Chapter 17
Aamon’s flirting with me before I've even set my bag down.
"Miss Dellaby. Center of the room, please."
I bite the inside of my cheek before following his instructions.
This is the game now. We played it all last week and we're playing it again this morning, down in his lair with the door shut and the wards humming low. There’s no one here to perform for, but we can’t help ourselves.
No open door, no passing faculty, no reason on earth to keep six feet of stone floor between us except that we've decided to.
He decided to.
He stands across the room with his sleeves rolled to the elbow—the tattoos I've had my mouth on running down into the bunched black fabric, which I do not look at—and he calls me by my surname in a private room where the only witnesses are his ancient furniture and my own thundering pulse.
I stand where he tells me to stand.
I wait for instruction like a good student.
But all I can think about is being back in his arms again.
The discipline of it is its own kind of torture.
That's the part nobody warned me about—that a man holding himself back can be louder than a man who isn't. Every inch of space he leaves is space I'm painfully aware of.
Every "Miss Dellaby" is a door closing that I watched him open a week ago with my name breaking apart in his mouth.
"Channeling exercise. The one from Tuesday. Open the flow, hold it, close it. Slow."
I guess it just isn’t as difficult for me to compartmentalize the way I feel about him.
"Is that what we're doing today?" I keep my voice even, conversational, the way he keeps his. "Channeling exercises? From all the way over there?"
"That's what we're doing."
"Mm." I tip my head. "Because a week ago you weren't so worried about the six feet."
Something moves behind the hazel. A flicker. The amber threatening to warm.
"Miss Dellaby."
"I'm just saying. For a man who has a whole speech about consistency in training, you're being awfully—"
He crosses the room with his vamp speed.
He's just suddenly here, the six feet gone, his hand coming up to catch my jaw, and the amber's gone all the way dark when his mouth comes down on mine.
It isn't gentle. It's a week of aching space breaking at once, his fingers firm at my jaw, tilting me exactly where he wants me, and I make a sound against his mouth that I'll be embarrassed about later.
My hands find the front of his shirt and—
He pulls back.
Just as fast. Just as controlled. His thumb drags once along my jaw as he lets go, and the flat is already sliding back over his face, the architecture reassembling, and I'm left standing there with my lips stinging and my whole head gone soft and white at the edges.
"Focus," he says. Even. Unbothered. Like he didn't just do that. "From the top."
Bastard.
I know he’s right and I need to train, but I’ll be damned if I tell him that.
I exhale and inhale, then reach for the core of me.
It answers too fast, heat blooming up under my sternum, pressing out toward my palms, and it takes me an extra second to gather it because my thoughts are still scattered all over the stone floor where he dropped them. I hold it there.
Let a thread of it out. Keep the rest leashed.
This is the work. This has been the work for two months: not the destroying, which I could do in my sleep, but the not destroying, the holding, the standing at the lip of the thing and choosing not to jump.
"Good. Now let me feel the edges of it."
He sets two fingers against the back of my wrist and I feel his magic come into mine.
It's supposed to feel like a hand closing over a hand. His power laid over my power, mapping it, checking the shape. That's what it felt like in September. That's what it felt like in October, even, when I'd started noticing the warmth of him and hating that I noticed.
It doesn't feel like that now.
Now his magic slides in and I can't find where his stops and mine starts.
There's no seam. No edge for him to trace, because the edge isn't there anymore—it's gone soft, blurred, two colors bled into each other at the border until you couldn't say with a straight face where one became the next.
His power moves through mine like it belongs there.
Like it's always been there. Like it lives here.
I go very still. So does he.
His fingers go still on my wrist. His face gives nothing—it never does—but there's a tightening at the jaw, a recalculation behind the hazel. He felt it too.
It’s almost exactly what happened when he…
A flush creeps up the back of my neck as I think about it. The way he made my body sing–the way I felt his want like it was my own.
That was the same sensation.
He pulls his hand back and clears his throat.
"Again," he says. "From the top."
"That's it? Again?" I don't move. "Aamon. That wasn't normal. I felt your magic and I couldn't tell it apart from mine, that's not—that doesn't happen. What the hell was that?"
"Try it again, Calypso."
"Don't do the thing where you answer a question with a command."
"Open the flow. Hold it—"
"You know what it was, don’t you?" I blow out a breath, incredulous. "You do. I can see it on you. Your jaw did the thing."
For a moment he says nothing. Then something in him decides against whatever door I just found, and the shutter comes down clean.
"That's enough for today," he says.
"Wait…we just started."
"We're both distracted. This isn't productive." He's turning, already reaching for the folder on the side table that he doesn't need to consult, the flat fully back in place. "We'll pick it up tomorrow."
"Aamon—"
"Miss Dellaby." A warning, gentle. The door, closed.
I glare at the back of his head. He gives me nothing to glare at, which is the most Aamon thing about him.
Seriously?
Fine.
I grab my bag off the floor and clock the time on the old brass clock over his shelves—half past eleven—and do the math.
If I move now, I can catch Nellie before the lunch rush thins out.
Nellie, who's spent her whole life around witches, who grew up in her mother's shop with her mother's books.
Nellie might know what the hell just happened here.
Because someone in this room knows, and it isn't me, and I’m sick of always being in the dark.
I throw up a sarcastic wave as I take the stairs out of his lair two at a time. After a short cut across the quad, I make it to the dining hall just in time.
Nellie's at her usual table, the corner one, halfway through a sandwich with a textbook propped against the salt shaker. She's not expecting me, so when I drop into the chair across from her she startles hard enough to nearly take the book down with her elbow.
"Oh my God." She slaps a hand flat on the textbook to stop it sliding.
"You can't just—warn a person. I almost lost my whole sandwich.
" But she's grinning, already shoving her tray sideways to make room for me like I've got a standing reservation.
"What are you doing here? You never surface before one. "
"Escaped early. Long story."
"You look like hell."
"Wow. Thank you."
"I mean it lovingly." She tears her orange in half and pushes the bigger piece at me without asking. "Eat something, you look like a ghost that skipped breakfast. Sit. Talk. Distract me from thermodynamics, I'm begging you."
I take the orange. Peel a segment. And for a second it's just this—the two of us, the din of the hall, the plain comfort of being amongst friends. I've been living in a house where I’m walking on egg shells, worried about the intentions of my overly generous host.
It’s nice to relax with her. Let all that fade away.
Which is why I dive straight into it. I wasn't going to. I was going to ease her in, perhaps tell her that this is happening to a friend of mine. But Nellie’s too sharp to believe that and she’s sure as hell not judgmental.
"Can I ask you something… witch to witch."
Her eyebrows go up. She sets the bread down. "Always."
"Have you ever felt something that… wasn't yours?"
She frowns. "You're going to have to be less cryptic, babe."
"Okay. Say I'm with someone. And I feel something—and it's real, it's mine, except it's too big.
Bigger than what I actually feel, like it's been turned up past where I set it.
Or I'll feel something aimed back at me that I know I'm not making.
" I turn her water glass a quarter-turn on the table, trying to find the shape of what I’m trying to say in words that don't sound insane.
"It's like there's a—a channel open. Between me and someone else.
And I can't always tell which side a feeling started on anymore.
Mine bleeds into theirs, theirs bleeds into mine, and it all comes out the same color. "
Nellie's watching me carefully now. The teasing's gone out of her.
"And this morning, in training—" I stop.
Start again. "There's an exercise where Aamon puts his magic against mine to check it.
And it used to be like two separate things touching.
And today I couldn't find the line. I couldn't tell where he stopped and I started.
" I make myself say the last part. "It's happening more.
The feelings. The—bleed. And I don't know if that's normal, or if I'm losing it, or if it means something. "
She doesn't answer right away, which is how I know she's taking it seriously and not just soothing me. Nellie soothes fast when it's small. When it's big she goes quiet first.
"I don't know," she finally says. "I've never heard of anything like that.
Two signatures blurring—" She shakes her head.
"That's not a thing I’ve ever heard of." Then, decisive, the way she gets when there's a problem to solve: "But my mom might.
If it's the kind of thing that got left out of the sanitized curriculum, that's exactly her wheelhouse.
Let me call her. I'll tell her what you told me and see what she says. "
"Nellie—"