The Book of Firsts

Forty

Friday brought a still morning, heavy with frost, followed by a day of gusting winds. I scurried straight to the summer house door and whisked myself inside, shuddering. Rin handed me a cup of tea without a word, and I clutched it through my gloves, then sat down on an upright chair he’d placed next to the heater.

"Your nose might be a little blue."

"This wind."

My teeth were chattering, and I watched with approval as Rin carefully nudged a draft stopper in place before the door, and then wound something around the window latches to keep them from rattling. He placed a towel along the base of the window, then sighed, and came to sit on the couch near me.

"Best I can manage," he said. "Short of bringing a half dozen heaters."

"It’s not too bad," I said, drinking the tea in quick sips. "I just have to get the chill out."

"Here," he said, handing me something black and white and warm.

"What?" I examined it, then laughed and hugged it. A hot water bottle in a panda-patterned cover. "You’ve put a lot of thought into this, huh?"

"There seemed little likelihood of you being naked in this weather without sufficient heating," Rin said, picking up a cup and then moving some blankets over his legs.

"Close to none," I agreed, tucking the hot water bottle inside my pullover. "Do you actually want to take your clothes off right now?"

"I want to know if you still have those socks."

"Oh?" I grinned at him. "I knew that fantasy costume challenge was yours. So, one of your white shirts and a pair of thigh-length socks, huh?"

He stirred, then took my near-empty cup away and pulled me over so I was sitting sideways on his lap. "Answer the question, Cheshire."

"I could be wearing them right now," I said, and felt him go still.

"You’re not," he said, after a moment.

"I am wearing thermal underwear," I announced. "In a quite pleasant shade of plum."

"Not for much longer," he said, and began stripping me with no mind for the cold, but tucked us both under the blankets once we were bare.

The hot water bottle was trapped between my back and the couch, which kept a part of me warm until Rin heated up the rest of me. The room temperature still didn’t make the move to the upright chair attractive, but I didn’t protest when Rin shrugged off the blankets and drew me to my feet. He sat down again immediately, and I settled down on top of him. Rin was just magic in on-top positions.

"No jokes this time?" he asked.

"None." I tested moving on him, watching his expression. "It’s occasionally worth being serious."

"Sometimes I doubt you’re ever serious, Cheshire," Rin said, so softly I barely caught the words.

We both knew our encounters were light-hearted for good reason, so I didn’t answer him, just leaning forward to kiss him. Rin responded by pulling me even closer, and kept his arms locked around me so that I ground against him. It was so satisfactory, and though the close hold meant I could no longer watch his reaction, I gloated privately when he outright groaned with pleasure.

The cold crept back too quickly in the aftermath, turning the sweat on my back and brow clammy, but I didn’t move, staying with head tucked against Rin’s throat, arms wrapped around his neck, listening to him breathing. Nor was he relaxing his hold.

Before either of us was driven to move by the chill, a notification on Rin’s phone sounded. Not one of the cat noises Bran had built into the Cheshire app, or the very subdued chime that occasionally sounded, but a brief rat-tat that made Rin glance in the direction of his bag.

"Urgent?" I asked, unwinding my arms.

"No, just Kyou." He let go of me with a sigh. "But I suspect we’ll have you sick again if we stay sitting here."

"I’m quite healthy, usually."

"Tell that to someone who didn’t have a fun two hours waiting to risk calling you after Lania skipped a Student Council meeting because you weren’t answering your phone."

"Is that why Kyou called me that night? I was wondering how he knew I was sick."

"Picture all three of us listening to that very odd conversation and trying to decide if you were lucid."

"That was a perfectly sensible conversation," I said, heading to the sink for a little clean up.

"Perhaps, but you sounded very strange. Slurred and vague and not at all yourself."

That didn’t match my memory, but I decided to accept his probably sharper recollection. "Lucky I was in hospital."

"That did save us from foolishly trying to ride to your rescue." He was looking at his phone. "What about the Mirion would make Kyou ask me to spank you?"

I laughed, but only said: "You’d have to ask him."

The sink was so convenient for cleaning up, for all I sometimes felt awkward scrubbing myself with a warm wet hand towel before an audience. Though I’d noticed they would all turn away to give me a minute or two of privacy at critical moments. Rin was half-dressed and paging through images on his phone when I turned to find something to put on. I pulled on my tartan underwear and plum thermals, snagged a couple of blankets and arranged myself beside him to look at the Mirion shortlist.

"Ah," Rin said eventually, increasing magnification on an underwater photograph. "Carr called you about the shortlist not simply because he was riding on a bubble of high spirits."

"I must be much more recognisable than I expected, despite all the SCUBA gear. Hopefully the organisers put it on big posters somewhere my parents can see. Though they’re supposed to be heading off to a mine site when the snow melts, so the chances are low."

"You enjoy surprising people, don’t you Cheshire?"

"Setting things up and waiting for the payoff is the best," I said. "My dad thinks I enjoy it a little too much."

"I understand Kyou’s urge to spank you. Are you sure you wouldn’t enjoy that?"

"Would you?"

"Possibly. So long as you were on the receiving end."

"I don’t see what about being photographed by Carr would prompt any kind of punishment," I said, gesturing for him to continue viewing the rest of the shortlist. "Is this part of this artistic rivalry Kyou has with Carr?"

"Photography isn’t one of Kyou’s areas. This is more that Carr’s been able to do things Kyou can’t risk, though now enormously balanced by being able to witness you turning Carr down." Rin laughed. "I truly think Kyou and Carr will end up better friends because of you."

"I still don’t fully understand why they fell out."

"Ah, well, Carr is—" He paused. "Actually, I’d be interested to know your opinion of Carr. Would you date him if Lania wasn’t a factor?"

"I doubt he’d date me in a friends with benefits way. And I don’t think our personalities align enough for me to be serious. He’s…conservative is the wrong word for a blue-haired somewhat soulful artist, but he has a traditional streak. There’s plenty of things I like about Carr, but I’m more inclined to enjoy hiring body doubles than Carr’s approach to bullying, which I think may have been a few quiet words of disappointment in Sirocco’s direction."

"Ineffectual," Rin murmured.

"Hm, I don’t know. Carr is a natural mediator who has a habit of staying out of things, but I don’t think he’s incapable. Is ineffectual the reason Kyou has issues with him?"

"No. Carr thinks Kyou is going to abandon art to follow a financial career. Kyou thinks Carr—who will inherit a fortune and is entirely supported by his family—has never been in a situation where he hasn’t been able to follow his heart, and so was irritated when Carr started being disappointed at him. And, being Kyou, instead of explaining, he started goading Carr. Would you like to see Lania and Carr together?"

"I wonder. You and I might find Lania’s ability to recite The Lego Movie from end to end just a little bit adorable, but would Carr? Does he even know she’s pure gamer geek? And would Lania be able to cope with Carr’s most eligible whatever? She’s not strong against social pressure, so unless Carr changes somewhat, I don’t think they’d work out. Of course, Carr’s not shown any signs of return interest, so it’s all a moot point."

"She might get him on the rebound."

I raised my eyebrows. "Katerina might get him on the rebound, too. Which of them has higher odds?"

"Lania. Completely. Carr isn’t so stupid."

"But—"

I broke off, because an alert had popped on Rin’s phone, and he’d immediately checked it, whole body tensing. Then he sighed, disappointed, and sat back.

"You’ve set up another hidden camera?" I asked, watching as Vicky walked into a room containing three office desks and put a pile of papers on the largest.

"We’re hoping the next trap is in one of the obvious places we’re monitoring."

"The school’s been very clear about its increased security, so perhaps whoever it is has been scared off."

"Never finding out who did that to us would be a lifelong irritation," Rin said, dropping his phone on the coffee table and turning to me. "Time to work off some frustration, Cheshire."

I hadn’t expected to start again, but at least under the blankets I wasn’t so reluctant to shed my layers, and Rin himself was very warm to tangle with. His need to work off energy did mean I arrived at Art Club well after everyone else. The whole room buzzed, everyone busy, chatting, having fun, and getting a lot of paint everywhere.

"Almost thought you weren’t coming, Mika," Lania said, turning from a poster that seemed to have transferred its every colour onto her face.

"I had to steel myself to walk outside," I said, hanging my scarf and outer coat among the many by the door. "What’s today’s project?"

"Yours is still your personal project, Mika," Carr said, walking over with a smile. "Let me help you get it down."

Carr being graceful and avoiding any post-rejection awkwardness was only to be expected, so I smiled back at him and went to fetch the step stools from the storeroom.

"You’ve made a lot of progress," he said, after we set it on a table as far from the centre of activity as possible. "And it’s even more incredible than I expected. I never guessed you’d do the cabling with string and thread."

"It makes it a more fragile model, but there’s no real way to do a suspension bridge just using construction foam and paper. Not one that I’d want to show people, anyway. I went through a string art phase, which gave me a foundation before I moved on to cabling."

"What’s string art?" Rick asked, coming closer to admire, but not near enough to risk his paint-daubed self coming into contact. "Like macramé?"

"No, you create shapes using nails and string stretched between them. It gives a nice Bézier curve effect."

"I don’t know what that is, but I’m sure it’s pretty."

"Maths," Lania said, coming over, but again stopping a cautious distance away. "Knowing Mika, that’s probably why she did the string art. I can’t believe how much progress you’ve made, Mika. Do you think you’ll finish today?"

"The bridge, yes," I said. "Then next week I’ll have fun making little models of all the buildings on the foreshore."

With only another week until the school festival, everyone was too busy to stop working for long. In a noisy environment, it took me a little while to get into the right headspace, but I did so by rechecking all the measurements, and turning the laying out of my tools into a small ritual. Model building will always be one of my favourite things, and I was particularly enjoying recreating the Sunseeker Bridge.

The Mirion was an international award, and one of the largest art prizes in Helios, so it wasn’t a surprise to me when the Principal himself came down to congratulate Carr. It did make me wonder how Kyou had found out a few hours earlier than Carr’s in-room fan club. Luckily my model was safely back on the cupboard when celebrations boiled over, since some of the excitement washed over onto me as the subject of the photograph.

All things considered, I still skipped the trip to the Tokley Centre. Carr was graceful, but I was sure he could use a little more moving-on time.