Her eyes widened in degrees as if she was a sleepy kitten. “Oh. Oh, shit! Yes, I am.”

“Hang on.” He reached into his pocket for Dani’s morning protein bar, a habit he’d fallen into since she’d started working at Echo months ago. It was only fair, since she always brought him coffee. And since she never had time for breakfast, a fact he’d learned after seeing her chomp down a bag of Skittles at 9 A.M. And since she was a bleeding-heart vegetarian who might die of malnutrition without him.

“Thanks, Dad,” she said, and snickered, holding out her hand because she knew the drill.

Zaf snorted. But what he found in his pocket was hard and cold and definitely not protein-rich: his phone. Wrong pocket. As he let go and withdrew his hand, sound filled the air.

“Then have me. I’m dying for you, and you know it.”

Oh, shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

Of course he’d managed to press Play on his latest audiobook. Zaf grabbed his phone and fumbled with the earbuds wrapped around it—the same earbuds that hadn’t stopped him from hitting Play but now acted as some kind of impenetrable fucking shield protecting the Pause button. This must be one of his teenage nightmares, because his hands were way slower and clumsier than usual. The audiobook narrator warned, “If I touch you tonight, I’ll make you mine,” and across the desk, Danika made a choked noise of—horror? Yep, probably horror—and put a hand over her mouth.

“Zaf,” she half-shrieked, “is that porn?”

“No!” The word came out a bit too loud to seem honest. “No,” he repeated through gritted teeth, trying to sound like a calm, sensible man instead of a raging pervert. He finally managed to pause the app, then opened a desk drawer, shoved his traitorous phone inside (technology, like most apparently good things in life, clearly couldn’t be trusted), and slammed it shut.

“That was definitely porn,” Dani said, and Zaf was so busy wanting to jump off a bridge, it took him a long while to realize she was laughing. One hand still covered her mouth, but little chuckles escaped between her words, and her eyes creased at the corners in an unmistakable smile. The relief that hit him was so fucking intense, he almost passed out. With every good-natured giggle, a bit of his instinct to think the worst faded away.

“It wasn’t porn,” he repeated, and this time he didn’t have to shout over the frantic pounding of his heart, or the urgent moaning of his phone. “It’s an audiobook.”

“What the bloody hell kind of audiobook?” But she asked with a grin on her face.

“Doesn’t matter,” he muttered, not because he was embarrassed about reading romance novels, but because now didn’t seem like the best time to explain it. “Listen, I really didn’t mean for that to—”

“I know,” she said, no hesitation, which was good. Because if she’d taken that fiasco as some kind of creepy, quote-unquote accident, Zaf would’ve had to run away to Guatemala to herd goats for a living. And he’d never been great with animals.

His cheeks still burning—thank fuck for thick beards and brown skin—Zaf stabbed a hand into his other pocket, found the protein bar, and handed it over. “There. Now piss off.”

“Rude,” she said, but she was smiling as she walked away.

“You’d better eat that!” he groused.

“Enjoy your sex book!” she called back. Then she swung open the door to the stairwell and disappeared.

Zaf exhaled and dropped his head into his hands. “Kill me,” he murmured to no one in particular. “Just kill me now.”

CHAPTER TWO

It was absolutely typical that Dani’s first year as junior teaching staff—good—had coincided with her unfortunate transfer to the hideous building that was Echo—bad. She should be teaching next door to one of her Ph.D. supervisors right now, in the tiny, cozy building on campus dedicated to literature and women’s studies. But back in October, there’d been an unfortunate incident involving a group of first years, clown suits, a pi?ata, and a surprising amount of asbestos. In the chaos of relocation, Dani had helpfully and foolishly volunteered to take the classroom no one else wanted to touch. After all, Jo worked in Echo, so how bad could it be?

Now that Jo was no longer her good friend and regular lay, the answer was: quite bad. Even the best thing about Echo—one rather entertaining security guard—had a habit of making her late. Or later than usual.

“All right!” Dani clapped her hands as she strode into her temporary classroom. “I’m here, shut up, hope you did the reading, because if you didn’t, you’re buggered.” She carefully removed her laptop from her rucksack, put it on the desk, then dumped the bag unceremoniously on the cold, hard floor. Uncapping a whiteboard pen, she pointed at the table of students waiting for her, all of whom looked slightly unnerved—which was just how she liked them. “Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market,’ let’s discuss. Emily, start us off.”

The sleepy-eyed teenager wrapped a strand of long, blue hair around her finger and said promptly, “Totally about banging.”

Dani approached the board and wrote Goblin Market in a bubble. Traditionalists might find writing on the board unnecessary, but not all learners were aural, no matter their stage of education. So she scrawled a little arrow coming out of her bubble and wrote: Banging.

Then she turned back to Emily and said brightly, “Please elaborate.”

“Well,” Emily hedged, “I mean, it’s either banging or Christianity. One of those. Maybe both.”

“I think it’s both,” added the boy beside her, Will.

Dani nodded, drew another arrow, and wrote Tits out for Christ? Then she asked, “Anything more specific?”

“Tits in for Christ,” Will corrected.

“Tits wherever you want for Christ,” Emily said firmly, “because he’ll totally forgive you. It’s an allegory. Lizzie suffers, right, for Laura’s sin?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Dani grinned, grabbed a board cloth, and replaced Tits out for Christ with Allegory: original sin, savior’s suffering. “Okay, someone else . . .” Her eyes landed on an unfamiliar face—the new girl. She’d received an email from scheduling about that. “Fatima, yes?”

The girl nodded, small and serious and alarmingly well dressed. “That’s right.”

“Did you have time to read?”

“I did.”

“Hit me, then.”

Fatima cleared her throat. “I got the Christ thing, too. And I think the goblins are anti-Semitic.”

The girl next to her, Pelumi, clicked her fingers. “Like in Harry Potter.”

“Hey,” someone piped up from across the table. “Don’t shit-talk Harry Potter.”

“It’s not shit-talking if it’s true.”

Dani clapped her hands. “Robust discussion is precisely what I want from you, but unless you can connect Harry Potter to Rossetti’s themes more solidly, I’m going to ask that it’s taken off the table.”

There was a pause before Pelumi said, “Excess sensuality and the private cost. Hogwarts has magically refilling tables as a result of underground slave labor; the girl in the poem dies of too many orgasms or something because she tasted some dick. I mean, fruit.”

Dani nodded gravely. “For sheer ingenuity, I will allow it.”

The debate burst to life.

Dani spent the rest of the class listening to a mix of razor-sharp insight and meme regurgitation, directing the conversation when it seemed necessary, shutting up when it didn’t. Time skipped ahead of her until the seminar was over, notebooks were being stuffed into bags, and the cupcakes at the union stall started calling her name.

As the students filed out with waves and good-byes, Dani paused to open her laptop and take a quick look at her emails. One had to stay on top of these things. Someone might need her to—

Ah.

There was a new email at the top of the screen with a bolded subject line that made her gut squeeze. Whether that squeeze was excitement or a warning sign of nervous diarrhea, it was hard to say. All things considered, it might even be both.

DAUGHTERS OF DECADENCE, THEN & NOW: A PUBLIC RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM.

Hi, Dani . . . the preview read, and was doubtless followed by something like: Just need final confirmation re: topics for discussion panel with Inez and co.!

The discussion panel was a public speaking event Dani had foolishly agreed to take part in when she was presumably high on (then undiscovered) asbestos fumes the previous year.