Aaron
My back is to the worktable. I’m watching my whole class stir pewter-blue base into copper bowls, and I can’t stop thinking about Mara.
My tongue up the middle of her. Her thighs shaking.
Her pussy grinding down into my mouth while her tail stroked me off wrapped around my dick like she was going to finish us both at the same damn time.
Took the jaws of life to peel me off her.
I’ve been thinking about it all morning, and thinking graphically. About putting my face right back between her legs the minute she gets home from class. What it would take for her to let me sleep in that pussy one night straight. Let me wake up in it and roll over and do it again.
Goddamn. Focus.
I blink and the classroom slides back into focus. My whole class, none of them looking at me, bent over their potions. Priya in the third row is stirring counterclockwise. Behind her, at the back worktable, my brother is pouring too fast.
Seth’s copper bowl is bubbling wrong. The base should be settling into a slow pale-gold roll, but his is pitching. There’s a pale green skim forming at the edge that shouldn’t be there. He skipped the measured pause after the mercury add.
When did I get this nasty? I used to be a serious person.
The green skim on Seth’s bowl goes white.
My magic is out before I’ve called it, blue-gold light unspooling from my fingertips. I push off the worktable and the ribbon splits into two as I move, wraps once around the ceiling of the classroom and once around the floor, and I snap my hand closed and hold. The air thickens.
Every student in the room is still moving, but the stirring has gone syrup-slow, like I’m watching them through water.
Priya’s spoon is frozen mid-air. Seth’s bowl is in the middle of exploding.
The green-white flare is an inch off the surface, a jagged corolla of light and liquid climbing for the ceiling, and it is not moving.
A splinter of copper that’d have taken someone’s eye out is suspended above his table in a fine held line.
The whole thing is glowing soft blue at its edges. My magic is holding all of it.
I breathe out. I walk around my desk, past Priya’s slow spoon, and the kid in row two whose mouth is open mid-laugh. I reach Seth’s table and lift my hand.
I gather the light of it back into itself, reeling it in against my palm.
The copper splinter floats back down into the bowl.
The green-white flare folds inward, collapses into a bright point, and dissolves.
The pale skim thins out. The bowl is back to where it should have been before Seth rushed the mercury.
I release my hand and the classroom snaps back into itself. Priya’s spoon completes its arc with a small metallic ting against the side of her bowl. The kid in row two finishes his laugh. Seth’s bowl gives one neat golden glow and settles. The room goes dead silent.
The class stares at me, and Priya’s lips part.
Priya finds her voice first. “Mr. Blackwood.” She’s staring at her bowl like she doesn’t trust it. “Okay, please don’t report me to Headmistress Ebony for this, but holy shit.”
The whole class erupts. Someone in the back saying no way, no way. The girl two rows in front of Seth turning around and whispering did that just to her partner. Priya hasn’t moved. She’s still looking at me. Then someone starts to clap, and the whole room joins in.
“Show-off,” Seth mutters, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Mr. Blackwood, what was that?” Priya’s voice has climbed a full step. “That was time? You bent time? That’s not curriculum, that’s like highest-of-highest-level, that’s—“
I raise my hand and the clapping stops. Every head in the room snaps toward me at once.
“That,” I say, “is a high-level spell. Bending time, even in the minimalist way you just saw, is not something you take lightly. Not ever.”
“Every one of you in this room was given magic by Mother Fate.” My eyes move row by row, landing on Seth last. “It was a gift. And because it’s a gift, it has a price.
Every spell you cast, small or large, costs you something.
Sometimes the cost is obvious—you cast something big and you’re tired afterward.
Sometimes you don’t see the bill until years later. ”
The hair on the back of my neck lifts a little as I say it. I keep going anyway.
“So when you misuse magic—especially when you cast for personal gain, or to dodge something you should have just faced, or to bend a rule you weren’t supposed to bend—the cost goes up.
Sometimes it goes up a lot. And it always comes due.
” I let that land. “Sit with that. That’s the lesson for today. ”
The room is quiet in a different way now.
I glance at my brother. “I was hoping to see how much you’d retained over the break.
A full semester of review work to prepare you for higher-level potions this term.
” I don’t look away from Seth’s face. “Turns out some of us need more work than others. I’ll be holding off on the elevated material for a few more weeks. ”
The whole class groans. Priya glares at him. The boy in row two mutters Seth, come on man loud enough for everyone to hear. Seth glares back at me across the worktables.
I clap my hands once. “Alright. That’s it for today. Clean your stations. Priya, Mercer, bowls need dumping in the disposal bin. I’ll resume the unit on Wednesday.”
They start moving, chairs scraping, the class muttering at Seth the entire time. Priya gives him a flat look as she walks past his table on the way to the disposal bin and doesn’t say anything.
Seth is cleaning slow as if he’s stalling.
When the last student is through the door, I lean over his table. “You didn’t study at all. Did you.”
He doesn’t look at me. He scrubs at a spot on his table that isn’t there. “How about you get your fucking lust under control and stop worrying about me.”
I stiffen against the worktable, my hand tightening on the wood. Every student in this room has been breathing the same air as me all morning, and most of them can’t scent. But Seth has been right there. Smelling exactly what I’ve been thinking about all morning.
I run a hand over my face. “Seth—“
“Maybe that’s why I can’t focus.” He stops scrubbing and looks up at me finally, his eyes flat. “I’m tired of smelling that shit.”
I catch the hiss before it gets out of my throat. He shoulders past me and walks for the door.
“This isn’t over,” I mutter at his back. “I’m telling Mom.” He doesn’t slow down.
I stand there for a minute with my hands still on his table.
Casting for personal gain. I just lectured a whole classroom about the cost of bending magic for your own purposes.
I just slowed time, not for them, but because I was daydreaming about my mate’s body so hard I stopped watching my brother’s potion work.
Seth almost blew his own face off because I was half-stiff thinking about our morning.
And I did what I do best, I covered it. Turned a near-disaster into a wow moment and made them applaud.
The hair on my arms stays lifted. Somewhere in the back of my head, where I’ve been pretending not to know things for the past year, my own bill is waiting on me.
I shake it off and clean the classroom. When I’m finished, I turn off the lights and step out into the hall.
Fuck. I don’t know why Eric is in my head as I walk.
He shouldn’t be. He hasn’t shown up in a year, not once since the vow renewal.
The lake that night was the last time I saw him, and he was aged then, coughing, his skin thinner than I’d ever seen it.
Not long, he’d said when I asked how much time he had.
I still haven’t figured out what to do with any of it.
I take the main stairs down toward the Academy side. Tyrion’s classroom is on the next landing, and his door is open.
He’s standing at his workbench with his back to me, the new telescope assembled and mounted on a brass tripod beside him. He’s bent over a spread of star charts that run the length of the bench. One of his hands is planted on the edge of the paper. The other holds a pencil.
I rap on the doorframe with my knuckle. “Professor.”
He straightens. His face crinkles up when he sees me.
“Aaron.” He smiles. “Come in.”
“You finally get the tracking aligned?” I ask him.
“Last night.” He gestures at the charts. “I was up into the small hours. The Equinox Star crosses in front of the Crown cluster tonight, first time in a generation.”
I grin. “You stargazed through your dinner again, didn’t you.”
“I stargazed through last week’s dinner too.
Don’t tell Claude.” He takes two steps toward me, formal as ever, his hands folding behind his back.
“Which brings me to why I am pleased you are standing in my doorway, Aaron. I was going to send for you after your last class. I would like to invite your mate to the border with us tonight.”
“Mara?”
“The star in question—the Equinox Star—is sacred to Solaris Pride. Claude is coming. Ezra asked if he could bring Aya if she’s up for it. I think Hazel and Dominic might join us if the weather holds.” His eyes soften. “I would be honored if Mara would walk me through what her pride teaches.”
“She’ll love that.” I’m already grinning. “I was on my way to find her anyway. I’ll tell her.”
“Good.” He inclines his head.
I smile and head out. I turn the corner into the main corridor, and it hits me.
Not a thought this time, a wave, low and hot and pulling down into my pants.
My step stutters. Mara bent at the waist, her dress riding up the backs of her thighs.
Her looking up at me from the kitchen table this morning. My dick is hard.
I hunch forward and tug my shirt down over the front of me, which doesn’t help.
Makes it worse, actually, because the friction is bad.
A cluster of shifters passes me in the opposite direction and I catch the smirk from the wolf on the left before he’s past. They can smell me.
Goddamn this school and its nose-in-everybody’s-business shifters.
I pick up my pace toward the stairs. Another wave hits, worse, and I grab the banister and lean into it. Mara on our kitchen table. My face between her legs. Her tail curling around my—stop it, stop, you are at work.
I need to find her right now. There’s an urgency underneath this that isn’t just horniness, it’s pulling.
I reach the stairs. I’d been heading to the Conjuring Hall to talk to my mother about Seth.
Another wave hits me on the landing and it’s so bad I sway.
I’m not making it over there. I need a wall.
I need anywhere that isn’t an open corridor full of shifters who can tell what’s happening under my shirt.
There’s a janitor’s closet behind the main stairs, tucked in the dead space behind the stairwell.
I walk as calmly as I can manage, turn the corner behind the stairs, find the door. I step inside and lean my forehead against it to breathe.
It smells like bleach and dust. There’s a mop in the corner and a bucket beside it, one bare bulb hanging on a chain, a shelf of cleaning supplies, and me, hunched against the cool wood, trying to get my dick to go down so I can walk across a school and have a conversation with my mother.
“Get it together,” I whisper. “Get it together.”
I close my eyes and start breathing. Which is when I start thinking about Mara again. The softness of her skin. How her purr kicks up a register when I slide into her. The way she goes absolutely liquid when my lips touch her claim mark.
My eyes snap open. This is worse. I’m doing the opposite of what I came in here to do.
I pace the closet, bucket scraping my foot, my hand dragging back over my head. Maybe I should just rub one out. Take the edge off and then I can walk up those stairs like a person—
I stop pacing. The hair on my arms is lifting. Mara. She’s near, and my body moves, easing the door open an inch.
She’s in the hall, head tipped back, eyes half-closed, her tail moving in slow uncertain arcs behind her. She’s scenting for me.
“Aaron?” she says to nobody.
I don’t think. I yank the door open, wrap my hand around her wrist, and haul her inside. She yelps, startled. The door is already closing behind her, my shoulder against the wood, her back flat against it. I cage her with an arm on either side of her head and breathe hard.
“Aaron!” She hisses at me. Her tail is up and fluffed, her ears are back. She’s got one hand against my chest pushing at me. “What the heck, what are you doing in here—“
“I don’t know.” I press my forehead to hers because I have to or I’m going to fall over. “I don’t know, baby. I’m losing my mind.”
She sighs, half-frustrated and half-worried, then her hand comes up from my chest and cups my face.
“I could feel you,” she says, her voice gone quiet. “Like you needed me. I was working on my lesson plans and I just stopped. I came looking for you.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and she strokes her thumb slow through my beard.
“Why are you in the janitor’s closet?”
“There’s one on every floor.” It comes out, and the second I hear myself I know how it sounds.
She pulls back enough to look at me, and her tail is coming down. Her brows are drawing together. “Aaron. That is not a reasonable thing to know off the top of your head—“
I shift my weight and my hard dick brushes the front of her dress.
She freezes, and her mouth falls open.
“Aaron.”
“I know.” I don’t move.
“You’re—“ She can’t finish it.
“I know.” My forehead is still pressed to hers. Her breath is uneven against my mouth.
Her eyes go to the door behind her. Then back to me. “Are we actually—“
I press my palm flat against the wood beside her head. Blue-gold light pulses out of my fingers and seals the closet in a perfect dome of my magic. The bare bulb flickers once as it draws on me, then steadies.
I smirk at her. “Quieting spell. No one can hear us.” I reach up and flip the lock on the doorknob.