Free The Coming of Bright by Sadie King Page A

Wednesday. Zora and Jack settled into their seats. Zora centered, Jack scattered.
    Walking off into the black that Tuesday morning, barely Tuesday, after the longest Monday of her life, the most memorable for its extremes of fear and frenzy, loathing and longing, Zora had forgiven Jack.
    She knew his type, or thought she did: the over-protective brother figure. He took his TA duties too seriously, as far as she was concerned anyway, allowing feeling to interfere with doing.
    She chalked up his solicitude, overbearing as it could be at times, to a by-product of Victor’s brooding interest in her. He resented Victor, whether out of rivalry or genuine distrust she didn’t yet know. And very likely it was a by-product, one Victor hadn’t foreseen and couldn’t forestall, of the professor asking the TA, the lowly cog, to be a go-between with a favored student. A middle peg.
    Zora prayed to God, as much as she found Jack charming in his wayward way, that his being the middle peg wouldn’t extend to ménage à trois.  She hoped with a rising inner heat that Jack’s knowledge of French didn’t extend to the intricacies of that term, the tangled meaning of that phrase. She’d been raised a traditional girl, and ménage à trois between a professor, TA, and first-year student—not necessarily in that order in the way it actually played out—was definitely pushing the conservative envelope. Maybe even the liberal one, though from stories she’d heard she doubted it. She was no stranger to TMZ, let’s put it that way.
    Jack was far from done playing the middle peg. After they’d exchanged pleasantries, and Jack had casually, playfully touched her arm, knowing the Qi meridians of her body, his touch instantly relaxed her, his fingers could perform their own acupuncture without needing to break the skin, calibrating the rhythms of her self back to their natural state, he handed her a small envelope.
    It was sealed in red wax with an impression of the Chinese character for “forbidden,” jin , a complex symbol of 13 strokes, the bottom meaning the revelation of God and the top signifying two trees, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. An allusion to the forbidden fruit. A symbolic bond between ancient China and the Judeo-Christian world.
    Zora ripped open the envelope, splitting the waxen symbol vertically, tearing the revelation of God in two and cleaving the Tree of Life from the Tree of Knowledge. It had to be from Victor. His version of a billet-doux . A love letter. She read eagerly, having to hold the note at an angle to banish Jack’s inquisitive eyes.
    Hello my luscious Pandora,
    Now you’ve done it, opened the forbidden note. Who knows what may come, daring love. The symbol in wax comes from my collection, my most valuable object, an ivory stamp once belonging to the Qianlong Emperor to enclose state secrets. To break its seal by the wrong hand was to invite death by a thousand cuts. Stop by my house tonight. Bring the plea for Dorothy and bring your desire to know. I have something for you, something that melts like wax and seals up skin. It will enclose a secret of its own, a secret meant only for your senses, every single one. Life by a thousand touches.
    V.
    Her hand clenched upon the note, crumpling it. Her teeth clenched even harder, straining at their roots. A seizing up of muscle, of sinew, from a rush of adrenaline. No one could take the power of death and magnify it into love like Victor could. It wasn’t until Jack tapped her hard on the shoulder that Zora realized her eyes had clenched shut as well. She must have looked like someone being electrocuted.
    Speak of the devil, there was Victor at the front of the class. She sought him out with pooling eyes, ripples of feeling on their surface, pulsing with the energy of connection, but he deflected them with indifference, the air of the regal professor for whom every student is a pauper, a peon. Her energy reflected back, rejected back, its warmth