Chapter 9
Faye
My ears went hot. I forced my mouth open.
"Hey." My voice came out half a pitch too high. I cleared my throat. "Didn't expect to run into you."
Savienne tilted her head. "You look like you've seen something worse than a ghost. Something that made you considerably more uncomfortable."
Is she testing me?
I couldn't tell. Her expression gave me nothing solid to work with — just that half-smile, patient and faintly amused, the same one she'd worn in the fog last night before everything went sideways in my head. I made a decision: play dumb, redirect.
"I just got jumped in a bathroom by four girls," I said. "So. Rough morning."
Her gaze dropped. Not to my face — to my sleeve. The blood had soaked through the fabric at my elbow, a dark patch the size of a quarter, still damp.
The amusement in her eyes didn't disappear. It just got quieter, replaced by something more focused.
She crossed the corridor without making a sound. I didn't hear a single footstep.
"Let me see it," she said. Not a question.
I stepped back. "It's fine."
"It isn't." She reached for my arm, and her fingers closed around my wrist before I'd fully processed the movement. "You're bleeding in a school hallway, Faye. Do you understand what that means here?"
Evander said almost the exact same thing. Day one. Bleeding on campus grounds is a genuinely poor habit.
I stopped pulling away. Held still.
Savienne pushed my sleeve up to the elbow, exposing the gash — ceramic edge, clean cut, still seeping. She looked at it for exactly two seconds. Then she lowered her head and ran her tongue along the wound in one slow, deliberate stroke.
The sound I did not make took real effort to contain.
It hurt first — a sharp sting as her tongue made contact with the open edge. I bit the inside of my cheek and held still. Then the sting dissolved into something warm and faintly electric that spread up my forearm, and I became very aware that Savienne's mouth was on my skin in a corridor where anyone could walk past.
I looked down despite myself.
The edges were pulling together, the bleeding stopping mid-seep, the whole thing rewinding in real time. Ten seconds. The warmth faded, the buzzing faded, and what was left was a faint pink line where a gash used to be.
Savienne straightened, unhurried. There was a trace of color at the corner of her mouth, and her tongue moved across her lower lip to collect it — slow, deliberate, like she was making sure she got every last bit.
I pulled my arm back. My pulse was doing something embarrassing.
"Every second that stays open," she said, smoothing my sleeve back down like she was finishing a task, "the probability of someone less polite noticing doubles. Consider it a public service."
Less polite. Right. Because that was the clinical version of what I just watched happen.
I was already rearranging everything. Last night — Savienne and the department head, the honey, the way she'd handled that woman like she owned her. The department head was a woman. Savienne had touched her like she owned her. And now this — the deliberate closeness, the tongue, the way she'd looked at me after.
She's into women. And she just did that to me on purpose.
The realization hit me like cold water and I felt my face go warm from the jaw up.
"I have class," I said. The words came out faster than I meant them to. "I'm going to be late."
"I'm heading the same direction. We can walk."
"It's fine, I'll — I'm good, actually." I was already moving. "Thanks for the, uh. The arm thing. Genuinely. I'll see you."
"Faye—"
I turned the corner. I did not look back. I was not quite running, but I was walking at a speed that had no business being called casual, and I was very aware that if Savienne decided to follow me, I would not hear her coming.
She didn't. Or if she did, she let me go.
The lecture hall was already half-full when I got there. I took a seat in the back row, over-aisle, and spent the first three minutes staring at the pink line on my elbow where the cut used to be.
It's not a big deal. It's just how they heal people. It's practical. It doesn't mean anything.
The professor called the room to attention — white-haired, round glasses, the kind of academic energy that made you sit up without being told. He announced a guest speaker. Cross-disciplinary essay competition, only perfect score in the school's history, three consecutive semesters at the top of the academic rankings.
Savienne Baudelaire.
She came in through the side door.
Deep gray blazer over a white shirt with one button undone at the collar, champagne-gold hair pulled back in a loose knot at the nape of her neck. She walked to the front of the room like the room had been built around her, unhurried, and the noise level dropped in a wave that followed her progress from the door to the podium.
Someone in the front row actually inhaled audibly. The girl next to me put her phone face-down on the desk and sat up straight.
The applause was real. Not polite — real, the kind that comes from people who actually mean it.
Of course, I thought. Of course she's this too.
I sank slightly lower in my seat.
She spoke well. Effortlessly well, the kind of fluency that didn't sound rehearsed because it wasn't — she moved through ideas the way she moved through corridors, like she already knew where everything was going to land. I caught myself actually listening twice before I remembered I was supposed to be keeping my distance.
Then she said she needed a volunteer.
The room shifted. Heads turned, looking around, the usual performance of hoping someone else would go first. Savienne let the silence sit for exactly the right amount of time.
And then she looked at me.
Not in the general direction of the back row. At me. Directly, precisely, with that same small curve at the corner of her mouth that I was starting to recognize as the expression she wore when she already knew how something was going to end.
Every head in the room followed her gaze.
I felt the weight of it — the curiosity, the surprise, the particular flavor of unfriendliness from the people who'd already decided they didn't like me. Forty-something pairs of eyes, all landing on the girl in the back row with the slightly too-fast heartbeat and the sleeve pushed down over a wound that wasn't there anymore.
Savienne stepped down from the podium. One step, deliberate. She leaned toward the microphone.
"The girl in the back — over-aisle, chestnut waves. Would you like to come up?"
