Chapter 97 A New Perspective
Zion came back to consciousness abruptly.
He listened first. The ambient quiet of an empty building at night, the particular silence large indoor spaces had when no one was moving through them. Then smell, which arrived before his eyes opened and told him several things immediately, the most relevant being that he was not where he had last been conscious.
He opened his eyes.
High ceiling. The faint grey of pre-dawn light through the high windows.
‘This is the school's Gym. I've been in here too many times not to know.’
He tried to move his arms and found them bound behind him. His feet kicked out and found nothing restraining them. He started pulling at the bindings around his wrists and found them tied with the specific looseness of someone who had done their best with no experience tying knots.
He had woken up earlier than he should have. The powder had been made with Enzo's blood, not his, and he had taken a fraction of what Enzo had taken. His senses had been returning for hours, the spell burning through his system faster because of it.
He started working on the bindings.
And then the scent hit him.
He stopped moving.
It arrived without announcement, vanilla and something underneath the vanilla that was warmer, the combination of a person's natural scent and the warmth of sleep. It was coming from the floor to his left.
His head turned.
Molly was asleep on a gym mat a few feet away.
He had seen Molly before. He had known who she was, been aware of her in the general way you were aware of people in a school you attended, had sat in the same space with her once or twice in the school’s library, and had sat across from her at a restaurant the previous evening for two hours. He had a clear mental image of Molly Marsh.
What was on the gym mat did not match that image.
Her hair was down. He had never seen it down. It was always pulled into that double ponytail that he had filed away as simply part of how she looked, and down it was a completely different thing, dark and loose and framing her face against the gym mat. It made her face more visible in its structure, the line of her jaw, the lashes against her cheek longer than he had ever had any reason to notice.
Her lips were slightly parted.
She was in a gym towel. The standard issue kind, and it had loosened at the front over the course of several hours of sleep, worked itself open to a degree that made Zion look at the ceiling immediately.
He had not known. That was the honest summary. He had not known that Molly Marsh looked the way Molly Marsh looked, and the towel's current failure was communicating this information with considerable clarity and he was having a response to it that had no framework attached because Molly had simply never existed in that part of his brain before.
He breathed in again without meaning to. The vanilla and the warmth made something in his chest pull in a direction he didn't have a name for yet.
He looked at the ceiling and went back to the bindings.
He had most of the knot undone when he heard the small sound from the mat. He looked over and watched the towel complete the work it had been doing all night and fall open entirely revealing her large supple breasts, her nipples were perked and flushed pink like her skin.
Zion sucked in a deep breath and laughed believing himself to be crazy, he fixed his gaze on the ceiling with great conviction.
He heard Molly shift. A groan. The sound of someone waking up reluctantly.
"Is it morning already?"
Her voice was thick with sleep.
He brought his eyes to her face and kept them there.
Molly blinked at him. She looked at the pillar and the ropes and back at him and the sleep cleared from her expression.
"Oh," she said. She sat up on the mat. "I didn't mean to still have you tied up."
"It's fine," Zion said.
"I'll untie you," she said, starting to stand. "If you agree not to free Enzo." She glanced at the other pillar. "I don't like him." She scrunched up her nose.
By Heavens, Zion found those little movements extremely cute. His eyes moved to where Enzo was still fully unconscious with considerably more rope around him than Zion had, including what appeared to be a tape wrapped around his face covering his mouth entirely.
Zion looked at this for a moment.
Then a soft sound came out of him that he hadn't planned, building from somewhere low in his chest into a genuine laugh, the kind that arrived before you could decide whether to let it out.
He got his wrists free while he was still laughing, brought his arms around, and rolled his shoulders.
He looked up.
Molly had gone still.
She was standing in the middle of the gymnasium floor and her arms had wrapped around herself, hugging her own ribs, and her expression had changed into mortification. Zion tracked the reason a half second behind her.
The draft from the high gymnasium vents.
The towel on the mat behind her.
Molly looked down.
The sound she made had no classification. She reached down for the towel, her foot caught the edge of the mat and she went forward. Zion immediately moved before he decided to move because his reflexes did not wait for decisions.
She landed on his lap.
The sound he made was involuntary and completely beyond his ability to prevent.
She had landed on his boner. And it was becoming increasingly painful to ignore. He focused his stare on the gymnasium wall.
Molly went completely still on his lap, she felt how thick he was and the pulsing of his cock made her feel.
The stillness lasted three seconds. Her breathing forgotten, her face turned toward his profile from about two inches away.
He turned to say something.
She slapped him.
The sound rang off the gymnasium ceiling. His head snapped to the side and he sat looking at the wall with the heat of it spreading across his cheek and said absolutely nothing.
Molly scrambled off his lap and grabbed the towel from the mat, he groaned because she had accidentally rocked her ass against his cock, causing his head to be filled with images that involved Molly, those ropes, and that gym mat with no towel anywhere in sight.
Molly wrapped the towel around herself with a speed rivaling that of the Flash. She backed up several feet until she hit the wall, and stood there with the towel held at her chest and her face red with embarrassment fully visible even in the low light.
Zion sat on the floor and pressed his lips together.
"I can explain," he said.
"Don't," Molly said.
"It's a physiological—"
"I said don't."
He bit down a grin as a single, boyish thought crossed his mind: Had Molly Marsh always looked this cute?