It should’ve alarmed him, being sprawled across Eunny like that. Being held. Ollas had hugged people before—hard not to, when his mother had all but made a sport out of it. He’d been intimately embraced before, too. If there was a perk to being dubbed the Homegrown Hero, it was that it had garnered him some interest, let him hone a few carnal skills. Yet none of those acquaintances had made his heartbeat speed like it did now, and not from nearly falling out of a carriage but because every fiber of his being was acutely aware that Eunny Song was holding him with such casual ease.
A jiggling motion at his back made Ollas freeze. Then the sound of her poorly concealed laughter nearly turned him to jelly.
“Can manage a door, eh?” Eunny let go, gently pushing him up. “You’re squishing me.”
“Sorry,” Ollas said, heat burning across his cheeks as he stumbled onto the opposite bench. “Oh, gods, I’m so, so— Eunny, are you— I’m so sorry.”
Eunny waved away his stammering apologies, her grin turning more into a smirk. “I’m hardly fragile. Calm down, Nev. Wasn’t going to let you break again on my watch.” She reached past him to push the door fully open. “Let me get the stool,” she said, laughter in her voice.
Eunny wasn’t upset. No, even better, she was joking with him. Felt enough at ease to make light of that part of their past. It was as if the final piece of ice between them had finally broken away, the tension and regret banished. Like they could truly pick up, now, from where their relationship had been. Not running from the past but no longer being held back by it, either.
Maybe his babble was finally setting him on a better course.
The thought filled him with relief. With hope. Made a tremor run down his spine. And… had his cock bobbing against the confines of his trousers, a mortifying realization as he tried to will it into submission, or at the very least compliance—as he tried to say something, anything, that would distract Eunny from noticing. All that came out was an incoherent squeak. When words failed, he went with what he knew. Used his cloak as a shield, pretending to fuss with his cane as he flipped his cock up beneath his waistband. Treacherous fucking thing.
Eunny didn’t seem any the wiser as she helped him down, bowing over his hand with an exaggerated flourish.
They struck off down the path to the greenhouse complex, side by side.
Eunny liked to think she was in decent shape. Not up for running with the Sentinels anytime soon, but she trekked around town often enough. Helped out in the Mighty Leaf regularly, both with serving and the manual labor of unpacking shipments. Not to mention all the lifting, carrying, crouching. Gods all break, so much crouching and kneeling involved in her repair café work. The point was, Eunny was active.
Or so she thought. They’d been working in Trunk, the storage greenhouse, for a couple hours now, and Eunny’s back and feet were starting to hurt. She was even beginning to get a blister on her palm from gripping the wheelbarrow handles too tight. A blister! As if she didn’t use her damned hands every day for work already.
“You really don’t need to bring any more in,” Ollas said, an apologetic note in his voice.
He sat perched on a stool at a workbench that spanned the length of the greenhouse wall. Piles of different soil mixes and amendments covered the surface, while large wooden bins on wheels, each housing a different component, surrounded him. Several more of the bins were tucked beneath the bench, some empty and others already labeled and filled with special blends.
Eunny lugged two more bags over to the bench and added them to the stack she’d been growing. “All right. I’m now fully in favor of making the students haul their own dirt.” She exhaled with much drama to emphasize her point.
“It’s so?—”
“Hush, you.”
Snagging her own stool, she flopped down, leaning back so her elbows rested on the countertop. Her arms quaked with fatigue. They’d intended to just have a quick look around the greenhouse complex, but one question had led to a demonstration, which had then turned into Ollas going into prep mode. Nettled as she was about her body’s weaknesses, Eunny was glad she’d asked for the orientation. The elective had magic-users and mundane alike, and a wide variety of imbued amendments available for them to try, courtesy of more funding from the Restorers and a sponsorship from Graelynd contacts.
Ollas had a lot of preparations he’d still wanted to do for the elective before their first lab, and he wasn’t in any condition to be doing so much heavy lifting. Over the last couple of hours, Eunny had become well-versed in some basic greenhouse jargon and learned more about the focus of each building in the complex than she’d ever need to know.
She watched as Ollas mixed the components from a few bags and bins he’d assembled while she’d been ferrying around the sacks of dirt. Along with the dirt she’d hauled in, he used measuring scoops to add powders and granules to a large tub, even chucking in what looked like sand and some handfuls of moss. Then he combined everything together, nodding toward a watering can as he looked at Eunny. “Could you pour while I mix?”
She grabbed the can and wetted down the medley of dirt as Ollas turned it over with a hand trowel and then a small rake.
“Is this for the class?” She pointed with her chin toward a new blend.
“It’ll be their baseline.” Ollas scooped it into an empty bin. “They’ll make more throughout the course and start developing their own changes.”
Eunny eyed a row of seed-starting trays he’d lined up against the wall. “Are you doing all of those now?”
“No, they can wait.”
As Eunny helped him stow everything away, a group of Adept Two grovetenders and their Magister Three-level supervisor came in to gather supplies. With the door to the front antechamber propped open and a few of the big rolling bins of potting mix blocking off the main entrance, Ollas gestured toward the back of Trunk. Brushing aside a few dangling vines that had crawled through gaps between the antechamber walls and the greenhouse’s roof, Eunny pushed open the heavy back door so they could make their escape.
“Sorry, this didn’t end up being very quick,” Ollas said.
“It was good. I did ask to be orientated.” Eunny bumped his shoulder. “But I’m beat?—”
A low pulling sensation wrapped around a corner of her mind. It set off a pulse at her temple, near her eye but not quite the same twitching she’d felt on previous occasions. It wasn’t painful but… insistent. Impossible to ignore.
Looking around, Eunny swallowed down a curse. When they’d first arrived at Trunk, she had surreptitiously steered Ollas’s tour so that they gave the overgrown patch along the side of the building a wide berth. The grassy clumps dotted a narrow plot at the back of the greenhouse, sweeping out from the door to curve around the corner. She’d assumed they were weeds, but in daylight Eunny noticed they were contained, somewhat, to a specific area. Intentionally planted, then, though not very well maintained. And she still didn’t have gloves.
