The Breaking of Day by Sadie King

Author:Sadie King [King, Sadie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Spine Books
Published: 2013-02-10T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Zora arrived late to class the next day. She was fuming at herself for showing up at all. She’d wanted to punish Victor, test his fondness, with her absence. But that was like cutting off her nose to—well, you know. She’d rather spite him by cutting off—well, you know.

The point was, if she missed one class too many, tested Victor’s forbearance not as a lover but as a teacher, she might get an incomplete in his class. Put her entire legal career in jeopardy. That made her fume even more. Shit. The impossible situation he had put her in. Academically, emotionally, erotically, everything. The prick bastard. She had never met his father, but the figure of speech would have to do.

She made an entrance guaranteed to make him fume. Seating herself next to Jack, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. A simple gesture. Arguably the most beautiful gesture in the repertoire of human intimacy. True, Jack was a pawn in the game between her and Victor. Without him there wouldn’t be triangulation, there wouldn’t be envy, there wouldn’t be the deflection of desire. There wouldn’t be love and hate, devotion and sin.

But to say her intimacy with Jack was false would be falser still. Not after their conversation of the previous night, him walking her home, the two of them sitting on her bed. She got a 3L’s take on the 3 L’s—life, love, and law. They both bitched about Victor, commiserated about how fucked up law school was, about how it turned life into a dry brittle thing, love into a shallow imitation of love.

He spoke to her rhapsodically of the Juris Club. Which made her weary of his company. When he offered to show her his Blackcoat brandings, the scars on his chest, she declined with the hint of a hiss. The suggestion of a departure. She fell asleep alone. She would have anyway. His offer had shortened their sharing of words, that was all. It didn’t lessen her respect for him as a man. Scratch that: it did. But of all of her virtues, Zora was proudest of forgiveness. Of all her vices, she was proudest of vengeance. To be fully human is to be completely paradoxical.

If Victor noticed the kiss—which needless to say he did, he never for one instant let Zora slip from the front of his perception—he ignored it with the flair of a lawyer overlooking the truth. He didn’t dare single her out for Socratic ridicule. Even hours upon hours later, the paleness of the previous evening hadn’t fully left his face. We will never know whether her allusions had haunted his dreams that night. Assume for the sake of sordidness that they did.

The class was uneventful, right up until the very end. Jack proved his worth as a pawn once again: he passed her another note from Victor. She waited for a moment of privacy, an hour later, to read it. The note had no greeting.

Who would have guessed that a Plebeian could have more power than Caesar himself? You have rendered me powerless.

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