Chapter 14 - Sebastian
SEBASTIAN
Two days.
Two days of silence from her, and every hour of it sinks deeper beneath my skin.
The Vespera common area hums with its usual early-evening noise, fire snapping in the enormous stone hearth, students murmuring over open books, the tension of ambition and rivalry pulsing faintly through the room like a second heartbeat.
Normally, this is the one place I can think clearly.
The one place I can breathe without the weight of expectations crushing my ribs.
But tonight the walls feel too tight, the air too thick, and every flicker of gold and crimson reminds me of the girl who refuses to look my way.
I sit in one of the wide leather chairs near the fire, but my attention drifts far from the crackling logs and floating lanterns.
My thoughts circle the same memory for the hundredth time, the library alcove, the rain behind her, the warmth of her knees bracketing my hips.
I still don’t know what possessed me to pull her onto my lap.
It wasn’t rehearsed, wasn’t planned, wasn’t even something I realized I was doing until my hands were already on her waist. It hit fast, and hard, like instinct overriding reason.
She was so close, close enough that I could feel the tremor of her breath against mine, and in that moment, some part of me refused to let her walk away.
That part of me, whatever it is, hasn’t quieted since.
Harper avoids me now with near surgical accuracy.
She enters a room and angles herself instantly away.
She passes me in corridors without glancing up.
She sits as far from me in class as possible, as if proximity alone might pull her back into that moment neither of us has the spine to acknowledge.
I’m not sure whether she’s afraid of me or afraid of herself, but either way, the effect is maddening.
She looks through me like I’m made of smoke, when just two days ago she had her fingers tangled in my shirt, her chest rising hard against mine.
And then there’s her magic.
That alone should have unsettled me enough to keep my distance.
The shockwave she unleashed in the alcove wasn’t ordinary wand-less magic.
It wasn’t even advanced. It was raw, ancient, frighteningly instinctual, something that slid under my skin and pushed me back without lifting a single hair on her head.
Her eyes had changed, not with color alone but with something alive behind them.
I’ve never seen magic behave like that, and I grew up surrounded by spells that should never have existed in the first place.
I should have been terrified.
But I wasn’t.
I just wanted to understand it.
I wanted to understand her.
Across the common room, students argue heatedly over the best way to manipulate elemental wards, but their voices barely register.
My attention drifts toward the stairs leading to the girls’ wing, though I catch myself and force my gaze back to the fire.
Pathetic. I’m acting like some first-year infatuated with the first girl who looks his way.
Except she hasn’t been looking my way. Not since the alcove.
Not since her magic flared. Not since she ran.
Theo has tried prying the truth out of me twice.
I brushed him off both times. Liam has been circling me like I’m one misstep away from disaster, and Trevor…
Trevor hasn’t dared show his face near me, which is a blessing I didn’t expect to enjoy so much.
But Harper, she keeps herself cocooned in distance, pulling her cloak tighter around her shoulders each time she senses me.
And gods help me, the more she avoids me, the more impossible it becomes to ignore the storm she left behind.
The bruise on my cheek from the tavern is finally fading, though it still throbs faintly when I touch it.
She doesn’t know how the rest of that fight ended.
She doesn’t know how close she came to seeing me lose control completely.
Part of me is glad she didn’t. Another part wonders if she would have looked at me differently, less like a threat, more like something human.
Staring into the fire, the heat washing over my face, I still feel the ghost of her hands in my shirt. The weight of her on my lap. The magic that shook the air around us. And the silence she gave me instead of the word stop.
I should let this go. For my sake. For hers.
The soft hum of conversation in the Vespera common area barely registers anymore; I’ve been staring at the same page of the same book for nearly an hour, rereading the same sentence without absorbing a single word.
The fire crackles low at my side, casting shifting ribbons of orange along the stone walls, but the warmth does nothing to soothe the tight restlessness knotting in my chest.
Then the doors open.
I don’t look up at first, not until the murmurs around the room shift into something sharper, something more pointed. When I finally lift my eyes, she’s standing there.
Harper.
Her arms are drawn tight over her chest, not in defiance but in exhaustion.
She moves like each step is measured, like she’s forcing her legs to carry her further than she wants to go.
Something about the angle of her shoulders, the tension in her neck, the slight drag in her stride, it’s wrong.
Off. She’s hurting, though she’s doing everything she can to make it invisible.
The fire pops again, loud in the sudden quiet.
Two Vespera boys near the hearth lean toward each other, whispering behind their hands.
I hear the words even though they try to hide them: unhinged, dangerous, her eyes, the explosion last class.
And underneath it all, the smug thrill of people who think gossip gives them power.
My entire body goes cold.
Before logic can intervene, I’m out of my chair. The legs scrape sharply against the stone, silence rippling outward through the room like a shockwave. The boys go stiff the moment they realize I’m coming toward them.
“If I hear you speak her name again,” I say quietly, quiet enough that only they hear, but sharp enough that the meaning carves itself into the air- “I’ll make sure neither of you speaks for a week.”
They panic. One tries to sputter a defense; the other tugs him by the sleeve and nearly trips over a table in his rush to get out of the room. They vanish toward the boys’ hall like cowards who’ve just glimpsed the edge of a blade.
When I turn back, Harper has stopped moving.
She’s watching me, not wide-eyed, not frightened, but with the stunned stillness of someone who expected far too little from me and got something else entirely.
The lantern light catches the exhaustion under her eyes, softening her features in a way that pulls something taut inside my chest.
I walk toward her, slower than before. Careful. She already looks one breath away from collapsing into the shadows she’s been carrying all day.
“Can you talk?” I ask, stopping just close enough that she can decide the distance between us.
Her gaze flicks to the iron clock mounted above the hearth. The pendulum sways steadily, ticking away a rhythm that fills the silence stretching between us. For several seconds she just watches it, maybe deciding, maybe steadying herself.
Finally, she nods once.
“Five minutes.”
Not agreement.
Not surrender.
A boundary.
She turns without waiting for my reaction, heading toward the corridor that leads to the Vespera dormitories.
I follow at a respectful distance, resisting every urge to reach for her, to ask what’s wrong, to close the space she’s trying so hard to maintain.
The lanterns dim as night deepens, casting golden halos along the walls that flicker like restless shadows.
Her steps slow when we reach my door.
She doesn’t ask permission to enter, doesn’t need to. I push it open for her, and she steps inside with the quiet certainty of someone who doesn’t want comfort but needs answers.
I follow her into the room, closing the door behind us with a soft click.
The faint scent of rain clings to her hair, droplets still dampening the shoulders of her robe as she stands near my desk.
Her arms uncross slowly, as though the tension is unspooling from her in exhausted increments.
I stay near the doorway for a heartbeat, just watching her take in the room, its dark wood, its shelves lined with spell books and artifacts, the single candle flickering atop my desk.
“Five minutes,” she reminds me without looking back.
I step further into the room.
"Five Minutes.”
Harper moves through my room with the quiet heaviness of someone carrying far more than she’s willing to speak aloud.
She sits at the edge of my bed, posture rigid, shoulders tight beneath the weight of her own exhaustion.
Her eyes travel over the bare walls, the neatly kept bookshelf, the weapons rack in the corner, the stack of cloaks folded without care.
There’s nothing personal here, nothing sentimental or soft, and she seems to take it all in with a kind of tired curiosity.
“Not one for keepsakes?” she asks, her tone light but lacking any real levity. It sounds more like she’s searching for something to comment on so she doesn’t have to comment on me.
“Never needed them,” I answer, and the simplicity of the truth hangs between us.
Keepsakes require roots, attachments, moments worth preserving.
Those have always felt like luxuries, things belonging to people safer and softer than me.
I wait for her to look at me, to ask something else, but she keeps her gaze fixed on the floorboards, tracing invisible patterns with her eyes as though the grain of the wood is easier to face than whatever brought her up here.