by Sarah
To trembling because I can’t.
His gaze has me locked.
One more second, I tell myself, looking at him, looking at me in the mirror. Just one more second, and I’ll do it. I'll disappear like my kind can when nothing's got ahold of us. Just one more second, and I’ll leave in a gasp of glitter, and it doesn’t matter where I go. Just that he’ll never, ever know.
How petal-soft this sentence is.
How ironclad.
One more second.
I’m not ready to stop taking him in yet.
I’ve never felt anywhere the way I feel in his eyes.
I just need one more second.
Just one.
I swear.
SEVEN
When I finally turn around, there’s a puff of glitter where she was, floating down like amethyst snowflakes from the rafters.
“Where are you going?” One of the garnet-eyed girls asks, approaching me as I head for the door. The chalice in her hands is so full, red drips over her fingers when I brush against her as I pass.
“Don’t leave,” she calls, and something like deja-vu unwinds inside me, rippling the seamless dark of missing memories.
“Slow down.” Outside, a wave of calm warmth comes over with Magnus’ voice, and I do.
I slow down.
“Easy,” he tells me, and I am.
I’m easy.
But I know she’s close. The girl in the mirror. Hyperawareness rushed under my skin the second I found her eyes, and it’s bound in muscle and marrow now. Every nerve I’ve got hums with her proximity.
“You can’t have Fawn,” Magnus says, deep as the sea and as coarse as its salt. Standing beside me on the sidewalk while creature after otherworldly creature passes by, he pats my back and squeezes my shoulder. “Fae are …” His sigh is half resigned, half resentful. “Forbidden.”
I hear him.
Forbidden.
“And total teases,” he adds, his exasperated tone turning apologetic. He takes a bite of something and it sounds like a kiss. “Even if she let you get close enough, and they never do, you’d tear her apart.”
Stepping into the commotion, I scan the crossroads for lacy white-gold wings and curls the color of sixteen-year-old cognac.
“She wouldn’t be more than two or three good drinks anyway.”
I lick my lips, searching the crowd for anything that might lead to a shyly parted smile and shimmering skin. Her nearness is unmistakable. Tensing tendons and filling me with endorphins. But it’s getting harder to focus on between flashing bar signs and rolling spotlights. Ring-tailed acrobats and blindfolded jugglers, shuffling cards and jingling tambourines mix signals I’m trying to zero in on. Everything’s bright and loud and strong, and it’s too easy to get lost in Magnus’ voice.
“Plus,” behind me now, he takes another bite of whatever he has, and vanilla sweetness tinges the air. “It’s sort of a rule or whatever. Here -”
When I turn around, all I can remember extends his right hand, offering a crimson and cream popsicle instead of a flame, and when it hits my tongue, dreamy comfort eclipses the rest of the memory.
“You want girls -”
I don’t know if it’s a question or a statement.
“I’ll get us girls.”
He turns me around, and it feels good to heed his words, to walk beside him.
“Not real fairies, but nacre-pink with chantilly wings if that’s your thing. I prefer laurel crowns and ethereal peplos myself, but whatever butters your muffin - ”
“I don’t believe it -”
Two guys with scarlet-stained antlers step in front of us.
“Magnus the Unthinking?”
One ruffles my friend’s hair. The other reaches for his wrists.
“How’d you get away from those nephilim?”
“And where are they now?”
Magnus greets them half-heartedly as I sink my teeth into the reddest part of the popsicle. Rolling melting bliss slowly over my tongue, I let my eyes wander the street-sea of revelry. On the other side of it, a skinny boy in white sunglasses gives me the finger when I stare too long, while a few feet in the other direction, a pale boy with fingerless gloves and a scar on his cheek winks when he finds himself in my sights.
Closing my eyes, I breathe in, searching a myriad of known and unknown smells until a whisper of coconut milk and jasmine stands gently out. It tickles my nose and prickles my skin with visceral sensitivity as I turn my head.
When I open my eyes, she’s there. Bite-size and beaming behind a palm tree, she can’t hold back her smile, and neither can I.
“You don’t remember?” One of the antlered men asks Magnus, all of them behind me now as I shift my feet to face her completely.
“Sure you do,” the other man insists.
I take a step toward little forbidden. Diaphanous platinum wings twitch, tight and fast, and she bites her lip.
“Let’s jog that memory with a drink,” one of them says. “And do some Unthinking.”
The crowd moves between where I am and she is, and I take another step, craning my neck to find her eyes. Wonder-wide and glinting bright, they fasten to mine across buoyant chaos, and everything in me says get closer.
But for every step I take, she moves one tip-toe forward and darts to the left. Skips back. Flits to the right. Taunting adrenaline and flirting with my reflexes. She plays with me, and I can feel my body taking notes as I play back, chasing her past boutiques and bordellos. Between elephants blocking an intersection. Down a sidewalk lined with glowing telephone booths. All my muscles memorize all her impulses as I close in, and we both pick up speed.
I’m so locked on her, I run into a push-cart, sending kiwis and guavas and my popsicle all flying. A vendor bellows as we turn a corner, but I’m already gone, following the one thing I’m not allowed through a candle-filled necropolis, into an alley.
The only light shining on graffiti-tagged brick walls turns around, facing me as she soars out of reach. Delicate giggles ring in my chest as I push forward, so close I almost reach her.
Then, we’re out of the alley.
My steps echo where her laughter should, and the sudden quiet crashes over like a tidal wave. She must be nearby. My body’s thrumming with the sense of her, and there’s a blush of glitter floating down onto me, just like in the club.
But as I look and look around the loading dock, she doesn’t come out.
Rubbing her soft sparkle between my fingers, I watch it glisten before disappearing completely, and cold foreboding pools in my chest. Slow at first. Then so much worse. The pale pink stardust on my sleeves vanishes the moment I touch it, and when I look around again under dim yellow lamps, silent pressure chokes up my rib cage, and I realize -
I can’t hear my pulse.
I try to swallow, but there’s something heavy between my lungs. The pressure that’s been there all night is a hush where my heart should pound, and I don’t understand. I press and press at my chest, my neck, my wrists, feeling anywhere for a beat but there’s nothing. Just dread and panic, eating their way down my back, taking over everything.
There’s nothing.
Anywhere.
Until she’s there.
Back in front of me, tremulous and unpermitted stands as still as she can and lets my eyes land on hers. Close-up, they’re dark skies swirling with a thousand stars, and all of me throbs except the one part that should.
“My heart isn’t beating,” I say, and immediately wish I hadn’t. I’m scared and I don’t want to scare her.
Eyes like mini-universes open even more under my own, softening as she worries a kiss-beckoning bottom lip before asking, “Want to feel mine?”
She turns around then, and the slip of nearly see-through lace she’s wearing hangs low, baring illicit, nacre-pink skin from tailbone dimples to gold-dusted wings no bigger than my hands. At my right side, whisper-light fingers find my own, and I exhale harder than I mean to as she brings them up, guiding my
palm between dainty wings.
Assurance and relief radiate everywhere we’re touching, but the warm rush of her pulse floods all my senses the second I feel it under my hand. I wrap my other arm around her middle without another thought, drawing her so close her breathing hitches, and she rests her arm timidly atop my own.
This close, I can only see one of her eyes like cosmos when she tilts her head, but even just one holds me entirely.
“Better?” She asks, reverently low-toned and maybe a little scared, and it is.
It’s better than anything.
I nod, and the corners of her bitten-slick bottom lip curl as she watches me find comfort in her curious beat. It’s so quick, more of a purr than a pulse, and nothing’s ever felt more meaningful, more gratifying, or more right to me than this girl’s heart.
I have no idea how much time has passed when she shifts tentatively in my arms.
Going against every reflex I’ve got, I loosen up, but she doesn’t turn around like I expect. Little off limits sways on her feet instead, the sweetly clean scent of fresh flowers filling the air as she presses back against me, tilting her head so we see each other better. Star-filled eyes swim with questions while lips that should always stay parted close against them. Still cradling her pulse, I bring my other hand up from her side, brushing my thumb over the corner of her mouth like it’s okay.
She might not be permitted to me.
But no part of me is off limits to her.
Lips like petals part on contact, and soft lashes fall as she smiles, helplessly high, and I feel myself, getting addicted to the tender beat of small wings against my chest.
“What?” I coax, like say anything.
I’ll do anything.
Just don’t disappear again.
Returning her eyes to mine, she pulls me from my thoughts and touches my lips like I’m touching hers, tethering me to here.
Now.
Her.
All there is flutters just like a heartbeat as she finally speaks. “Want to see something cool?”
EIGHT
“Are you doing that?”
“What?”
“That-”
I peek over my shoulder at black and white in the middle of the dark green rain forest. The only other color on him - hair the exact hue of my birthright - falls over his eyes as he watches a tiny vanilla orchid sprout near his shoe. Dreamy pink brushes the curve of his cheek as his grin grows, and warm yearning tingles under my skin.
“Come on,” I say instead of, I don’t know. Maybe. If soulmate legends are still true, sure. I’m doing that.
So are you.
Another vanilla flower blossoms near my naked heel, and I give the hand that could crush mine a small squeeze. “We’re almost there.”
In one stride, devastatingly irresistible is beside me instead of behind, sliding long, tattooed fingers between my own. Shifting left after a few steps to catch a glimpse of salamanders painted like oil slicks, then right a little later to check out a patch of mushrooms that looks more like cerulean coral, we stop whenever he wants, but our hands never unclasp. He keeps my thumb under his while I keep our fingers twined, and we don’t say much, but I learn more about him this way than words could ever tell.
Well-defined in the center of this lifechanger’s palm, there’s a crease that runs right through the lines that reveal his head and heart. Unlike most of his former kind, it goes all the way up, crossing his ring of Saturn, into his middle finger, and he straightens his spine, walking taller than ever as I trace it to the tip. More orchids that can only mean one thing spring up around our feet as we keep moving, precocious petals and glistening bottom lips opening fast and full, and the truth is:
I don’t know if I’m doing it.
I have no idea what I’m doing.
One minute, I’m letting a fledgling hold my heart because he’s scared without his own, and now, ceremonial flowers are budding all around us. I can’t stand to not be touching him, and every single part of me feels it when I do. Every single part of me aches with what’s happening. My arms, my legs. Inside my chest and under my dress. Even my mouth feels heavy and desperate to stay open for him.
To bloom.
Just like the orchids.
Following his fate line back down his palm, I hide my burning cheek in his black satin sleeve as he seeks the spot on my wrist he can’t stay away from. Soft strokes of his thumb make my heart soar toward his touch, and the small circle he draws there makes it almost impossible to keep quiet. My wings tremble like a goldcrest before a hawk, but we keep walking because I don’t know what else to do.
All I know is he makes me want to break the second oldest law we have so bad.
And I don't know if that can happen.
But it’s happening so fast.
Leaning down, boyish and brutally precious brushes his nose against my hair, and I feel him breathe in as I peek out from his sleeve. We’re finally approaching the understory’s edge, and I remember why I brought him here.
“Okay.” Lifting my face from his arm, I move forward, but only by a step. We’re still holding hands, and I still feel it everywhere. “They startle really easy, so …”
I glance over my shoulder to find sorbent black eyes waiting on mine, and I make myself face forward again before I drown.
“No sudden movements, okay? Slow and easy,” I warn, taking a steadying breath. “There will probably be a lot of them.”
Guiding him between soft fronds I’ve never parted for anyone but myself, I duck as he reaches ahead from behind me. He lifts tangled liana vines out of our way, and as we pass beneath them, I understand what humans mean when they talk about having butterflies.
“Wow.” Under his breath, this half-god, half-demon’s soft awe goes straight to my heart.
Looking around Van Gogh’s Grove, I almost second his sentiment. A few cherry-pink flamingos wade in the cove, while a few hundred nests speckle the beach, each one holding a baby bird. Curled up. Fast asleep. Grey-white and waiting on me.
Tiny-tight stitches of guilt slip into my stomach. I can’t even remember how long it’s been since my last visit.
“I’ve been … slacking off,” I admit, more to myself than him as I step slowly out onto cool sand.
I miss his hand the second I let go, but the heat of his attention clings to me as I ride the breeze down to the fullest rookery I’ve ever seen. Alighting at the outermost nest, I cozy up to a dreaming flaminglet, and toss my hair over my shoulders. Crouched so close, her gossamer down brushes my nose, and the weight of panther cub eyes makes me blush deeply. I can’t wait another second to finally say it.