Page 55 of Five to Love Him
“We were just thinking.” “Our new boss looks good in them, and we were thinking you’d look better.”
“Yeah, right. Okay, where is that book with the school rules? I have to show my resting bitch face at my new job.”
“Your face is beautiful,” they mumbled, but one of them stood to get me my book while another held another strawberry to my mouth.
I ate it, just because the sex had been that good, and I deserved a treat. Then I grabbed the last one, turned, and fed it to the hive, who kissed my fingers and said thank you over his cup of tea.
***
The next few days went by in a flash. I’d always had the feeling that my life had been on pause, but now with the hive around, I could tell it was moving forward rapidly.
Work was…odd. Not so much the actual secretarial part of it, the parts where I got to organize Headprincipal Farrow and reminded him of meetings and whatnot. A lot of that needed to be done by walking over to him and telling him because Farrow was selectively online and had a real talent for making his old PC crash or come up with weird errors.
After I’d handled several of those crashes, I found another gift basket on my desk consisting of sweets and bottled water in various flavors.
The IT Department is grateful for everything you have done, read the card that had come with it. It wasn’t signed, only had their email address.
All of that was normal enough. The odd things were in the enrollment requests and all the interactions I had with the other teachers and the students, except for Adam and Joyce, who managed to be actually helpful.
“No one is really sure, and she doesn’t smell like much, but we think that Ms. Henderson is a mimicry,” Joyce told me, something I’d never have known by myself. She had several more bits of information about other students and teachers on top of all of that.
Adam had decided that coffee runs were cool and that he had to go to a coffee shop outside the school, because bosses like fancy stuff, and they had decided I was their boss.
But nothing beat watching the hive and the two werewolves, especially when the hive was there with three or more.
With my afternoon macchiato, some three weeks in, I watched the lot of them one too-hot afternoon.
“Mr. Hive,” Joyce said, her eyes downcast.
The hivelings had found a table for my office, just a small one, but big enough for four chairs. They currently occupied two while Adam was sitting in a third, and Joyce had walked up next to them, a binder clutched to her.
“That’s not our name.”
“But Secretary Hill said it’s fine.”
The hive sighed, and I mouthed sorry to the one who was sitting in the chair across from my desk and reading over the homework I had done for Instructor Arick’s class.
“Then it’s fine. What is it?”
“Well,” Joyce said, keeping her gaze down and pouting a little, something I’d come to recognize as typical werewolf submission or wanting to be praised.
The hive sighed, but only with one, which told me they didn’t actually mind. “Is it math again?”
“Yes!” Joyce bounced back and forth on her heels. “They said summer term was going to be easier, but I don’t get this.”
For full boarders, St. Auguste allowed extra classes that would let them graduate faster down the line. It was a pretty flexible system, and there were more students who took advantage of it than I would have thought.
Adam, watching Joyce happily taking advantage of the hive’s math skills, slurped the remainder of his iced coffee.
“If the principal hears this, you’ll be written up,” the hive said to him.
Adam put his almost empty cup on the table. “Sorry, Mr. Hive.”
They looked up from my homework again, their unimpressed expression failing to make me feel guilty.
I mouthed the next sorry with some exaggeration, and they went back to reading over what I’d written, almost looking like they were smiling to themself.
“This is just algebra,” a hiveling told Joyce after she’d pulled up the final chair and shown them her binder.
