The two students stepped off the path.

Their shoes found the grass. Their eyes swept directly toward the oak’s shadow — toward the exact space where Marla lay on her back in the trampled grass, bra unclasped and shoved up above her breasts, skirt bunched around her waist, white panty pulled to the side, her thick dark pubic hair matted and glistening, her whole body still trembling through the tail end of an orgasm that had stripped her of every remaining shred of composure.

They looked directly at her.

Through her.

Their eyes moved across the shadow like it was empty air and kept going.

"I don’t see anything," the girl said, frowning. She had a ponytail and a philosophy textbook tucked under her arm.

"I swore I heard something," the boy muttered, turning a slow circle.

Marla didn’t breathe.

She was staring at them with the whites of her eyes fully visible, both hands pressed flat over her mouth, every muscle in her exposed body locked rigid. The cool night air was moving across her bare breasts, her stiffened nipples, the slick wet heat between her open thighs, and two students were standing eight meters away unable to see a single centimeter of it.

’They’re looking right at me.’

’They are looking. Right. At. Me.’

The ward shimmered faintly at the oak’s treeline — that same purple heat-haze, barely visible, just a slight softness at the edge of the shadow where the real world bent slightly inward and then carried on without investigating.

She hadn’t known what it was.

She knew now.

She turned her head — very slowly, muscles screaming with the tension of staying silent — and looked at Raven.

He was watching the two students with mild, detached interest. The way a person watches a bird land and take off from a windowsill. His fingers had not moved. Still inside her. Still resting against the slick, clenching heat of her with the absolute calm of someone who had absolutely no plans to remove them.

She grabbed his wrist.

Squeezed.

’They are standing there,’ she mouthed at him, enormous-eyed.

He looked at her.

His fingers curled.

’—Mmpf—’

She bit down on her own lip so hard she tasted iron.

"I don’t know, maybe a cat," the girl said, turning back toward the path. "Come on, the library closes at ten."

The boy lingered. His gaze swept the oak shadow one final time — slow, vaguely suspicious — and Marla felt the specific existential agony of being naked in a public garden while a stranger’s eyes passed directly across her exposed body and found nothing.

’Go. Please. Please just go.’

The boy turned.

They walked.

The philosophy textbook disappeared around the curve of the hedgerow.

Marla collapsed against the grass and breathed.

One breath. Two. Her whole ribcage shaking.

Then his mouth found her left nipple.

"’—!’"

The sound that came out of her was not a word. It was not anything with language in it. It was the involuntary, punched-out cry of a woman whose sensitized breast had just been taken into a warm mouth and sucked — properly, thoroughly, with the flat of his tongue pressing the stiff peak upward and his lips sealing around it with slow, deliberate suction.

She grabbed the back of his head.

She was not sure if she was pushing him away or holding him there. Her fingers didn’t seem to know either.

His tongue circled. Drew. The suction increased — not gentle, not careful — and her heavy tit was pulled upward slightly with it, the soft flesh shifting with the motion, the weight of it redistributing as his mouth worked her.

’Stop — someone will — I just —’

His teeth found the edge of her nipple.

"’Nngh—’" She mashed her palm over her mouth again.

The tears were back. Not from pain, though the bite had a bright, clean edge to it that made her hips jerk upward. From the relentless, unmanageable accumulation of sensation. From the specific humiliation of lying in open air with her glasses somewhere in the grass and her bra around her collarbones and a student’s mouth on her breast and her body doing absolutely nothing she’d told it to do for the better part of an hour.

’I am a professor.’

He switched to the right breast.

’I have a doctorate.’

He sucked hard enough that she felt it in her spine.

’I have published in six peer-reviewed—’

His fingers withdrew from her.

She registered the absence — the sudden, awful emptiness of it — before she registered anything else. Her walls clenched around nothing. Her hips made a small, involuntary motion that she refused to acknowledge.

She heard his belt.

She heard it in her bones.

The leather sliding. The buckle. The slow, deliberate sound of a zipper that carried more intention per centimeter than any sound she’d encountered in her professional life.

She turned her head.

He was kneeling between her spread thighs, unhurried, his dark eyes on her face while his hands moved at his waistband with the calm efficiency of someone making a decision they’d already made some time ago.

Then he pulled it out.

She’d known — intellectually, abstractly, in the way that a person could know something without knowing — that based on available evidence the situation was going to be substantial.

She had not known it was going to be like ’that.’

Thick. Heavy. The length of it catching the ambient light through the canopy, the head flushed dark and already slick at the crown. Her brain produced the word cucumber and then produced nothing further because the rest of her cognitive function had vacated the premises.

Her thighs — which had been open, which had been cooperating, which had been doing things for the last forty minutes that she would be reviewing with considerable shame at three in the morning for the rest of the academic year — snapped together.

Or tried to.

His hands were there first. Palms on the insides of her thighs, pressing outward and down, spreading her back against the grass with patient, firm authority.

She stared at him.

He looked at her.

"’That,’" she whispered, "is not going to—"

"It will," he said.

"It’s not—I haven’t—" She stopped. Her face had reached a color that had no name in the standard spectrum. "’I haven’t.’"

The words sat in the air between them.

Something shifted in his expression. Not softer. Just — more attentive. The predator noting new information and adjusting its approach without slowing down.

His thumb found her clit again.

One slow circle.

Her thighs stopped fighting him.

’Traitors,’ she thought, at her own thighs.

He leaned over her — his weight distributed on one forearm planted beside her head, his body a warm wall of shadow against the night sky, his cock pressing at the entrance of her wet, hair-framed cunt without pushing. Just present. Warm. Enormous.

His mouth found her ear.

"I know," he murmured. Not triumphant. Not mocking. Just — aware.

Two more girls appeared on the garden path.

Marla heard them before she saw them — laughter, the particular pitch of undergraduates who had nowhere to be — and she turned her head with the slow, terrible clarity of someone watching a disaster materialize in their peripheral vision.

They were walking slowly. Stopping. One of them pointed at something in the flower bed. They were not leaving.

’No.’

’No, no, no.’