Page 37 of The Entanglement of Rival Wizards (Magic and Romance #1)

His arms go slack so I can move off him.

I should.

I don’t.

I can feel his smile, the way it curves on my skin when he pushes his face into the crook of my neck.

We fall into a routine.

Thio picks me up in the morning. His driver, a dwarf named Hordon, doesn’t let us know that he definitely knows what we’re doing behind the barrier spell, gods bless him. The poor guy must be going through a ton of air freshener to keep the back seat from smelling like sex all the time.

We get to school and spend the day in the lab.

I trek to the library for my job or off campus to eat with Orok.

Thio occasionally heads out for stuffy meals with Arasne or calls with Myrdin for updates on his progress.

Those always throw him out of sorts, so I’ve taken to summoning Nick afterward, where he spends a few hours curled on Thio’s lap, getting fed pieces of dog food like grapes at a Bacchanalia feast.

There’s no repercussion from Thio yelling at Myrdin, not that I can tell. I asked Thio once, and he shook his head and cooed at Nick how his daddy is cute when he worries.

I’m not worried. Or cute. Fuck him.

Thio and I always end up leaving for the day at the same time, and three of the five days, Hordon takes us to my apartment. The other two days, Thio says he can’t give me a ride, and when I find out it’s because he’s going to visit his mom at Blooming Grove, I hop in the car anyway.

Which is how we spend a few hours a week with Thio’s mom, having dinner with her in the garden courtyard or playing checkers in the game room while she sits next to Thio.

Even though she doesn’t respond to what we say, occasionally she’ll lean her head on his shoulder with a contented hum or pat his arm.

I don’t hear from my dad anymore. Mom keeps up her usual stream of asking how I am like nothing happened.

My replies were already almost nonexistent, but it’s harder to respond when I expect every text to be news that my dad got the job.

I focus on Thio instead. On the stories he tells about stuff he and his mom did before her accident. On the way she’ll make eye contact with him, and he lights up like a supernova.

I expect Thio to drop me at home and leave after our evenings at Blooming Grove, but even those end with him following me up. Orok’s practices keep the apartment empty on the weeknights, which is good, because we never get farther than the kitchen.

Does Thio kiss me longer the nights after Blooming Grove? Does he linger more, make it almost agonizingly good?

The only time we don’t see each other is on weekends, but gods, that separation turns Monday morning into fireworks, prompting us to find really fun uses for spells that create a temporary extra hand or generate warmth on certain focused body parts.

Orok mocks me for my distracted energy one Sunday, but I quite pleasantly remind him that I’m having sex twice most days. To which he says, “Low blow, dipshit,” and steals the leftover tacos I’d been saving.

But seriously, I’m having sex twice a day .

I’m saving a ton on bus fare.

And I can still barely focus when Thio’s in the lab.

Every eye contact, every brush of our hands, every time he’s standing too close or not nearly close enough—it’s all something I’m aware of, and that awareness eats up my attention like acid.

What’s the solution? We’re having sex twice a day .

What more does my body want? Sure, we’re keeping it to hands and mouths and that’s more than satisfying, but something tells me that even if we went further, it wouldn’t quench this greed.

Thio’s no help. I swear he stands too close on purpose.

I catch him dragging his nose near the skin on my neck and I glare at him, but he grins like a little fucker.

I bend down to grab the marker I dropped, and I catch him checking out my ass with his lower lip between his teeth, and he pops an eyebrow and pats his thigh like I’ll hop to and plant myself there in an obedient heap.

Which I don’t .

Because we’re in the lab.

Where we said we will not fuck around .

We map out experiments to run on my project and brainstorm things to try with his, but nothing overlaps.

Our lab space becomes cluttered with more than his mess; we’ve got books on conjuration and scrolls from the dregs of the library on the oldest forms of evocation, and we’ve started sorting through piles of components to fit in our tests.

Working together is… fluid. Ish. He’ll reach for something, and I’ll already be handing it to him. I’ll say, Maybe we should look up— and he’ll have a book open to the page that lists the thing I’d been about to say.

But there’ll be times when he insists on using a pure crystal rod for a spell we’re testing the safety net idea on, even though the standard way to do the spell is with a glass rod.

The spell needs a light-refracting component, and we’re not sure if the equation we’ve come up with for the safety net addition will work, so why waste expensive materials?

Thio concedes to me, and we use the glass. But when we run the test and it turns out, hey, the safety net equation is in fact off and the original spell destroys the glass rod, he insists it wasn’t the equation, but the use of glass instead of crystal, and I should stop being such a cheap-ass .

An added benefit of knowing him now is the realization that he’s not arguing to be pretentious or superior—he’s fighting for control because he’s terrified.

Terrified of his mom’s accident repeating itself.

I don’t know how to process that knowledge. It feels like something I shouldn’t know, something forbidden. So I suggest we add more protection spells to our next test. Which is reasonable, right? Meeting him halfway.

But Thio keeps on about me being stingy over our components, only instead of me storming out when I can’t stand the sight of him anymore, I shout at him to shut up and call Hordon.

We close the lab early.

Head to my apartment in infuriated silence.

Then he hate-fucks my throat until we both come all over my kitchen floor.

The weeks until Founder’s Day and spring break fly by—until one day, we get off on the way to school like normal, but it does nothing to bank the fire, even less so than usual.

Hordon drops us behind Bellanor Hall and Thio and I are both strung taut, breathing like we raced to school.

The energy between us aches, a bruise in the ether.

Maybe we should see a doctor? Maybe we’ve caught something. A lust spell gone wrong.

We get into the lab, and the minute the door shuts, Thio’s shoving me against the wall.

“Sebastian,” he growls, and he sounds pissed, but honestly, I am, too. What is this? “Why can’t I get enough of you? Why the fuck can’t I stop wanting you?”

I don’t know. I don’t know . I almost whimper it, dolefully.

He bites his way down my neck and I tear off his jacket, wanting to rip his black T-shirt in two, but I stop with my hands fisted in the fabric, my chest heaving.

“Your rule about the lab. Thio—back up. Not in the lab.”

But he doesn’t move. Stays right up against me, his teeth in my neck, the bite sharp and making my eyes roll back.

“I rescind it,” he says. Laps at the bite mark he left.

“Rescind—?”

“That rule. The no-fucking-in-the-lab rule. I rescind it. Agreed?”

We can change the rules?

The rules can change .

It rings in my head. A fire alarm. Smoke’s gathering, churning—

I nod frantically. “Agreed.”

The components in his hand barely register before he murmurs a spell. My wrists are lifted and slammed back against the wall, held in place by invisible force shields.

Adrenaline spikes, stays high and roiling as Thio grins deliciously. “Good?” he asks.

Need ribbons through me. “Oh, fuck yeah.”