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“Come on, Trepe. You’re holding us up.”
Quistis pauses to push her hair back off her sweaty forehead and fix Seifer with an incredulous look. “I’m holding us up? We’re supposed to report back to Garden ASAP, not aimlessly roam the wilderness according to your whims.”
“Ain’t aimless if there’s a destination.” Seifer grins and spreads his arms, walking backwards through the field, like he’s basking in this fleeting moment of liberation from their duties. Tall grasses, nearly thigh-high, ripple around him in the wind, brushing against the fabric of his black combat pants. “No one’s gonna notice if we’re gone another thirty minutes. I just wanna show you something.”
Quistis sighs. It’s been a long day already. They left Garden three hours ago, at mid-afternoon, to do the trial at the Fire Cavern, which Seifer passed with flying colours (again).
Not that it’ll matter much once the real SeeD exam begins. That’s the way it always goes with Seifer. When it comes to fighting, he’s good—exceptional, actually, one of the very best in Garden, maybe better than Squall—but his judgement in a real operation is garbage. This will be his third try at making SeeD. There will probably be another one after it. So she can’t help feeling like she just wasted her time, and on top of that, she’s sweaty and scraped up and wants a cold shower.
“Just humour me,” he says. “You won’t regret it. Promise.”
Seifer’s promises aren’t worth much, but Quistis bites her tongue and gestures for him to lead the way. This is what she learned a long time ago: Seifer does what he wants and he doesn’t care what anyone else—even his instructors, or maybe just her—has to say about it. At least he’s calling her by her last name, not her title, which means he’s in a decent mood. So she may as well go with the flow and get this over with.
They walk north from the Fire Cavern for a while, neither speaking, him whistling a tune and her trailing a good ten paces behind him. Soon, the field turns to hillside, and then they meet the vertical granite face of the Alcauld Mountains. To Quistis’s disbelief, Seifer starts to scale it, digging his fingers into the crevices between craggy rocks and climbing with a smooth finesse, like he’s done it a thousand times.
Above, the sun gives off a radioactive heat in a cloudless sky. Quistis rubs at the back of her neck. It’s sticky with sweat, the skin burnt and chafed and itchy.
“Seifer,” she says irritably, “this is ridiculous. Where are you taking me?”
He grunts as he boosts himself with one foot, reaching for a handhold above. “Keep your panties on. We’re almost there.”
Quistis tuts under her breath in annoyance. Leave it to Seifer to find the crudest possible answer to the simplest question.
“You coming or what?” he calls down over his shoulder.
No, she wants to answer, but she throws up her hands and starts to climb anyway. Partly because she can’t just leave him out here all alone; that would be against Garden’s fieldwork protocol, even though Seifer is more than capable of looking after himself.
And partly because Seifer spends so much time taunting her for being uptight that she wants to prove she’s not a total stick in the mud.
The climb is only twenty feet or so, but she takes it slower than Seifer, her heart pounding when her foot slips out from under her and she nearly falls. A few stones loosen, rattle down the wall below her. Gasping for breath, she clings to her rocky handholds, counting to ten before she’s brave enough to keep going. By the time she reaches the top, Seifer’s already standing on solid ground. He extends a hand to help her up, his grip strong and sure.
“Is this it?” she asks breathlessly, smoothing down her skirt and looking around. They’re on a small, nondescript plateau—brown dirt underfoot, a few trailing weeds, more rock walls. There’s nothing worth climbing up here to see.
“Not yet.” Seifer beckons. “Let’s keep going.”
Quistis rolls her eyes, but trails after him. They leave the clearing to descend along a narrow pass between the mountains. This, they follow for about fifteen minutes, until, gradually, the path opens and they arrive at two towering pines blocking the way. Seifer moves a branch aside and ushers her through. Beyond, there’s a small, grassy hill dotted with pink and purple wildflowers. To the left, the mountains continue to soar heavenward for thousands of feet; to the right, there’s pure sky for as far as the eye can see.
Seifer lopes up to the top of the hill and spreads his arms again, turning in a triumphant circle. Up here, the wind is more violent than it was at sea level. It whips the long grass around and rocks Seifer where he stands. It even flings a strand of Quistis’s hair into her mouth. With a hooked finger, she pulls it free. A seagull swoops by overhead, crying out as it’s buffeted by the wind.
“Check it out,” Seifer says.
She climbs up the hill to join him and looks. The sea spreads out for miles below them, pristine and empty; it’s the opposite of Balamb harbour, where sailboats bob on sunny days. The water is blue-green in the sunlight. Across, in the clear day, she can see a thin stripe of brown that must be the Trabia landmass. She’s not quite on top of the world, but it may be the closest she’s ever been.
“It’s beautiful,” Quistis says. A stark beautiful, but beautiful all the same.
“Told ya.”
Seifer shrugs out of his coat and lets it drop into the grass. Quistis looks at the chiselled V where the curve of his shoulder meets the hard muscle of his bicep, then clears her throat and glances away, folding her arms over her chest.
“How did you know about this place?” she asks.
“The last head of the disciplinary committee told us about it,” he says. “Me and Fujin and Raijin sneak out of Garden all the time and come here.”
She raises an eyebrow. “That seems a bit hypocritical, don’t you think?”
“That’s the thing, Trepe. The difference between you and me.” Seifer strolls over to stand next to her, leaning into her personal space. He smells like sweat and ash and a hint of the only men’s cologne they sell at the general store in Balamb. “You may be a goody two-shoes, but I ain’t on the disciplinary committee ’cause I like to toe the line. You follow?”
Quistis looks up at him, coolly meeting his eyes. “Well, at least you’re honest.”
Seifer chuckles like he’s agreeing with her. “Anyway, the view isn’t the only reason I brought you here. There’s more.”
“More?” she echoes.
Seifer grins and unzips his vest, baring a stripe of well-muscled chest and abs. “It’s the best spot for cliff-jumping. Thought it might be nice to take a cold dip after the Fire Cavern.”
Quistis just stares at him. He wants to fling himself off a cliff? Into frigid water? Into the open sea?
“Are you insane?” she asks.
Seifer shrugs, his grin never faltering, and tosses his vest on the ground with his coat. Now he’s in nothing but his combat pants and boots, and Quistis can’t help but stare at the narrow taper of his waist and his washboard abs. It’s not the shape of his body, necessarily, that gets her attention so much as his confidence in how he inhabits it. Seifer knows he’s good-looking. It’s obvious in every swaggering line of him.
“It’s a long drop,” he says, pulling off one boot, “but the trick is to go in feet-first, arms folded over your chest. You land any other way and you’re just asking for trouble.” The other boot comes off, and both are added to his growing pile of discarded clothes. “So how about it, Trepe? Feel like living dangerously for a few minutes?”
Quistis gestures helplessly down at herself. Not only does she not want to jump, she didn’t come prepared to do it. “I don’t have a change of clothes.”
“Duh,” Seifer says with a roll of his eyes. “That’s why you do it naked.”
As if to punctuate this statement, he unzips his pants and lets them drop. Underneath, he’s wearing a pair of navy boxer briefs that cling to his lean, muscular thighs. Quistis swallows and forces her eyes back up to his face. This is inappropriate on so many levels. Seifer is her student, for crying out loud, and he’s…well…Seifer.
“You can stay up here like a big party pooper if you want,” he says. “I’m jumping.”
Then he starts to push down his underwear.
Quistis has never seen a naked man before, except in the anatomy textbooks she’s taken out of the library and a clip from an erotic movie someone once anonymously posted on the Garden intranet. It was only up for fifteen minutes before Instructor Aki caught wind of it and had it taken down. Just a short time, but enough for word to spread like wildfire through the student body. Enough for Quistis, in a curious adolescent frenzy, to log on and watch it. Not that there was much to see. It was only thirty seconds long and looked like it was filmed twenty years ago, the picture dark and grainy.
But Seifer isn’t a textbook diagram or an image from a dated porno. He’s a flesh and blood man, high-definition, presented in full colour.
Flushing, Quistis averts her eyes before she can glimpse too much of anything, fixing her gaze instead on the horizon, on Trabia, so close and yet a world away. She looks at it without really seeing it, wanting more than anything to look at Seifer instead and drink her fill of him.
“Hey. Trepe,” Seifer says.
Quistis chances a glance at him out of the corner of her eye. He’s standing about ten feet from the edge of the cliff, facing away from her, and even though she’s not looking at him directly, she can tell he’s as naked as the day he was born.
“It ain’t gonna kill you to take that stick out of your ass for once in your life.”
And then he makes a run for the cliff edge and leaps off it, whooping as he disappears from her sight.
“Seifer!”
Quistis goes to the edge and looks down. There’s a white wreath of frothy water where Seifer must have landed, but there’s no sign of him. She watches, worrying, wondering if the fall killed him for what feels like a long, long time, but then his blond head finally breaks the surface. Relief washes through her. He shouts something, but she’s too far up to make out the words.
Probably encouraging her to jump, knowing him.
Collecting herself, Quistis steps back from the edge, her fingers going to the tab of her vest’s zipper and hesitating there. This is ridiculous. If she lands the wrong way, she could shatter her bones, even die. But if she doesn’t jump, then she’ll need to find her way back down the cliff without him. There’s the protocol to keep in mind, too.
…And she’ll never hear the end of it if she chickens out.
You can do this. Seifer does it all the time, and he isn’t better or braver than you.
Buoyed by a rising courage (and a reckless determination to prove Seifer wrong), Quistis resolutely pulls the zipper down and shrugs off her vest before she can talk herself out of it. Next goes her skirt, and then she unhooks her bra, flushing as her breasts are bared in this wide-open space. It’s unlikely anyone will come up here and find her in a state of undress, but still, she glances over her shoulder self-consciously and hopes no one does.
Finally, she steps out of her underwear. But now she sees the problem: If she leaves all her clothes here, she’ll have nothing to cover herself with down on the beach. She thinks about it for a minute, chewing her lip, and makes a decision. She gathers all her clothes and Seifer’s and rolls them up inside Seifer’s coat, knotting two corners of the fabric together to create a tidy package. The wind whispers over her bare skin as she works, stirring the fine hairs on her arms and the backs of her thighs.
When she’s done, she tosses the whole thing over the far edge of the cliff, the one overlooking the beach. She watches as it bounces down the steep, grassy slope and explodes, scattering their clothes all over the sand below.
Taking a deep breath, she approaches the edge of the cliff again. Her stomach rolls over in fear. The drop is probably only sixty feet or so, but it looks much farther. So much farther now that she’s about to jump it. The water directly beneath her is a deep blue, the ripples on its surface shining silver in the brilliance of the sun. Seifer bobs in the waves, strong arms treading. His face is upturned, but from this height, his features are nearly indistinct.
You can do it.
Seifer beckons impatiently with both hands. Quistis sucks in a steadying breath.
On the count of three…
Two…
One!
Shoving down her misgivings, she takes a running leap off the cliff. She’s too scared to scream. She folds her arms in across her chest and points her toes downward, just like Seifer told her to do, squeezing her eyes shut as she falls.
An instant later, she plunges into the water. The ice-cold shock of it punches the breath out of her lungs as she sinks in the sea’s dark, deep embrace. Bubbles glide up around her, a cool caress on her skin. Now that the hardest part is over, now that she’s overcome her fear, it feels nice not to be sticky and sweaty anymore. And there’s a euphoria, too—from the rush of the jump, from evading death. She can see why Seifer does this.
Feeling refreshed, she starts to kick hard for the surface.
When she breaks it, dragging in a lungful of air and tossing her wet hair back off her face, Seifer crows. He’s swimming toward her, his face bright with a delighted grin.
“Guess you’re not such a buzzkill after all, are ya, Trepe?” he teases.
Normally, that kind of dig from him would tick her off. But is that a hint of affection she hears behind the words?
No. That’s not possible.
She splashes him. He laughs and splashes her back. They keep it up for a while, paddling and chasing each other. She even lets him grab her around the waist once and throw her, shrieking with laughter, into the water. They play until Quistis forgets that she’s Instructor Trepe and he’s her problem student. Forgets to suppress all the rebellious urges she’s pushed down all her life to get to where she is, to achieve what she’s achieved. They’re just Quistis and Seifer, two carefree young adults who’ve known each other all their lives and have nowhere more important to be.
As the sun dips toward the horizon, they start to make for the shore. Seifer swims ahead in long, smooth strokes, eventually rising to his feet when he reaches the shallows. He wades up onto the sand, and for the first time, Quistis dares to look right at him.
Water drops glitter on his broad, muscular back. Seeing him naked, it’s a shock to realize how completely his clothes hide the sheer size of him when he’s fully dressed. She watches as one droplet shudders loose and trails down his spine, over dimpled skin and freckles and mounds of muscle, before coming to rest just above the curve of his bum. Only then does she look away, her face hot.
On the beach, he shakes the water out of his hair like a big dog. There’s absolutely no effort to hide his nudity, unlike her; as she joins him on dry land, she covers herself as best she can, one arm across her chest and the other hand between her legs. Seifer looks at her and smirks, though his eyes linger for a moment before he turns to grab his coat from the ground. Shaking sand out of it, he offers it to her.
“Here,” he says. “Since you’re such a goddamn prude.”
Quistis just looks at it dubiously. Rolling his eyes, Seifer drapes it around her shoulders and tucks it closed under her chin. It’s a couple of sizes too big for her, but in this case, that’s not such a bad thing. It’ll keep everything hidden that she wants to keep hidden.
It smells all right too. Good hygiene—that’s another thing Seifer has going for him, at least.
She expects Seifer to get dressed next, but he doesn’t make a move to gather his clothes. His hands remain on her shoulders, big and heavy, and she’s suddenly all too conscious of how close they’re standing, how naked he is. A gust of wind blows in off the sea and Quistis shivers.
“You cold?” Seifer asks.
“A bit.”
Seifer nods, but rather than release her so she can get dressed, he pulls her in against his chest. Quistis is so startled that she doesn’t immediately push him away—and then his skin is so warm under her cheek that she doesn’t want to. She lets him hold her for a minute, listening to the quick, steady rhythm of his heart as one of his hands rubs up and down her back, like he’s trying to dry her off or comfort her. His body is sturdy against hers. Solid.
“Seifer…” she murmurs.
What are you doing? she doesn’t ask.
What am I doing?
Hooking the knuckle of his index finger under her chin, he tilts her face up so they’re looking into each other’s eyes. As his gaze searches her, questioning, Quistis’s heart starts to pound. Is he going to kiss her? It seems like he wants to. Before she can wonder further, he leans in and presses their mouths together, soft and gentle, almost timid. She makes a muffled sound of surprise and Seifer pulls back.
“That okay, Trepe?” he asks. His voice is so low, so un-Seifer-like; there’s none of the arrogance and bravado she usually hears in it.
Quistis only hesitates for a second before nodding. She tilts her head back and he kisses her again, his arms gathering her closer. Despite the coat she’s got on—his coat—their damp, bare skin sticks together. Cautiously, she places her hands on his waist. The skin is silky but the muscle underneath is taut, and just touching him, kissing him, is enough to start a wet, aching pulse between her legs.
She’s so turned on that when he parts her lips with his tongue, she can’t help a soft moan. It should repulse her—the last thing she ever thought she wanted was Seifer’s tongue in her mouth—but he’s less aggressive than she expected. And as his tongue slides over hers, something stiff presses against her bare hip. His erection.
That doesn’t repulse her either.
“Have you ever…?” Seifer licks his lips and tries for a cocksure grin. “…You know.”
Quistis frowns, unsure what he’s asking. Then it hits her. Seifer is asking if she’s a virgin. The realization brings heat to her cheeks.
“No.” She shakes her head. Actually, before now, she’s never even been kissed, but she’s not about to give him that intel so he can lord it over her. “Have you?”
Seifer hesitates before also shaking his head. That’s a surprise. With a face like his—strong jaw and nose, piercing aquamarine eyes—she figured he’d be getting more female attention than he could handle.
Then again, there’s his personality.
Quistis initiates the next kiss, standing on the tips of her toes to reach his mouth. His hands are somehow inside the coat now, palms skimming up her ribs to cup her breasts. Callused thumbs brush over her nipples and it’s like a bolt of thundaga searing through her and into her core, turning her blood to molten heat. Despite herself, she lets out a whimper. There’s so much confidence in the way he handles her that she’s convinced she’s not the first woman he’s ever touched, no matter what he says.
“Do you want to?” he murmurs against her lips.
She shouldn’t want to. The makeup of Seifer’s character has been at least seventy percent asshole for as long as she’s known him—he’s always been abrasive, not just to her, but to everyone he’s ever met. But he’s handsome and he’s willing, and she’d rather not be a virgin anymore, even if she always imagined her first time with someone else. There’s no amount of logic that will change her mind or curb this sudden, primal, incomprehensible hunger. It goes beyond want.
She needs him.
“Yes,” she says breathlessly.
They stumble, kissing, over to the grass. Seifer spreads his coat out and lays her down on it, and she lets her knees fall apart as he settles on top of her, between her thighs. Quistis isn’t sure what to do with her hands, so she puts them on his shoulders. They’re thick and solid and beefy with muscle, and she squeezes them almost unconsciously.
They look at one another for a moment. There’s something nervous in Seifer’s eyes, and that makes Quisis feel less silly about all of this. If someone like Seifer, who walks through the world like he owns it, is nervous, then that means it’s okay for her to be nervous too.
Seifer captures her lips, her cheek, her jaw, her pulse, until his mouth finds her throat. The kisses he places there are soft at first, but as Quistis slides her hands over his back, trailing her fingers down the knobs of his spine and up again, they become open-mouthed and eager, his breath hot and panting on her skin. A hand finds her breast between them and kneads it. Their skin is pressed together everywhere, and Quistis feels hazy with desire, like she’s floating despite his weight pinning her down.
Wanting more, Quistis folds her leg around his hips, and the change of position nudges the blunt tip of him against her opening. A current of excitement jolts through her.
“Seifer,” she murmurs, and when he doesn’t answer, just keeps devouring her throat, she grabs his head and lifts it to meet his eyes. “Do it now.”
His brow creases and his eyes search her. “You sure?”
Quistis nods. She doesn’t need more than this; she’s wet enough to take him, she can feel it on her inner thighs. When he doesn’t move, just keeps staring at her like he’s expecting her to change her mind or ask for a little more foreplay, her look turns pointed.
“All right, all right, keep your hair on,” he says.
Seifer raises himself onto his elbows on either side of her. Quistis holds her breath, quivering with fear and anticipation. Anatomically speaking, she knows what’s involved. But what will it feel like? Will it be as good, as mind-blowing, as everyone acts like it is? How can it be, if Seifer’s never done this before—if he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing?
She’s about to ask what he’s waiting for when Seifer pushes his hips forward. As the head of his erection breaches her, he lets out a disbelieving breath, his wide eyes locked on her face.
Quistis answers with a soft cry, her muscles tensing up involuntarily. It doesn’t hurt, exactly, but it pinches; her body isn’t used to having something so big in it.
Seifer pauses, looking down at her. “You okay?”
Quistis nods, biting her lip.
“Does it hurt?”
“Kind of.”
“Oh. So…” Disappointment flickers almost imperceptibly across his face. She can feel the tension in his body wherever it touches hers, like it’s taking every atom of his self-control not to drive himself all the way inside her with a single thrust. “You want me to stop?”
Quistis shakes her head and puts a hand on his lower back. It hurts much less than she thought it would, after all the first-time horror stories she’s overheard in the girls’ locker room. But even if it did hurt, it wouldn’t matter, because she needs the rest of him. She needs to know what it feels like to have a man inside her, even if that man is Seifer.
“No,” she says. “Just take it slow.”
Nodding, Seifer pushes in a little deeper, then pulls out again, working his way into her incrementally. She tries to keep her breathing steady, to relax her muscles for him. It’s much more considerate than she would have expected sex with Seifer to be. The pinching subsides, and then all she can feel is him. It’s not as intensely pleasurable in the same way it is when she touches her clitoris, but it’s nice. More than nice. It feels right, like she’s discovered something she didn’t realize she was looking for.
At last he’s all the way in, and yet his hips press against her like he wants to go deeper. He pauses there, and she can feel him trembling, his balls a soft pillow against her bottom.
“Fuck,” he says. He lifts himself onto his hands to look down at himself inside of her. “Fuck, Quistis.”
A shiver goes through her; a fresh throb of heat. He called her by her first name. He never does that.
They start slow. He rocks in and out of her with shallow movements, his brow furrowed in concentration and his eyes moving between her lips and her chest and back again. Eventually, his mouth covers hers and his hand finds her breast, squeezing it rhythmically as his thrusts smooth out, gather power. He’s finding his confidence.
And so is she. Quistis cups his bum with both hands, feeling the muscles clenching tight with every motion of his hips. It’s a reminder of what a fierce soldier he really is, that even though he was just splashing around innocently with her in the sea, he’s in peak physical shape, a deadly weapon honed by years of training.
Quistis kisses him back, running her hands up his spine again to card through his hair. It’s dry already, soft and feathery. Every so often, as she lifts her hips to meet him, his pelvic bone rubs against her clitoris. It sparks little bursts of pleasure, though never enough to bring her to the edge.
Soon enough, he drapes his full weight over her. His arms tuck close around her and he presses his face to her hair, muffling his grunts in it. Quistis kisses his shoulder, tastes sea salt. Although she’s never slept with anyone before, she knows instinctively that he’s starting to come. His smooth thrusts are turning sharp, his breathing erratic. Then his body stiffens in her arms.
With a ragged groan, Seifer drives deep with a final thrust and holds himself there for a couple of seconds. A few weaker pumps follow, and then he stills against her, his skin tacky with a light sheen of sweat. His breath tickles her throat and stirs her hair.
So that’s it, then, Quistis thinks as she holds him numbly. It’s a bit of an anticlimax. Less than five minutes—maybe less than three—and he’s already finished. Is Seifer the kind of man who’d care for his partner’s pleasure after his own needs have been met? Something tells her no.
But after a moment, he lifts his head to look down at her. He’s breathing hard, his face flushed. He’s still inside her and doesn’t make any move to withdraw.
“Did you…?” he asks.
Quistis considers lying, ending this so they can get back to their regular lives and pretend it never happened, but she’s still aching with unfulfilled need. So she shakes her head. Seifer slowly pulls out, releasing a hot trickle of his semen down her thigh, and moves his weight off to recline beside her. His hand slips between her legs. It’s unexpected, and Quistis bucks, nearly clamping her thighs together over his hand. His touch is tentative, one finger slipping between her wet folds and stroking.
“Not like that,” she says.
Seifer pauses. There’s a glimmer of curiosity in his eyes, instead of the annoyance she was expecting. “Okay. Then show me how you want it.”
Quisis holds the lips of her vulva open with her left hand and uses her right hand to guide his to her clitoris. She presses his fingers over it, only releasing him when she’s sure he understands what he’s touching.
“Rub it,” she says. “In little circles.”
It doesn’t take him long to catch on. She doesn’t even have to correct him again, which probably shouldn’t come as a surprise; every waking moment of Seifer’s existence is dedicated to improving his dexterity, to analyzing physical challenges and making split-second decisions. At first, he works her fast and hard, but the minute she so much as frowns in discomfort, he backs off, adjusting the pressure until her face slackens with bliss again.
Gradually, the motion of his fingers relents until his touch is slow and light and he’s making wider circles around her clitoris. It’s almost tender. It’s so different from the quick and dirty job she normally does on herself that it catches her off guard. And it does feel good, suffusing her body with a warm, tingling pleasure that concentrates between her legs, so strong that all she wants is to feel him inside her again.
“Seifer,” she breathes, her body quivering and her hips jumping off the grass, chasing his touch, “keep doing that. Exactly that.”
Their eyes meet, and the single-minded intensity in his makes Quistis close hers. Seifer is a model student in every way except his attitude. He excels at everything he does. Of course he’d be the same with sex, watching carefully for the things that drive her mad and mastering them.
She puts a hand on the back of his neck and pulls him in for a kiss, moaning as their tongues meet. Orgasm rises within her slowly but steadily. It lifts her on a cresting wave, then crashes over her like she’s a boat unmoored in a storm. She arches and cries out, clinging to Seifer’s neck and pressing her face to his shoulder. It rocks her again and again, more violent than anything she’s ever been able to do to herself.
As she rides it out, grinding herself against his hand, she can feel his gaze still on her. The waves subside, and she opens her eyes slowly. The look on his face is no longer focussed, but spellbound. It’s been a long time since she’s seen him look like that—amazed, awakened. Actually, she can't remember him ever looking anything other than jaded, surly, or arrogantly sure of himself.
Seifer presses a last, chaste kiss to her lips and then settles down on his back in the grass with his hands folded over his hard stomach. For a while, they lie side by side catching their breath. Seifer’s arm is warm and sweaty against her own. Quistis brings her knees up, tucking her heels against her bottom, and crosses one arm over her chest. She should get up and get dressed, but now that she’s coming back into her right mind, she’s frozen with embarrassment. This is Seifer. They may be the same age, but he’s still her student.
Her student who can’t stand her.
Ugh. What were you thinking, Quistis?
She lies there until he finally sits up. He rubs the back of his neck and looks at her over his shoulder.
“It’s getting late,” he says.
And so it is. The sun hangs low over the sea, a ball of deep, burning orange. Xu is probably wondering where they’ve gotten to, if she hasn’t already sent out a search party.
That’s enough to spur her into action. She pushes herself upright, then into a squatting position, reaching out to grab her panties off the grass. Face hot and with her back to Seifer, she steps into them, then locates her bra and hooks it on. By the time she’s finished getting dressed, Seifer is already making his way over to the slope that will take them back up to the clifftop they jumped from.
“You coming?” he asks her.
“Yes,” she says shortly, tugging the hem of her vest straight. “After you.”
Seifer smirks as she approaches. Whatever vulnerable, magical thing that passed between them, however brief, is gone now. They are themselves again. She is Instructor Trepe. And he is her problem student. It was silly to think they could shed those identities without consequence.
“Come on. Don’t take it so damn seriously,” he says, slinging an arm around her shoulder and steering her toward the slope. “It’s just sex. I’m not gonna tell anyone.”
“And pass up the chance to ruin my career? How chivalrous.”
She shrugs him off and hurries to walk ahead, almost going on all fours to get up the steep first few feet of the slope. When she finally turns to look at him, he’s still standing where he was, a pensive, almost wistful, expression on his face as his sea green eyes study her. Seeing him like that—handsome, thoughtful—she can't bring herself to regret what they did.
Quistis puts her hands on her hips. “What are you waiting for?” she asks.
Seifer shakes his head a little, like he’s snapping out of a trance, but the serious look in his eyes remains.
“I won’t tell anyone. Cross my heart and hope to die, Trepe,” he says, and jogs to catch up with her.