Kissing Frogs

by Kim Deister

  “Do you? Then why Connor? Not exactly the bad boy type.”

  “Coercion. I was taken advantage of by others and coerced into it.”

  “Uh, huh,” I answered with a great deal of skepticism. “Since when has anyone ever been able to get you to do a damn thing you didn’t want to? Are you saying your doctor forced you into the whole Connor debacle? That you aren’t capable of standing up to MacKenzie and Mom? I respectfully call bullshit, Grandma.”

  “I will grant you that Connor was a mistake. But he was Dr. Rourke’s son and Dr. Rourke is a doll. He is smart, handsome, and quite funny. I had no reason to think that his son wasn’t just as wonderful. Besides, I never even met him. I only ever saw a photo. Blame Dr. Rourke. It was his fault.”

  “Awesome. So, you set me up with a total stranger? Gee, thanks, Grandma. What about Mac and Mom? Were you powerless against them, too?”

  “Things have changed, my love, and it isn’t healthy to look at the past,” she sniffed. “You need to let it go and focus on the future.”

  “Well, that would be easier for you, wouldn’t it, Grandma Fi?”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” she said imperiously. “The point is to look forward. Besides, judging by what I’ve seen so far, your future is extremely attractive. I do have to ask one question, though.”

  Oh, God. Talk about looks that belie one’s nature. Grandma Fi, while quirky, looked like a sweet, older lady, but it was all a lie. Inside she had a raunchy mind fit for the rowdiest biker bar and I was afraid to hear her question. I steeled myself for it and she didn’t let me down.

  “Do his tattoos cover every inch of his glorious body?”

  Her question was delivered in a far louder voice than necessary and I heard a muffled snort from the other room. Grandma Fi wasn’t deaf in the slightest. She just liked to get a reaction and she got one.

  “I refuse to answer that on the grounds that I’m innocent,” I replied, hearing another snort in the distance. My grandmother responded with an eye roll and a disbelieving noise of her own. “But I will tell you that he has an ass that won’t quit.”

  “That much I can see for myself, love. I’m old, not blind or dead.”

  “Don’t you mean that you felt it for yourself? Besides, I meant when it was naked.”

  “That’s my girl!” She winked at me before picking up two cups of tea and carrying them to the table.

  “So, tell me, love, how are you handling all this?” The teasing was gone from her voice and all there was now was love and concern.

  “That’s a loaded question and the answer changes from moment to moment. It’s hard not to be skeptical. But it’s also hard to deny what’s right in front of my face. The less I think about it, the better off I am. It’s easier on my sanity. But there is something. From before he changed and it still strikes me as weird.” Where did that come from? I hadn’t thought about that since it happened.

  “Weird how? What did he do?”

  “It wasn’t anything Finn did. Someone else.” Grandma Fi looked thoroughly confused by my less than sufficient explanation. “I had a customer a couple weeks ago, a woman named Chloe. She came to the house to commission a bunch of custom work. Finn was in one of his tanks in the studio and she kept staring at him funny.”

  “Well, he was a rather large frog. I’ve seen you look at him like that.”

  “Maybe... it just seemed like it was more than that, though.” A girl gets her world turned on edge and begins seeing mystery everywhere. “Whatever. I’m sure it was nothing.”

  “So, Finn told me you thought it was an elaborate prank set up by Mac.”

  “At first. Either that or he was a nut job who had escaped from the state hospital and somehow found his way to me. It seemed more plausible than the truth, which I still have a hard time wrapping my head around.”

  “Sometimes love doesn’t make sense. Surely you know that by now, my darling.”

  “Love? Yeah, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves with that, Grandma Fi.”

  “Don’t be so close-minded, sweetling. I know you modern girls aren’t supposed to believe in things like love at first sight and fate. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

  “I don’t know that love at first sight has anything to do with this. After all, I kissed him while he was still a frog. Please don’t tell me you think I have a thing for amphibians. Besides, I’ve only known him as a guy for a few days. It’s a little soon to be using the l-word, don’t you think?”

  “Just don’t close your mind or your heart to the possibility. Love follows no schedule but its own.”

  “You should stitch that on a pillow, Grandma. Or submit it to Hallmark.”

  “Hush your disrespect, child,” she said with a light slap on my hand. “It’s not polite to sass your elders. I’m not suggesting love at first sight was what led you to kiss him as a frog, as you very well know. I’m suggesting that perhaps fate played a part. Love at first sight came later, after he became human again.”

  “You seem awfully sure. I, however, am not so sure I believe in fate.”

  “Objectivity makes it easy to see.”

  “Uh, huh. The thing is… I’m not sure I really understand why the curse broke at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “According to all the stories you’ve ever told me, curses get broken by true love, right? Which gags me with its sappiness, by the way. And we’ve established I’m not in the habit of falling in love with frogs. And yet here we are, curse broken. Or so Finn seems to think.”

  “I think that’s where Siofra went wrong with her curse.”

  “What are you talking about? It certainly seems pretty effective to me. He learned his lesson and she got centuries of revenge out of it.”

  “True. She did both of those things, but I highly doubt she thought he’d ever break it. He told me the terms of it. And every time he got close to finding his way out, she made sure to ruin it. She let Finn and the curse get too personal and she interfered, weakening it. Finn remembers every word she said to him that night and not once did she state that he had to be human when it was broken, nor did she say it had to be love for him. She simply said he had to find it. He had to know what it felt like to be used and hurt and he had to find true love.

  “True love comes in many forms. It can be romantic, of course, but it can also be the love you feel for family or friends. There's more than one way to love in this world, but she focused on her heart. She let her feelings get in the way.”

  “Finn says he thinks it was my love for Kyra that did it.”

  “He’s probably right. It broke because of your unconditional love for her. It wasn’t what Finn spent centuries looking for, nor was it what Siofra intended. But true love it is. The whole point of the curse was to teach a wayward pirate about love, pain, and loss. To teach him about the consequences of his actions. He found that in you and Kyra.”

  Magic and curses, none of it made sense to me. I didn’t know the rules of it and I felt like I was floundering.

  “The curse may be broken,” my grandmother began. “But not every story has a happy ending just like that. Books and movies pretty them up and make them romantic and perfect because that’s what people think they want. But this isn’t a book or a movie. Happy endings aren’t a given. They’re something to be earned. There’s almost always a dark side beyond the curse itself, especially when you’re dealing with the aes sidhe. I’m afraid that the dark side is yet to come.”

  Well, that’s cheerful…

  We gathered Finn from underneath the lazy dogs and sat down at the table in the kitchen to eat dinner. For once, Grandma Fi waived her rule about no heavy conversation during a meal. Apparently, she deemed the situation important enough to make an exception. This was a good thing because my patience was thin. Handling suspense was not one of my stronger skills.

  “Somebody put me out of my misery and tell me what you are talking about with the whole “dark side” thing?” />
  “If there’s one thing I know, it’s that when the aes sidhe are involved, nothing is ever black and white.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Finn nod in agreement as my grandmother continued. “From everything our pirate has said about Siofra, I can’t help but fear that she won't accept defeat gracefully, especially since it’s her own fault.”

  “Fantastic,” I grumbled. “Crazy men and now a crazy fairy. Just what I need.”

  “Well, it’ll be worth it in the end, I think,” she said with a smile directed over my shoulder at Finn. “Maybe it’s the ramblings of an old lady, but I believe that Finn is the one you’ve waited your entire life for. He’s the reason that Luke was a disaster from the very beginning. You two are meant for each other.”

  My grandmother could be the spokesperson for any sappy movie channel. Happy endings made her swoon while I usually gagged. I rolled my eyes and she waggled an admonishing finger in my face.

  “Scoff all you like, granddaughter. You’ll figure out that I’m right soon enough. And eventually, Siofra is going to realize that, too, if she hasn’t already. She’s also going to realize that it was her own mistake that broke it and she’s not likely to be happy about either of these things.”

  As I thought about what she said, I looked down at my hand cradled in Finn’s, our fingers interlaced as if they had always been that way. He leaned over and kissed my temple, his lips lingering a moment. His breath tickled my ear as he bent down to whisper to me.

  “I love you, a ghrá, even if it has only been a day.”

  I whipped my head up so fast I felt it in my neck. I wasn’t expecting to hear that, not this soon. As I looked into his eyes, I realized that I was in real danger of falling for him, too, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Too much too soon, especially after the emotional roller coaster I’d been living on lately. And I had spent the last several months fleeing from even the thought of love, not diving right into it without a second thought. I was not a fan of so-called instalove, but I couldn’t deny that there was something between us, something big.

  But love? I didn’t know if I was ready for that. And there was a niggling thought at the back of my mind, doubt different than anything I’d known before. How much of what was happening between us was even real? Maybe he only thought he loved me because of the magic in the curse. Was it only magic that made me feel this way? If I was going to go down this road again, I didn’t want it to be because of some kind of magical compulsion. I wanted it to be real.

  However, my poker face sucked and my thoughts were not in stealth mode. Finn let go of my hand and wrapped his arms around me. He mumbled words I couldn’t hear into my hair and I felt his warm breath on my scalp. I looked across the table at Grandma Fi and she smiled back at me, no sign of worry or concern. No answers were to be found in her face because for her there were no questions. I didn’t know if that helped or just added to the confusion

  “I know what you’re thinking, my sweet girl, and you need to put it out of mind. Curses and magic don’t work that way. Yes, magic brought you together, but the love is all yours. Trust me on that. Think about it, darling. Siofra was angry with Finn when she cursed him. Do you think that she would have allowed a compulsion to love?”

  “True, but as we’ve determined, she made mistakes in her zeal for revenge. Why couldn’t this be another one?” A part of me was a little annoyed with my grandmother. I knew she meant well, but she was awfully quick to label my feelings for Finn as “love” and I wasn’t ready for that quite yet. I needed to come to that in my own way, in my own time. Both of them seemed entirely too comfortable with the idea and I felt like I was being pushed into a corner.

  “She did make a mistake, but it was in not envisioning all the possibilities. That’s a whole different thing than a love compulsion. A fairy with her kind of power would never make that kind of mistake.”

  She had a point and that successfully destroyed my last excuse. “I might be falling for you, too, Captain Finn.” It wasn’t quite an admission of undying love and we both knew it, but it was all I had right now. I watched his face, waiting for some sign of disappointment. A flicker of the eye, a twitch of the lips, something.

  A smile spread across his face and he bent down to kiss me and we both forgot we had an audience. It was a long lingering kiss that left me wanting more when he pulled back to look down at me. I didn’t want for long before his lips came down on mine again. I felt his tongue slide along my lower lip before he caught it between his teeth. That nibble would have been my undoing if not for the ladylike cough.

  “If you two are done making out at my kitchen table, we have some things to talk about.” The aggressiveness of her words lost all credibility when accompanied by the mischievous smile. She was enjoying this a little too much.

  “As I said, when the aes sidhe are involved, nothing is ever as it seems. They don’t exactly lie, except by omission. Instead, things are left unsaid or the meaning and intentions of what is said aren’t what they seem. They tell half-truths. They are tricksters. At best, they are mischievous. At worst, they are vengeful and cruel. One needs to be especially cautious when dealing with aes sidhe.

  “And I hate to say it, but this is especially true when love is involved and a fairy has been wronged.” She looked at Finn as she spoke and he started to speak. But she raised a hand and shook her head, silencing him before the words left his mouth. “No, Finn, wait. Even an imagined slight can be enough and your wrongs were greater that. But I’m not judging you. We’ve all made mistakes and done things we’ve come to regret. Even one as pure-hearted as I,” she said with a teasing loftiness. “And you are no longer the same man you once were. You’ve learned to respect life, love, and women. You’ve learned from your mistakes. Siofra’s curse worked exactly as it should have in that respect.”

  “It took too long to do it, but I did learn. And then some,” Finn remarked dryly.

  “But it’s been more than three hundred years! How much revenge does this crazy chick need? Isn't three centuries a long time to hold a grudge?” After we broke up, I held a grudge against Luke, but it didn’t last long. I got over it because, at some point, I just didn’t give a damn enough to hold on to it anymore.

  “Not for a fairy. Time passes differently when you are immortal. Three centuries is a long time for us, but no more than a passing moment for her. The need for revenge is in the nature of the aes sidhe. They are notoriously vindictive, although she’s taken it to unprecedented levels. And when they make mistakes, it’s others that suffer for it,” Grandma Fi said ominously. “And her mistake was focusing so much on herself that she failed to think beyond it. Nor did you, Finn. You wronged her romantically, so that’s what you assumed the curse was about.”

  “True. It never occurred to me that it could happen any other way. Ironic that it breaks when I wasn’t even trying.”

  “And now you’ve found your own love together. A love without condition, the kind she meant to keep from you, Finn. An unforeseen situation since my granddaughter isn’t in the habit of falling for nonhuman creatures.”

  “This is true,” I added. “You were pretty cute as a green amphibian, but not all that.”

  “You were rather cute… for a frog. But not really my type, either,” my grandmother told him with a grin. “This,” she said with a wave of her hand, “is much more my type. Cassidy’s grandfather had more than a little of the bad boy in him, rest his soul.”

  “Okay, before we go out on a tangent and I hear things about Grandpa that I don’t want to know and can’t unhear, let’s go back to Siofra. What exactly do you think could happen now? This might be a stupid question to the two of you enlightened people, but I’m new to the game. What can we do to protect ourselves from an immortal creature with abilities we don’t have?”

  “There are ways to be rid of the aes sidhe. Protections against them, even ways to kill them. But the latter would open up an entire new set of problems. The others don’t take it kindly when
one of their own is killed. So, I would like to avoid that if at all possible.”

  I pushed back away from the table, ignoring the concerned looks from both Finn and my grandmother. But I needed to move, to think. I felt like a string on my father’s mandolin… wound so tight that the tiniest pluck would make me snap.

  When this began a few days ago, I thought I was dealing with one of two things. A meddlesome sister with a twisted sense of humor or a hot, crazy guy. A few days ago, my worst problem had been the parade of guys in Operation Cassidy. Now I was having conversations about potentially having to kill a fairy. How the hell did I find myself in the middle of this?

  “When I was a lad, there were stories,” Finn said, “about a woman in my village who had killed a fairy. The fairy had toyed with her husband and he was never the same after the dalliance, spending most of his time in his cups. Soon the woman had to care for not only the hearth and home, but the farm, too. And the fairy continued to torment them both until the wife found a way to end it. It didn’t matter that the fairy had ensorcelled him and broken the laws of the aes sidhe. Her clan retaliated against the woman, driving her slowly insane.

  “Fresh milk curdled as soon as it was poured, sometimes even as the cow was being milked. Food spoiled too quickly. Invisible sticks poked at the woman, hard enough to make her bleed. This went on for a long time and got worse and worse as time went on. The woman was driven mad until one day she walked out of her cottage and made her way down to the shore. Legend has it that she walked into the water and kept walking even after the water closed over her head.”

  Oh, this keeps getting better and better. “So, is this your way of telling me that I really am going to be nuts?” I dropped heavily in my chair.

  Grandma Fi reached over and patted me on the hand. “No, my girl. It simply means that we need to take care to protect the pair of you until we discover it is not necessary. Besides, unless I am very much mistaken, and I so rarely am, that is not Siofra’s style. Her retaliation will be far more personal and visible.”