Page 54 of The Entanglement of Rival Wizards (Magic and Romance #1)

I’m back at my apartment.

Fingers knotted in my hair, a headache throbbing across my skull, I drop against the door.

What just happened?

I can’t breathe. Out, at least; air goes in, in, damming against words, angry, stupid, small words .

One word.

Going around and around in my head.

Love.

Footsteps pad down the stairs.

Orok stumbles into the living room, screwing the heel of his hand into his eye, looking as exhausted as I feel. Maybe, impossibly, more.

He takes a few steps toward the kitchen before he sees me and jumps, startled. “Shit, dude, what are you doing here?”

“I… live here?”

He snorts. “Do you?”

And I suddenly can’t remember the last time I was here when it wasn’t to grab a change of clothes. Have I really been staying at Thio’s so much the past few weeks?

I’m pushing at my chest. Pushing, pushing against my sternum. It hurts, it’s cracking in half, why can’t I hear the bone breaking? Why isn’t my body collapsing from the pain?

It isn’t pain.

Yeah, what Thio said hurt. But what this is, what I’m feeling, isn’t agony from that.

I’m in love with him.

A breath finally goes out, a grasping, frantic noise.

Orok immediately straightens. “Seb?”

“I’m in love with him,” I say out loud, testing the words. “Oh my gods. I’m in love with him.”

Orok nods soothingly. “Pretty sure you have been for a while.”

I know my eyes are bloodshot, know I look a wreck.

“Why is that a bad thing?” he asks.

Reasons clatter over themselves in their rush to get out first.

I don’t deserve it.

I’ll freak out and fuck it up.

“It isn’t,” I say instead. I make myself say instead.

And it forces all those reasons to evaporate like mist, like the insubstantial bullshit they always have been.

It isn’t a bad thing that I love him. I deserve to love him.

What is a bad thing is that he’s gotten so stressed out by his family that he said what he said to me.

How did I not see how much this was beating him down?

Or maybe I did. Maybe I knew, but thought he was handling it.

Maybe I was so corrupted by my own stress that I trusted his smiles and reassurances because why wouldn’t I?

We’ve only been dating for a little over a month.

We’re still new and cautious and I couldn’t have known he was hurting so much. Right?

Fuck that.

A month, two months, hell, two days —it doesn’t matter how long Thio and I have been together.

This is real . We decided this is real .

And that means he should have told me how upset he was getting, and I should have realized how upset he was getting, but I was lost in my own issues, and fuck that .

I’m pacing across our kitchen, back and forth, Orok watching me, a considering, worried look on his face.

It rips me to a stop, my eyes running all over him, taking in his posture, his stained sweats.

He really is exhausted. Sunken eyes, with a crease between his brows.

“You’re not okay either,” I guess.

Recognition slams into me. Orok’s been struggling, too. Not in the same way as Thio, and not in the same way Orok’s usually struggling; this is different.

I haven’t talked to him about my dad’s visit either. About the lawsuit. He hasn’t brought it up, and I thought we were both focusing on surviving this last push until graduation. That we’d talk about it after.

But… whatever’s wrong with Orok has been going on since before my dad’s visit. The differences echo out over the past few months: Orok’s deflection, he let me not be home practically ever.

Orok chews the inside of his cheek. Between one blink and the next, his eyes tear.

My stomach knots, desperately trying to build a retaining wall against the remorseful look he’s wearing now.

I don’t pry, don’t push him, and we watch each other in silence until he shakes his head and lays it all out in a breathless rush.

“I got a contract. To play pro rawball.”

I rock backward. “What? When? I—but, tryouts, I thought—”

He shrugs. “I was supposed to. But I kept putting off responding, and it must’ve scared them.

They offered me a position straight-out.

A full contract, Seb. The kind of money that—” He gasps, winded, like this news has been running circles in his head the whole time he’s held it in.

“In one season, I could pay off all my student loans. All your loans.”

“You aren’t paying my loans.”

He ignores me. “And I’d be playing professionally, and I—”

“O.” I cross the kitchen and squeeze his forearm. “You don’t have to sell me on it. Are you happy? Do you want this?”

He nods.

“Well, that’s all—”

“It isn’t for the Hellhounds.”

My fingers spasm on his arm.

Orok keeps his eyes pinned on me, fragile. “It’s for the Chimeras. In Vegas.”

Vegas.

Nevada.

And I have a job here. In Philadelphia.

“That’s—” Far. Far away. “Great, O.”

I sound like I’m saying it through my teeth. Because I am.

I peel away from him and flex my hands, try again.

“Orok. That’s—”

He takes a step toward me, a step back. “I’ve been thinking about this for… weeks. The recruiter, Savasea? She sent the official contract over a few days ago, but Vegas has been interested since the beginning of the semester—”

The beginning of the—

He’s known that long? Known it was a possibility that long, at least.

“—and it’s why I’ve been dragging my ass about it.

But I’d have money. Real money. I thought, that’ll be fine, I’ll fly us back and forth whenever we want.

Or I looked, and Clawstar has a branch in Los Angeles.

That’s crazy though, asking you to move across the country to be a few hours closer to me.

You have Thio here, and I’ll be traveling so much anyway, and you’ll be working, and—”

He cuts himself off. Silence hangs. I loop my arms around my chest, holding myself together.

Orok sucks in a breath. “I kept thinking. Over and over. How it could work. I talked to my therapist, too. I—it’s been killing me.”

“You should have told me.” It’s killing me, too. And I want to say it’s only because he felt like he couldn’t tell me, but I’m not that selfless.

He’ll be in Las Vegas.

And I’ll be here.

“I wanted to figure out where I stood before I told you,” Orok says.

“Whether I wanted it. And if I did want it, whether I wanted it for me . I was worried I’d be doing it for my mom.

Yet another thing I’m doing to please her.

But it’s not. I want this. I’m good at it. This could be… this could be big.”

He smiles, easy and hopeful, and it brings a matching one across my face.

“You are good at it,” I say. “You deserve this. So gods-damned much.”

“And—” Another sigh. Another wounded look. “I was worried it’d break us. That’s why I kept trying to figure out ways to make this”—he points between us—“work before I told you. But I… it won’t work. What we are, how we are. When I go to Vegas.”

I almost offer to go with him.

“No,” I whisper. “It won’t.”

“It won’t,” Orok repeats, his eyes bloodshot. “I love you. You’ll always be one of the most important people in my life. But you don’t need me as much anymore, and I’m so glad for that.”

My arms unwind from my chest. “I need you, O. I’ll always—”

“But not as much.” His smile wobbles. “Not as much as I’ve needed you. Not in the same ways. And I… I need to stop needing you. We’ve both been clinging to what’s safe for too long, which is why—”

His eyes go to the floor.

“If you want to do what your dad said,” he whispers. “If you want to go after the people at Camp Merethyl. I’d back you, Seb.”

My chest lurches. “You’d be in the lawsuit, too. It happened to you, too.”

“But he’s your father.” Orok looks back up at me with a one-shouldered shrug. “It’s your family dynamic that’d be at the center of this. Although, I’d have money with this contract, too. To fund a lawsuit.”

“No.” I shove toward him. “This money, this opportunity, it’s your future, and like hell are you going to use even a cent of it for anything from our past. If we do it.”

Orok’s smile is lopsided. “We will. I think we need to.”

I want to argue. Deny it. We don’t need it. It’ll be messy and painful and dig up everything we’ve spent six years trying to forget.

But Orok takes my hand. “Watching you break out of our past this semester? Seeing you have a healthy relationship? Seeing you fall in love? It isn’t enough to ignore what happened. We owe it to ourselves, now and back then, to live .”

Tears pour down my face and I barely get out a whimper before Orok snatches me into his arms. He trembles against me, crying, too, a sloppy hug that keeps us both from collapsing.

“I’m going to Las Vegas,” Orok says into my neck. “And I’m going to play pro rawball, and you’re going to stay here and change the world at Clawstar and be dopily, crazily in love with Thio. We’re going to be so happy, Seb.”

I sob into his shoulder. “Gods, you oaf, shut up . I can’t handle this. I love you, too, you absolute asshole.”

Orok stills.

Then he loses it.

Great hiccupping rolls of laughter, his body heaving.

I peel back from him, my sobs turning to helpless laughter, too, and he snorts and cries; we’re a mix of blotchy faces and snot and emotion.

We settle, end up on the couch, and I tell him what I said to Thio. What Thio said to me.

“You know he wasn’t going behind your back when he looked into their names,” Orok says. He’s sagged into the cushions, body deflating. He’d been carrying the news about the Chimeras for too long.

I twist to frown at him. “But I asked him not to.”

“You asked him not to get involved with them, and he didn’t.

But he wanted to know who they were. I get that.

He wanted to make sure he isn’t inadvertently nice to them, and after spending his whole life genuflecting to all those assholes?

I can see how that was a last straw for him. Check your phone.” Orok elbows me.

“What?”

“Check your phone. Is he trying to apologize?”