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Someone knocks at the door to the Ninth House quarters in Canaan House. Gideon leaves her comics to answer, expecting Harrowhark, probably, back from the dead or wherever she’s been, only it’s not Harrow. Better still, it is Coronabeth, Princess of Ida, yellow hair fluffed and eyes practically glowing.
“Hello,” she says, pleasantly, like she is arriving just on time to tea. She wears a white silk shirt, cut quite low in the front, so perfectly made to compliment her figure that it completely removes any possibility of Gideon speaking.
Coronabeth sweeps past her—Gideon smells sweat, and perfume, and then something she can’t identify—and examines first Harrow’s big, ostentatious bed with its awful lace-patterned sheets, and then the dust-covered one at its foot. She barks a surprised little laugh, one hand in front of her mouth, before turning to ask Gideon, “You don’t sleep there, do you? Do you sleep in her bed?”
Gideon’s face has to do the job for this.
“Show me,” says Coronabeth, and then, horror of horrors, she takes Gideon’s hand, so that Gideon has to focus on not walking into walls all the way there. Corona gazes at the murk and drapery as if it is intentional decoration on Gideon and Harrow’s part, winding her arm now quite casually around Gideon’s waist, and the moment she spots the bed she pulls away to touch a hand to Gideon’s chest—not a push, even, as much so a gesture, and yet Gideon falls like a sack of bricks to sit at the edge of the bed, mutely. Her knee brushes against her comic, which Coronabeth peeks at, head tilted, the corner of her lips pulling up.
“Very cute,” Corona pronounces, before kicking off her boots and seating herself nonchalantly on the bed, legs curled up beneath her. Gideon wishes she had maybe not been on so revealing a page, and also that she could remember whether she’d zipped her pants before opening the door. It seems irrelevant, though, when Corona beckons her closer with one crooked finger, and—when Gideon pulls up so close she can see the individual bands of her irises—asks, quietly and simply, “Do you want to?”
Gideon can barely nod. She assures herself, internally, that this is happening. She has got to not fuck this up. She has got to remember her comics, though whatever is useful is not coming to her at all right now, what with the difficulty she is having thinking of anything but the gradually revealed skin of Coronabeth’s midriff as she pulls the silk shirt up and over herself. She is brushed with sweat, as if she’s been exercising, lightly. Gideon is too addled by the sight of both of Coronabeth’s breasts! to ask herself what in the world necromancers do for exercise, and only reaches out, carefully, to touch her. Coronabeth giggles, as if amused by the novelty of this, and pulls Gideon’s hand gently to her mouth, where she slips the tips of her second and ring fingers inside and sucks on them, gently.
Gideon has absolutely no idea what the fuck to do with this.
Then Corona scoops up Gideon’s other hand and brings it to the shape of her hard cock in her trousers, and Gideon does know what to do with that. She hopes she is not drooling visibly as she unzips Corona’s trousers and finds— fuck —lacy violet underwear, skimpy enough for Corona’s bare ass to be exposed in the back. Gideon lets Corona guide her hand over her bulge, first, and then when it is not enough she waits for Coronabeth to get up and yank everything off and sit herself squarely back down in Gideon’s lap, where she wiggles invitingly.
Gideon knows how to do this. She knows, at least, what she wants to do, and when she wraps a hand around Coronabeth and gets a contented sigh in response she is filled with enough confidence to run her thumb over the tip—a delighted, soft yelp from Corona at this—before she continues. Then, of course, Coronabeth begins sliding her fingers up Gideon’s waist, which makes Gideon momentarily forget how to use a single one of her digits. By the time Corona has gotten her hands on Gideon’s chest it is enough for her to lose all grip—at least where it matters. She feels dizzy.
“Not yet?” Coronabeth teases, cocking her head, and Gideon nods, face burning. She wonders how all those well-muscled cavaliers in the comics do two things at once in bed, ever. They 69, for fuck’s sake, which is not something Gideon feels up to, now that she has to focus on both jerking off Coronabeth and Coronabeth being there to see it . She looks down at her hand, which is sweaty—this is definitely the moment to kill herself and get it over with—but Coronabeth just presses a kiss to the top of her head and scoots back to lie down against the mass of pillows at the end of the bed. She beckons Gideon forward, and Gideon curls up at the other end to take Coronabeth in her mouth.
She is very large, and Gideon is not sure how well she’s doing with what she can take—but Corona brushes manicured fingers through her hair, whispering good girl, and sometimes only oh, oh , and Gideon has just managed to get a hand down to her own cunt when someone stops outside the door and knocks.
Gideon almost bites Coronabeth’s dick off.
eep! says Coronabeth, when this happens.
“Princess?” says the voice outside the door.
If Gideon didn’t currently have girldick inside of her mouth, she would learn necromancy on the spot. She would personally root through every one of Harrowhark’s notes to find the How To Do Bones, Motherfucker Manual and reorganize her own genetic structure. She would huff bone dust right now if it meant she could personally send Naberius Tern into the stratosphere.
“I know you’re in there,” the voice says, petulantly, because fucking of course. Coronabeth traps a giggle behind her hand, looking at Gideon as if they are sharing a very good joke. Gideon, jaw starting to hurt, staring up into Corona’s lambent eyes, is wondering if this now makes her half a virgin. She wonders if being bad enough at sex can make you a negative virgin, or worse.
“Oh, fine,” says Coronabeth, at normal volume, and Gideon, reluctantly, pulls away from her cock. She gets one last miserable look at it, wet with her spit, before Coronabeth yanks her clothes back on, pats Gideon on the head, and leaves. “You never let me have any fun,” Gideon hears her say, and then a loud groan at Naberius’s rejoinder, and then it is just Gideon and the warped bedsheets and a comic whose spine may be irreparably damaged.
Gideon is holding it in her hands, like a dying bird, and wondering whether maybe this can still count as a 6.0 FINE grade issue if it sort of has sweat all over it, when Harrowhark herself returns. Gideon knows this because Harrow blasts the door practically off its hinges with her entrance and says “NAV,” in a manner so bitchly only Harrowhark Nonagesimus could manage it.
“Present,” says Gideon, and Harrow stomps into her room. She looks disheveled, anemic, and ratlike at the edges—which is to say, normal, if slightly incandescent with rage.
“Did I or did I not just see,” Harrow says, tiny hands balled into fists, “Naberius Tern, cavalier of the Third house, escorting Princess Coronabeth of Ida from these quarters.”
“That depends,” Gideon says. Harrow’s fists tighten. “Was he acting a queen douche about it?”
“What. Did. You. Do,” says Harrowhark.
Gideon holds up Coronabeth’s underpants.
Harrow loses her mind.
The sounds that come out of her are not describable and manage to be profane without involving human words. Then she spits out: “I tell you not to speak to anybody—I think—this is a more than reasonable limitation—” which is insane, obviously, because it is Harrowhark Nonagesimus talking, but Gideon has to prioritize.
So she says only, “I didn’t say anything,” and then, when Harrow gapes at her for a full thirty seconds, “Is it that hard to believe that I don’t have to talk to girls to get them in my pants?” as if she did anything more than get so flustered by a girl’s hands on her boobs that she forgot how to jerk said girl off—but if there is anyone in this universe whom Gideon would tell about what just happened, it would be not Harrow.
It takes another several seconds for Harrow to take her head out of her hands. Her paint is smudged at the corners. She holds out one gloved hand, trembling slightly.
“If I fail to ascend to Lyctorhood,” Harrow says, “because the Third cavalier challenges you to a duel over the honor of one of his charges, and you lose, and we are both killed by a man with more hair gel on his head than brains inside of it because you could not use your alleged brain to come to the conclusion that you should not undress the Princess Coronabeth of Ida, I will conduct my own bones out of my grave to dig you up, kill you again, and rebury you for good measure. Is this clear?”
“You think he’s fucking her?” Gideon asks, conversationally. “There’s no way. I mean, there’s no way, right?”
Harrow whips a bone chip at Gideon.
“Yowch!” says Gideon, not meaning it.
“You are not to speak to,” Harrow says, her voice rising very non-gradually, “ nor fuck anybody, Nav!”
Gideon rests her elbows on her knees. “I honestly don’t think that’s fair.”
“I am altering the deal,” Harrow says, already smoothing down her robes. She sweeps the bone chip back into her pocket with a gesture. “Pray I don’t alter it any further.”
Then she sweeps out of the room and their quarters, banging the door shut behind her, leaving Gideon with the pair of Coronabeth’s underwear hanging off her bed, which she honestly does not know how to return, given her new terms. She sighs and puts her hand down her pants.