Page 25 of The Entanglement of Rival Wizards (Magic and Romance #1)

I’ve created a self-destruction infinity loop: What happens when the stupid thing I do is the catalyst that makes me want to do stupid things? Do I keep doing the same stupid thing over and over for eternity?

Not that I’m going to go back and kiss Elethior again.

Oh my gods, I kissed Elethior.

Then turned invisible.

And ran.

And left all my shit in the lab.

Which I can never go back to.

Because I kissed Elethior.

Of all the ways I feared losing this grant, kissing my lab partner was not one of them. But I have to drop out now, right? I have to drop out of the grant, probably the whole university, and move. Change my name. Join a druid commune.

What the fuck was I thinking?

I know Orok’s at practice; they have their first spring season training game on Sunday. I veer across campus, and the moment my invisibility spell wears off, I check over my shoulder like I’m on the lam. But I don’t see Elethior coming after me.

I get to the rawball field and find a configuration I vaguely recognize as one Ivo was talking about at dinner a few weeks back.

Stone towers, endless pits, a thin river of lava cutting down the side, all courtesy of the team’s artificers, usually students from the engineering school.

Players are stationed on top of obstacles and on the ground, all shouting encouragement at someone I can’t see downfield, but blasts go up there, magic bursts of arcane blue.

The coach floats above the field, held aloft by a levitation spell, and she blows a series of whistles. “Dunst—you polymorphed too soon. Monroe, Rodayne”—oh hey, Orok and Crescentia—“nice hustle, but you came in too late. Everyone, run it again!”

The players scurry into other positions, and after a beat, another whistle blast sets them into motion.

A handful of people watch from the stadium seating.

It’ll be mostly filled on Sunday; even for a training game, there’ll be an outpouring of school spirit for the Manticores.

For now, I take one of the lowest seats, hunched over, hands stuffed in my pockets.

But the longer I sit, watching the team run drills, the more I realize…

I don’t feel that panicky.

Even though I’m still rather exhausted and can’t remember the last time I had real food, I’m not as jittery as I’d been only an hour ago.

I’m not blacking out with the drive to feel something else as a counterbalance to feeling too much, and what I am feeling is—okay?

Foolish. Embarrassed. Dumb. But I’m not freaking out, and I think I only ran out of the lab because I expected to freak out.

Why am I not freaking out?

The coach calls a water break, and as players pour off the field, most heading for the metal benches stacked with towels and water bottles, Orok takes off his helmet and spots me, his eyebrows popping.

He snatches water from his duffel bag, jogs over, and plops on the seat next to me.

“What’d you do?” he asks, guzzling half the bottle in one go. He’s drenched in sweat, his practice uniform covered in grass stains and what has to be remnants of a magic blast.

“Who says I did anything?”

“You’re watching my practice.” He motions at the field. “You’ve either had a complete personality change and taken a sudden interest in rawball, or—” He twists to eye me, then looks at his teammates by the benches and groans. “You’re not still trying to get with Crescentia, are you?”

I blanch. “What? No. That was months ago, and—how do you remember that? You were shitfaced. But no. I’m not here for—for that .”

My tone warbles. I am here for that, sort of. Just not involving Crescentia.

All that calmness, all that not panicking, screws up tight. I can’t get my throat to work right.

Orok’s eyes narrow in concern. “Seb? You—”

“I kissed Elethior,” I whisper. It barely comes out at all. A hiss of sound, and I sit there, frozen, reliving that moment.

The softness of his mouth.

The contrasting bite of his lip rings.

The way he’d groaned. The clench of his fingers in my hair. How he’d seemed relieved I’d kissed him, like he’d… like he’d been wanting it.

My knee bounces hard and I watch Orok. His reaction is all that matters.

He stares at me, his eyes round, his lips parted.

“It was fucked up,” I say, and here comes the panic, racing in like a mudslide. “It’s a complete betrayal of everything that happened, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Gods, say something?”

The water bottle crinkles in his grip and he downs the rest of it before carefully screwing the lid back on. He’s studying me in a way that feels too levelheaded. He’s always been too mellow, and I need him to be mad at me .

Orok cocks his head. “You like him?”

“I—what?” I flinch. “He’s a Tourael .”

Orok rolls his eyes. “That’s your hang-up, not mine. All I know is, you’ve been talking about this guy pretty much nonstop. For someone you claim to hate, you spent a lot of time going on about those treats he bought Nick.”

My face burns. This isn’t how he should be reacting.

“ I kissed Elethior . You’re not—you should be angry with me. I fucked up. Again.”

His face collapses. He looks heartbroken for some reason, and before I can figure out why, he shifts to face me fully and grabs my shoulders.

“You are not a fuckup, Seb,” he tells me. He sighs, hands lowering to his lap. “I’m kind of hard on you, aren’t I?”

“No, you’re—I mean, I need it, right? I appreciate you looking out for me. Gods know what I’d get up to without you reining me in.”

Orok scrubs angrily at his chin. “That’s it, though. You don’t need it. You have issues, but you’re not broken. You can make choices and do things without my voice in your head questioning your motive. You liked kissing him?”

His coach blows her whistle, calling the players back. Orok doesn’t move.

My heart thunders, a roiling storm in my chest, in the curve of my wrists.

You liked kissing him?

No. Elethior’s… Elethior. He’s infuriating and pretentious and everything, everything, that pisses me off.

“Yes,” I whisper.

Orok grins. “Did he kiss you back?”

My face burns so hot it aches. “Yeah.”

“I know you might not believe it right now,” Orok says, “but this wasn’t a fuckup. You like the guy. You kissed him. That’s what it is. Simple.”

“ Simple? This wasn’t—it wasn’t —we can’t—”

“Tell ya what.” He knocks my shoulder with his fist. “After the Manticores secure what’s sure to be an embarrassingly elaborate win on Sunday—”

“So humble.”

“—we’ll hit the party circuit with the express intent of finding a way for you to blow off steam.

What you’re not going to do is spiral out and punish yourself, okay?

And if you thought you’d get that from me, that I’d berate you for this, well, too damn bad.

You kissed someone you’re interested in, and he kissed you back. Like I said. Simple.”

He stands, and I stare at the spot he vacates, numb.

“Oh.” Orok flattens the empty water bottle. “Speaking of voices in your head, your dad called me.”

I whip an appalled look up at him. “What? What’d he want? What’d you tell him?”

“Nothing. I didn’t answer. But he left a message saying how he wants to talk to you, and could I be the voice of reason and get you to call him?

” Orok’s face falls, that heartbroken deflation again.

“But I don’t have to be your voice of reason, because you’re perfectly capable of making your own choices, Seb.

And I’m sorry you feel like you have to question yourself. ”

“It’s not because of you,” I say softly.

He smiles, just as soft, just as unconvinced.

When he gets a few steps away, a mundane detail clicks in my brain.

“I left all my stuff in the lab.”

He glances back at me, one brow lifted. “And?”

“And I can’t go back. Not—not yet.” I plaster on an utterly pathetic, wincing smile. “Can you go for me after practice and rescue my shit?”

Orok rolls his eyes up to the clouds. “Urzoth, give me strength. Yeah, I’ll go.”

“Love you.”

He bats his hand as he jogs back to the field.

And I sit there in a stupor.

I hadn’t expected him to support me. He was going to tell me I’d made a mistake. That I am spiraling again, that it’s unfeasibly dumb to fuck around with your lab partner, especially when said lab partner rattles your heapin’ helpin’ of emotional baggage.

But if he doesn’t think this is a bad thing.

Maybe… maybe it’s not.

I scoff at myself.

I’d rather this be one of my fuckups. Then at least it’d be something I know how to deal with.

That Sunday, the Manticores do secure an embarrassingly elaborate win, prompting all students to set off celebrations that serve the dual purpose of both distracting me and hiding me.

Surely, in the hordes that take over every bar, dance club, and restaurant within a ten-block radius of the stadium, Elethior won’t be able to find me.

He emailed me, though. Once. On Friday night.

Sebastian,

Don’t avoid me. We need to talk.

—Thio

Thio . Like we’re friends.

See? This is what I need distracting from.

Orok landed a massive number of saves during the game, ever one of the team’s best players, so I let his fame sweep me up and carry us to Prismatic, a club near the river.

We used to frequent it in undergrad, but the shine of dancing all night wore off when grad school barged in with what is, quite frankly, an unreasonable demand on our time.

The club lives up to its name with a myriad of flashing lights spasming constantly, some magic, some not.

Music throbs through the converted warehouse that gives a grunge vibe beneath the rainbow-hued illuminations.

One full end is a bar with multiple bartenders scurrying—sometimes flying—around, pouring drinks called things like Guardian and Poison Cone and Fairy Lights.

I’m almost certain the club owners pump pixie magic into the air, because the whole place always feels a little wobbly even if you haven’t had anything to drink.