"Young Mistress Serica, you have a guest," came the muffled voice of my landlady, Prava, from down the attic stairs.
Young Mistress. Rich.
I rolled out of my cot and called back, "Thank you, down in a moment!"
I held nothing but pleasantries for the ex-schoolteacher turned shopkeeper. The rent she charged was a pittance, yet at the same time, it was as much as I could afford.
Who even has this address?
The chill loft air pebbled my chest against my rough nightshirt. It slid off my shoulders, past my tits, down to my hips, and half-rigid cock. With a wiggle, it fell to the floor. I grimaced, gazing down at my mismatched curves and lines, and set about dressing. My brown leather skirt, white blouse, bralette, and harness sat on the corner chair. Mud-caked boots with thick gray socks lay beneath it, the completing pieces to my entire wardrobe.
The mystery of my visitor's identity remained.
I didn't tell anyone.
My family couldn't apologize if they couldn't find me, and despite how hardened I felt, I didn't trust myself not to forgive them.
As I buttoned my shirt, I found a sleeve torn. A box or shelf must have caught it at the warehouse the day prior. The setback was unsurprising; each shift left me senseless, trudging home in a daze.
I bottomed the stairs and rounded a trio of corners to reach the town-home's entryway, knotting my black hair into a ponytail. Prava's artisanal quilts and woolen blankets, hanging from the walls, framed a familiar small figure. She wore a similar white blouse and a teal pleated skirt, her thick thighs poking out underneath.
"Cora?" I said and receded a step. I hadn't seen her in three months.
Cherryblossom pink hair, short and loose, spun, and she met my gaze.
The two of us grew up together, reciting letters, playing games of tag, shopping, and discussing boys.
Tulk Breadworks, her father's bakery, sat on the same street as my childhood home. Our families traded off hosting dinners every month.
"Why'd you find me?" My voice spilled. 'Why,' not 'how.' I already reckoned 'how', and kicked myself for not having guessed.
How did I forget?
"I told no one I was coming," she said, running her thumb along the edge of a quilt she was inspecting before I arrived.
"That's good, but why?" My stomach rolled, and the walls loomed too close.
"I..." her freckled cheeks sunk as she searched for the right words, "I'm playing mailman."
A marigold yellow envelope sat on the counter behind her. I approached it and made out my name, scrawled in tightly wound cursive, followed by the bakery's address.
"Is this?" I didn't have to ask.
The return address read Université Bloom - École de Tactique.
We both dreamed of correspondence from Bloom. Every girl around here did.
Tacticienne.
My chest thumped.
That was the plan.
I would have studied Esprit and their bonded capabilities, as well as how to best leverage them in combat and competition. With the title of Bloom Tacticienne, I could scratch my itch, tell my peers they were doing it wrong, and hold the needed authority for them to respect my word.
I never applied.
"Cora..." Heat pooled in my chest. "I didn't want you to do this. I didn't submit an essay. How did you?"
"The- the applications we filled out together, and the writing was yours, the study plan you wrote for me... I only had to move a few pieces around." She forced a smile and snatched up the letter, "Promise you won't trash it."
Her study plan.
Pride warred with betrayal. I put my heart into those pages, detailing how exactly she could secure admission as a combatante. Her last-minute switch from pursuing admission as a cuisinière, motivated by the loss of her mother, seemed an impossibility. The document set her on a course of diet, physical training, and weapons drills, complete with disciplinary measures to hold her accountable.
She was forcing my hand. It took me months to come to terms with my decision, letting go of that part of myself. It meant a plain, menial life, holding my tongue at every purposeless action that made me want to scream. It meant letting another take my spot as captain of an équipe, a squad of student peers, that should have been mine.
I couldn't show my face there. Instinct kicked in, and my palm shot to her wrist, wrapping it tight.
"Just hand it over."
Without missing a beat, she hip-checked me and bolted for the door. The counter broke my fall, and I dropped into a three-point crouch, only to catch sight of pink cotton-clad ass under her fluttering, pleated teal skirt. It took me a moment to break my daze. A familiar heat rose in my throat.
Okay bunny.
"You're a terrible mailman!" I said and pushed off after her.
"Ser, I'm sorry," she said, zigging around an apple cart and onto a stone path leading into a park.
The grass still carried frost. She showed marked improvement, but still couldn't beat me in a foot race. With every other step, she let out a puff of hot steam.
"Too late!" I tightened the space between us as she wound deeper into tightly pressed hedges, "When I catch you-"
"Eep!" She struggled with her collar, slipping the envelope into her shirt, "I just want you to read it!"
A swat of her skirt released her shirt-tail, and she pushed into a harried sprint, each breath marked with a wheeze.
The trail deposited us into a secluded clearing. A gazebo sat at its center with numerous pairs of initials scored into its white paint. I pinned her with my gaze, "Hand it over."
"I'm so sorry," she set her palm to a beam, "Not for the letter, for... you know..."
The bathhouse.
"You don't have to..." I blamed them for their reactions, not Cora.
With wet eyes, she scrunched her other hand into the pleats of her skirt, "I took things too far. I had to make it right."
She couldn't be more wrong. What she'd done placed as the best thirty seconds of my life, before it all went to shit, and now it hung from my chest like a tether, testing me with a yank whenever she dwelled on the event. That's how she found me.
"You think I wanted to stop you?" I asked as I ground a heel into the dirt.
"Things have calmed down," she said, "No one's mentioned it in weeks."
"I don't care." It didn't matter if they forgot; I refused to.
Her head dropped, a mop of loose, frizzy pink. She toed her way toward me, and my hands rose to needle fingers into it. Her lips trembled against my shoulder, "I wasn't thinking straight."
When you erased both of our virginities in a crowded bathing-hall...
Short, soft, she felt like home, the home I couldn't let myself return to. I simply couldn't, after waiting in a cell for three days, only to be sprung by a teacher I'd all but forgotten instead of my parents.
"I... I'm sorry, Serica, the way you were pushing me, all the time we spent together, I thought you wanted me to..."
To secure acceptance, live up to your mother's legacy, a pudgy baker's daughter doesn't make a combattante.
She had thinned out; I could feel her ribs, plump, not pudgy. She hadn't let up. I tried to quit, and she refused to let me.
My jaw held clenched, holding onto pain from the fallout, holding onto spite over her claiming control in my life.
Just tell her. My need was there, held in check behind spite and shame. I wrestled against it, holding her in silence. She waited, didn't press, as I grappled with my reservations. I couldn't forget, but I could set it aside.
Wrenching my lips apart, I let cool air flood my chest, let the fire exit.
"I loved it."
Her chest shook, breasts bulging against my own, and I bit hard into my lip. "Everyone blamed you," she said.
Yeah, they did.
I couldn't hold it against her. She tried to take responsibility. No one accepted it. As the "man" in the situation, I bore the fault. They claimed me "the aggressor". The optics were terrible, the geometry of it. Everyone thought she was covering for my mistake.
"I'm not mad at you," I said, thick paper crinkling between us as she pressed close, soft, warm, like a loaf of freshly baked bread.
Flour and yeast, her scent, her presence, ignited within me. Stooping, I pressed my lips to hers, and she opened herself to me. She shuddered as my tongue swam in her heat. Sliding down my side, she placed a hand on my hip and gripped her fingers tight to the bone. Her leg wrapped around my other side, and she broke our seal to whimper, "I hate how it ended."
My mind drifted back to slick tile and lavender-scented water. In that moment, eyes closed, my arms stretched wide across the communal bath's shelf, my length throbbed in her palm. I struggled to pinpoint exactly when she took me inside of her. Her gasping and shaking pulled my eyes open to the realization of what she'd given me. My breath caught, trembling beneath her. Her warmth, her soft need in that moment, matched the tender caress of her mouth in the present.
I pulled myself from my thoughts, refusing to let their approaching tragic conclusion sour the event unfolding before me.
"So do I," I said and dipped back in, writhing my tongue against hers. Her breath puffed so sweetly. My lungs quaked, and we lowered to the gazebo's chipped floor, onto my back. I wanted this, a second chance. Months prior, she gave me something precious, her maidenhood. She claimed me, and it ended in disaster. I wanted that bold action to have a payoff, for both of us.
A flush rose on her cheeks. Warmth beneath her skirt radiated into my lap.
My dick strained and bent, wrestling for freedom, and my breasts ached.
The rise of her butt slid under my palm. Pleats rippled beneath my fingers, "Gods, I missed you..."
The button of my harness, the sheath that held me in place, released. My cock sprang free against the soft leather of my skirt and her leg beyond it. She gasped, then a crow called, and it hit me. Again, she and I were in public.
Why here?
"Ser..." she said, and my mind raced with repercussions. "Nnnh-" she shook against me, "I don't trust myself to... just- tell me what you want... I'll-"
"More," I parted my mouth around her neck, tasting salt and flour. She ground herself against me, the movement dragging my skirt up my thighs. Morning chill kissed the bottom of my length and her heat the top, plush flesh rubbing against it. My core tensed, riding out the sensation. I tried to calm myself.
"This- this is what you want?" She said, working fingers into the band of her panties.
"Cora- Yes..." I rocked my hips into her, fingernails biting into her ass.
She pulled her left leg loose from the pink cotton, letting it dangle from her right foot, then walked herself up to her knees. My cock flagged with her, sliding to the crook of her thigh, trailing a smear of my excitement.
"Oh-" She gripped my shaft and dragged me to her hot slip. I held my breath, focusing on the sensation as she circled her hips, easing more and more weight onto me.
That slide matched my memory, somewhere between honey and oil.
"Fffuuuh-" My teeth ground as she parted, descending onto my tip, "Cora..."
I pressed into my feet, and my hips rose into the air, claiming more space within her. Her palms hit planks, and a seconds-long shudder tore through her. "Nnhhh- more- pleasse..."
I lost control of my pace and let my hips do what they wanted, making a wet, trembling mess of her. Legs shaking, she begged and moaned. A thick drip of her slick rolled down my sack, and my stomach clenched, "Fuhh-"
I pulsed, and a line of lightning rolled to the tip of my cock. She rubbed the soft flesh of her mound against my pelvis and walked her hands down to my breasts, only to have them swatted away. In that moment, I was all cock, rigid, not soft flesh to be groped. Her arms rose, squeezed tight to her chest, "S-sorry...haaah~♥ My...my..."
"My what?"
"Mmmm...muh-man~" I winced at the word, but in this moment, it felt right.
Pressure built at my tip, roiled, "I'm- fuh, I'm gonna..."
She heaved steam, rolled her hips, "Now Ser...please~♥!" Her ribs popped within my hold, breath stammered, "Ohhh-Gaaaa~♥"
"Fuuhhh-" I flooded into her, pressing hard against her back wall. Thick liquid pulsed in waves and rolled along my length. Cora lay collapsed, a wild heaving mess, clinging to me.
"Mmmh-" she struggled to catch her breath, wheezing softly, "You going to- carve our initials?"
"We need more evidence against us?" I asked and fumbled at the clasp of the holstered pocketknife harnessed on my outer thigh.
My chest still heaved, blouse clinging tight to its sweat. Sparks rolled through me in waves. I pulled the knife free and slipped it into her palm, then she walked herself up with her fists to sit on my lap. The shift in her position was deliciously wet and sticky, each fold of her interior adding spackled electric texture.
She carved at the beam, scratching "ST + CT" into its length, "There...You'll- read the letter now- right?"
I held no fight, going flaccid inside her; the reality of the situation set in. Heading to Bloom meant seeing familiar faces, the ones I watched sour in the days leading up to my departure.
With her at my side, that moat felt crossable.
"Yeah- I will."
She rolled onto her side, lay her head against my shoulder, and pulled the crumpled envelope from her blouse.
I tore a top corner from the envelope, inserted a finger, and slit it to the other end. My throat clenched at the chance of rejection. The sensation surprised me.
I gave this up.
Cora's heel traced up and down my calf as I read. The text read standard. When our older friends received their own Cora, I reviewed them. During one of our sleepovers, we took the step of writing out mock letters from memory, in an attempt to manifest acceptance.
"I know you got in." She said without looking up, "If I made it, you're a shoe-in."
I did, with an exception.
"You're right." I folded the page and slid it back into the envelope, then set it on the floor beside me. At its bottom, in distinct handwriting, was a postscript.
"Please be aware, we received a report of your involvement in a socially transgressive incident of public fornication. Our walls have been and will continue to be a haven for young women. While select interpersonal activities are permitted between students, reproductive intercourse is among the expressly forbidden.
Your acceptance is contingent on agreement to academic probation protocols. Deviation from the university code of conduct will result in immediate expulsion.
We recommend that you thoroughly familiarize yourself with said code of conduct."
Reproductive intercourse? Why would they-
Then it struck me, reputation. Bloom marketed beauty, taught young women to court Esprit, immaterial and sensual entities that notably could not breed. The Bloom graduate was skilled, enticing, and not pregnant. There were no bulging bellies on its campus. Moms didn't go on adventures, didn't influence world events; they stayed at home.
Bloom didn't want its graduates at home.
My eyes pulled to Cora, blissfully clenching her thighs.
I'm off to a great start.
"So?" she asked, the steam of her breath rolling above my nose.
"I need to think on it," I said, giving myself an out despite having already made up my mind. If she could be bold, take these steps despite her failure, secure what she desired, I had no excuse. Tacticienne, Esprit, the Podium des Champions, they were non-negotiable.
If I'm embarrassed, fine. If they want to police me, fine.