Olivier was playing with fire, passing a blazing torch between his hands as it sent sparks flying over the bone dry grass of The Core’s outer fields, just tempting the aether to set his world alight—to burn him from without with the same intensity his insides were squirming and writhing under the flames of his arousal and ever-growing affection for Emilia.
He knew he was being stupid—he fucking knew that—and yet, he couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t stop himself from going along with Emilia’s suggestion that they head back to one of the restaurants they had passed as they made their way to the steward’s office, nor could he stop himself was letting her continue to walk with her arm linked through his, their bare arms constantly pressed together, and even through the stick of their day spent out in the heat, it was nice—wonderful, even, his touch starved body aching for more, more, more. It was a touch even better than when he had constantly found his hand pressing into the small of the girl’s back, guiding her along because she was just so distractible, her eyes constantly wandering and catching on everything.
Almost
everything. It didn’t escape his notice that she never spared more than a glance for any of the men they passed, the moments her eyes did linger tinged with comments about what they were wearing and how much she liked it, where she thought the outfit had come from. Then, her eyes would be back on him, and what he wouldn’t give for the silverstrain to always be looking at him like that—
No, that wasn’t quite right. Just like Emilia wasn’t suited for spending her life on a single task, she wasn’t suited for looking at a single man—or person, if she had no gender preference, although he’d never seen her out and about on campus with any women. Olivier would be perfectly happy to simply have her eyes returning to him regularly—gazing back at him after watching the world, reading, playing with her friends, doing whatever else it was that must soak up every moment of her life. There was even a part of him that said he would be okay with her attention and affection being directed at other people, as long as he received a piece himself.
It was a strange thought; as much as Baalphoria did have the occasional polyamorous group, including several powerhouses, they weren’t common. Most people, he assumed, simply couldn’t imagine sharing their partner with other people, even if Baalphoria’s brand of polyamory tended to be more open—a sharing of love between everyone within the group.
Could he do that? Could he share someone? Know they were fucking someone else while he… what? Went off to have sex with another member of the group? Especially given he didn’t think her gender preferences lay with other women?
It wasn’t that he didn’t find men attractive, although he’d never done more than give them fleeting glances. Halen had been so attractive it almost hurt to look at him. The clones Emilia was friends with certainly had an appeal, even if he was staunchly refusing to consider just how close the three of them were. Those sorts of people…
“What’cha thinkin’ about~” Emilia asked, so much teasing laced through her voice that Olivier had to assess himself and make sure he hadn’t popped a boner as they waited in line at the hostess stand—he hadn’t, but the fact that he’d needed to check was concerning, especially given his loose pants would hide nothing.
Unfortunately, thoughts of his pants—of how easily his erection would make him unsuitable for public—pulled his mind back to the image Emilia had made earlier, sitting on her knees in the entry to their lock-off rooms. Her eyes had slid up him so slowly. Had she even realized how blown out her pupils had become, even in her momentary surprise and panic? Did she know she’d pulled that full lower lip of hers between her teeth the moment her eyes skimmed over his hips?
It had been so fast, and yet so painfully slow, the way she had taken him in, her arousal so palpable that his cock had threatened to plump up, his hands itching to reach out and pull her face to his groin. Probably, she wouldn’t have resisted. Definitely, she would have enjoyed herself.
Therein lay the problem: how was he supposed to resist someone so willing and tempting?
Mostly, he was left to continuously remind himself of all the
why we can’ts.
His mother. His responsibilities. The guilt he would feel when he still couldn’t take her case—the frustration that would explode when, if he risked everything and took it, he would still fail her. The fact that the life that had been drawn out for him would smother her, both from the position of a partner or an extramarital lover. The fact that he was fucking insane and already fighting down imagined scenarios where they could make
something
work between them. Emilia with a group of lovers, all content to fuck and adore each other, but with a little space for him as something extra on the side.
It was insane! He wasn’t even in a relationship with her. Stars, they were barely even friends because he was awkward, and the longest conversation they’d had outside of class or those annotations—annotation that had become so painfully important to him the idea that she might one day stop replying to his own thoughts with more of her own sent of surge of pain through his chest—had been in that bathroom stall, weeks earlier.
Even now, standing side by side, having been in each other’s company for over an hour, he didn’t know what to talk about—he didn’t even know
how
to start a conversation despite the fact that Emilia had just given him an opening to talk about what he was thinking about! Not that he could tell her the wreck of his thoughts, but he could make something up!
Except he couldn’t, and while he had been frustrated with his parents for plenty of things, his complete lack of social skills was probably the worst of it all. Stars forbid they make sure he had the capacity to even talk about normal, small talk things! But no, studying law at the ripe age of five had been more important than playing with friends, or—
“You’re leaving marks in your palms,” Emilia noted softly as she pried his clenched hands open.
Thumb rubbing over the half moons left by his nails, a gentle skill leaked out of her, tickling the tender flesh. Olivier tried to tug his hands away, but either she was stronger than he was—very possible, given he’d heard her chatting with his students about several of the sports she’d done during compulsory schooling—or she was using another skill to augment her strength.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her purple eyes stuck on his hands as she soothed each little ache away, even brushing over calluses from the pens he held while marking out notes onto the paper copies of every legal case their firm handled.
Those records went into the de la Rue archives—which was really more of a bunker, offaether, and theoretically protected from future information wipes, should another Colonial War break out—and the notes each lawyer made on them would remain only for the eyes of the few allowed access. So much secrecy and protection, the physical notes a result of some intern having once downloaded all the internal records from a server, using the personal notes each lawyer had left to
set up a competing law firm
—allegedly, anyways. This had been centuries ago, the only records of it existing in the archives and an obnoxiously large pile of notes on the incident, as well as in the existence of the Floren Law Firm.
For its part, the Florens—another large, law-focused family—denied they had gotten their start with stolen documents and the personal notes of Olivier’s maternal ancestors. Still, their families had a long history of hating one another, running up huge bills in court due to their obstinate refusal to lose to one another. It no longer mattered if the story was true or not: their families had centuries worth of hatred and misdeeds between them.
“Your families have a feud?” Emilia laughed as Olivier told her all this. If he couldn’t make small talk, at least he knew the girl liked gossip and was unlikely to spread it to anyone further than her friends, themselves unlikely to spread it further due to the strangely intense privacy of The Penns and diplomatic circles. “That’s hilarious. I can’t really imagine
you
feuding with anyone—not even in a jokey way, the way Halen and I feud. Your mommy, though?”
“Do not call her my mommy,” Olivier replied darkly, glaring through the girl’s bubbling, infectious laughter. “And no. I have never particularly been inclined to engage with the feud.”
“But…”
Normally, Olivier wouldn’t talk about this. Even when he’d been in law school, dealing with the ire of his Floren classmate, he had rarely talked about it, even with his cousins. The bright smile Emilia graced him with, however, was like an anchor dropping, the force of it dragging the story of Xander Floren’s obsession with him out.
“There was a man at law school who was obsessed with me—Xander Floren.”
“
Was?
He’s not anymore? Also, weren’t you, like… a baby when you went to law school? It’s really weird for a grown man to be obsessed with a baby.”
“I was in my late teens,” he told her, internally cringing at the reminder of just how much of his life he had cut short by being forced into law school so soon—the result of both his mother’s incessant pushing and his own desire to just be done with the passive bulling and loneliness of compulsory schooling. The fact that he was still lonely, and the bullying he had faced under Xander Floren’s hands at law school had definitely been more than passive, was not lost on him. “And yes, was. One of his older relatives eventually stopped him… I think.”
“You think?” Emilia lifted an eyebrow at him—an exceptionally accusing eyebrow.
The line moved, and they moved with it. His not-quite student’s hands were still wrapped around his, and was she grooming his fingernails? It wasn’t that they were bad condition or anything, but here he was, watching her roll over each finger with delicate skills that pushed at his cuticles and filed the nails into perfect shape, her own sparkling grey nails occasionally scratching across his nail bed, presumably searching for something. What, he had no idea.
“I believe,” Olivier began, choosing his words carefully because Emilia was like a bomb, just waiting to be lit up, when it came to anything that might cast her friends in a negative light, “that one of his cousins is a black knot.”
As expected, purple eyes shot up to him, not exactly angry, but certainly waiting for him to pull on some stereotype as to why he thought that—waiting for him to tell some story of violence from the young man who had, quite frankly, terrified a nearly forty-five-year-old Xander Floren to the point that he had pissed himself, right there in the middle of the school’s courtyard.
“I admit, it is only a speculation,” he added as he told Emilia this. “However, there was a feeling about him and the two women he was with—something that said they were concerned he might actually kill Xander Floren if he didn’t agree to leave me alone, plus…”
“Plus?” Emilia prompted, her eyes no longer boring into him, even if her grip on his hand was firmer than before, almost as though she expected him to take off, should he say something she didn’t like, and he needed to flee.
Olivier didn’t think she would kill him for saying anything negative about black knots… probably.
“He didn’t seem to care until the younger of the women—his sister—told Xander Floren off for the way she had seen him talking to me. I might have thought her brother didn’t notice, but the way he was watching us… I believe he did see what was happening. He simply didn’t care until his sister did.”
Another step forward, another, another, Olivier explaining what he had learned about the siblings in the decades since that day, when he had seriously wondered if Florence Butani—a member of the Floren branch family that currently held the most power within their firm—would kill Xander Floren. He and his sister were close, but he was rarely seen with any other family member, and both seemed to have all but cut their mother out of their life. Florence Butani was a monster in the courtroom—vicious in a way that led many of his colleagues to dislike him, even if he did good work.
“Florence Butani represents victims in court, mostly, so we’ve never crossed paths. I’ve seen recordings of his cases, though, and…” Olivier licked his lips, trying to fight down the memories of those cases—of the things that had been submitted into evidence. It didn’t quite work, and his stomach still turned as fragments of small bodies, battered and abused, flashed through his mind, as records of mutilated bodies—alive and dead—and all the empty, broken eyes of the people Florence Butani spoke up for churned through him.
Emilia’s hands tightened around his—an anchor because she was so observant, seeing the hurt within him where so few did.
“And the things he has to look at—comb through, searching for the smallest specks of evidence—aren’t things most people can stand to even think about. There’s a reason so many lawyers rely on The Black Knot to look through some of their worst cases.”
“They don’t care about the things they see—not in the way a
normal
person does. Sometimes, they might not like it, but it won’t haunt them the way it would someone without a black knot.” Of course Emilia, friends with at least a few black knots, would understand that.
“Maybe he cares, maybe it haunts him,” Olivier continued as they reached the front of the line, the hostess gone to deliver the last group to their table. “I just know that all together, I still think he possibly has a black knot, and that regardless, Xander Floren was so afraid of him he still has himself removed from cases where we might meet in the courtroom. I know that Florence Butani helps vulnerable people who often struggle to find a lawyer because so few can stomach those cases, and those who can often charge exorbitant fees.”
“So… he’s a good guy? Don’t look at me like that! You know I’m friends with black knots and not about to call them bad guys for their genetics alone!” Emilia laughed, her giggles spreading when he rolled his eyes, muttering about how that was ironic, coming from someone who had only recently almost been killed by someone with a black knot.
“Ironic, but endearing… to the right people, anyways,” Emilia teased as the hostess reappeared, telling them it would be a few more minutes, the silverstrain breaking into conversation with the hostess, asking where she was from and then talking about the one time she had passed through the small Dionese city the hostess had spent the majority of her life in.
Endearing indeed.
Endearing, despite the jealousy that fractured through him that Emilia could start a conversation so easily—jealousy that she had turned her sunshine away from him, even if just for a moment.
Arc 9 | Chapter 323: a bomb, just waiting to be lit up
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