Chapter 114: Jealous of Who?

[... This is fucking difficult. What the fuck?]

I was halfway up the dormitory tower stairs with a fully loaded tea tray, and my arms were shaking.

The tray held a full teapot, four cups on four saucers, a little pot of honey, a milk jug, and a plate stacked with twelve lemon cakes. Altogether, it was heavier than any sword I’d ever swung. Every time I took a step, the teacups slid a little toward the edge, and every time I corrected it, the milk sloshed.

This was my third trip up the stairs, since the first two had ended in broken china. Pryce had said the stairs to the royal box were very steep. If I showed up at the top with shaking hands and a tray full of spilled tea, there was no way I’d be able to drop it and grab his wrist in time.

So, I was practicing while the rest of my class rehearsed the kiss scene without me.

I tried running Tide through my arms to steady them. The band slid into my wrists, and for about four seconds the tray was perfectly still. Then the band moved down into my legs for the next step, my arms went soft, and a lemon cake rolled off the plate and bounced all the way down the stairs.

"Wait, NO!!!" I lunged after it, and the teapot nearly went with it.

I caught the tray against my chest at the last second. The tea sloshed all over my shirt, and it was hot.

[Every maid in this world deserves a raise. I’m serious. They should all be knighted.]

I was sitting on the landing, wiping tea off my chest, when Fenna came loping up the stairs two at a time.

"Hey! You missed it!" She dropped down next to me and stole a lemon cake. "They did the kiss."

"Oh! Uh... How was it?"

"Good." Fenna chewed thoughtfully. "Long. Serena had her hand on Lily’s lower back the whole time."

She patted my head, took a second lemon cake, and left.

I sat there for a moment. Then, I picked up the tray and started climbing again.

I’d made it up two more floors when Marisol caught up with me, fanning herself with a script.

"Kohaku! You will not believe what you missed!" She grabbed my arm, and the cups rattled. "It was a scandal! It was a sensation! Serena dipped her so low that Lily’s hair touched the floor, and then the bucket broke in the middle of it, and they were both completely soaked, and neither of them stopped! Hugo started applauding and couldn’t stop. Somebody in the second row fainted!"

"Somebody fainted!?"

"Well, she sat down very suddenly. It counts." Marisol’s eyes gleamed. "Darling, if they do it like that on the night, we can sell tickets twice."

She swept off down the stairs, humming.

I made it to the top floor, set the tray down, and leaned against the wall to breathe. That was where Odette found me. She walked up the last few steps very slowly and stopped in front of me with her clipboard.

"Forty-three seconds," she said.

"What?"

"The kiss lasted forty-three seconds. I timed it." She adjusted her glasses. "At around the twenty-second mark, the princess’s hand moved from the knight’s shoulder to the back of her neck. At the thirty-second mark, the knight forgot she was holding a prop sword and dropped it on Hugo’s foot. When it ended, neither of them could look at each other for the rest of the rehearsal. Also, the knight asked me twice whether you were coming back."

She wrote something down, nodded to herself, and went back downstairs.

I stood there with my back against the wall and tea drying on my shirt.

My attention kept bouncing back and forth between two pictures. In the first one, Serena was holding Lily, and Lily’s hand was on the back of her neck. That one made my stomach twist, because Lily was my girlfriend, and I wanted to be the one she held onto like that. In the second one, Lily was kissing Serena for forty-three seconds, and that made my stomach twist too, because Serena had never kissed me for forty-three seconds without getting angry about it halfway through.

In other words, I was jealous of Serena and jealous of Lily at the exact same time, and I didn’t know which one was winning.

Light footsteps came up the stairs, and Lily appeared on the landing.

Her hair was still damp from the bucket. Her face was bright red, all the way up to the tips of her ears, and she was holding her script against her chest with both arms.

"Oh! Kohaku! There you are!"

"Hey, hon." I tried to sound casual. "So, how did the rehearsal go?"

"It was fine!" Lily said, very quickly. Then she looked down at the tray. "Did you make all of these lemon cakes yourself? They look so good! Can I have one? How many did you drop? You have tea all over your shirt! Here, let me help you clean it up!"

She grabbed my hand and started pulling me toward our room, talking the entire way about lemon cakes.

---

That night, Lily kissed me first.

I had barely closed our door behind us when she grabbed the front of my tea-stained shirt with both hands, pulled me down, and pressed her mouth against mine. It was clumsy and hard, and her teeth bumped my lip, but she didn’t stop.

"L-Lily!" I managed, when she finally came up for air.

"Don’t talk!" Her face was bright red, and her eyes were shining. "I’ve been thinking about kissing all afternoon, and I don’t want to think anymore!"

My attention went straight to the obvious question, which was why exactly she’d been thinking about kissing all afternoon. Then she pushed me backward onto my bed and climbed on top of me, and my attention stopped working entirely.

She pulled her nightgown off over her head on the first try. I didn’t even get a chance to help. Then she was tugging at my shirt, and my trousers, and her hands were small and warm and very determined. When she wrapped her fingers around my cock, I jerked so hard the bed creaked.

"Is this right?" she whispered.

"Yes! Very right! Keep going!"

She straddled my hips and sank down onto me slowly, biting her lip the whole way. She was already soaking wet, so hot and tight that I had to grab the sheets. For a second, she just sat there with her hands braced on my chest, breathing hard. Then she started moving.

Lily had never been on top before, so she wobbled a little at first. Luckily, she was a fast learner, the same way she was with everything else. Within a few minutes, she had found a rhythm, and soon after that she was grinding down onto me with her head thrown back, moaning loud enough that someone in the next room banged on the wall. She came with her nails dug into my shoulders, shaking all over, and she didn’t stop moving until I came right after her.

Afterward, she lay sprawled across my chest with her hair everywhere.

For a while, we just breathed. Then, Lily sat up, pulled the blanket around her shoulders, and folded her hands in her lap very neatly.

"Kohaku," she said. "There’s something I want to talk to you about. I thought about it in the bath for a really long time."

[Oh no. The bath. It’s happening again!!!]

My whole body went stiff. This was attempt number three, and this time, I was too tired to tackle her. My legs weren’t working, and my arms had carried a tea tray up the tower stairs five times. I had no moves left.

In other words, I was going to have to sit here and hear it.

I took a deep breath and braced myself.

"You’re the most important person in the world to me," Lily began carefully, "and I would never, ever want to do something that hurt you, or do it behind your back. So, before anything happens, I wanted to ask you properly, because I think that’s what a good girlfriend does. And, um, I know this might sound strange, but ever since the rehearsal, I can’t stop thinking about it, so..."

She took another breath.

"Would it be okay if I kissed Serena for real? Not for the play, I mean, just..."

"YES!"

Lily blinked.

"Yes! Absolutely! Go for it!" I sat straight up. "Okay, a few tips. She’s going to glare at you first. Ignore the glare, it doesn’t mean anything. Don’t say anything nice right before you do it, or she’ll get mad. She bites sometimes, so be ready for that. Also, grab her collar. She likes it when you grab her collar."

Lily stared at me with her mouth open.

"I... I had a whole speech," she said weakly. "I had three more parts. There was a part about trust, and a part about how I’d always come home to you, and I practiced it until the water went cold..."

"Oh! Sorry! Do you want to read the rest anyway?"

"No!" Lily puffed out her cheeks and flopped back onto the pillow. "It doesn’t matter anymore!"

She had asked me whether she could kiss Serena, and she’d clearly expected me to struggle with it.

[Struggle? Is she kidding me!? Lily Everdawn is the perfect heroine I spent an entire summer writing when I was fifteen. Serena Frostfall is the villainess I accidentally turned into my ideal woman. They’re my two favorite characters I’ve ever made, and one of them is asking for my permission to make out with the other one. You think I’m going to get in the way of my two OCs swapping spit? Hell no! Give me a chair and let me watch!]

Then, I remembered the stairwell, and the twisting feeling in my stomach.

That was jealousy, and it had been real. However, it had only shown up because they’d done it without me. Now, Lily had come home and asked me first.

In other words, the jealousy was completely gone, and all that was left was excitement.

Lily was still pouting at the ceiling. After a moment, though, her pout faded into something more thoughtful, and she pulled the blanket up to her chin.

"Then... I’ll go see Serena tomorrow," she said slowly. "For acting advice. Since the kiss in the play has to look really convincing."

"Yeah, dope."