Havermouth's Triquetra

Chapter Five

Tuesday

Reaching the transportable at the very rear of the school grounds was like obtaining sanctuary in a war field. Word had spread that she’d slapped Heath Gale, and she’d been followed by stares and whispers all day, eroding her control over her wards. She was exhausted from fighting to keep up with classes where she could not hear the teacher for the thoughts of the thirty students sharing the room with her, and from feeling the whiplash of disdain from the werewolf students who seemed to take it personally that she had hit Heath.

She was lucky that the Triquetra had left the school, and that Heath hadn’t reported her to the principal.

She sighed wearily as she leaned back against the wall to the side of the art class entrance.

“You are early,” Rhett strolled around the corner of the building nearest to where she stood. He had been smoking in the alley between the two classrooms and offered it to her. “Is it a habit of yours or are you just really eager for this class? Want some?” He added, flicking his black hair back from his face.

“I thought you’d be off with your friends, getting wasted,” she retorted, and he dropped it to the floor scuffing it out beneath his sole-heavy designer army-style boots. His shirt sleeves were folded back to his elbows, and he’d drawn tattoos on his knuckles and along the insides of his forearms again since she’d seen him that morning. They were intricate twisting designs using triangles.

“I went for a while,” he dropped his bag to the floor, heedless of the price tag that went with it, and leaned against the wall at her side. “But I like art. And I wanted to make sure you were okay. This morning was rough.”

It was stupid, she thought, that the piercing through his lip made it more inviting. She could imagine the softness of his full bottom lip contrasting to the ring of metal as she took it between her teeth.

“I shouldn’t have hit him,” she admitted.

“Probably not,” he agreed. “But he’ll get over it. How did you know? That s**t you said really rattled him.”

“A good guess?” It was a lame excuse for something so specific, but she couldn’t precisely tell him that she could read thoughts.

“A really good guess,” he said but seemed to accept it. “Do you miss the city?” He asked, his eyes searching her face, and his attention intense on her.

“I guess,” she wasn’t comfortable being the focus of his scrutiny, and was suspicious of these apparently friendly overtures.

“Friends?” He prompted.

“I guess.” Not many. Since she was thirteen, and her gift had made its appearance, she’d grown apart from her friends. It was hard to maintain a friendship when she’d had to hide something so big from them all.

“Have you made any friends here?” He asked her.

“Not really,” she flushed, awkwardly. If he was being friendly, if he was trying to be a friend, or if he was expressing an interest in her, she wasn’t helping him out at all, she thought. But did she trust him enough to answer him in more depth? “It’s hard to make friends here,” she volunteered uncertainly. “I haven’t precisely gotten off to a good start, slapping Heath and all. But also, because everyone here has grown up together. I know how it is. It was the same at my old school – I’d been with the same people from prep. It’s hard to, you know, fit in when you’re new and everyone else has known each other all their lives.”

“I know,” he agreed with a grin, his teeth perfectly straight and white. “I found it the same when my mum moved us here three years ago. I was lucky though; I became friends with Cameron and Heath pretty quickly. It shouldn’t have worked – three friends, usually there’s someone left out, eh? But it works for us.”

“I didn’t realize,” she was surprised. “That you had moved here. I assumed… Because you’re such good friends with Cameron and Heath…”

The arrival of more students and then My Graynor interrupted them, and they moved into the class. Aislen moved quickly through the room to claim the spot she’d sat in the day before, and Rhett sat next to her.

“Right, class. We’re going to work in pairs over the next four weeks,” Mr. Graynor announced. “Drawing the portrait of your partner. Yesterday, we went over the techniques to sketch, and then paint a portrait, and this assignment is worth thirty percent of your term marks, so get to work.”

Rhett rose to his feet and dragged his chair around the table. For a moment she thought that he was abandoning her for someone he’d rather work with, but he set the seat opposite to her and grinned. “This will make it easier,” he told her, opening his sketchbook to a new page, and opening his tin of pencils.

Due to the length of his legs, the new position meant that, beneath the tabletop, he slid one leg between hers, using the footrest on her stool to rest his toes upon, with his other knee resting on the outside of hers. “Will you be comfortable like this?” He asked her as flashes of him sliding his hand under the hem of her uniform skirt under the cover of the tabletop flooded her mind.

Comfortable, she thought, was not the word she’d use for it - her entire body seemed to focus on where his legs touched hers. There was an intimacy to the position that sent her hormones to the boil when combined with the imagery from his thoughts that the contact of their legs gave her access to. Sitting there like that and staring at him was going to be agony, she thought. She’d soak through her underwear in no time.

“Sure,” she said, when her tongue would work again. She distracted herself by preparing her sketch pad and pencils. They worked that way for an hour, and their faces began to take shape on the paper. “That’s really good,” she admired his piece, flattered by the way he had drawn her. He’d put a lot of work into her eyes, and the realism was impressive, she thought.

“I like me, too,” he smiled, dropping his pencil, and leaning back to stretch out. “Do you want to go somewhere else? Graynor is letting people go work outside. We could ditch school early and go to the park down the road, put in another hour there? It’s nicer than here.”

She shouldn’t, she thought. She really shouldn’t…. “Okay,” she began to pack away her pencils, unable to resist the opportunity to escape the school.

The afternoon was warm, and the moment that they stepped outside of the air-conditioned classroom, the heat hit them.

“f**k, it’s hot! Do you want me to hold your stuff so you can take your jumper off?” He held out his hand.

She surrendered her bag and pulled off the jumper, knotting it around her waist, blushing, knowing that he was looking at her.

Tiffany had been a beauty queen and model, and she was always disappointed by what she called “Aislen’s lack of style.” If Tiffany Carter had her way, Aislen would be bleach blonde, and go to school with a full application of makeup. The school uniform Tiffany had procured from the second-hand store all seemed to be a size too small and that left the buttons over Aislen’s breasts straining.

Rhett didn’t comment, handing back her bag. “There’s plenty of shade at the park. And there won’t be many people around.”

They passed out through the school gates and entered the tree-lined streets, the shade beneath them immediately cooler than it had been crossing the concrete of the school. Rhett fished a cigarette packet out of his back pocket and offered it to her.

She took one hesitantly. She’d never smoked before, but there was a certain anti-glamour walking beside the handsome Rhett, smoking his cigarettes. It was almost like being his girlfriend, she thought, and was sure that any number of girls from school would trade places with her in an instant. Rhett’s girlfriend was a role that Aislen wouldn’t mind holding, she admitted to herself, looking up at him as he cupped a hand in order to light his cigarette and then holding the end out to her.

She put the cigarette into her mouth and breathed in, the draw of air through the dried tobacco sucking the embers at the end of his into glowing. He watched her as she took a breath and fought back the urge to cough before releasing the smoke. His grin was mischievous, she thought. He knew that she didn’t smoke, that this was her first, and he enjoyed being the one to get her to try it.

“Turning good girls bad,” he said with a laugh, confirming what she already knew.

“I’m not a good girl,” she protested, not wanting to be labelled as that when he was so much the opposite with his overgrown dark hair, drawn on tattoos, and lip piercing.

“Oh?” He raised his eyebrows teasingly. “What secret rebellion do you hide, Aislen? Let me guess, your n*****s are pierced,” his eyes dropped to where her breasts strained against the shirt. “Nope,” he said. “Or they’d show through that top. Your c**t then?”

“Rhett!” She protested blushing. “You can’t just ask that.”

He shrugged. “Call it professional interest if it makes you more comfortable. My parents are pissed with me,” he told her. “Because I want to pursue becoming a tattoo artist and piercer, not study law, or anything dull and responsible like that.”

“How do you become a tattoo artist and piercer?” She wondered.

“An apprenticeship, and courses,” he said. “Maybe you’ll let me pierce you, Aislen?” He suggested heavy with innuendo. “I’ve done a few already, including my lip. It’s sexy to pierce someone, and to know afterward that their clothing is hiding something naughty,” his eyes lit with his wolf and his grin was sexy.

She was flustered and intensely aroused by his attention and the things he was suggesting. “Oh, I don’t know…”

“Ah, look, the guys got here before us! Hey!” He called out as they approached the park. She could see Cameron and Heath were at a picnic table, with a slab of beer between them. “And they have beer. Come on, Aislen,” he put his arm around her shoulders, and she saw clearly him leaning towards her, his eyes flicking between her lips and her eyes, the vision fading just at the point of his lips meeting hers.

Her heart raced. Every instinct said to run, but with the promise of that kiss tantalizing her, there was no way that she could listen.