Ray looked down at Cal’s hand resting lightly over his. “Some do.”
“But the not weres, right? Not usually?” Benny asked without waiting for an answer. “Because even if they don’t want it, it’s difficult to deal with the loss. If it’s, as you say, in your bones. This person. Or these people, I suppose, in your very DNA.”
Ray jerked his head up. Cal and Benny stared at each other, wide-eyed.
“I should look up polyamorous weres sometimes,” Cal blurted, excited, then quickly turned to Ray. “Out of curiosity only, Ray.”
“Widowed weres as well,” Benny added thoughtfully, and took a bite of his chicken burger.
Cal’s wings wentbrrpagainst the seat again.
Ray would have thought Cal would be upset at the implications ofwidowedbut he just seemed intrigued.
“I wonder how long that takes… the realization and the recovery.” Cal paused to gently push several of Ray’s hamburgers closer to Ray. “If it was killing you, albeit slowly, to stay away from me without a Rejection, you might have recovered, eventually, if Ihadgone away. Or you might not have. Like all things with you, it seems to be something you took on with your entire body and soul. Fighting or accepting. Hmm. If you had done, as you said, a courtship, that would have been different? But you didn’t consider that a possibility, so you didn’t push me away or try to win me, you just…” Cal peered at Ray as if Ray were a sample under a microscope. “Did you ever think about Rejecting me? Just ripping off the bandage? I don’t think you did. Not you. You let it happen and you let it sink deeper into you and resigned yourself to, what? Lifelong misery?” He perked up again. “Outside of human novels and movies, what really happens to a Rejected were, Ray? Do you know? Personally, I mean?”
“Not then, at that moment.” Ray thought uneasily of his mother’s cousin as Ray had first seen him. “After it happened. Years after, I think. I was a child, so my view of it was…” something unpleasant that he’d avoided. He could ask his mother, but it would worry her. “Humans would call it intense grief, or depression. Make it romantic and desolate in some old black and white movie.” Before it would inevitably turn bloody and the werewolf villain would die a grisly death at the hands of the ‘real’ love interest. “I’m not going through that now,” he assured Cal, who blinked but said nothing. Ray chose not to try to interpret that. “I know the movies might also make you expect a berserker rage, but I haven’t seen or heard of it. Which doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.” He gritted his teeth but made himself go on. “Some weres, like some humans, might be violent already.”
Cal blinked again. “But you’re not inherently violent and you still have me. Naturally, you aren’t going to be like that.” He nodded once, firmly, then inhaled sharply through his nose. “And you just—no, not now, Callalily.” If he was trying to calm himself, it didn’t work. “In the alley, when you met me—when youthinkyou met me, you implied that you wouldn’t try to claim me because I was fairy. I would leave and you would turn into some melancholy beast of mourning, and you wanted to protect me from that. Is that what you thought the first time too? To protect me? How would that—” He breathed in again.
Ray had the feeling he should jump in with an apology but had no idea what to say to defend whatever he had done the first time.
“Wouldn’t claim me but wouldn’t leave me,” Cal growled to himself; a teeny tiny fairy growl. He poked his dripping spoon at Ray. “We suffered in that limbo fortwo years, and not once did you ever think I could love you just as much?”
Ray responded to the growl as he was meant to and bared his teeth. “I doubt that I ever did anything but admire you, even if I didn’t believe that you would want me.”
Cal dropped his spoon. It hit the table, splattering melted ice cream.
“He’s speechless,” Ray observed after a moment, then made himself look at Benny. “Is that good or bad?”
Benny’s smile was wide and warm and just a little evil. Ray took it for approval and reached into his coat pocket for the candy he’d remembered to grab. He put the candy bracelet on the table since germs didn’t bother fairies, and Cal snatched it up with both hands to admire it before he put it on.
“Did you think of this back at the house?” His glitter was so bright that other people twisted around to stare. “Oh, you darling.”
“In public,” Benny reminded him quietly. But he glanced at Ray significantly before he reopened his laptop to read something while he ate.
Public did not matter much to fairies. But it mattered to Benny, and according to Cal, it mattered to Ray. Ray had allowed Cal to satisfy both of their needs but while minding Ray’s reputation. That seemed the sort of thing Ray ought to ask about next. For now, he watched Cal chew off one of the candy pieces on the bracelet, then pick up the spoon to absently eat some of his melted ice cream soup.
“Whoever planned this did not consider Ray,” Cal decreed, then paused. “Eat something, Ray.” He stirred the remains of his sundae before taking another spoonful. Ray dutifully unwrapped a burger. Cal kept talking. “I don’t mean your feelings. I mean your nature. This was intended to either kill you, all at once and dramatically, but the spell went wrong. Or it was meant to do this and you were meant to… give up. At minimum, this should have incapacitated you and forced you to take time off or quit. A casualty of war, taken off the field or the chessboard… pick your metaphor for ‘depressed werewolf can no longer work, possibly for years.’ That’s elaborate but sort of brilliant. No one would be focused on why or how it happened, only the result. Weres are mysteries to humans anyway; they wouldn’t investigate. Eat, Ray, I’m serious. You can’t heal if you don’t eat.”
“It has pickles,” Ray grumbled, but left the pickles on and ate the first burger in three bites. And no one was investigating now, but he didn’t say it.
Benny handed him a napkin.
Ray took it without snarling. He gestured at Cal to see if this would suffice. Cal just glanced to the next burger.
“So I am removed from the board?” Ray prompted, sighing but reaching for another burger.
“That’s what they think,” Cal responded smartly.
Benny reached into Cal’s bag and handed Ray a file to look over. “In reality, we’ve just moved you toourboard. Tri-dimensional chess, like on Trek.”
Ray stopped with the burger in his hands.
The sound of Cal’s wings hitting the upholstery reminded him to finally take a bite.
He ate without tasting a thing, then turned to Benny again. “What other kinds of candy does he prefer?”
“He’s part human, you know,” Benny answered off-handedly, eyes on his work. “He pretends he doesn’t eat our food, but he does.”
