KOTLC After Stellarlune-A Sokeefe Story

Stress

Just letting everyone know it gets a *little* spicy in the first half of this chapter. But you know what I always say...I will never be truly "mature" "smutty" or "explicit" 🙂

"Hey," Keefe murmured softly. "It's getting late. Come to bed."

Sophie was sitting at the desk in their room, trying to focus on the book Master Cadence had assigned for her polyglot training.

Mimicking was still not going very well, so Cadence had assigned extra reading. But Mimicry at its Finest was definitely not an exciting read.

"I really need to finish this chapter before my next linguistics session," Sophie told him, rubbing her temples. "We're already halfway to midterms and I still can't get the hang of mimicking."

"I wouldn't worry too much about it," Keefe told her—and not for the first time. "You know I can mimic really well—thanks for that, mom—and anytime you'd be in a situation where mimicking would come in handy, I'd be with you."

"Won't stop me from failing linguistics," Sophie muttered.

"You won't fail. You may not be as awesome as I am at mimicking," Keefe said with a smirk, "but you have improved and if it means enough to you that you want to keep at it, you have all of eternity to hone that skill. Not that there's much point."

"I guess," Sophie mumbled, only half paying attention. "I'm just concerned about passing my Elite levels."

"Yeah, I can feel all that stress coming off of you," Keefe said, crinkling his nose and fanning the air between them. He got up and walked over to stand behind her chair. "That's why you should call it a night. Come to bed." He bent down, lightly kissed her neck and whispered seductively in her ear "you know I can help you destress."

Goosebumps erupted up Sophie's arms and warmth spread through her at the implication, but she tried to ignore it.

"Just give me a minute to finish the chapter."

Keefe reached out and closed her book, getting her full attention. She twisted in her seat to look at him. "Sophie, you're tired and distracted. Can you even remember anything you read tonight?"

She scowled at him. "No," she admitted.

"It's because you're too stressed and exhausted. We're all stressed about the Kenric situation. If you're reading and can't remember what you read—with a photographic memory—I think it's time to take a break."

He was making sense, but she wasn't quite ready to admit it. She brought one hand up to tug out an itchy eyelash, but Keefe grabbed her hand and stopped her. "Hey," he whispered. "Everything's going to be okay."

He had her turn back around and started rubbing her shoulders, helping to break the tension that had been building up. Sophie sighed. It definitely helped, but she still needed to finish that chapter before linguistics tomorrow afternoon.

Keefe chuckled. "You feel...stubbornly stressed now," he told her. "I have ways of making you calm down and come to bed, you know."

"Oh yeah?" Sophie tried to scoff but knew where he was going with this, and knew he was right.

Keefe's hands left her shoulders and slowly slid down her front as he bent over. "You know you can't resist my powers of persuasion," he said in a low voice before beginning to nibble lightly on her ear.

"Not fair," Sophie breathed.

"What was that?" Keefe asked softly as he toyed with the waistband of her pajama shorts. "What did you say?"

Sophie caved. "You win," she whispered.

Keefe straightened up and grabbed her by the hand, pulling her out of the chair. "That was even easier than I thought it would be," he teased with a smirk.

"Shut up," she retorted as he led her to their bed.

"Are you going to try to finish that chapter before we have to leap to Foxfire?" Keefe asked Sophie when they woke the next morning.

"Ugh. It's not a very interesting book but yeah, I really need to."

But instead of getting up, Sophie scooted closer to Keefe with a sigh of contentment. Keefe looked at her, eyebrows raised. "Do I need to push you out of bed?"

"You'd better not," she said. "I'm getting up, really."

But at that moment, Sophie's Imparter rang. "It's Dex!" she cried out excitedly. "He never calls this early!"

The moment she answered, Dex's excited face filled the screen. Without preamble, he quickly said, "you guys need to get to Watchward Heath as soon as possible. I came to check the feed this morning and I'm pretty sure we found images of Kenric! Forkle is coming too but I knew you'd want to know."

"We'll be there as soon as possible!" Sophie assured him.

They both jumped out of bed, wide awake now, and managed to dress and leap to Watchward Heath in record time.

Mr. Forkle was there already. "I'm having Master Cadence fill in for Magnate Leto," he told them. "This demands our attention today."

Dex grabbed Sophie's hand and dragged her over to the screen he'd been checking. "Look at these images," he breathed.

Sophie looked, Keefe beside her. There were several images of a man in a variety of slacks and button-up shirts, a messenger bag slung across his broad shoulders. Judging by the throng of people around him in most of the photos, Sophie thought she knew where he was even before Dex told her.

"New York City?" Sophie asked.

Dex grinned. "Look at the time stamps on them." He pointed to the bottom right corner of each picture, where a date and time was listed.

They started a few years ago and continued up...as late as a few days previously.

"He's alive?!" Sophie shouted gleefully. "He's alive and you found him!" Sophie flung her arms around Dex and held him tight.

Dex coughed. "I knew you'd be excited."

Keefe snickered a little. "Foster, you're going to kill him if you don't stop squeezing him so hard."

Sophie laughed and apologized, pulling back. "It's a good thing you finally embraced being a technopath."

Dex grinned. "Yeah, I guess so."

Sophie looked over at Keefe. He, too, was grinning.

"This is the good news we needed," he told them. Then he looked at Mr. Forkle. "What now?"

Forkle smiled at them. "Now I'm afraid we put Mr. Dizznee to work even more. He'll have to dig into records and try to find out as much about Kenric's faux human identity so we can pinpoint his routines and find the best way to get to him."

"But what about us? What should we do while we wait? Should we hail the others?"

"You can hail them. I'm having the Collective gather as well. It shouldn't take Mr. Dizznee long to gather the information now that he knows where to look. The Collective will come here, but why don't you gather your friends at Aeternum and we will head there as soon as Mr. Dizznee has given us the information we need?"

They all agreed to this and began hailing their friends immediately, thankful they could catch them before sessions began.

"Party at Aeternum!" Keefe exclaimed as they headed toward the door. "Even more exciting since we get to skip our sessions today."

Sophie rolled her eyes. "Let's just get home before our friends arrive and wonder where we are."

"They'll just think we're...busy...upstairs," Keefe said playfully, tugging on the hem of her tunic.

"That does tend to happen a lot," Sophie agreed, locking eyes with him and grinning.

"We can still hear you, you know," Dex called out. "Forkle and I are not impressed."

Sophie blushed, but Keefe smirked. "Sorry. Guess we'll go home and do our flirting there," he said with a wink.

And with that, they glittered away and left Dex to his work.