Odin's Murder

“You’re doing a great job, but we’re in public out here, and you are a student, after all. I’m pretty sure it was in my contract to keep my hands off you.”

“Section three, bullet point five.” I kiss his jaw anyway. “No romantic or intimate relationships between students and staff.”

“Huh?”

“I read your contract online.”

He laughs, impressed, and that earns him another kiss. I pull back the collar of his shirt to find the smooth skin of his collarbone and trace the mark there. “What’s this?”

“Oh,” he says, reaching a hand up. “Er. It’s a henna tattoo. It’ll wash off, eventually. Some of us partied the first night. I hardly remember it.”

“Too much to drink?” I touch the mark with my fingertips.

“Something like that. Teacher initiation, I guess. Zoe and some of the others have them too.”

“I like it.”

“You would.” He kisses me between words, soft, no white-hot explosions in my brain. And despite his protests, his fingers drift higher, hands cupping. “You sign up for anything tonight?”

“Not tonight. Poetry tomorrow.”

He laughs, warm breath down my cleavage, thumbs searching. “I can’t see you reciting angry femme poems.”

“My roommate is performing.” I shake my head at the idea of tiny Faye perched on a stool in the student lounge. “Should be interesting. You never know what’s going to come out of that girl’s mouth.”

“She’s the little hobo girl, right? You think she’ll be bad?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. She can be outrageous. Like she’ll wear some fertility goddess phallic necklace thing under her dress and ugh, those awful sweaters. I’ve seen her changing, though, she’s got a killer body hiding in all that frumpy mess.”

Jeremy tilts his head, openly ogling. He wets his lips and says, “I doubt it’s as killer as all this.”

I raise an eyebrow, and open another button on my dress. “It’s hard to top perfection.”

13.

Extraordinary

After dinner, I’ve a couple hours to kill until I’m required in the kitchen. I spend a nice thirty minutes of that with Danielle, who brings me her dessert. She doesn’t require me to talk, or think about things I don’t want to, or risk a parole violation. Her lips are soft and taste of the peach cobbler, and smile beneath mine when I untie the pink strings of the bathing suit top that’s hidden under her t-shirt.

“This way,” she whispers, linking her fingers through mine, pulling me toward the lake, but when we get near the gazebo, she stops and pouts. “Crap. Someone beat us to it.”

Low laughter slides between the shadows and the crickets. I recognize both voices.

“Ow, easy,” Danielle unlaces her fingers from my fist. “C’mon. Let’s go to the little church. Where you took my picture the other night.”

“Um,” I stall, looking toward the dorms, and then the opposite direction, to the copse of trees that shade the chapel. “I don’t have—”

I stop, because I don’t know how far she wants to go, and girls get mad when a guy assumes too much, but protection wasn’t on the list of what-to-bring-to-SHP, and Mary hadn’t added a box of condoms to the dopp kit that contained soap, sunscreen, and to my surprise, a razor. I doubt Julian has any, either, and I sure as hell am not going to ask Jeremy.

“Oh, did you sign up for an EA?” Danielle misunderstands my pause. “Bummer. I hoped I could be your evening activity.”

“Didn’t you sign up for something?”

“My group is organizing the poetry reading tomorrow, but I was going to bail on them. If you weren’t busy.”

I want to be busy. With her and that barely-there bikini, but I’ve got kitchen duty and I’m pretty sure Constance has a low tolerance for being stood up for work detail. “Yeah, I signed up with my team, too.” The lie comes easily.

She fumbles inside her shirt and pulls the pink strings through the collar. I tie them in place, and then loosen them when she squeaks.