My hands slow on the stack. Then they stop.
A whole year. Not even a scare.
I press my palm flat against my own belly. I haven’t thought about it. Between work, nights tangled up with him, the whole glowing full feeling of being with him this long—it has genuinely never hit me that something should have happened by now.
Except my body was supposed to be dormant.
My body was supposed to be dead there. My heat cycle came back when Aaron pursued me. I felt it wake up in me, and I was so grateful my lion woke up at all that I never asked the next question.
Can I actually carry?
My tail comes around slow and brushes my tassel over the back of my hand where it rests on my belly.
I don’t slap my tassel away this time.
I sit back on the floor of my classroom with my palm pressed flat against my belly and my lion’s tassel brushing gently over the back of my hand, and I try very hard not to cry on the first day of my teaching career.
3
Aaron
My back is to the worktable. I’m watching my whole class stir pewter-blue base into copper bowls, and I can’t stop thinking about Mara. My tongue up the middle of her. Her thighs shaking. Her pussy grinding down into my mouth while her tail stroked me off wrapped around my dick like she was going to finish us both at the same damn time. Took the jaws of life to peel me off her.
I’ve been thinking about it all morning, and thinking graphically. About putting my face right back between her legs the minute she gets home from class. What it would take for her to let me sleep in that pussy one night straight. Let me wake up in it and roll over and do it again.
Goddamn. Focus.
I blink and the classroom slides back into focus. My whole class, none of them looking at me, bent over their potions. Priya in the third row is stirring counterclockwise. Behind her, at the back worktable, my brother is pouring too fast.
Seth’s copper bowl is bubbling wrong. The base should be settling into a slow pale-gold roll, but his is pitching. There’s apale green skim forming at the edge that shouldn’t be there. He skipped the measured pause after the mercury add.
When did I get this nasty?I used to be a serious person.
The green skim on Seth’s bowl goes white.
My magic is out before I’ve called it, blue-gold light unspooling from my fingertips. I push off the worktable and the ribbon splits into two as I move, wraps once around the ceiling of the classroom and once around the floor, and I snap my hand closed and hold. The air thickens.
Every student in the room is still moving, but the stirring has gone syrup-slow, like I’m watching them through water. Priya’s spoon is frozen mid-air. Seth’s bowl is in the middle of exploding. The green-white flare is an inch off the surface, a jagged corolla of light and liquid climbing for the ceiling, and it is not moving. A splinter of copper that’d have taken someone’s eye out is suspended above his table in a fine held line.
The whole thing is glowing soft blue at its edges. My magic is holding all of it.
I breathe out. I walk around my desk, past Priya’s slow spoon, and the kid in row two whose mouth is open mid-laugh. I reach Seth’s table and lift my hand.
I gather the light of it back into itself, reeling it in against my palm. The copper splinter floats back down into the bowl. The green-white flare folds inward, collapses into a bright point, and dissolves. The pale skim thins out. The bowl is back to where it should have been before Seth rushed the mercury.
I release my hand and the classroom snaps back into itself. Priya’s spoon completes its arc with a small metallictingagainst the side of her bowl. The kid in row two finishes his laugh. Seth’s bowl gives one neat golden glow and settles. The room goes dead silent.
The class stares at me, and Priya’s lips part.
Priya finds her voice first. “Mr. Blackwood.” She’s staring at her bowl like she doesn’t trust it. “Okay, please don’t report me to Headmistress Ebony for this, butholy shit.”
The whole class erupts. Someone in the back sayingno way, no way.The girl two rows in front of Seth turning around and whisperingdid that justto her partner. Priya hasn’t moved. She’s still looking at me. Then someone starts to clap, and the whole room joins in.
“Show-off,” Seth mutters, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Mr. Blackwood, what was that?” Priya’s voice has climbed a full step. “That wastime?You bent time? That’s not curriculum, that’s like highest-of-highest-level, that’s?—“
I raise my hand and the clapping stops. Every head in the room snaps toward me at once.
