Cerulean’s brows clamp together in amusement. “Oh, no. What now?”
I hitch my shoulder. “Just looking at you.”
“And…?” he draws out.
“It’s only that, I don’t even know your birthday.”
He runs his fingers over my ass. “But you know other things.”
True. As for the rest, we make up for lost time.
His birthday is in February, mine is in May.
He taught himself to play the flute, like I taught myself to wield a whip.
If he could be a flightless animal, he’d be a wily fox. Unlike me, who’d rather be an ocelot because they’re agile and have a spectacular coat.
He listens as I talk about my family, and I listen when he talks about Moth, Puck, and Elixir. Being around him, it doesn’t feel wrong, me being a human and him being a Fae.
We keep whispering. I show him how to whistle between my fingers. And we keep whispering. He tells me a bedtime Solitary Fable about a roadrunner. And we keep whispering.
“Teach me your language,” I say. “Teach me Faeish.”
Cerulean’s gives me an artful look. “Which naughty words do you have in mind?”
“Well, now. Since you’re offering.” I pretend to give it serious thought, then slide my palm down the muscles of his abdomen. I stray farther, cupping my favorite place in the universe, encasing the heat and length of him, which is warmer than the rest of his body. “What do you call this?”
He keens, his hips bucking.“Fanlídan.”
That sarcastic tone is a dead giveaway. “Oh, no you don’t. Not the formal word. Gimme something carnal and scandalous, or I’ll let go.”
Cerulean half-laughs, half-groans. He flips me over and grates his pelvis between my thighs, punctuating the movement with a single reply.“Tüppide.”
Now that sounds more like it. I pronounce the word, letting it glide across my tongue while rubbing my center against his, savoring him from the base to the tip. His entire frame shudders, and he speaks against my throat, “I want to know every corner of your heart.”
Juniper and Cove are gonna kill me. They have dibs on my heart.
From then on, Cerulean and I fail miserably to keep our hands to ourselves. We swap heated touches and breathless kisses, groping and tonguing one another. He whispers erotic, foreign words that translate everything we do, until I’m blissfully exhausted, and we doze off.
At one point, the cougar slinks into the area and curls up beside us with a lazy purr. Cerulean extends an arm, he and the feline batting at one another with playful drowsiness. I hook myself around him and watch, amazed at the trust between them.
Eventually, more creatures arrive and settle in, claiming branches and plots of grass. We find ourselves in a pack, falling into a deep, wild slumber.
When I blink awake, the fauna are gone, but Cerulean continues to sleep, his arm roped around my waist. I twist in the basin of his chest to watch him. When I was little, I wondered if Faeries had the same color dreams. Part of me still wonders that.
His body is a land mass, steadily rising and falling. With his mouth partly open and his windswept hair covering his ears, he looks real, flawed, and vulnerable. Human.
Pain carves through me. He’ll never be human.
I chart his eyelashes with my pinky. Then I move to the scars where villagers jabbed an iron poker at him, not because they condoned torturing a child, but because they believed he wasn’t a child at all. They believed he was a monster of magic, a violation of nature.
He’s done horrid things. So they did horrid things back to him.
Who’s wrong? Who’s right?
Faeries love. They feel loss and longing. They’re born of nature and live amidst the animal kingdom, same as my culture.
Faeries also rest. It hurts to look at him, such a brutal creature—who wasn’t brutal tonight. I lumber to my feet, the breeze caressing my skin. His shirt rests in the green, so I shrug it over my head. The linen quivers halfway down my thighs, the low neckline only marginally higher on me, the curves of my breasts peeking from the V.
