Cal was as hard as the oak at his back and shivering with it. “Do you not want me?” he asked, a tempting will-o-the-wisp and as desperate a man as ever was.
Raymond steadied Cal against the tree before reaching beneath Cal’s tunic. “More than you can know.” He turned his head to catch Cal’s mouth and his gasping, shocked breaths in a kiss. Raymond reached beneath his clothing too, brought their bare pricks together and kissed Cal for every pleading cry that slipped past his lips and carried through the forest.
He whispered Cal’s name as he should not have, held him there and made him weak and would not bed him properly, and it did not seem to matter to Cal’s body, which was alight and stinging. Cal’s lips were plump and hot from biting kisses, and sweet kisses, and their mouths brushing as Cal panted and begged for him. Raymond had undone Cal with one hand. Cal closed his eyes to deny it and stave off his pleasure, but Raymond dropped his head to bite a mark onto his neck, and Cal grasped Raymond’s hair at the pain and pleasure of it and finished with a feverish little cry.
He hid his face in Raymond’s shoulder and clung to him, and then did nothing but murmur nonsense to encourage Raymond to spend on him. He thought he begged more, which was no way to bargain, but when Raymond finally stopped and his seed was hot and thick on Cal’s skin, and they were both still and panting for breath, Raymond dragged his nose through Cal’s hair and put his lips to his brow and said, “Callalily,” the way no one else ever would.
Cal let his eyes fall closed, and only opened them when it seemed Raymond was trying to set him back on his feet. Cal locked his arms around Raymond’s neck and held him tight despite the quivering in his limbs and the pleasure that had left him slow. He was certain Raymond could have untangled himself and walked away without much trouble. But he did naught but sigh into Cal’s hair and reposition his hands to keep Cal with him.
If Cal had known all it would take was throwing himself into Raymond’s arms, he would have done it at their first meeting.
Raymond was taking deliberate breaths over Cal’s hair and his ears, then down to his throat again. His lips were soft over the marks he had left, which throbbed and stung in a way that made Cal want to ask for more.
“Are you sorry?” Cal wondered quietly, speaking of other things with Raymond’s curls half-looped around his fingers. “Did I force you to break your vow?”
He smiled when his ear was kissed.
“You did not force me to do anything,” Raymond answered, gruff.
“Perhaps,” Cal agreed, a hum in his blood. “But if I could persuade you easier, woodsman, we would have done this long before, and many more times since.”
“But you would go.”
That Raymond would say this and still nuzzle Cal’s cheek burned through Cal’s stunted, half-fae soul.
“Terrible woodsman,” Cal told him, with a wobble in his voice that made Raymond pull back. Cal turned his head and blinked away the tears that would come. “That is the deal that was made. My mother loves my father, but she is fae and cannot live here, and he too human to stay in the Court. When I was born, she could have kept me, but she cannot deny him anything, and did not want him to be left alone. It was a kindness.” It did not feel kind in this moment, but the intention surely mattered, as it always did with faery magic. Cal wriggled, stubbornly avoiding Raymond’s gaze, but shook his head in protest when Raymond gently set him down.
Cal’s tunic fell back into place as he stepped forward to get Raymond’s arms around him once again. He put his face to Raymond’s chest. “I did not bed you expecting you to keep me,” he whispered, muffled. “Even without this… I did not expect that. But I will wait for you. It is a small act. A fool’s gesture. But one I will mean.” Cal licked lips buzzing from their many kisses, then swallowed. “If I should return and find you wedded and blissful, well, it will not change my heart. But I wished you to know, before I am gone. It was a struggle to say it in my early visits, but the words fall out of me now, like this.”
The tips of his ears were beginning to grow cold again. His face was so very hot.
Raymond huffed a pained, long breath, a boar at the end of a fierce and arduous hunt, and then dropped his shoulders to bring himself close to Cal’s height. He buried his face against Cal’s neck and spoke quietly.
“You will not.”
Cal shivered, but did not follow, and Raymond did not explain. “I will not find you?” Cal guessed at last.
Raymond growled, truly growled, like a beast.
Cal felt the sound in his toes and in his heart. His hand went to the back of Raymond’s head, gentling. “Raymond.”
The sound stopped, or altered, became a low whine and then a whisper. “You will not find me wedded,” Ray admitted in a rasp against Cal’s skin. “It is not our way.”
He had no people in the village, or in any of the villages nearby, not that Cal had heard of.
It was not the fae part of Cal that was pleased to hear that Ray would not marry. Nonetheless, he frowned. “But you do not like to be alone, my woodsman, though you have chosen it. You like to speak to me, to my father, to the miller’s wife and a few others. You put flowers around your home. You would make a fine husband. I can even arrange it, if you like.” The fae part of Cal was suddenly in agreement with the rest of him, all gnashing teeth and sickly envy. But he knew what love was, saw it in his mother’s selflessness in giving up the human she adored because her life was not for him. Raymond was very tense now. Cal continued to pet him. “I could ask the Faery Queen for a boon. A blessing from the Queen herself. A nice wife for you! Or, mayhap, a nice fellow from the village, to assist you, you can say to others. Plenty of them eye you and will likely leap into your lap at the offer. For that, I cannot blame them. You are—”
“No.”
Delight slipped through Cal despite being interrupted. “No?” he wondered with feigned innocence. “Have you decided to bark at me again?”
“No wife.” Raymond scraped his teeth over skin still damp and stinging-hot from his last love bite. “Nofellow.” He nearly sneered the word. “You should not have kissed me when you cannot be mine, Callalily of Hillston and the Wildwood.” Cal sucked in a breath but managed not a sound. “You have known the pleasures of the procession, and seen the trooping faeries in all their splendor, the Court itself. I am nothing to that. I am not a soldier or a lord. I will never spend more time in the village than I can help—I can’t.” Raymond tightened his grip on Cal and Cal did not think Raymond even knew he did it. Then he growled again, and it was not a thing for a mortal, godly man to do, not at all. “You are desired and lovely, and if humans don’t see this, the fae will. That, I have always known.”
“I am human, too,” Cal reminded him feverishly. “I cannot stay in the Court forever, even if I wanted to.”
Raymond stopped growling, stopped breathing, and then pulled back. He stared at Cal as if the darkness did not matter and there was nothing hidden from him. Cal stared at him in return, letting Raymond see whatever was writ on his face.
“You don’t want to?” Raymond finally asked.
