by Amy Lane
“It’s hot already,” he sighed. “The heat isn’t good for us either.”
“That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” Charlie said with a slight smile. Everything about Whim pointed to the fact that he was very strong and very fragile. That he should have great magic and great physical vulnerabilities was pretty much par for the course. They walked across the field and then took a gap in the graffiti wall to the suburban neighborhood that sat behind their magic place. In the daylight, the suburb looked older and a little worn down, and Whim’s car, a fairly new SUV but not too fancy, didn’t look particularly out of place on the curbside. Charlie should know—his own car, a white Honda, was parked about a block away in front of a friend’s house.
He might have seen Whim’s car, or one of them, every Litha night for the last eleven years. The thought was somehow disturbing.
“Whim, if you drive here, how is it you just disappear?”
Whim paused in the act of throwing the stuff in the back hatch and fished out Charlie’s toy before he closed the hatch. “We can run really, really fast,” he said simply. “It only looks like I disappear.”
Charlie held an imperious hand out. “Here, give me the keys,” he said, and Whim pulled them out of his pocket. “Why do that? Why not just walk with me back out to our cars?”
Whim got into the car first and did the seat belt just like Charlie, although Charlie was pretty sure Whim had told him they were almost invulnerable to things like car crashes.
“I was hurt that first night—and you needed magic,” he said when Charlie had started the car. “Something beautiful. I didn’t have much I could give you. And after that… well, you expected it, and I didn’t want to disappoint you.”
Charlie shook his head, and then he shook his head again when Whim reached out and pressed play on the iPod sitting in the jack. Christmas music started to play, and Whim began to bob his head happily.
“You are magic,” Charlie told him, smiling sadly. “And you have never disappointed me.”
Whim looked at him, his smile old and wise. “I will,” he said with certainty. “You’re a grown-up now. You have higher expectations.”
Whim seemed both happy and sad to see Charlie’s little white-painted house sitting on the half acre of unfenced land. He definitely approved of all he saw, including the nicely mown, well-watered lawn, which he sank his bare feet into blissfully.
“It’s beautiful, Charlie,” he said sincerely. “Do you think your cat will like me? We have werecats at the hill, and I like them very much. Mitch and Renny like to curl up at my feet when I work.” Suddenly he made a hurt whimper, and Charlie looked at him sharply. “Mitch isn’t alive anymore,” he remembered. “And Renny’s damaged. Oh damn.”
Charlie looked at him in alarm. Whim had stopped still on Charlie’s lawn, a tall, pale man with alien features and hair the color of old blood. His neck drooped with dejection, and his whole body was smeared with the rust-colored remains of his fallen prince.
“We need to get you inside,” Charlie said gruffly. “Let’s give you a shower, get some food into you. You’ll feel better then.”
“Do you have oatmeal?” he asked hopefully, and Charlie was relieved to remember that he did.
After the shower and the oatmeal—Whim liked his with honey and butter and walnuts, but Charlie didn’t have any walnuts—Whim fell asleep in Charlie’s bed, wrapping his long body around Charlie and holding him to his chest like a teddy bear.
Charlie was tired too, but he spent long moments in that secure embrace just staring at that lovely, inhumanly beautiful profile. Even in sleep, he looked sad. Whim had loved the house, Charlie thought with a tight swallow. He’d loved the hardwood floor, he’d loved the comfortable furniture in eclectic colors, and he’d really loved the specially carved shelf Charlie had made for his toys. He even loved the cat. But his face, his heart, had been so transparent, even as he’d said, “This window is wonderful, Charlie. You must be happy to eat your oatmeal here every day.” He’d loved it, but it had hurt him, because Whim was obviously not suited for this world, and Charlie’s nice house and happy life were not things he’d ask Charlie to leave.
Over the next three days, though, Charlie found a reason to leave them. Whim woke up after only a few hours of sleep, ready to make love. He hadn’t cared about Charlie’s morning breath or the sweat that invariably coated his body in the summer. He just wanted to touch skin to skin, to put his mouth on Charlie’s body, from his ears (sensitive!) to his chest to his, well, everywhere. Charlie had let him, had reciprocated, had ended up doing a sleepy, happy, awkward (Whim’s body was very long) sixty-nine before he was even close to awake. And that was only a prelude.
Whim grieved. He lapsed into stunned silences in the middle of conversation, and he could be found at any moment, standing or sitting starkly still, staring into space and weeping. He also helped with the dinner dishes, petted the cat to distraction, put on work gloves and helped Charlie with the bathroom repair he’d been planning, and painted a playful and stunning—Charlie was forever impressed by Whim’s artistic gift—mural of cats lounging in magnificence on Charlie’s bathroom wall. And yes, Charlie was a little surprised at that one. But Whim asked for the latex paints and nonmetal equipment, and Charlie obliged. Two hours later, the bathroom wall was a living testimonial to Texas the ginger cat and any friends or relatives Texas might have.
He also made love with a frequency that would have left a rabbit sore, but Charlie wasn’t complaining. Every touch, every smile, every time Charlie came in his mouth (Whim was unfailingly generous—it was almost as though he’d been taught “sex manners”) convinced Charlie that Lithas weren’t an anomaly; they weren’t a magic pocket of time with a mystery lover. Litha was magical because of Whim. Whim was magical in broad daylight, in the dark of a moonless night, or when he was ambling over Charlie’s lawn in his bare feet on a bright, dry morning, singing a plaintive version of “The Little Drummer Boy.”
The morning of Whim’s fourth day, Whim woke up suddenly from a dead sleep and said, “They’re missing me. Oh, Charlie, Green is worried sick. I need to go.”
Charlie was caught flat-footed, horrified. “Go? Go? Whim—you… now?”
Whim’s smile added a whole new level to the mourning he’d been doing since he’d arrived. “I want to take you with me.”
“In a heartbeat.”
“But I can’t.”
Charlie’s beating heart plummeted to his toes. No. Not a rejection. Not after this.
“I wanted to…. Goddess, Charlie, I was going to ask you this year. Small”—a little quirk of his lips—“wonderful house be damned, I… I need you. I miss you. My years used to fly by, without anything to anchor them. Now they crawl by, from Litha to Litha. I was going to ask you. Beg you. I was going to make you every offer under the sun, fall to my knees if I had to—”
“You don’t!” Charlie burst out, hurt, moved, confused. “You just have to ask.”
“Ask what? Ask you to leave a good life for a country at war?”
Charlie opened his mouth, surprised by the analogy, surprised by the idea. “A country? It’s a place….”
“It’s a people, Charlie. And we just lost our prince. And now we’ll be besieged by enemies. Adrian left his vampires to his beloved—the girl, Charlie. A nineteen-year-old mortal girl-child is in charge of a kiss of vampires. Do you have any idea how badly this could go?” Whim took a shuddering breath and wiped the back of his hand across his cheek. “We lost six shape-shifters in this attack, Charlie. They’re the first ones to die. They’re our weakest members. Stronger than humans, yes, and longer-lived. But in my world they’re cannon fodder.”
Whim shook his head, his hair a mournful, aching twilight color, and took both of Charlie’s hands in his, even as they sat up in Charlie’s bed, naked—both physically and in any other way two people could be.
“Can you wait another year, beloved?” he asked, his voice raw. “Can you wait until I at least
know what I am asking you to become a part of?”
Charlie searched his face and saw only sorrow. “Beloved?” he asked, playing for time. Whim’s face fought against collapsing again, fought to stay composed.
“It’s our word at the hill, our endearment. Can I say it? Will you be my beloved, even if I can’t take you home with me?”
Maybe it was the word. Maybe it was the taut way it passed through Whim’s throat. But Charlie was convinced. This denial—it hurt Whim possibly more than it hurt Charlie. Charlie had a life without Whim. Whim didn’t like his life without Charlie.
“Yes,” Charlie whispered, and it was his turn to pinch the bridge of his nose and squeeze his eyes shut. “I’ll be your beloved. And, beloved, I will be soooo sorry to see you go.”
Whim kissed Charlie’s forehead then, and Charlie closed his eyes and tried to imprint this feeling, this warmth of having Whim there near him, the smell of him, the sound his breathing made in the silence. One more year, he thought resolutely. He could wait one more year.
“Whim?” he asked, trying not to whine. “Could you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Could you let me see you into the car? Don’t just disappear on me. Not this time.”
Whim’s eyes, which really did move from blue to green to turquoise in the light, flashed bright turquoise, and his hair grew tints of gold.
“That I can do,” he said simply. Then he proceeded to kiss Charlie, pull him down into the bed, and make love to him through simple touch and taste one last time.
Putting Whim into the car hurt, but it felt like a more temporary hurt than just having him disappear. Whim kissed him on the forehead and promised to drive safely and begged him one more time to wait, just one more year, and Charlie promised. And then he was gone.
THE YEAR seemed to slog by, and Charlie threw himself into his job. Counseling was grueling work. By the time he got the paperwork down, he found he’d been ignoring the students. And when he turned his attention to the students, he was suddenly ass-deep in paperwork. And none of it, none of it felt like a winning situation.
He got a small parcel at Christmas—a perfect miniature of his bedroom, complete with a blue bedspread and a purring Texas the cat on his bed. When you blew on it, the wind chimes outside the bedroom window made the sweetest sound and Texas twitched his tail. Charlie put it on his shelf with the others and stood looking at the little parcels of Whim’s devotion to him for a long, long time. If Whim could make it a year, then he certainly could.
In February, he went to a gay bar the day after Valentine’s Day.
It was an unusual move for him, but his whole life had become Placer High School and the needy students and beleaguered administration, and even his band had become a point of stress because nobody had time to rehearse, and dammit, he just wanted company. He hadn’t had a lover since Whim, and that was unusual, and all of his friends had their own girlfriends or boyfriends or family. Mostly he just wanted someone to talk to on lover’s day. He would have tried the regular bars to look for a girl to talk to (he got along with women just fine—in fact, he missed his mother frequently now that he was out of the house), but this was Auburn and he didn’t want to get the shit kicked out of him. So Auburn’s one hole-in-the-wall gay bar was where he ended up, and he was just about to give it up as a bad idea when someone sat next to him.
Charlie was surprised to find he knew the guy, and even more surprised that he was old enough to drink.
“Jesus, Daniel,” Charlie said, “has it really been three years since you graduated?”
“Five, Mr. Fratelli,” the kid answered, smiling a little over his beer. “But seeing you here is still like watching your dog sit up and talk.”
It should have been a good conversation. Daniel had always been a quick kid, funny with the one-liners, happy and easygoing. He’d been in one of Charlie’s first theater groups, and he and Charlie had gotten along very well in that way some teachers and students can. Charlie had never, ever thought of him as more than a kid, a student, somebody to mentor, somebody to help.
Daniel needed a lot more help now.
He’d recently been diagnosed as bipolar. He had no health insurance, no job, and his parents were on the verge of kicking him out of the house because of his sexuality and his refusal to be discreet with his bed partners—even Daniel had to admit he’d been less than circumspect.
When Charlie had asked him, alarmed, if he should be drinking, Daniel had given a fuck-it-all shrug. “Hell, with the meds, it’ll just make it easier for the razor blades to slide in.”
Charlie experienced a horrible frisson of truth. He meant it. Just like Charlie had meant it the night he’d gone wandering the railroad tracks with a gun.
Oh God. Whim. Charlie closed his eyes and wished so hard for Whim that he was surprised the elf didn’t just show up there in the bar, ready to take him away from the pain of the world and the hard choices it held. When he opened them, it was still Daniel sitting on his bar stool, smelling of alcohol and despair.
“Don’t say things like that,” Charlie said softly, placing a careful hand on Daniel’s as it sat near his on top of the dirty bar. “Some of us care about you.”
Daniel turned to him with the greedy love a drowning man shows a rope, and Charlie thought dismally about June, when Whim would be coming for him.
Whim, forgive me. I owed the world for you, and now it’s time to pony up.
Whim—Suppliant
HE’D FELT it, in February, the dreary month when it seemed the siege of his people would never end. He’d felt Charlie’s remorse, a single bloody shaft right to his chest, but he showed up for Litha anyway.
The sullen young man Charlie brought with him and left at the gap in the graffiti wall looked as though he would rather Whim hadn’t, but Whim was too heartsore to care.
“I’m sorry, Whim,” Charlie said, walking the rest of the way across the clearing. He wasn’t running and jumping into Whim’s arms, and that hurt too. Whim looked up to where the boy sat. Dark blond hair, maybe, and probably hazel eyes. Whim didn’t care. He was the boy who would take Whim’s boy away from him, and Whim didn’t care what he looked like.
“You’re not coming,” he said back. “Ever.”
“It’s not forever!” Charlie burst out, and then he looked hurriedly behind him and grabbed Whim’s hand, pulling him into the trees, dropping his voice. “Me and Daniel, it’s not forever, Whim. It’s not you and me. It never was. It was never supposed to be.”
“Then why?” The terrible shaft of betrayal seemed to ache where it landed.
Charlie sighed. “Because you saved me, Whim.”
“You don’t owe me.”
“I don’t….” Charlie blew out a breath and scrubbed his hands through his hair. Whim could see one or two threads of silver in it now, not too much, but still, his mortality was glimmering in those silver threads. “I do, but that’s not why I love you. It’s not why I’ve shown up here, year after year. But I owe somebody. God. The world. Somebody. I came here twelve years ago to kill myself, and the universe sent me you instead. Don’t you see? Don’t you see how wildly out of balance that is? This is me, giving back. This is me, sacrificing a year of my life, of happiness with you, to make up for all of the time I’ve had that I wouldn’t have had if you hadn’t shown up.”
Whim felt his face relax, and some of the pinched misery that had taken up his anticipation of this night faded away. The pain in his chest eased to a dull throb. His people understood good works. They understood giving back. They understood a debt to the Goddess. Whim took several deep, trembling breaths and tried very hard to understand Charlie.
“He thinks this is forever,” Whim stated, wanting to know if Charlie knew that.
Charlie shook his head. “Daniel is really troubled, Whim. His disease makes him selfish, and sometimes unkind. He doesn’t know forever. I just need to get him to a place where he’ll take his meds, take care of himself, learn to exist on
his own. Once I know he’s not going to… to rob the world of all he’s got to offer, then I can let him see how wrong for each other we are.”
Charlie’s voice deepened with irritation then, and Whim was heartened (as petty as it was) to see that Charlie didn’t really love this boy. Not like he loved Whim. But still….
“A relationship based on pity, Charlie?” Whim asked, not liking that idea either. “Is that what you think you and I have been? Is that what you think he wants?”
Charlie took Whim’s hands then, regardless of eyes that could be watching, and held them up to his stubbled cheek. “I do not doubt, nor have I ever doubted, that you love me for me, beloved,” he said solemnly, and Whim’s heart actually started beating again without feeling like it was pumping through a sucking chest wound.
“Yes?” Whim asked pathetically, and Charlie eased closer and wiggled, looping Whim’s arm around his shoulders.
“Not once,” Charlie reassured, leaning against him. Whim’s whole body gave a sigh of relief. He had known he wouldn’t get sex this night, but he hadn’t counted on getting a full dose of Charlie, either. Apparently Daniel the chaperone was going to have to live with the idea that Whim got to stand as close as a lover, even if they couldn’t make love.
“What about him?” Whim asked, wanting Charlie to see how this could all go wrong. “Nobody wants to be someone’s pity lay as a long-term relationship.”
Charlie looked up at him, his chocolate-colored eyes dancing with their first glance of humor for the night. “Pity lay? Did you just say pity lay?” he asked, inviting Whim to oh-please-laugh with him a little.
Whim could never deny Charlie a damned thing. “I watch movies,” he replied loftily, and then he sobered. “But this is important, Charlie. You both could end up hurt. Anything that hurts you is always a bad thing.”
Charlie leaned his head against Whim’s chest, and for a moment there was only the sound of their breathing, loud among the trees, and the sound of the train far off in the distance, not ready to roar through their Litha yet.
