Page 27 of The Entanglement of Rival Wizards (Magic and Romance #1)

Then that analysis is gone, and he’s smirking, the cutting, self-important cockiness I hate.

“I don’t think liking each other is a prerequisite for that,” he says.

For some reason, that sets my entire body on fire. An instantaneous frisson that scours my muscles, my nerves, the part of my face where I can feel his breath bathing down on me.

“You’re unable to see beyond me being a Tourael?” he asks. He’s so, so close to me.

I nod.

“Well, good,” he tells me. “I’m unable to see you beyond a smartass, low-level evocation wannabe who would rather bother real wizards with childish antics than apply himself.”

There’s something wrong with me. Which is not a new revelation. But I’ve drilled down into a previously untapped vein of wrongness. My fingers tighten where they’re still on his chest, tugging the fabric of his sheer shirt, pulling him closer, just pulling .

The music rises, and the lyrics roll, Move with me, move—move with me, move—

The beat drops. A cry goes up in the fall and bodies thrash harder on the dance floor.

My lips part and I’m sucking in his exhales, my eyes wide and unblinking on his.

It’s the pixie magic. The slightly off-kilter sway of being in a club. It’s the stress of this semester and the impending threat of graduation and all the hatred I let have space in my body finally breaking me.

I hold Elethior’s gaze, giving my grip on his shirt one firm tug, before I let go and step past him.

This time, he allows it.

I cut around the remaining tables and push onto the dance floor, wiggling between people who are lost in the music and lights and effervescence of the night. We’re all free here, equalized in the fantasy of escape, and my emotions crank to only simple extremes.

I’m sweating already, can feel it beading down my spine, in the palms of my hands. The song is all synthesizer and swelling drums, throbs that climb my legs, vibrate my thighs, settle in the base of my stomach.

My hands go up, and almost immediately, fingers ghost down the undersides of my biceps, over my armpits, along my sides, to settle on my hips. Every place he touches sparks so strongly that the club won’t need their light shows—we can create pyrotechnics on our own.

“Is this okay?” The way he asks, forehead pressing to the back of my head, voice a muffled croon against the music—my body twitches with resistance.

“Don’t do that.” My arms jerk down, head angling to the side. “That’s not what this is.”

Elethior mimics my stiffness, but he doesn’t peel his hands away from my hips. “Then what are we doing?”

“Using each other.”

His fingers clamp my hips more firmly. I hiss, but it isn’t bad.

It should feel bad.

It should feel like standing on that collapsed bridge behind the grocery store when I was younger and wondering if the levitation spell would fail; but it feels like the final time I did that, when I turned away instead of stepping into the abyss. When I chose to be safe.

He feels… safe .

My heart’s been going at a sprint since he appeared beside me, so it’s got nowhere to speed up under the wash of panicked adrenaline, and it all churns together, confusion and fear and wanting, such heady, dismantling wanting .

His voice is mostly tremors as he growls into my ear, “You want me to use your body, Sebastian?”

I don’t trust what’ll come out of my mouth, so I nod.

No thinking here. Just feeling.

Feeling those fingers conform to my hip bones.

Feeling my ass against the solid wall of his pelvis.

Feeling his face alongside my head, feeling his breath dust across my collarbone, feeling, feeling —

We sway with the music. Exploratory at first, finding the rhythm with the crowd, with each other.

The song builds and we let it take us faster, faster. The bass crashes and we jump with the other dancers. One of his hands leaves my hip to splay against my bare stomach and I loop my arm around his head, holding him there as I grind on him shamelessly. I’ll be mortified by this in the morning.

Or maybe I won’t.

Maybe I don’t have to carry this with me. It doesn’t have to be anything more than what it is now, an outlet. We don’t like each other and don’t have to. This is a safer detonation than screaming at each other. Although, not gonna lie, that’s pretty hot, too.

The energy of our dancing changes. Nothing on the surface, no new song, no new moves; but the rock of my hips against his takes on a new gravitational pull, directing us in a wordless, fluid reorienting.

My heart goes sluggish, slowing everything to the frame-by-frame shuttering of my head dropping back against his shoulder.

His hand climbs my stomach. All the air leaves my lungs in a punctured groan that he has to feel, the rumble of it; he moves his hand up under my shirt, sliding between my pecs until he’s gripping my neck and the lights go scarlet.

The beat falls again, but we miss the jump.

He’s holding my body to him with his hand on my neck and fuck it if I’m not a boneless, compliant mess.

On the next swaying grind of my hips, he cants into me, letting me feel he’s as hard as I am, and the knowledge skitters across my sweat-slicked skin like a gust of wind. Goose bumps erupt everywhere; I shiver in their attack.

My lips part, eyes pinched shut like I’m in pain. I am. It hurts, and it doesn’t, and that hurts, too.

His fingers spasm on the pulse point in my neck. I turn my head and I know his face is right there. I can taste the heat on his mouth.

Our lips touch, a scratchy brush.

His thumb will leave a bruise under my jaw, and we hold there, panting into each other’s mouths, bodies pressed together, limbs tangled. We’re not dancing anymore. Just—just gasping, miring in each other.

Kissing Elethior Tourael should be as catastrophic as the worst thing I’ve done.

And it is.

But it’s not a bad catastrophe, and I never knew, never fucking knew that calamities could be wondrous, too.

This isn’t one of my self-destructive episodes. This isn’t something I’ll regret.

And I’m going to keep it that way.

Gods, I think it’s been going on for a while.

Quakes rock from my ankles to my neck, oversensitized, overwhelmed.

I twist into Elethior, disentangling his arm from under my shirt, his fingers from around my throat. I press my mouth to his ear, push down against the thudding of his racing heart under my palm.

“We should talk,” I say, unable to catch my breath. “But not here. Come home with me?”

He leans his head against my lips. Strokes his fingers over the bare, sweat-glossed skin of my lower back.

And nods.