But then I pause, twisting back just enough to glance at him once more.
His shirt is wrinkled where I clutched it. His lips are parted like he still doesn’t know how to speak. The tent in his pants still painfully obvious.
And I say it. The truth I hate. The wound I twist into my own chest.
“Just another body for your roster, right?”
His eyes flash, shock, maybe guilt, but I don’t stay long enough to hear what he has to say.
Because if he answers…
If he confirms it...
I’ll never come back from it.
So I walk away, soaked in heat and regret, knowing full well that I left a piece of myself on that alcove with him. And he’ll never forget what I gave him. Even if I pretend it never happened.
14
SEBASTIAN
Two days.
Two days of silence from her, and every hour of it sinks deeper beneath my skin.
The Vespera common area hums with its usual early-evening noise, fire snapping in the enormous stone hearth, students murmuring over open books, the tension of ambition and rivalry pulsing faintly through the room like a second heartbeat. Normally, this is the one place I can think clearly. The one place I can breathe without the weight of expectations crushing my ribs. But tonight the walls feel too tight, the air too thick, and every flicker of gold and crimson reminds me of the girl who refuses to look my way.
I sit in one of the wide leather chairs near the fire, but my attention drifts far from the crackling logs and floating lanterns. My thoughts circle the same memory for the hundredth time, the library alcove, the rain behind her, the warmth of her knees bracketing my hips. I still don’t know what possessed me to pull her onto my lap. It wasn’t rehearsed, wasn’t planned, wasn’t even something I realized I was doing until my hands were already on her waist. It hit fast, and hard, like instinct overriding reason.
She was so close, close enough that I could feel the tremor of her breath against mine, and in that moment, some part of me refused to let her walk away.
That part of me, whatever it is, hasn’t quieted since.
Harper avoids me now with near surgical accuracy. She enters a room and angles herself instantly away. She passesme in corridors without glancing up. She sits as far from me in class as possible, as if proximity alone might pull her back into that moment neither of us has the spine to acknowledge. I’m not sure whether she’s afraid of me or afraid of herself, but either way, the effect is maddening. She looks through me like I’m made of smoke, when just two days ago she had her fingers tangled in my shirt, her chest rising hard against mine.
And then there’s her magic.
That alone should have unsettled me enough to keep my distance. The shockwave she unleashed in the alcove wasn’t ordinary wand-less magic. It wasn’t even advanced. It was raw, ancient, frighteningly instinctual, something that slid under my skin and pushed me back without lifting a single hair on her head. Her eyes had changed, not with color alone but with something alive behind them. I’ve never seen magic behave like that, and I grew up surrounded by spells that should never have existed in the first place.
I should have been terrified.
But I wasn’t.
I just wanted to understand it.
I wanted to understand her.
Across the common room, students argue heatedly over the best way to manipulate elemental wards, but their voices barely register. My attention drifts toward the stairs leading to the girls’ wing, though I catch myself and force my gaze back to the fire. Pathetic. I’m acting like some first-year infatuated with the first girl who looks his way. Except she hasn’t been looking my way. Not since the alcove. Not since her magic flared. Not since she ran.
Theo has tried prying the truth out of me twice. I brushed him off both times. Liam has been circling me like I’m one misstep away from disaster, and Trevor… Trevor hasn’t dared show his face near me, which is a blessing I didn’t expect to enjoy so much. But Harper, she keeps herself cocooned in distance, pulling her cloak tighter around her shoulders each time she senses me.
And gods help me, the more she avoids me, the more impossible it becomes to ignore the storm she left behind.
The bruise on my cheek from the tavern is finally fading, though it still throbs faintly when I touch it. She doesn’t know how the rest of that fight ended. She doesn’t know how close she came to seeing me lose control completely. Part of me is glad she didn’t. Another part wonders if she would have looked at me differently, less like a threat, more like something human.
Staring into the fire, the heat washing over my face, I still feel the ghost of her hands in my shirt. The weight of her on my lap. The magic that shook the air around us. And the silence she gave me instead of the wordstop.
I should let this go. For my sake. For hers.
