I blinked. That had escalated quickly.
So, yeah, the tension here was a lot. Sexually speaking. Obviously.
Holding off on going there with Win as a foursome again hadn’t exactly panned out the way we’d figured.
It’d gotten more complicated when Vax had come home and told Evira and me about what Sylas had revealed of Win’s conversation with him in the Veil.
It had brought up this whole new worry that wasn’t only about making sure he was ready and feeling safe and everything again. That worry was that Win might bring that new aggression and rage into our fucking, and react badly to wanting it that way now, like feel shame, if it came out.
I mean, I was here for every bit of it. It wasn’t exactly a secret that I liked a bit of rough. Evira and Vax were even more intensely into that with their primal natures.
But we’d held off, thinking giving it a bit more time would help. And hopefully, that Win would even bring it up, so we could put it out there and discuss it.
He hadn’t.
In fact, he’d been acting like nothing had happened.
Except for asking to visit those necromancer allies of his.
Well, hisnew friendsas he’d been calling them.
Vax and Evira had convinced him to give it some time before he went to see them, as they were also trying to settle back into life topside in those Guardian Movement safehouse apartment thingies. And, yeah, Win had needed some separation from all of that.
Some.
Not… what this had become now.
Because with all the holding off on the fucking, Win had ended up becoming really gun-shy about it.
It was a whole clusterfuck.
Anyhow, now here I was studying my cute little ass off, thanks to Vax being in academic-drill-sergeant mode.
I finished scrawling the last line of my report forApex Magic Theory and Practical Application—the theory aspect of it, not the fun exercises. Not that we could be part of that again right now anyway, seeing as though we were here studying remotely. It was something Cassius, being a highly-respected professor at another Academy—Wraeven—had arranged for us until things settled. We were almost there now, and Win had already mentioned wanting to go back to Loxley and attend classes again on the actual campus.
“Yes!” I exclaimed, slapping the completed assignment down on the coffee table, then snatching up the papers for the nextthing I needed to get to. An awfully dense report I had to write for myGovernance Through Crisis: Treaties, Turmoil & Adaptabilityclass. It was basically the senior, fourth-year version of the first-year class that Evira and Vax were taking calledPrincipal Governance & Supernatural Institutions. Win had been exempted because of his connections to The Shadowed, an organization that was referenced a lot in the class, which obviously was a conflict of interest given his ties to it.
“Very nice.”
I jolted on the snowy white couch at the sound of Win’s voice.
He was sitting opposite me on the brown leather one. He hadn’t said a word for over an hour. He’d been so immersed in catching up on all the work he’d missed.
“I know, right?” I said, smiling out at him, as he sat with a levitating tray over his lap that had a bunch of textbooks on it, a notebook open, a stack of papers, and even one of his grimoires. Yeah, he’d really been going for it and throwing himself into it. “Almost there.”
“Youarethere,” he countered.
I frowned. “Still got this report to get through.”
“Nope.”
He swept a wave of his amber magic over the papers he’d been scrawling on for the last twenty minutes. Then he levitated them over to me, and they landed neatly on my pink leather-clad thighs.
My frown deepened as I lifted them to eye level, then took inmyhandwriting all over seven pages’ worth of a report—the report I needed to write next.
“Win, what is—you wrote this whole thing for me?”
He lifted a shoulder. “A tiny little spell so it’s now in your handwriting too—and your verbiage—with no need to spend unnecessary time writing it out.”
