Tess’s warm ochre eyes turned and met mine. She was considering it. I was too. Mostly out of habit, though—it had been a while since I’d had some fresh pussy, and Tess was as fresh as they came. Petite and vivacious, she always seemed to be in heat. As we stood at the wall, sizing each other up, I had half a mind to pull her over and slide my hand down the front of those tight Jordache jeans.
“It’s a nice offer,” I deadpanned, “but I got stuff to take care of.”
I might have been imagining it, but I thought I saw a flash of disappointment in her eyes.
“Some other time, maybe,” she said sweetly.
“We’ll see. Now why don’t you scamper off? I need to talk to your guy.”
Tess gave Arvo a peck on the lips and dashed off. We both stood silently, appreciating her athletic haunches flexing with each jogging step.
“You know,” I said to Arvo, “your girl bears more than a passing resemblance to someone.”
“Yeah,” he answered, “she looks like every wet dream I had in middle school.”
“No, she looks like fucking Biba.”
He tried to laugh, but nothing came out. I must have hit a nerve with that irrefutable observation.
“Not a big deal,” I added. “I understand the attraction, obviously. It’s just . . . a little weird, don’t you think?”
“I’ll hand it to you, Z,” Arvo said ruefully. “It is not easy to make it seem deviant to fuck a smoking hot blonde with a killer ass. But you did it.”
“I just needed to point it out.”
“Did you?”
He was making me feel a little bad about the crap I was throwing at him. I always had to remind myself that despite his athletic prowess and remarkable good looks, Arvo was not as confident as he pretended—and certainly not around me.
“Nothing deviant at all,” I said by way of apology. “At least no more deviant than you normally are. Speaking of which, the more I think about it, the better it sounds to take little Tess for a test drive and see how she purrs.”
“A Tess-drive?”
“That’s fucking lame,” I said, laughing all the same.
“You just say the word, man. She’s got a mouth like an industrial vacuum, I promise.”
“Might take you up on it. Purely academic, though. I need to compare her talents and Biba’s.”
Of course, something was nagging at me. Despite the Dean’s relative quiet over the last couple of weeks, I couldn’t shake his comments to Biba: we fought a long time to rid Stormcloud of the Kings. So you did, Schmidt. So you did.
“Schmidt is going to be a problem,” I muttered as much to myself as to Arvo.
“It’s an easy problem to solve. I keep telling you.”
“I’m not offing the keeper of this school on a hunch. Keep watching him, okay. I need to know if he’s actually maneuvering or just talking big.”
“I mean, he’s definitely got designs, Zeph.”
“Designs don’t matter unless he’s making incursions. And you haven’t seen any provable moves against us, right?”
Arvo didn’t say anything, but his silence said something.
“Right?” I repeated.
“For the most part, I’m sure—”
“I’m not asking for your best fucking approximation, okay? I need to know if you’ve seen anything.”