I cleared my throat, trying to pretend that the thought of eventually losing her wasn't turning me into a limp bag of skin, bones, and self-doubt. "So. What is this place anyway?"
"Oh. I can't believe I forgot to tell you." She laughed at herself and shoved her hands into the pockets of the hooded jacket. "I suppose I was just... distracted."
She bit her lips, blushing pink as she looked at me and suddenly, I felt very, very self-conscious. There was something in my teeth, I was sure of it. I might as well die now.
Her face was only growing pinker by the second as she stared longer than was necessary.
"What's wrong with your face?" I asked, immediately wanting to be eaten by beavers when I heard the way I phrased it.
"Just distracted." Her hair fell into a cute brown mess as she shook her head. "I get distracted sometimes."
"No, I remember. I, uh, distracted too," I said, staring at the way she was nervously running her fingers over the purple markings on her arms.
She started going around the house, tidying up the dolls and bones and sticks as best she could while she explained it to me. "This is a world of dreams. They call it Somnia. Everyone who's ever been taken and put under the sleeping curse comes here, and lives in a never-ending sleep. Since none of us die, they've built a whole society."
Her way of speaking was different than I remembered. She would pause for a few too many seconds between some sentences, and stutter over a word every now and again. I didn't mind. I liked her voice. High and sweet. Musical. Like a... bird squawk. But a good one.
Gods, I needed to get better at romantic metaphors.
She kept talking. "We have food and water and buildings and books, and we eat and sleep just like everyone else, but we don't die. We age until we're about twenty-five, and then we're just stuck here. Forever. I'm not sure what happens to our bodies in the real world, though."
"Oh, it's alive. It's in a tower. I was touching it," I said absentmindedly, before immediately dying inside. I squished my hands between my knees and stared at the floor. Dear gods, please, just zap me now. "I didn't mean-- no, not that, not touching, I didn't touch anything, I was just smooshing your face with my thumb. I promise I would never touch things, especially not without permission."
"Is it all right if I touch you?" Pippa asked, stopping in front of me and interrupting the stream of hole-digging words tumbling out of me. "Just on your face?"
She was probably going to clamp her hand over my mouth and throw me to the beavers, and at this point, I didn't even care. I needed to be saved from myself, so I nodded.
Pippa slowly reached out and put her hand on my cheek.
With her so close, and feeling the roughness of her fingers, I could finally guess why her skin looked so golden and her arms were so surprisingly muscular. Her gentle fingers were no stranger to work. And I didn't know how, but the contact seemed to suck all the lumpiness and fear right out of me. I didn't usually like warm, soft things, but I liked this.
"You don't need to worry." Her smile showed off that chipped tooth. "I know what you meant."
"Uh," I said, mouth open like a fish. I cleared all the embarrassment and garbage out of my throat. "Thank you. I'm sorry."
"You don't need to worry," she told me earnestly. "You're handling it much better than I did. You've only been here a few hours. I've been here fifteen years, and I still have bad days. Being taken isn't easy at all. It was deeply traumatic for most of us."
I gave an awkward chuckle and stared down at the small snake sliding across the floor. "I don't have that excuse. I wasn't taken. I wasn't ever touched by the fae. Well, not the bad fae, anyway."
"You weren't cursed?" She tilted her head in confusion. "Then how are you here?"
"I..." Something inside me was begging me not to lie to her but bending the truth about our prophesied marriage would only make this whole process easier and make her happier in the long run. "I was with your true love, helping them on their mission to come save you."
"Why?"
"Because we're friends. They said I should help. I came to the tower with them, and then I fell asleep in the same room as you, and I woke up here."
"I've never heard of that happening." She looked at me with a raised eyebrow. "Are you sure that you're not here for your own true love?"
Shoot. Shoot shoot shoot. This would take all my lying skills. My most powerful powers of deception.
"I... no. I can't," I protested feebly. "I, uh, have a condition."
I looked up to see how she was reacting. She still had that one eyebrow raised. That was either a good sign or a terrible sign. The longer I looked at her, the more I could see how she resembled her parents, and my mind took off in a different, less-composed-of-me-saying-blatantly-falsehoods direction.
"Your parents have never fully recovered, you know," I said, trying to stick my hands in the pockets of the tight pants and failing. "They still visit Ki every year, and I know that they really miss you. You may not remember anything about it, but it was really hard when you were taken. The room looked destroyed."
One hand flew up to twirl in her brown hair, and she chewed on her lip. "I haven't thought about how the room must have looked."
"What do you remember?"
"I remember green eyes. Sharp teeth. They came into my room, and I tried to fight my way out. I even stabbed one of them, but they pinned me down and touched my forehead and then I was here."
"You stabbed one?" I asked, partly amazed, partly bewildered that the unicorn-loving six-year-old I remembered had apparently been a fighter. "With what?"
"A poker from the fireplace. I didn't want to leave home." She shrugged and adjusted her dress like stabbing fairies was a common activity among six-year-old girls.
Gods, I liked her.
"Although, if I'm honest, sometimes it feels like home isn't real anymore. I've been here long enough that, as terrible as it sounds, I don't miss my parents. That's not to say that it wasn't lonely here, but I didn't really miss anyone until I started having these dreams a few weeks ago." Her eyes flicked up to examine me, but that blush returned, and she ducked her head.
Okay, that settled it, my teeth must have been full of lettuce, even though I couldn't remember the last time I sat down and ate lettuce. There was no other explanation for how she kept looking at me. I covered my mouth and tried to clean everything off before she could tell the whole world how stupid I was.
"I do spend a lot of time thinking about home though," she conceded. She stood up and scooped up the snake, who'd managed to get tangled in a ball of fabric scraps. "About what it would have been like to have stayed. I probably would have finished painting my room. I would have learned how to bake properly. And I would have wanted a family, and to learn leatherworking."
She kept talking about her dreams, rattling dozens of hopes and desires off in rapid succession, but I didn't mind. I didn't want to speak. I just wanted to listen.
To sit next to her and bake with her and look at her eyes and watch her paint things and listen to her sweet honey bathtub voice every day for the rest of my life.
In a friendship way, of course.
"They're going to be really happy to find out you're alive," I told her. "They've been making offerings for years to try to find your true love. They love you. They've missed you."
I love you. I've missed you.
I banished those thoughts out of my lumpy heart. I didn't mean them. I had only cried over her a few times, right? At least, a few times every anniversary of the day my best friend besides my brother went missing.
"You said you know who my true love is? You were with them? What are they like?" Pippa put her chin on my knee.
My knee was apparently directly connected to my voice bone because the contact made me choke on air.
It was like she actually wanted to touch me. Like she didn't think I was a lump. I didn't fully understand what was happening, but I knew that the last thing I wanted to do right now was talk about Jo.
But I had to. If this plan was going to work and they were going to fall in love and everybody was going to get their happy ending.
"Their, uh, name is Jo," I squeaked. "They're happy. Much happier than anybody should be. And helpful. And..."
Shoot. Aside from the fact that they were a fairy, which I was not going to tell Pippa yet, I was realizing that I didn't know very much about Jo. What was another attribute that women liked? Something that would capture Pippa's heart and make her swoon?
"Hair," I finished lamely.
Pippa tilted her head. "What color of hair?
"Buh-" I started. Wait. No, Jo's hair wasn't brown. It was red. "Bread."
Oh gods, please send the beavers to eat me now. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath so I could remember how to use my mouth like someone who wasn't a moron. "Red hair. They have red hair."
She frowned. "That's odd. In those dreams I mentioned, there was someone I thought was my true love, and he had..." She stared at my forehead. "Different hair."
"Huh," I said dumbly.
"Black hair," she added.
"Huh," I said again. I had black hair.
Her words felt like they were trying to poke me in a direction. "My dream man was a Ki, like you. I think he's handsome. He looks kind and calm and easygoing. We were able to interact like friends. We were friends. He's the sort of person I would want to be with. Do you know what I mean?"
I tried to think of whoever she could be talking about, but it was hard when my mind was nothing but a pile of pudding and my stomach was full of flutters. She was looking at me like she wanted an answer, but I honestly didn't have the slightest idea of a Ki that fit that description.
"I guess things aren't always what they seem." I said. "Maybe your dream was wrong."
Phew. Good answer.
Her face fell, and that made my own face fall.
Perhaps not a good answer after all.
"I suppose not... It's just sad. The dreams were so happy. He would dance with me, and walk with me, and we'd spend all day together. We even had a family." She toyed with her dress, feeling the purple fabric between her fingers. "A little boy, actually. In one dream, I was teaching him how to paint. It was amazing. It felt so real, like an actual vision of the future."
My heart popped like a boil full of molten sadness. She had just reminded me exactly why I was doing this. Because she wanted to be a mother and have a family, and I would never be able to give that to her. As badly as I wanted to be with her, I already knew that this intense aversion inside me would never leave. It would never be my son in her arms.
Gods, I hated feelings. I wished that I could just go back to my room and sit in my bed and hide from them.
And I hated even more that there was a part of me that wanted Pippa to be there in my bed with me.
Not to be disgusting. Just to have her there. To know she was with me and I had somebody I could talk to.
Her eyes seemed to melt sadly. "Now, I'm not sure that I'll ever get the chance to have that. The only son I'm ever going to have is Moss, and I think he keeps trying to run away from me because of the clothes."
"Why?" I asked. Who wouldn't want to be with her?
"There's a few obstacles in my way." She gave me another one of her smiles, but from the way her eyes drooped, I was starting to get the impression that maybe she wasn't always perfectly happy when she smiled. "But I hope I do get to fall in love with him someday. I think he and I really get along."
"Was he nice to you?" I surprised myself by asking. "Your, uh, dream man?"
Her big brown eyes darted back and forth between mine before she gave a halfhearted smile. "Nicer than anyone's ever been. Why?"
My chest felt as tight as these trousers Jo gave me, but something inside of me had enough courage to answer. "Because that stupid 'happy horde' made you cry. I didn't like that."
She started laughing, tossing her head back. "The 'happy horde'? That's a good nickname for them. I've just been calling them a group of crotch weasels."
I wheezed at that image. She was probably the first person in the world that my brain thought was funnier than itself. I needed to get better at this if I was going to impress-
No. No, no, no.
Impressing her needed to be the least of my worries. Thanks to my carefully-but-not-carefully constructed plan, she would be falling in love with Jo soon. I needed to resist the masculine urges to woo her, so I tried to ignore my brain and just kept wheeze-laughing.
"They were awful," I finished once my weird laugh retreated back into its cave. "Thank you for not taking me back to them after the, uh, mushroom pot thing. It's nice to be here instead of there."
The expression on her face was somehow sad and content at the same time. "You're welcome. I really enjoyed getting some time with you, but now that you mention it, I think I should take you back now. They're going to be wondering where you went."
"No!" I blurted, reaching out for her arm. I snatched my hand back as soon as our skin brushed and her eyes went wide. "I'm sorry, but no. Is there a... swamp or other place of some kind I could live in instead? Somewhere that isn't there?"
"But you'll need a house. Clothes. Food. You need to meet everyone," she argued, though it didn't seem like she actually believed the words.
"I hate all of those people," I groaned, leaning down and plopping my face into the pillow.
It was probably severely rude to plop one's face into a lady's pillow, but I didn't care at the moment. We were former best friends, and there was absolutely no way I was going back into a town where people would speak to me.
She hummed in response. I peeked one eye open to see her walking over to stir the pot on the stove. She took her lips between her teeth, twitching her fingers a lot.
She took one big deep breath before looking at me and pulling the hooded jacket tighter over herself. "Rory, I know I don't have a lot, and we haven't seen in each other in so long, and you don't have to do this, but... you could stay here with me if you wanted."
The shock was too much. I sneezed. "Who? What?"
"They don't come around here very often. Not to where the outcasts live." She was either smoothing out the front of her dress, or her palms were as sweaty as mine were. "They don't like me very much anyway. The weasel horde wouldn't find you. And if it isn't too forward, I would really like to spend some time with you. Alone. Before my true love shows up. Do you want to do that?"
Wow. Yes. I wanted.
I wanted to say yes immediately. Hiding in a creepy witch house with one of the only humans I liked and painting skulls was everything I had ever wanted.
And by gods, she was perfect.
Even kinder than I remembered.
Liked bones.
Had a collection of sticks with faces on them.
...this would make everything so much harder.
If I felt this strongly about her already – like she was the cake AND the frosting – it was only going to get worse. If I stayed here, it would only make it harder and harder to let her go to a place where she could have everything she deserved.
But those beautiful-mud eyes were keeping me trapped, and I couldn't help but think that maybe my sacrifice could wait a little bit longer.
Jo would get here soon, and it wasn't like she wasn't going to fall in love with my lumpy self anyway. My plan would still work. A few days couldn't hurt.
My heart was already going to crumple into a ball and die the moment Jo took her away. Why not share my final moments of having a whole heart with the person who had lit this fire inside of it?
Why not dive headfirst into the warm honey while I still had it?
Why not enjoy a bit of sunshine before a bitter winter?
So, refusing to use my brain for a second longer, I smiled and said the most dangerous words of my entire life.
"Sure. YOLO."