Page 47 of The Entanglement of Rival Wizards (Magic and Romance #1)

I lock my legs around his back, heels digging into his spine, and wiggle unsuccessfully; he’s got me pinned. No amount of whining or thrashing does a damn thing, and that sense of fullness is taunting, a ship there on the horizon.

Sweat pours off me, every nerve wound so taut I fear what the snap will bring.

“Please,” I relent, tugging at his arms, his neck. “Please, Thio, fuck me. Fuck me, own me, ruin me—”

He kisses me to silence. Eats the last few garbled words. “Oh, I’ll ruin you,” he tells me. “But you’re mine, so I’ll always put you back together again, too.”

His hips jerk away, almost all the way out, and slam forward so brutally I shout. He doesn’t give me a beat to brace myself or prepare for the next wave; it comes and comes, seismic thrusts that trigger earthquakes across my skin, goose bumps so sensitive they ache.

I moan his name, moan it until it becomes a sob, and I know as I reach for my dick that he isn’t going to let me. He grabs my hand and puts his mouth at my ear and snarls, “ Mine, ” and it doesn’t matter that he stopped me from touching myself, I almost come on that hair-trigger word.

He pulls out without pretense and flips me over.

I go, ass in the air and fingers groping for the top of his mattress as he impales me again, nailing my prostate with each hard drive, interstellar light playing in fragments across my eyelids.

The sheet pops off the corner of the bed. A pillow goes flying. I’m scrambling, clinging to fabric, seeking leverage, seeking gravity. Every thrust shoots me further into orbit, the air thinning.

“Thio,” I whine. “Thio, please —”

He pulls out again. I all but scream and claw back for him, but he grabs my torso and heaves me up until I’m sitting on his bent legs and he’s slamming up into me.

He has his hand around my neck, holding my back to his chest, the way we were at the dance club. I writhe like there’s music now, bouncing on his cock, swaying to the firing beat of our own pulses.

“This ass.” He digs his forehead into my shoulder. “You’re too good. Gonna make me come. You want that? My cum in you. Filling you up. Gods, Sebastian—wanna mark you, wanna come inside you.”

If I had a semblance of control over my brain, I’d be mortified by the sounds that undulate out of my mouth. Wails and “Yes, gods, Thio, I want it, please—”

He grabs my hips and stabs so deep within me I swear I can feel him in my throat. It stops me from moving and my head falls back against his shoulder, hands grasping at his hair, at his fingers where they bruise my hips.

“Not yet,” he tells me. “Don’t want to come yet. Okay?”

No, no —the need to come is stifling me. It’s a clamp on my neck and pleasure-pain radiating through my chest and down my thighs, no .

I whine again, and nod.

Ruin me.

He maneuvers me off the bed, bends me over, and fucks me face-first into the mattress.

The moment either of us gets close, he pulls out and changes the position.

Him holding me against the wall.

We drop to the floor, and fuck there, too.

Then back on his bed, me riding him, gods, so close, so close —

He shoves me away, my head bouncing off the foot of the mattress, and I barely have enough grip on reality to bark out a raspy fuck you before he’s driving back into me, the two of us half hanging off his bed.

His lips are everywhere; mine are, too, biting, sucking. What’s bruise and what’s shudder, what’s kiss and what’s teeth? This stopped being something tangible; we’re stratospheric now, rocketing through outer planes and star-speckled multiverses.

His hand finally wraps around my oversensitive dick and I strangle down a scream.

I’m coming on barely one tug, orgasm detonating in the pit of my stomach and rolling off eruptions that annihilate all last ties to anything substantial.

There’s only pure beams of light, the salty taste of sweat on his neck, the tectonic shift caused by this destruction.

One last determined thrust, and his shout chokes off in an intensity that doesn’t allow sound. Bleary, I watch him, soaking up the way the tendons in his neck stand out in stark contrast, those red stripes on his cheeks near neon.

I lean up and kiss one of those stripes. The other.

He catches my mouth in a retreating kiss as he pulls out of me. I only have a moment to wince before he’s dragging me away from the edge of the mattress and shoving my knees up to my stomach.

“Wha—” But no question comes, just pathetic gasping, and I look down to see him staring at my hole.

I can feel his cum leaking out of me. That’s what he’s looking at.

He’s been a predator before, but it was only a part of him, a flicker of could-be.

The rabid look on his face leaves nothing hypothetical about what he is now.

“So hot, baby,” he snarls and bends to lick a long stripe through the crease of my ass to my balls, dipping his tongue into my hole as he passes it.

Electrocution. A full-body lightning strike.

It’s hypersensitive but I’m begging, sobbing. “Please, please, Thio .”

He attacks, licking and sucking. I writhe and he hauls me up to him like his own personal feast, tongue arrowing into me, messy and dirty and gods, I think I could come again.

But it’s too much and too good all at once, and when my cries change in pitch, Thio shifts to bathing the insides of my thighs in open-mouth kisses.

Each one slows more and more until it’s worshipful, intimate, everything he wanted this to be, boiled down to lips on quivering skin.

I don’t know anything else until I feel his chest rising and falling under my cheek. He moved us, tucked us under what parts of his bedding remained on the mattress. His arm is tight around me, both of us wrecked.

He coasts his fingers through my hair. “You with me?”

“No,” I grumble. “Summon me back to earth. Not sure where I ended up.”

A chuckle reverberates in my ear.

His hand moves down, stroking, soothing, and he stops at the small of my back, fingers toying over the swell of my ass.

“Are you okay?” he whispers. “Did I go too rough? Too—much?”

There’s uncertainty in his tone.

I look up at him, resting my chin on his chest because I can’t find the strength to hold my own head up.

“It was perfect,” I manage. Then I attempt a glare I’m sure falls flat. “Sadistic, with the edging. But perfect.” My face heats. “All of it.”

Thio grins, his own cheeks red again, too. Gods, those stripes. “My sadism ends now, I promise. How about a shower, then we eat?”

I groan and bury my face in his armpit. Even that smells good, his sweat and cologne and deodorant; just him .

“You said no more sadism,” I mumble.

“I did.”

“Then don’t make me move.”

He chuckles again. “We can eat dinner in bed.”

“Can we shower in bed?”

“Sadly, no one’s developed a spell for that yet.”

Another groan. “What is the point of magic?”

Despite my protests, we get to the shower, which is huge, and luxurious, and I’m instantly okay with having left the bed for it. Thio washes me thoroughly, and that washing turns to touching turns to creating our own steam to rival the water. We get each other off again in a soapy, leisurely grind.

And back in bed, naked, plates of reheated—for the second time—pasta balanced on our knees, Thio and I lean against each other and eat and talk about nothing.

All the heavy shit has been said and done; now we get to prattle on about shows we’ve binged and that gaudy statue in his living room and how Paeris and Nick will get along.

The food is still phenomenal, and with our empty plates stacked on his nightstand, Thio pulls me back against his chest.

His hand drifts through my shower-damp hair, and I flutter in and out of consciousness, absorbing the warmth radiating off him, the warmth we generated that seems to linger.

It’s been nonstop heat with him from every angle, fighting and fucking, constant infernos and explosions.

It should be exhausting, or feel like a warning.

Something this tumultuous can’t sustain itself, can it?

Something that does nothing but burn can’t last.

But I come back for that burn. My own fire was destroying me, and I keep getting close to his fire because I need a better warmth.

“Sebastian?” Thio asks into the soft glow of his bedroom’s low lights.

I moan, half asleep.

“I’m in this,” he whispers. His hand in my hair, his other arm around my waist; they both tighten.

“You don’t have to say anything. What you told me tonight, about Camp Merethyl—I want you to know how seriously I take it.

I know it was no small thing for you, and this, you and me, isn’t small for me either. ”

He gave me an out. I could stay quiet and drift off in his arms and call this night the best of my life.

“I’m in this, too,” I say.

Now it’s the best night of my life.

His fingers draw shapes on my hip and I know he’s smiling. Grinning, probably, all dopey and shit.

“Shut up,” I mutter.

His snorted exhale is hot on my bare shoulder. “Never. You like me.”

I can’t wrestle down my smile. He really has ruined me.

One last, mumbled confession slips out. “You make me happy.”

And I fall asleep with his lips pressed to my forehead.

The first half of spring break, we barely leave Thio’s apartment.

It isn’t until Orok texts asking for proof of life that Thio makes the executive decision to put clothes on, because I won’t give your best friend reason to think badly of me.

Which, damn, that’s downright honorable of him, so we end up hanging with Orok and some of the rawball team.

Thio fits. With Orok, and Orok’s sporty circle of friends.

They’re quickly laughing along with a joke Thio told or buying him a drink because he beat them at axe throwing, and even Crescentia gets over her prejudice.

I can only watch in disbelief at incontrovertible proof that I’ve somehow attracted another people person into my inner circle.

I can’t believe he doesn’t have his own established group of friends; he’s so easy to like.

Charming and engaging. I’m not at all too proud to admit I latch on to his side on most of our excursions.

Gods damn, he chose me? He chose me, and he holds my hand or idly plays with my hair or smiles down at me in a private way between us.

We visit his mom at the end of the week.

The care facility staff seems to have figured out her medicine; she hasn’t had any more seizures, and her eyes are clear when we sit with her in the courtyard.

Thio tells her what we’ve been doing—the PG version—and her focus drifts as he talks, to the weeping willow we’re seated under, to the lilies blooming by the pond in the corner, to—me.

She stares at me as Thio talks about how we went axe throwing. I smile, not sure how much she’s aware of, if she remembers me from our other visits.

She touches my hand. It’s fleeting, barely a brush of contact, but my eyes prickle.

I still haven’t heard from my dad since his unsolicited astral projection visit. My mom stopped her usual harmless how are you texts, probably because I didn’t congratulate my father on his new job. This silence between us feels… conclusive. Like this was the last straw.

The effect of them giving up is that they’ve given up . And now neither side of our already rickety bridge is passable.

I don’t know what to do about that. Why I find myself glancing at the text thread with my mom in case I missed something.

I’m dating an incredible guy who for whatever reason is obsessed with me.

I have Orok. My parents have finally stopped hassling me about my failures.

I’m on the downslope to graduation, set to finish up my project in a few weeks.

I have the Clawstar job locked in, so I’ll be able to get protective spells to people who need them.

For the first time in my life, I have everything I’ve ever wanted.

If I’m feeling uncertain, it’s because I’m not used to being happy. If I’m feeling like this perfectly clear, brilliantly bright day is forecasted for a storm, it’s only because I’ve never had stuff to worry about losing.

If all this joy has me holding Thio tighter at night, it’s only because that’s what you do when you like someone. You hold them close.

And wait for the dread to let you take a full breath again.