Chapter 52: Choices

After lunch, Mokuba bought a tie-dyed T-shirt much like Joan's. The yoga had made him unbearably sweaty and, after seeing people in outrageous attire all morning, Mokuba decided he'd rather look like a hippie than smell like one. However, even with the shirt change, Mokuba maintained a subtle body odor, which Joan rather liked. She tugged on his arm and said to her friends, "I'm going to go show Mokuba another make out spot."

"Have fun!" Jessica said.

"Our band is performing at four if you make it back to the stage in time," Dimitri said.

"Cool," Mokuba said, "see you then."

With Tamara and Joe once again following from a respectful distance, Joan led Mokuba deeper into campus, past enormous concrete and brick buildings. She pointed out the chemistry lab and the lecture halls where she'd had her favorite classes as well as where she'd attended gatherings with Campus Crusade for Christ.

Wide open doors and signs directed them into a building with a geology exhibition. It housed an impressive display of crystals with placards explaining where they'd come from and how they'd formed. Joan and Mokuba stopped to read a few, but nothing shed light on the mechanisms behind Joan's magic ring other than vague references to tribal peoples using certain stones for rituals. This gave Joan an idea.

After they had seen enough rocks, Joan took Mokuba on a detour to the Native American Studies Department. Along the way, she pointed to a window in the Mathematical Sciences Building where Dimitri once had his office. "See that? Dimitri is probably in a different room now that he's a professor, but I used to drop by here every week when he was a graduate student and drag him to lunch."

"It's amazing how well you've kept in touch with him. I completely lost touch with the few friends I had back in Japan after graduating," Mokuba said.

"Why not fix that?" Joan asked. "Dimitri didn't speak to me for about a year because his ex-wife felt threatened by me. Now I have to admit that Dimitri is really hot, and I've flirted with him a few times, but Dimitri is monogamous, and I don't do monogamy, so he was never really an option for me. Anyway, Dimitri missed my little wedding with Michael because of his ex, but even something like that can't keep good friends apart."

Mokuba sighed. "I was never close enough to anybody back in Japan for that sort of thing to work out. Seto always kept them at a distance, so I wound up doing that too. Even when we went through all that magic stuff and pretty much saved the world together, I never felt that things were ever really . . . real between us."

Joan tugged on the door to the Native American Studies Department and found it locked. It was a long shot anyway. She turned to face Mokuba and leaned against the broad wooden door. A light breeze brought the scent of manure from the nearby Animal Science Barn past their noses. "I've known people like that too. We would work together on a group project and then never speak to each other again."

"Exactly. Fate brought us together, but saving the world was only a group project."

"Anything, if you're forced into it, makes for a miserable experience, and miserable people don't make good friends. That's why I got along so well with the graduate students here. Most of the undergraduates were more or less forced to attend university by their parents or by societal expectations, but the graduate students chose to be here. Sure I had alumni parents, but I chose to go here because I admired them, not because they forced me. Then what I wanted changed, so instead of sticking with the Christian crowd, I moved on. Of course I've occasionally found myself in bad situations, but those only helped me to make better choices about whom to trust. Then, when I found out you and Seto were brothers, and Marc showed me I could trust you . . ."

"You chose to be our whore." Mokuba didn't wait for her to grab him this time. He pressed her against the door and ravished her mouth. Surprised, she resisted for a split second before yielding and letting his tongue roam her orifice. Her hands slid around his back, feeling the raw power of his muscles holding her captive. They went at it for several minutes before the pressure in Mokuba's pants grew unbearable. "Joan, I, uh . . ."

"I know." She giggled while he drew away. "Wanna find a good bush to hide in while our bodyguards stand watch?"

Mokuba looked around. Although the trees provided ample shade over benches and tables where students could study, only sparse shrubbery lined the pathways. Even with the bodyguards serving as lookouts, they couldn't risk anything frisky here. The lack of viable options deflated him. "Maybe somewhere else."

"I know where we might have better luck." Joan took Mokuba's hand and led him south. They walked past more lecture halls and through a complex of six-story dormitory buildings. "Didn't you say you had a theory about the ring?" Joan asked.

"Yeah, well," Mokuba began slowly, "this is going to sound crazy."

"It can't be that crazy. I mean, I just discovered I have psychic powers I can tap into whenever I want."

"Actually, I think I read your mind Thursday evening, but it was because you were really focusing on me and trying to send me a message."

"Really? Let's try that again, but this time you try to send me your thoughts about your theory."

Joan didn't have to ask twice. Electricity pulsed through Mokuba's head, but he expected it this time.

Joan found herself back in the Hyatt bedroom, this time watching herself through Mokuba's eyes as Marc and Seto fucked her. «What if Seto breaks the condom like that? What if that's exactly what he's trying to do? Can we really pass it off as an accident if Joan winds up pregnant from us? What if . . . what if the condom doesn't even have to break?» An electric pulse shot flashes of white light through Mokuba's memory.

The scene shifted to the moment when Seto announced his early departure. Mokuba's heart raced as he tried to act natural while concealing Joan's ring, his hand sandwiched between hers and Marc's. Seto glanced at their stack of hands. "How touching. Listen up. My neural implants keep going haywire, and the only surgeon I trust to remove them is back in Domino City. Mokuba, if anything happens to me, it's your duty to carry on the Kaiba name." A sudden wave of desire shot through Mokuba along with more bursts of white light.

Joan's knees buckled as the realization hit her. The bodyguards stepped forward but paused when Mokuba caught her. "Are you all right?"

Texts from Michael and Marc buzzed into Joan's phone asking more-or-less the same question.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Just pregnant." Joan pulled out her phone and tapped one-word replies to her husband and boyfriend. "Congratulations, you're a dad."