[CH VI]

I’d thrown a tiny tantrum, and that was kind of embarrassing. I was hiding in my room when I heard Keyd and Rysa come back through the front door, talking quietly to each other. I was sitting on my beanbag chair, which was alongside the far side of my desk, so that hid me from an immediate glance into the room—if either of them planned to come looking for me.

Although I didn’t really think hiding would do much. When, a few minutes later, my door pushed open with a rather useless preemptive knock, Rysa came in and just stood there. Not looking for me, but just waiting, her hands loosely palmed on her hips. The fact that she wasn’t talking or moving was more unnerving than if she had done anything else.

“What?” I finally said. “What do you want?”

“Come with me,” Rysa said, only sort of looking at me. I could see her profile, and just a bit of the iris of her eye, slanted towards me.

I just kind of wanted to yell no, I don’t want to! I don’t want to do any of this anymore! But I’d already had my fit for the day. So I just stood up and nodded, like the good go-along enduring guy I was.

“All right,” I said, and followed her out to the living room. Keyd was there, leaning up against the back of the couch, his arms crossed and his hair hanging in his face and definitively not looking at either of us.

When I looked at him, I felt two things. An ache, and a dull uselessness. And then the third thing, which was just disbelief that I even felt the first two. This was just depressing. I had a silly little crush on Keyd and I shouldn’t be letting it do this to me. Sure my silly little crush had made me take what should, apparently, have been a killing strike for him, but it was still silly.

I’d never been attracted to another guy in my entire life before this. It felt like there should have been more warning signs if I was going to suddenly turn up gay. I wasn’t. I just—had no idea what was happening to me. And there was absolutely no proof—other than the fact that he had kissed me once, albeit it completely unsuggestively—that I held any interest to him at all.

But Rysa’s plan was, apparently, not to keep me in the living room with him and all my stupid stewing emotions. I heard her clear her throat loudly, and realized she was standing by the open front door. Waiting, and looking at me with one eyebrow lifted.

“Come on,” she said, and made a little gesture towards the outside. I glanced again at Keyd, made a confused face at Rysa, and then walked where she was pointing. She followed me, shutting the door behind us, and then started walking. I figured I was meant to follow, and so I did.

“Where are we going?”

“We’re walking,” Rysa said, and that we were. More like striding, really, and I had to half-jog to keep up with her long steps. She didn’t speak and neither did I, and I had no idea what this all was about.

Once we were a good distance from the apartment, out of the neighborhood, Rysa slowed down. I was almost getting a stitch in my side from the rapid walking so I was glad she’d calmed down the pace a little. She slowed down enough to fall back to walk beside me, instead of being a step and a half ahead.

“I understand you’re upset,” she said, suddenly. “And I’m sorry—for our role in this. You never asked for this.”

That’s damn right, I wanted to say, but she was already apologizing, so I kept my mouth shut.

“I wish I knew what to do, or tell you how to deal with this. The only thing I can try to do is help you. I know that’s not what you want to hear.”

“Well,” I said. “How important is it that I figure out what happened, or how to fix this? It only happens when you guys or Ahieel use your energy. And Ahieel—hasn’t been around. And how long are you two sticking around?”

“As long as it takes,” Rysa said. “We have to make sure that Ahieel really is gone. But we also have to try, eventually, to make contact with our own people again.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, that makes sense.”

“Don’t you want to know what happened—what you are?”

“Only—sort of,” I said. “I mean, once you guys are gone—what’s the point, right?”

She looked at me, in a way that made me feel like a jackass for saying that. Maybe it had kind of sounded like I was chasing them out again. Or insinuating that they were just going to dump my ass here and take off without explaining half of the shit that had gone down.

“So where are we walking to?” I muttered, looking away and shoving my hands in my pockets.

“Just out,” Rysa said. We were about halfway to my school now, and I kind of wondered if that was purposeful, but didn’t say anything. Nor did I ask why Keyd wasn’t here, why she had specifically left him.

We kept walking. And we did end up at my school. Since it was still mid-early afternoon there were students still around, and tall black-haired tattooed-hand Rysa definitely got a few glances. It was strange that she didn’t look odd to me anymore, not at all.

“Grove time, huh?” I said to her, and she gave me a look.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s important.”

“I understand,” I said, although she totally could have told me that’s where she wanted to go. I was done having stupid tantrums about this stuff. At least, on the outside.

We went over to the walkway between the library and cafeteria. The first thing I noticed was that I could see the grove instantly—we didn’t have to get close to it. And I could feel it, just like before, but not really as strong. Maybe because we were father away.

“It’s fading,” Rysa suddenly said.

“Doesn’t look like it to me,” I said.

“You can’t see it. You have to feel it,” Rysa said. “If they’re fading, it means Ahieel is no longer a core for their energy. They have nothing to center on, nothing to grow off of.”

“And that means…”

Rysa looked at me, hard. “Either he’s gone, or he’s given up here.”

“I somehow doubt that,” I muttered. Rysa didn’t say anything else. I exhaled, fidgeted my hands in my pockets, and said, “so, what do we do now?”

#

So what we did try and figure out what the hell I was, or had been, before Ahieel’s energy messed me up.

Rysa and I started these ‘training sessions’ in which to do this. She’d narrowed it down, she told me, to four things. They all had very self-explanatory names; neutral (which I wasn’t), nullifier, enhancer, and alter. They could all do different things to the presence, and what they did was pretty easy to figure out just from the names, but they were hard to tell apart from a third person’s perspective.

Which meant it was up to me to try and describe what I was feeling and doing, to her, so she could try to figure it out. That meant purposefully absorbing a lot of her energy. Just hers, because Keyd wasn’t cooperating on this endeavor. He was avoiding me, or maybe both of us. Either way, he didn’t help.

The easiest thing to practice this with was something Rysa called a break shield, which she told me I had seen her use. It was basically an invisible barrier wall of energy that lasted for a few hits, depending on how powerful the user was and how powerful the enemy was. So Rysa was constantly summoning these things up, I was taking them in and trying to explain what it felt like when I involuntarily absorbed them from her.

It was also practice for me, on how to not absorb them. Because, before, I’d only been able to do it when things were thrown at me, or I touched someone or a spell, or when there was just too much energy around entirely. Now it was actually difficult to not absorb energy, starting at a distance of about fifty yards. If I was farther than that, it was all right. The closer I got to her, the harder it was to avoid taking her spells in, while she was in the middle of casting them. I could do it, but it took a damn lot of concentration, and always felt physically draining.

Also, I felt energy all the time now. Not just from where it was being stored or whatever in me, but from Keyd and Rysa. I could identify the individual feel of both of them, and thusly could tell when they were anywhere near me, and which one of them it was. It took a good while to get used to, but I started treating it like an extra sense. That’s what it was like – like hearing noises, or smelling scents. Another sensory input. Rysa told me that she and Keyd both had that ability, to sense and read energy from other oenclar and clarbach, but that usually people like me, without the actual symbiotes in them, couldn’t.

Rysa was trying to formulate idea about why all of this had happened to me. Her guess, currently, was that the overload of energy from Ahieel had made me just superbly sensitive to energy of either alignment, and also kicked my ability to absorb it all into overdrive. He’d accidentally super-powered me, in shorthand.

And he was, apparently, gone. Rysa and Keyd kept taking turns going back to my school and checking on the grove—which was still fading, according to them. They couldn’t do anything to speed up its disappearance, except monitor it, but apparently all of this was a good sign.

Meanwhile, during all of this, I had the Keyd thing to deal with. He was acting more fucking bizarre than normal, in a way that was both increasingly infuriating and depressing.

If he was in a room when I came in, he would either leave, or very efficiently act like I wasn’t there at all. If I spoke to him, he would make some fast muttered excuse, and then leave. I could chase him all around the apartment if I wanted, but he wouldn’t stay still to talk or even look at me. I’d known I’d made him angry, for whatever reason, but I had no idea it was this bad. Especially because before this, I had almost thought we’d been friends. We’d been getting along.

It took nearly an entire week after my complete recovery, and well into my ‘training sessions’ with Rysa, to reach a breaking point. It happened when Rysa was out checking the grove and Keyd and I were alone in the apartment. I’d been idly attempting to do some homework for the classes I was sometimes bothering to attend again, but it was too hard to focus and I’d gone out to the living room for a break.

Keyd was there, sitting on the couch. Rigidly straight, with his hands resting at his sides. Stoic, quiet, unmoving. He was wearing dark jeans and a plain black cotton shirt. The TV was off and thin bars of light were falling through the pulled blinds, falling in harsh stripes over his legs. He didn’t turn to look at me, but he knew I was there. Because the same brittle, chest-tightening tension that I felt every time he was aware of my presence was filling the room now. It had to end.

I strode over and sat down, with purpose, right beside to him. Not just near him, but right next to him, our legs pressing together and shoulders knocking. I was going to make him talk to me, or react to me—anything to make him acknowledge my goddamn presence, like he hadn’t been doing for the past week.

Keyd drew in a startled, almost-inaudible breath—and started to stand up. Because he was just going to leave the room, the same reaction as always. Rather than deal with me—talk to me.

It made me furious. Before Keyd could even fully stand, I rose as well, grabbing his shirt in the center of his chest, and used him like a brace to push myself up. Which threw him back down to the couch. Not normally something I would be strong enough to do, but it worked now because his body was already off-balance and I’d levered the whole weight of my own body against him.

“No,” I said, and threw one leg over both of his, and sat on him. Sat on his thighs and put us face to face, ridiculously close to each other. I grabbed the collar of his black cotton shirt and dragged us even close together. “Look at me.”

Keyd’s eyes had widened, but nothing else of his facial expression had changed. I could feel him repelling against my grip, trying to slouch back into the couch cushions, to get away from me.

“Stop it!” I shook him, once, sharply. “Stop being such a fucking douchebag. What did I do? I deserve to know that much, I—fucking look at me, Keyd!”

His gaze had fallen away from my face and gone somewhere off to the extreme right. I felt desperate, and anxious, and sick and sad and so incredibly angry.

“Stop,” Keyd said, quietly and calmly, like I wasn’t sitting on his lap and manhandling him—now gripping him by the back of his neck and his shirt collar.

I reeled back a little, but didn’t let go. “So that’s it?” I felt like snarling and punching him, maybe multiple times. “You just—do you hate me now? Because I saved your life—is that some sort of stupid pride thing? You can’t handle being near me anymore?”

“No,” Keyd said, and closed his eyes. He wasn’t really fighting against me anymore—he’d gone oddly relaxed. “Nothing like that.”

“Then—Jesus—what is it?” I demanded. I flexed my hand in his collar and then let him go—he sunk back into the couch cushions, and I let my hands fall to my legs. I was still sitting over his lap, but I couldn’t bring myself to move off. I put my hand on the middle of his chest, which was rising and falling quickly with his breathing.

“I kind of thought—we were getting to be friends,” I said. “I kind of liked that.”

“So did I,” Keyd said, his eyes flicking between me and somewhere down to the left. “But we shouldn’t. Rysa and I will leave soon and—there’s no point.”

“Oh,” I said, and sat back. Flattened. I’d forgotten that now there really was no reason for them to stay. And that ached. Not even just because of my stupid inappropriate crush but because—I really liked both of them, and I was so used to having them around. Even just the thought of my apartment without them was an empty and lonely one.

“Will you let me up?” Keyd asked, and I realized I was still sitting rather embarrassingly on top of him. I didn’t really want to get up, but I supposed I had to. But for a moment I stared into his face, his stupid, unemotional and controlled expression. Nothing—nothing—mattered to him at all, except Rysa and this stupid clarbach fight. He didn’t even want to try to be friends with me because there was no long-term benefit. There was nothing I could do to become as important to him as he had somehow slowly become to me.

It was startling how suddenly and blindingly angry that thought made me, in just a single sharp moment. I almost did hit him, until I remembered how built he was and it would have probably felt like slamming my fist into a brick wall.

So I got off of him. Utterly embarrassed and feeling ridiculous. What was that—I’d practically thrown myself at him. Keyd was staring off to the side, at the couch cushions, his face set very tensely. There wasn’t too much room between the couch and the coffee table and I had to stand with my knees against his and our feet fighting for room on the carpet.

“I’m sorry,” Keyd said, flatly, and it just sounded so damn insincere and so condescending and infuriating that I almost didn’t realize what I was going to do until I did it, just rushing into a fast and furious motion. I grabbed Keyd’s collar again—he made a soft surprised grunt as I hauled him up, shifting one hand to his thick hair and twisting.

I pushed our faces together, mouths meeting, noses mashing. Hard, unthinkingly, more of a collision of faces than anything else, yanking him up against to me and squeezing my eyes shut. I couldn’t look at him and I couldn’t think. This would end it—doing this would bring this whole stupid tension to a place where Keyd would finally have to recognize it, and he would reject me, and then this would be over. I wanted this and I didn’t want this and Keyd was either going to kill me after it, or never speak to me again. Either was acceptable—either, if it just ended.

Keyd shifted violently under me, and I braced myself for his reaction—which would probably picking me up and throwing me away from him, because he was entirely capable of it. His hands flew up to my face, his fingers dragging into my skin and hair and temples, and for a wild moment I thought he was trying to gouge my eyes out, until I realized he was—holding onto me. Gripping at me, pulling me closer to him, moving into me. He was kissing me back.

Which startled me so much I jerked back from him, letting go entirely. My hands hovered in the air near my shoulders, and I had no idea what to do with them or where to put them. Keyd’s hands had fallen to my throat, loosely cupping around my neck—but he pulled them back just as quickly as I had. His lips were drawn off his teeth and he was panting—much harder than five seconds of kissing was really worth. My knee had gone to the couch in between his legs at some point, so I was half-kneeling in front of him, awkward and off-balance.

“I’m—sorry—“ Keyd said, in a horrified, strangled tone. He looked horrified, as well. The only time I’d seen his control slip this much was when he’d yelled at me for taking a killing strike for him. “I’m sorry, I—that was a mistake.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I snarled. I suddenly knew what to do with my hands—I grabbed the sides of his face and kissed him again, not as violently, but just as determinedly. Keyd’s body moved like a broken puppet, a series of uncoordinated movements where his hands gripped at me and let go like his muscles had no strength—or like he couldn’t choose between kissing back or shoving me off.

I didn’t really let him chose. I pushed him back into the couch with my whole weight, trapped him by climbing back across his legs, my hands entirely twisted into his hair. Our mouths pushed too hard together and I could feel his teeth behind his lips and the angles of his jaw pressed into my wrists. It was not like the kiss he’d given me to prove the statue curse was gone. It was violent and intense and good, so fucking good.

I finally wrenched back from him, fury still racing under my skin hotter than blood. Keyd was panting and his eyes were so hugely dilated that his irises were just slivers of ice-chip rings around his hugely blown pupils. His hands were twisted in the front of my shirt, and he looked terrified and trapped like a wild animal, breath hissing through bared teeth.

“How could you do this?” he said, a coarse whisper, and it sounded like he was accusing me of a betrayal. But there was nothing I had done. “With…with me?”

“Because I fucking want to, all right?” Shit, this was embarrassing. I just had to wait for the fall, for Keyd to tell me that I was a ridiculous, childish idiot, and would I please never speak to or look at him again. “You didn’t really tell me to stop, either!”

“But you—“ Keyd said. His hands twisted abruptly harder into my shirt. His throat worked, and it looked like he was having trouble either figuring out what to say, or barely managing to say it. “Don’t you care? That you—that I—we’re both…”

“What, men?” I snarled, and Keyd flinched terribly, and nodded.

“Yes,” he said softly, and so despairingly that I stopped, pulled back. Looked at him. He was sunk into the couch cushions again, his eyes hooded and not looking at me, shoulders hunched up around his neck. I’d never seen him so timid or hesitant or—this broken looking.

And things clicked into place.

“Oh, my god,” I said, slowly. I thought I understood it now. The weird looks he gave me or looks he pretended he wasn’t giving me, the hesitancy to touch me or be touched by me, his avoidance of me—almost every interaction Keyd had ever had with me for the past few weeks. I had never thought to consider what his culture—or Keyd himself—might think about this kind of thing. I had assumed it would be more open, accepted, just because of all the other things that were commonplace to them. Apparently…it was the opposite.

Keyd was shaking softly under me now, one hand pressed over his eyes.

“Oh shit, Keyd,” I said. He let out a shuddering breath, and lifted his hand to rest against my chest, above my heart. Just very lightly, fingertips catching at the material of my shirt.

“I thought I would…disgust you,” he said, so quietly it was barely more than a whisper. “If you realized that I was…like this…”

“No,” I said, “No, Keyd—fuck, I’m sorry I didn’t even think about this—shit, I’m an idiot.”

“There’s no excuse for it, for my people,” Keyd murmured. “Unacceptable, loathsome—a crime. I’ve hid it my whole life. I didn’t think it could be any different, anywhere.”

I couldn’t even say anything to that. And my throat was too thick and closed-up to speak through, even if I’d wanted too. I couldn’t think of what to do—so I put both my arms around him and hugged him. His arms went around me and squeezed so tightly I thought I might pass out, but I held onto him anyway. Now I was sorry for tossing him around and assaulting him because—shit, it was hardly his fault.

I eased off of him, slowly, getting off his lap and settling next to him on the couch, instead. This broke our hug but Keyd kept his hands on me, just as gently as before, gripping lightly at my clothes.

“Maybe I—“ he said, and swallowed roughly. “Maybe I shouldn’t have avoided you. But I didn’t want you to see what I—I didn’t want to know what you’d think of me.”

“I don’t think any different of you,” I said. “Keyd—it’s all right. It’s all right. It doesn’t change anything, okay? Look at me. You’re not better or worse for it. You’re just you. It’s all right.”

Keyd looked like he was about to cry, which was kind of horrible. With all of this, with everything, that had been going on, Keyd fighting his sexuality wasn’t something I had ever expected to deal with. Hell, I was doing the same damned thing. But at least it was kind of progressive and trendy to be an alternative sexuality here in California. Keyd’s society—I didn’t know anything yet but it already seemed like a nightmare. Keyd was one of the strongest, toughest people I had ever met, and yet just talking about this was nearly breaking him apart.

“Keyd—“ I said again, and then had no idea how to continue. I was holding the collar of his shirt in both hands, and I didn’t know if this was where everything stopped, or where it started.

“Why—“ he said, again not looking at me, but at somewhere far to the right of my face. “Why are you doing this?”

“I want to,” I said. “I don’t really get it and I’m not trying to. I just want to. You’re—you’re okay with it, right?”

Slowly, Keyd nodded. He still couldn’t seem to look at me.

“Since the first time we met, I—“ he started, and then snapped his mouth shut. But I wasn’t stupid, I understood what he’d been about to say. And, seriously, that kind of scared me. I couldn’t even describe how I felt about this—kind of astounded, shattered, sickened, and aching. I couldn’t square with all of this yet. It was really, really fast—going from nothing at all to this. I’d never expected this to be mutual.

“Fuck,” I said. “I have to—uhm—let me think, a second.”

Keyd just nodded. He looked like he needed a second, too. Or more like a week—or a year. We’d both kind of stunned each other, and now it was just—bizarre. What the fuck were we supposed to do now?

It was at least a few minutes that we just sat there, quiet, together on the couch. I’d said I needed to think but I wasn’t doing much of it at all. My brain was just buzzing in a haze and I was trying to figure out if, after all of this, I even wanted it at all, because I’d wanted it so badly when it was unattainable, and now I could just feel Keyd next to me, shifting against me with each breath, just reminding me of how male and foreign he really was, how much I had no idea how to deal with any of it.

I’d never thought, really thought, about this going both ways. It had been weird enough that I was attracted to another guy, but I hadn’t thought that another guy might ever be attracted to me. That was a whole new level of this that I was not prepared for, not at all.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I blurted, finally, the hardest thing to admit.

“I know,” Keyd said, quietly. “Neither do I.”

“That’s not very fucking useful at all, is it?” I said, and Keyd gave me a tight, nervous smile. It was only the second time I’d seen him smile, and it wasn’t a very reassuring one.

“No,” he agreed. “I don’t have—experience, at all, with this.”

“You’re not a virgin, are you?” I said, my mind jumping a little far ahead of things, but seriously. Despite how he looked, I knew Keyd had to be much older than I was, and if he was about to tell me he was some sort of centuries-old virgin I was going to have to start laughing at him, no matter how rude that was.

“No,” Keyd said, with a kind of defensive irritability. “It wouldn’t be acceptable for me to be. It’s barely acceptable that I’m not married yet.”

“So who’d you do it with? Not—Rysa?” That idea was a little gross—they were practically siblings, after all.

“No!”Keyd said, obviously just as put off by the thought as I was. “Just—women,” he said. “No one I really knew, or—cared about. I just had to make sure people knew. It’s—“

“A mark of manhood?” I guessed, when Keyd trailed off. That wasn’t much different. It was ridiculous how fast I’d had to prove to my friends that I’d had sex with my first girlfriend, back in high school. I hadn’t been very suave or thoughtful about it, and that was pretty much what had broken us up. But it had been lose the girlfriend or have my friends think I wasn’t man enough—I’d panicked.

“Yes,” Keyd said, with a slight bitter tinge to his voice. He glanced at me. “You—understand.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah—maybe not to the same degree, but I get it.”

“Rysa never really has, not fully,” Keyd said. “It’s different for her—different for women.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think it really is.”

Keyd was still looking at me.

“What do we do?” he asked, finally, with sort of an honest desperation.

It was a good question. I had no answer for it.

#

Rysa came back only a short time later, with Keyd and I both still quietly puzzling over that last question. She’d obviously noticed the tension between us over the last few days, because she looked honestly startled to see us sitting next to each other on the couch.

“Hey,” I said, twisting around to address her over the back of the couch. “How is—what’s going on, over there?”

“It’s still fading,” Rysa said. “Like it should.”

Keyd twisted around similarly. “And Ahieel?” he asked, quietly. She shook her head.

Keyd made a soft sighing sound, and I almost forgot myself right there and reached out and touched him. But I didn’t, managed to catch myself before I did that. We hadn’t figured anything out yet. And he’d said that Rysa had no idea he was gay. Or—whatever he was.

“Alan,” Rysa said, and I startled. “Shall we go?”

More practice. More messing around with my stupid, nonsensical ability.

“Yeah,” I said, getting reluctantly off the couch, “sure.”

I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay with Keyd, because…it felt like we’d gotten somewhere. And it was kind of a bad place to leave off—me suddenly figuring out that Keyd actually felt something back but was seriously terrified that he did, and Keyd hopefully figuring out that I had no problem with it, because I wanted back.

I looked back at him, just before I followed Rysa out of the door. He was still turned over the back of the couch, looking at us. Or me. His eyes met mine and he looked so…oddly lost, that I almost told Rysa to forget the whole thing. I actually took a step back towards him, but he shook his head, quickly, making a little motion with his hand that seemed to insinuate I should go, after all.

My heart was kind of jumping around in my chest and I felt high-strung and nervous as Rysa and I made the getting-really-familiar walk down to the little park. I wasn’t saying anything, and neither was she, and I wondered if she’d already figured out something was up.

Our stupid practice session went like normal. I was getting better at resisting absorbing everything, but I still wasn’t great at it. And Rysa still couldn’t figure out what I was, or had been.

“If there was some alternate energy,” she said, as we walked back, “if you could absorb any spells from light, to interact with everything else, I think I would be able to tell, more easily.”

“But we can’t exactly do that,” I said. I had some left over stuff in me from Ahieel, and the grove, but I learned a bit ago that I couldn’t do anything with it. It was just energy, with no form or purpose or inclination. It wasn’t spells.

“Right,” Rysa said. “If I had to, really had to make a guess, I would say that you’re probably an alter. Although the way you’ve been taking spells from me before they’re cast is more like a nullifier. So—I really can’t be sure.”

“It’s all right,” I said. It really couldn’t be that important. But I thought Rysa was probably just frustrated that she couldn’t figure it out. We walked back the rest of the way in silence.

#

Dinner that night was such a goofy affair that I was surprised Rysa didn’t call both me and Keyd out. Keyd deviated from his norm just by staying at the table with us both—at the infrequent times that they did eat, Keyd had always taken his elsewhere, especially recently. But he was here now. Once in a while I risked a glance over at him, and half the time he was doing the same to me. We would both look away when that happened, if only to not alert Rysa, but there was no way she wasn’t noticing a completely different vibe between us. She picked up on the subtlest of things, and we were being incredibly far from subtle.

It was the first time I’d ever really been hiding anything from Rysa. It felt kind of strange. Because she and Keyd were so close and interconnected that usually telling one of them one thing was like telling both. But now Keyd and I had this little secret, this little thing that we couldn’t let her know about. It felt almost like a betrayal, and I couldn’t imagine how Keyd actually felt about it.

After dinner, Keyd caught my wrists, and pulled me into the hallway. Rysa was doing the dishes (something I’d taught her to do after she insisted, because she’d felt bad about me always doing them) and I could hear the water running through the wall, clinking plates and silverware.

“I just have to ask you…” Keyd said, his voice low and soft. It was the first chance we’d gotten to talk since earlier this afternoon. “That you—really mean this. Because I—you don’t know what this, for me—how risky this is.”

“I mean this,” I said. And Christ, he was so damn tall, but I stretched myself up as far as I could go, and kissed him. Just lightly, close-mouthed, chaste. His grip on my wrists tightened so suddenly that it hurt, and I felt him shaking against me. His magic started to buzz crazily, getting stronger and deeper and wild.

He made a little noise against me, and suddenly his hand was against the small of my back, his fingers in my hair, dragging me up against him. I grabbed back at him, everything going from chaste to really not very quickly. He actually stumbled back, against the wall, and I fell against him, everything pressed together and my hands going under his shirt and sliding against his burning skin. I could feel his magic like a vibration around him, strumming and pulsing and beating into my body like a drum.

Something snapped, dry and loud beside my ear, and I startled in Keyd’s grip and jerked back from him. He’d done the same, and he looked at me with his pale eyes huge and bright.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry—I didn’t mean to do that.”

“You did that?”

“Nnh, yes.” Keyd didn’t look pleased about it. I had no idea what he had just accidentally done, but I suddenly realized we were right in the middle of the damn hallway and Rysa was just over in the kitchen and—

“Hey,” I said. “Let’s—let’s…come on.” I pushed him gently off me with my other hand, and tugged on him. He was surprisingly easy to guide, and followed me, clutching hard back at my hand, into my room. I thought about shutting the door behind us, decided not to, but then Keyd did it for me. When I looked at him, his head was lowered, his hair falling over his face.

“I don’t think I—can,” he muttered, so quietly I almost didn’t hear him. “Do this. Yet.”

“Do—“ and then I realized what dragging him into my room must have looked like. Damn, had it really been that long that I’d forgotten what an inherently sexual place a bedroom was? “Shit, no, I didn’t mean—I just didn’t want to do this all in the hallway! Rysa could see, and I—“

“Oh,” Keyd said, and went red. I laughed, because I couldn’t help it. Keyd flushing was an odd concept.

“I don’t think I can either, yet,” I said. “And there’s no way I would unless we were both all for it. I just wanted to talk, more in private.”

“All right,” Keyd said, and sounded into that idea. So he sat on the corner of the bed and, to be safe and non-invasive, I sat on my beanbag chair against the opposite wall. That way we were close enough to talk but it also wasn’t looking like I was about to put a move on him.

I wasn’t really sure what was going on. We’d both awkwardly admitted a mutual attraction, but there was such an inherent psychological block on Keyd’s end that I was pretty sure we weren’t going back to making out anytime soon. I felt more like I was going to be playing psychologist for him for a bit. Which I actually felt all right with. It gave me time to actually—realize this was even happening. I was actually trying to get involved with another guy.

“Tell me about—you,” Keyd said. “And this kind of thing. You’ve—with other men?”

“No,” I said, almost laughing at the assumption. “Never, I—you’re the first.”

“Why?” Keyd said, and the question was so flatly honest that I knew he wasn’t fishing for a compliment. And it threw me, because with everything else I’d been contorting my brain around figuring out, I hadn’t even started to think about why.

“Can I—get back to you on that?” I said. “Honestly—I’m new to this too.”

Keyd actually half-smiled. “All right,” he said. “I guess I couldn’t answer right away if you asked me the same, either.”

At least I wasn’t alone in being an awkward, bumbling idiot here. Keyd just had such a composed exterior that no one would ever assume he was anything but completely confident in everything he did. I think I’d learned more about him this single day than I had in the entire time I’d known him.

“But you have with women?” he pressed, and I nodded. I wasn’t sure why he needed to know, but there was no harm in it.

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s been a couple girls I dated, nothing ever really serious. I know a few guys with real intense relationships that’ll probably be married in a few years, but—I guess I was never really into that.”

“But no one’s pressuring you to marry,” Keyd said, half a question but mostly a statement.

“No, not really. I’m sure my parents would love to see it, and love to see grandkids more, but I’ve got a lot of siblings who can take over that job. Especially if I really do turn out to be gay.” I kind of stumbled over the word. It was still sort of shocking to say, even if I wasn’t yet sure that was even what I was.

I was also starting to wonder if all of these pressures about sex and marriage Keyd had on him were part of the extra “responsibilities” that Rysa had sometimes vaguely alluded that Keyd had. I still didn’t actually know very much about him at all, compared to the amount of things there seemed to be to know. But I was starting to get that this kind of stuff was probably quite important to his culture.

“You don’t want to get married,” I said, which was only a question as much as Keyd’s last one had been.

“I’m not very interested in it,” Keyd said. “But it’s not a choice I have. One of the reasons I pledged antshil with Rysa and joined the general ranks was so I could delay it. My father was—unhappy with me.”

“And he doesn’t know that you’re—not interested?” I didn’t just mean marriage.

Keyd shook his head. “I told you. I’ve hid this my whole life, from everyone. Even from Rysa.”

That surprised me. “What—seriously? You don’t think she’d understand?”

“It wouldn’t be her fault—but no. She was raised just like everyone else, to think about it the same way. She’s too important to me and I—couldn’t lose her by telling her.”

“I don’t think she would want to lose you, either,” I said, but Keyd misunderstood.

“That’s why I won’t tell her,” he said, a little shortly, and I got a feeling he didn’t want to talk about this particular part of the subject any longer.

“So,” I said. “So. If you can’t tell anyone and you can’t act on it and everyone expects to you marry some expendable girl—what are you doing right now?”

Keyd’s features tightened, almost imperceptibly. I was watching his face a lot more now, looking for these tiny changes. All of them meant something—and I was going to learn how to read them. Because otherwise I would never know what the hell he was feeling. And I did want to know.

“There are only two things I’ve ever done in my life that weren’t expected of me,” Keyd said. “One was pledging antshil with Rysa. The other is—this. I’ve known that I was this way most of my life, but I knew I would never act on it. You’re—the only one who has ever made me want to. I’ll still have to hide what I am, from everyone else. But not from myself.”

“So,” I said, my mouth suddenly dry. I was the only person Keyd had ever wanted to be gay for—was that complimenting or insulting? “That means you—want something with me. This isn’t just talk.”

Keyd just looked at me for a moment. “I do—want something with you,” he said. “But, this is difficult for me. I can’t tell you what, or how soon. I’m even still just trying to accept that—you want anything to do with me.”

“Don’t say it like that,” I said. “And it’s fine—to hold off. It’s not like I’ve done this either. But I’m willing to, you know. Give it a shot.I really do like you, you know.”

I probably wouldn’t have said that normally, but it seemed like Keyd really needed that reassurance. And he looked startled, but maybe—it was hard to tell, because I’d never seen the emotion on him—pleased.

“It is different here,” Keyd said, sort of a question. He didn’t seem to pitch his voice at the end of questions much at all, actually. “To be—this way—is accepted.”

“It’s getting worked on,” I said.

“You said you’d never—would anyone give you trouble, over this? Because I’d—“ kill them for you, was kind of what I heard in the way Keyd’s voice hardened suddenly. But he actually finished his sentence with, “—not want to do anything like that to you.”

“Uh,” I said. I hadn’t been thinking long term. Or—about coming out or anything. I didn’t even think I was gay yet. Still. Ever. Whatever. I just had this thing for Keyd, who happened to be male. “I—don’t know. It’s really bad, for your people, isn’t it?”

Keyd only nodded, but he actually paled as he did. His face just washed out, of color and expression both, and his stare went blank, unfocused at the floor.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

This time, Keyd shook his head. “None of them,” he said, a little carefully, and glanced at me, “are here.”

“Okay,” I said. So, for a little bit then, until—well, until he and Rysa left, I guess—this was all right. We could do, at least, something. “So. What…do we do?”

“I do like kissing you,” Keyd said, with a little, difficult smile. I guess he was trying to be a little lighter about this. “Can we do more of that?”

“Yeah.” I smiled back. “Definitely.”

I hoped he meant now, because I moved off the beanbag chair and went to sit beside him on the bed. He started a little, but didn’t move away, and I figured it was fine. I put one hand on his face, carefully, trying not to move too quickly. It was like dealing with some sort of timid, wild animal—if I startled him, he would flee.

I leaned forward and kissed him, slowly and thoroughly, carefully not touching any other part of him in case it was too much. But I felt his fingers close around my wrist, and he pulled our hands up against his chest, into the hot space between our bodies. I gripped his shoulder with my other hand, angling him to me—he shifted forward and breathed in hard and his hand curled at the back of my neck and now this was real making out, not a sterile safe kiss.

I sort of climbed/rolled over onto him, and he lost his balance or something because he fell back to the bed. I fell with him, we kind of bumped faces pretty hard, and Keyd made a little sound like “ouch” which made me start laughing. But I grabbed his face again and this time he came up to meet me, and his hands went into my hair and pulled and gripped and there was a lot of hot, hot breath between us and everything tasted bizarrely of pasta sauce. We sort of rolled over, Keyd doing the most to facilitate that, easing his body over on top of mine and pinning me with his warm, kind of heavy weight to the bd.

He was the one who broke away first, lifting up on his elbows and looking a little dazed and bemused. He didn’t seem to be aware that he’d rolled us over because he looked a little startled that he was on top of me.

“Um,” he said, and blinked his pale eyes at me. His face was moving in a way that looked like he was suppressing a smile, or just not sure if he should be smiling.

“Was that okay?” I asked, grinning a little.

“I’m not sure yet,” Keyd said, lifting one hand up and putting it back in my hair. “Do it again.”

#

We did, and we did for a while—a nice make-out session that ended when Keyd suddenly freaked out, pushed me off and pulled away, and disappeared into the attached tiny master bathroom for a few minutes. I wasn’t going to pretend I didn’t know why—because it wasn’t like it hadn’t happened to me too—but there was just no way, this soon, for anything like that.

Keyd came back, tight-jawed in embarrassment, and it took another moment of cajoling to even get him to sit down again. I’d’ve liked to have gone into the bathroom myself for a bit but right now I was just going to…sit on it and deal. Keyd was the one with the issues here, way deeper than mine, and I couldn’t run away or he definitely would.

“I feel stupid,” Keyd said, which I think was the first time I’d ever heard the words I feel come out of his mouth.

“Don’t,” I said. “It’s okay.”

He didn’t look reassured at all. The poor guy really did have issues. A lot of them. That I even knew about—and there were probably a lot more to discover. Maybe for this one I could find a book called Everyone Ejaculates and he’d feel better. I’d bet good money on the fact that someone had written a book like that.

So because Keyd was even more skittish than before, now, I put everything vaguely physical on full stop. So, instead, we talked.

Keyd still wasn’t a huge talker, but I was getting the idea that a lot of the reason he’d never really spoken to me was because he’d been uncomfortable around me. It wasn’t hard to shake words out of him anymore—he’d speak, but his sentences just tended to be shorter, more succinct. More like when he talked with Rysa.

I can’t even remember what we talked about. Stupid, fluff, bubblegum stuff, the same kind of stuff we’d used to talk about when Keyd was doing his ‘buddy hour’ thing. We sat with our backs against the wall and just didn’t do anything that would rise above the rating of ‘platonic’.

And then, somehow, at some point, we both dozed off. Still totally clothed and on top of the covers, which is exactly how we were when I woke up abruptly at about seven thirty in the morning, my neck aching because of the uncomfortable angle it had been cricked at against Keyd’s arm. Keyd was still sleeping, his mouth slack open and all his hair in his face. He really didn’t look very attractive when he was sleeping, and that made me just a little more…fond of him.

I remembered that when I had first met him, I had thought him too angular and harsh in his features, like cut glass. I’d gotten used to how he looked somewhere during everything, or I’d reassessed him—but he was handsome. Like Rysa had a deep, wild beauty about her, Keyd had the same thing, only certainly more masculine. He really was striking—just not when he was sleeping.

I flicked some of his hair out of his mouth so he wasn’t breathing it in anymore, watched him for another moment, then got up. Didn’t really need to be a creepy stalker right now, especially when this was all so new and fragile and tentative. I could give him space—hell, I needed space.

I went out to the kitchen and really felt like having a pancake. Or about ten. Most of my meals came out of cans and packages but I could make pancakes all right. Rysa was still asleep on the couch so I tried to be kind of quiet—I had no idea how deeply she slept.

I felt so ridiculously cheerful that I was almost worrying myself—except that I didn’t have room for worry in with all the goofy giddiness. I just felt so good about this whole thing. Not that there was anything official, or that there even ever might be, or even that this was any kind of stable anything. But having a serious talk and then making out a bit and falling asleep on each other was not a bad night in my book. Even if that was all that ever happened. I could be happy for the moment, and I was going to take that.

I knew it was going to be hard to get involved, in any sort of way, transitory or not, with a person who hid his emotions away like shameful secrets. Or someone whose society would do something terrible to him if they found out his sexuality. Or someone who was pretty much afraid of that sexuality. This was something really intense and deep and—on top of my own insecurities and uncertainties, I didn’t even know if I could deal with Keyd’s too.

But all of that was for thinking about later, way later, when I joined reality again off of my high happy cloud. I liked my high happy cloud right now. It was a place where I didn’t have to think too much. If I started thinking about all of this—I’d probably have a complex.

A few minutes later, I felt the little strum of energy that was uniquely Keyd’s. Meant he was in or near the room. When I glanced up, he was standing sort of halfway behind the wall that opened to the living room, most of his body behind it but his head leaning out. When he saw me see him, he took another step out.

“Hi,” he said, with a soft tilt of his head.

“Hey,” I said back. We looked at each other, for the first time in days with no awkward discomfort. I just felt relaxed. I had no idea what this was or where it was going but even that uncertainty was better than everything else that had been before it.

“Want a pancake?” I said, after another moment. He blinked, a little bemusedly.

“What’s a pancake?”

I grinned. “I’ll make you one and you can see.”

Technically, they were made already, so I just gave him one. Since he’d eaten last night I didn’t expect he was very hungry because of his and Rysa’a ridiculously slow metabolism. And he didn’t eat much of it, and he also ignored the fork, rolling the cake up like a cigar or something and eating it that way. Meanwhile I was chomping through a stack of about four.

“It’s kind of sweet,” Keyd said, and I tried to practice my Keyd-reading skills by looking at the tiny changes in his face when he spoke. There was maybe a very slight lift to his eyebrows, and a pull on one side of his mouth.

“Do you like it?”

Keyd paused for another moment, then nodded. “I think so.” But he only ate another bite, and was done.

It was nice that things weren’t that awkward, at least not yet. They probably could get so, would get so if we did anything more than this. But right now—just another reason to feel ridiculously cheerful.

“May I use the shower?” Keyd said, and I nodded. Both he and Rysa asked, every single time. Probably some sort of manners thing.

Keyd looked around, quickly, like he expected someone other than Rysa to suddenly pop up, then pressed a fast kiss against my mouth before standing up. I don’t think I’d ever understood the meaning of “steal a kiss” before right then. Because Keyd was up and gone and out of the room in the next second.

I just sat there, kind of stunned. It had been entirely unexpected, and oddly—could I even ascribe this word to Keyd?—cute. Now I just wanted to chase him down and throw him against something and do all the stuff I’d been holding back from. But instead I got up to wash the dishes, feeling a little warmth in my chest the whole time I did.

#

The day went as normal. Rysa and Keyd took their shifts of going out and checking on the grove, making sure it was fading like it was supposed to, and also scanning around for any other signs of Ahieel. And I went to classes, but sometimes two of us were in the apartment at the same time.

When it was just Rysa and me, we aimlessly chattered and sometimes watched some House reruns, which were hysterical to watch with her because she refused to believe that they were representations of what doctors here were supposed to be. She also couldn’t understand what they were saying because the TV was, of course, not in frequency. I verbally transcribed things to her, at her insistence.

When it was Keyd and me, things were different. We’d spent the last week rabidly not speaking to each other, but now we were in a sort of peaceful coexistence, with a thread of edgy expectancy in it. It took me almost half the day to realize that it was now shared sexual tension. But a sort of mild, middle-schoolers-with-a-crush kind of tension. We knew we liked each other and we also knew that nothing was going to happen about it very fast. We shot each other looks all day and both pretended that we weren’t, and pretended just as hard that we weren’t trying to touch more than usual when we walked past each other.

I just didn’t want to push him, and I was very sure he wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure if I was, either. And not even about sex—I wasn’t sure if he was ready to handle kissing again this soon. These silly little gestures we did all day—they were fine, and harmless. If anything more happened, I was going to let Keyd start it.

I also wanted him to talk to Rysa about it. Right now, we had to hide everything from her, but she was too smart to not figure it out—if she hadn’t already. And I was pretty sure there was no way she would abandon Keyd for it—they both just loved each other too damn much.

The next day went pretty much the same as well. My happy cloud had finally sunk and dispersed and left me on the cold, barren ground of reality, where I had to stop thinking mm, making out was nice, and start thinking about what the hell did we start?

Firstly, Keyd and Rysa couldn’t stay here forever. Rysa had already made a few mentions of what would happen when the grove was entirely gone (and it almost was, at this point). That she and Keyd would return to the last world they knew that had been occupied by their fellow oenclar, and try and contact their people. They still had no idea how long they had been under Ahieel’s statue curse and what had happened in the ongoing war in their absence.

It made sense, of course. And I was also starting to understand why Keyd had even been cagey about starting a friendship with me. Because it would stop as soon as they left—and hell if I was going with them to another damn world. I had my semester to try and salvage (since I was finally going back to classes, now), and a normal life to try and pick up again. And maybe I had been stupid to push this thing with Keyd. And it was really unfair that I had to consider all these factors when all I really wanted was burn off some of this damn sexual frustration that had been building up for the past week. I didn’t want to think anymore, I was tired of it.

And Keyd wasn’t avoiding me, persay, but he wasn’t making any sort of moves, either. It was like it had been before the last confrontation with Ahieel—a sort of casual coexistence in which we talked, but about nothing. He didn’t seek me out more than usual and I didn’t either. Maybe he’d figured this was stupid, too. Because it was. And he had way more reasons to cut this thing short.

It hit day three after the Incident, as I was starting to call it. Still nothing more had happened, or looked like it was going to happen, or had even started thinking about looking like it was going to happen. Discouraged is about the lightest description for what I felt about that. Still, I wasn’t going to slink around like a kicked cat or a dumped chick (even though that’s what I felt like) and I just kept doing things as normal.

I had a later class this day, getting out at about 6:30 from the art building, which was way across the campus from the library and cafeteria, but I headed over there anyway. I always checked the grove while I was here, there was no reason not to. Since Ahieel was almost verifiably not around, it didn’t feel dangerous to get over there by myself.

As I came around the corner between the two buildings, I could see that the grove was barely there. I had to double-take at it to even realize that it even was. The trees looked like the gauziest of curtains, faintly gleaming like dying glowsticks. I could see all the way through it, to the buildings in the back. It would probably be gone in another day, or so, at this rate. Or at least very, very soon.

“Shit,” I muttered, something in my chest sinking. When it was gone, Keyd and Rysa would be, too. There was no point to even trying anything more with Keyd, now.

I went back to my apartment, slowly. I took the drive at about the slowest speed I could. No reason to hurry back and deliver news that they could be leaving soon. I parked my car in the lot and sat, for a few minutes, gripping the steering wheel. A week ago, I would have said hell yes, let them leave. Now…Christ, I had no idea. I didn’t know what I wanted.

Keyd and Rysa were on the couch, talking with each other in their own language, when I came in. Both of them snapped to attention and looked at me, breaking off their conversation.

“Uh.” I rubbed my fingers at my temple, kind of startled by the intensity of interest aimed at me. “The grove is—it’s practically gone,” I said. “I mean, I can barely see it at all. It’ll probably be gone tomorrow.”

“You should check it,” Keyd said, immediately, to Rysa. I gave him kind of a strange look, and so did she, but she got up.

“Probably,” she said. She glanced at him, glanced at me—she knew something was up—but she excused herself and left through the front door.

About three seconds after the door clicked shut I found myself being pushed up against the wall, Keyd’s hands on me and his body flush against mine, his hair tickling against my face.

“Whoa,” I said, and lifted my hands to his hips, the easiest place to get a grip. “Whoa, what—“

Keyd ducked in and pushed his mouth against mine, shutting me up instantly. Especially because he suddenly had his tongue in my mouth and whoa, hands under my shirt and on my stomach and up my back and Christ he moved fast when he wanted to.

He drew back, just enough to talk, even though his lips moved against my mouth when he did. “We’ll leave, when it’s gone,” he said through a breath, hot air against my skin.

I swallowed, slightly. “I know.”

Keyd reached up, carefully with one hand, and took my glasses off. I don’t know what he did with them because my vision was pretty much tunneled to just his mouth and pale eyes and dark hair and the world beyond was filled with bokeh blur.

“I want to,” he said, very quietly, and I felt his fingers brush against the face of my face. I heard him swallow, and his eyes closed, laying a sweep of dark lashes against his skin. “Do—you?”

So he did have a libido. And he wanted to use it.

“Yeah,” I said, kind of thickly. Despite all the reasons not to, I did. “Yeah, I—yeah. Yes.”

#

I walked Keyd blind through the doorway of my room, because I was halfway through pulling his shirt off and it was kind of stuck over his head. His hands gripped and slid at my waist and the edges of my jeans, holding himself steady until we hit the bed and fell, rolling. I finally got the shirt off and Keyd’s hair fell in static strands against his face, a soft crackle when he pulled me down close and seared our mouths together again.

His skin was warm, burning almost, and every time I touched the mark across his chest, or any of the marks on him, I felt a strong pulse through my body, a bass beat added to the energy already strumming through the air around us. I wasn’t sure if it was mine or Keyd’s but it was there, like a field of thick power simmering off of us.

I was working blind on Keyd’s jeans, while he was trying at my shirt, we were still trying to kiss each other and sometimes missing—I got his ear and he made a tiny sound almost like a laugh when I got the corner of his eye, but he’d got my chin and some of my nose and when he couldn’t get my shirt he rolled us over, me below him, clamped my hips between his knees and dragged it off, twisting it around my arms and keeping them held up above my head. He smeared hot, fast kisses again my chest, each one a burning mark against the cold air in my room, and I wrangled my arms around, trying to get them out of my shirt because I needed to touch him back.

He finally let go of the shirt and my hands flew down to the back of his neck and his hair, tugging at him until he leaned up and let me drag him into another messy, uncoordinated and perfectly amazing kiss, pulling his body flat to mine. I could feel the undone zipper of his jeans cold and rough scraping against my stomach, and I worked a hand down between us as Keyd was doing his best to suck all the air of my body through my mouth, and I got my hand down to his jeans and then down into his jeans and down to somewhere else. Foreign and familiar both—I had one of these, I knew what the hell to do with it. It was just a little different, on someone else.

Keyd’s entire body shuddered, and he let out a strange gasping noise against my mouth. I tightened my grip on him a little bit, experimentally, feeling kind of light-headed and daring and shocked I was even doing this. Christ, it was bizarre. I’d never imagined doing this, nor could I have imagined liking it. But it was kind of amazing, and Keyd reacting to it. He was arching a little bit, his face fallen to my neck and pressing against my throat, his breathing faster and rougher whenever I moved my hand on him. He was gripping my hair so hard I thought he might pull some out.

And then, abruptly, his one wing burst out from over his shoulder, flaring wide and glittering in the light coming in through the blinds. Then I pulled my hand back fast because I was afraid I’d done something really wrong.

“Whoa,” I said, while Keyd’s eyes widened, and he pulled back a little from me. His wing shifted and shivered, strains of light sliding over the glassy surfaces.

“I didn’t do that,” he said, both breathless and puzzled. “Or, I didn’t mean to.”

“Really?” I said, and a grin twitched at my mouth. “That’s kind of hot.”

Keyd grimaced a little, and moved his shoulder. I put a hand on his arm.

“Don’t get rid of it,” I said, and he startled. I had the sudden thought that he was ashamed of it, now. That he only had one.

“Don’t get rid of it,” I said again, and Keyd’s eyes wavered before he leaned down and kissed me. His wing curled up and forward, draping over us.

“All right,” he murmured against my mouth. “I won’t.”

#

We didn’t get to sex. Maybe that’s kind of vanilla, or whatever, but who cares? I didn’t. I was perfectly fine with a mutual hand-job because damn, it was really good. Probably anything at this point would have seemed awesome, but I didn’t even care. Keyd obviously had no idea what he was doing but it wasn’t like I did either, and that made it okay. Better than.

Afterwards, I think I dozed off, but not for very long. When I woke up again it didn’t feel like much later, and it was still nighttime. Keyd was cramped up beside me on the bed (it was a twin, not the most roomy), sleeping, and his wing was still out, folded up a little and lying over his arm. The obsidian pieces quivered a little with each breath he took, dark against his pale skin.

I touched one glittering piece, because I never had before. They felt like what I would have imagined—like volcanic glass, with smooth, circular ridges along the surface. I didn’t touch the edges, because I thought they would also be like I imagined; thin and razor-sharp.

Keyd shifted a little, stirring and rolling his face out of the pillow that he had completely stolen. His wing lifted and lowered again, spreading over me.

“What’s that,” he murmured, his voice thick with sleep.

“Just me.”

Keyd opened his eyes, and blinked up at me. For a long moment, he just looked at me, neutrally. Then, a very soft smile crossed his face. He didn’t say anything, but I didn’t think he needed to. I lay back down next to him, closer than before.

“You’re all right?” I asked him, and he nodded.

“You?”

“Yeah.”

Maybe—we could go again? That’d be awesome. I kind of reached out him, just as I heard the front door open, and swing shut again.

Christ, Rysa was back. Maybe she wouldn’t come back here. The door wasn’t even closed. Keyd had already gone tense and alert, going from sleepy to sharply awake in about a fifth of a second.

“Keyd,” I heard her voice coming down the hall. “Keyd, we have to talk, it’s gone—“

She appeared in the doorway, and went utterly still, freezing there. Keyd lurched up, his wing snapping up and disintegrating back into his skin in an instant, his face going dead white. I didn’t even get to move at all before Rysa had obviously taken in the sight of us, together, mostly naked, in my bed, and there wasn’t anything else it could be explained as. Keyd’s mouth was open, his throat working like he wanted to speak, but was incapable of it.

But Rysa didn’t really look at Keyd at all. She looked at me. I could see the pale, bright green of her eyes even from across the room. The initial expression of surprise was gone from her face—in place was a sort of neutrality that didn’t so much worry me as it did confuse me.

And then, she dipped her head in—acquiescence? acceptance? surrender?—and took a step back out of the room. The door closed, softly, behind her.

Keyd put his face to his knees at once, curling up on himself. I touched his shoulder, the markless one, and he jolted badly.

“It’s okay,” I said, awkwardly. “It’s—“

“It’s not,” Keyd murmured. “No. She—she’ll hate me. For…for this, what I am.”

“God,” I said. “If she cares about you a fourth as much as it just looks, then there’s no way she can hate you for this. Seriously, I mean—“

“You don’t understand,” Keyd said. His voice was flat and empty and horrible. “It’s different—for us, it’s not like here—“

I put my arm around his back, and pulled him against me. After a moment of resistance, Keyd leaned into me. He was shaking, and his breathing was forcefully controlled.

“It’s not great here either,” I said. “But not everyone thinks the same, and Rysa—I don’t think she could hate you, ever. You’re afraid of losing her, but I think she’d be just as afraid of losing you. She’ll have to understand.”

Keyd seized my arm. “Talk to her,” he said. “Talk to her, please. I—don’t think I can.”

I couldn’t fight his battles for him. But maybe I could herald for the approaching army.

“Okay,” I said. “Now?”

He nodded, wordlessly. I nudged my forehead against his temple and just let my head rest there for a moment, and Keyd leaned back against me. We took two breaths in accidental tandem, slow and heavy in the stillness of the room. And then I lifted away.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

I put my clothes back on while Keyd just sat there, staring dully at a spot on the carpet and looking like he’d gone into shock. He apparently really did think this was some sort of severing point between him and Rysa. And maybe it was—although I had seriously miscalculated that girl if it was.

I went to the door, opened it, then paused. I looked at Keyd, who slowly looked up at me himself, his expression heavy and just…miserable.

“I don’t want this to be a choice between her or me,” I said. “If she really doesn’t understand, if she really doesn’t accept it—I’m out of this.”

He looked startled in the second before I shut the door between us. But I’d been serious. I couldn’t come between Rysa and Keyd. Their relationship was so much stronger and deeper than I could even conceive of, that I’d ever even known could exist between two people. I wouldn’t make Keyd choose one of us if Rysa couldn’t accept me as another part of Keyd’s life. If he actually did want me, that permanently.

Rysa was out in the kitchen, sitting at the table and staring straight ahead at the wall. She looked a little blurry since I still wasn’t sure where my glasses were. She startled when I came in and looked at me with her hard, unreadable gaze. I pulled out a chair next to her and dropped into it. I suddenly saw my glasses—they were here, on the table. I reached for them and put them on. Rysa was still staring at me, and now I stared back.

I wasn’t going to tiptoe around this, this had to be hashed out completely black and white. So I started with, “you’ve known, haven’t you?” Of she had—she wasn’t stupid.

“Well,” Rysa said, somewhat uncomfortably. “Yes, maybe.”

I leant forward on my elbows. “And?”

Rysa exhaled a little and fidgeted. “I think you’ll be good for him,” she said, finally. “I know you’ll be good for him. You already have been.”

“I’m not talking about me,” I said. “I’m talking about you. What do you think?”

“I—“ Rysa squirmed again, and then suddenly her eyes snapped up to meet mine. “You have to understand,” she said. “For us—men who sleep with men, and women who sleep with women…are more than usually killed.”

I stilled, something in me draining and going cold. Keyd. Shit, no wonder he’d been soterrified.

“That drastic, huh?” I muttered. I stared at my hands. There were places in this world that did the same thing, but it still felt like a savage and severe way to think.

“Well,” Rysa said. “They’re forcefully separated from their oen.” She drew her fingers along the black marks that twisted around her hands. “After tainting themselves that way—they are considered unworthy to bear them. And after a certain age, a long enough time living conjoined since birth—separation from our magic will kill us. Depending on the age…some survive it, some don’t.”

I swallowed. “If Keyd—“

“Keyd, at the age he is, would probably die,” Rysa said. Almost flatly. But when I looked at her face, her eyes were bright and blinking rapidly. “He has been hiding the way he is, from others if not even himself, for a very long time.”

“But you don’t—you can’t hate Keyd for it, can you?” I said, not daring to put hope in my voice. Rysa was as hard to read as Keyd sometimes. I had no idea what she was thinking.

She drew in a slow breath. “It’s how I was brought up to think. Keyd as well. But I’ve known how he is, for a long time, and I know how good of a person he is. He never wanted to hear me say anything on it, even if it was to say I didn’t care, that I wouldn’t love him any less. I couldn’t.”

“Good,” I said. “Good—I really hoped that’s what you would think. I know you really love him.”

“I do,” Rysa said softly. “And I’ve hated to see him so lost in himself for so long. It makes him lonely, in a way I can’t touch. But you—“ she gave me another piercing look, “—you make him act a little differently. You did since the beginning. I knew that his care for you was…very deep. Deeper than he wanted it to be. I’ll admit I never thought he would act on it.”

“I pushed him, a little,” I muttered. Push, hah—I’d pretty much thrown myself at him. But…it had worked. “I—uh—but you really have to talk to Keyd, about all of this. He thinks you hate him.”

Rysa sighed, and closed her eyes. “I want to talk with him,” she said. “I don’t know if he’ll listen. He never has before. Maybe if you—”

“Ah,” I said. “You’re still way closer to him than I am. If I go and preface whatever it is you say to him, it’s going to mean less. Just go and, you know—do your thing. Your I’m the boss and everyone’s going to listen to me thing.”

Rysa smiled at that. “Yes,” she said. “I can do that.”

“Good,” I said. “So go. Go right now.”

She stood up, her lower lip drawn into her mouth but her eyes set with her usual, fierce determination. Her hand came down, touched my shoulder, then squeezed briefly, as if for reassurance, or thanks. Then she walked down the hallway and back into my room.

I stayed at the kitchen table, my stomach churning and feeling like—I didn’t know what to feel. This could either be catastrophic, or completely fine. I didn’t want to screw Keyd up, I really didn’t. I didn’t want to hurt him.

At least ten minutes passed. Every second that ticked by just heightened the almost nauseated feeling I had, until I was wondering if I was actually going to be sick. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore, I had to get up, and I had to go back there. I did, creeping down the hallway, keeping against the wall, trying to be quiet. I couldn’t actually hear any voices, no talking. I got down to the end of the hall and peered around the frame of my door, glancing into my room.

I don’t know what Rysa had said to Keyd, or what emotional blockades they had finally pushed through, but whatever it was, it must have been epic. Keyd had his arms wrapped around Rysa’s waist, his head to her chest, sobbing noiselessly. Rysa was pressing her face against his neck, and she was crying. She was bent over him, stroking his hair and his back—he was still naked, and the one mark was dark and harsh against his skin.

I felt like I was intruding on something immensely private, something I shouldn’t have ever seen, and I stumbled away from the door and fled back out to the living room. I turned the TV on and turned it up loud, and tried to focus on whatever the hell mindless thing was blaring across the screen.

It was probably only a few minutes later that Keyd and Rysa came out of my bedroom, together. Holding hands. Keyd had put pants on but not a shirt, and Rysa was wiping her other hand under her eyes and shaking her head sharply. I thumbed the off button at once, and stood up, facing them.

“Is everything—“ I started, looking back and forth between them. “Are you—“

“Fine,” Rysa said, and smiled at me. “Better than that.”

At her side, Keyd nodded, and lifted his head, setting his shoulders back. He hadn’t looked this confident for a while, not since before our last encounter with Ahieel. But he looked sure now, and stronger. More like what I knew him for—knew him capable of.

He put out his hand to me—and I went to him. Rysa stepped aside, and Keyd leant down and embraced me—almost just like a strong, friendly hug, except for the slight nudge of his face against mine, and the whisper of something in his own language against my ear. I supposed even though Rysa was clearly accepting of this, Keyd didn’t want to push it. I got that. I was hardly trying to flaunt it either.

When I stepped out of his arms, he took my hand. And then he took Rysa’s again. Just for continuity, I reached for her hand too, and she took it. So we were standing in a little circle of hand holding.

“Thank you,” Keyd said, calmly but with a quiet force. The meekness from before was entirely gone. And it was all he said, but it was enough. Rysa smiled and squeezed his hand, then stepped forward and kissed his cheek. Then she moved over, and kissed my cheek.

“I’m glad it’s you, Alan,” she said, very quietly and I wasn’t even sure Keyd could hear. “I’m so glad.”

I didn’t really know what that meant, but if she was saying that she approved of me and Keyd—then that was great. I smiled at her, and we all kind of dropped hands, at the same time. I glanced at Keyd, who still had that no-shirt thing going on.

“Put some clothes on, stud,” I said, and Keyd laughed. I had never heard him do it before, and it startled me. Rysa’s laugh was dark and smoky and rich, but Keyd’s was lighter and almost boyish. Suddenly I could believe that he was all right, and I could believe that he could be happy. Maybe with me, maybe with just the knowledge that his closest companion didn’t hate him for the way he was. But he wasn’t exactly the same person I had met, weeks ago—and that was something good.

And whatever happened from here on, all three of us were going to manage it together.

All right, I’m editing this A/N to say that even though this is the end of Tenebrism, this story continues. There are currently two sequels, Chiaroscuro is the next one and the one after that (currently WIP) is Nocturne. This is not all of the story. :)