Magic University Book One: The Siren and the Sword (18 page)

“But you’re upset.”

“Well, a little. I’m going to be counting the days until you come back as it is.”

Her expression softened. “I know.” She pulled him close, still looking at him. “It’s just your luck they changed the schedule, too. The break’s longer now.”

“I know. I’ve been hearing no end of whining from the Scips about how they liked having the whole break to study for exams,” he said, mustering a small smile. “Personally, I’m glad to get them over with. So where do you want to go?”

“I know I’m going to be eating Spanish food for the next month at home, but...we haven’t been back to that place since our first date.” Her smile made her face glow a little, and Kyle’s heart skipped a beat.

“Okay. You order, though.”

“Of course.” She held his hand all the way to the restaurant and Kyle decided that the feeling of being in love itself, irrespective of reason or direction, was cause for celebration. No wonder there were so many poems about it.

* * * *

By the time they got back to Jess’s room, Kyle’s head was spinning. Jess had made friends with the owner and the next thing he knew, they were being treated to some sangria. Kyle had never had wine, and this was wine and fruit and who knew what else, and it was very hard to drink it slowly. Jess didn’t seem that affected. She said her family drank wine at home all the time. She’d been allowed to have a tiny glass of it, watered down, since she was about ten, and regular strength in small amounts since she was a teenager.

Or maybe she
was
affected. She hung on his arm as they walked across the campus, and although she was always affectionate, she seemed even more so. Or maybe that was how the wine affected Kyle. Everything seemed softer and more touchable and warmer.

She lit candles all around the room, filling the air with some exotic flower’s scent, and turned on some music with a
sinuous sound, violins and sitars and drums. Then he found himself sitting on the bed, watching her undress to the music, peeling her clothes off layer by layer in the most enticing manner she could, looking up at him with her dark penetrating stare, then glancing coquettishly away.

When she was wearing nothing but her earrings and a bracelet, she pushed him back on the bed and started undressing him with great glee, like he was a gift on Christmas morning. She seemed delighted to find his nipples, bending down to lick and suck them, then even more so to discover his cock, already almost completely hard in anticipation.

She crawled over him, pressing a kiss to his mouth, then turning around to put his head between her knees and take his length into her mouth.

This was something new, but the scent of her mixing with the orchid or jasmine or whatever the candle aroma was made his mouth water, and he fitted his hands in the small of her back, pulling her down so his tongue could reach her clit. He’d licked her to orgasm before, but never while she was sucking him at the same time. He suckled at the sensitive nub, flicking it with his tongue and making her jump, then switching to long, soft strokes.

He lost himself in the vertigo of wine and music and scent and her body, the light flickering like a movie seen in a dream. Every time he opened his eyes, her skin looked made of bronze, the globes of her ass perfect and unblemished. Time ceased to pass, until at some point he decided it would be better if she came first. Jess could come two or three times as often as he could; if he spilled now it’d be a half hour before he could go again. He began making a more concerted effort to push her arousal higher, flicking his tongue more directly where it counted, then slipping one finger into her to tickle her G-spot the way she’d taught him to.

She came almost instantly when he did that, the vibrations from her moans going straight through his cock, as she kept it in her mouth. She finally pulled it free when her orgasm had subsided and she caught her breath. She turned around then, placing kisses up his torso until she reached his mouth, still slick with her juices.

“I want to do something special for you,” she said softly, “since it’s the last time you’ll see me for a while. I’m really going to miss you, you know. What would you like?”

He looked up at her, tendrils of her hair curling down toward him. “I like everything, you know that,” he said with a chuckle.

“But don’t you have a favorite thing? Of all the things we do? Or something new you want to try?”

His cock throbbed and he swallowed hard. “The only new thing I want to try is something we said we wouldn’t,” he said, his voice hoarse with suppressed emotion. He had a strong suspicion that when he did try it, it would quickly become his “favorite” thing. “Although there are probably things to try I don’t even know about.”

She grinned at him. “Are you so tempted that I shouldn’t even let you come between my legs?”

“Oh fuck, Jess...” He shuddered as she reached down and stroked his cock. “It’s...it gets harder and harder not to.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I know.”

The next thing he knew, she was straddling his legs and rubbing her clit and slippery lips up and down his cock. He groaned and gripped her bedcovers tight, to keep himself from reaching down to her hips and trying to get inside her.

She shuddered, moving her hips faster, jerking them. “Mm. Think...think I’m going to come, rubbing on your cock like this...” And suddenly she cried out, rubbing not just there, but her cheek against his cheek, her breasts against his chest, a sudden frenzy of friction as she came again. “Oh, Kyle...”

Now he did slip his hands around her back, over her buttocks, to the back of her thighs. “I want to come with you rubbing me, then,” he said. “Just like you are.”

“Mmmm. I might have another one before you get there, unless you’re close...”

“Please do,” he said with a feral grin. “The more, the merrier.”

She began to move again, but this time he urged her into a rhythm that suited him just a little better. Again he sank into sensation and music and scent, losing himself, but never so much that he forgot the rules. When orgasm seized her again, he crushed her tight against him and thrust up against her, pushing her toward his feet a little so that now, as he snapped his hips upward in that desperate last kick for the finish line, the head of his cock slid along her stomach. A burst of hot wetness made the way suddenly slicker as he came, and he kept her tight against him as he milked more spurts out with more thrusts.

He wasn’t aware of having fallen asleep or blacking out until he felt a cool cloth on his forehead, and then her lips kissing gently across his brow.

“Wow,” he said.

“I am really, really going to miss you,” she said again, as she tossed the cloth aside and snuggled down next to him.

“Yeah,” Kyle said, wondering how long he had been out. Long enough for her to clean him up and pull up the blanket, anyway. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through it. I’ve never...had anyone I was going to miss this much.”

“No one?”

He thought about that a moment. “I never knew my parents, so I never missed them. There was, well, there was Jove, I guess.”

“You haven’t mentioned that name before,” she said, as she rested her arm across his chest.

“He was a cousin of mine, but a much older cousin, like...I’m not even sure how old he was. In his twenties, I guess, when I was ten, eleven, twelve...He came to live with me and my great-aunt for like two years. The two of them fought all the time. It wasn’t a very good situation for him. He up and left suddenly...” He broke off speaking and shrugged.

Jess lifted her head. “You’ve got tears in your eyes.”

It was such an old hurt, Kyle didn’t even realize he could still feel it, until now. “He never even said goodbye. Just...ran off. I kept...I kept thinking he would show up again, or he’d write me or send a postcard from wherever he was...” He drew a long slow breath, trying to keep the tears from falling.

“It’s okay,” Jess said gently, planting a line of soft kisses along his jaw. “Sex makes you vulnerable, you know. It opens your heart in all ways.”

He swallowed. “I don’t want to cry over someone I don’t care about anymore,” he said, letting the breath out as slowly as he’d taken it in.

“Okay,” she said, and kissed his eyelids, one and the other. A few stray tears wet his lashes. “I promise I’ll be back.”

“Okay,” he said, and let her kiss him and stroke his hair softly until he fell asleep.

* * * *

Christmas morning, he went to visit Alex. He hung a small stocking on the window sill for him and told him he’d have to wake up to get what was in it, and who on Earth could sleep on Christmas morning anyway? But Alex didn’t stir.

“Well, it was worth a try, I guess.” Kyle sat down next to him. “You missed how it started snowing last night when I was on my way back from dinner at Ms. Finch’s. Yeah, she took pity on me, seeing as I’m one of the only ones actually staying around. It was the weirdest dinner ever. Her and me, and the first-floor tutor—what’s his name, Hansen? I can’t remember why he’s staying—and her next-door neighbor, and Professor Bengle, and Master Lester and his daughter and her husband whose names I’ve forgotten.”

He kicked off his boots and leaned back in the chair, putting his feet on Alex’s bed. “It was great food. I’d never had goose before, and after the meal Ms. Finch brought out these things called crackers. You probably know all about this, but we pulled them and they sort of exploded, and everyone got a hat to wear, a horrible pun to read, a piece of candy, and a toy. I could use your help with the toy.”

There was no answer. Kyle dug it out of his pocket. “It’s a puzzle, you see, with these little pieces that were supposed to be difficult to get apart. Well, I got it apart in just a few seconds, to which Master Lester said then of course, for me the puzzle is how to put them back together. Obviously they must go together because that’s how they were, but I’ll be damned if I can figure it out now.”

He fiddled with the pieces in silence for a while, but he didn’t get anywhere with the puzzle and eventually started talking again. “So what’s up with your family, anyway? Why aren’t any of them here visiting you? Do you really have fey blood? That makes you...part elf, does it? I’m probably getting that wrong. I got into a magical biology class for next term, so maybe I’ll know more about that kind of thing in a few months.

“I’ve been reading a lot about sirens, though. It’s confusing stuff. I mean, if there’s an actual siren-siren around, it’s one thing. Very hard to catch, I know. But if it’s a student or a person who just has a lot of sirenic bloodline, it complicates the issue, doesn’t it? Well, I’ve got a lot of time on my hands. The catch-up reading they have me doing during break...I can’t really do it more than two or three hours a day. So the rest of the time, I’m working on these two projects. One, to make this amulet that will tell if someone has mantic blood. I’m not totally sure what mantic blood is, except that it applies to sirens and to sphinxes. Supposedly it’ll make the siren answer my questions, anyway.

“The other one, of course, is Project Jess, and man, it would really be so much easier if I could conjure. Or even transmute. There’s a graduate tutor in the house who did a whole thing for her master’s degree where she made a pumpkin into a carriage, mice into footmen, the whole nine yards from Cinderella. It was like twenty things all total, something crazy like that! Then at midnight, bam, it all changed back, and she said she slept for a week afterward. But man, that sounds cool, doesn’t it? I know, it took her years to perfect all the steps, and a whole year just to muster up the energy to focus into it all at once, but...yeah. I was impressed. Unfortunately, she’s gone for the break, just like everyone else, it seems.

“Well, okay, not everyone. Monica is still around, but hardly anyone I know. They closed the dining halls except for Nummus again, because there are only like twenty of us or something. At least they’re letting us stay in our rooms. And Nummus is sort of on the way here...”

He sighed as he ran out of things to say. He stayed for a little while longer, holding Alex’s hand, but there was no reaction. “Well, when you wake up, your stocking’s on the window sill. Merry Christmas, Alex.”

The pristine beauty of the first snow had faded by New Year’s Eve as rain and sleet and more snow piled on, and Kyle didn’t see the sun for a week. He would be spending New Year’s Eve at Scipionis House, where a couple of the diehard graduate students had declared a party. Kyle was curious what a party run by Scips would be like, picturing a bunch of people gathered around a Scrabble board.

When he arrived, he was surprised how many people were there. He was by far the youngest, one of the only undergraduates he could see. Where had all these people come from? Then it dawned on him that there were grad students who lived off campus, who weren’t counted in the two dozen or so staying through the semester break.

Lively music played from a portable stereo set up on the mantelpiece and people were bopping near it without quite fully committing to dancing. Nearly everyone he could see had a paper cup or a mug in their hand.

He wished either Jess or Alex were there. Alex would have fit right in. No one was dressed up, most in jeans and flannel shirts. Even Master Lester was dressed down, having swapped his tweed jacket and elbow patches for a comfy-looking cardigan sweater. Well, that was someone he could talk to.