Chapter 119: The Uniform Stays On*

On the next day of the festival, Serena showed up at the café during her first free hour.

She walked through the door in her uniform, with her hair pinned up and a palace-issued schedule folded in one hand. She was obviously only here to sit down somewhere quiet for a while. Then she saw me.

I was carrying a tray of teacups across the room, in the too-tight maid uniform, with my tail swishing out of the brand-new hole in the back of my skirt.

Serena stopped dead in the doorway.

Her eyes went to the headband, then down to my chest, which was still straining every single button on the blouse. After that, they went to the tail. They stayed on the tail for a long time.

[Hex said she’d lose her mind. Hex was right.]

"Welcome to our café, Lady Frostfall~" I gave her a little curtsy and a wink. I mean, I knew damn well I looked cute as hell. "Table for one?"

Serena walked past me without a word and sat down at the corner table, facing the wall. I followed her with a menu.

"Tea," she said, without looking at it. "Black."

I brought her black tea. She took one sip and pushed it back across the table.

"Too hot."

I brought her another one, and I let it cool for a full minute first. She sipped it, and her jaw tightened.

"Too cold."

The third cup, I timed perfectly. I set it down in front of her and bent over a little to place the saucer, and my tail swung around and brushed against her arm. Serena went completely rigid.

"The cup," she said through her teeth, "is the wrong shape."

"The wrong shape!?" I held it up. "It’s a cup! They’re all the same shape!"

Across the room, Marisol was watching us over the cash box with one eyebrow raised. Fenna, at her usual table, had stopped eating to stare.

"I’m afraid I need to explain to you how to do your job," Serena said.

Then, Serena stood up so fast her chair scraped. She grabbed me by the wrist, dragged me across the café, past Lily, past the counter, and through the little door behind it into the storage closet. She slammed it shut behind us.

It was dark in there, and it smelled like flour and tea leaves. Shelves of jam jars were pressing into my back.

I reached for the buttons on my blouse.

"Don’t," Serena snapped. "Leave it on."

"Oh! Um, okay! The uniform stays!"

"Good." Her red eyes were glittering in the dark. "Now, take your thing out."

I blinked.

"... My thing?"

"Your cock, you mutt." She was breathing hard and blushing. "Take it out."

"W-What!!!"

I lifted my skirt with shaking hands and pulled down my underwear. My cock was already half hard, and it got the rest of the way there the second Serena sank down onto her knees in front of me.

She looked up at me, glaring, with her mouth an inch away.

"Not a word," she said. "If you say anything, I’ll bite it off."

Then she took me into her mouth.

[HOOOOOLY!]

Her lips were hot, and her tongue was rough and pressed flat underneath me. She took me deep right away, fast and rough, with one hand wrapped tight around the base and the other gripping the back of my thigh hard enough to bruise. When she pulled back, she sucked hard on the head, and my knees almost gave out.

I grabbed onto the shelf behind me, and a jam jar rattled.

Serena kept her eyes on mine the whole time. She was still glaring at me, as if she was furious at me for making her do this, while she worked her mouth up and down my cock faster and faster. Her free hand slid up from my thigh and found the base of my tail, and she squeezed it.

I clapped my hand over my own mouth to keep from screaming.

It didn’t take long after that. I came with my back pressed into the shelves and my whole body shaking, and Serena held me there and swallowed every drop without looking away.

When it was over, she stood up, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and straightened her uniform. Her face was completely calm, except for the bright red tips of her ears.

"Your tea service is terrible," she said.

Then she opened the door and walked out.

I stayed exactly where I was, slumped against the shelves with my skirt still bunched in one fist and my tail limp on the floor. Out in the café, I heard the bell over the door jingle as she left.

Serena Frostfall had just dragged me into a closet, refused to let me take off a maid uniform, and gone down on me herself, and then she’d complained about the tea.

In other words, I didn’t understand that woman at all.

---

That evening, Lily dragged both of us into the second-years’ haunted house.

It took up a whole classroom building on the east side of the academy. The windows were covered in black cloth, there were fake cobwebs over the door, and every few minutes, someone inside screamed loudly enough for the whole line to hear it.

"I’ve wanted to do this all day!" Lily had one of my hands in her left and one of Serena’s in her right, and she was practically bouncing. "Everybody says it’s the scariest thing at the festival!"

"It’s a classroom," Serena said flatly. "With sheets in it."

"Then you won’t mind going in!"

Serena opened her mouth to argue, looked at Lily’s face, and closed it again.

The second-year at the door handed us a single candle in a jar and waved us through. The door shut behind us, and everything went dark except for the little circle of candlelight.

Lily immediately let go of our hands and grabbed our arms instead. She wrapped herself around my left arm and Serena’s right, so tightly that the three of us were squashed together in a row.

I knew this scene. I’d written it at least a dozen times. The heroine goes into the haunted house, something jumps out, she shrieks, and she grabs her crush’s arm. Then the two of them look at each other in the dark, and their hearts start pounding for a completely different reason.

This time, I was the crush. However, I was also standing in a pitch-black building with my ears flat against my head, and I was absolutely terrified of ghosts. As soon as something rattled somewhere to the right, I grabbed the nearest arm I could find, which was Serena’s.

In other words, I was living my own cliché from both sides at once.

"Let go of me," Serena hissed.

"Nope!"

We shuffled forward. Something wet dripped on my ear. A cold breeze blew across my ankles from nowhere. Somewhere ahead, a chain dragged slowly across the floor.

"There are three of them up ahead," Serena muttered. "Behind the curtain on the left. I can smell them. They’re students. They’ve been sweating under those sheets for hours."

"How can you possibly smell that?"

"I have a good nose."

Lily squeezed both of our arms tighter.

"So, if you know where they are, then you’re not scared at all, right, Serena?"

"Of course not. It’s a classroom with sheets in..."

The curtain on the left flew open, and a ghost lunged out at us, howling.

Serena punched it.

It was one clean, straight punch, right in the middle of the sheet. The ghost flew backward through the curtain with a thump and a loud "OOF!" and landed somewhere in the dark with a crash.

There was a long silence.

"...He startled me," Serena said stiffly. "It was a reflex."

"Serena!" Lily let go of my arm and ran to the curtain. "I’m so sorry! Are you okay in there?"

"I’m fine," the ghost wheezed from the floor. "Please keep moving."

We kept moving.

After that, it got much darker. The candle flickered and nearly went out. Lily came back and wrapped herself around both of us again, and this time, the three of us were squashed together so tightly that I couldn’t tell where one person ended and the next one began.

I spent the next few minutes trying to work out whose hand was where. There was a hand on my left arm, and I was pretty sure that one was Lily’s. There was a hand on my waist, which could have been Lily’s or Serena’s. Someone’s fingers brushed my tail, and I had no idea who that was. Someone else’s hand was holding mine, and I wasn’t even sure it was a person.

[Is that Lily? Is that Serena? Is that a GHOST???]

Something screamed in the dark, and all three of us flinched at once.

Then, a hand slid down the back of my skirt and squeezed my ass.

"EEP!!!" I jumped so high that my ears nearly touched the ceiling. "WHO WAS THAT!?"

"Who was what?" Lily asked.

"Somebody grabbed my butt!"

"It wasn’t me!" Lily said at once.

"It wasn’t me," Serena said at the exact same time.

Neither of them let go of my arms. We stood there in the dark for a moment, in the little circle of candlelight, all three of us breathing hard.

Lily’s face was turned away from me, toward the next curtain. Serena was staring straight ahead with her jaw set. Both of them looked completely innocent.

In other words, one of them was lying to me, and I was never going to find out which one.