Page 30 of Good Losers (Lochkelvin Academy)

“You heard me.”

“When?” Luke asks urgently, and then grabs the side of Finlay’s gleaming fencing jacket in bunched fists. “When?”

“I-I dinnae know. I only…” He pauses, licks his lips, and admits in a soft voice, “I only helped write it.”

Luke staggers backward, almost bumping into the wall behind him. “No,” he croaks, and then turns his back on Finlay. “No. No more.” He leaves the fencing hall without a second glance, storming on ahead as though into the wilds.

Finlay rubs the back of his head, untying his hair purely to stab his fingers through it. “That couldnae have gone any worse,” he mutters, meeting my eyes as though for reassurance.

“He knows,” I say, taking my place beside Finlay. “There’s nothing you can do. You’ve told the truth. It’s up to him now.”

* * *

The truth, though… It’s a hard thing to pin down. No one lies to Rory when he returns from scouting eagle chicks across the wildflower-laced moorland with Captain Porthos. They just censor the truth instead. The three chiefs and I dine together in stiffened silence. Luke is no longer flighty with rage or flecked with unprincely anger. He eats mostly in a daze, sulks in the corner of the room, and yet remains waited on hand and foot. Perhaps to reinforce his status, Luke asks formorefrom Armstrong — more sauce, more wine, more of those delightful little brandy snaps, won’t you, old fellow.

Finlay glowers at him darkly while I keep my attention on my plate.

If Rory’s eyes narrow at our lack of communication, if we are not entertaining enough in his immortal presence, then he says nothing of it but files it away in the back of his always-analytical mind for leverage to be used at a later date.

The court of Rory Munro must be happy and joyous at all times.

Similarly,mytruth is a hard thing to pin down. Because while I distract Rory later that evening in the library, listening to the hard needles of rain from a charcoal-gray sky as they attempt to pierce the window, while I press a thousand hot, furious kisses against his greedy mouth and down the slope of his neck… While he cups my breasts and buries my nipples with his agile lips and tongue, while I buck my hips up to meet his thick, clad length, and cry my catharsis into paper-and-ink air, my mind is on fire for tonight.

It’s on the dossier on Oscar Munro’s side table.

It’s also, strangely, on Oscar Munro himself.

Thinking of the father while being with his son is a new… perversion. I try not to dwell on it, though every hard, jagged shard in my soul screams for more of the beautiful, twisted corruption of it.

Because I can’t deny it, I think to myself, as Rory curls contentedly against my naked chest, his dark blond hair framing the swell of my left breast. By being deemed acceptable by Rory — acceptable enough to kiss, to get off with, to give the time of day — something between us has altered, shifted. I’m not out of bounds anymore. I truly have become one of the gang by being banged by its leader, and now Rory no longer shows me his fangs.

Sure, there’s the quiet exasperation when I say something Rory considers ridiculous. A silver eye roll, a snooty correction, a low all-knowing drawl.

But the fight between us? The stoic unfeelingness, the casual disregard…?

Part of me aches for his contempt. To be treated abysmally, the way Rory used to treat me. And I can hear them all, the chorus of feminists in my mind, Dworkin and Greer and de Beauvoir, each of them shaking their wise heads and giving me sad, pitying looks as my hormones hunger for boys instead of self-betterment.

Rory’s biting hatred has morphed into hot, heavy petting and dizzying kisses and sleepy, post-orgasm hugs.

It’s different, strange. Scary.

Before this summer, we’d been two lines, stubbornly bashing into each other. Now the lines have tangled, been absorbed into one, the line bending, relaxing. Softening.

A softening has taken place.

I wonder what it says about me that I want the old Rory back.

I wonder what it says about me that I recognize those hard, dismissive qualities in his father.

I wonder what it says about me that I crave them desperately.

Rory lies on my chest, rumpled and content, his eyelids soft and gently closed. I stroke his blond hair soothingly, the strands winking at me in the low light like threaded gold.

And then there are footsteps.

Before I can move Rory’s sleep-drifting body off me, slide his slack mouth away from my naked breasts, the entrance to the library is shadowed by Finlay’s presence. He stops, stares, and I watch with sick fascination the slow descent of his mouth.

What the fuck?

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