Page 54 of Beltane

Sparks of euphoria skated across my skin, and I clenched my muscles while my climax took me over, pushing into Lex a few more times before freezing to empty deep inside him. His cock kicked inside Ivy. I felt his inner muscles pulsing with his orgasm. Miri moaned and Ivy’s toes curled, and for one blinding second, that brilliant emerald connection between us exploded, escalating every sensation in my body.

I didn’t just disintegrate under my pleasure, but I shattered with the weight of theirs…ours.

“It’s us,”Miri had said, and the absolute magnitude of that raw power confirmed what everyone had been saying all along. We were better together. The strength we had as a foursome could topple entire kingdoms.

In the aftermath, Lex and I fell to one side of Ivy, and Miri lay down on the other, each of us lost in our own comedown while we panted away our hormones.

When I had the strength, I laughed out a quiet noise and murmured, “That was incredible.”

To which Lex agreed with a chuckle of his own.

“Rest up, all of you,” he said. “Because we’re going to do that again.”

He made good on that promise at least four more times. After that, I lost count. We took each other and raised that forest-green vibrance to the point where it hovered in the air around us like a fog, like a tangible thing we could control and move around.

“It’s beautiful,” Miri said, waving her hand through it long after Ivy and Lex had passed out. It was just the two of us for the last little while now. We had lost track of time a million years ago. Who the hell knew? I took another deep breath and let it out on a soft sigh.

“Do you think it’s tomorrow?” I asked through my pheromone-induced haze.

She shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“I don’t want this to end.”

Miri rolled on her side to face me, the sounds of Lex and Ivy’s soft breathing coming from the other side of her. “Me neither.”

“Make me a promise.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Okay.”

“Whatever happens tomorrow, you’ll stay with us.”

Miri froze and blinked owlishly at me. “Romeo.”

“I’m serious,” I said. “I won’t let you leave us again. You saw what happened to you and Ivy when you were gone. If we all don’t leave Faerie tomorrow, then none of us leave.”

Miri closed her eyes and tears streamed down her cheeks. She opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again before she could, ultimately deciding to give me a small nod instead. “Yeah, Romeo. Okay.”

Act IV

Are you sure

That we are awake? It seems to me

That yet we sleep, we dream.

-Demetrius, Act IV, Scene II

20

Miri

Shouting woke me. I snapped my eyes open to a face full of beautiful ginger hair and Ivy’s sugar cookie scent deep in my lungs. I had my arm draped over her waist, my fingers intertwined with Lex’s on the other side. Carter curled behind me, my back to his chest, his leg in between my knees, and for a moment, I didn’t have a care in the world.

We’d taken each other so many times, my body ached in the best way, but I had also been rejuvenated. When I glanced down at my naked form, I was no longer a skeleton wearing a Miri costume. My body had a certain vibrance to it, as if I was glowing from the inside out. Carter, likewise, seemed more effervescent than he had before, and when I glanced at Ivy and Lex, I realized we made a matched set.

The four of us were shining, lit from within, and I remembered what happened when we all came together last night. A beautiful emerald energy had filled the space between us, coating us in ancient magic that we had no hope of understanding. I could still feel it there, thrumming just under my skin. It was no longer physical, but instinct told me it still existed inside us.

The screams got my attention again, and I looked at the tent flaps where more fairies ran by the opening with gasps of excitement…or terror.

---