The smoke was affecting me I realized and started to step towards the doors, seeking fresh air.
“Here,” one of the men from outside intercepted me, holding a pill on his fingertip. His eyes were predatory as he watched my face. “For you.”
“Thanks,” I reached for the pill, intending to palm it.
“Uh-ah,” he shook his head. “Open up…” He mimed sticking out his tongue, his stained with alcohol and the colour residue of pills that he had consumed. I reluctantly mimicked the move and as the pill touched my tongue, someone caught me around the waist, twirling me away from the man, dipping me to the music, and sealing their mouth over mine.
I recognized the fall of flame-like hair and Mal’s dark blue eyes as his tongue stole the pill from mine, and then he righted me, keeping my body tight to his as he writhed us both into the dancers. His cheek stroked against mine, rasping slightly with the stubble that sought to break through his skin.
“Best not to take pills from strangers, Nyx, unless you want to find yourself in a back room being fucked by a bunch of horny Chads. If that’s your thing… don’t let me stop you,” he laughed as he spun me out, and I came face to face with Xander holding two drinks.
I glanced over my shoulder, but Mal had disappeared into the throng of students. “Thank you,” I took the drink that Xander offered and pretended to take a sip under his watchful eyes. I was beginning to suspect what some of the hand signals had been. Two fingers… or a V for virgin?
“We have everything you could want to party with,” Xander told me over the music. “Feel free to help yourself… to anything or anyone,” he grinned suggestively.
“Great,” I forced a smile on my lips.
I felt like a lamb amongst wolves. Just scanning the faces around us was enough to know that I had been marked as a target, a newcomer, and prey for the night. Suddenly it felt as if my dress was too tight, too short, and my lipstick too bright. I had to stop myself from adjusting my clothing, knowing that it wasn’t anything to do with me… it was all about them. I wasn’t a person to them - I was fair game. A local girl, from a poor and un-influential family, at the school under a scholarship, I wouldn’t complain, I wouldn’t speak up about them taking advantage, if I wanted to make it in the school, and if I wanted to make it beyond the Academy into one of the elite Universities and from there into a prestigious career, so they could do what they liked to me.
Xander was distracted by a blonde and her friends who draped themselves over him in enthusiastic greeting, their words lost to the music. I took the opportunity to slip through the crowd and poured the cocktail into a potted plant before reaching the bar. I caught a bartender’s eyes and watched as he mixed another cocktail, placing it on the bar before me.
“Thank you,” I said to him, the words lost in the music, but he grinned and bowed his head in acknowledgment, knowing the words from the shape of my lips.
As I turned away, Mal appeared before me again, catching my waist and pulling me away from the bar and into the dancers. He encouraged my arm around his neck and leaned in to place his lips near my ear.
“You can call me your knight in tarnished armor if you like,” he teased my earlobe with his tongue. “But let me show you the delicious deviousness that I’m saving you from…” He leaned back and raised his eyebrows in invitation.
The glass of the pool room showed that the afternoon had darkened into evening, and the room was bathed in shadow which convulsed with flesh. Coloured lights cut through the darkness erratically and played over his hair and face. It was an unusual face. Handsome, but not in the traditional way, his features were strong and sharp. Framed by the shoulder-length dark red hair, he was entirely enticing and exotic… and irresistible.
He’d saved me already, and I had no reason to think that he was anything other than my white knight… or red knight, as seemed more appropriate as the light shifted, there was a shadow of flame that burnt behind his skin and eye.
I shook it off, blaming the marijuana smoke that billowed and sifted through the air for making me overly sensitive and causing me to see things that were not really there.
I took his pro-offered hand.
Mal laughed, the warmth of it encompassing me, and drew me towards the pool room, where people were jumping in, the water seeming to boil with their motion. Many were fucking, I realized, gripping Mal’s arm, my eyes on the water, uncertain as to what my reaction should be. The water, and around it, seemed to spill into sin as clothing drifted like strange seaweed and naked flesh wrapped around naked flesh, hands in hair, and… It was both repulsive and arousing.
“This way,” Mal pulled me towards the changing rooms. We pushed past people leaving as we entered, their hair and clothing stuck to their skin with moisture, and their laughter trailing behind them. Someone was running all the showers, and the changing rooms had filled with steam so that the reflections in the misted mirrors were ghostly, and people seemed to appear out of nowhere.
Mal moved forward unerringly. People were leaning against the walls and cubicles, watching what was happening on the floor under the spray of half a dozen shower heads… It took me a moment to take in what I saw, the tangle of limbs distorted momentarily into the grotesque before my mind sense of them. A girl was buried beneath the writhing bodies of men.
She looked so… Blissful. My logical mind told me that women took longer to reach orgasm and that we were designed to take multiple lovers, and there was nothing truly sinful about sex or the enjoyment of it if all parties were of an appropriate age to consent and had done so soberly… and yet, here, in this environment, I doubted that her morning would escape the shadow of shame, and I did not envy her that.
Would the moment of pleasure and satiation balance the shame of the morning? Or negate that she had been used by men whose mornings would be free of the same element of shame? For they would be praised for their actions of the night, their lust accepted as normal and acceptable, whilst she would be shunned for hers.
“Yes,” Mal said into my ear, his voice rich with lust and appreciation. “It’s both glorious… and terrible, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I breathed out my echo of the word. “It’s… foul,” I told him, turning my face away. I did not mean the act of sex, but what I knew would follow in the morning for the girl involved.
His lips dragged along my cheek. “Yes,” he agreed. “Because of what they make of it.” I looked up at him in surprise, and he laughed, derisively. “What?” He asked, arching a brow. “Did you think I would agree with what happens here? This is not the Devil’s work. It is entirely that of Heaven. This is shame in its grotesque distortion. It’s humiliation and disgrace. It’s giving humankind pleasure and then condemning them for experiencing it. What type of leader does such a thing? And yet, the Devil is humanity’s enemy…”
He pulled me out and away, and out of the changeroom, and suddenly we were amongst a group of people toeing the line of the pool preparing to jump in. Mal laughed, wickedly, and tugged me over the edge.
The water was lukewarm, so there was no rude cold shock, however, the pool was so filled with flesh and stroking limbs that for a moment I couldn’t determine the surface, and then Mal dragged me out of its depths and pulled me to the edge. As I found my feet below me, he pinned me against the tiles, his hands in my sodden hair, his mouth on mine, the kiss tasting of chlorine, the water running down our faces, and yet still full of fire and desire… And my legs wrapped around his hips as he ground his cock against me whilst his tongue ravaged mine.
He reached between us, tearing away my underwear, and I watched the lace sink behind him as he thrusted against me, his cock behind the barrier of cloth that his trousers provided. Both our hands tangled at his fly, our eyes meeting…
Suddenly his attention shifted, his expression moving from desire to annoyance. I was hauled from the water onto the edge of the pool, and I sprawled in shock, looking up at Ender, whose dark cloak whipped out behind him as if stirred by a wind that didn’t touch me. He crouched over me, his fingers touching the edge stones, his eyes on Mal, his legs splayed as if he’d fallen from a great height.