For one suspended second, everything narrows to the impossible, pulsing heat between my legs. My cock throbs untouched, trapped hard against fabric, each pulse dragging another wave through me until my spine arches and my forehead knocks against the shelf. I feel myself come in my boxers, the sensation so intense and so wrong for where I am that my vision whites out at the edges.
Just magic, bond, body, release.
By the time it passes, I'm shaking too hard to stand properly. My jeans are ruined. My palms hurt. My cheek is hot from the shelf, and the silence afterward is somehow louder than the sound I made.
Harold reappears first and he looks down at the rosemary on the floor, then back at me. "We never had that kind of reaction to mugwort in seventy-three."
A strangled laugh slips through my lips as Ira steps between me and the customer before I manage to lift my head. His body becomes a wall, broad shoulders blocking the aisle, one hand braced on the shelf beside me without touching. The other points toward the door.
"The shop is closing early," he says, voice flat enough to make the room obey. "Technical difficulty."
The customer doesn't argue. I hear the bottle of protection oil click back onto the shelf with impressive speed, then the retreat of expensive sneakers, then the bell over the door chiming with cheerful cruelty.
I stay where I am, breathing like I've run miles. My whole body is still echoing. Not aroused anymore exactly, not in the easy way. Overloaded. Exposed. The aftershocks keep rolling through the bond in faint pulses, each one making my thighs tense and my stomach twist with the memory of what just happened. I'm aware of the cooling dampness against my skin, the drag of fabric, the awful practical reality of needing clean clothes after a magical accident no one at the Seminary ever covered in crisis training.
Ira waits until the lock catches before he says my name again. He keeps his body angled between me and the empty shop, one hand braced on the shelf beside my head and the other holding out a glass of water. He does not touch me, which is either the kindest thing anyone has ever done or the final proof that this day has become too humiliating to survive.
"I'm going to kill them," I say into the shelf, but the words come out thin and unconvincing because my legs are still shaking. Ira only waits, until I take the glass from him. The first sip nearly makes me choke. My mouth tastes like blood where I bit my cheek, and the damp drag of my jeans is so awful and physical that I have to close my eyes before the shame gets another set of teeth in me.
The library doors open hard enough to make the jars on the nearest shelf tremble. Soren comes out first, flushed, disheveled, and already guilty. Cain follows behind him, pale in a way that strips every trace of velvet from his face. His gaze goes to Ira,then to my face, and stays there with careful discipline. That restraint should not make my throat hurt. It does anyway.
"The overflow reached me," I say before Cain can ask. My voice sounds scraped raw, but at least it is mine. "I think the rosemary, the customer, and my dignity can all confirm."
Soren stops so suddenly Cain nearly walks into him. "Aven, I am so sorry."
"You should be." I lift my head from the shelf. "Technical explanations are banned until I am in clean clothes and no longer standing in the evidence."
Soren’s mouth opens, then shuts. Cain’s hand curls once at his side and releases. Ira steps away just enough to give me a path toward the back room, then hands me a folded towel without looking anywhere except my face. The steadiness of it almost breaks me more than the accident did. "Clean clothes are in the chest," he says. "Door locks from the inside. We will clean the shop."
I want to argue because arguing is easier than walking across the room in ruined jeans while everyone carefully does not look. Instead, I take the towel and the last shredded pieces of my dignity, then move toward the back before my body can decide standing is no longer an option. The back room is narrow, windowless, and blessedly empty. I shut the door harder than necessary, then lock it, then stand with my back against the wood while my breath finally starts to come apart. Out in the shop, voices lower. Ira's boots move away. Soren says something I can't make out, and Cain answers in a tone too quiet to catch. No one follows me.
I strip out of my ruined jeans and boxers with stiff, furious movements, refusing to look down longer than I have to. My skin feels too sensitive, like the magic scraped me from the inside and left every nerve exposed. There's no arousal left, not really, but the memory of it clings to me: Cain's cold-heavy magicbeneath Soren's bright fever, the impossible rhythm of them fused together, the way my body responded before I had any say in it. I clean myself with the towel Ira gave me, jaw clenched hard enough to ache.
The worst part isn't that it felt good.
I wish it were. That would be simple. The worst part is that it felt good while I was scared. It felt good while I was exposed. It felt good in a room where I didn't choose to be touched, and now my body has proof that wanting and violation can wear the same skin if magic is careless enough.
That thought makes my hands shake harder.
I sit on the closed lid of an old storage trunk and press the towel to my face, breathing through cotton and cedar and the faint bite of whatever cleaning powder Ira uses because of course Ira smells like a weapons locker learned domesticity. My chest hurts with a knot under my ribs made of humiliation and anger and a terrible, aching want to go back out there and be surrounded by them anyway.
I find the clean clothes in the breakroom chest: black joggers soft from too many washes and a plain shirt that's too broad through the shoulders. The shirt smells faintly of cold air, cedar, and Cain. I stare at it for several seconds before putting it on because apparently I'm committed to making every part of this day emotionally complicated. The fabric hangs loose over me. It covers everything. That helps more than I want it to.
I pull the pants on and sit on the cot with my elbows on my knees.
For the first time all day, the dead are quiet. Harold isn't complaining. No one is whispering from the walls. There's no crying in the floorboards, no old woman at the edge of my vision, no pressure behind my eyes. My body feels like a crime scene, but my head is mine.
A soft thud sounds outside the door and I freeze, waiting until the floorboards creak away before standing and opening the door a few inches.
A tray sits on the floor. Toast, heavily buttered. Coffee fixed exactly how I like it. Beside the tray is a thick sweater folded into a neat square, dark wool, broad enough that it can only belong to Ira. There's also another clean shirt, black and expensive, placed with the careful precision of someone who wanted to offer it without making me face him.
Cain.
My throat tightens.
I hate all of them.
Tucked under the edge of the plate is a scrap of paper covered in Soren's terrible handwriting.
