Chapter 4: Confronting Ruby
The stairs to the mezzanine were behind a case of atlases, and Chloe took them two at a time before she could talk herself out of it. The gallery was colder than the floor below, the light through the narrow windows thin as blade edges. Ruby sat on the top step of the iron stair that led nowhere, book open on her knee, red hair catching what light there was.
Ruby looked up and closed the book without hurrying. "Petra's nine seconds. I saw."
"How much did you see."
"All of it. That was the job." Ruby stood, and something in her face was already tired, like she'd rehearsed this argument in her head and lost. "Vance put me on it. First night. She doesn't ask, Chloe, she assigns. You don't say no to Vance your first year here, not if you want your remaining two years to go anywhere."
"You could have warned me."
"I could have." Ruby came a step down the stair. "And then I'd be the roommate who leaked Vance's arrangements to a first-year, and I'd be eating meals alone for a term, and I'd still be on the job, because she doesn't release you, she just stops trusting you. Everything here is designed so the smart move and the decent move are different moves." She stopped. "I'm sorry. That's the actual words, no sale attached. I watched you get cornered in the showers and I watched Petra's little theater down there, and I reported all of it, and I'm sorry."
Chloe studied her. The charm was off, for once, and underneath it Ruby just looked like a girl in a cold room doing arithmetic she hated.
"What did you tell Vance about me."
"That you said no and meant it. That you stayed anyway." Ruby shrugged. "Vance liked that more than I expected. She made a note."
"What kind of note."
"The kind that means Monday matters." Ruby set the book on the rail. "Sit down. Third day's tomorrow, Sunday, and you need to hear this from me and not from the rumor mill."
Chloe sat on the top step. Ruby lowered herself beside her, close, not touching.
"Monday, four o'clock, the big ballroom, the one you haven't found yet because it's behind the dining hall. About a dozen boys come up from Ashworth. All third-years, the top of their class." Ruby's voice had gone flat and factual, the register of someone reading a syllabus. "It looks like a party. It's a test, both directions. The first-year girls get graded on how they handle being seduced. The boys get graded on how they seduce."
"Why not the boys' first-years?"
"Because it's a reward." Ruby smiled without much in it. "Top of the third-year class gets to come up the mountain and evaluate the new girls. It's the thing everyone at Ashworth works for. They get graded on what they've learned, and the girls get written into the impression book. First impressions, formal record. It follows you."
"The book Petra mentioned."
"The book." Ruby turned to face her. "And listen to me now, because this is the part nobody tells you straight. Be ready for sex. Real sex, that night. There are alcoves along the walls, no doors, and the staff watch who goes and who doesn't. The girls who perform do well. The girls who stand at the punch table all evening get marked, and the mark doesn't wash off. Make a good impression. It counts for a lot."
Chloe's hands were cold in her lap. "And if I don't want to."
"Then you'll learn what exclusion costs, and you'll learn it in front of an audience." Ruby's voice gentled. "I'm not telling you to want it. I'm telling you to want it in a way they can see."
"Or I could lead," Chloe said, and heard herself say it, and Ruby's eyebrows went up slowly, like a door opening.
"Well," Ruby said. "There it is. Vance was right about you."
Sunday was Chloe's third day. Ruby spent it dressing her, which meant arguing about the collar. Petra's advice won: second button open, hair down, the locket tucked inside the blouse where it wouldn't be read. Ruby rolled her skirt at the waist and stepped back.
"They'll smell nerves," she said. "Boys that age smell nerves the way dogs smell fear, except here it's currency. Let them think you're a little bored."
"Whose side are you on?"
"Mine." Ruby grinned. "Always mine. But mine happens to be standing next to yours this week."
When Monday arrived the ballroom was bigger than the library, all white stone and tall windows gone dark, chandeliers burning yellow against the glass. Tables with wine and small elegant food. Music from somewhere invisible, quiet enough to talk over. Along the walls, at intervals, the alcoves: open archways framing a bed or a low loveseat, curtained at the sides, doorless, lit warmly like stage sets waiting for actors.
Twelve boys. Chloe counted them from across the room while pretending to look at the hors d'oeuvres. All of them twenty or twenty-one, a couple maybe twenty-two, all of them tall and groomed and wearing charcoal like a uniform they'd been born into, moving with the lazy confidence of people who had never once been told no by anyone who mattered. The female counterparts, Serena's world, her father's world, translated into flesh. Two men stood apart by the far table, one silver-haired in his fifties, one younger, maybe thirty, both watching the boys the way coaches watch a first scrimmage.
Vance stood near the doors with two of the school's instructors. She caught Chloe's eye across the room and inclined her head half an inch.
The thirteen first-years were arranged in a loose line, and the boys came in.
They were good. That was the first thing Chloe understood, watching the first two boys work the ends of the line, hands finding waists, weather and the mountain and the wine deployed like practice drills. Most of the boys were smarter and more sure of themselves than the girls they approached. Dot went pink and let a boy steer her toward the windows. Liv, opposite, took a boy's lapel in her fist inside the first minute and said something that made him laugh and step closer. Two boys found Chloe in the first half hour. The first was polished and boring, his hand landing on her waist exactly like Petra's choreography, and Chloe felt her body recognize the baseline and refuse it, nothing arching, and she watched his interest cool in real time. The second tried harder and got less.
The third was Charles Blackburn the third, and he didn't touch her at all for the first two minutes, which was the tell.
He was one of the younger ones, dark-haired, a jaw that had been drawn by someone with opinions, and his opening line about the chandeliers was so polished it had a seam in it. Chloe watched the seam. Underneath the performance his eyes kept flicking to the silver-haired man by the far table, checking, and his glass was full and untouched.
"You're nervous," she said, pleasantly, under the music.
His mask held for a second and then flickered. "I'm evaluated," he said. "It's different."
"It's the same feeling." She let her mouth curve. "I'm graded too. Want to compare notes?"
The rest of the conversation went better for both of them. His hand found her waist on the third exchange, and this time the touch landed right, warm and patient through the blouse, and her spine did the half-inch thing, and she saw him feel it and his shoulders drop a notch. Around them the room was tipping. Couples were drifting toward the walls. She could see, past Charles's shoulder, Dot against a pillar being kissed breathless, a boy's hand working the buttons of her blouse without haste. In the second alcove a girl was on her knees on the loveseat cushion with a boy's cock in her mouth, her head bobbing slowly, his fingers laced in her hair, both of their faces turned slightly toward the room as if the audience were part of it. In the third, a girl was bent over the arm of the loveseat, skirt up, stockings down around her thighs, a boy behind her driving into her with long even strokes while she gripped the cushion and made sounds the music couldn't cover.
The staff on both sides were watching the girls who weren't going. One of the female instructors stood near the line with her arms crossed, and her expression at the three or four unclaimed girls had a specific flatness Chloe had already learned to read as disapproval. The silver-haired man wore the same look for any boy who hovered too long without committing.
Charles took her elbow, lightly, the gesture of leading. "We could..."
"We could," Chloe said, and let him take the first step, and the second, and steered him with the smallest possible pressures of her own hand on his arm, left here, slower, the way you'd steer a horse by shifting your weight. He thought he was leading her. She felt the whole architecture of it and let him.
They'd gone half the length of the wall when she saw the girl.
She'd seen her twice in three days. Small, mousy, brown hair in a tight braid, always at the edge of things, and now she was standing alone near the drinks table with a glass she wasn't drinking from, watching the alcoves with an expression Chloe recognized from her own first night, and no boy had come near her all evening. The instructors' attention had found her the way water finds a low spot.
Chloe rose on her toes and put her mouth at Charles's ear.
"Change of plan. The girl by the table, braid, green skirt. She's getting left out and it's going to be written down, hers and maybe ours for not noticing. Bring her with us. Lead her over. Make it look like your idea."
He glanced over, understood in about two seconds, which was to his credit, and turned with a smile broad enough to be seen from the staff table. "Miss. You've been standing here being decorative all night. Come be decorative with us." He offered his arm with a flourish that was almost too much, and the girl looked at Chloe, and Chloe nodded once, and the girl took his arm like it was a rope thrown from a boat.
Some of the staff looked pleased. Vance's face didn't move, but one of the instructors lowered her crossed arms, and the silver-haired man said something to the younger one, briefly, approvingly.
The alcove Charles chose was near the end of the wall, curtained at the sides, a low bed with a quilted cover and a loveseat angled toward it. By the time they arrived most of the room was occupied. They were the second-to-last couple through an archway, and the last couple followed within a minute, and then the ballroom belonged to the staff and the music.
The girl's name, in the archway, whispered, was Marguerite. Her hands were shaking. Chloe took them.
"Nobody's going to eat you," Chloe said. "Well. Someone might. Nicely."
Charles laughed, a real laugh, the nervous seam showing again, and sat on the end of the bed like a boy waiting for a verdict.
Chloe pulled Marguerite in toward her. That was the decision, made in the half second before she could think better of it, the whole evening's arithmetic, the book, the mark, Vance's note, Petra's baseline, all of it tipping the same direction. She drew the smaller girl close, chest to chest, and tipped her chin up, and kissed her.
Marguerite froze for one heartbeat and then melted into it with a small sound, her mouth opening, and Chloe kissed her slowly, deeply, one hand at her jaw and the other sliding down to the small of her back, pressing their bodies together. The girl tasted like the wine she hadn't been drinking, nerves and lip balm. Chloe walked her backward one step, two, until her shoulders met the alcove's side curtain, and kissed her harder, and felt the girl's hips start to move against her own.
Charles made a low noise from the bed. Chloe looked at him over Marguerite's shoulder, and he was sitting forward, lips parted, and the performance was entirely gone from his face. What was left was younger and much more interested.
"Watch," she told him. It came out steadier than she'd expected.
She turned back to Marguerite and unbuttoned the girl's blouse, one button at a time, unhurried, letting each open gap show a new strip of skin to the room and to the boy on the bed. The girl's bra was plain white and her breasts were small and full under it, and Chloe pushed the blouse off her shoulders and let it drop and cupped her through the fabric until Marguerite's head fell back against the curtain. Then she reached around and unhooked the bra and drew it down her arms, and Marguerite's breasts came free, pink-nippled, rising and falling fast.
"God," Charles said.
"Take your cock out," Chloe said to him. "Don't touch it yet."
His breath went out of him. He fumbled his flies open one-handed and pulled himself free, hard already, thick and flushed, and sat back with his fist wrapped around the base and did as he was told, barely.
Chloe bent her head and took Marguerite's nipple in her mouth.
The girl cried out softly, hands flying to Chloe's hair. Chloe sucked her slowly, tongue circling, drawing the nipple up hard and wet, then moved to the other and gave it the same treatment while Marguerite shook against the curtain and made small helpless sounds. Her skirt was rucked up; Chloe slid her hand under it, over the damp panel of her panties, and pressed, and the girl's hips jerked forward into her palm.
"Chloe," Marguerite gasped.
"That's it." Chloe stroked her through the fabric, feeling the heat and the wet soaking through, finding the shape of her slit through the cotton, pressing up against the clit until the girl's knees visibly wobbled. "You're soaked. You've been soaked all night, haven't you, watching all of them."
"Yes," she whispered. "Yes."
Chloe drew the panties down her thighs and off, kneeling as she went, and lifted one of the girl's legs over her shoulder, opening her to the room. Her pussy was bare except for a neat trimmed stripe, lips flushed dark and glistening, clit swollen out of its hood. Chloe put her mouth on it.
Marguerite grabbed the curtain rod with both hands. Chloe licked her in slow flat strokes first, bottom to top, savoring her, then closed on the clit and sucked, two fingers sliding up inside her at the same time, curling forward against the smooth front wall of her cunt. The girl's sounds stopped being small. She was moaning openly, hips pumping against Chloe's mouth, and Chloe glanced sideways without lifting her lips and saw Charles on the edge of the bed, stroking himself in long slow pulls, watching Chloe's mouth work the girl's pussy, his knuckles white.
Across the ballroom, past the curtains, Chloe could feel the staff watching this alcove too. Let them write it down.
Marguerite came with her leg locked over Chloe's shoulder, crying out, her cunt clenching around Chloe's fingers in waves, and Chloe worked her through it gently until she slumped against the curtain, boneless, chest heaving, nipples wet and hard in the warm light.
Chloe stood, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and looked at Charles.
"Stand up."
He stood. She pushed him back onto the bed, crawled up over him, and stripped her own blouse off, second button and all the rest, the black lace bra underneath earning a strangled sound from him. Marguerite, recovering, watched from the curtain with wide eyes and her own hand drifting down between her legs.
Chloe unclasped the bra, let it fall, and took Charles's cock in her hand. Hot, iron-hard, slick at the tip. She pumped him twice and then swung her leg over and positioned him at her entrance and sank down onto him inch by inch, both of them watching it happen, his face wrecked, her own body splitting open around his thickness and flooding with the deep animal satisfaction of it after three days of ambushes and half-inches.
"Oh, fuck," Charles breathed. "Oh, god, you feel..."
"Quiet." She bottomed out, sat full on him, ground her hips in a slow circle, feeling him press every wall of her. "This is my show. You hold my hips. Nothing else."
He held her hips. She rode him, slow at first, long deep rises and drops, her small breasts bouncing in his face, and when he leaned up to get his mouth on a nipple she let him, gasping at the pull of it, and sped up. The slapping of her hips on his thighs filled the alcove. Marguerite had given up watching from the wall; she knelt on the loveseat, two fingers in her own pussy, fucking herself in time with Chloe's rhythm.
The pressure built in Chloe fast, the evening and the baseline and the hand on her waist and three days of banked heat all pouring into one place. She gripped the headboard and fucked him harder, chasing it, and felt him swell inside her, close, and pulled off him entirely.
"Not yet." She rolled onto her back beside him and spread her legs, bare and glistening under the alcove light. "Marguerite. Come here. Sit on my face. Charles, fuck me. Now."
They obeyed. It was, Chloe thought dimly, the first time anyone at this school had obeyed her. Marguerite climbed over her, knees bracketing her head, lowering her wet cunt to Chloe's mouth, and Charles pushed back into her in one deep stroke that made her moan up into the girl's pussy. He fucked her hard then, both hands on her hips, driving her up the bed with each stroke, and Chloe licked and sucked at Marguerite's clit while her own orgasm wound tighter and tighter under the boy's pounding, until it broke, sudden and enormous, her whole body arching off the mattress like Petra's ten seconds had taught it to, screaming her pleasure into the girl's cunt, and Charles shouted and pulled out and came across her stomach in thick spurts, and Marguerite ground down on her mouth and followed, shaking, drenching her chin.
They lay tangled in the alcove light, three bodies steaming, the music still playing somewhere behind the curtains.
Vance, Chloe thought, from somewhere out there in the dark ballroom, was making a note. She found she didn't care. Marguerite's fingers were laced through hers, and Charles was laughing quietly at the ceiling, and the note could say whatever it wanted.
The evening wound down within the half hour. Chloe kissed Charles goodbye at the doors, a cordial press of lips, nothing more. "Thank you," he said, low. "For leading. All of it. I hope I see you again." "Probably," she said, and meant nothing by it.
Marguerite caught her hands on the way out. "You saved my standing. All of it, even the, the rest. I'd like a repeat sometime, if you would." "Maybe," Chloe said, and Marguerite grinned like a changed girl.
As the Ashworth boys filed out, Vance caught Chloe's eye and smiled, warm and unmistakably approving.
In her room Chloe showered long and hot. Ruby appeared in the doorway after, towel-wrapped, pleased with herself. "Rumor's already moving. Outstanding rating, staff from both schools. Charles too, apparently. Only boy to fuck two girls tonight, high marks all around."
Chloe slept deeply that Monday night, her first real school day behind her. What tomorrow would bring was her last thought before sleep took her.