Of Love and Iron Ch. 05

Her face burned scarlet, nonetheless, and she realized that at that moment, she would gladly have laid Annabelle flat on her ass if she had the luck to see her.

The violent urge shocked her, and with it her mind slowly calmed down.

Focusing on the woman, she let out a deep sigh.

"I have no idea what kind of stuff was in this email, but you can ignore it. I'm bisexual, but it sounds like someone was making crap up to mess with me, or with Aiko."

"That a fact?" the woman retorted with a smirk.

Her levity vanished under Rachel's harsh glare.

"Yeah. We're in a class all about making images up, whether they exist or not. You should know better than to trust anything you see in some email."

Her words seemed to strike a chord with the students listening, since they all looked properly chastised.

"Were the drawings fake, too?" a man asked with a tone of disappointment.

"They were drawings. Anyone in this program with a good imagination could probably do that," Rachel responded.

The quickly piling up lies tasted bitter on her tongue, but she ignored the guilty sensation.

She didn't particularly care what kind of stupidity went on regarding herself, but admitting anything meant implicating Aiko, which was unacceptable to the blonde.

Fortunately, a thought seemed to occur to the woman that made her much more concerned and sympathetic to Rachel.

"If they weren't a girlfriend's, you've got someone seriously creepy trying to mess with you, Blondie."

"Something like that," Rachel muttered. "Anyway, you can all go back to pretending I don't exist now, yeah? No more mysteries to solve here," she continued with a vague hand gesture towards herself.

And, thankfully, they did just that, at least everyone but the woman, who remained in her seat...

When Ai walked into the locker room, she felt a strange, inexplicable tension in the air.

Deciding to ignore it as something imagined, she began to change.

Only when she was halfway through slipping into her cheerleading uniform did she notice that the women in the same aisle as her had moved to the opposite side of the lockers from her.

It would have likely seemed odd even in normal circumstances.

What made it worrying was the fact that of the three women, two had wrapped a towel around themselves and were changing while seeming to use it as a shield of some kind.

The third woman just glared at the others and gave a huff of irritation before she herself finished changing.

Something about how the two were occasionally glaring at Ai and blushing made a ball of tension form in the pit of her stomach.

Shaking it off, she finished hastily and headed out to the gym.

She found more of the same reaction with her other squad mates when she joined them.

One of them in particular glared at her from the moment she stepped through the doors, and Ai felt her blood pressure spiking as she met the stare.

"Something I can help you with?"

"Fuck no, I don't want any kind of help from someone like you," the woman spat.

Ai blinked in surprise at that, though the dread grew stronger in her gut.

"The hell does that mean? Look, I'm not in the mood for this, so why don't you all tell me why I'm getting stared at like I have a new head," she groused.

"We want you off the team. None of us want you lookin' up our skirts," the woman retorted with several agreeing nods accompanying the statement.

Ai raised a brow in question at that, though she was starting to figure out the basics of the situation.

"The hell?"

"Now that we know you get off on that shit, it'd feel really creepy," another of them supplied with just as vehement a glare in her eyes.

"Ooookay... I reiterate, what the hell?" Ai demanded with her own gaze narrowing.

One of the women shook her head before making her way over to Ai, her phone in hand.

Flipping it open, she pressed several keys before turning the phone to Ai's gaze.

Her heart skipped a beat at the sight of a photo of her letter, with all its notes.

The woman pressed her thumb onto the screen and slipped up, and Ai watched as several of her illustrations of Rachel scrolled through her gaze.

She'd been caught up in the moment for each and every one of them, and had been more than happy to reward Rachel for her help posing for them.

They'd all been very thoroughly enjoyable for both women.

Now, though, the sight of them caused her chest to squeeze as she cursed her stupidity.

Outwardly, though, she seemed calm, if very pale, to the other cheerleaders.

Lifting her gaze, she met the woman's own.

"And this is...?"

"We all got this email. And I've seen your handwriting, Ai, and that letter's definitely it," the woman explained.

She, though, didn't have the glare of many of the others, her expression far softer.

She slipped further down the email, and showed Ai the last part of the email.

Beneath all of the photos was a single sentence, and it made her vision turn red.

"Portraits of Rachel King taken courtesy of the notebook of Aiko Kai," the note read.

Having typed out and shredded the draft she was seeing, it had to have been when she'd left her bag unattended.

She hadn't brought her supplies for Rachel's gift anywhere near the campus since then, and neither she nor the blonde would send them out.

Rachel...

Her eyes widened as her mind wandered to her lover, wondering if she was going through anything similar.

She felt her heart squeeze at the thought of Rachel reading the letter, in a circumstance like that.

"You said we all got that? How many people is we?" she demanded.

"Word spreads fast," one of the glaring women answered. "The contact list this morning was, like, twenty when I got it."

Several of her squad mates didn't seem to find it nearly as amusing as the others, with a few even glaring on Ai's behalf at the smirking ones.

Others were staring at her with disgust, and it was they that caused Ai to straighten to her full height and take a calming breath.

In the background of it all stood Annabelle, giggling to herself as she watched the Asian grow angrier than she'd honestly thought was possible.

Ai's chastisement of the women stopped short when she noticed the redhead's mirth.

The mystery solved itself in her head, and she turned her gaze fully to her.

A shudder ran through Annabelle's spine at the feel of eyes on her, and she reluctantly met Ai's gaze.

She briefly wondered, while staring into the burning, amber-colored eyes, if this sensation was anything like what others had described feeling when she glared at them.

If it was, she suddenly sympathized with all previous victims of her ire.

When Annabelle's eyes flinched away, Ai nodded to herself before spinning around.

"Fine. A lot of you seem to have some issue. Either that I like women, or that I like my roommate, I don't know and really, I don't care. I'll take the rest of the day off. No problem. See you next week. In the meantime, you all need to get the fuck over it, because I'm not quitting because of this."

With that, she stormed off without another glance back.

And she didn't spare another glance back towards the campus, nor the many staring eyes, the entire way home...

When Ai stomped through the door, she found Rachel sitting on the couch.

The blonde was sitting with her head on her knees and her arms wrapped around her ankles.

Ai quietly slipped the door closed and slid to a seat next to her, not saying anything.

The blonde was known to take the somewhat bizarre position whenever she was deep in thought.

She'd once explained that it was a defense mechanism so that her brother would leave her alone whenever she wanted to figure things out growing up.

Ai stayed motionless at her side for what seemed like an eternity before the blonde's face slowly peeked up from her knees.

Guilt hit Ai hard...