The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 399

Chapter 399: 399 | Belmont, What Are You? [GT BONUS]

"Oh no. Oh no, Belmont, I scratched you, I never scratch people, I’m so careful, I’m always so—"

"I’m fine."

"You are not fine, that’s a neurotoxin, you’re about to feel like the worst version of yourself, you’re going to want to lie down on this floor and stop existing—"

"Maribelle."

"—and it lasts forty minutes and you’ve got Aspect Development at one and Dravid takes attendance and I am so sorry—"

I took her chin.

Just two fingers under it, tilting her face up, and I let her look at me and see that my pupils were normal and my breathing was normal and that whatever she’d expected to be happening to my central nervous system was not happening.

Her mouth opened.

"You," she said.

"Yeah."

"You should be on the floor."

"I know."

"Nobody resists it in two seconds. My instructor at Saint Ambrose was a Rank C with an eighty-two constitution and he needed a chair." Her eyes had gone very wide, the pupils still dilated from the proximity or the panic or both. Her tail came up off my thigh and curled around her own leg the way Rina’s did when she was frightened, that instinctive retreat that said something in her was processing threat faster than conscious thought could negotiate with it. "Belmont, what are you?"

Six days ago I’d have deflected. I’d have said something about clean living and a good breakfast and let her decide whether to be annoyed, and she’d have laughed and filed it and moved on, and the whole thing would have cost me nothing. She would have gotten a joke and I would have gotten a deflection and neither of us would have had to exist in the version of this conversation that actually mattered.

I looked at the girl who had come down the hall to ask me whether I’d been cruel to Petra Lang, and who had put money on my hand-holding, and who had told me she didn’t do the kind of gossip that ends up in somebody’s file.

"Something the paperwork doesn’t cover," I said.

Maribelle’s breath came out unsteady, and her tail twitched against her leg in a way that suggested she’d stopped processing what to do with her body and was just letting it respond on instinct now.

Her hand flattened on my chest, right over the four fading lines, and she pressed down like she was checking for a heartbeat she no longer trusted. Her hips were still where they were, pressed into mine, thigh against thigh, and neither of us had done anything about that for a while now. I wasn’t sure either of us knew what doing something about it would have looked like. The hallway wasn’t offering options.

"Okay," she whispered. "Okay, that’s, that’s a lot, and my brain is doing something and my body is doing something else and they’re not talking to each other, and I don’t know which one I’m supposed to be listening to right now."

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