Chapter 2: The Initiation Begins
Sleep came at Chloe from both sides and would not take her. The room was dark except for the seam of moonlight at the window's edge, and Ruby's breathing across the room was slow and even and enviable. Chloe lay on her back with the blanket pulled to her collarbone and stared at the ceiling, and the ceiling had nothing to offer, so her mind went where it had been refusing to go all day.
Back to the stairwell. Back to her birthday.
She had come downstairs for a glass of water. That was the whole truth and it sounded so innocent now, so laughably innocent. Eleven at night, house quiet, her father's study light off because he was in Singapore, and Serena in the kitchen doorway in a silk robe the color of dark wine, holding a glass of wine herself, one hip against the doorframe.
"Happy birthday, sweetheart," Serena had said. "Come here. Sit with me a minute. The house is so empty when it's just us."
And Chloe had sat with her. At the kitchen table, under the one low light, while Serena talked about nothing, about Milan, about the weather in the city, and her hand came to rest on Chloe's forearm and stayed. Serena's hands were always warm. She wore perfume that arrived in stages, something dark first and then something softer underneath, and when she leaned in it came off her skin in a wave.
"You've grown into such a beautiful girl," Serena said. "Did you know that? Do they tell you?"
"You're my stepmom," Chloe had said, and it had come out stupid, defensive, a wall made of the wrong material.
"I'm aware of what I am." Serena's thumb had moved once along the inside of Chloe's wrist, on the pulse, the way a person takes a pulse, and Chloe had felt it in her teeth. "I'm not blind, though. Nobody could be."
Then Serena had kissed her.
Chloe remembered the decision happening, or rather not happening, the gap where a decision should have been. Serena's mouth had come toward her and Chloe had not moved away, had not moved at all, and then Serena's lips were on hers, soft and unhurried and completely sure of themselves, and the wine was on her breath and her hand had come up to cup Chloe's jaw, and Chloe had kissed her back. That was the fact she could not get around, lying in the dark at St. Aurelia's with her heart going. She had kissed her back. Not frozen. Not pulled away. She had opened her mouth when Serena's tongue touched her lips, and Serena had made a small satisfied sound into the kiss, a sound like a cash register or a door unlocking, and slid her fingers into Chloe's hair.
It had been nothing like kissing her boyfriend. Danny kissed like a boy her age kissed, eager and slightly clumsy, all tongue and hurry, and it was fine, it was fun, it was hers. This was different. Serena kissed the way she did everything, like she had all the time in the world and already knew the ending. She had pulled back an inch and looked at Chloe with those dark made-up eyes and said, "There she is," and Chloe had felt the words go through her like a hook through soft tissue.
"Serena, we shouldn't." Her own voice, thin, a formality.
"You can stop me whenever you want." Serena had taken Chloe's hand, carried it, and set it flat against her own breast, over the robe, over the heavy warm weight of it. "But you don't want to. Do you."
And Chloe had not taken her hand back.
That was the memory that ambushed her now, on the lumpy dormitory mattress, three hundred miles and one day away. Her own fingers curling against silk without being told. The robe coming open under her hand because Serena reached down and undid the belt herself, one pull, and the robe fell off Serena's shoulders and there was nothing under it. Serena was older, softer through the waist, with big heavy tits that swung free and dark nipples already tight, and she had stood there and let Chloe look, let her stare, patient as a museum piece.
"Touch them," Serena had said. "It's your birthday. Everything tonight is yours."
Chloe had touched them. She remembered the heat of the skin, the surprising weight filling her palm, the way Serena's breath went out slow when Chloe's thumb crossed the nipple. She remembered the shock of finding that she liked it, that her own body made a low humming approval she had no vote on, and she remembered leaning in when Serena's hand pressed the back of her head, opening her mouth, taking the nipple onto her tongue. She had sucked it, tentatively and then not tentatively at all, and Serena had threaded both hands into her hair and made sounds Chloe had never heard from anyone, low genuine sounds of pleasure, unperformed, and the sounds had gone straight down Chloe's body like current down a wire.
Serena's hand had been in her lap by then. Under the waistband of her pajama shorts, under her panties, fingers sliding through the wet she had been producing in mortifying quantity, two fingers finding her clit and knowing it immediately, the way you know a keyhole you've unlocked a hundred times. Chloe had been sitting on the kitchen chair with her head thrown back and Serena's tit in her mouth and Serena's fingers inside her and she had thought, distantly, from very far away, this is my stepmother, this is my father's wife, and the thought had arrived without any power at all, a fact with no weight, while the fingers did things Danny had never found in two years of trying.
"You're so responsive," Serena had murmured into her ear. "Your body is a gift. Let me enjoy it."
She had come like that. Loud, disgracefully loud, clamping a hand over her own mouth too late, shaking on a kitchen chair in her father's house on her eighteenth birthday with her stepmother's fingers on her clit, and Serena had watched her face the whole time with an expression of pure appreciation, like a collector at an auction watching the lot go up.
Chloe turned over in the dark bed now and pressed her face into the pillow. Her body was doing it again, the same disloyal warmth, the same pulse between her legs, remembering. Ruby's breathing went on across the room, slow, even, possibly not asleep.
"Stop it," she whispered to herself. To the memory. It did not stop.
Because the memory had more in it. It went on. She had come down from the orgasm boneless and pink-faced and Serena had kissed her wet mouth and then pushed the robe the rest of the way off and stepped back and simply looked at her, hands on her hips, offering herself. The lamp found every inch of her. Big soft tits, the dark thatch between her legs, the confidence of a woman who had been looked at for thirty years and enjoyed it every time.
"Your turn," Serena had said. "However you want me."
And Chloe, God help her, had reached out and touched her. Ran her hand down Serena's stomach and through the soft hair and further, fingers slipping into the wet heat of her, and Serena had exhaled and smiled and spread her own feet a little wider, and Chloe had rubbed her clit with two fingers the way she would do it to herself, watching Serena's face change, and it had been the most powerful thing she had ever done to another person. Serena had guided her onto the bed eventually, onto the chaise in the study actually, laid herself back on it with her legs open and her big tits falling to the sides, and said, "Mouth, baby. Use your mouth. I'll show you how."
Chloe had knelt at the edge of the chaise with her face inches from her stepmother's pussy, the smell of her thick and unfamiliar and not unpleasant, and Serena's hand had been in her hair guiding gently, and she had wanted it. That was the part she kept arriving back to in the dark. She had wanted it, her mouth had actually watered, and she had gotten as far as sticking her tongue out, as far as the first heat and the first touch of it against her lips, and then some cold civic part of her brain had come online all at once and said stop, and she had pulled back.
"I can't," she had said. "I'm sorry. I can't, it's too much, it's too fast."
Serena had lain there for a moment, legs open, looking at her with an unreadable expression. Then she had sat up without hurry, entirely unembarrassed, and taken Chloe's face in both hands and kissed her forehead like a mother.
"That's alright, sweetheart." Her thumb had wiped Chloe's chin, where the wet was. "You gave me a beautiful birthday present. We have time." She had tied the robe and smiled, and her smile had been the smile of a woman marking a date on a calendar. "Plenty of time."
Chloe had gone upstairs to her room and locked the door and slept like the dead.
She lay awake now, at St. Aurelia's, and the memory would not close. It kept reopening at the same page: her face between Serena's thighs, the heat of it against her mouth, the wanting. She had liked being kissed by a woman. She had liked being touched by her. She had come apart under her hand and it had been the best orgasm of her life and she had run from the rest of it, and now she was on a mountain full of girls like Serena, older girls, girls with confidence, a school that Petra said was built on exactly this, and there was nowhere left to run to that wasn't also the thing she was running from.
The window went gray by degrees. She must have slept eventually, some shallow trench of sleep with the memory standing at the bottom of it, because when she surfaced the room was daylight and Ruby was up, moving around in front of the wardrobe in her underwear, pulling clothes over freckled skin.
"You're awake," Ruby said, without turning. "Good. You got a full night, lucky you."
"What time is it?"
"Eight-ish. Breakfast's till nine." Ruby found a clean blouse and shrugged into it, doing the buttons low, as always. "Also, some news. The initiation's off. For now."
Chloe sat up too fast. "Off?"
"Postponed." Ruby turned around, arms crossed under her breasts, expression somewhere between apology and amusement. "There are two other new girls this term. Delayed, out of the country, visa mess or something. They won't be on the mountain for a week. Maybe two. Vance won't run it until the whole first-year class is here." She picked her skirt off the bedpost. "So you get a reprieve, new girl. Enjoy it. Some girls wait all year to find out what you'll be doing in a fortnight."
"A fortnight." Chloe's voice came out flat. "Doing what, exactly? What happens at it?"
"You'll see." Ruby smiled. "It's better seen."
She disappeared into the bathroom and Chloe got up and opened the armoire, and stopped.
Her clothes from home were stacked at the bottom, her jeans, her own shirts. Above them hung a uniform she had not unpacked, because she had never packed it. White button-up blouse, crisp, pressed. A pleated skirt in dark gray. White knee socks, folded. Black shoes, gleaming, sized correctly. Somebody had built this for her, from her measurements, before she had ever said yes to any of it.
The underthings were in a tissue-papered box on the shelf. She lifted out the bra and turned it over in her hands and understood within a second that it was not uniform issue. French label. Fine lace, black, scalloped, the kind of thing that came in its own box in a boutique where they asked your size and then asked if this was a gift. It was exactly her size. She put it on and it fit like it had been molded to her, the lace sitting against her nipples through the thin cups, and the panties matched, black lace, high-cut, a scrap of expensive silk that covered nothing it didn't have to.
"Who put these here?" she said through the door.
"School issue," Ruby's voice came back, water running. "Everything's provided."
Chloe stood in her underwear in front of the mirror and told herself the practical things. It was a uniform. Schools gave uniforms. The lace was somebody's strange choice and it meant nothing, it was just what had been ordered in bulk, and she was not going to read a message into underwear.
She dressed. The blouse buttoned to the throat. The skirt sat above the knee and swung when she moved. She pulled on the socks and the shoes and looked at herself in the glass: a schoolgirl, a caricature of one, the classic picture, and under it the black lace pressed against her skin with its own soft opinion.
Ruby came out of the bathroom while she was tucking the blouse in and stopped in the middle of the floor and looked.
She didn't say anything about it. That was the thing. She just stood there with her toothbrush drying in her hand, in her half-buttoned blouse and rolled skirt, and her green eyes went over Chloe from the shoes up, slow, thorough, pausing where the skirt ended and the sock began, pausing at the collar, at her mouth, and Chloe felt every inch of it like a hand. The heat went up the back of her neck and she kept her eyes on the mirror and finished the last button and said nothing either.
"You look right," Ruby said finally. She took her blazer off the hook. "The uniform suits you. It's supposed to."
They went out together, down the corridor with its dark wood and its portraits of girls who had worn this same uniform for a hundred and thirty years, and down the stair with its iron railing, past other girls moving toward the smell of food, a few of whom looked at Chloe and looked again, and she kept her chin level and her hands from shaking.
The refectory was brighter in the morning, hollow, loud with silverware. Ruby steered them to a table in the middle, where there was coffee and eggs and bread, and Chloe sat down and wrapped her hands around the cup and the cup was warm and real.
Three tables away, Petra sat with Liv and Dot. Petra looked over, caught her looking, and raised her coffee cup a half inch, a small unhurried toast, and smiled.
"Food," Ruby said, pushing the plate toward her. "Eat. You'll need it. There's a full weekend and I've been told to show you around."
"By who?"
"By the person whose job it is to decide those things." Ruby buttered toast, entirely comfortable, entirely at home. "Relax. Two weeks, and everything gets decided. Until then you just have to survive being looked at." Her eyes came up over her cup, green and easy. "You're already better at that than the last new girl was."
Down the length of the hall, Professor Vance stood at the far door in her black blazer, talking with another woman in gray, and mid-sentence her dark eyes lifted and crossed the whole room and settled on Chloe, one beat, two, and then went back to the conversation as if they had never moved.
The summons came before she had finished her coffee. A girl in gray appeared at their table, small and quick, and set a folded card beside Chloe's plate without a word. On the front, in ink gone brown with age: Miss Bennett. The Tower, first floor, ten o'clock.
"Vance's office," Ruby said, reading upside down. She looked almost pleased about it. "That was quick. Usually they wait a week."
"What's in the tower?"
"Vance. Old books. Fireplaces you can hear the wind through." Ruby drained her cup and stood. "And whatever she wants to tell you. Come on, I'll walk you. You'd get lost."
The tower was reached through a corridor Chloe hadn't seen yet, narrow, lit by tall windows with diamond panes that threw small crooked shapes on the stone floor. Their heels made a sound like clockwork. At the foot of a spiral stair sat a wooden bench, polished pale by generations of waiting, and Ruby sat down on it with a sigh and pulled out her phone.
"This is me," she said. "The office part is one at a time."
Chloe looked at the door. Black oak, iron hinges, no nameplate. "Is it bad? Is it a discipline thing?"
"You've been here fourteen hours." Ruby smiled up at her from the bench. "What would she discipline you for? Go in. Be honest with her. She likes that, or she likes pretending she does."
The door was not locked. It opened onto warmth, firelight, the smell of woodsmoke and old paper and something else underneath, amber and dark, perfume worn close to the skin. The office went up into the tower's guts, two stories of shelves, a ladder on brass rails, a fireplace big enough to stand in with a fire laid low in it. Dark rugs. A desk that was probably three hundred years old. And behind it, in a wingback chair, Professor Vance, with a file open on her knee and her reading glasses low on her nose.
"Miss Bennett." She closed the file without hurry and set it aside, and Chloe caught her own name at the top of the front page, and under it, in a different ink, a word she couldn't read. "Punctual. Sit down."
There was a chair opposite the desk, smaller than it needed to be, or the desk was bigger than it needed to be. Chloe sat with her knees together and her hands in her lap and felt the room take her measure the way its owner had on the gravel.
"First, the practical part," Vance said. She laced her fingers and rested her chin on them. "St. Aurelia's was founded in 1887 by six women. Three of them were disowned for doing it. We have been operating continuously for a hundred and thirty-eight years, through two wars and every fashion the outside world has had for education, and we have never once appeared in a newspaper. Do you understand how difficult that is? How expensive?"
"No."
"Nobody does, at first. It's the first lesson." Vance rose and went to the window, unhurried, her back half to Chloe, and the firelight moved on her blazer. "You will hear the word society used here. Not the polite one, not debutante nonsense. A real one. Ours, and one other. Down the valley, four miles as the crow flies, there is a school for young men. Ashworth. You will not find it on a map either. A few dozen boys at a time, sons of the same families that fund us, learning to be captains of industry, of capital, of countries if the mood takes them."
"And the girls here learn what?"
Vance turned around. The look she gave Chloe was long and level, and something in it made Chloe's neck warm.
"Different skills," she said. "The men are taught to build. We are taught to be the reason buildings get built. Wealth, first. How it actually moves in the world, which is not the way any textbook says. Then the rest of the toolkit. Manipulation. Reading a room. Reading a person. Deception, when it's called for, and it is called for more than anyone likes to admit. Sabotage, when deception isn't enough. And seduction." She let the word sit in the room a moment before she went on. "The oldest lever there is. Anyone who tells you it isn't a lever is someone who wants to pull it on you unopposed."
Chloe thought of the showers. Her face must have moved, because Vance's mouth curved very slightly.
"Yes," she said. "You've already had your first exposure to our methods. Petra and her cohort are blunt about it, because they're twenty and bluntness is a form of showing off. What we do at the senior level is more elegant." She came back around the desk but didn't sit. She leaned against its edge, an arm's length from Chloe's chair. "And before your mind goes where it's going: this is not a school for converting anyone to anything. Girls who love men leave here loving men, but with a working knowledge of women, and girls who love women leave here loving women, with a working knowledge of men. Both languages. You'll come to understand the pleasures of both, Miss Bennett, because a woman who can only seduce half the world is half an instrument."
Chloe's mouth was dry. "Instrument."
"Graduate. Asset. Partner. Pick the word you can live with." Vance studied her. "Here's what the tuition doesn't say. Every girl who walks out our gates with a diploma walks out owed. The alumnae fund, the placements, the introductions, the marriages arranged or dissolved as the situation demands, the quiet hand on the shoulder of every door that matters. Our girls do not fail. It is a point of institutional pride. And the money for all of it comes from the alumnae themselves, and only after they've made their fortunes. Never before. That's the rule. The school collects its debts from the successful, and the successful pay gladly, because they remember."
"Remember what?"
"Who made them." Vance said it simply, and it landed heavier than shouting would have.
The fire ticked. Somewhere above them the wind came against the tower and the old stones took it. Chloe found she was leaning forward without meaning to.
Vance went to the shelf beside the fireplace, ran one finger along a row of spines, and pulled out a slim ledger, bound in green leather gone soft. She opened it on the desk and turned it toward Chloe.
"You told the taxi driver your mother didn't go here. You may have believed it. Her name is in this book." Her finger came down on a line. 1994. A name Chloe had seen on gravestone paperwork and almost nowhere else, in faded copperplate. "Entered at eighteen. Left with distinction. There's a photograph in the archive, if you'd like to see what she looked like in that uniform. You have her jawline."
Chloe touched the page. The paper was cold and toothy under her fingertip. "She never said."
"They rarely do. The second thing we teach is discretion." Vance turned another page, and there, lower down, a second name in the same hand. Dubois, S. "Your stepmother. Entered two years after your mother left. They never overlapped, though the archive suggests your mother's name came up in her interviews." She closed the ledger with a soft breath of old paper. "And your father is an Ashworth man, class of five years before your mother. He did not meet her here, incidentally. That was later. But he was four miles down the road wearing the same blazer the boys still wear, learning what he learned. Why do you think he sent you so easily, when you told him where?"
Chloe had no answer. Her father's voice on the phone, warm and far away. It made her the woman she is today. Her skin prickled.
"You're going to be confused," Vance said, and her voice changed, dropped a register, became almost kind. "Possibly frightened. Everything you were taught about the world, about wealth and society and relationships and what your own body is for, is going to be taken apart and rebuilt properly, and dismantling is not a gentle process. You will want to leave. Some days you will want to leave very badly."
"And I can't."
"You can. The gates open on request. But understand what walking out means, and understand that the girls who stay are never alone. That's the part no one believes until they feel it." She looked at Chloe over the desk, and the kindness was still there but it had layers under it, the way the perfume did. "You have your roommate already watching over you. Whether you asked her to or not."
"Ruby."
"Miss O'Connell. Who was sent to that room for a reason, though she doesn't know the reason." Vance straightened from the desk. "That's the introduction. The rest, you'll learn by doing. Monday, the Ashworth boys come over for the autumn social, so you'll meet your counterparts sooner than most first-years do. Watch them. They're being taught to want things. It's useful to know what wanting looks like from the other side of it."
Chloe stood, because she was clearly being dismissed, her knees unsteady in a way she resented. But Vance didn't dismiss her. Not yet.
"Before you go." She came around the desk, and Chloe's pulse went up without permission. "The uniform. Turn around. I like to see it sit right on the first-years. The tailor gets the measurements from the file but the file doesn't tell him how a girl carries it."
It was an order wearing a suggestion's clothes. Chloe turned. She heard Vance move behind her, unhurried, the soft click of her heels on the boards, and then the presence at her back, close, the warmth of her arriving before any touch did. Vanilla and smoke and a woman's clean skin under it.
"Chin up," Vance said, near her ear now. "Shoulders back."
Chloe did it. A hand came to rest on her shoulder, then smoothed down over the blouse, over her collarbone, down the center of her sternum with a touch light enough to be adjustment and heavy enough not to be. It stopped at her waist. Drew the blouse fabric straight where it had wrinkled. Then both hands, one on each shoulder, turned her a quarter turn, and Chloe turned, her face hot, her body doing the thing it had done in the showers, doing the thing it had done in her kitchen at home, answering before asking.
"You hold tension here," Vance said, and her palm flattened briefly against the small of Chloe's back, through the blouse, warm as a brand. "The new girls always do. It leaves, in time."
"I'm not tense," Chloe said, and heard how unconvincing it was.
"No." A soft sound from Vance, amusement without cruelty, and Chloe was turned again, another quarter, until she faced the fire and Vance stood behind her, very close, not touching, and the warmth of her body came through the air between them like the fire's did, and her breath was on the back of Chloe's neck, on the fine hair there, stirring it. "You're studying me," Vance observed. "You've been doing it since you sat down. The way I stand, where my hands go, how close I get. Good. That's the first real thing you've done since you walked in, and you did it without being taught."
Chloe's heart was going hard enough that she was sure the woman could hear it. She could smell Vance's perfume properly now, off the heat of her skin, and behind her own eyes, uninvited, the kitchen, Serena's mouth, the sound she'd made. Her thighs pressed together before she caught herself doing it. Heat sat low and stupid and loyal in her stomach.
"You'll learn the pleasures of men," Vance said, very quietly, into the warmth behind Chloe's ear. "And you'll learn the pleasures of women. Both will be taught by people who are very good at teaching. You have nothing to be ashamed of in wanting, Miss Bennett. Wanting is the raw material. Everything else here is what we do with it."
The breath of the words moved on Chloe's neck. Vance was an inch away, maybe less, and one degree of lean would close it, and Chloe stood at the fire with her hands shaking at her sides and did not lean and did not move away and counted the seconds the way she had counted them in the shower.
One. Two. Three.
Vance stepped back. The cold air came in where her warmth had been, and it felt like a loss, and Chloe hated that it felt like a loss.
"There," Vance said, returning to the desk as if nothing had happened, because nothing had, because everything had. "The uniform sits correctly. You may go. Miss O'Connell is waiting, and she dislikes waiting, though she's better at it than she pretends."
Chloe got her hand on the door handle. It took two tries.
"Miss Bennett." She stopped. Vance had opened the green ledger again, and the firelight caught the silver in her hair. "Your mother was one of the finest we ever graduated. I expect comparisons to be made. Try not to find them flattering. Flattery is a leash."
The door closed behind her.
The corridor was cold and bright and smelled of stone. Ruby was exactly where she'd left her, one leg up on the bench, phone in hand, and when she saw Chloe's face she pocketed the phone and stood, and the grin that came across her was enormous, unashamed, foxlike.
"Well?" she said. "How'd it go?"
Chloe opened her mouth and found she had to swallow first. The heat was still in her, banked but alive, her neck still carrying the ghost of breath on it. "She talked. About the school. The society."
"Uh huh." Ruby fell into step beside her, and her shoulder brushed Chloe's and stayed brushing it. "And at the end? The inspection bit?"
"She checked my uniform."
"Mm." Ruby's grin got worse, if anything. "She used to do that to me. Took me four sessions before I figured out nothing about my uniform ever actually needed adjusting." She pushed the stairwell door open and held it, and looked at Chloe's flushed face with frank, delighted appraisal. "You want to know the funny part? She never once touched my neck."
Chloe walked through the door and didn't answer, and Ruby laughed low all the way down the spiral stair.