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It was the first Saturday in April—a drizzling, chill sort of day—and yet Jesper felt as warm as the finest summer afternoon that Ketterdam had to offer, because Wylan had finally, finally come to the greenhouse.
Jesper had offered Wylan an empty garden bed for his chemistry project weeks ago, but between midterms and work and the whole rescuing-a-werewolf-by-making-a-coven thing, Wylan hadn’t yet taken him up on it. But today, finally, he had arrived a little after lunch, carrying a white crate stuffed with gallon-sized plastic bags of what looked to be fertilizer.
Jesper stole glances at him, peeking up from his work of carefully watering, weeding, and repotting some of Nina’s more finicky magical herbs. He didn’t want to make Wylan uncomfortable, but he was irresistibly curious about this mysterious chemistry project, and he was also desperate to find some excuse to strike up a conversation. Despite living directly underneath Wylan’s attic bedroom, despite sharing a bathroom with him, despite being housemates for the past six months, Jesper always felt that he could never get enough time alone with Wylan, could never get enough of a conversation going for the two of them to move past getting-to-know-you and into getting-to-know-you, if you caught his meaning.
The past two weeks of being coven-bonded to each other had only made the distance between them more apparent to Jesper, because now he could feel the faint hum of Wylan’s thoughts and emotions like an undercurrent in his mind. He could feel all of them—Wylan, Nina, Kaz, Inej, Matthias—and knew they could feel him in return. There was certainly a learning curve, a process of getting used to the coven connections, almost like learning to live with an omnipresent shadow in the corner of your eye—always there at the edges of your vision, enough to be noticeable but moving just out of reach the moment you tried to focus on it.
Matthias was still a mostly unknown quantity, and since Jesper had anticipated that it would take longer to get used to being bonded with a stranger, he wasn’t unduly bothered by the rough edges between them. Meanwhile, being literally connected to the souls of Nina, Inej, and Kaz simply felt like an extension of the years-long friendship that already existed between the four of them. With Wylan, though, Jesper felt caught in a strange in-between space, hyperaware of all the little fluctuations in the part of Wylan’s soul that brushed up against his own but unable to interpret their meaning.
There were no words to explain just how much he wanted to know every last corner of Wylan’s heart.
He watched Wylan spread his materials out on a workbench and start lifting out various bags of fertilizer. One by one, Wylan held them each up to his phone, paused for a moment, and then set them on the bench in a careful order that Jesper didn’t understand.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Wylan glanced up and pulled an earbud from his ear. “Hmm?”
“Oh—I just asked what you were doing. I didn’t mean to interrupt your music.”
Shaking his head, Wylan smiled and took out the other earbud as well, storing them safely in their little container and shoving it into his back pocket. “It’s not music. I was listening to my labels.”
He showed Jesper one of his bags, pointing out the NFC tag affixed to the clear plastic and then touching his phone to the sticker. A fuzzy recording of Wylan’s voice emanated from the speaker, stating the chemical formula of the contents.
“Ohhhhh,” said Jesper, genuinely impressed, the way he always was by Wylan’s creative use of technology to navigate his dyslexia. “That’s really smart.”
Wylan merely shrugged, not meeting Jesper’s eyes. “I guess.” He pulled a roll of the NFC stickers from his crate of supplies and asked, “Will it bother you if I’m recording more of these?”
“No, go for it!”
A twinge of something tingled along the coven bond, buzzing like static in the back of Jesper’s mind, but he couldn’t identify the feeling. Was Wylan embarrassed? Uncomfortable?
He scrambled to think of something else to say to keep the conversation going but came up blank, and Wylan turned back to his work, seemingly content to work in companionable silence. Jesper begrudgingly moved to water and weed the next bed, watching from the corner of his eye as Wylan started setting up a row of planters, one for each bag of fertilizer.
The quiet between them grew and threatened to consume Jesper, who felt anxious in the face of such stillness. The silence was broken only by the soft splashing of his watering can and Wylan’s occasional murmur into his phone as he labeled each planter with a fresh tag…
And then Wylan started to hum under his breath—a faint melody, barely audible.
Jesper found himself grinning irresistibly at the sound, almost as if Wylan’s voice were calling up every latent drop of joy in his entire being.
And now that they knew Wylan was a siren, perhaps that’s exactly what was happening.
Jesper hadn’t had the chance to hear Wylan’s music in ages, not since before they did the coven ritual—before the revelation that Wylan was just as magical as the rest of his housemates. Wylan didn’t often sing or play in front of them, anyway, preferring to practice in the soundproofed rooms available on campus or use headphones with his electronic instruments. The few times Jesper had heard him had mostly been moments just like this, moments when Wylan hummed under his breath without realizing while studying or helping out in the kitchen. Jesper had always found himself utterly captivated, unable to do anything else but listen—he’d just always assumed it was because Wylan was so talented and charming rather than because of any supernatural ability.
He wasn’t sure if things had changed because he knew the truth or because the coven bond between them made him more attuned to his housemates’ powers, but either way, Jesper could feel the magic in Wylan’s voice now, like an ocean current pulling everything in the greenhouse towards the source of the lovely music.
Everything… including the cells of the seeds that Wylan was burying in each planter under his various fertilizers. Jesper could feel how the internal makeup of the seeds shifted in response to the faint humming. He could feel them changing, beginning to germinate faster than their natural growth pattern, longing to become the ripe tomatoes that Wylan wanted them to be.
He paused, setting aside the watering can.
“Uh, Wylan?”
“Hmm?” Wylan glanced up, halfway through pouring the next bag of fertilizer into a fresh planter.
“Your project is an experiment, right?”
Wylan nodded and gestured to his growing pile of empty plastic bags. “I’m testing out variations on a popular fertilizer compound to see which one works best.”
“Yeah, about that…” Jesper clicked his tongue. “I think your humming there is messing with your scientific method.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that if you keep humming like that, you’re going to have to include a step in your lab report about letting a siren sing to the plants to help them grow.”
Wylan stared at him, mouth slightly agape, frozen for several long moments.
Never one to let an awkward silence linger, Jesper continued, “I suppose since you’re singing to all of the seeds, it’s not introducing a new independent variable, but still, it would impact the validity of your results. Plus, your teacher will probably get suspicious of your data if your plants keep growing at this rate. No fertilizer is that good…”
“At this rate?” Wylan finally managed to interject, looking paler than usual.
“Well, yeah. I can sense the seeds reacting to you. They’re trying to move towards your singing, the same way they would move to catch more sunlight.”
“Oh,” he said softly, eyeing his row of planters with some trepidation. “I didn’t realize…”
Jesper had been waiting for two whole weeks for an opportunity to ask Wylan how he felt about discovering his magic, his true nature. That night in the basement, the night of the coven ritual, when both he and Wylan had learned they weren’t quite as human as they thought, Jesper had felt… something. An opening, maybe, or a point of connection—not just the coven bond but something specific to the two of them, a shared experience, a heartache in common.
Since that night, coming to terms with the fact that witches were technically a different species had been… not easy for Jesper, necessarily, but also not as hard as he’d first thought. Ultimately, he’d spent his whole life encountering people who had refused to see his full humanity, refused to treat him like a person. They’d seen him as a hodgepodge of queer stereotypes, as just another Black kid in a hoodie, as the poster child for Vyvanse, as a problem to be solved, as the kid whose mom died, as the class clown, as a walking party trick who could shoot the exact center of a tin can from across a football field every single time.
They hadn’t always seen him as human, so finding out that he wasn’t quite human felt almost like… reclamation, in a weird way. Like when he’d gone to Pride for the first time and gotten to revel in all the things people had hated him for. And even though Jesper knew the supernatural world had plenty of hateful shit of its own, he hadn’t grown up with that. Instead, he’d seen firsthand the worst parts of the human world, all its bigotries and meanness, and therefore felt a little gratified to discover that he wasn’t fully a part of it. If that’s what humans were like—so eager to classify each other as not really human—then he’d rather be a witch, anyway.
Besides, at least Jesper had always known about magic, always known that he was different from the people around him. Wylan, on the other hand…
He’d wanted to ask Wylan how he was feeling about it that first night, but there was a ritual to perform and a werewolf to save. He’d wanted to ask the next day, but Wylan had disappeared early, probably to go practice on campus before anyone else arrived in the music building. He’d wanted to ask the day after that, and the day after that, and every single day since, but Jesper’s shifts at the bar and Wylan’s shifts at the café and midterms and meetings and minor Milo-related crises had all conspired to prevent him from finding the right moment to bring it up.
Here in the greenhouse, Jesper finally saw his chance.
He pounced.
“How’s it going? With figuring out your siren powers and everything?”
Wylan swallowed, tracing one finger through the dirt scattered on the surface of the workbench. “Slow. Nina lent me a book, but, uh… I mean, even with this app I have that can read printed stuff for me, it’s slow going, and not always accurate.” He frowned, his nose scrunching up in frustration. “And it doesn’t have much information on the powers of siren-human hybrids. Apparently, we’re not all that common.”
Jesper considered offering to read the book to Wylan, but he wasn’t sure if that was overstepping, or if maybe Wylan would be offended by such a suggestion. Instead, he picked up his watering can again and moved to the next bed, trying to sound casual as he responded, “That tracks. Everything I’ve ever heard about mermaids says they like keeping to themselves. It’d be fascinating to try and figure out when they got tangled up with your ancestors. Do you have a guess about which side of your family it came from?”
Wylan was quiet for a long moment—long enough that Jesper glanced nervously towards him, wondering if perhaps that was the wrong question to ask—but just as he was about to backtrack, change gears, Wylan finally answered, “No need to guess. It… it had to be from my mom.”
His voice got so soft at the end that Jesper had to physically lean closer to hear him. Between them, the coven bond zinged with something sharp and sad, and it took everything in Jesper not to immediately jump in with more questions or hypotheses or chatter just to fill the space. His fingers clenched around the handle of the watering can until they hurt a little, wound tight with the effort it took to stay quiet, to let Wylan take his time responding.
Eventually, Wylan continued, slowly at first, the words emerging like the fragments of some ancient tragic poem, preserved only in bits and pieces.
“It’s hard to… to remember her now. But I could never forget her music.”
From the corner of his eye, Jesper saw Wylan lower himself onto one of the stools that Nina kept on hand for when she needed to cast time-intensive spells on her most delicate potions ingredients.
“She taught me to play piano, to read music. Bought me my first flute... She was the one who convinced Father to get me the EWI—y’know, the electronic one I have that looks like a clarinet.”
Jesper had seen it before. He’d never admit it, but he had spent an embarrassing amount of time watching Wylan practice on the… ee-wee thing, or whatever it was called, all throughout the winter, when massive snowstorms had kept them mostly indoors.
(Just because some of them could find magical means of blizzard-proof transportation didn’t mean they wanted to go to the trouble unless they really had to. No amount of magic could make a person immune to the lure of staying cozy when the weather outside was frightful—and certainly not when that person was Jesper.)
It had gotten a bit too cold in Wylan’s attic bedroom for him to spend all day up there, so he had eventually holed up in the library with his strange, electric clarinet-like instrument, his headphones, and his laptop.
(Well, Kaz would have called it “the study,” but the rest of them called it the library—a long, narrow room at the back of the house with enormous windows down one side and enormous bookshelves down the other. In addition to the eclectic collection of communal books that they’d brought home, a few at a time, from thrift stores and garage sales, the library was home to a broken vintage Victrola cabinet that Jesper was planning to fix up one of these days—definitely soon, for sure, probably—and a pair of armchairs upholstered in threadbare emerald green.)
Even though Jesper had been unable to hear any of the music that must have been playing in Wylan’s headphones, he’d still felt captivated, watching surreptitiously from the doorway as Wylan sat cross-legged on one of the armchairs and practiced. He’d considered the way the light fell through Wylan’s curls, pondered the careful movements of his fingers over the instrument’s keys. He’d noted, as he had so often before, the ring that Wylan always wore, the shape of it standing out in Jesper’s innate alchemical map of the world around him because of its quality, its materials: pure gold, 24 karat, with an exquisitely cut ruby tucked into the middle. He’d never gotten a good look at it up close, but he could sense it without even trying, the first thing that drew his attention in any room.
Well, second thing.
He always noticed Wylan first.
Wylan had the ring, the expensive electronic instrument, but he could barely afford the rent. His clothes bore designer labels but were falling apart, superbly tailored for some past version of him but just a bit too small now. And there in the greenhouse, he called his dad Father, something Jesper had only ever heard from the fancy white boys who hung out at the country club back in Birmingham. It was enough to make him wonder…
But no, he needed to focus. Wylan was still talking, and he wanted to know—needed to know—what was going on inside his gorgeous, gorgeous head, especially since, given the way Wylan was speaking about his mother, it seemed as though they might have yet another heartache in common.
Wylan laughed bitterly. “I used to wonder how she and my dad had ever ended up together, but I guess the answer is obvious. She could charm anyone with half a dozen bars of Beethoven, and Father’s always been good at… collecting people, when he wants them. Friends, allies, donors, fans.”
Donors? Jesper filed that tidbit away to ask about later.
“He must have found some way to collect her, too, and then pinned her up in a display cabinet like some kind of fucking trophy…” He cut himself off suddenly, as if biting down a much longer rant that was bubbling up inside of him.
Jesper wanted to reach out, wrap an arm around Wylan’s shoulders, but once again, he wasn’t sure if it would be welcome. He didn’t want to overstep.
But he also couldn’t help himself, curiosity brimming up through his throat with the desire to know if he and Wylan were the same.
“What happened to her?” he asked quietly, fully expecting Wylan to be mad at him for asking, steeling himself for the conversation to end abruptly with Wylan retreating back to the house and leaving Jesper alone amongst the plants.
To his surprise, however, Wylan answered, scuffing his feet through the dirt and fallen leaves that Jesper had yet to sweep off the flagstone floor.
“She died.” His adam’s apple bobbed; his toes brushed over the leaves with a soft rustling sound. “I was twelve, just coming back from this special boarding school that my dad insisted I attend. They were supposed to… I don’t know, fix my dyslexia, I guess, but of course they couldn’t. The only reason they didn’t expel me outright is because the principal liked hearing me play so much. But Father found out I wasn’t making any progress and demanded that I come back. He didn’t… he didn’t even tell me that Mother was sick. Didn’t come to pick me up at the airport. Didn’t…” He shook his head. “I got home and everyone was crying, and Father called me into his office to tell me she’d died the night before, as if he were telling me about the weather or something. He wouldn’t even let me go to the funeral, said that I didn’t deserve…”
Wylan’s voice curdled around a sob that he couldn’t quite keep inside, his fingers twisting and tugging at the hem of his enormous sweater.
This time, when Jesper felt the urge to offer comfort, it was more of an irrepressible pull, and he could sense the way it echoed along the magical coven bond between them, bringing Wylan’s head up suddenly in response. Almost immediately, he felt an answering emotion hurtling through the bond towards him, a desperate plea: Yes, please, don’t leave me alone.
Before he even realized what he was doing, Jesper was moving, setting aside the watering can and stepping closer, wrapping Wylan’s entire frame into a sweeping hug. It was a bit awkward—Wylan was already a good bit shorter than him, and sitting on the stool, his forehead barely even hit the middle of Jesper’s ribcage—but it was warm and real, and as Jesper magically sensed the dampness of Wylan’s tears on his shirt even before his skin registered that it was wet, he got the feeling that Wylan didn’t much care about awkward right now.
Jesper held him for a moment, running his fingers over the soft brown of Wylan’s sweater where it draped across his spindly shoulder blades. Real cashmere, but full of snags and holes, coffee stain on the cuff. He didn’t need to look to know—his fingertips brought back the information without him even intending to seek it out, drawn through force of habit. Another clue to come back to later, but he knew this wasn’t the time to present Wylan with the metaphorical murder-board he’d been compiling in his mind, red thread connecting datapoint to datapoint in a tangled web across the mystery that was Wylan’s life before he came to Crow House.
No, it wasn’t the right moment for that—because Wylan’s fingers had stopped twisting in the hem of his surprisingly expensive sweater and were now curled tightly in the denim of Jesper’s jacket instead, because Wylan’s tears had soaked through the Queen t-shirt underneath, and because when Jesper slid one hand up to caress soothingly over his red-brown curls, he could feel Wylan trembling.
Jesper knew that sometimes, people got the wrong idea when he responded to their stories with stories of his own, thinking he was being self-centered or trying to one-up them or something. But he got the feeling that Wylan would understand what he meant to do, and not just because of the thin thread of magic that spanned between them.
“My magic came from my mom, too,” he murmured, running his hand over Wylan’s hair again and again. “She passed when I was ten.”
He could feel Wylan stiffen a bit in his arms, then felt his head twisting underneath of the palm of his hand as Wylan pulled his face away from Jesper’s torso, leaving a wet patch behind.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Wylan whispered, peering up at him through ridiculously long lashes clumped together by tears.
“Yeah, me…” Jesper paused, surprised by the lump that had suddenly formed in his own throat. He’d thought he could talk about this without crying, focusing all his energy on comforting Wylan, but now, he wasn’t so sure. “Me too.”
“She was a witch?”
Jesper nodded. “A damn good one, too. An alchemist, like me. Or… durast, or whatever Nina’s people call us.” He gave Wylan a watery smile. “She couldn’t play piano or anything, but she loved music. I think she must have sung something every single day of her life. We always had the radio on in the house, back when she was… Anyway, I bet she and your mom would have gotten along.”
Wylan returned the smile, even as a tear dripped off his eyelashes and onto his cheek. “I think so, too.”
He hesitated, and somehow Jesper knew what Wylan wanted to ask—because hadn’t Jesper wanted to ask the same thing? Even though the coven bond was still new, Jesper thought that maybe, if he concentrated enough, he could send out an emotion on purpose, using the magic between them to communicate without words that it was okay, that he didn’t mind the question.
(Jes really, really hoped that the rest of their housemates weren’t getting a front row seat to whatever psychic back-and-forth was happening here. The last thing he needed was Kaz making obnoxious comments about the whole thing over dinner.)
Wylan blinked, tilting his head curiously, and then smiled again, as if to say, message received.
“What happened to her?” he asked, echoing Jesper’s earlier query.
Jesper stepped back and hoisted himself up onto the workbench, feeling like this was a conversation best had if they were both sitting down—although he immediately moved one hand back to rest on Wylan’s knee, wanting to maintain the connection.
“It’s a bit of a long story, but basically… there was this, like, hazardous waste site near our school, only they didn’t tell anyone that it was hazardous, just said it was private property. As kids, we used to play near it sometimes, and we’d dare each other to walk up to the fence.”
Jesper’s stomach clenched, remembering how poorly the perimeter had been marked, how lax the protections were.
“One day, this girl from my school, Leoni, was playing out there with her friends, and I guess she got dared to actually go past the fence, into the site itself. But then it got rainy and dark, and she got lost for like an hour in there. And even though, y’know, they’re supposed to seal up toxic stuff like that really carefully, they didn’t, and Leoni must have gotten into something when she was wandering around. A few days later, she started getting sick, and the local pediatrician couldn’t figure out what was wrong.”
He could still remember how ill Leoni looked when they’d gone over to visit, bringing a casserole and baked beans and a pie so that her parents could focus on taking care of her. She had seemed so small in her nest of pillows on the couch, her skin ashy and covered with a strange rash, her dark coils of hair falling out in clumps.
Jesper swallowed and continued. “But Ma knew. She could sense it immediately, this toxic… sludge that was poisoning her. And so, when Leoni’s parents weren’t looking, she did a spell to take the sludge out.”
Wylan moved his hand to cover Jesper’s where it rested on his knee, squeezing lightly.
“And the thing about toxic chemicals like that… Well, they can be difficult to work with for witches, even those of us who are really good with material magic. They’re slippery, and they rarely do what you want. Ma was trying to move the sludge into a rock that she could seal up, but about halfway through the spell, she realized that it wasn’t going into the rock at all. The spell was pulling the sludge into… into her own body, instead of Leoni’s. But she kept going. She thought… it would be worth it to save Leoni, even if she couldn’t heal herself later, even if it killed her…” Jesper felt a tear roll down one cheek as he added, in a choked half-whisper, “… and it did.”
He knew he’d probably been talking for too long, oversharing again—this was supposed to be about comforting Wylan, dammit!—but as he remembered how Wylan ended his own story about his mother’s death with the fact that he wasn’t allowed to go to her funeral—which, also, what the fuck?! What kind of dad does that?—Jesper was struck by a sudden thought, one that he couldn’t help but share.
“I guess… I wasn’t really able to go to her funeral, either,” he said, slowly, thinking through the new realization. “I mean, we had one, and I went, but it wasn’t really a funeral. More like… a memorial. We put up a stone under this cherry tree on our farm, but we couldn’t actually bury her or anything. They… they took her body.”
“They?”
Jesper huffed cynically. “The great state of Alabama, paid off by the tech company that owned the waste site. They claimed her body might still contain dangerous chemicals, but really, I think it was so they could cover the whole thing up, destroy the evidence. I found out later, from Nina, that the Grisha actually came and stole her from the state troopers, replaced her body with a fake. I guess they didn’t want anyone accidentally discovering the existence of magic during an autopsy or something… which makes more sense now that I know witches aren’t biologically the same as humans.” He shook his head, trying to get his train of thought back on the tracks. “Anyway, I guess she’s actually buried in the Little Palace, where Nina grew up.”
Away from everyone who really loved her, he thought but didn’t say aloud.
Wylan squeezed his hand again. “It sounds like she was a hero.”
“She was.” Jesper wiped away his tears with the back of his free hand. “But she was also my Ma, y’know? I still needed her.” He didn’t add the bitter thought that sometimes crossed his mind—the awful wish that his mom would have just let someone else handle the problem so that she could have stayed with him—but he got the feeling that even if he did share it, Wylan wouldn’t judge him for it.
As if to prove him right, Wylan nodded slowly. “I get it. I used to feel like… Well, I knew that my mother was brave, but I didn’t always want her to be. She would stand up for people—stand up for me—and I appreciate it now, of course, but at the time, I was just so scared that she’d get in trouble for it. I didn’t want her to get hurt protecting me.” His face suddenly broke out into a rueful half-smile. “Like, one time, I was working with this reading specialist who used to yell at me when I got something wrong. And when Mother found out, she was furious. She marched right up to him… and she wasn’t a very big person, probably a few inches shorter than I am now, while this guy was huge, maybe almost as big as Matthias. But he didn’t scare Mother. In fact, she scared him, literally backed him into a corner. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d peed his pants.”
Jesper couldn’t help laughing through his tears at the mental image: a tiny woman with the same reddish curls and birdlike frame as her son, hands on her hips, confronting a cartoonish villain of enormous proportions like some kind of modern-day David and Goliath.
“Yeah, our moms definitely would have been friends,” he declared.
“I think so, too,” Wylan replied softly, his cheeks still damp but no longer crying.
Okay, even if I did make it about me for a minute… mission possibly accomplished anyway?
Wylan gazed up at him, eyes full of… something, and Jesper felt overcome by fondness for this beautiful boy, the one who shared so many of his own heartaches, the one who had pushed his way into Crow House—and Jesper’s heart—to made a home for himself there, choosing to stay despite the supernatural dangers and the social difficulties of entering an established group of housemates and the generally terrifying reality of living with Kaz Brekker. Much like his mom, Wylan was incredibly brave… and Jesper suddenly needed him to know that.
“I think you inherited more than just your mom’s magic,” he said, leaning forward. “You’re pretty brave, yourself.”
Wylan blushed, his ears and cheeks and even the top of his neck glowing pink.
“I mean it. You confronted all of us about being magic, which… I mean, it would be hard confronting anyone about keeping a secret from you, but you did it knowing that Kaz has actual fangs that he uses to drink actual blood. From what you’ve told me, that sounds exactly like your mom’s brand of courage.”
Despite already being redder than Jesper had ever seen him, Wylan somehow blushed even harder, scrubbing one hand across the back of his neck.
“I thought you were going to say I inherited her hair,” he mumbled bashfully. “Everyone always says that.”
Jesper recognized the move for what it was—deflecting the compliment—but he supposed he could allow it, just this once. He’d work on making sure Wylan really understood how amazing he was at a later date.
For now, he just laughed, replying, “Why would I say that? I don’t even know what your mom looked like.”
“Oh… right.” Wylan ducked his head as if embarrassed. “Here, I can show you…”
He stood and grabbed his phone from where he’d left it beside a pile of NFC tags, moving closer to lean against the workbench next to Jesper as he flicked through a photo gallery.
“Here,” he said again, passing the phone to Jesper. “This is her.”
The picture was clearly a photo of a photo, a slightly fuzzy polaroid framed against a green surface. In it, Jesper could see a woman sitting in profile at a piano, her mane of amber curls pulled up into a loose bun. She wore a purple sundress and an enormous smile, clearly thoroughly enjoying whatever music she was playing. In one corner, the tip of a tiny finger blocked out part of the photo, and Jesper realized that Wylan had probably taken the polaroid himself.
(He was also gratified to learn that his mental image of Wylan’s mom was not that far off from reality.)
“You really do have her hair. She’s beautiful.”
You’re beautiful, too, he thought about adding—but right at that moment, he went to hand the phone back, glancing up only to find that Wylan had leaned over his shoulder to look at the photo, too, and was consequently much closer than he had been before.
Suddenly, their faces were mere inches from each other, their breaths sharing space in the humid air of the greenhouse. You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful—it ran through Jesper’s head like a mantra, his entire mind filled with the thought of Wylan’s loveliness, just as his entire field of vision was filled with Wylan himself. This close, Jesper guessed he could probably count Wylan’s freckles if he had the patience to sit there for long enough…
Jesper was hardly ever patient, though, and as the moment continued to unfurl like a flower gradually opening to the pale spring sunlight, slow and nearly infinite, he kept waiting for the usual burst of restless energy to fizz through his veins and push him into movement, into some wild new decision. But it didn’t come—he sat and he breathed and he let his nose nearly brush against Wylan’s—and still, it didn’t come.
Wylan’s gaze dropped, just for a moment, to Jesper’s lips, then up again—and Jesper couldn’t help doing the same, glancing down at Wylan’s beautiful mouth.
Rather than a burst of energy, Jesper instead became aware of a different feeling, an inexorable pull towards Wylan. It was like the way the seeds earlier had turned their every cell towards Wylan’s soft humming, attuned to his music on a chemical level—but somehow also totally different, because Wylan wasn’t singing now.
This was a different sort of magic, a different sort of chemistry.
It felt almost like a dream as Wylan came closer, moving to stand between Jesper’s legs where he sat on the workbench. Without meaning to, Jesper found his own hands in motion, too, setting aside the phone and coming up to cup the soft edges of Wylan’s face.
When their lips met, Jesper expected to feel the same sharp, burning zing of desperate desire that he usually felt kissing someone he really liked, someone he really wanted. Instead, to his surprise, he felt… settled, for once, at home in his own body.
It was soft, a sugar-spun thread crystallizing delicately between them, and it stretched through Jesper’s ribcage with an ache—the good kind of ache—so profound that it threatened to shatter the walls of the greenhouse as well as his heart with its gentleness.
Jesper had always assumed that when he and Wylan got together—if they got together—it would be bright and explosive, all fireworks and inevitable passion.
That’s how it always had been for Jesper when he started something with someone new, an exciting, exuberant encounter born out of emotional overflow—desire, affection, loneliness, maybe even love, once or twice. That’s how he’d gotten through those awkward first kisses and attempted handjobs back in high school, the passion of the moment helping to make up for the fact that neither he nor any of his teenage crushes had any idea what they were doing. That’s how things had been with the people he’d gone out with during his semester and a half at NYU—sensual encounters at parties or in library stacks fizzling out into halfhearted dates in overpriced cafés. That’s how it was when he occasionally hooked up with customers in between shifts at the bar or made out with pretty strangers in the bathrooms of Ketterdam’s infamous supernatural club scene.
That’s how it always was with Kuwei, even after more than a year of friends-with-benefits booty calls any time the pyromancer’s travels brought him into town for a few days, the sparks still flying between them as easily as the ones that danced over Kuwei’s knuckles when he started weaving a spell. That’s even how it had been with Nina when they first met, when Inej had set them up on a blind date and they’d realized after only thirty minutes that they’d be better off as friends—and then promptly decided that they should sleep together anyway, cementing their newfound friendship with excellent sex, their immediate affinity bubbling up into something physical between one breath and the next.
There was no reason to believe that things would be any different with Wylan.
But now that the moment had come…
It wasn’t fireworks or a thunderstorm, wasn’t the first bone-rattling wave of sound at a concert or the clattering of a roulette wheel in motion—but maybe it was better.
Wylan’s lips moved gently beneath his, one hand coming to grip Jesper’s shoulder, the other finding its way to Jesper’s jaw. He stepped even closer, his waist fitting neatly between Jesper’s knees, and turned his head, opened his mouth a little, to deepen the kiss.
When they finally broke apart, the first thing Jesper noticed was that his fingers had left smudges of soil across Wylan’s cheeks, the dirt from the workbench now streaked through the damp traces of Wylan’s tears.
He couldn’t help it—he giggled, and even if it broke the crystalline atmosphere of the kiss, it did nothing to shake that bone-deep feeling of being settled, of being content with the world for the first time in… well, for as long as he could remember.
“Here, sorry, I…” he started, stumbling over his own laughter as he used the sleeve of his jacket to try and wipe the streaks away. “My hands were dirty.”
Wylan glanced down at his fingers, then the workbench, and laughed a little, too. “That’s probably my fault. I made a mess earlier.”
“We could make even more of a mess…” Jesper said with a wink, finding it easier to drop back into his usual flirty banter than to think too much about the way their kiss had felt so… comforting.
“Hey,” Wylan whined, shoving lightly at his shoulder.
“Kidding!”
Mostly.
Jesper finished wiping off Wylan’s cheeks and leaned back to admire his handiwork.
“There. All clean.”
Wylan tilted his head and gave Jesper a mischievous look, then said archly, “I don’t mind getting a little dirty sometimes… as long as it’s with you.”
Jesper’s mouth dropped open.
“Two can play at this game, Jesper Fahey,” Wylan added with a wink of his own.
It took a moment for Jesper to get his limbs working again, and by the time he was able to reach out to draw Wylan in for another kiss, he’d already slipped away, moving to the other end of the workbench to rearrange the rows of planters for his experiment.
“Come back here…”
Wylan’s voice was teasing when he replied, “I really do need to keep working on this. These tomatoes won’t plant themselves, you know.”
Jesper slipped down from his perch on the workbench and came to stand behind Wylan, wrapping his arms around Wylan’s narrow shoulders. “You might be planting tomatoes, but do you know what my favorite thing to plant is?”
“If you say ‘eggplant,’ I swear…”
He interrupted Wylan by planting an enormous kiss on his cheek, making it unnecessarily loud and the tiniest bit wet, just because he could.
“That’s my favorite,” he whispered into Wylan’s ear, “although eggplant works, too!”
“Je-es,” Wylan groaned, drawing out one syllable into two and brushing away the bit of dampness on his cheek—but he didn’t push Jesper away, instead grabbing Jesper’s arms around him when he moved, pulling them both forward so he could continue prepping the seeds.
“I can’t believe I get to kiss Ketterdam’s most preeminent chemistry prodigy,” Jesper murmured, nuzzling into Wylan’s neck.
He could feel Wylan’s skin heat up as he blushed in response.
“It’s just some fertilizer.”
“Hey, fertilizer can do a whole lot of things. It can save the world! As a certified, card-carrying farmer’s kid, I should know.”
“Card-carrying, huh?” Wylan turned his head back just enough for Jesper to see his smirk.
“Oh, yeah, you gotta register and everything. Plus, I did get a five on my AP chemistry exam, so…”
“Okay, so enlighten me, Mr. Farmer’s Kid. How does fertilizer save the world?”
Jesper let his hands slide down Wylan’s arms, tapping his fingers against Wylan’s wrists as he ticked off the reasons.
“I mean, first”—tap—“obviously, we’ve got solving world hunger. But second”—tap—“if you invent better fertilizers, you can reduce harmful agricultural runoff and thus”—tap—“help solve climate change. Plus”—tap—“if we need to revolt against our evil capitalist overlords, knowing how to make fertilizer easily translates into knowing how to make bombs. And…”
He was about to launch into a wild conspiracy theory he’d made up on the spot about scientists learning to befriend the fungi now, before mushrooms developed sentience and decided to go full-on The Last of Us with their vast underground mycelium network, when he suddenly felt Wylan stiffen and freeze in his arms.
At first, he panicked, thinking he’d done something wrong, but then he realized what he’d said that had sparked Wylan’s reaction, and a lightbulb came on.
“Wylan?”
“Yes?” he squeaked out in response, voice suddenly very high.
“Do you… know how to make a fertilizer bomb?”
Wylan’s answer came immediately—too fast, his defensiveness painfully obvious. “What? No! Of course not, why would I know that?”
Jesper released him and stepped back, spinning Wylan around to face him, finding that his face had once again turned entirely pink.
He wouldn’t meet Jesper’s eyes.
“Wylan, did you… make a fertilizer bomb?” Jesper felt giddy with disbelief. Wylan Hendriks was the last person on earth that he would ever suspect of doing such a thing, and yet…
Wylan said nothing, the tips of his ears going even pinker.
“Oh my god, you did! When? Why? You have to tell me the story.”
“You know what? I promised Inej that I would help her choose some music for her dance classes, so I’m just gonna…”
Wylan sidestepped Jesper’s outreached arms and began moving swiftly towards the exit, still avoiding Jesper’s gaze.
“Wylan!”
“I just… really don’t want to disappoint Inej, so…”
“What about your phone?” Jesper said, nodding down at where the device in question still sat on the soil-covered workbench.
Wylan hesitated, clearly torn, then begrudgingly came back towards the workbench, trying not to get close enough for Jesper to grab.
Suddenly, Wylan looked sharply off to the right, exclaiming, “Milo! No, don’t eat that!”
But Jesper had lived with Nina—a perpetual would-be snack thief—for far too long to be deceived by such a trick, one hand snaking out to encircle Wylan’s wrist as he tried to snatch the phone.
“Uh-uh-uh,” he scolded, teasing, pulling Wylan back into his arms.
With a halfhearted groan, Wylan whined, “Jesper, come on.”
“What? You can’t just drop a bomb like that—pun intended—and then not spill the details!”
Wylan glanced away primly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Please, Wy? Don’t you trust me?”
At that, Wylan turned back to look at Jesper, finally meeting his eyes, his expression shifting in an instant to something more serious.
“Of course, I trust you, Jesper. I always trust you.”
To his surprise, Wylan pushed up onto his tiptoes and pulled Jesper’s head down until their lips connected in another sweet, slow kiss. Once again, Jesper found the static in his brain fizzling out into something soft, something stable. The curiosity that had started burning through him settled into a gentle hum, and the primary thought in his brain shifted from Wylan made a bomb! to Wylan has the loveliest lips in the entire world…
The kiss was over as quickly as it had begun, and Jesper opened his eyes to find that Wylan had already retrieved his phone and danced out of Jesper’s embrace towards the greenhouse door.
“Hey!”
“Seeya later!” Wylan called cheerily before disappearing out into the gray April drizzle.
Jesper was left standing alone in the greenhouse, pressing his fingers reverently to his lips… until he remembered that his hands were covered in soil, that is.
He hardly knew what to make of anything that had just happened—a shared grief, a kiss, a handful of flirty jokes, a figurative bomb about a literal bomb, another kiss—and for a moment, he worried that perhaps Wylan had been more upset about the bomb thing than he let on, that perhaps Jesper had ruined whatever delicate thing had bloomed between them.
But no—the softness of the second kiss, even if it had been a sneaky distraction, and the waves of fondness that continued echoing along the coven bond towards him without losing strength, even as Wylan moved further away, told him that nothing had been ruined whatsoever.
Grinning like a maniac, Jesper brushed off his hands and went back to his work, still feeling the lingering sense of comfort, of rightness, of being at home, as he watered and weeded his way through the greenhouse. He knew, with a certainty he rarely felt about anything, that whatever was happening between him and Wylan had only just begun. There would be more achingly soft, endlessly delicate kisses in their future—and hopefully some other sorts of kisses as well. He would have the chance to ask Wylan about his awful-sounding father, his wonderful-sounding mother, and whether or not he was secretly a disgraced millionaire. He could tell Wylan all about his own family, about the farm in Alabama that he missed terribly, despite his best efforts to leave it behind. Maybe he could even read to Wylan, help him get through Nina’s bestiary to find some answers about his siren powers.
And, come hell or high water, Jesper was determined to figure out the story of that bomb.