Page 78 of By the Fae

Goldie wore nothing but grey sweatpants. He stood at the oven. His bare feet tapped the white tiles along with the music. The muscles in his back flexed as he tended to two separate dishes at the same time.

Hot potato cakes!Those were some fantastic trapezius and latissimus muscles he possessed. So defined. And those deltoids. And triceps. I think my mouth was hanging open.

I should point out, I did not know the names of all the muscles before I started fooling around with a fae. But simply gawking at them felt criminal. As though I wasn’t appreciating them enough. They needed to be acknowledged, revered. Captured in oil paint or carved into marble, or painstakingly mosaiced onto a chapel floor. And don’t get me started on the way the marl fabric of his joggers hung just so over his glutes. I tried not to drool on the salad.

The view was even sexier from the front, but Goldie rarely indulged me with that while he was busy cheffing.

Was I ready for sex? Yes. And no. I wanted it, really wanted it. I’d done everything else with him except feel him inside me, and the need to have him inside me was almost anthropomorphic. It had taken over, developed its own personality, consumed my every waking thought, and all the sleeping ones I could recall the next day. It called out to me. Whispered my name. Played its own private movies on loop inside my mind.

I had loved our five weeks together. Was now a woman that knew the true meaning of multiple-orgasms. Not simply one orgasm and then another, but sliding straight from one spine-melting, sheet-ripping white-out into a second, and a third. An onslaught if you will. No respite. No time to catch your breath, or order your thoughts, or control your screaming. Turned out, I did scream.

He did that. The man had talent. I had to give it to him.

And Goldie had taught me all manner of new stuff, just like he’d bargained. I’d had my muffin buttered. I didn’t even know that was a thing until he asked for it. I thought he was going to make me breakfast. Imagine my surprise. I’d put my finger inside his bumhole! He didn’t last long when I did that. Told me it was a universal, interspecies thing, and that he was up for pegging if I worked on my stamina. I hadn’t yet developed the nerve to look that one up on my computer.

But sex. Full penetrative sex. Something about it was too . . . final. Like if we had sex, I’d never want the deal to end.

Like maybe, if we had sex, I wouldn’t be able to give him up.

It had to end at some point. The longer we stretched it, the worse it would feel when we finally ended it.

Over the past five weeks, I had gone from loathe to . . . like.

Nothing more than like, though.

Definitely nothing more.

A month ago, Goldie had been horrible, miserable, swore at me, threw my cardigan across the room. Then . . . glamoured a picture of me. Two pictures. I found a second one balled up in his wastepaper bin when I snuck back in to swipe it. I kept both, smoothed them out, put them between the pages of my Faecyclopaedia to press them flat.

He gave me hisGroovy Graham and Palswatch. Handed it over just like that. Pretended the gift meant nothing to him, but I watched him chewing on his cuticles, then relenting into a relieved smile when he gave it to me. I may have cried. It was a beautiful watch and there were just so many new emotions swilling around inside me.

Okay, yeah, Goldie was inconsistent. But it didn’t mean he wanted anything beyond our current arrangement. Especially if his flatmate’s experiences were anything to go by.

I was human. I would die. Eighty years was nothing to a fae. That was the crux of it. I finally understood.

Even if we remained as good friends, he’d still one day have to deal with the death of a friend. Joey was human, and Taurin’s life expectancy was the same as a human’s. One day, Goldie would have to go through the pain of losing them. He loved them so much.

Earlier we had gone to Goldie’s favourite supermarket, AlaeMart. A megamart at the corner of his street. So different to anything we had in the human-dominant Westside. Aisles upon aisles of foods that I not only didn’t recognise but couldn’t even read the packet text to garner any clue about its contents.

“Stroubs,” Goldie had said, scooping a handful of small, orb-like, green vegetables into a bag and flinging them into the trolley. “They only grow in East Winterlands. Taur’s favourite.” He shuddered. “They’re an acquired taste. Very bitter. You’d hate them.”

You’d hate them.I tossed these words around in my mind.You’d hate them.Like he already knew me. Knew my preferences for things. Like he’d paid attention to me. It made my tummy feel squirmy and soupy.

“We need wine,” he’d said, apparently not realising the sloshiness of my insides. He checked his list and pointed me in the general direction of the wines. When he observed my horrified face, he added, “Get the pink fae wine. Sugar Paste loves that one. You might like it too. So, yeah, get two bottles.”

I wanted to ask him how to tell the difference between fae and elf wine, but I was too busy feeling all giddy and gooey inside. Goldie’s adoration for his friends. His noticing of things I liked or didn’t like. Just him.

Swooning. I was swooning, I realised. Great.

“There’s no B positive in the blood fridge. What should I get for Dima?” I’d asked.

“Anything with the plus sign is fine. A or O positive. If you get him negative blood, he’ll be a moody bastard all evening,” Goldie said with a straight face.

And that was how I ended up snogging a fae in a supermarket.

He loved his friends.

I got it now. Why he wanted to push me away. Why he didn’t want to get to know me. Why he didn’t want to like me.

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