The corridor had emptied out the way old buildings do at the turn of an hour—all at once, then slow, then not at all. Ashley's heels had clicked a countdown down three flights and past two closed lecture halls, and now the sound of them was the only sound, and Mikala's hand was still in hers, warm and a little damp at the palm, and the fluorescent tube above the stairwell stuttered and buzzed and stuttered again, throwing the stone wall in and out of light.

Room 410 waited at the end of it. The door was closed—the kind of heavy oak that Ashcroft had put in before anyone now teaching had been born, brass plate worn smooth at the middle where a century of hands had pushed. Under it, no line of light. No sound. Either Marsh wasn't in yet, or he was in and sitting in the dark the way he sat in his office sometimes, both hands folded on the blotter, thinking about something you wouldn't like.

"He's not here," Mikala said, quiet. Her thumb moved against Ashley's knuckles, once, and stopped.

"His office hours started four minutes ago." Ashley let go of her hand to check her watch, then didn't. "He's always early. He's never—" She stopped. The corridor smelled of old paper and floor polish and something faintly electrical, the fluorescent dying by degrees above them. "If he's early, he's in there. If he's in there, we wait out here and we don't say a word, and when he leaves for his two o'clock we go in."

"And if he doesn't leave?"

"He leaves. He has a lecture at two. He's never missed a lecture in eleven years, and he's not going to start on the morning after he sabotaged a lab and nearly killed a student." Ashley heard her own voice come out low and flat and steady, and knew it for the lie it was—her heart was going like a bird in a box. She looked at Mikala, and Mikala was already looking at her, and there it was, the glint, the dare, the smile that had walked into her classroom ten weeks ago and refused to leave.

"You're doing the thing," Mikala said.

"What thing."

"The thing where you decide the whole day in your head before it's happened and then get annoyed when it doesn't obey you." She tucked her hair behind one ear, and the fluorescent caught the platinum of it and let go. "It's a very professor thing."

Ashley opened her mouth to say something precise and cutting, and what came out instead was a laugh—short, startled out of her, the second one in a day—and she pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead and said, "God. You are going to be the death of me."

Mikala stepped closer. Not touching. Close enough that Ashley could smell the soap on her, the faint mint of the gum she'd been chewing in the car, the under-scent that was just her, that Ashley had woken up to in the archive and would, she suspected, be able to find blindfolded in a crowd for the rest of her life. "You keep saying that," Mikala said. "You keep saying it like it's a bad thing."

The fluorescent stuttered. Went out. Came back on with a tick, and in the half-second of dark Ashley had already moved—or maybe she'd been moving the whole time and only now let herself notice—and her palm found the wall beside Mikala's shoulder, flat against the cool stone, and the rest of her followed.

Mikala's back met the wall with a soft sound and her breath came out of her all at once, and Ashley's mouth was on hers before the breath had finished. There was nothing careful in it. Nothing of the professor who measured her words and her hours and her distance from every student in the room. Her free hand came up to the side of Mikala's throat, thumb riding the jump of her pulse, and Mikala made a sound against her lips—half gasp, half laugh, the dare still in it—and her hands went into Ashley's hair and pulled.

"Ashley—"

"Quiet." Ashley said it against her mouth, and then again, lower, against the corner of it, against the hinge of her jaw. "There's a man on the other side of that door. You want him to hear?"

Mikala's hips had already come off the wall, already found the line of Ashley's thigh, and she was rocking into it in small, impatient rolls, her breath hot and uneven against Ashley's cheek. "Then maybe," she said, and her voice had gone thin and bright, "you should give me a reason to be quiet."

The skirt was cheap and thin and short—the kind of thing a freshman wore because she'd decided that morning to make someone's life difficult—and Ashley's hand found the hem of it and pushed it up without ceremony, the fabric bunching at Mikala's hip, the cool air of the corridor meeting the heat of her thigh. Mikala's leg came up, knee bent, foot braced against the wall behind Ashley, and opened for her, and Ashley's fingers slid up the inside of her thigh and found her already wet through the cotton of her underwear.

"Already," Ashley breathed.

"Since the lecture hall," Mikala said, and then her head went back against the stone and she stopped talking, because Ashley's fingers had pushed the cotton aside and were moving through the slick of her, slow, spreading it, learning the shape of her all over again. "Oh—God—"

The bond opened between them the way it did now, without either of them asking—a hot bright thread running from the girl's skin to the base of Ashley's skull—and Ashley felt it hit her: the sharp flare of Mikala's pleasure, the desperate tightness of it, the way it spiked and gathered and spiked again under her fingers. It was like standing in her own body and Mikala's at once, and her cunt clenched around nothing, a low hot pull, and she had to press her forehead to Mikala's temple and breathe.

"You feel that," Mikala whispered. Not a question.

"I feel it." Ashley's voice had gone rough. "Every bit of it. You're—" She found the girl's clit and circled it once, slow, and the bond lit up like a struck match and Mikala's whole body jerked. "You're so loud in my head. Even when you're being quiet."

"Then make me—" Mikala's hips bucked, chasing her fingers. "—make me—"

Ashley slid two fingers into her. The girl was so wet it was effortless, a slick, obscene give, and Mikala's mouth opened against Ashley's shoulder and she bit down on the wool of her blazer to keep from crying out, and Ashley felt the bite through the bond and through the cloth at once, and her knees nearly went. "There," Ashley said, against her hair, and began to move—deep, deliberate strokes, the heel of her hand grinding against Mikala's clit with every push, her fingers curling inside her to find the spot that made the girl's breath fracture. "There. Is that what you wanted."

"Yes—" The word came out strangled, muffled by wool. "Yes, don't—don't stop, don't you dare stop—"

The fluorescent tube above the stairwell buzzed and flickered and threw their shadows huge and jerking across the opposite wall, and Ashley watched them—her own back, the girl's bent leg, the two of them tangled into one shape—and something in her chest turned over and kept turning. She pressed her mouth to Mikala's throat, to the place where the pulse hammered, and said, "We have time." A kiss there. "Before we walk into hell." Another, lower. "I want you shaking when we go in that room. I want you to remember this while he's lying to our faces."

Mikala laughed—a wrecked, breathless thing—and then it broke into a moan as Ashley's fingers found the angle and pushed deeper, faster, the wet sound of it loud in the empty corridor, obscene against the stone. "Ashley—Ashley, I'm—"

"I know." She could feel it building through the bond, a bright rising pressure, the girl's pleasure going high and thin and frantic. "I've got you. Let go."

"If he hears—"

"Let him hear." Ashley's thumb found her clit and pressed, hard, and her mouth came back to Mikala's ear. "Let him hear what he tried to take from us."

That was what did it. Mikala's head went back against the stone and her mouth opened and the sound came up out of her—a choked, helpless cry, too loud, echoing off the stone and the closed door and the dying light—and her cunt clenched hard around Ashley's fingers, once, twice, a rhythm that Ashley felt in her own body through the bond, hot and bright and shattering. Her hips jerked and stuttered against Ashley's hand and her knee slid down the wall and her fingers dug into Ashley's shoulder hard enough to bruise.

Ashley's mouth was already on hers, swallowing the sound, catching it against her tongue—and she felt the last of it break through the bond and wash back into her own body, and her thighs shook, and she had to brace her free hand against the wall to keep them both upright.

For a moment there was nothing but the fluorescent buzzing and Mikala breathing against her mouth like she'd run up four flights, and the wet heat of her still wrapped around Ashley's fingers, and the smell of the two of them in the cold corridor air.

Then, from behind the closed door of room 410, a chair scraped.

Ashley went still. Her fingers were still inside Mikala, and she didn't move them, and Mikala's eyes flew open and found hers, and the two of them stood there in the flickering light, breathing, listening.

The chair scraped again. A drawer slid open, then shut. Then nothing.

Mikala's mouth curved, slow and wicked and absolutely unrepentant, her cheek still flushed, her hair a mess against the stone. "So," she whispered, barely a breath. "He's in there."

"He's in there," Ashley said. She eased her fingers out of her, slow, and Mikala's breath hitched at the loss, and Ashley wiped her hand on the inside of her own wrist and straightened the girl's skirt with a care that was somehow more intimate than what she'd just done. "And he heard."

"Good," Mikala said. She reached up and tucked a strand of Ashley's hair back into its ruined bun, and her hand stayed there, warm against Ashley's jaw, and her eyes had gone soft in a way that had nothing to do with the dare. "Let's go walk into hell."

Ashley looked at the closed door, and at the girl in front of her, and at her own hand still trembling faintly against her wrist. Then she reached past Mikala and knocked—three flat, unhurried raps against the brass plate—and waited.

The knock went into the door and did not come back. Ashley counted her own heartbeats against the silence—four, five, six—and the fluorescent overhead chose that moment to steady itself, to hold, as if the building had decided to listen too. Her knuckles still rested against the brass plate and she could feel the cold of it in the small bones of her hand.

Behind her, Mikala had not moved from the wall. Ashley could hear her breathing—still not level, still catching at the top of each inhale—and the sound of it did something to the back of her neck that had no business being there while they stood outside a man's office waiting to be let in.

"Maybe he's deaf," Mikala whispered.

"He's not deaf." Ashley did not turn around. "He's making us wait. It's a technique. He's had it since before I was hired."

"It's a bad technique. It's making me want to kick the door."

Ashley turned then, and found the girl still flushed, still rumpled, one hand pressed flat to her own sternum as though to hold her heart inside it. The skirt had been straightened but the wool of Ashley's blazer still carried the wet mark of a bite, and Ashley looked at it and felt her own face heat and turned back to the door before she could do anything about it.

The handle moved. Not turned—moved, the way a hand resting on the inside of it moves a thing before it decides. Ashley straightened her spine and set her jaw and arranged herself into the professor she had been for ten years, the one who did not flinch, and the door swung inward.

Marsh stood in the frame with his reading glasses in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other, and he was not surprised. That was the first thing Ashley registered, and it was the thing she would keep coming back to—that he was not surprised, that he had the look of a man who had been expecting the knock for some time and had already decided how he would answer it.

"Professor Greendale," he said. Then his eyes went past her shoulder, unhurried, and settled on Mikala, and something crossed his face that Ashley could not read and did not like. "And Miss Snow. I wondered when I'd be seeing the two of you together."

Ashley stepped forward.

Not through the door—into the frame of it, into the smell of him, cold coffee and the particular chalk-dust dryness of a man who had spent thirty years breathing lecture halls. Her shoulder caught Marsh's lapel and he gave ground, one reflexive half-step back into his own office, and the reading glasses in his hand swung and caught the light. His mouth was already opening around whatever measured, patient sentence he had prepared for the two of them.

She didn't let him get to the verb. Her hand found the brass handle on the inside of the door, and she pulled it shut.

The latch caught with a click that went down the corridor and came back off the far wall. Then the heavy oak settled, and behind it there was nothing—no scrape, no voice, no hand testing the knob. The silence had a stunned quality to it, the way a room goes quiet when a glass has been dropped and not yet hit the floor.

Ashley stood with her palm still flat on the wood, her forehead an inch from the grain, and listened to herself breathe.

It came out of her too fast and too shallow and she made herself slow it. Four counts in. Hold. Four out. The corridor smelled of floor polish and the electrical singe of the dying tube above the stairwell, and her own hand was leaving a faint bloom of warmth on the varnish where she'd pressed it, and somewhere behind the door a chair creaked once and then did not creak again.

Then, low and delighted, Mikala laughed.

"Oh my God," she said. "You just—you closed the door. On him. You closed the door on Professor Marsh's face."

"He was going to say something."

"He was going to say something," Mikala repeated, and the laugh got away from her, hushed and helpless, both hands pressed flat over her mouth to keep it in. "He had the whole thing ready. He had it rehearsed, Ashley, he had the little pause in it—"

"I know."

"He was going to do the thing where he takes his glasses off slowly."

"I know." Ashley turned around. Her back found the door and she let it take her weight, and the brass plate dug into her shoulder blade and she didn't move away from it. "I've watched him do it for ten years. It's a very good technique. It's the best technique in this building." She tipped her head back against the wood. "He's going to be insufferable about this."

Mikala had come off the wall and was standing in the middle of the corridor with her hands still half-raised, and the fluorescent was doing what it did now—steady, then a stutter, then steady—so that she was lit and then unlit and then lit, the platinum of her hair going bright and dim and bright, and her cheeks still carrying the flush of two minutes ago, and her mouth still reddened from Ashley's own. She looked, Ashley thought with a strange, sinking clarity, exactly like what she was: eighteen years old, rumpled, and standing in a university corridor at eleven in the morning with her skirt still faintly creased where a hand had bunched it.

"What's the plan now," Mikala said. Not a dare. A real question, and it landed differently than the ones she usually asked, flatter, with the joke gone out of it.

"The plan is the same as it was." Ashley pushed off the door. She took her time about it. "He leaves for his two o'clock. He's never missed a lecture in eleven years. We come back at a quarter past, and we go through that room, and we find what he took out of the lab the night the failsafes went down."

"And if he doesn't leave."

"He leaves."

"Because he always does."

"Because he always does," Ashley said, and heard the shape of the argument close over her like a lid, and knew that Mikala heard it too.

The girl didn't say anything. She reached up and pulled her hair back off her face and held it at the nape of her neck, and the gesture was so ordinary, so unguarded, that Ashley felt something in her chest go sideways. Then Mikala let it fall and said, "He knew."

"He knew what?"

"He knew we were coming. He said it— I wondered when I'd be seeing the two of you together. Not one of you. Both." Mikala's eyes had gone narrow and cold and entirely un-eighteen. "He wasn't guessing, Ashley. He was checking his watch."

Ashley had already had that thought and had already put it away in the place where she kept things she couldn't afford to look at yet, and hearing it out loud in Mikala's flat young voice did something ugly to the back of her neck. She looked down at her own hand. There was a faint wet shine across the inside of her wrist and she turned it into the shadow of her body before she thought about why.

"There's a supply closet at the end of this corridor," she said. "It's never locked. It has a window that looks out on the quad, and from that window you can see the whole south walk—everyone who comes and goes between the lecture halls and the faculty building. If he leaves, we'll see him leave. If he leaves early, we'll see that too."

"So we wait in a closet."

"We wait in a closet."

"For two hours."

"For two hours and forty minutes," Ashley said, and checked her watch, and this time she let herself look at it. "Unless he's decided to make a point."

Mikala considered this. Then she said, "I've never been in a supply closet with a professor before," and the glint was back, small and wicked and entirely restored, and Ashley felt the whole corridor tilt a degree back toward something she could stand on.

"You've been in a supply closet with a professor for approximately nine minutes," Ashley said. "You simply didn't know it. The archive is a supply closet that got ideas."

Mikala's laugh came out of her nose, undignified, and she clapped a hand over it, and Ashley turned her face away so the girl wouldn't see the corner of her mouth go up.

The closet was four doors down and it did not, in fact, have a window.

It had a vent. A louvered metal grille set high in the wall, painted over so many times the slats had gone soft-edged, and through it—if you stood on the overturned bucket and put your eye to the gap—you could see a slice of the south walk: the wet grey flagstones, the corner of the faculty building, the bare arms of the trees that lined the path. Ashley had known about the vent for six years. She had never once had a reason to use it that she'd have been willing to say out loud.

"This is the most romantic thing that's ever happened to me," Mikala said, from the floor, where she'd folded herself down between two shelves of toner cartridges and reams of paper with her knees drawn up and her chin on them. "Truly. A bucket. A vent. The smell of—what is that smell?"

"Toner and mildew and the ghost of every secretary who ever cried in here." Ashley set the bucket against the wall and stepped up onto it, and the metal complained under her heel, and she put her eye to the grille. "It's a storied closet."

Through the slats: the quad, grey and wet. A groundskeeper dragging a barrow of sodden leaves. Two students crossing fast with their hoods up. No Marsh. The faculty building's side door stood closed and solid, and the clock above it said eleven twenty-six.

"Anything?"

"A man is losing a fight with some leaves."

"Is he winning?"

"The leaves are winning."

Mikala laughed again, quieter this time, and then was quiet, and the quiet went on long enough that Ashley turned her head from the vent to look at her.

She was sitting with her back against the shelf and her arms wrapped around her shins, and the flush had gone out of her face and left something underneath it that Ashley hadn't seen there before—not fear exactly, something more tired than fear. Her thumb was moving over the knuckle of her other hand, back and forth, back and forth, the same restless motion as the pen.

"Say it," Ashley said.

"Say what."

"Whatever it is you've been chewing on since the stairwell. You've been quiet for a full minute, which for you is a geological age."

Mikala's thumb stopped. She looked at the shelf across from her, at the neat ranks of toner boxes, and said, "He looked at me like he already knew what I was."

"He's a theorist. He looks at everyone like that. It's a professional deformity."

"No." She shook her head, once. "You've known him ten years and you've never seen him look at you the way he looked at me just now. Like I was a—a result. Like something he'd run and gotten an answer out of." She pulled her knees in tighter. "He flagged my entrance exam. You told me that. He asked about me twice before the surge. And then the surge happens, and the failsafes are off, and my channels turn out to be—whatever they are—and now he's sitting in his office with the door shut and his glasses off, waiting for me to knock." Her jaw worked. "I keep feeling like I've been walking into a room he built. Since the first day. Since before the first day."

Ashley stood on the bucket with her eye an inch from a painted-over vent and did not say the thing she wanted to say, which was that she had been thinking the same thing since midnight and that it frightened her in a way that had nothing to do with her career.

What she said was, "Then we take the room apart and find the blueprints."

Mikala looked up at her.

"He built a room," Ashley said. "Rooms have drawings. Marsh is the most fastidious man I have ever met—he keeps his lecture notes in bindings, Mikala, he has a system for his system—and a man like that does not disable a failsafe without writing down what he did and why and what he expected to happen next. It'll be in that office. It'll be somewhere stupid and obvious, in a folder with a sensible label, because men like Marsh do not believe they will ever be caught." She stepped down off the bucket. It rang against the floor. "We are going to humiliate him with his own filing."

Mikala's mouth pulled to one side. "That's a very petty plan."

"It's a precise plan."

"It's petty and you're enjoying it."

"I'm going to enjoy it a great deal more in about two hours," Ashley said, and sat down on the floor beside her, and the both of them put their backs to the shelf and their shoulders touching, and the closet was small and dim and smelled of toner, and the vent let in a thin bar of grey daylight that fell across their knees.

They sat like that for a while. Ashley could hear the building around them—a door somewhere, the distant rise and fall of a lecture through a wall, the tick of the radiator coming on. Mikala's shoulder was warm and solid against hers and her breathing had evened out, and Ashley found that she was listening to it the way she listened to a piece of music she was trying to memorize.

"Ashley," Mikala said, after a while.

"Mm."

"In the corridor. When you said—" She stopped. Started again. "You said, let him hear what he tried to take from us. "

Ashley looked at the bar of light on her knees.

"Did you mean it?" Mikala said. "Or was that just—a thing you said. In the moment."

The radiator ticked. Somewhere down the corridor a door opened and closed, and neither of them moved.

"I meant it," Ashley said. "I've spent ten years being careful, and it has bought me exactly nothing—a probation, a locked lab, and a man in a room down the hall who thinks he can use my student as a specimen." She turned her head. Mikala was already looking at her, close enough that the grey light showed the darker ring around the ice-blue of her irises. "I am done being careful with you. It's the only thing I've decided all morning that I'm sure of."

Mikala's throat moved. She didn't say anything clever. She leaned her head over and set it against Ashley's shoulder, and her hair smelled of the soap from the archive and the corridor and the morning, and Ashley sat very still and let her.

"Two hours," Mikala said, into the wool of her blazer.

"Two hours."

"You're going to be insufferable about the bucket."

"I'm going to be unbearable about the bucket," Ashley said, and reached over and took the girl's hand, and held it, and watched the thin bar of daylight crawl across the floor toward noon.

The light had moved the width of Ashley's hand across the floor, and the radiator had gone quiet, and the building had settled into its late-morning hush—the lecture two doors down let out with a scrape of chairs and a wash of voices that passed the closet and faded toward the stairs. Ashley counted them without meaning to. Nine students. Marsh's seminar was eleven. Two missing, or two who'd left early, and she filed it away in the place where she kept things she couldn't afford to look at yet.

Mikala had not let go of her hand. Her thumb had found the ridge of Ashley's knuckle and was working back and forth across it, slow, absent, the way it worked a pen.

"Ashley."

"Mm."

"In the corridor." The thumb stopped. Started again. "Before the door. When I—" She didn't finish it, and Ashley turned her head and found the girl looking at the shelf across from them, at the neat ranks of toner boxes, her jaw set in a way that had nothing to do with mischief. "What did it feel like. Through the bond. When I came."

The radiator ticked. Ashley looked at the bar of grey light on her knees and felt the question land in her chest like a stone dropped down a well, and kept her face still.

"You said you felt it," Mikala said. "You said every bit of it. I want to know what every bit of it was."

"It's not—" Ashley stopped. Started over. "It doesn't translate. That's the trouble with it. You're asking me to describe a color to a woman who's only ever seen it from the outside."

"Try."

Ashley was quiet for a moment. The closet smelled of toner and cold paper and the faint sweetness of the gum on Mikala's breath, and the daylight through the vent laid a thin pale stripe across the toes of both their shoes, and she found that she could not look at the girl while she said it and so she looked at the stripe instead.

"It comes up through the back of my skull," she said. "Not my skin. Behind the skull, at the base, where the neck joins. Like a—" she turned her hand over, searching— "like someone put a hot wire in me and pulled it taut. And then it's not a wire anymore, it's you. All of you at once. The tightness first, that gathering you do just before—" she heard her own voice and made herself keep going— "and then it breaks, and it doesn't break in your body, it breaks in mine. My cunt clenches around nothing. My thighs shake. I have to hold the wall to stay upright." She let out a breath. "That's what every bit of it was."

Mikala had gone very still beside her. When Ashley finally looked, the girl's face had lost its color and gotten it back somewhere else—high on the cheekbones, a flush that had nothing to do with the corridor. Her mouth was open a little. Her eyes had gone dark around the ice.

"That's not—" Mikala's voice came out thin. She cleared her throat and tried again. "That's not how it's supposed to work. Is it. The books say the bond is a channel. Information. You feel what I feel the way you'd read a gauge."

"The books are written by men who have never had it happen to them."

"Ashley."

"I don't know how it's supposed to work." Ashley turned to face her, and their knees knocked, and neither of them moved them apart. "I've read every paper on mana-linking published in the last forty years and half of them are wrong and the other half are cowardly. What I know is what happens in my body when you—" She stopped. "When you come apart under my hand, I come apart too. Not the same. Not the—the spilling, the mess of it. But the crest. The white. The moment where the world goes quiet and there's nothing in it but the thing you're feeling. I get that. I get it from you, and I get it in me, and I don't have a single word for what that is."

Mikala's hand had tightened around hers, hard enough that Ashley felt the bones of her own fingers press together. The girl was breathing through her mouth now, slow and deliberate, as though she'd forgotten how to do it any other way.

"So when you touched me in the corridor," Mikala said. "When I came against the wall with a man on the other side of the door. You felt that. In your body. You felt me come."

"Yes."

"And you—" Mikala's throat moved. "You didn't. You didn't come. You just stood there and felt me do it and kept your hand steady."

"Somebody had to keep their hand steady."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have." Ashley turned her hand in Mikala's grip until their palms met, and their fingers laced, and she looked at the joined shape of them in the grey light. "I've spent ten years teaching a room full of people to feel nothing they weren't invited to feel. It's a—" she almost laughed— "it's a professional skill. I can hold a thing at arm's length while it burns. I've been doing it since before you were born."

"That's a horrible thing to be good at."

"It's a horrible thing to be good at," Ashley agreed.

Mikala was quiet for a moment. Then she pulled her hand free—Ashley felt the loss of it in her palm like a small cold spot—and turned on the floor, unfolding her knees, and came up onto them so that she faced Ashley properly, close, her hands braced on the shelf behind Ashley's shoulders, her hair falling forward off her neck. The grey stripe of light crossed her collarbone and the hollow of her throat and the small pulse going there.

"Then don't," she said.

"Don't what."

"Don't hold it at arm's length. Not with me. Not now." Her voice had gone low and even, and there was no dare in it, and that was somehow worse than any dare she'd ever thrown. "You've been careful for ten years and it bought you a probation and a locked lab and a man down the hall who thinks I'm a specimen. You said that. You said you were done being careful with me. So be done. Feel it. All of it. Let it burn you and don't put it down."

Ashley looked at her. The girl's face was close enough that Ashley could see the fine grain of her skin, the small chapped place at the corner of her mouth where she'd been chewing her lip, the way her eyes had gone bright and steady and entirely unafraid.

"You don't know what you're asking," Ashley said.

"I'm asking you to stop being a professor for ten minutes and be a woman who wants something." Mikala's hand came off the shelf and found Ashley's jaw, and her thumb pressed just under the bone, and her palm was warm and a little rough from the cold. "I've had you inside my head since the lab. I've felt you want me and I've felt you put it away in a drawer and shut it. I want to know what happens when you don't shut it."

Ashley's breath came out of her uneven. She could feel the bond now—it had been there all along, a low hum under the surface of the morning, and it was not low anymore. It had brightened, come up through the base of her skull, and it was carrying the girl's want into her the way a river carries cold: the heat of her, the ache of her, the way her pulse had quickened and her skin had flushed and her whole body had leaned toward Ashley like a plant turning to a window.

"You feel that," Mikala said. Not a question. Her thumb moved along Ashley's jaw. "You feel what I'm—"

"I feel it." Ashley's voice had gone rough. "You're—God, you're so loud. You're not even touching me and you're—" She closed her eyes. Opened them. "This is a supply closet. There is a man four doors down who is going to walk out of that office in an hour and a half and find us in it."

"Then we have an hour and a half."

"Mikala."

"Ashley." The girl's voice had gone soft and wicked and certain all at once, and her other hand came up and found the lapel of Ashley's blazer and held it. "You told me in the corridor you wanted me shaking when we walked into that room. You told me you wanted me to remember it while he lied to our faces. I'm asking you to remember it too. I'm asking you to feel it the way I feel it. Not at arm's length. Not in a drawer. Here. Now. In a closet that smells like toner."

Ashley sat with her back against the shelf and felt the whole careful architecture of herself—the ten years, the measured words, the arm's length, the drawer—creak and give at the joints.

Then she reached up and took Mikala's wrist, and pulled her hand away from her jaw, and held it between both of hers, and looked at her.

"All right," she said.

Mikala's breath caught.

"All right," Ashley said again, and it came out steadier the second time, and she let go of the girl's wrist and put her hand flat on the center of Mikala's chest instead, over the sternum, over the heart going hard under it. "But you asked for it. So you're going to sit there and you're going to feel what I feel, and you're not going to look away, and you're not going to make a sound."

"I—"

"You're going to make a sound," Ashley said, "and I'm going to put my hand over your mouth, and you're going to like it."

Mikala's eyes went wide and dark and her tongue came out and wet her lower lip, and through the bond Ashley felt the spike of it—the flare, the bright hot jolt—and her own cunt tightened in answer, a slow deep clench, and she had to press her hand harder against the girl's chest to keep herself from moving.

"There," Ashley breathed. "That. Do you feel that? That's mine."

"Ashley—"

"That's what it feels like from my side." She leaned in, close, her mouth at the girl's ear, and her voice dropped to nothing. "Every time you come, that happens in me. Every time. A clench and a pull and a—" she found the word and it was the right one— "a hunger. And then I put it away, because there's a door to knock on, and a man to lie to, and a career to save, and I don't have the time to be a woman who wants something." Her hand slid down from Mikala's chest to her stomach, flat and warm through the thin cotton. "You want me to stop putting it away. So I'm going to stop. And you're going to sit there and take it."

Mikala's hips had already come forward off her heels, seeking, and her hands had found the shelf behind Ashley's shoulders again and were gripping it, and her breath was coming fast and shallow through her nose because she'd clamped her mouth shut, obeying, already obeying.

Ashley looked at her for a long moment. The grey light on her throat. The flush. The hair falling forward. The way she was holding herself still with everything she had.

Then Ashley leaned in and kissed her—not the way she'd kissed her in the corridor, not hungry and hurried. Slow. Deep. Her hand still flat on the girl's stomach, holding her there, and her tongue in the girl's mouth, and through the bond the whole bright flood of it, her own want pouring down the wire, and Mikala made a small desperate sound into her mouth and Ashley swallowed it and did not stop.

When she finally pulled back, Mikala was trembling. Her hands had gone white on the shelf.

"That's what I felt," Ashley said, against her mouth, quiet. "That's every bit of it. Now you know."

Mikala's eyes were open and enormous and fixed on hers, and her mouth was red and her chest was heaving, and she did not say anything clever at all. She just looked at Ashley the way you look at a thing you've been trying to see your whole life and have finally, finally seen.

Then, from down the corridor, a door opened.

Ashley's hand came up and covered Mikala's mouth before the girl could make a sound, and the two of them went still against the shelf, breathing through their noses, listening. Footsteps. Unhurried. A man's tread, measured, passing the closet door without pausing, going on toward the stairs.

Ashley counted them. Nine. Ten. Eleven.

Then the stairwell door opened and closed, and the corridor was quiet again, and the clock above the faculty building's side door said eleven fifty-one.

Ashley took her hand away from Mikala's mouth. The girl's lips were wet where her palm had been.

"He's leaving early," Mikala whispered.

"He's leaving early," Ashley said, and got to her feet, and her knees were not entirely steady, and she did not look at the girl as she straightened her blazer and put her hand on the closet door. "Which means he's not coming back before two. Which means we have the room."

She turned the handle. Then she looked back over her shoulder at Mikala, still on the floor between the toner cartridges, flushed and rumpled and watching her with those enormous eyes.

"Well," Ashley said. "Come on. Let's go humiliate a man with his own filing."