So I didn’t. I just kept kissing him and running my hands all over him and breathing in time with him, our foreheads pressed together making a warm private space between us to catch our breath in, full of gasps. Orion had a hand all tangled up in my hair, moving around like he wanted to feel the strands running over his fingers, tightening his grip and relaxing in small bursts, his own breath coming out in hard panting raspy gulps, and it felt so good I laughed a little into that open space between us and reached down to grab the bottom of his shirt.
He gave a convulsive shudder and jerked back, pushing me to arm’s length, and crackled out, “No, we can’t,” in a rawly agonized way.
I’ve been mortified in all sorts of awful ways in the course of my life, but I think that might possibly have been the worst. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to; that would’ve been all right. But he wanted to just as much as I did, and he’d nevertheless managed to stop himself, and I hadn’t, like some undisciplined yahoo grabbing at the shiny treat that I knew perfectly well would lead to complete disaster. He even heaved himself off the bed in the next moment, all but levitating to the other side of the room.
“Right you are,” I said, and fired myself out the door and into the still-lightly-toasted corridor at once.
Precious was right on the other side of my door when I shot it open, so frantic she was leaping almost as high as my waist. I caught her right out of the air and said furiously, “Will you stop? Nothing happened, no thanks to you.”
I slammed the door hard behind me and slumped onto my bed. Precious crept up my arm to my shoulder and sat there silently until I finally admitted, “No thanks to me, either,” as bitter as rotten squash. She crept closer to my ear and rubbed the lobe with the tip of her little nose and made a few comforting squeaks as I put up my hands to rub away a few leaking tears.
Orion didn’t even have the bare decency to avoid me the rest of the day. In fact, he spent all of lunchtime casting pathetic looks of desperation and longing in my direction, exactly as though I’d been the one who’d fired him up only to cruelly leave him hanging. Nobody made a peep about it in my direction, but I could tell they all assumed that I had done just that. When I complained to Aadhya about it that afternoon, she told me—with a total lack of sympathy—that no one was spending that much time thinking about my love life, but what did she know?
“You should just be grateful he saved you from yourself, anyway!” she added.
I glared at her. “And who was just asking me for all the salacious details?”
“That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have thrown a bucket of cold water on your head if I’d been in range. What were you thinking? Do you even know when your last period was?”
I really couldn’t argue with her especially since no, I had no idea when my last period was or when the next one was due. Thankfully, that’s one thing magic is good for; whenever the first signs show up, you brew yourself a cup of nice go-the-fuck-away tea—an easy alchemical recipe every wizard girl can brew in her sleep—and that’s the end of it. Some of us do have to keep a sharp eye on the timing, because theirs starts with blood spotting, and you don’t want mals to get a whiff of that. But my first symptom is a nice sharp whanging cramp in the midsection, completely unmistakable, and it arrives with a good five hours’ warning.
Unfortunately, one thing magic is not good for is avoiding pregnancy. The problem is, if you deliberately do something that you are conscious and deeply terrified might cause pregnancy, the magical intent gets confused. Protective spells are about as reliable as the withdrawal method. Science is much more reliable, but then you have to either invest some of your very limited induction weight allowance to bring in condoms or pills and then use them properly, or get an implant or an IUD before you get inducted and cross your fingers that nothing goes wrong with it over the four years you’re hopefully going to be in here before you next get to see a gynecologist. I didn’t see the point. Or rather, I hadn’t seen the point four years ago, when I’d been reasonably sure no one was going to talk to me, much less date me.
“It’s just—” I stopped squabbling and sat down on the floor of her room in a thump and said, “It was just so nice,” and maybe that sounds stupid but I couldn’t help my voice wobbling. Nice was what we didn’t have in here. You could manage desperate victories and even dazzling wonders sometimes, but not anything nice.
Aadhya sighed out a long deep breath. “Well, forget it. I’m not getting eaten by a maw-mouth because you got yourself knocked up.” I sat up with my mouth open in low-blow outrage, but Aadhya just looked at me hard-faced and serious, and she was right; of course she was right. I’d already been screwing around excessively without making it literal, and if I kept on, I’d very likely end up with something even less helpful than a pewter medal.