Where I expect a quip about how I need to be more mature, he hums.
“Fine,” he says. “Game on.”
He faces his desk again.
Leaving me stupidly slack-jawed.
I frown at the back of his head. “Game on?”
“Yes,” Elethior says. “I told you before that I was never involved in your ill-advised pranks, but if you insist on bringing that nonsense into our partnership…” He trails off and looks at me with a too-pleasant smile. “You started this. But I’ll finish it.”
Heat creeps across my face. Not rage this time. Something… definitely not rage.
I swing back to my desk. “Get to work, Tourael. We havemyproject to do.”
His stifled laughter sounds tinny in the big lab.
It’s not a huge sacrifice to work on my project. I’m still in the early stages, so we silently—separately—spend a few days ensconced in reading and note-taking. I hammer out things to try based on said reading and note-taking—only I have to,get to,share it with Elethior.
I wheel my whiteboard in front of the window and start a list of potential evocation spells that can be used as jumping-off points for my safety net idea. I’d ordinarily put it in a document on my laptop, but we’recollaborating,and I’m vehemently pretending I’m not now overly aware of Elethior in the lab.
Gods-damned brain had to go and fuck up my already fragile truce with him by realizing,shit,he does have nice arms.
Thursday morning, before he’s there, I stuff his desk with kindergarten workbooks. He hasn’t reactivated a protection ward. Sucker.
He gets in while I’m scribbling a new idea on the board.
“Sebastian.”
I roll my shoulders under the huge sweatshirt I borrowed from Orok. Not a hazmat suit, but it’ll do. “Yes, partner dearest?”
Elethior’s quiet for a beat, like I tripped him up, and I grin at the board before turning.
“Is something wrong?” I ask.
He swings around in his chair and holds up the five children’s workbooks I’d shoved in the clutter of his desk. “I have no need for evocation texts, but you’re sweet to think of me.”
I cap the whiteboard marker a bit too hard. “I’m surprised you found them in your—” I gesture at his mass ofstuffthat has, against my warning, crept over into my workstation. I kick an offending item: a grocery sack containing a bag of chips and other snacks. “Forgods’ sakes, Elethior, the demarcation line, warfare, the collapse of our tentative peace—”
“Hey!” He shoves up out of his chair. “Don’t crush it.”
He grabs the grocery sack and pulls out a—not a bag of chips.
A thing of dog food?
He checks a few other items, a container of dried fruit, one of birdseed, before he decides they’re unharmed and slides the bag closer to his workstation.
Okay. I got nothing.
When he dusts his hands off and straightens, I must have a perplexed look on my face.
He blushes.
Those two stripes, perfectly level on either cheekbone.
Orok’s hoodie is way too thick; sweat drenches my torso and I curse myself up and down and all around.
“They’re, uh—” Elethior rubs the back of his neck, flexing that gods-damned bicep. “They’re for Nick.”
