Ellsbeth spoke first. “I’m sorry,” she said, although she didn’t look quite sure what she was sorry for.
Rawlins shook his head. “You have nothing to be sorry for. We were just…testing the effect. It worked. Congratulations.”
She exhaled—right, of course—and hugged her sides. He couldsee that she was wounded by his denial, and felt torn by his empathy for her, uncertain how best to proceed. Tell her the truth? That he had seen her physically restrained and wanted to strip her naked and drag her to the floor and take her again and again, touching her and teasing her and pleasuring her until she forgot her own name? What he’d felt for her was dangerously excessive, and he didn’t know how to let out only a little.
Ellsbeth glanced around at the elementals scattered across the ritual platform and said to the floor, “I should probably start getting this all put away before someone comes in and arrests us.” She began to pick up ingots from the floor, but he stopped her, putting a hand on her shoulder. He desperately longed to explain himself. To tell her…
Yes, it works, like I knew it would.
AndYes, I wanted to kiss you last Friday.
AndFucking hell, yes, I wanted to do more than that tonight.
But his tongue was heavy and numb. Anything he said would change their relationship forever. Would only cause problems down the line. Would only weaken his resolve. “Yes,” he said finally. “We should clean up.”
He forced himself to lift his hand from her shoulder, and turned to take down the hanging incense. He felt impossibly idiotic, knowing he looked like an absolute fool—but at the same time, a strange realization: He washopingshe could see through him. That she could read his mind.
When he glanced back and watched her kneeling to pick up gold ingots, her face was partly turned away, but he was glad that by the glow of the streetlight reflecting through the high window of the Practicum, he could see her smiling.
Ellsbeth
For their date, Oscar took Ellsbeth to a trendy restaurant nestled inside an arcade meant for adults, a place where you had to raise your voice over the mechanical clanging of an aggressive game of pinball ten yards away in order to order a thirty-six-dollar deconstructed Caesar salad.
“Sorry,” Oscar said as soon as they settled into their seats. “This place got amazing reviews. I didn’t expect it to be so loud.”
“Oh. No! It’s fun,” Ellsbeth said. “I’ve been meaning to try this place.”
Oscar gave her a shaky smile, clearly grateful at her grace, and Ellsbeth settled into her seat, placing her napkin neatly on her lap.
Ellsbeth and Oscar had seen each other on jogs around campus for weeks. Eventually, when their faces became familiar, they would smile or wave as they passed, but their communication never ventured beyond a mouthed “hi” or “good morning” until one morning, Oscar had slowed up where Ellsbeth was stretching by a park bench and asked if she wanted to get a cup of coffee.
“I’ve been trying to build up the courage to talk to you,” Oscar had confessed over oat milk flat whites. “But I didn’t want to be that creepy guy who bothers a girl on her run, you know? Like, call campus security or whatever. A girl is allowed to work out in public without a guy making it all about him.”
Ellsbeth found him to be endearing and sweet, if a littleself-congratulatory in his campus-ready feminism. He was on the shorter side, with curly blond hair cropped close to his head. He was handsome in a way that made her think of country clubs, or dentists in commercials recommending toothpaste. When he had asked for Ellsbeth’s phone number (“So I could ask to take you out to dinner on a night you’re free”), it was with a tone of such polite, old-fashioned courtship that she half expected him to ask for her father’s phone number, too, so that he might ask permission.
But of course, Oscar would never be that regressive. Sitting opposite her at the restaurant in the arcade was a boy twenty-four years old, well trained in consent, in intersectionality, in emotional labor, and in the importance of self-care. Ellsbeth had no doubt that at the end of their dinner, he would offer to pay but not feel threatened if she insisted on splitting the bill. He was the type, she knew, instantly, who would put his arm around her at dinner parties and kiss her cheek and call her his “partner.”
Ellsbeth studied him after they both ordered their cocktails, how shockinglynon-neurotiche seemed. It was easy for him to tell her about his mom, his dad, his older brother who’d gotten into trouble with the law but seemed to be straightening out now. He told her about his favorite movies without a shred of self-deprecation or irony. Here was a boy, Ellsbeth thought, who was happy with who he was. And it was nice, Ellsbeth realized, how visible his effort on the date was, how unashamed he was to reveal the fact that he liked her. He had looked up a fancy restaurant and made a reservation. He had picked Ellsbeth up outside her apartment in his used Honda and worn a button-down shirt.
“So,” Oscar said, elbows perched on the table, gnawing on the toothpick that came in his drink, “what made you want to study arcane mechanicals?”
Ellsbeth’s mind flashed back to the evening in the Practicum, holding her breath as she watched Professor Rawlins prepare to test the ritual she wrote. His mouth had been a tight straight line, and she could see a vein lifted in his forearm as he checked to make sure the ingots were the proper distance apart. Just that: The vein in his forearm, visible because he had rolled up the sleeve of his button-down shirt, had been enough to cause her heart to race and an uncomfortable warmthto spread between her legs. She was excited and impatient and eager to test the ritual, and there was the thrill of sneaking into the Practicum with the professor after hours, but there was something else: an urge she knew would only lead to trouble for both of them.
When the ritual had worked, the sensation had been like nothing she had ever experienced, nothing she could have prepared herself for. How much of the lightheaded thrill had been due to the success itself, her pride at getting firsthand evidence that her research and her instincts had led to this, a miracle of the arcane, in a single weekend? How much had been the effect of the ritual itself, the strange strangle on her nervous system paralyzing her limbs and leaving her muscles numb and heavy? And how much had been Professor Rawlins standing so close to her that she could smell his aftershave, see the texture on his skin, his long almost feminine eyelashes, and the way he was clenching his jaw?
I want to sleep with my professor.She was embarrassed even as she thought it. It was a cliché out of tawdry pornography, evoking too-short tartan skirts and too-tight button-down blouses over ample breasts. It was wrong, it was regressive, it was dangerous, and it was impossible: Professor Rawlins was not the type to risk his professional career for a brief dalliance, and even if hewas,Ellsbeth was certain there was a younger, lither, glossier student that would have a hold on his attention.
And then there was the ritual itself, the tingling warmth that had come when he had been standing before her while her hands were bound. It was just a test, it was arcane mechanicals, there was nothingkinkyabout it. And yet in that moment, she understood why fuzzy handcuffs were a mainstay of cheap motel ephemera—what arushto imagine that she could be standing there, helpless and bound, while someone likehimwanted her. He had felt it, too. She knew he had. But it was impossible to talk about without incriminating them both, without risking the future of her thesis.My thesis that now has a functional ritual.She was so close to getting everything she needed. She had already unlocked writ magic. It would only be a matter of time before she would have the tools to get at the truth of what had happened to Bertie.
“Oh,” Ellsbeth said after too long a pause. “It’s sort of the only thing I ever loved. It’s like…physics, if you added poetry. Arcane mechanicals has rules, like science, but it’s sort of closer to cooking, if that makes sense. No matter how much you learn, there are still mysteries that you’ll never fully be able to understand. There are infinite factors that can affect a ritual. I think that’s why I like it. With most science, the goal is finding a concrete answer. With the arcane, you’re always looking for new questions.”
“Wow,” Oscar laughed. “That’s a really good answer. When people ask me why I want to be a doctor, I say it’s because I passed orgo and it seemed like a good way to help people.”
“Well, it is,” Ellsbeth said. “The problem with arcane mechanicals is it’s a pretty…dusty, isolated field these days. Being a doctor, you know you’re actually doing good in the world. Making people’s lives better.”
“I guess,” Oscar said. “Although I’m not looking forward to my loans coming due when med school is over.”
“Do you know what kind of doctor you want to be?”
