Page 31 of Too Many Beds

“Just...just let me stay with you?”

“There’s no room.”

“I need to be around you, Xem!”

“How nice for you. Get out.”

“It’s not about sex,” Asher said desperately, even though it kind of was. After getting that brief taste of him, Asher wanted him so badly it hurt.

But he wanted Xemnearhim even more. “I could sleep in the other bed? Please?”

Violet eyes followed Asher’s vague arm wave towards the other side of the room, and narrowed in disdain. “In the bed reserved for my closest competition? You think you deserve that, recruit?”

“Please,” Asher said again. He’d lost all eloquence, reduced to begging.

Then Xem unexpectedly smiled, all teeth and lustful daring. “You want that bed, Asher?” He leaned in until cinnamon became all Asher could smell, taste, feel, somehowsee. “Thenearn it.”

The door slammed in his face, shutting him out in the corridor once more.

If Asher was going to take the place of Pippah Shae, the second highest ranked student in their first-year cohort, then he had a lot of work to do. The rankings were determined each trimester and coursework counted for only a quarter of their grade, with the outcome of an elemental duel determining the remainder. The duel was held on the final day of each trimester, which meant Asher had twelve weeks to win himself the bed in Xem’s room for the rest of the year.

Twelve weeks to bring himself up to a standard far beyond what he’d even dreamed, until he was good enough to beat whoever was pitted against him.

For one idiotic second, he considered asking Xem to throw his own duel so they could bunk together in the worst room at Asher’s end of the corridor. It seemed easier than Asher somehow topping the rest of their year. But Xem wouldn’t agree to it in a thousand years, and besides, a student had to finish in the top half of the cohort to graduate to the second year. Asher wouldn’t dare risk either of their futures like that.

Not when Xem was the embodiment of magic. Graceful, quick, and competent: the mage barely seemed to need the lessons drummed into them by impatient professors and was clearly only here to achieve his certification. Asher could no sooner take Xem’s ability to cast magic from him than he could stop himself obsessively dwelling on the man.

How enthralled he’d been when discovering Asher had come for him untouched. The defenceless, serene expression on his face when Asher’s tongue worshipped his fingers. The challenge in his violet eyes that made Asher instantly want to be better andwork harder, so that he could win Pippah’s rank – and her bed in the room she currently shared with Xem.

Whereas for the first month at Gannon Academy his fixation on Xem had caused his grades to slip, now it propelled them. Asher skimmed by on five hours of sleep a night, casting an ice spell on himself to stay awake, and eschewed all non-essential pastimes for study. He could be found in the basement library more often than not, gritting his teeth against the distance it put between him and Xem up in the Attic or the bedrooms, and obsessively comparing his skill to that of the other students in the year.

When he got the hang of casting air shields, he gave a single nod of acknowledgement and then trained even harder. When his test results in the mid-term theory exam turned out to be higher than half of the year, he spent that night memorising the answers to the questions he’d gotten wrong. When he soundly thrashed Bonnie in a practice duel that pitted fire against fire, he helped her back to her feet and immediately insisted on a second round.

Slowly—ever so fucking slowly—but surely, Asher began to improve. Not just in skill, but also in confidence, something he hadn’t realised he’d been lacking until he earned it.

And instead of staring mindlessly at Xem in class and drooling over his delicate wrists and the way his breeches framed his slender legs, Asher trained himself to watch how the other magemoved. There were three or four occasions where the instructions of the professor and the descriptions in the textbooks completely failed him, and he was only able to learn the casting by mimicking Xem’s movements.

A flick instead of a jerk. A finger that needed to be crooked instead of bent.

Miniscule differences that meant the difference between a jet of water and a cloud of steam...or worse still, an embarrassing anticipation when nothing happened at all.

Because even when performing a cast he’d clearly never learned before, Xem seemed to instinctively understand how his hands should move. He was a fucking natural, and one day the world would cower before the might of Xem Whitlock.

But until that day, he was all Asher’s. He just hadn’t accepted that yet.

The day before the ranking duels, Bonnie burst into Asher’s bedroom with her frizzy auburn hair flying loose of its ties.

“Asher!” she called delightedly, and he looked up from where he was sitting cross-legged on the floor facing his roommate Dawson. The pair were batting a globe of water between them, its outer film so thin that applying too much force might break it. Too little, and your opponent would gain the upper hand.

The contest wasn’t fair considering that in the previous trimester Dawson had ranked at the bottom of the year—although Asher was pleased to discover that his own renewed interest in study had rubbed off on his roommate and he was no longer the pushover he had been—and Asher had been forced to handicap himself before Dawson would even practice with him. So his attention was split between Bonnie, the threatening ball of water above their heads, and the three ropes of vine he was also weaving around the legs of their beds.

“Asher!”

“Hmm?”

“They’ve just posted the lists for...the first round...of the ranking duels!” Bonnie told them between heavy pants, doubled over with her hands on her knees. “You...have...a good match.”

“Who am I going up against?” he asked, pushing back the globe of water as Dawson tried to use the distraction to win. The other mage’s hands fluttered frantically to try to stop it colliding with his face.

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