Chapter 11: Private Lessons*

{Lily}

I’d never been particularly good at standing around doing nothing.

Kohaku had been gone for a while now. I stayed right where she’d left me, by the hedge, guarding her drink with both hands like she’d asked. The party moved along without us. The quartet had started up again, the nobles laughed at things that didn’t sound very funny, and I practiced standing like I belonged there. Which mostly meant standing like Kohaku, shoulders back, chin up. It probably worked better with a tail.

[She’s so confident... That could never be me, huh?]

She’d gone off to talk to the professor for me. After I’d already been told no, marching across the whole garden to argue my case to a woman she’d never met. That was apparently just a thing she did.

[Please go well. Please, please go well. She’s trying so hard for me, and I don’t even know why. What did I ever do for her? I have to find something to give her. What do you get a fox? A scarf? Would that be weird with the fur? I need to check if she has neck fur. In a normal way. There’s a normal way to check that... Right?]

"Well. Look what the countryside dragged in."

I knew the voice before I turned around.

Serena Frostfall had detached from her prince and was standing in front of me with a glass of wine. She was looking down at me the way she looked down at everyone, which was easy for her, since she’d been taller than me since we were nine.

"You keep dogs by your side nowadays?" she said. "How quaint."

"She’s a fox, and she has a name, and you know it, since you’ve insulted her twice now." I put Kohaku’s drink down before I spilled it. "What do you want, Rena?"

"Don’t call me that."

"What do you want, Lady Frostfall?"

Her eye did a tiny twitch. At nine years old it did the same twitch when I beat her at cards, right before she flipped the table and made us both swear the wind did it.

"What I want," she said, swirling the wine, "is to understand what you think you’re doing here. A scholarship at this academy. Standing in a garden full of people who’d sell your whole village for a better seat at dinner, wearing a dress you got, where, exactly?"

"Kohaku bought it for me. We earned the money ourselves."

"Earned." She said the word like it was in a foreign language. "You don’t belong here, Lily. These people aren’t your friends. That thing you brought isn’t your friend either. You’re a lamb who wandered into a butcher’s banquet and you’re admiring the knives."

"You came all the way over here to tell me to go home?"

"I came over here because you’re embarrassing yourself."

"Yeah? Well, you walked past me an hour ago," I said. "You looked right at me and picked the person next to me to talk to. If I’m so embarrassing, Rena, you had your chance in front of everyone, and you spent it on her instead. So either I’m not worth your best material, or you didn’t want to do it where people could see. Which one is it?"

"You’ve gotten mouthy," she said. "The fox is a bad influence."

"The *best* influence," I said. "She’s brave, she’s funny, and she’s kind to me, and if you’re not going to be nice, you can go back to your prince!"

Serena stared at me for a long moment with a look I’d never gotten from her before. Back home, I could always read her. Here, she apparently picked up a few new expressions.

"Enjoy the party, Lily," she finally said, already turning. "Lambs usually do. Right up to the end."

And she glided off into the crowd like nothing had happened, greeting a baron with the smile she gave people she hated. I let out the breath I’d been rationing and picked Kohaku’s drink back up.

[She didn’t used to be like this. Or maybe she did and I was too little to see it. Whatever. Whatever! Not tonight. Tonight is about Kohaku fixing things.]

I looked toward the manor doors where the professor had led her off, and I hugged the drink to my chest.

[I hope it’s going okay in there. Knowing her, she’s giving it everything she has. She must be trying *so* hard right now.]

---

{Kohaku}

I was trying *so* hard right now.

Professor Sabine Corvane, Mage Course faculty, certified legend, was bent over in the last stall with her dress hiked to her waist. Her hands were braced on the, uh... the thing, the porcelain box on the back of the toilet, the water hat, whatever it’s called, I never needed the word until tonight.

Anyway, her ass was out and up, and I was buried in it to the hilt. I was fucking her like I was making up for an entire wasted lifetime.

[I’m weak. I know I’m weak, okay?! I know that. But listen. Listen, I died a virgin. Thirty years! I wrote four hundred sex scenes across seven novels, five stars, "so realistic," and I died having researched all of it from my desk. And then God or whoever gave me a second life, and a dick, and a gorgeous older woman bent herself over academy plumbing. Judge me at my funeral! The, uh, second one.]

And, for the record? The dick was amazing.

Whole different experience from the manufacturer’s other model. Every stroke into her lit me up from the base of my spine to the back of my teeth. Her ass was tight and hot around my cock, cheeks clapping against my hips on a beat, and the professor was gripping the porcelain pushing back to meet me with commentary like "harder, fox girl, I’m not made of glass," since even bent over a toilet this woman gave instruction.

So, I gave her harder. I gripped her hips with both hands and pounded that prestigious academy ass until the toilet thing rattled its lid.

[FUUUUCK!]

Her knuckles went white on the porcelain, her instruction stopped using words, and my tail had wrapped around her thigh at some point without asking me. The pressure built up my shaft like a countdown, and I slammed deep and finished in her ass with a full-body shudder that curled my toes inside my party shoes and whited out my vision at the edges.

For a moment, the powder room was quiet except for two women breathing and the gentle, traumatized refilling of the toilet.

[So that’s sex. *That’s* what I was writing about. I owe my readers an apology. I undersold it. I undersold it by *so* much.]

The professor straightened up off the tank, rolled her neck, and smoothed her dress back down like she was leaving a faculty meeting. I leaned against the stall wall on legs that had resigned from service, and, with the last operational corner of my brain, remembered I’d come in here with an agenda.

Time to be subtle.

Delicate.

A true negotiator.

"IF YOU WON’T TEACH LILY, TEACH ME!"

[... Maybe I could have toned it down a bit.]

She looked back over her shoulder at me.

"All right."

"...Eh?"

"All right," she repeated, checking her hair in the stall’s absurd little mirror. "Private instruction. Twice a week, my lab, before the first class or after the last bell. Don’t be late, don’t tell the faculty office, and don’t bring that dreadful curriculum binder, I’ll assign my own reading."

[Eh?! EHHHH!? That worked?! I fought this flag *all night* with logic and begging and it folded to POST-NUT NEGOTIATION?! Where was this energy at the fountain, lady?!]

"But," I said, since apparently I like arguing against my own victories, "the curriculum exists for a reason?"

"The curriculum," she said, turning around and hooking one finger into my collar, "does not have a cute tail. Now come here. It’s time for round two."

I blinked.

"Round... H-Hold on, wait a moment, MERCY! MERCY!" I said, as she pulled me in.

Then, as my penis slowly hardened again in a "okay, here we go again" way, I heard:

Ding.

A translucent blue window unfolded in the air beside the professor’s head, uninvited, glowing politely in the powder room like it had knocked.

❖ MANUSCRIPT — Lv.1

+25 MP

Current MP: 25

I stared at it over the professor’s shoulder.

[What?]