Bethas 7th, 2718
Breathe. He needed to breathe before he began to take things too far—oh, but—
Smirking lopsidedly at her hand on his chest, sure that had she wanted to, she could ask the mona to rip his rapidly beating heart from his chest, one cell at a time, so eager was it against his sternum, he chuckled at her comment,
"Prudish. The word you're looking for is prudish. Yes, foreign critics have been known to say that the Kingdom of Anaxas is perhaps just as sexually repressive as it is socially oppressive, but some of us consider ourselves intellectually enlightened. At least, on one of those arguments." The young Siordanti grinned wickedly, one side at a time, her promise and use of his title ridiculously more arousing than he thought at all mortally possible. This desk would really just have to do, thought the professor as he leaned in to meet her lips again.
He didn't hear his door open, and the poor, unfortunate creature who was tasked with the tidying of his classroom had no field with which to give more appropriate fair warning. Instead, a faint slosh and tinkle of spilled water, and the even smaller voice was like an electric shock of surprise, Nauleth's eyes widened and his hands slid away from smooth skin to disappear into his trouser pockets in desperate need to hide all things inappropriate with the speed of a startled chrove, stepping back dizzily with Athrym's equally hasty shove—
This wasn't the first time the junior professor had been caught after class in his classroom, though it was the least innocent of all moments. Usually, he'd be recording his notes from the blackboard into his worn leather-wrapped journal, having come up with something interesting through discussion with his class. Or he'd be buried under a pile of mid-terms, sorting to stay sane. Or, he'd be napping, curled up on its wooden surface after a long night of crawling through the Stacks, hungover and barely surviving his throng of students for the day. He'd run the gamut of surprise moments, truly, but this moment was by far the most scandalous.
Thank the goddess they were interrupted sooner rather than later, by the way things were headed.
—The physical mona in the room, so attuned to his constant presence, swayed and shifted with the tide of his emotions, drawn to him with a tangible pressure like an increase of gravitational pull in the small space,
"...yes! Well, uh, er, responsive to that particular inflection. I can understand the difficulty, given the linguistic differences between Estuan and Gioran, though I'd venture to say that you Gioran have made your own adaptations in Monite—and—and—yes. Other things." Nauleth rambled very quickly like a deflating balloon, making up words as if the small passive boy even clocking cared, so obvious had their actual activities been that there was very little he felt he could say to cover their indecency. The red that flushed his freckled cheeks much more embarrassment than arousal now. Still, he flashed Athrym an assuring smile—whatever gossip the passive could possibly spread through his kind would hardly end up anywhere damaging.
They were kept isolated for everyone's safety, after all. What was the harm?
Finally turning around, he offered the uniformed creature still clinging to his sloshing bucket a very thin, almost apologetic smile. Had he seen this one's face before in his classroom? Perhaps. Maybe he'd found him asleep and hungover. Or maybe he'd patiently cleaned the blackboard while Naul groaned from beneath a pile of mid-term papers. Whatever the case, he just needed to make sure the child didn't go blabbing anything about what he even thought he saw to the faculty and cover their hasty escape,
"Clocking hell, don't tell me I need to put in a request to ask for a knock before entering? I shall do that. Please take a note of it. I'll speak slowly—from now on, please knock. Yes?"
There was an authoritative weight in his tone, as if he was threatening an opponent on the Lawn, the heaviness seeping into his field and into the physical mona that lingered in the classroom, "Look, uh," Passive uniforms didn't have name tags, godsdamnit, "Boy—what's your name, anyway? Listen, we were just leaving, so you can, er, carry on with your duties. However—"
Gold-rimmed eyes held the youth's firmly, aware that he lacked the appearance of anyone threatening with his coat ruffled and his hair mussed, lips still longing for more of the Gioran Ambassador behind him. Pausing just long enough to speak a few quick, almost necessary-sounding lines of monite, the Perceptive mona in his field sluggish as if just as distracted as he'd been before the interruption. His simple spell seemed to bolster the suggestion in his next words, tugging on Edriel's consciousness to make his offer sound much more compelling than the actual truth, though in his current state of mind, Nauleth's casting was not at all as strong and the mona not at all as convincing as it could have been, leaving the boy with his own choice to make even if he felt pulled in one direction slightly more than another,
"—I recommend that you remember this moment as a extracurricularly studious one accidentally interrupted instead of a scandalous one, out of respect to our esteemed Gioran Ambassador. Do we have an understanding?"
His hands were straightening out his coat, his collar, his shirt before running nervous fingers through his hair, pulse racing in his ears. Without waiting for an answer, the young Siordanti was already gathering his things, but he kept his gaze on the boy expectantly.
