by Amy Lane
“Don’t you care where you are?” Whim was there under the moonlight because this was his holiday, a treat to himself. He wanted to feel the warmth of the lingering sun and the faint, cooling breeze. He wanted to smell the new-mown hay, brown grasses, and burgeoning green orchard smells that permeated the Sierra foothills in June. He wanted the absolute aloneness to seep into his bones, because it was so very different than the masses of family that beat in his blood from life on the hill. He cared very much where he was.
“I care that I’m not at home,” the boy said on a bleak sigh.
“Well, then,” Whim said, feeling a little disappointed that he would not be sharing flesh with someone this night—the boy was too young, after all, “for tonight and tonight only, I will care where you are, and this roof of darkness can be ours.”
The boy looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Do you want me for sex?” he asked suspiciously, and Whim gasped a little. He had forgotten that with the changing of the years, human children had become more like sidhe children about these matters.
“I don’t even know your name,” Whim replied, affronted. “And you are too young, even if I did.” The two of them began to walk together through the darkness, using the tracks as a guide but staying well away from them.
“My name is Charlie,” the boy supplied with a gratifying readiness, “and I’m eighteen.”
“My name is Whim, and I’m…. Well, shit… how old am I?”
“You don’t know?” the boy asked, and Whim wrinkled his nose at him.
“Our days pass so ordinarily,” Whim replied, wondering. “We sit and we do whatever we want…. There are the solstice celebrations, of course, but no real way of marking our days…. What year is it?”
Charlie told him, and Whim nodded, pretty sure. “Yes, I was born near the beginning of the last century. I am nearing one hundred, but not quite.”
Charlie shook his head and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Man, that’s messed up. If you live a hundred years, you’d think you’d have something to show for it. Pain, laughter, you know. Something.”
Whim looked at the young human with wondering eyes, seeing every feature perfectly with his better-than-human vision. Charlie had fading acne scars and the awkwardness of the young, but… but in that moment, Whim saw something special about him, something indefinable. It was a quality that never left.
“That’s exactly what Adrian said,” Whim told him, amazed. He’d thought Adrian was the only human—he’d been human once—capable of wisdom. Well, that should show Whim that arrogance was truly an unattractive personality trait. He would find himself struggling against making assumptions of his own superiority for the rest of his life.
“Is Adrian the reason you don’t want sex?” Charlie asked suspiciously, and Whim laughed outright.
“Adrian is sex on legs,” Whim told him frankly. “One night with you—one hundred nights with you—and Adrian would still play if I asked him. But no. You… you are barely the age of consent. I am not here to give you a yearning for things you can never have. I come out at Litha to give someone a gift, an offering. If they have regrets or loneliness or sadness in their lives, I can give them something magical—a memory that not even time can erase. A moment when their bodies become light and sound, and they’re one with the Goddess’s shining child. You—you have so much potential in you. You have no regrets yet. Look at you. Your hands are quivering with the urge to paint this night, surreal though it may be. Your eyes are looking at a dark sky and seeing heathered purples and blended greens, a charcoal-tinted rainbow with blood-edged stars. You hear music in the faraway freeway—I can watch it pulse in your throat. Your mind teems with a thousand stories of what is possible this night. I can hear your characters speaking, as though on stage. Myriad talents compete for space inside you, Charlie. You have no regrets—only possibilities.” He was very proud when he finished speaking. It was one of the longest speeches he’d ever made on a single topic.
Charlie looked at him very carefully. “You talk really weird,” he said at last. “Is that an elf thing?”
Whim looked at him steadily. In the darkness he could see the blush, the sideways slant to Charlie’s eyes, the way the pulse throbbed in his throat with a passion waiting to break free. “My words touched you,” he said softly. “You’re pulling into yourself because you are afraid of what I’ve said.”
And now Charlie looked over his shoulder, squinting into the darkness as though he could make something out. “Man, everybody wants to hear somebody beautiful tell them they’re special. Did you think you could tell me something like that and not make me want to cry like a weenie?”
Whim’s mouth quirked upward, and he stared at Charlie with more of that renewed appreciation. “My people do not think less of you if you shed tears,” he said earnestly, and Charlie turned a shining smile in his direction.
“I’ll have to remember that if I ever feel like crying again,” he said with mock seriousness. Whim felt a sudden shaft, a sudden flaw in the shape of his heart. He wouldn’t be here for Charlie to shed more tears. Not if he held true to the pattern of his butterfly mind.
“We only have Litha,” he said with soft regret. “But if it’s any comfort for you, I will be sorry to see the dawn.”
Charlie didn’t have anything to say to that, and he didn’t question why Whim would only be there for one night. Whim was grateful. Suddenly, his policy of only mingling with the humans one night a year sounded… artificial, artificial and cowardly, a shield between him and the censure of someone who might not understand the nature of Whim. Especially by the end of the night, when Whim had learned so much about Charlie, and everything about him was real and brave.
Charlie had just finished his senior year in high school. He had earned scholarships to a performing arts school—a full ride, in fact—but his father wanted him to join the military. Charlie didn’t want to go. He planned to tell his father the next morning that he couldn’t join the military. For one thing, the military did not appear to approve of specific ways of sharing flesh, and Charlie was gay.
“I never understood that word,” Whim said, frowning.
“You’re not gay?” Charlie asked, clearly disappointed.
“I’m sidhe,” Whim told him. “Most of us are pansexual. We don’t discriminate among genders or species.” Whim especially had no trouble with that. He tended to bed whomever he wanted, depending on… well, his whim.
Charlie raised his eyebrows and mouthed the word “species” with some appreciation, but then Whim asked him what he intended to do with his art scholarships and his family life, and he moved on to the answer.
“I guess now I’m going to have to really live up to all that bullshit I was just spouting and tell them,” he answered obliquely.
Whim blinked. “You didn’t mean it when you said it?” He was puzzled and let it show. Charlie flashed a crooked grin.
“What—you mean everything you say?” he asked snidely.
Whim nodded, his eyes open very wide. “I have to. I forget that humans and vampires and were-folk can lie, but we cannot. I did not realize you were lying.” Whim pulled his head back, a little disappointed.
“I’m not lying now,” Charlie said, his voice firm. Surprising Whim, he caught Whim’s chin with his fingers and made the taller man look down, into his eyes. “I mean every word I said, I swear. And I’ll never bullshit you again.”
Whim nodded, touched yet again. Maybe it was the boy’s youth that touched him, he thought optimistically. Youth would pass. But he did not think that was the reason this boy seemed to yank at his heart.
“You are a very good person, Charlie,” he said gravely. “This night is much more exciting than I had anticipated.”
“Even though you’re not getting laid?” Charlie asked, incredulous. “Because having not been laid yet, I can only tell you, I was really hoping you were up for it!”
Whim took a deep, deep breath and exhaled through his nose. The problem, he
thought crossly, was that human young were so beautiful at this age. There was an aching softness to even the strongest jaw, and a terrible vulnerability to simple things, like clavicles and biceps and limpid eyes that spoke of an awful, stomach-churning need to be cared for.
“I do not think so,” Whim said, wrapping an arm around Charlie’s shoulders. They trembled underneath the old ratty trench coat, and Charlie tucked right into him as though his slight frame was made to fit. “I think I’m up to good company and comfort tonight, if you don’t mind.”
They had reached a stand of woods by now, also carved by the cold iron of the railroad track, and Whim, with Charlie at his side, ventured into it. It was not too terribly deep or thick, but in the darkness it would have been daunting to a human, especially since the moon was not full and the light was poor. Charlie followed Whim’s footsteps without hesitation, and Whim turned toward him, trying not to censure.
“Please tell me you do not trust other humans the way you trust me!”
Charlie’s lips quirked up. “You just turned down sex. Twice. And you won’t even stand on a railroad track. Odds are good you’re not going to gank me with a shiv as soon as the light gets dark.”
Whim stopped and mouthed “gank me with a shiv” and then shook his head. “Whatever. You must promise me to take care of yourself, Charlie. Elves don’t reveal their true selves to just anybody. You’re special. Please be careful.”
Charlie’s long-suffering sigh was the only response. They found a nice place to sit and spread Charlie’s trench coat on the ground to sit upon it—he’d been sweating under it anyway, pure affectation on a night with a low temperature of eighty degrees—and then Whim spent the rest of the night talking with the boy and trying to convince him why his life, of all mortals’, was important.
It was a beautiful conversation. The night smelled lovely, and other than the two trains that passed that way during their time, there was no sound but the shush of the mortal road a few miles away and the occasional animal tracing delicately padded paths through the underbrush. Whim switched topics often, as he usually did, but Charlie seemed able to follow him, and their voices hummed into the breeze-touched summer night. Once, Charlie stopped talking abruptly and looked up, his eyes large. Whim turned his head and saw a family of rabbits venturing out in the predawn chill. Charlie shivered, and Whim stood regretfully.
“Is it over already?” Charlie was plaintive as Whim shook out the coat and put it over Charlie’s shoulders. Whim didn’t need to guide him through the trees or across the field this time, because the darkness had become tinged with silver.
Whim reached down and grabbed his hand, and he was gratified by the way their fingers threaded together. “This Litha has passed,” he told the boy logically.
“Does it have to end now?” Charlie asked. His voice was tired and had taken on an edge, like that of the child he no longer was.
“It doesn’t, no,” Whim told him thoughtfully. They had reached the railroad tracks by now, and Charlie took a step up to the rail so that Whim, down the rise a little from him, could look him in the eye.
“Then see me tomorrow,” he demanded, and Whim shook his head.
“Tomorrow, you’ll be no older than you are today,” he muttered—but it was hard, so hard, because the boy’s face was so amazingly appealing. His skin was pale, and in the predawn light, Whim could make out the barest print of dark brown freckles.
Charlie made a grunt of impatience, grasped Whim’s face in both chilled hands, and pulled his face so close Whim could see gold flecks glimmering in his chocolate brown eyes. They stood, panting gruffly at each other, and then Whim heard it—the approaching train. Charlie must have felt it through the soles of his battered sneakers, because he gave an evil little smile and hauled Whim the last few inches and kissed him roughly.
Whim groaned and wrapped his arms around that skinny, all-ribs-and-elbows body and opened his mouth and returned the kiss, then pulled back roughly. “You can’t do that,” he panted, Charlie’s taste still on his tongue. “You can’t steal kisses from the sidhe.”
“Why not?” Charlie wanted to know. Then he hummed in his throat, and the sound was so wanton, so innocent and greedy, that Whim wrapped his arms around Charlie’s body again, and he fed Charlie’s hunger this time. It was an openmouthed, gleefully carnal sort of kiss, and Whim used his preternatural strength to hoist Charlie up in his arms and haul him down the hill even as the train rounded the corner. Thousands of tons of indifferent cold-iron death chilled their secret little island of serenity with its ear-shattering scream.
Whim didn’t care. Charlie tasted so good, and his hands on Whim’s stomach were eager and questing, and his touch was…. Whim shuddered and pulled him even closer, growing hard and full against Charlie’s upper thigh.
Charlie’s own decent-sized erection was burgeoning through his jeans against Whim’s stomach, and that alone was what made Whim pull away from the kiss and pant into Charlie’s neck.
“Dammit,” he muttered. “It’s almost dawn.” People at Green’s hill would start missing him if he wasn’t back by dawn, and he’d been keeping his expeditions at Litha a secret from everyone but Adrian.
“Are you going to disappear at dawn?” Charlie wanted to know. Then he laved a tongue around Whim’s ear, and it was all Whim could do not to just sit down, right there on the open ground, and let this boy have his body like a Litha sacrifice.
“You can’t steal kisses from us,” Whim muttered again. “You can’t….” He was trying to warn Charlie, because this entire moment was ill-advised.
Charlie hmmmed into his ear, and Whim let out a sound much like a whine, if a sidhe had ever been undignified enough to whine.
“I’m serious!” Whim pulled his head away—still holding the boy, of course—and made sure they were eye to eye. “You understand? Stealing kisses is like… stealing joy, like humans get from drugs. Stealing kisses will turn you into a junkie…. Unless you get your next… mmm—” Because Charlie was looking so wicked and so wide-eyed and so happy that Whim just had to steal his own kiss even as he lectured. “—taste,” he breathed and then tried to start again. “Unless you get your next taste willingly, the want alone can kill you.” It was true. That part of faerie lore held its roots in fact.
“But I got my next taste willingly,” Charlie teased, playfully nuzzling the corner of Whim’s mouth. “Doesn’t that mean I’m good?”
“More than good….” Whim groaned and turned his mouth into what he promised himself was going to be one more voracious, youthful, gleeful kiss. Oh Goddess, did this kid taste like hunger and joy and everything Whim yearned for when he made his Litha pilgrimage. He opened his slanted mouth and took in Charlie’s wicked, rapacious want, and grabbed Charlie’s bottom as the boy wrapped his legs around Whim’s waist and ground up against him.
Charlie was groaning and whimpering in his passion, and Whim reached between their bodies to the snap on Charlie’s jeans, gratified when the only thing between Charlie’s flesh and Whim’s bare stomach was a thin layer of rapidly slickening cotton.
Then he hauled Charlie closer and sank blissfully back into that glorious kiss while this very mortal, very human man-child rutted up against his skin as though he was life and sanity and beauty and pleasure, all in one simple, befuddled elf.
Charlie’s movements became frantic, almost frightening, and Whim’s supernatural strength alone kept both of them from buckling to the ground as Charlie stroked himself violently against Whim’s body. After a moment, a dazzling, terrifying moment, Charlie came, groaning into Whim’s mouth, and Whim was shocked to find his own vision blackening, his own body shuddering, a glorious climax rocking his entire body even as Charlie’s spend coated his abdomen through his child’s white underwear.
Trembling, Whim sank to the ground, catching himself on one hand and keeping Charlie in his lap while Charlie panted and shuddered in his arms and dawn flirted with the horizon.
“God… holy Jesus shi
t damn fuck…”
“Holy Goddess, merciful God, damnable other….”
The oaths may have been blasphemous, but the sentiment was reverent, and they simply sat, holding each other for many long, shaking breaths.
Whim’s palm was planted firmly on the soil beneath him, and he felt the added power of Litha drain out of his body, back into the earth that spawned it. He was still strong, though, and the sex had made him stronger. With a scoot of his bottom, he leaned forward, raising his arm up to enfold Charlie completely into his arms, to protect him and cherish him. That is what sidhe were taught to do with lovers who moved them in unexpected ways.
“Are you sure you have to leave?” Charlie asked mournfully, his voice muffled in the cocoon of Whim’s arms, and Whim was going to say, No. No. I’ll take you with me. You can be my mortal, or I’ll give you the gift of the were-folk and you can be a mortal-that-was. Just be mine… be mine….
That’s not what happened, though. What happened was a ferocious, agonizing pain that exploded along Whim’s forearm, and he yelped and stood up, dumping Charlie on his ass.
“Owwwwwwwww….” Whim had never truly felt pain before, and he had no stoicism on which to rely. He turned his face to the pale silver-gold sky and howled, holding his forearm out in front of him as it blistered madly, even as Charlie stood and cradled it against his chest.
“My God, Whim! What happened?”
Whim gasped and looked at the wound with a hurt so deep it felt like wonder. “It’s a cold-iron burn,” he mourned. “Goddess, Charlie, what do you have in your pocket?”
Charlie’s pale features blanched so white they were gray. “Oh God, Whim, I’m so sorry…. I even forgot it was in there. I was going to….” Charlie’s lower lip began to tremble, and suddenly Whim’s burn was soothed—temporarily, anyway—with blissful salt tears. “I never meant to hurt you,” he muttered. “I’m so sorry. Jesus, do you really have to go?”
Whim nodded miserably. “I need to go home. Green can cure this. Someone can cure this. But I don’t have what we need. Look….” Before their eyes another blister formed, another half inch of skin turned red around it, and a blister in the center popped and ran blood. Whim raised his free hand to Charlie’s cheek and rubbed the cheekbone with his thumb. “I need to go.”
