Chapter 298: 298 | Not a Secret Fantasy with Camille Ortega
I left Professor Crane’s classroom with the distinct sensation of having survived something I hadn’t fully understood. The paper with her contact information sat folded in my pocket, carrying implications I wasn’t ready to examine too closely. The woman taught brand management, wore a mask to class, and had just singled me out in front of thirty students to discuss the strategic value of kissing someone during combat training.
Normal Tuesday.
The hallway outside the lecture hall was crowded with students moving between classes, the usual chaos of foot traffic and overlapping conversations. I spotted Caden and Marco heading toward the cafeteria, Caden gesturing wildly about something while Marco nodded with the patience of someone who had learned to filter his best friend’s enthusiasm into digestible portions. Felicity had disappeared somewhere, probably to interrogate someone else about my personal life while I wasn’t around to deflect.
My phone buzzed. Sloane’s name lit up the screen.
Cafeteria. Now. I’m starving and you promised.
I smiled despite myself. The bond between us pulsed with her impatience, a warm thread of hunger and anticipation that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with proximity. Sixteen hours apart and my body already treated reunion like a physiological necessity rather than a social preference.
The walk to the cafeteria took five minutes. I spent three of them thinking about Professor Crane’s mask and two of them thinking about Sloane’s smile. The ratio felt appropriate.
The cafeteria at midday operated at maximum capacity, every table occupied by students in various states of post-morning exhaustion. The noise level sat somewhere between busy restaurant and small riot, with conversations overlapping and trays clattering and someone in the back laughing at a volume that suggested they wanted the entire room to know they were having a good time.
I found Sloane at a table near the windows, golden sunlight catching her pink hair and turning it into something almost annoyingly beautiful. She’d changed out of her gym uniform into civilian clothes, a fitted white top and high-waisted jeans that reminded me why I’d spent the entire morning distracted. Her blue eyes found mine across the crowded room, and the bond between us surged with warmth so intense it almost hurt.
"You’re late," she said as I dropped into the seat across from her.
"Three minutes. Professor Crane wanted to talk about my career prospects."
"Professor Crane." Sloane’s eyebrows rose. "The one with the mask and the legs?"
"That’s the one."
"And how were your career prospects?"
"Apparently I’m a brand management case study now. On account of the kissing incident."
Sloane’s expression shifted into something that wasn’t quite jealousy but wasn’t quite not jealousy either. The bond carried the emotion to me before her face fully committed to it, a complicated mixture of possessiveness and amusement and something darker underneath that she wasn’t ready to name.
"She brought that up? In class?"
"In front of everyone. Used it as a teaching moment about the brand implications of tactical decisions made under surveillance." I leaned back in my chair, enjoying the way Sloane’s jaw tightened slightly. "Apparently kissing Camille was actually a genius move for my public image. Who knew."
"I’m going to kill her."
"Professor Crane or Camille?"
"I haven’t decided yet."
I laughed, and the sound seemed to drain some of the tension from Sloane’s shoulders. She reached across the table and grabbed my hand, her fingers intertwining with mine in a grip that was half affection and half warning. The contact sent warmth flooding through the bond, her emotions bleeding into mine until I couldn’t tell where her relief ended and my comfort began.
"I missed you," she said quietly. "Which is stupid because it was sixteen hours and we’re literally at the same school."
"Same. Stupid. Both things."
Her smile softened into something private, something meant only for me. The cafeteria noise faded into background static as the world narrowed to the space between us, to her hand in mine and her eyes holding my gaze with an intensity that made my chest ache.
"Food," I said, because if I kept looking at her like this I was going to say something embarrassing in a room full of our classmates. "You said you were starving."
"I am. But I’m also processing the fact that my boyfriend just told me another woman used him as a teaching example for strategic romance."
"It wasn’t romantic. It was tactical."
"Lukas."
"The distinction matters."
"Does it?"
I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it again because she had a point. From the outside, the distinction between tactical kissing and romantic kissing probably looked like splitting hairs. From the inside, where I’d been genuinely concerned about taking a rivet to the skull, the distinction felt enormous. But Sloane didn’t have access to my internal reasoning in that moment. She just had footage of me pressing my mouth against another woman’s while pinning her against a wall.
"I’m sorry," I said, and meant it. "For the situation. Not for surviving, but for how it looks."
"I know." Her grip on my hand tightened. "I felt it, remember? Through the bond. I know you weren’t enjoying some secret fantasy with Camille Ortega while I was in another building."
"Then why are you upset?"
"Because knowing something intellectually and feeling it emotionally are different things. And because twenty of our classmates watched my boyfriend kiss someone else and are probably forming opinions about our relationship right now."
"Fair."
"I’m working on it. The emotional processing. Give me time."
"All the time you need."
She nodded, and some of the tension in her expression eased. The bond between us settled into something calmer, the sharp edges of jealousy smoothing into acceptance and trust. Not perfect acceptance, because she was still human and I’d still done something that looked bad regardless of context. But enough acceptance that we could sit here holding hands and talk about it like adults instead of exploding into drama.
I liked that about us. The ability to name the uncomfortable things without pretending they didn’t exist.
"Food," she said again, releasing my hand and standing. "Real food this time. I’m getting the chicken sandwich and you’re going to tell me everything about your morning that you’ve been carefully not mentioning."
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