Chapter Text
In hindsight, I blame it on the heat.
It was an sweltering Chicago summer, and the subterranean chill of my basement apartment just barely managed to keep out the oppressive heat, even after sundown. The sense-enhancing potion that I was preparing (or more accurately, Molly was preparing under my semi-watchful eye, as she insisted she didn’t need supervision) turned out to require a four-hour simmer (which Bob had completely neglected to mention until I read the recipe he’d written out for me), and the alcohol burner managed to turn the lab into a veritable oven. By the time we trudged up the stepladder it was nearly one in the morning, as the potion couldn’t be started before sundown, and I elected to let Molly crash rather than try to get her home and risk waking up the whole Carpenter household (or falling asleep at the wheel). In a moment of chivalric insanity, I’d offered to take the couch and ceded the bed to Molly, which is how I wound up in this position: soaked in sweat, legs bent awkwardly as I shifted to try to find a position comfortable enough to allow me to finally sleep.
The heat laid over me so thickly it almost felt like a physical weight, even after I’d kicked the sheet off of my body and stripped down to my boxers. It felt like I’d been languishing there for hours, though when I finally broke down and went to check the clock by the light of my pentacle amulet it had only been twenty minutes.
Needless to say, things were getting desperate. Unfortunately, my one reliable cure for insomnia came with its own problems. Usually when I had trouble sleeping, I’d just…take matters into my own hands, so to speak, and it would knock me out about five minutes afterwards like clockwork. Lately I’d had trouble getting to sleep more nights than not, and coupled with my several-year-long dry spell, it had become something of a routine for me. Routine or no, though, there was no way in hell I was going to try to get off with Molly in the other room.
I should’ve known better than to bring up Molly. Images flashed through my mind’s eye in an instant: Molly grinning triumphantly at me over a beaker of happily bubbling liquid, face and neck and chest flushed from the heat; Molly intently bent over her work, tank top plastered to her skin with sweat and riding up to expose a tantalizing inch of skin; Molly, blue eyes wide and glittering as she looked up at me—
No. No, no, absolutely not. I was not doing this.
Why not? You’ll just be suffering all night otherwise.
There are some things a man just doesn’t do, okay?
That’s not a reason, it’s a tautology.
(I knew that word-a-day calendar was a mistake. The last thing I needed was to give my subconscious more rhetorical ammunition in situations like these.)
It was the principle of the thing. I had to draw a line somewhere, for moral reasons, and not jacking off to the thought of my barely-no-longer-teenaged apprentice (who was, again, approximately twenty feet and a single door away at that very moment) seemed like a pretty freaking good place to do it!
Of course, the moral argument. Because if you’re enjoying yourself, there must be something morally suspect afoot, right?
It wasn’t about that, it was just…wrong.
Who would it possibly hurt? It’ll make you feel better, and it’s not like Molly would be upset if she found out.
I winced. I couldn’t decide if she would, in fact, be upset about my sending mixed messages with my continued rebuffing of her advances (which had finally tapered off of late, to my immense relief) and then doing this, or if she’d just be disturbingly enthusiastic about it.
That still didn’t make it right, though.
If you’re so worried about thoughtcrimes, do you think laying here agonizing about it for the whole night would really be any better?
Not really, but…
But that would be acknowledging it in a way you couldn’t just pretend never happened.
Would that be so terrible? It had gotten me this far, after all.
And yet here we are. Ignoring the problem hasn’t made it go away. You know as well as I do that it’s even harder to deal with lately.
Stupid double entendre aside, he had a point. As Molly seemed to give up on her dream of wearing me down enough to make a move on me, the occasional bouts of fumbling awkwardness or self-conscious coyness had been replaced by something far more dangerous: easy familiarity. It felt natural, being around Molly, and I’d had to consciously stop myself from casually draping an arm over her shoulders or slipping it around her waist, trailing my fingers over the inside of her forearm, or any number of other overly-intimate touches, more times than I could count.
On top of that, Molly seemed to have stopped wearing provocative outfits specifically to, well, provoke me, but she had been dressing for the heat (as had I, or else we’d both have dropped dead), and without her sly glances when she thought I wasn’t looking (or her smug grins when she thought I was looking) it was a lot harder to remember not to…appreciate the procession of cutoff jean shorts, tank tops and sports bras that she rotated through.
Which was all in favor of my point: I had to keep my guard up, or things could get dangerous, fast.
Or maybe you just need to get it out of your system.
I knew that tone: it was the one I used when I tried to convince myself that what I wanted and what was right were in alignment. Still…
What would it hurt?
Resolved, more or less, I shifted slightly on the couch and slipped the fingers of one hand under the band of my boxers.
Two soft footsteps and a light creak were all the warning I had before the door to my room ghosted open and Molly slid into the living room.
I barely managed to snatch my hand back and go totally still, like a startled deer. Plan A: pretend to be asleep, and hope Molly didn’t want to wake me up.
Molly peered owlishly into the darkened room. “Harry?”
I immediately abandoned Plan A when I realized my boxers were not so much hiding as accentuating my condition, and moved on to Plan B. I looked up groggily, as if I’d just been roused, and tried to make pulling the sheet over myself look like a natural part of sitting up.
“What is it, Grasshopper?”
Molly had swiped one of my shirts, which managed to fall to mid-thigh on her despite the fact that she was most of six feet tall, and as she moved to perch on the arm of the sofa, it rode up to reveal inch after inch of smooth, pale thigh, and finally—I breathed a silent sigh of relief—a pair of running shorts. She worried the hem of the shirt in her fingers and looked down at me, eyes nervous. It immediately put me on edge.
“I had a question, um, about the—the terms of my apprenticeship. Like, the rules and everything.”
Uh oh. Where was she going with this?
“I mean I’ve been your apprentice for a while now, and I know that the whole thing is about self-control, and it’s for my own good and everything, and I’ve been doing really well, really, but I just—“
Oh god. Had Molly relapsed? We’d talked about it, other times before when she’d had the urge to fall back on her darker talents, and I’d foolishly assumed that she’d let me know before anything actually happened. Had I been too hands-off? Backed off before she was ready, and given her enough rope to hang the both of us?
“—I feel this pressure, and I thought it would go away but it isn’t, and I’m not sure how much longer I can deal with it, and I just want to know—“
If things went bad, could I take Molly and go to ground? I had enough contacts that I could potentially avoid the grasp of the White Council for long enough to figure out a longer-term solution. It might mean making some deals I’d rather not make, but I’d be damned before I’d let Molly get executed under my watch.
Molly paused, looked jerkily away and then back at me again, drew in a bracing breath, then said, in one outrushing exhalation, “Did you mean it when you said I’d go blind?”
Record scratch. I froze for a long moment, the machinery of my brain grinding to a halt and beginning to smoke as I tried to parse what the hell Molly had just said. When had I told her that—
Oh.
Oh.
My eyebrows shot up to my hairline and I just barely managed to avoid a spluttering cough, though I did have to swallow thickly before I could speak.
“Uh. Yes and no. Not literal blindness, probably, but…that kind of thing can cause all sorts of magical fluctuations for a young practitioner, and it’ll produce uncontrolled effects that are occasionally dangerous but more often inconvenient and embarrassing.”
I’d kept my gaze fixed resolutely over Molly’s left shoulder while I talked, but I chanced a look at her face and found her nodding thoughtfully, brow furrowed in thought.
“That being said, I think you’re a level of focus and control where it wouldn’t be much of an issue, so you’re probably…”
I trailed off as my brain caught up to what I was actually saying, and I saw a blush heat Molly’s cheeks until the practically glowed in the darkness. She gave a quick, jerky nod, not meeting my eyes, and scurried back out of the room whence she came.
Well.
If I wasn’t going to be fighting off thoughts of Molly the rest of the night before, now I definitely was.
I leaned sideways against the back of the sofa and thudded the heel of my hand into my forehead a few times.
I was preparing to lie back on the couch and once more attempt to wrest sleep from the jaws of pointless contemplation, when I noticed that Molly had forgotten to close the door behind her.
I considered letting her know, but if she was lucky she could already be back in bed and asleep, and I’d feel like a real heel if I woke her up now. I shifted on the couch, debating whether or not I should just go close it myself or leave it be. I knew it was the sort of thing that was going to bother me if I didn’t do anything about it (my brother has accused me of being a control freak, but I maintain that there’s nothing wrong with a man wanting to have control over his own domain). Besides, the open door stood there mockingly, like it somehow knew the content of my thoughts and offered me a continual silent temptation, which sort of pissed me off.
Hmm. My latent control issues were probably not as concerning as my habit of ascribing emotions to inanimate objects. Perhaps something to worry about in the future.
I rolled my legs off the couch and moved to stand up, and paused as I heard a soft sound from the bedroom. It was a hissing, sighing outrush of breath, which was more likely Molly turning over in her sleep than it was her deciding to get up and deal with the door herself. I pressed on, padding two silent steps toward the door, when another noise stopped me in my tracks.
It was still quiet, but even after a few years of dry spell, it was unmistakeable. A soft moan.
I froze, paralyzed, halfway across the floor, long enough to hear another moan, this one higher, breathier. I absolutely couldn’t close the door now; with how small my bedroom was, that would put me basically within arm’s reach of Molly as she was…doing whatever it was she was doing.
Come on. You know exactly what she’s doing; hell, you just gave her the go-ahead to do it. After a few years of holding off, can you really blame her for not wanting to wait?
I really couldn’t. I remembered what being 20 was like, and I was honestly impressed she’d made it this long.
I took a couple of fumbling steps backward, hit the arm of the sofa at the backs of my knees, and tumbled ass-over-teakettle back onto it.
If Molly heard me, it didn’t slow her down. She let out a shuddering gasp that made me bite back a noise of my own as all the blood in my body rushed south. I closed my eyes involuntarily and the scene played itself out on the inside of my eyelids without my input.
Molly was sprawled out on my bed, sheets discarded against the heat, naked—or, no, still wearing the borrowed shirt, but pushed up to reveal the smooth, soft expanse of her stomach and the undersides of her breasts. Her hair would be fanned out on the pillow above her, her face flushed and her eyes wide and unfocused with arousal. I heard another moan, this one desperate but strangely muffled, and revised the image: now, one fist was pressed against her mouth in an attempt to contain her cries as the other continued its pace between her legs, circling steadily, her piercing glinting between her fingers.
I didn’t have to speculate what she’d look like, not really; I’d seen Molly naked before, and it wasn’t the sort of image I was likely to forget, even if I’d made a nominal effort to, given the circumstances. Something about the thought of her in my shirt, splayed out in my bed, though, affected me on a level I didn’t expect, and before I knew it my hand was gripping my throbbing erection through my boxers, my hips rocking in time with my imagined Molly’s movements and the real Molly’s soft sounds.
I was past restraint, now, past any semblance of the self-control I usually prided myself on. I might have hated myself for it later, but it didn’t matter: inexorable need burned in my stomach, and I could no more ignore it than I could stop my heart from beating. I shifted my hips awkwardly, pulling my boxers down until I could start thrusting into my fist in long, slow strokes.
I guess four years and change of zero action had really taken its toll on me, because thirty seconds after I’d started, the muscles of my stomach and legs were trembling with the Herculean effort of holding back my orgasm, my movements torturously slow. I damn near bit my tongue off fighting not to make a sound as I clutched at the sheet with white knuckles. I could hear Molly’s sounds rising in pitch and volume, suddenly no longer muffled: in my head, her other hand had abandoned its attempt to quiet her cries and slid down along her body to slip two fingers into her wet heat, so desperate and slick I could almost convince myself I could hear it from where I lay. Her back arched, head thrown back in the throes of ecstasy, and as her cries got more rhythmic and desperate I found myself urging her on in my mind.
Come on, grasshopper. You can do it. You’ve waited long enough for this. You’ve earned it, now take it. Come on, Molly, cum for me.
As if I’d given her permission, Molly’s cries reached a final crescendo, culminating in a sound that was practically a sob, before she fell silent altogether, even making noise beyond her as the orgasm rocked through her. I finally let go, too, and my muscles twitched and spasmed as I came all over my stomach, hand clamped over my mouth to contain the low, shuddering groan it drew out of me.
My head flopped bonelessly back onto the couch cushion, and I barely managed to fumble the box of tissues off the end table with leaden fingers and get myself cleaned up before exhaustion fell upon me like a bird of prey.
Well.
Fuck.
From the bedroom, I could only hear the soft sounds of breathing again, and in minutes, the occasional gentle snore. I fell asleep to the soft rhythm of Molly’s breathing, twenty feet away.
I would have written the whole thing off as a shameful, heat-induced dream, except it happened again.
It was a few days later, and the heat had loosened its crushing grip on Chicago enough that I didn’t have to stick my head in the icebox a few times a day to get by. That afternoon, Molly had come over to help me do some fairly menial enchanting work, turning out a bulk order of minor protective talismans to distribute amongst the Paranetters. We’d gotten through about forty of the fifty I’d planned to make when she started shooting me sideways glances every couple of minutes. I finished the talisman I was putting together, tied the final knot in the leather cord that held it, and turned on my stool to face her.
“Yes?”
She fiddled idly with a small black bead, and turned to meet my eyes.
“I’m pretty sure if I have to string another bead I’m going to lose it, and I miiiight have pulled a late one last night finishing that book you leant me.”
She smiled cajolingly, and the expression was as disarming and sweet as always. I slipped my hand into my pocket to avoid doing something stupid, like stroking her bare knee where she was perched on her stool.
“Would you mind if I went upstairs and took a quick nap while you knock out the rest of these? I will remind you,” she said, before I had a chance to answer, “that I just came through for you pretty big on that theft case, and this would be an excellent way to show your appreciation.”
She was right; I’d been hired on to stake out a client’s shop and see who had been repeatedly lifting their inventory without appearing on their cameras, and Molly had set up a ward around the place that was damn near undetectable, and not only alerted us the minute anyone crossed it, but scrambled their veil as they came through. I mean, I was going to let her go anyway, but I’d hate to let her think I was going easy on her.
“I suppose you’ve earned a nap. I’ll probably be up and making lunch when I finish these; you can crash in my bed so I won’t disturb you.”
Molly grinned, eyes flashing, and leaned forward to wrap her arms around me in a momentary hug before sliding off her stool and ascending the stepladder up out of my lab.
I chatted companionably with Bob while I finished up the rest of the talismans. I tied the knot on the last one, then got halfway through cleaning up the materials when my stomach informed me that I ought to be making a sandwich at my earliest convenience, so I left the tins of beads and spools of wire lying on the work table and headed for the kitchen.
When I poked my head up out of the trapdoor to the subbasement, some deep instinct told me something was amiss. I paused, scanning the apartment for signs of whatever had set off my alarm bells.
The door to the bedroom was open. I could hear sounds coming from it, soft but getting louder, needy, and hauntingly familiar. I realized three things in short order.
One: that night had, in fact, happened. I had told the grasshopper than she was cleared to get herself off and then proceeded to listen in as she did like a voyeuristic creep. I felt a little pang of remembered guilt at the memory.
Two: Molly had left the door open on purpose, presumably both times. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, good luck. Which meant that there was every possibility she’d intended me to hear her, that night and also right now. That was…unexpectedly hot.
Three: I had to close the trapdoor immediately, or Bob was about to become a level of insufferable that would threaten my ability not to smash his skull into tiny little pieces with a hammer.
I climbed the last few steps with minimal creaking, eased the trapdoor shut, and went over to the kitchen to start making my sandwich. Loudly. It couldn’t quite drown out Molly’s slow, drawn-out groans as she brought herself to an unhurried and apparently very satisfying finish. By the time she was done, I’d finished the sandwich, settled into the easy chair by the fireplace, and read the same sentence of my paperback novel twenty or thirty times.
When Molly emerged, her face was still lightly flushed, but she gave me a sunny and entirely guileless smile as she bustled over to the kitchen to fetch a can of Coke from the icebox. She settled gracefully into the easy chair opposite and popped the tab on the can, tilting it at me like a toast.
I needed to say something, to put my foot down, to lay down the law. I should have said Grasshopper, we’ve talked about this or We’ve crossed a line, kid, and it ends right here or something that would make sure this didn’t happen again. What came out of my mouth was, “Did you have a nice nap?”
Molly’s eyes glittered and she nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, I did. I really really appreciate you letting me crash here. Between the Jawas and my parents it’s basically impossible to find enough time to myself to have a properly relaxing nap at home, so…thanks.” Her smile turned bashful, and she turned her face away to take a long sip of her Coke.
I had to shut her down. This was my chance; I had to set her straight, in a way that would stick. Probably I’d need to be a little harsh about it, but it was necessary to maintain—
“No problem.” And then, since I’d evidently been possessed by a morally degenerate lunatic: “Anytime.”