Steelhands - Jaida Jones [102]
“Sure, okay,” I said, since I knew the only thing he liked better than studying was proving he could teach the same stuff to me, too. “You do that. And I’ll come back to get ’em when I’m done with my walk.”
“You aren’t going to go somewhere dangerous?” Toverre asked, recalling, no doubt, my threat of running away to Molly from before.
“I’ll take this butter knife with me,” I offered, picking it off the table and making like I was going to hide it in my sleeve. Toverre looked so distressed that it wasn’t even any fun, and I dropped the knife back onto my plate. “Just walking along the ’Versity Stretch,” I promised. “I’m not that foolish. Not yet, anyways.”
Toverre’d made me promise just after we’d arrived—just after we’d nearly been robbed blind—that I wouldn’t walk around the city at night by myself. It was too dangerous for young women of a certain age, and even though I could take care of my honor just fine, I knew Toverre’s delicate constitution wouldn’t be able to handle all that worrying. That left the ’Versity grounds for me to roam, however, streets winding in and out of all the mismatched buildings, each one of them looking like it had been built for a different street.
It comforted me to walk routes I already knew, and the cold night air was bracing—not frigid and unbearable the way Toverre said. It was a crowded time of night, with laughter bursting up off every street corner. There were even night classes for the upperclassmen going on in some of the lecture halls, and I found myself standing in front of Cathery without ever having plotted out a real destination.
There was no one in the city I could really talk to, without being careful not to make them worry too much about my sanity. In fact, there was barely anyone I felt comfortable talking to about the weather, except for Toverre. There was only one person I could think of who might listen, and ex–Chief Sergeant Professor Specialpants Adamo’d made the mistake of telling me where his office was. He was double-cursed, since I kind of thought of him as the sort of man who’d clear out a cluttered head in no time.
It had to be him.
Before I’d had time to talk myself out of it, I was inside the building, the door blowing shut behind me with a sudden gust of wind.
“Cold day,” said the desk clerk, smiling at me in a familiar way.
Not as cold as me, I thought, brushing past him with a grunt of agreement.
It took me a few tries to find Adamo’s office, because I didn’t remember the number Radomir’d given me off the top of my head—it was written down in my notes somewhere, but I hadn’t thought to bring those with me. Bastion, I hadn’t even been planning on coming at all. I should’ve been discouraged when I opened the door on a private session between a tall professor with graying hair and a young man about four years my senior, both of them coloring all kinds of purple when I barged in and interrupted them.
“Should’ve locked the door,” I said, giving them a salute. I left my own blushing until I got out into the hall.
Maybe Toverre was right about me—and the rest of the world, too, for that matter—and I was just a silly girl who couldn’t find her way about a simple lecture building.
But then I told myself I wasn’t the one who should be embarrassed since I wasn’t the one tangled up with a man at least twenty years my senior. They ought to’ve taken that someplace private if they were going to go for it at all.
By my fourth attempt, I’d at least started knocking, and when I heard Professor Adamo’s voice call out to me with a peremptory “Yeah?” I wondered what I was even doing there. What was he even doing there, considering he’d gone and said he didn’t even know where the place was? Well, maybe he’d made a point of finding it since exam season was coming up. It wasn’t for me to parse another man’s motivations, though; I had enough to worry about when it came to my own. What’d I plan on saying, I asked myself, and, maybe more importantly, what was the man going to think of me?