"Good answer." She sank down, and her mouth replaced her hand, warm and wet and immediate, and the sound I made this time echoed off the empty seats in a way that a smarter man would have found alarming.

I did not find it alarming. I found it excellent, which was the entire flaw in my character rendered visible.

Her tongue did something I didn’t have a name for. Her hand kept working the base while her mouth handled the rest, and she moaned around me, the vibration traveling straight up through the whole of me, and I understood with sudden clarity that this was not a girl performing enthusiasm. This was a girl having a genuinely good time. The Temptation Gauge pulsed at the edge of my vision, climbing, and I dismissed it because for once I did not want the number. I wanted the moaning blonde with my hand fisted in her ponytail and her makeup wrecked and her hips still moving against nothing because her body couldn’t stop even when it wasn’t the focus.

"Slow down." I meant it as a warning. It came out closer to a plea.

She pulled off with a slick sound and grinned up at me, lips swollen, a strand of saliva connecting her mouth to me before it broke. "Why. You got somewhere to be?"

"I have Sloane at eight."

"It’s four-fifteen." She licked her lips, slow, deliberate, watching me watch her do it. "You have time to come at least twice before I have to give you back."

Twice.

The word had barely finished landing when she went back down, and any protest I might have mustered dissolved into the wet, obscene rhythm she set, her cheeks hollowing, her free hand cupping and rolling in a way that pulled a genuinely undignified sound out of me. My grip tightened in her hair. Her moan pitched up in response, delighted, like the pull was the whole reason she was doing this.

"Nnh, mmph, haah." The sounds she made weren’t quiet. Weren’t trying to be. She’d warned me. She’d warned me twice, and I’d let her keep going anyway, and somewhere in the back of my Intelligence-boosted brain a very small, very ignored voice pointed out that empty theaters didn’t stay empty by accident, they stayed empty because someone was paid to keep an eye on them.

That voice got significantly louder when the door at the top of the aisle opened.

Light spilled in, a narrow white cone sweeping across the seats. Footsteps on worn carpet. A bored voice, not Quinn’s, older, the specific weariness of a campus employee who has walked in on more than they were ever paid enough to process.

"Everything all right down here?"

Felicity froze with me still in her mouth.

I froze with my hand still in her hair.

The flashlight beam started its lazy arc down the rows, and I ran the math faster than I’d ever run anything in my life. We were in the back. The seats reclined. The angle was bad for the worker and worse for us. Blitz would get me across the theater but not into a state of dignity. There was a genuine, non-zero probability that the elected male representative of Class 1-B was about to be discovered with his shorts around his knees and Felicity Hardy’s mouth full, four hours before his first strategy session with faculty leadership.

Then Felicity’s eyes went sharp.

She slid off me, quiet, controlled, none of the fumbling panic I’d expected. Her hand came up, fingers spreading, and the air in front of us shimmered with that dreamlike warmth, that soft-edged light that was her signature whether she wanted it to be or not.

Two feet to our left, an illusion of us bloomed into existence. Fully dressed. Sitting a respectable distance apart. Me with an arm slung over the seat back, her with her legs crossed, both of us angled toward the screen. The illusion-Felicity was mid-sentence, gesturing at the film with the specific animation of someone with strong opinions about cinematography.

"The whole third act falls apart," illusion-Felicity was saying, her voice pitch-perfect, carrying just far enough. "The pacing’s a mess. They spend forty minutes building the threat and then resolve it in one punch. It’s lazy."

The real Felicity, kneeling in the dark with her lips still wet and my very real self very much not put away, mouthed the words along with her fake as she projected them.

The flashlight beam found the illusion. Held. The worker’s footsteps slowed.

"Keep it down, would you? People are trying to watch in there."

"Sorry," illusion-me said, in my exact voice, with a wave that was more casual than anything I could have managed in the actual circumstances. "Got heated about the plot holes. Won’t happen again."

The beam clicked off. Footsteps retreated. The door swung shut, and the theater dropped back into blue and gold and the swell of a Japanese orchestra scoring the hero’s tearful reunion with his mentor.

For a long moment neither of us moved.

Then Felicity dropped her forehead against my thigh and started laughing, silent and shaking, her whole body trembling with the effort of not making a sound loud enough to summon the flashlight back.

"Oh my god." She wheezed it into my leg. "Oh my god, I told you. I told you we should have picked somewhere private."

"You created a fake version of us discussing pacing while you were actively giving me head."

"I contain multitudes." She lifted her head, and her eyes were streaming, mascara officially declared a total loss. "Also that was maybe the hottest thing I’ve ever done and I don’t know what that says about me."

"It says you’re a menace."

"You keep calling me things like that and then not stopping me." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing black across her cheekbone, and somehow made even that look good, which was its own kind of unfair. "Where were we?"

"You were monologuing about your relationship with sex."