Thio’s no help. I swear he stands too close on purpose. I catch him dragging his nose near the skin on my neck and I glare at him, but he grins like a little fucker. I bend down to grab the marker I dropped, and I catch him checking out my ass with his lower lip between his teeth, and he pops an eyebrow andpats his thighlike I’ll hop to and plant myself there in an obedient heap.
Which Idon’t.
Because we’re in the lab.
Where we said wewill not fuck around.
We map out experiments to run on my project and brainstorm things to try with his, but nothing overlaps. Our lab space becomes cluttered with more than his mess; we’ve got books on conjuration and scrolls from the dregs of the library on the oldest forms of evocation, and we’ve started sorting through piles of components to fit in our tests.
Working together is… fluid. Ish. He’ll reach for something, and I’ll already be handing it to him. I’ll say,Maybe we should look up—and he’ll have a book open to the page that lists the thing I’d been about to say.
But there’ll be times when he insists on using a pure crystal rod for a spell we’re testing the safety net idea on, even though the standard way to do the spell is with a glass rod. The spell needs a light-refracting component, and we’re not sure if the equation we’ve come up with for the safety net addition willwork,so why waste expensive materials?
Thio concedes to me, and we use the glass. But when we run the test and it turns out, hey, the safety net equationis in fact offand the original spell destroys the glass rod, he insists it wasn’t the equation, but the use of glass instead of crystal, and I shouldstop being such a cheap-ass.
An added benefit of knowing him now is the realization that he’s not arguing to be pretentious or superior—he’s fighting for control because he’s terrified.
Terrified of his mom’s accident repeating itself.
I don’t know how to process that knowledge. It feels like something I shouldn’t know, something forbidden. So I suggest we add more protection spells to our next test. Which is reasonable, right? Meeting him halfway.
But Thio keeps on about me being stingy over our components, only instead of me storming out when I can’t stand the sight of him anymore, I shout at him to shut up and call Hordon.
We close the lab early.
Head to my apartment in infuriated silence.
Then he hate-fucks my throat until we both come all over my kitchen floor.
The weeks until Founder’s Day and spring break fly by—until one day, we get off on the way to school like normal, but it does nothing to bank the fire, even less so than usual. Hordon drops us behind Bellanor Hall and Thio and I are both strung taut, breathing like we raced to school. The energy between usaches,a bruise in the ether. Maybe we should see a doctor? Maybe we’ve caught something. A lust spell gone wrong.
We get into the lab, and the minute the door shuts, Thio’s shoving me against the wall.
“Sebastian,” he growls, and he soundspissed,but honestly, I am, too.What is this?“Why can’t I get enough of you? Why thefuckcan’t I stop wanting you?”
I don’t know.I don’t know. I almost whimper it, dolefully.
He bites his way down my neck and I tear off his jacket, wanting to rip his black T-shirt in two, but I stop with my hands fisted in the fabric, my chest heaving.
“Your rule about the lab. Thio—back up. Not in the lab.”
But he doesn’t move. Stays right up against me, his teeth in my neck, the bite sharp and making my eyes roll back.
“I rescind it,” he says. Laps at the bite mark he left.
“Rescind—?”
“That rule. The no-fucking-in-the-lab rule. I rescind it. Agreed?”
We can change the rules?
The rules can change.
It rings in my head. A fire alarm. Smoke’s gathering, churning—
I nod frantically. “Agreed.”
The components in his hand barely register before he murmurs a spell. My wrists are lifted and slammed back against the wall, held in place by invisible force shields.
