Page 50 of Midsummer Phoenixes
“Oh? What about woodchipper jokes?”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. So you’re not scared at all, being here, meeting the students of Freak High?”
Tate stopped in his tracks and gave me a shocked look. “I don’t think you want to call anyone here a freak? I mean, you wouldn’t want to call anyone a freak to their face, right?”
I pretended to consider that. “Right. The next time I see a proud supernatural calling themselves a freak, I’ll tell them that’s insensitive.”
Tate paled a little, his eyes going wide. My little rat, confronted with a dead end.
“No, I mean, uh, if you put it like that, I mean, it’s just that I thought…” He cracked a smile. “As you can see, I’m still super new to this. I guess it’s easier, understanding this world if your boyfriend is part of it.”
Was it? I’d shown Amory things, hadn’t I? Well, I’d shown him around a little bit. I wasn’t going to expose him to the likes of the triglav brothers or chimerae arguing with themselves, that was out of the question. He was making friends with Young Hawthorne though, and that was already a lot more than anyone needed, on a good day.
“I’m really trying my best,” I told Tate, and it was the fucking truth. I rubbed the back of my head, tried looking slightly apologetic as a sort of peace offering.
Tate nodded. “We all are. I mean, there was this one lady last time, she got mugged but this cab driver sees it happen and jumps out of her cab, only the driver has scales on her arms, and the lady sees them. One thing leads to another, and she’s here, discovering a whole new world with the rest of us.” He lifted a finger. “With a lot more job opportunities. I mean, who would have thought, right?”
We resumed walking across the echoey hallways that still got a remarkable amount of daylight. Benches framed the wide halls of Freak High’s basement on either side, and outside of rooms, digital screens showed the schedule for the respective room while the signage continued to make getting lost near impossible.
“Wow, extra job opportunities. That’s so exciting,” I lied. “Do you think it would bother you, working with supernaturals?”
Tate shook his head. “Oh, not at all! I think that would be so cool. I mean, sometimes, they will hire people to just do errands for them because they can’t pass, and I think that is lovely. And my Roomie said there’s really a big community here, and they just need people for all kinds of stuff. I mean, apparently there’s a whole secret force of cab drivers, and sometimes, they will hire a human in the know. Of course you have to know specific locations and stuff.” He leaned over to me once more. “My roomie said there’s even a place below the city, the sacred underground. He said maybe he’d take me, but I asked the instructor, and they do excursions as well, to the relevant places. Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that just the coolest?”
“You think the secret underground sounds cool?”
“It’s the sacred underground. I mean, I don’t know if there is worship there as well, but maybe? And yeah, I think it’s rad.”
I shrugged. “Well, they do have good food down there.”
Tate stared as we went left. “You’ve been? How was it? Is it really dark down there? I imagine a steampunk world, but my roomie says I’m an idiot.”
“Depending on what kind of shifter he is, that might just be his way of trying to get in your pants, Tate. And the freaks have totally discovered electric lights. Everyone’s so over this Victorian steampunk shit, you have no idea.”
He flushed again. “No, we’re really just roommates. He’s simply being nice and—he’s being nice, is all.”
“Well, if he’s trying to be nice, why don’t you ask him really nicely to take you down there and see what happens? Worst case, he says no.”
And here I was, giving my lab rat relationship advice. This was what things had come to. It was what being abandoned by my lover all day did to me.
Ah, if only Amory had allowed me to lather him in whipped cream and decorate him with strawberries before licking him clean and fucking him into oblivious delirium… I knew that was my fantasy more than his, but I was allowed to have my fantasies, couldn’t really help them forming with him serving me pie each night and smiling like that…
Yup, I was slipping into yet another fantasy as we were approaching the cafeteria. I evened out my breathing, tried not to think of Amory walking up to my table in his tight server uniform with the cute apron and the very straight bow tie.
The cafeteria was indeed nice. There were tables inside the cafeteria itself, but also in the hallway that widened here as it intersected with another. Each little table had a little flower in the center, a real bloom, because that’s how fancy the school was.
Through the glass-fronted cafeteria, I could see they also had those fancy little tables set out in the courtyard, the one used by all the students, but especially the live-ins.
But. Freak High had apparently discovered Pride as another holiday to celebrate and to decorate for, at least if the cafeteria was any indication.
“This is nice, isn’t it?” Tate said as he walked in ahead of me. The door stood open, inviting to everyone.
“Sure.”
“They’ve had these up all month,” Tate said, indicating the streamers strung across the interior tables, the little flags stuck into the flowerpots in here, and the menus in rainbow colors.
It was so gaudy, I wondered if Young Hawthorne had had a hand in this.
