They spent hours naked, long after the needle ran out on whatever record had been playing, running fingertips over any errant centimeters of skin that hadn’t been touched yet. Ellsbeth told Rawlins about her lonely childhood, how her parents had been polite but cold and she had felt like an adult long before she should have. With his hand running down her torso, she confessed the unflattering extent of her ambition, how she saw a future in which she becameimportantas the lifeboat away from a life that was dull and ordinary. “I know this is the wrong thing to say, but I really do believe I would rather be impressive than happy,” she told him.
“What does ‘impressive’ mean to you? Because when you get to my age, I hope it’s a comfort to know, you will begin caring less about what other people think.”
Ellsbeth flipped her hair in a way she hoped would read as sexy and French. “I suppose I mean, making people jealous of me.” Rawlins cocked an eyebrow, and Ellsbeth continued, “It’s not the jealousynecessarilythat I want. It’s that if people are jealous of me, it means they aren’t pitying me. I want enough money, or power, or fame, orimportance,orwhateverso that I never become an object of pity. Someone helpless. Someone whoneedsthe goodwill of someone else to preserve my basic dignity.”
Rawlins didn’t laugh at her, or argue. He just kissed her again and then trailed his lips down her neck and her collarbone. “I can’t imagine anyone ever pitying you, Ellsbeth Storer,” he said.
Rawlins told her about the years he spent as an outsider at boarding school, and the thrilling rush of becoming a literary wunderkind after the success ofThe Arcane and the Ordinary.He had achieved exactly the type of success Ellsbeth fantasized about: feted at dinners and parties, respected by both academics and the general public. “But I don’t know if I was actuallyhappyduring any of that time,” he said. “The money was nice. But most of those galas were nightmarishly boring. And they would always seat me next to some donor who secretly believed he would be a genius at mechanicals.”
“Still,” Ellsbeth said. “It’spower.The money, yes, but also the recognition. Plus, there must have been women throwing themselves at you.”
He ran his hand down her calf and lolled his head toward her. “I’m not sure that’s the type of thing you want to hear about.”
“It makes mefurious,to be completely honest. Women touching you before I even met you.”
“Before you were born!”
“I wasborn!”
“Still.”
“You’re right,” Ellsbeth said. “I hate hearing about it. You, the young genius, surrounded bymodelsandactressesprobably, all hoping that your genius would rub off on them. The Arthur Miller to their Marilyns.”
“There were some girls, yes,” Rawlins said. And even though she had asked for it, the sting was intense and venomous. Ellsbeth pressed herself upright and pulled Rawlins into a kiss, snaking her tongue into his mouth. She smiled when she pulled away. “I want you to use writ magic on me tonight.”
Rawlins raised an eyebrow. “Oh, do you?”
“Yes. I want to feel like I belong to you.”
He kissed her then hard, and she clasped her hands behind his neck, gasping in surprise when he rose, lifting her, and carried her to the bedroom.
Their limbs were still tangledwhen Ellsbeth rose early on a Saturday morning. Rawlins came to as she was returning from the bathroom, his hair shaggy and mussed from sleep. “Morning,” he said, smiling at her. “Can I make you breakfast?”
Ellsbeth pulled on the pair of jeans that had been disposed of beneath the bed the night before. “I want to get an early start. Finishing an article I’ll hopefully submit to the journals in the spring.” She kissed him and felt the way he pressed toward her, making the kiss linger. “Not everyone gets to become a tenured professor on good looks alone.”
“Hopefully this is at leastsomewhatrelevant to your thesis? Or something you’ll be able to submit to the department?” Rawlins propped himself up by the elbows, and Ellsbeth’s breath caught at the glimpse of chest hair running down his stomach. “Lennox is asking me about your topic. And the longer we delay, the more she’ll scrutinize it.”
“I’ll have something for my thesis the first week of classes, I promise. This is just something I’m working on for me. Very early stages. I’d be embarrassed to have you read anything this rudimentary.” The lie had come out more easily than she had imagined.
“If you’re writing an article for publication about writ magic—”
“God, no. I’m not. Just a few thoughts on reversing magnetic fields. I read Jonathan Cartwright’s new book about magnetism and it gave me some ideas. I feel like I should at least be doingsomework while classes are out.”
“Oh,” Rawlins said, lowering himself back down. “Sure, of course. Well, send it to me when you feel it’s ready.”
Ellsbeth pulled her hair into a messy ponytail. Another benefit of an empty campus—no one to see her returning home with her teeth unbrushed and wearing last night’s underwear turned inside out. “Absolutely.”
It was a shockingly bright morning, the sun reflecting off the thin sheen of frost that had encased the grass like a carapace in the night. The only life Ellsbeth saw as she walked to the library were a few dull-brown sparrows undaunted by the cold, pecking half-heartedly at the hardened earth.
Ellsbeth had expected to feel guilty about returning to obscuration. The incantation and runes, which had seemed so daunting the first time, now were almost comforting in their familiarity. It took her only half an hour to complete the entire ritual in her apartment, complete with the time-dilation component Rawlins had inadvertently suggested.
The online archive of the school library that was available to anyone on the Newlyn network only contained newspaper articles back to the 1980s, but the neo-Brutalist building had a basement of yellowing computers with a much longer memory, and a microfiche collection with a longer memory than that.
The whoosh of warm circulated air hit her as she strode through the automatic doors. There was only one student-employee working behind the library desk, and he didn’t look up from his manga when Ellsbeth swiped her ID to get past the mechanized gates.
“Is the archive library—”
“Closed for break,” he said, still not looking up. “Second and third floors are still open.”
