persenche

content warning: more sex!

“I just don’t feel like moving all the chairs around, is all.” Himari’s voice was petulant. “I’m comfortable. Why can’t we go get it later?”

“Because I asked Supply to send it up tonight, and when the constructs get here they’re going to leave it in the hall and then we’re going to get yelled at for creating an obstacle, Mari!” Suli sounded exasperated.

“Suli, I just got back from the gym and I’m tired,” Himari whined.

“You got back from the gym almost thirty minutes ago, and I told you then, and you told me to let you rest. Well, now you’ve rested and I want these chairs moved!”

The almost-shouted conversation paused as Riley and Eve entered the common room of the suite, where the furniture was in disarray. One of the armchairs was pushed halfway to the wall near the main entry, and the rug underneath it was shifted and bunched in a clear sign that someone — Suliat, likely — had tried to move it around singlehandedly.

Supporting this thesis was Suli herself, wearing a light shirt and a skirt made of a heavy, dark fabric, with her sleeves pushed up to her elbows and her face slightly shiny with the glow of pre-sweat exertion.

Himari sprawled in her usual spot, looking like a study in laziness, calculated indolence that was nearly parody. She was wearing a dressing gown over her underwear, loosely tied and hanging open, looking like she’d been intercepted on her way to the shower.

“Riley! Tell Himari to help me move the chairs.”

As Eve slipped past to give Suli a kiss, Riley held up her hands in mock defensiveness. “Why are we moving the chairs?”

“Because she arranged for a sofa to be delivered, and there’s nowhere to put it, and she wants to get rid of two of the chairs to make room.” Himari’s voice was tinged with a hint of annoyance, and Riley didn’t know her well enough to tell if it was genuine or performative.

“We’ll have the same amount of seating. We’ll have more, because we can fit three on the sofa, in place of two chairs.” While Suliat’s voice was calm and assured, there was a slight note of impatience signaling that she was becoming genuinely frustrated.

Himari had, over the past few days, become almost reflexively resistant to anything Suliat tried to propose. If she suggested they have dinner together, Himari wanted to eat alone. If she offered to make tea, Himari wanted coffee. If she tried to plan a study group for geometry, Himari had to do Sigil study. It never seemed entirely like defiance for its own sake, but it crept right up to that line. Was she provoking Suli, or was she unaware that she was being annoying, or was there something else going on?

“Mari, come on, let’s just move the furniture.” Riley shook her head, went to help lift the chair Suli had stalled out on. The damn things were massive, made of some dark heavy wood and thick, dense padding under embroidered fabric, riveted in place with flat-headed brass tacks. Between her and Suli, they were able to hoist the chair up a few inches, and crab-walk it over to the wall.

“Fine. Fine.” Himari stood up, sighing with exaggerated exasperation. She joined them in moving the second chair, and then they straightened the rug out.

“I’m gonna go lay down,” she said, and the irritation in her tone seemed, at last, to be genuine.

After she’d closed the door of her room behind her, with just a touch more force than was really necessary, Eve gave Suliat a confused look. “Where did that come from?”

“I don’t know. She was fine when I suggested we get a sofa a few days ago, but tonight… she never said anything, but I think she changed her mind.” Suli said. Then she put her arms around Riley’s neck to kiss her. “Hello, dear.”

Riley was, as usual, left breathless and slightly dizzy from this encounter, and so the knock at the door startled her. Suli released her from the embrace to let the constructs in with the sofa. The whole thing drifted past on shimmering heat-distortions, one at each corner, and then it settled into place. The distortions hovered for a moment.

“Take the chairs?” Suliat pointed.

The constructs lifted the heavy armchairs seemingly without effort, and Riley was reminded of the scene in Star Wars where Yoda lifts an entire spaceship out of the swamp.

Once the chairs were gone, Riley sunk into her chair, and Suliat and Eve curled against one another on the sofa. Riley grinned at the two of them, cuddling. “I wondered if that was the reason for the couch.”

“It’s just comfortable,” Eve insisted, while simultaneously Suli smirked broadly and nodded.

And that’s why Himari’s irritated. She sees the rest of the cadre forming bonds she feels excluded from. Riley sighed inwardly. Himari’s problem was that she didn’t want to talk about any of this. She was unhappy, but she’d just let that simmer and poison all her interactions with everyone else.

It sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? Riley hated when her cynical inner voice was right. Still, she’s nowhere near as bad as I was. But I’m probably going to have to talk to her.

Conflict resolution was really more Suli’s thing, but Suli was also the current source of Himari’s upset, and so that wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

“Join us?” Suliat inclined her head to her right, opposite where Eve sat. Suggesting a Suli sandwich on the sofa.

Riley flushed. “Uh, I’m. I’m fine here. In the chair.”

Suli giggled, and Eve poked her in the stomach. “Don’t tease Riley, Su. She’s having a hard enough time.”

“Right, you’ve been locked away with Therese since the Spike showed up.”

Collectively, the Academy had taken to calling the distant structure ‘the Spike’, with the capital letter implied in the deliberate way it was said. In the past three days, there hadn’t been any other topic of conversation. The Rangers were talking about putting together some kind of expedition to go investigate it, and the Theoreticians were trying to explain a model of the City that could accommodate two Towers, and Logistics were mapping Portals to the south at a tremendous rate, looking for something that would let them anticipate movements on the Primary.

And Riley and Therese were doing divinations. Or Therese was, and Riley was riding alongside as a passenger, jumping into anything even vaguely prophetic-looking anywhere near the distortion. So far, they’d come up with more headaches, and a whole sequence of Tarot themed nightmares for which Therese was finally forced to admit responsibility.

The rest of the Divination department was trying to establish farseeing connections near the Spike, but the whole area seemed to repel Workings. Repeated attempts had led to rumbles from the Tower and a minor celestial storm, so the project had been abandoned.

She’d had to go to another meeting with Gaveny, where the importance of their work had been repeatedly emphasized. It wasn’t clear to Riley what use she was, other than providing emotional support for Therese, but since she was grateful for even just that contribution, Riley kept going to the divination sessions.

And as a consequence, she was drained every night. She’d met Eve on her way out of the canteen, a mug of black coffee and a bag of chocolate chip cookies clutched in her hands, and Eve had insisted on taking the coffee from her and walking with her to the suite.

The coffee in question was now steaming gently on the table, and the bag of cookies was slowly leaking oil into the enclosing brown paper.

Suliat said, “I’m guessing you’ve had no more luck today?”

Riley shook her head. “We’ve found another set of dreams that all follow the same ‘split Tower’ pattern, and the Tarot imagery is so strong now that it always just comes down to ‘who’s falling out of the top of the tower on each side?’”

“And? Who is it?” Eve’s voice was muffled by having pressed her face into Suli’s shoulder, like her girlfriend was a big soft blanket to curl into and hide her eyes.

“It’s almost always, uh. Me and Therese.”

Suli gave her side-eye. “If I didn’t know better—”

Eve poked her tummy again, and she giggled.

“Always on the same sides, me on the left, her on the right. I don’t know. Tarot reading seems like… It’s weird to say this at a magical school, but it seems like bullshit to me?”

Suliat nodded. “It’s all sorts of cultural signifiers that mostly only matter to white people. It’s colonizer occultism.”

Eve asked, “There aren’t parallels in Nigeria?”

She shrugged. “There’s a kind of… archetype-based practice? But it’s an esoteric tradition that women aren’t allowed to participate in, so I don’t know much about how it all works. It’s called Ifá, and it’s more complex than something like Tarot, and the archetypes are all much more deeply described. It’s basically the spiritual literature of my ancestors.”

Riley tilted her head to one side. “Wait, women aren’t allowed to learn it?”

“We’re not allowed to be initiated into it.” She smiled. “Either my people know something about magic that this Academy doesn’t, or there’s an awful lot of frustrated would-be male magicians in Nigeria.”

“Or both,” Eve said from her shoulder. “The more I learn, the more I think the Tower is, I don’t know. Narrow? Like looking at the sky through a crack in the wall.”

“You’re tickling me when you talk into my armpit, dear.”

“Don’t care.” Eve snuggled deeper.

“I get what you mean,” Riley said. “When Therese and I go exploring, she sees the celestial realm as a tree. The Tree. And you remember what happened when I tried to ask about that in the Archives?”

“Shut down, Magisters don’t want to talk about it, stop asking,” Eve said.

“Right. But she says it’s way easier to do Divination with that model than the way it’s taught in the Academy. Like, they have an idea about how the universe works, and they don’t follow any path that doesn’t fit that idea.”

Suli snorted. “Orthodoxy of western thought.”

“Yeah, basically. But there’s like, pieces of other ways of thinking, just scattered everywhere. The Tree. The uh, you know. Demonic possession.” She looked briefly embarrassed. “Intuitive magic. The Tower itself barely makes any sense when you start looking at the whole magical model, you know? Like, why can it make Workings fail? Why is Divination easier here than in the Primary? Why do Portals always lead to the City?”

“What I’m hearing is that you’ve decided to go into Theory,” Suliat suggested.

“Hell if I know.” Riley slumped, her brief burst of enthusiasm drained and her baseline exhaustion reasserting itself. “I feel like even in Theory they’re mostly just writing more and more detailed notes on stuff they already know.”

Eve said, her voice sounding murky with drowsiness, “Go kick them in the arse, Ry.”

Suli laughed. “Is it bedtime, dear?”

Eve straightened out, sat up a little bit, pulled her face out of Suli’s shoulder. “No! No, I’m awake.” She yawned. “Just comfy.”

Riley’s attention was drifting back to the recent set of Tarot dreams. The Tower imagery was, they decided, not useful. If it meant anything, it just meant what Therese had already seen, that the Tower would be cast down and unable to defend itself. And the more stylized the imagery got, the less detail they could tease out of the Tower’s final assault and the way it consumed the Magisters in its failure. Without that detail, the dreams degenerated into tours of each others’ subconscious fears and desires, and despite how well they knew each other by now, this was alternately worrying and embarrassing for both of them.

The other problem with the Tarot themed visions: once the Tarot imagery was allowed in, it was only a matter of time before that imagery tried to spread to others of the Major Arcana, because so many of them featured a similar composition. Over and over, the cards depicted two people flanking a central focal figure. The Tower could so easily become The Lovers, The Chariot, or The Devil.

In that last, which was aggravating in how quickly it showed up and how recurrent it was when the Tarot theme was allowed in, Riley and Therese were chained to a pedestal, and atop the pedestal hunched the shape of a man. Or a human-shape, at least; the face was dark, gray, and angular, and gave no hint of gender or expression. The planes of the face were broken, seemingly at random, reassembled indifferently, abstractly. Human features tossed together by something that didn’t know what a human looked like. Blank eyes of white fire, dripping down from the empty holes. Emotionless, implacable, the mouth carved like a wet slit, a wound, a slash through the stone.

Neither of them had any idea who it was, but the face was the only other element besides the two of them that recurred in every dream. Therese’s theory was that it was the Tower, personified, but that didn’t fit with Riley’s intuitive sense of the Tower, of its interest in her. The Tower felt oppressively powerful, but never malicious. This face was frightening.

Riley wanted to explain all this to Suliat, wanted to find out what she thought, what advice she had, but she was waving her hand to get Riley’s attention. She gestured down to Eve, who had, in fact, fallen asleep. “Shhh,” she said, putting one finger on her lips and smiling slightly.

Su leaned down to gently whisper in Eve’s ear, and the two of them — Su leading the groggy Eve — headed to Eve’s room.

Riley waved to them, and went back to brooding over the dreams. Over the strange monstrous face. Over its blank emotionless expression, giving no hint of its inner depths.

Over its implicit malevolence.

# # #

Nora’s door opened at her touch, and Therese pulled her hand back in surprise. Did she forget to close— oh, right. No, you idiot, she just gave you access to her room. Still, she didn’t want to startle Nora, so she made a point of knocking loudly on the now-ajar door. “Nora?”

“Come in, Tee. I’m just out of the shower.”

Nora’s room was bright in a way most of the Tower interior wasn’t. Her window-light was a brilliant midday white, and the fabrics that draped her walls were gauzy and pale cream, caught by a gentle breeze that occasionally drifted through the space. A springtime smell lingered in the air, fresh growing things and flowers; Therese knew that Nora had spent a large part of their second year developing that Working and embedding it in the folding fan that sat in a display rack on her bedside table.

Where Key’s room was split into a bedroom area and a study area by a hanging curtain, Nora’s room was one big open space, with a soft pit of cushions and blankets on a kind of sectional couch ring at the back, a combination of seating and sleeping that Therese had always found impossible; how would you ever get anything done if you were always just one comfortable flop away from sleeping?

Unlike Therese, who crowded all her personality into her office in the Divination chambers, Nora’s office was strictly a work-space, and her room was exclusively for relaxation. Where the walls were not clothed in diaphanous white curtains of embroidered lace, they were hung with framed oil landscapes of a rocky green coastline under crystal-blue skies. The furniture was pale wood and white cloth upholstery, and small tables hosted collections of carefully-arranged objects, all apparently chosen for aesthetics. A distant ocean sound rose and fell, just barely audible, providing a gentle white noise that seemed to grow the acoustics of the room into something vast and open.

Nora sat at a vanity, wrapped in a white and pale blue robe, her hair all pulled over to one side as she ran a brush through the damp waves of platinum. Therese saw how her eyes flicked up to the mirror, and then away again, as though she was forgetting the lines scrawled into her flesh and then reminding herself, over and over again, involuntary and freshly painful every time.

Therese wanted to cry, or throw herself around Nora and guard her from the pain she saw in the mirror, or somehow assure her that she was still exquisitely beautiful, or kiss away her tears, or anything. She felt so helpless.

Instead of any of those things, she stood behind Nora and put her hands on the still-thin shoulders hidden under the robe, and let them rest there, and leaned in to press her lips to the top of Nora’s head.

“I’ve just brushed, and you’re going to muss me,” Nora said, but there was a teasing invitation there, as well. “You haven’t come by before. What brings you here now?”

Therese held her face against Nora’s flower-scented damp hair for a moment, relishing the way the warmth of her scalp fought with the cool evaporating shower water. When she pulled away, it was with a faint hum of happiness, a kind of wordless murmured joy.

“Nightmares. Over and over. The same ones.”

“Oh, Tee. Come here.” Nora stood, and turned to face her, and Therese fought not to let the emotions come to the surface when she saw Nora pull her hair in a practiced motion to cover the left side of her face. You are no less beautiful for having been shattered and remade. Like porcelain repaired with gold. But there was no way to explain that to her, and so Therese just adored her as fiercely as she could.

Nora enveloped her, her slender arms looping around Therese’s neck and coming to rest on her upper back. Nora was taller than her by more than six inches, and without any effort, she could rest her chin on Therese’s head. “Let’s sit, and you can tell me about them.”

Therese let herself be led to the pool of soft cushions and blankets, and she sunk down into them, pulling her legs up under her and to one side, the skirts of her blue dress spreading out over to cover her gray stockings. She worried about how plain she felt around Nora, but Nora never seemed to as much as notice the mismatch between them. She reached out to tweak Therese’s big toe, and then rose smoothly. “One moment; I need to dress.”

Oh please do that here, Therese thought, and felt heat rise in her cheeks. Nora smiled faintly, and drifted into the bathroom. When she emerged, she was wrapped in a light silk dress that hung loose at her knees and wrapped her tightly around the waist. The neckline was simple and straight, the shoulders with straps and otherwise bare.

She gingerly stepped into the cushion pile, carefully navigating around Therese, trying not to step on her or otherwise stumble. She was naturally graceful but it was only lately that Therese had begun to learn how much of that was careful practice and vigilance, not preternatural self-possession. She wanted to seem like an ethereal dancer, and she worked at it.

She settled down to Therese’s left, and slightly behind, letting her tuck her own legs alongside, and slip her right arm across her shoulders to stroke the side of Therese’s head, letting her fingernails drag gently along her cheek and ear and neck.

“Tell me.”

Therese was lost for words — or breath — for a long moment, and then she returned enough to her senses to find words. “The Tarot dreams. They’ve gotten worse.”

“Worse how?”

“I’m not sleeping, not really. Not since… the Spike.” She shivered, and Nora’s arm tightened briefly around her shoulders. “But the dreams are also getting, I guess, more intense? There’s more foreboding. They seem more frightening.”

Nora hugged her and waited, and eventually she continued.

“The main theme is always two figures, me and Riley, with some person between us. Whoever they are, they’re bad. They give me that same feeling, that wrongness, that comes from the distortion. Like I’m looking at something that can’t actually exist, something that the universe doesn’t allow. Just… hostility, you know? Like they mean us harm. Us, everything. Reality.”

“You’ve found a villain.”

“Or made one. I’ve been thinking about that, trying to decide if this is prophecy or if the fact that so many Tarot cards look like this, with the two figures and the person in the middle, has just made me and Riley construct someone to stand there. I mean, they don’t look like anyone I’ve met. Or seen. They don’t even look, I don’t know. Human.” She bit her lip. “More like something shattered, like all jumbled pieces.”

“That’s not everything, though, is it?” Nora’s voice was gentle but firm. “Tell me.”

Therese burrowed her shoulder into Nora’s body, trying to increase the contact between them, trying to draw the warmth from her to stop her own chills. “We’re divided in every dream, separate, and… it feels more than just an accident of the symbolism. It feels like one of us has turned against the other.” She drew a slow breath. “Like one of us has become an enemy.”

Nora stroked her hair. “Who?”

Therese’s exhalation was ragged. “That’s the problem. I don’t know. I can’t tell. It’s like the dreams are all meant to bring me to that point, where I learn which of us is the enemy, and we both start to turn, and I know it’s about to be revealed, and then…”

“You wake up?”

She laughed, softly. “I wish. No. The whole thing starts over. Again and again. Just as I’m about to find the answer, it’s snatched away from me.”

They were silent for a moment, and Therese could feel the comforting soft rise and fall of Nora’s breath in her.

“That seems more malicious than any Divination I’ve heard of. Is it possible that…” Nora trailed off, trying to compose her thoughts.

“I don’t know. It occurred to me too.” That these aren’t divinatory dreams, they’re a Working being targeted at me. By someone. By the mysterious figure in the center. “But the Tower?”

Nora was lost in thought. “The Tower. I don’t know. Before the Spike appeared, I would have said that no Working could reach you here, but now?” She pressed her lips against the side of Therese’s head, and then pulled away. “Tee, may I Work something around you?”

Therese leaned her head back into Nora’s upper chest, smiling. “You goofball. Of course.”

Nora nodded, and her face remained serious. She takes magical consent really seriously, Therese thought. There’s an ethical elegance to her ideas about magical theory, something in the way she thinks about causes and effects.

Nora murmured, and Therese heard the name of the Sigil: “The Sentinel at the Gates of Twilight,” which was a moderately esoteric Sigil, the kind of specialized thing Nora loved playing with. Therese watched as Nora’s concentration shaped a Working above them, planes of force assembling into a folding shape that seemed nearly architectural, and then it grew to fill the entire room. It was the most complex and beautiful piece of magic Therese had ever seen.

Immediately the lights began to dim, and after a few moments they were snuffed out, and the window light faded until it was only the faintest gray picking out the edge details of shapes in a limning glow.

Therese was terrified in the dark, for just the barest moment. “What—”

“Shh.” Nora stroked her hair. “I’ve warded the whole room against Working. Nothing can happen in here that I didn’t personally create.”

The spring breeze still played with their hair, with its gentle scent. The ocean sounds still whispered quietly. And in the near-darkness, Nora’s silver hair seemed to shine like the moon.

“I can’t shut the Tower out entirely, but it would have to cancel my Working completely to reach through it, and… I don’t think it will. It hasn’t yet, at least.” She opened her eye and smiled at Therese. “There’s no outside Working that can get to you now. You can rest.”

“Nora, this is so much.” Therese tilted her head up towards the high ceiling, remembering the Magister-level structures she’d just watched unfold. “This Working is enormous. How did you— No, wrong question. Why did you make this?”

Nora’s voice was quiet in the dark, barely audible over the hushed waves. “I wanted to be alone.” The way her voice caught on that last word, the way it broke with some barely-concealed turmoil.

The pain Therese heard in Nora’s voice was old, deep pain from a child broken in some unimaginable way. Oh my love, you’re hurting so much, and you’ve been hurting for so long. Therese turned towards her, reaching her hand to Nora’s face, to brush her hair back—

Nora flinched.

Therese froze. Her face. The side of her face.

No. Fuck this. I won’t let this linger between us like the fucking corpse at a funeral. The sense of outrage that something had hurt Nora, that something lurked within her that could come out in this moment and keep hurting her, was like a fire that lit within her.

I will be strong for both of us when you can’t.

Therese moved her hand decisively to Nora’s cheek, brushed Nora’s hair back behind her ear. Then Therese turned all the way to face Nora, pulling her knees under her. Nora had stiffened, holding motionless, her breath caught in her throat.

“I love you.” Therese pitched her voice to just carry, whisper-soft. Their faces were close, so close that Therese could feel Nora’s breath touch her, warmth in among the light breezes that still caught at her hair. That breath spilled out of her, ragged and uncertain, and Therese thought she heard tears in it, but in the dark, she couldn’t tell. In the dark, she can be as beautiful as she needs to be, to be as beautiful as I know she is.

Her hand held a few inches from Nora’s cheek, she searched in her shadowed face for anything like permission or consent, waiting, poised.

Nora looked down into her lap, and then back up to Therese. “I’m so afraid to be touched.”

Therese hated the way Nora’s voice became so tiny and fragile, that she could ever feel that way about herself. She started to lower her hand, and then in a sudden grab, Nora took that hand in her own, and pressed it to her face, closing her eyes and shivering.

Oh my love. She stroked Nora’s face with just one thumb, across her smooth cheekbone and up to the furrow of the Sigil-pattern carved into her flesh, just at the cheekbone’s point. Her shaking grew as Therese’s hand approached the scar, and so she let her hand slip down to cup her cheek instead.

I will give you anything I have to hold you up and keep you brave, Therese thought. “Tell me again that you love me,” she said. “I need to hear it.” She brought up her other hand, so that she could cup Nora’s face in both, so that she could breathe the breaths Nora exhaled. Wordless breaths, quick but maybe no longer frightened.

Nora found the words Therese had hoped to hear. “Oh, Therese. Yes. Yes. I love you.” The shivers subsided now, and Nora pressed into Therese’s palms, turning her face to press against Therese more firmly.

“I want you,” and now Therese’s voice was more insistent. “I want to kiss you. Can I kiss you, Nora?”

Nora’s eyes opened again and she leaned in, eager.

Therese slid her left hand to cup the back of Nora’s head, tangling in her white gold hair, pulling, dragging her in. I want you so much.

Dragging her in to the kiss, their mouths open, needy. Each of them devouring the other, desperate and needing to take in the other’s entire essence through the soft hot insistence of their lips.

Nora gasped, and the gasp turned into a quiet moan as Therese’s fingers tightened. Pulling. Taking a fistful of Nora’s beautiful silk hair and pulling her, tipping her head back, chin up.

“Therese— I— I want—” Nora’s breaths were fast and shallow, close, tickling across Therese’s mouth, and she couldn’t seem to get enough air between gasps to speak.

Therese rose onto her knees as Nora leaned back beneath her, and she descended on her mouth, her face, kissing, keeping her grip in the girl’s hair, hard enough to make her whimper—

“Say it,” Therese said. I need to hear it, Nora. I need to know this is real.

“I want you,” Nora murmured. “I want you to take me,” she whispered, and her voice was shaking with need. “Please. Please take me.”

It was like a release, tension unwinding into action, as Nora’s arms came up so she could grab at Therese’s shoulders, and then her head, pulling her in. Therese followed Nora down, hands on her shoulders, lowering Nora slowly onto her back, feeling Nora’s long legs unfold beneath them both. She fell into another kiss, sank her teeth gently into Nora’s full lower lip, and then sat back up.

In the faint gray light of the dark room, Therese’s shape was a fairy fire outline as she dragged her dress over her head, taking her shift with it. Her curves spilled out from the abrupt freedom. Therese knew that she was no slender beauty, but Nora gasped as she opened her eye and saw the goddess-shape above her.

“Therese,” she whispered, struck almost silent in awe.

Therese threw the dress aside, and then her hands were back on Nora, back on her shoulders, holding her in place, as she dove in for another fierce biting kiss. “I want to put my mouth on you.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“I want to bite every inch of you. I want to mark you.”

Nora shuddered, with the tension between desire and her awareness of the marking, of the ruin of her face, too much to bear. But she nodded, wordlessly, the motion visible only as a blur in the dark.

Therese didn’t give her time for further self-loathing. She fell on her again, taking the skin of Nora’s throat between her teeth, nipping and kissing as she made her way to Nora’s perfect ivory-shell right ear.

I want you forever, Nora. I never want to let you go.

“You’re mine,” she said. Intense, low, absolute, incontestable. “You’re my beautiful angel. Mine.”

“Yes. Yes.” The sounds were just atonal hissing, just the sibilants repeated over and over. “Yes yes yes yes—”

Nora shook under her, and the noises she made went from rapid panting breaths to desperate moans of excitement. Therese caught her hand in the hem of Nora’s slip dress, dragged it up, feeling the stitching strain and pop.

Gasping with need, Nora lifted herself up towards Therese, letting the dress slide past her hips, up her waist, over her torso. With it still tangled up in her arms and over her face, Nora was helpless.

Unable to kiss Nora’s lips through the barrier of silk, Therese’s mouth instead found Nora’s small, round breast and sucked her pale nipple between her teeth, her tongue working over it, insistent, flicking, needy.

Nora’s moans grew in volume as she rocked her hips up against Therese, again and again, struggling to free herself from the slip, scrabbling desperately at the slippery fabric, pulling, straining, tearing—

Then she was free, and naked, and her hands found Therese’s body.

“Oh fuck,” Therese hissed around Nora’s breast. “Oh shit.”

“I want— I want you— in me,” Nora managed, speaking through her gasps and whimpers.

Therese let her hand slide down Nora’s body.

“Oh Therese, yes,” Nora managed, and then words failed her as Therese’s tongue, moving in tandem with her hand down Nora’s body, reached the cleft of her legs. She arched, thrashing, and then Therese’s fingers joined her tongue and Nora began to cry in ecstasy.

persenche

We're finally getting to where the relationships all start taking off, so feel free to root for your favorite pairings in the comments! Mostly so I can smile mysteriously about them.

This chapter is a bit shorter because it doesn't break easily in half; the next scene is longer and so I had to decide whether to put it in this drop or the next drop. I went with the next drop! That means an extra-large second half on Wednesday. With, maybe, more kissing? And more details of how the Tower operates. And more danger~

As I'm posting this I just realized that The Tower hit number one in the Scribblehub Trending category! Holy crap, listen, thank you all so much for making that happen. Please do keep commenting and sharing this and engaging with it, because the stuff that's coming up next is pretty fantastic. We're almost to one of my favorite scenes in the whole novel.

<3 you all!