Page 51 of The Entanglement of Rival Wizards (Magic and Romance #1)

It’s dark when I wake up.

The clock on my nightstand is blurry without my glasses, but I barely make out that it’s after two in the morning. Which explains the groggy pressure weighing down my limbs, and I roll onto my back, sluggish, thoughts held at bay by the in-between of being only half awake.

I’m not sure what woke me up at first. I hold my breath, listening for Orok, but there’s no moaning or telltale signs of him having a nightmare.

After a long stretch of stillness, I relax into the bed.

Next to me, Thio’s still asleep, curled toward me, a strip of his face illuminated yellow-white by a streetlight blade that slashes through my curtains.

The previous night tries to come back to me.

But what overwhelms the kick of anxiety, what pushes it down and levels out my heart rate, is Thio.

My lips find his, a brush of contact, something to settle me back into sleep.

But he stirs under me.

His lips rise to mine, the brush turning to a hold, mouths connecting.

He pulls back and his eyes glide open. Dark pupils, sleep-drenched in that shaft of light. We stare at each other, heads nestled close on his pillow; everything is quiet and sleepy and we could slip back into unconsciousness.

I don’t know who moves. It’s a shared collision, we’re both at fault.

We’re kissing again, my hand on his neck, his on my waist, fingers waking up. A pull, blankets coming with me; I roll on top of him, cradled between his legs, rocking against him as our kisses create humidity and we’re still half asleep.

Thio moans, and I curse that we went to bed in boxers.

Another thrust, our hard cocks dragging against each other through two layers of thin fabric, muted but so good. Everything with him is so good .

My mouth goes to the spot on his collarbone I know makes him shudder, and I work his body into just that.

He reaches between us to shove down his boxers; we kick and wriggle until we’re naked and somehow the blanket stays over my shoulders, tenting us in.

The smooth, precum-slick glide of our bare dicks against each other has me concaving my body over his and whimpering.

His legs go back around my waist, crossing so his ankles rest in the divots on either side of my tailbone. I find the lube in my nightstand, but as I reach back to prep myself, Thio grabs my hand and guides my fingers to his hole.

The muscles behind my belly button twist viciously. “Thio—”

“Yes,” he says, and it disintegrates into a moan as he pushes one of my fingers around his rim. “ Please .”

I take over, no part of me still drowsy.

Every nerve is inexhaustibly awake, memorizing the hitch of Thio’s breath and the already blissed-out gloss to his eyes in the darkness.

I circle my finger around him once, twice, the lube warming in the friction, each pass making his body do this convulsive twitch that intensifies until he’s begging again.

“Please, Sebastian,” he says and I eat it down, sucking his tongue as I delve my finger into his body.

His whine? Delectable.

I increase to two fingers, three, rocking and smooth, and then—

A crook of my fingers, and Thio’s stomach arches off the bed, head digging back into the pillow and exposing his long, inked neck.

“Fuck me,” he begs, fingers hooked in the ridges of my spine and pulling. “Fuck me, please, baby—”

Always. Anything. Everything.

My fingers curve again and he breaks apart in a keening wail I quickly suck down until we’re back to quiet gasps and slick, moving skin. More lube, my cock aching and rigid, driven to the very edge of insanity by Thio giving me this, coming apart for me.

I notch at his entrance and his eyes crash to mine, half shadowed in the blanket over my shoulders. The air is thick with the smell of sex and the muted notes of Thio’s cologne and as I push inside, neither of us says anything.

My hips hit his ass and I collapse over him, arms coming under his shoulders; I’m as close to him as I can possibly be and it isn’t enough.

He grips my cock in the best strangulation, so tight and hot I can feel the muscles in his walls quivering as he adjusts to me; his body is conforming to mine and I want the imprint to last forever.

That possessive drive jerks my hips deeper, back out, deeper again. I need to change him from the inside the way he’s altering me at a cellular level.

No words still. No pleas or warnings or admissions.

Just the air disappearing. Thio sucking on his lower lip. Me finding some kind of ascension between his legs. I don’t know how much time passes, what outer planes might have shifted to make room for our orbit.

I can feel the beat of blood in his body, in mine, I’m not sure what’s his pulse and what’s from me. His dick’s trapped between us and I focus on rolling my hips to drag across it so his jaw slackens and his fingers fist my hair.

He comes with a bright cry, eyes bursting open to latch on to mine like he can drag me with him in the pleasure wave. And he does; my own orgasm rips through me in a fervor, relentless and brutal and he’s kissing the moans from my lips.

It’s still early. The fog of orgasm shifts everything dreamlike again, and as our kisses slow, I fight through the haze to clean us off before we tangle up in bed again.

My head on his chest, his fingers card through my hair, slower and slower until he’s asleep again, the whoosh ing inhale and exhale of his breath a lulling, symphonic rhythm.

The calmness of this moment has my chest cramping tight.

He faced my parents’ ridicule without flinching. He made sure Orok was okay, too.

I need Thio to be happy. I need him as happy as he makes me, as supported, as safe .

In the low light, I look up at him, watching the interplay of sleep and dreams smooth out his features.

Powerlessness was my driving force behind studying magic. Because we have all this potential literally at the tips of our fingers, so there should never, ever be situations where we’re small and weak and acquiescent.

But there are. With Arasne, with his family, and I can’t do a fucking thing to fix it.

Can’t get his family off his back; can’t pay for his mom’s care; can’t intervene in any way that’d help.

I’ll be here next to him like he is for me, a firm hand on his back, a shoulder to lean on, but there should be more .

There has to be something else I can do.

Something else I can give him, the way he’s given me—

An idea sizzles through me like a lightning strike.

I can do one thing. One of the first things he gave me: his research topic.

That topic is the only thing he’s gotten to choose on his own. He doesn’t want his degree or the life path his family set him on, but figuring out his mom’s topic?

Yes, it’s a huge concept, and yes, it’s dangerous.

But it’s too late to incorporate anything new into our main project anyway, so if I found something, it’d be just for him; and I don’t have to give him a complete solution for it to have an impact.

We’ve both set aside his project to focus on the measuring cup theory with mine, but I can dive back into his and dedicate the attention to it that it deserves. That he deserves.

What good is living in a world with magic if I can’t use it to make him happy?

Three weeks until our final presentation.

Four weeks until graduation.

I tell my parents that I’m busy with school and can’t think about any lawsuits yet.

And they, for the first time in my life, respect my boundary.

My mom restarts texting me though, asking how I am.

It isn’t surprising how good it feels to have her messages filling my phone again, and I respond every time.

Back in the lab, Thio and I run more tests, adding various factors, recording the limitations—and as we work, I poke at Thio’s project with deliberate focus.

Every time I find something in evocation texts that I think will work, we try it; but nothing makes a dent at disconnecting a conjurer from their conjured item.

Thio shrugs it off. He never thought we’d make progress on his topic, so these failures aren’t unexpected to him, and if he notes my new levels of ferocity in research he doesn’t say anything.

He’s distracted on his own; when he comes back from his meetings with Arasne now, he’s hollow, withdrawn.

Not even Nick purring brings him out of the fog.

He works in silence until we leave for the day, only to kiss me in the car on the way to his place like nothing happened.

“I just need to make it to graduation,” he tells me. “Everything’s fine.”

I’m the fucking king of things being fine. And this? Not fine. Not at all.

He doesn’t tell me what Arasne says to him at these meetings, only that he’s trying to keep her appeased with mundane details of our project, but she has to know what he’s planning to do after graduation. And she’s not going to let him go easily.

Neither of us mentions my dad’s offer, but I know Thio’s waiting for me to talk about it the same way I wait for him to bring up his family.

We visit his mom and there are bruises under his eyes from lack of sleep.

Focusing on Thio consumes me those last weeks.

I fall into a state of delirious work but Thio and Orok blame it on the end of the semester approaching fast. We’re all stressed, we’re all overcaffeinated and sleepless—but mine is half from writing up the safety net rune paper, and half from researching Thio’s project in every free moment.

The days pass, and the grant presentation looms. We have our final check-in meeting with Davyeras and the advisors, where they give our last tests and concepts their approval.

Thio and I put finishing touches on our paper and I think, maybe, there won’t be anything for me to find, no great revelation I can offer him as a buffer against the stress looming post-graduation.

That’s sappy, isn’t it? I want to bring him a research solution on bended knee.