Page 49 of Mayhem

The top floor of the library stayed quiet even when the rest of the building was full. Aldrich students liked privacy until privacy required climbing stairs, which kept most of them on the lower levels. The rooms up there belonged to the kind of people who did not need signs on doors to keep everyone else out. There were study spaces, two smaller meeting rooms, and a long open section near the windows where we worked when the lounge became crowded or too easy to find.

I heard Malakai before I saw either of them.

His voice carried from the far side of the floor, lower than usual because somebody had already told him to shut up at least once. Echo answered with enough irritation to make it obvious the warning had not worked.

I rounded the last shelf and found her at the long table nearest the windows. She had chosen the chair with the cleanest view of the stairs again. Her books were spread around her in a loose semicircle, laptop open, one bare foot tucked under the opposite leg while the other rested on the rung beneath her chair. The bandages at both heels were still visible.

Malakai had taken the chair beside her and somehow occupied more space than the furniture allowed. One arm stretched across the back of her seat while he read something on her screen. His own work sat abandoned several feet away. He had a pen in one hand that I knew from the expression on Echo’s face did not belong to him.

“You’ve highlighted the same sentence three times,” he said. “At this point, I think the sentence understands you’re angry.”

Echo reached for the pen without looking away from her screen. “Give me my shit back before I start cataloging which of your fingers I can break without affecting your coursework.”

Malakai turned the pen once between his fingers and set it on top of her notebook, close enough that she did not have to reach far. He had learned something, apparently. The fact that he immediately leaned over to read the next paragraph ruined any possibility that the lesson had taken.

I set the folder down at the opposite end of the table.

Echo looked up first. Her gaze landed on me, moved to the floor beside the chair I had chosen, and stopped.

Her boots were there.

The change in her face was immediate enough that Malakai followed her attention and grinned before she had said anything. Echo uncrossed her leg and leaned sideways to make sure she was seeing them correctly, then looked back at me.

“You finally developed judgment.”

“I got tired of watching you walk barefoot through Aldrich.”

“That sounds suspiciously like admitting I won.”

“It sounds like I prefer you wearing shoes.”

She reached down and pulled the boots toward herself, checking them like somebody might have tampered with them on the way upstairs. I had expected a comment about the heels, maybe another argument about the uniform. Instead, she started undoing the laces with quick, practiced movements and kicked the Aldrich shoes farther beneath the table without giving them another look.

Malakai watched the entire process with an expression that would have been embarrassing on anyone capable of embarrassment. “You missed those ugly things.”

Echo slid one foot into the first boot and pulled the leather snug around her ankle. “Say one more disrespectful thing about them and I’m using your tongue piercing as a zipper.”

His grin widened. “There she is.”

I opened the folder because watching Malakai watch her was beginning to tell me more than I wanted to know.

He had always attached quickly to things that interested him. People were usually different. Malakai could spend an evening fascinated by someone and forget their name by breakfast if nothing kept his attention. Echo had lasted days, and the interest was getting worse instead of fading.

He knew her class schedule now. I knew that because he had disappeared from the lounge shortly before one of her seminars ended yesterday and returned beside her thirty minutes later. He knew which assignment she was working on because he had apparently read enough of it to argue with her about one of the sources. He reached for her things without thinking, stopped when she told him to, and resumed the behavior five minutes later in some slightly altered form that technically respected whatever boundary she had just set. When Echo shifted her chair to reach the outlet beneath the table, Malakai moved his leg before she asked. When she started searching beneath one of her books, he handed her the page she wanted without looking away from his phone.

That was new.

Echo finished tying the second boot and planted both feet flat on the floor. The change was stupidly obvious. She sat differently with them on, shoulders settling as if somebody had returned part of her balance. She flexed one ankle, then the other, before looking at me again.

“I’m keeping these.”

“I assumed that was the point.”

“And the heels are going somewhere they can’t hurt anybody ever again.”

“I don’t care what you do with the heels.”

Malakai finally looked away from her long enough to glance at me. “Can I have them?”