Page 9
Story: The Hazelwood Pact
He crossed the room, barefoot and stupidly serene, and offered her the cup with both hands, like it was sacred. And Rowan took it… because she wasn’t stupid, and because tea was a weapon in its own right, and because some part of her needed it too badly to pretend otherwise.
She took a sip, and the warmth hit her like a hex. Low in her chest, unwinding something she'd kept bound for far too long. Her breath shuddered. Her eyes closed. She made a small, involuntary sound that might have been a sigh if it weren’t so close to surrender.
Linden smiled. A little tilt of the lips that spoke of satisfaction and memory and things unspoken. It made her want to hex his eyelashes off one by one.
“I also have something dry for you,” he said, turning to rummage through the cedar chest by the fire.
“If it’s a monk’s robe or a cursed blanket, I swear…
” she began, but the words faltered as he turned around, holding a sweater.
Not just any sweater. His sweater. Enormous and soft and dark green, worn thin at the elbows, hand-darned with the same stubborn care he gave everything he loved.
It was the kind of thing that smelled like rosemary and smoke and heartbreak.
Rowan stared at it like it might bite her.
“Linden,” she said warningly.
“It’s the only thing I have that isn’t hexed, warded, or made of wool thick enough to insult your dignity,” he replied mildly. “It smells like me, yes. And no, that wasn’t the point, but I’m not going to pretend I didn’t know you’d notice.”
She narrowed her eyes. He met them with maddening sincerity.
“I’m not putting that on.”
“You’ll catch a chill.”
“I’m immune to chill. I’ve dated warlocks.”
“Rowan.”
She groaned. Clutched her tea like a lifeline. Glared at the sweater as if sheer willpower could combust it.
“Fine,” she snapped, grabbing it from his hands with a speed that nearly spilled her tea. “But if I find even one memory thread in this thing, if it tries to whisper our song to me, I will hex your knees backward.”
He had the gall to laugh. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
She stalked away before he could say anything else unbearably kind, the sweater clutched to her chest like a shield.
In the little washroom, surrounded by lavender soap and an alarming number of plants that definitely shouldn’t have been flowering in June, she peeled off her wet layers and pulled the sweater over her head.
It was enormous. It smelled like comfort. It clung to her wrists and pooled around her thighs and somehow managed to fit her perfectly in all the places that mattered.
Out in the kitchen, she heard the clink of ceramic, the hush of running water. Linden was washing her teacup like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, like he hadn’t just disarmed her completely with wool and warmth and remembered details.
Rowan hated him. She hated how soft he was. She hated how safe he made her feel.
And most of all, she hated that she was already wondering what it would feel like to fall asleep beside him again, wrapped in this stupid sweater, in this stupid house, in this stupid, flickering hope.
***
The bedroom was where things truly began to unravel, like a spell miscast in haste. Too much feeling in too small a space. Rowan stood in the doorway, arms crossed and sweater sleeves swallowing her hands, staring at the bed as if it had grown teeth.
It was small. Criminally small. A charming little iron-framed thing with a patchwork quilt and hand-embroidered pillows and the distinct, unmistakable energy of a bed that had seen things .
Worse still, it was neat. Warm. Clearly slept in.
The blankets bore the faint indent of Linden’s long body, the pillow at the head still shaped to cradle a neck she had once kissed.
The entire room smelled of rosemary, beeswax, and old magic — his magic, soft and woodsy, clinging to every corner like a memory she hadn’t invited in.
“This can’t be it,” Rowan said, her voice flat and faintly accusatory, like the bed itself had personally wronged her.
Linden winced, a hand drifting up to rub the back of his neck in that way he always did when guilty or unsure. “It’s the only one in the cottage,” he offered, half-apologetic, half-resigned. “I wasn’t expecting company.”
“We’re not sharing.” The words came out sharp, too sharp, not because she meant them with venom, but because anything softer might have trembled.
He raised both hands in a placating gesture, brows lifting like she was the unreasonable one here. “We’ll just make a barrier. Pillows. Blankets. An anti-collision charm if you like.”
And so, ten minutes later, Rowan found herself standing at the edge of Linden’s too-small bed, tucking a bolster into position like it was a live grenade.
The sweater he’d given her was warm, and it smelled like him, and she hated that she liked it.
Hated that she liked this , too: the faintly ridiculous, faintly domestic absurdity of it all.
A pillow fort. A grown-ass woman and her inconveniently hot ex constructing a chastity wall out of upholstery.
“This is the worst idea in the history of bad ideas,” she muttered, adjusting a velvet cushion with more force than strictly necessary.
“You once used a sentient vine to break into the Council archives,” Linden pointed out mildly, arranging another pillow with the practiced ease of a man who had definitely made forts like this before.
Probably for injured dryads and anxious familiars.
Probably with the same quiet, devastating tenderness.
“That was strategic ,” Rowan hissed, turning to fluff a pillow with extreme prejudice. “This is madness .”
“It’s just a bed, Rowan.”
But it wasn’t. It wasn’t . Not with him.
It was the ghost of every night they'd once spent tangled together, breathless and laughing and a little bit wild. It was the echo of whispered spells in the dark, of shared warmth and dream-slick limbs and stupid promises they’d almost believed in.
It was memory pressed into linen and mattress, a time capsule of everything they’d had and lost and still hadn’t let go of.
It was not just a bed . It was a trap. And she was walking into it willingly, wrapped in his sweater and cradling the dregs of the tea he’d made her like a love spell in a cup.
She finished placing the last pillow with grim determination, then turned to face him. “This means nothing,” she said, even as her body betrayed her with a shiver, not from cold, but from the unbearable nearness of him.
“Of course,” Linden said solemnly. But his eyes, stars and soft moss and ruined worship, held a different story.
They climbed into the bed from opposite sides like diplomats entering a delicate treaty, each moving with the stiff caution of people trying not to touch what they wanted most. The pillow wall stood between them, absurdly fluffy and completely useless against the way heat bled through fabric, against the fact that desire had never needed permission to reach across divides.
Rowan lay on her side of the bed, staring at the ceiling, rigid as a statue. “This doesn’t mean anything,” she whispered again, softer this time.
“No,” he said, and the word felt like a promise broken in advance.
She squeezed her eyes shut. But of course, that only made things worse.
Because now there was no visual distraction, only sensation.
The lingering scent of him: green, earthy, rain-slicked.
Loam and elderflower, moss and old pine and something darker beneath, like salt wind over still water.
The rise and fall of his breath. The occasional creak of the mattress when he shifted ever so slightly, as if careful not to intrude on the uneasy détente.
Time blurred.
The minutes stretched out, soft and endless and soaked in stormlight.
Then, some time deep into the hush, past midnight and well into danger, her traitor leg moved.
She shifted without thinking, slipping sideways in her sleep, a loose, half-conscious reach for warmth. Her foot slid past the border of bolsters and cushions and blanket walls. A breath later, it landed against skin.
A calf. Warm, solid, familiar.
Her eyes flew open. Linden went still.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t even breathe, not at first. As if afraid that one exhale might break the spell or tip them over into something they couldn’t come back from.
Rowan’s foot should have jerked back. Should have fled across the border of decency and sense and self-imposed restraint.
But it didn’t. Because it was warm. Because it felt like safety in a world that had been anything but. Because his skin under her toes felt like the pulse of something old and half-forgotten, something sacred.
The contact was nothing, really. Barely there. A whisper of a connection.
But it thrummed. Gods, it thrummed.
It was a magical feedback loop of longing: the harmonic pulse of two bodies with history, aching to sync again.
It traveled up her leg in a flush of heat, curled around her hip, twisted low in her stomach like ivy unfurling in spring.
And beneath it all, the ache, that quiet, brutal ache behind her ribs that she had never quite been able to banish, not in ten years, not with spellwork or sharp words or the steady passage of time.
Something shifted then, a thread being pulled loose, or a lock beginning to turn. Something small and trembling and irrevocably new took root in the stillness.
Rowan lay there in the dark, eyes wide, lungs too full. Linden, just on the other side of a few insubstantial inches, didn’t speak again. But she could feel his awareness like a palm pressed to her spine. Could feel the fact that he was just as awake as she was. Just as aware.