Page 24 of The Entanglement of Rival Wizards (Magic and Romance #1)

My mom texts for updates about your project with that Tourael. Your father and I are so proud .

And dad keeps calling. He doesn’t leave more voicemails. Just lets the missed calls every few days be enough of a disturbance.

Clawstar checks in. Nothing threatening or passive aggressive, a simple How is your project going, Mr. Walsh?

We’re looking forward to working with you!

But I still send back what is probably a too-thorough email explaining how I’ve been advancing my project and that I’m making the most of this grant and see, you haven’t made a bad choice in giving me the job.

I’m pretty sure my blood content is 85 percent caffeinated beverages by the end of the week.

This semester is going to kill me.

I trudge into the lab Friday morning, bleary-eyed, clutching an extra-large drip coffee with a quad shot of espresso, which is apparently my regular order now.

Elethior’s already here, dressed in his usual tight T-shirt and fitted dark jeans, his hair swept into a messy knot at the back of his head. He doesn’t look ragged or like he hasn’t been sleeping, which is good; it means his mom is okay, if he’s here and not frazzled.

He’s also standing in front of my whiteboard.

Writing on my whiteboard.

It’s our project now, but that’s still been my whiteboard, and only I’ve been writing on it. Only I’ve been touching it.

He hasn’t noticed me, his cell phone pinched between his ear and shoulder as he writes, tracing the same rune over and over with progressive intensity.

“Yes,” he says sharply. “ I told you —”

His eyes connect with mine and he stiffens.

“I have to go,” he says into the phone, and whatever’s said in farewell makes his eyes roll in a grimace. But he clicks off and stuffs his phone into his pocket.

My gaze flicks to that pocket in question.

His cheeks pinken. “Arasne,” he grumbles.

“Anything concerning?”

Elethior shakes his head, tongue pushing against his teeth in exasperation. “No. Her usual invasive pressure. Irritating, but—”

“Okay. Good.” I shove my bag and coffee onto my desk, stomp over to him, rip the marker out of his hand, and give him my best sleep-deprived, at-the-end-of-my-very-last-wit glare. “Don’t touch my stuff.”

Elethior blinks in surprise. I’m making eye contact and that was almost banter, if not for the way I’m holding strong in my offense. This is more direct interaction than we’ve had all week.

He snatches the marker back. “Before she interrupted me, I was putting down an idea I got when I was cooking dinner last night.”

I grab the marker again. “Then tell me, and I’ll write it down.” Boundaries. I have strapped myself to boundaries, and by gods, I’ll let the bulldozer of stubbornness squash me flat before I give up this very, very flimsy grasp on the last vestiges of my sanity.

Elethior tosses his hands up. “You know what? Fine. You write it down. Write: measuring cup .”

I lean in to the board.

Then stop. “What?”

He crosses his arms. “Measuring cup.”

“Repeating isn’t an explanation.”

“If you’d let me write it down, I would’ve written an explanation, too.”

“So, again, tell me, and I’ll—”

“I’m allowed to talk to you now?”

Oh, fuck no.

He’s not going to point out our weirdness when this is the exact weirdness he once pushed for, all mature and collected.

My jaw clamps, muscles bunching near my ears. “What’s your idea, Tourael?”

He holds long enough that I think he won’t tell me.

“The research I was doing on Kojyngilla,” he says.

“Her spell to braid several pieces of magic together wasn’t one spell; it was several variations that she used depending on the other spells she wanted to combine.

That’s a common idea in a lot of conjuration work, having variations on the same spell to fit different wizards.

Since the conjurer is the source of energy, we make room for differences from person to person. ”

I lower the marker and look at him, listening.

“And it got me thinking, how it’s like cooking,” he continues.

“If a recipe calls for two and a half cups of an ingredient, you wouldn’t make a two-and-a-half-cup measuring device.

You’d use a cup and a half cup, and double up the cup.

Same for your spell.” He waves at the whiteboard.

“You can create baseline energy caps for different expectations. Wizards could select the combination they’d need for their individual spells, but you would only need to create a handful of variations rather than shove thousands of options into one single-use spell. ”

My face slackens.

Holy shit.

I use the sleeve of my sweater to scrub a clean space on the whiteboard and scribble out his idea.

A handful of general capping spells of different sizes rather than something that targets the exact amounts of everything.

Oh my gods.

Oh my gods.

It’s so dumb. So dumb and so obvious. Why didn’t I see it? I was going too big with the idea, trying to get it to fit perfectly in every spell. But it was never about fitting the safety net to every single spell; it’s about fitting each spell to the safety net .

I stumble back from the board, my body vibrating like a hummingbird having an anxiety attack. “Oh my gods.”

“We’ll have to test it,” Elethior says, staring at my chicken-scratch handwriting like it wasn’t his profound idea. “We’ll need to develop a few variations on it, but—”

He turns away from the board with a smile.

That smile plummets off. “Sebastian?”

I’m shaking. Gods, I’m shaking; haven’t stopped shaking since—since the cocktail party, with him out under the snow and the way the individual flakes stuck to his eyelashes, and how he’d told his cousin not to kick me off the grant.

He might’ve given me a way to cap spells so no one has to risk draining their components.

Elethior Tourael might’ve given me what I’ve been wanting for six years. Since—

Is that all you’ve got?

My vision goes spotty and I throw the marker on my desk, start pacing. We haven’t tested this idea yet. It might not work.

“Sebastian?” Elethior steps into my path. “Are you—”

I bump into him. That solid chest and the smell of green plants and flowers. Those stupid lip rings—

They’re warm.

They’re warm because they’re pressed to his mouth, and his mouth is warm; and I know that because I’m kissing him.

I’m kissing him.

Neither of us moves. Just pillowy lips and metal rings.

Then he—then he gasps, sucks all the air straight out of my body, and it sounds so excruciatingly ardent.

His hands plunge into my hair and I’m not kissing him now; he’s kissing me, eating at my mouth, and I let him.

He tastes so good .

Like mint toothpaste and berries and coffee; breakfast. Like the overwhelming diaphanous cloud of his cologne, invading my senses with springtime as he licks into my mouth, all velvet tongue and those sharp piercings.

The kiss whips through me in a furor that weakens my knees and excises a noise from me that I’ve never made before, a rapturous moan.

“Fuck,” Elethior growls against me. “Sebastian, yes .”

We’re kissing.

I’m kissing Elethior.

My lungs close up and I shove away from him, I leap away from him.

This isn’t—this didn’t happen. Oh my gods, this didn’t happen.

“No,” I say to his fiasco of a workstation, not looking at him. “No, no .”

Then I do the only thing I can possibly do in a situation like this.

I snatch a vial off my component belt, turn myself invisible, and run from the room.