Page 82 of Disenchanted

Casimir was visibly drained with exhaustion but still smirking. “Anyway, thorns and tights don’t mix well, and I also have a vague recollection of someone walloping me with a saucepan. Does my hair still look all right?”

Through her tears, Sage laughed.

She shuffled under his weight, doing her best to lower him gently to the ground so that he could rest his tired, injured body. For once, her magic could help. She wasn’t adept with anything as impressive as healing magic—that would require considerable Alchemy study, which she greatly looked forward to—but she could at least conjure a cloth to wipe away some of the blood. With a flurry of a quick summoning incantation, she gently pushed the stray curls out of his face, cradled his head on her lap and stroked it with the cool, damp rag.

“I’ve been fighting so hard against it. It really was awful, Specs. My mind was slipping away; my thoughts weren’t my own. It was like being in a bubble, one that was getting smaller and smaller, closing in on me. But even at the end, all I could recall was you, Specs. Your hair. I kept thinking of your hair,” he said dreamily, talking like a man in the midst of sleep.

Sage ignored her own tears and focused on his face. His eyes were glazed as he looked up at her, trying his best to keep telling her what he’d experienced. “The spell was trying to trick me, convince me that I had to hunt the witch. But I fought it. I fought it the whole time.”

Lilara had come so close to getting what she’d wanted. If Casimir had slain Sage, Port Sylvan would have been spellbound forever. Fortunately, Sage happened to have an impossibly good friend on her side.

Casimir gave a pained swallow, wincing as he tried his best to turn closer into her. He struggled to sit up with her on the floor, the pair of them leaning against the whirling labyrinth walls. With her desk in front of them—if she ignored the freezing snow, the perfumed roses and the frightening thorns—Sage could almost be convinced that they were back in the archive together, that this moment was happening in just the way that she had always dared it might but never permitted herself to believe that she deserved. Beneath warmly lit sconces, amid the scent of old pages.

Casimir’s eyes fluttered at her touch as she pressed the cool cloth against his cut jaw to stem the bleeding of a particularly nasty scrape. He pushed her hand away and leaned his forehead against hers, the rhythm of their breathing in matching white plumes against the cold. Her heart hammered foolishly. Or maybe beautifully.

“The mad old bat was right about one thing. It was the witch I wanted,” Casimir said quietly. “But not because she’s the villain; she was never the villain.” His expression grew still. “But she was always mine.”

His confession, replacing infinite unspoken glances and endless dismissed touches, unlocked something between them. Forgetting herself entirely, Sage flung herself against him, and finally, after so many years of foolish, forbidden wishes, her lips found Casimir’s.

His hands flew to either side of her face, cradling her with tender brushes of his thumbs before they slid back into her hair, burying his fingers in her curls with a gentle tug of desperation that made her shiver. The feeling of his touch sang through her veins, combining with her magic in an electric, fizzing heat that left her breathless and burning.

Her arms wound around his shoulders, and he pulled her in even closer. His soft, full lips travelled to the corners of her mouth, along her jaw, down her neck. He was kissing the pulsing hollow at the base of her throat, forgetting all charm and composure, then trailing back up hungrily to find her mouth again.

“I have imagined this in a million different ways,” Casimir laughed. “Granted, this wasn’t one of them, but…”

Sage had never even permitted herself to imagine it properly. Not for the first time of late, she wished she had given her imagination more time to shine.

“I love you, Sage.” He breathed the words into her lips. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

For once, she had no comeback.

Sensing her stiffen beneath his hands, Casimir pulled away. His eyes questioned her silently. She dropped her gaze, bit down on her swollen lip.

Sage could barely even say the words out loud. “I’ve always thought…no one would ever love a witch.”

A lifelong belief held fast. Everything she had ever feared, everything she had ever known to be in her fate. It was the reason she had kept herself alone and separate from everyone. Almost everyone.

“Well, that’s just not true, is it?”

Sage glanced at him from under wet lashes, cheeks burning at how she’d unravelled so easily underneath him. His hands slipped up her arms, bringing her back into him, and he held her chin to raise her stubborn gaze to his.

“Specs, I have loved you since the very first moment I saw you. I love you because of all your magic, certainly not in spite of it. To me, you are the very epitome of all that magic is. Chaos and moonlight and enchantment and everything wondrous in this world and probably the next one too. I will be by your side forever, happy simply to see you shine.”

He pressed a kiss to her palm and another on the end of the finger from which her magic flew. Then his lips returned to hers, delivering a third kiss for her exhausted soul to melt warmly into. “Some spell…” he murmured into her mouth.

When she finally broke away, Sage saw her favourite, slightly dopey, lopsided grin of satisfaction. It was a look she had loved for such a long time.

They returned to sitting side by side, and Casimir rested his head on her shoulder.

“I love you too,” she said quietly, a little more matter-of-fact than she would have liked, but she had to bite down hard on her bottom lip to stop herself grinning as she said it. She felt Casimir give a small nod of acknowledgement in return.

“Oh, look,” he replied quietly, his voice thick and sleepy. “I was right.”

Sage swallowed. She knew she needed to offer him a little more than that, even though this sort of thing wasn’t her forte. She had to be braver if she was going to grab joy in such a way. She stared out at the desk in front of them, letting her eyes glaze a little as she watched the trails of mist turn inside and out.

“I have loved you in so many quiet ways, for such a long time. I know that sounds impossibly simple next to your eloquence and dramatics, but I love things about you that you probably don’t even know to be true. I love the crease between your eyebrows when you’re caught by a new idea. I love that your eyes always find mine across an awful party, even though you’re the most popular man in the room, and that we can share a joke in silent code. I love that you always listen like nothing else matters. I love that you’re horribly honest and incomparably loyal and…Well, if you need a final preposterous footnote, I think to be so seen by somebody—truly seen—is something I never thought would happen for me. I always thought I was too strange, too peculiar, too impossible. You know that…” Sage admitted. She traced a finger up and down Casimir’s forearm absent-mindedly as she spoke. “But you see everything, don’t you? You see through it all. You’ve always seen me,” she told him gently.

Casimir did not reply, only gave a small silent nod into her hair. She didn’t have to glance down to know that he would be smiling smugly, and he knew her well enough to understand that such a confession did not require further expansion. It was enough for them to just be, with closed eyes and heads resting on shoulders. Before she fell asleep, she made sure to conjure a small flame to keep them warm.