4. Seb #2
He leaned back against the wall, arms folded, and watched her.
Asher might be his oldest friend, but Tori was his best. Their friendship had been forged by two a.m. texts—drunk and sober, despairing and revelatory—in secrets and burgeoning truths they couldn’t share with anyone else.
Together they waded through those questions—what am I, who am I?
—that no one understands unless they’re asking them themselves.
Tori had been the one he’d called, sobbing, when he was outed to his family.
He’d been the one waiting up through Tori’s jaw reconstruction, the one holding an ice chip to her swollen lips as she cried silently through the pain.
Tori’s eyeliner went on, surgically precise, as it did every time.
She was, he was sure, the best enchanter at Windermere, and no one would ever know.
Every morning she burned through a litany of prepared spells that she stored in her perfume, her lipstick, her foundation.
Spells that kept her makeup fresh all day, that kept her lipstick off her teeth, that kept her hair from frizzing, nails from chipping.
Seb thought she was flawless without them, without makeup, but he knew that it was about armor.
“I could do you, if you wanted,” she said, raising her mascara wand in the mirror.
“I’m good, thanks.” He grinned, remembering the last time he’d let her do him up.
The evening had started with Seb nearly breaking an ankle in her stilettos as he drunkenly attempted the “Cell Block Tango,” and ended in a sloppy pile on the floor, Brunello soaking into the carpet, and Tori’s wardrobe of expensive lingerie dangling off the coffee table.
“Did you guys see this?” Asher called from the living room. The floor creaked in the hallway as he joined them in the bathroom. “Your brother is getting married,” he said to Seb.
Tori dropped her mascara and unlocked her phone with preternatural speed. “Mon Dieu, Reginald!” she shrilled with faux dramatics. “Announcing on the autumnal equinox.” She raised an eyebrow at Seb in the mirror. “How…auspicious.”
“Did you know this was coming?” Asher said. “I thought he was going to wait until after Priya finished her PhD.”
“It’s news to me,” Seb said, trying not to sound bitter as he eyed the engagement announcement, complete with purportedly candid shots of the act obviously taken by a professional.
“I don’t know what the hurry is.” He frowned at Reg, his dark blond curls perfectly windblown, his green eyes dashing.
Reg was twenty-six, and these days that seemed young for commitment.
But even as he said it, Seb knew what the hurry was.
“Doesn’t want to lose the inheritance to a certain younger brother, I suspect,” Asher said, voicing Seb’s thoughts.
But Reg wouldn’t lose the inheritance. Reg might be barely adequate and nothing more, but Reg could do whatever he wanted because he had never been caught with another boy’s dick in his mouth in their parents’ bed.
Seb’s queerness wasn’t even his biggest disappointment to his parents.
After all, as they liked to remind him—their ignorance purposeful—he could still settle down with a lovely European heiress, since he swung both ways.
Well, he corrected, taking in Tori’s glossy bangs and angular cheekbones, recalling more than one drunken, experimental night, all ways.
No, Seb’s most disappointing quality was another thing he had no control over and that his parents acted like he’d done deliberately—the fact that he’d had the bad timing to be born second.
Seb was the second son of a second son, and while he might have a giant trust-sized safety net, the estate and everything, the Tribunal seat, that was all going to Reg.
He was never quite sure if his parents were also disappointed that a mysterious accident hadn’t befallen Reg in late adolescence, as had befallen his father’s brother, if rumors were to be believed.
He might almost hate Reg most of the time, but he certainly couldn’t kill him, and he shuddered to think what would happen to his connection with Magic if he used it to hurl his older brother out of the Falconstone rookery.
“Ready for drinks?”
Tori gave herself one last appraising look in the mirror and turned to Asher. “What’s on the menu?”
“I’m calling it a Lavender Fog,” Asher said, moving to his bar cart and dashing liquors, essences, and other things Seb couldn’t follow into a copper-clad shaker.
Asher was a genius for flavor, and for Metaphysical magic, but mostly for music.
He and Seb had met when they were eight, at their AEtheric prep school.
Asher had insulted Seb’s sweater vest, Seb had punched him in the face, and they’d been friends ever since.
Asher had attended nearly every one of Seb’s dance recitals until he’d quit, and Seb had done the same with Asher’s piano recitals, though he played to this day.
They’d been debate champions in high school, Cantrèa sparring partners until Seb got too good for Asher to keep up, and they’d briefly been an electronic music duo until it was decided by both parties that Seb was far better suited to music appreciation than its creation.
Tori watched over Asher’s shoulder as he shook the concoction and then strained it into three antique coupe glasses.
The drink swirled somewhere between gray and lilac.
Delicate foam floated to the top, which Asher garnished with lavender buds that he stripped from the stalk by running it through his fist. Tori plucked one from his palm and tasted it.
“Is this fresh? Where did you get it?”
Asher smiled slyly. “Botany lab.”
For all Asher’s brilliance in the Metaphysical arts, if he’d had more of a say in his own future, he would have chosen botany as his magical major, but for his parents’ only son, a “soft study” like botany was a non-starter.
Seb grimaced as the thought called to mind the memory of standing in Asher’s kitchen, watching him sob as his mother tore up his acceptance letter to NYU, which Asher had applied to in secret.
Seb took the glass Asher handed to him and raised it. “Cheers,” he said, feeling lighter than he had all day. “To Cert Year. And,” he added with a sigh, “to Reg.”
* “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)