the absolute legal minimum of clothing coverage and let the red silk shorts beneath it appear and disappear depending on how she was sitting.
Currently she was sitting in a way that answered the question. The red was visible. The legs below it were very long and very present.
She raised an eyebrow.
"What?" I said.
"You just drafted a legal docunt in forty minutes to contain a girl who cornered in a bathroom." She leaned forward slightly, elbows on her knees, chin in one hand.
Her shirt shifted with the movent and I had to make a deliberate choice about where to look. I chose her face. I was very mature about it. "That was the most useful forty minutes you have ever spent."
"Probably."
"You should be rewarded for useful behavior."
"That sounds like a policy that will be selectively applied."
Her smile got wider. She uncurled from the couch in one motion and moved onto my lap, both knees on either side of my hips, and settled her weight down with the specific unhurried confidence of soone who had already done this twice and understood exactly what it did to . Her tail wrapped around my left leg at the knee, that automatic possessive gesture that she did not do on purpose and would deny if I ntioned it.
She was warm. She was always warm, the elevated temperature of the Root-Type modification, but contact made it sothing different, the heat spreading through my hands where they found her waist.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," I said.
She kissed , slow and deliberate, and the drain opened at the baseline the way it always did now, that low channel between us that her Essentia flowed through like it had been doing this since before either of us understood what it was. It tasted like cinnamon. It had tasted like cinnamon the first ti and every ti since and I had stopped being surprised by it sowhere around hour six of knowing her.
She pulled back just far enough to speak. "You’re thinking about the contract."
"I’m not."
"You’re thinking about Cheon."
"ra."
"You are."
"I am thinking," I said, and I moved one hand from her waist to the back of her neck and brought her back down, "about this specifically, and nothing else."
She made a small sound against my mouth that was either agreent or skepticism. I decided to treat it as agreent.
The kiss deepened. Her hips shifted forward in a slow roll that was not accidental, and the drain spiked upward, her Essentia flowing warm and bright through every point of contact between us.
I felt the spatial awareness co with it, that borrowed knowledge of where the walls were and the distances between things, the sense of the room her Essentia gave that mine had been slowly losing all day as the copy degraded.
She felt it too. Her breath caught and she pressed closer, her hands moving to my jaw.
I stood up with her. She wrapped her legs around my waist and held on and I crossed the apartnt to the bedroom because the couch had done its work for the evening and the bedroom was where the actual furniture was.
She hit the mattress with her back and looked up at with those yellow eyes gone dark at the edges, the amber glow starting faintly where her Essentia was running hot.
"The contract can wait until tomorrow," she said.
"The contract is already done."
"Then everything can wait until tomorrow."
"Agreed," I said, and I reached for the hem of the black sleep shirt.
She lifted her arms and let .
Her red skin was darker at the collarbone and along her throat where the blood was running fast, the marks from the previous night fading but still visible, a map of everywhere my mouth had been that I considered a reasonable record of events.
The silk shorts were a secondary problem that resolved itself in short order. She stretched across my sheets like she was considering whether to let have what I wanted or make work for it, and based on previous experience I knew the answer was always both simultaneously.
The tail curled around my wrist. A warning. A hello. So combination.
"Ro," she said.
"Yeah."
"Co here."
I did.
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