Sweet Clematis

by R. Cooper

  Flor growled something under his breath and scrubbed his cheek with a fist before giving Clematis a long, searching look. “It hasn’t even registered. You’re looking at me. You’re listening. I can see you breathing. But it’s like you aren’t even in the room.”

  “I’m here,” Clematis insisted, the sound echoing through his head. Flor liked words the way Hyacinth did.

  “Are you?” Flor took a step closer. “You seem distant, almost like when you’re becoming that other you, except right now it’s not aimed at anything. Clematis?” He took another step, peering into his face. “Are you okay? I didn’t mean to upset you. I just sound mad when I’m concerned.”

  “Do I look upset?” Clematis thought he was frowning and tried not to. “I don’t want you to worry.”

  “That’s not—” Flor stopped, then tried again. “Why don’t you want me to worry?”

  “Well, I don’t want to annoy you.” Clematis stuck out his lower lip, just a little. “Obviously.”

  “There will be no pouting your way out of this,” Flor informed him quietly. “If you need to do this distance thing to feel safe, then I’m sorry for making you feel bad. But don’t do it for my benefit, okay? I’m not annoyed with you.”

  “You said you get cranky when you worry,” Clematis recited, focused on the wet sheen in Flor’s eyes. Flor was so extraordinarily pretty. But he shouldn’t cry.

  “Can I take your hand?” Flor asked slowly, a strange and timid question. Clematis wasn’t certain he’d heard it right at first. But then he lifted his arm and sighed at how gently Flor circled his wrist. Then Flor tightened his hold to something more solid. “Do you do this a lot? Sort of… zone out like this? Or hide yourself?”

  “I don’t know.” Clematis imagined everything around him was air and the only real, tangible thing he could feel was Flor’s fingers, firm at his wrist. “I don’t always notice. Sometimes I get lost in my thoughts, you know, like daydreaming. My thoughts go on a lot, but, you know how fairies are, hyper, always talking, so I try not to bother people.”

  Flor took a breath. “Okay,” he said carefully, an angry person trying not to sound angry. “I’m worrying again, but I’m not mad. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Clematis nodded too, because Flor was serious. “But you shouldn’t be sad about it.”

  “Don’t tell me how to feel. Jerk.” Flor tugged on his arm. “Come sit with me for a while?”

  “Okay,” Clematis agreed again immediately.

  Flor led him to the couch, glancing back at him with each step, then released his wrist to make sure Clematis was settled before he sat crisscross applesauce on the cushion next to him. Their wings brushed, just at the tip, where it felt like the barest whisper of a touch.

  Flor didn’t seem to notice. He held Clematis’s wrist in between them, and then his hand. He laced their fingers together tightly, like someone who had a lot of experience holding hands. “You don’t actually talk a lot. But you apparently think you do. And you think you bother me and everyone else—or that you could bother us, I guess. Clematis,” he added, speaking slowly, “the only thing I’m bothered about is that you didn’t feel comfortable enough to say this sooner. And that’s our fault—my fault, probably.”

  “How is that your fault?” Clematis pulled his legs up underneath him.

  “I am suddenly wondering what kinds of things you’ve wanted to say to me over the years but kept to yourself.” Flor had color in his cheeks. “And I’m suddenly aware that you also know what it feels like to be with David but not with David, and instead of sharing the experience, I glared at you a lot for it. No wonder you thought it would bother me.” He heaved a breath. “So you just… agree with whatever people are saying, but absent yourself from the discussion? Fucking hell.”

  “The word used in my psych class was dissociation,” Clematis offered.

  “Are you doing it when you decide to seduce someone?” Flor blinked at him, eyes round with fascination and fear. “What about when you… you know, how you are with Stephanie? You’re not thinking then either. I thought that was normal, but now….”

  “I….” Clematis looked away. He hadn’t anticipated ever answering questions like these. “It’s not like that. If you—if Stephanie or someone else—takes care of me, then I don’t think, but I feel better. You would—someone would be there to keep me. This is the same, but… different. People expect things. They want you to act like a human at school or at work and be that fairy they want the rest of the time. And if you aren’t those things, they don’t want you at all.” His voice was full of rust, the words scraping and scratching their way out of his throat.

  This was Tulip’s fault. Clematis would never have said so much before the curse. He would have stayed away, and he and Flor would have been happier. Now Flor was going to be upset. He’d get angry. Then he’d go.

  “I want you,” Flor whispered, softly but firmly.

  Clematis turned sharply toward him.

  Flor was staring hard at some point in the distance. “I want you around. We all want you around. That’s what I’m telling you. Your friends might complain sometimes because you can be a pain, but they want you around. I’m bossy and rude, and they want me around too. It’s… that’s friendship, okay? Fairy truth, spoken just for you. I want you around even though you eat french fries and you slept with David and then didn’t call him. Human or fairy, I don’t care how you act except for this. This bothers me, because you shouldn’t have to do this.”

  “Sometimes I don’t do it,” Clematis explained to make it better. “I just—fold things up and put them away.”

  “Okaaay,” Flor said cautiously with a stunned expression that he didn’t hide, because Flor didn’t bother hiding much. He swept his thumb over Clematis’s skin in little circles while he thought about it. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked at last. “The things you… fold up and put away?”

  “Hyacinth thinks I should.” Clematis stared down at their linked hands.

  “Who’s Hyacinth?” Flor started, then shook his head. “Never mind. Do you want to talk about it?”

  Clematis tried to consider it and started to breathe harder. “I don’t think so.” He kept his gaze down, stayed focused on the warmth of Flor’s hand in his. Flor was worried for him. “Maybe. Not now, I think. I don’t want you to leave.”

  “I’m not going to leave unless you want me to,” Flor assured him without hesitation. “But okay, no talking about it right now. Can I ask something else?”

  Clematis nodded. “Whatever you want.”

  Flor squeezed his hand at that. Clematis let out a small breath and waited.

  “Is it all right if I look up stuff about this?” Flor was tentative and quiet. “I don’t know what to do, but I want to make you feel safe.”

  Clematis looked up. “Really?”

  Flor set his phone down on his knee and smiled at him. “I said I’d take care of you, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.” Clematis thought Flor would let go, but Flor began to type on his phone with his free hand and left the other between them. After a while, he started to read aloud, pausing every so often until Clematis said yes or no or I don’t know. And each time, he would nod or smile and then continue reading.

  “Flor,” Clematis said after some time had passed, and Flor finally released his hand in order to stretch out a little and reposition himself on the other side of the couch. He patted his knee, as if Clematis should rest his head there, so Clematis dropped down slowly, as though he was one of the people in their group who got to do this. Then he curled up on his side and lowered his head and held his breath for a long time.

  Flor stopped reading. “What? Is something wrong?”

  Clematis shook his head lightly. Lis had told him this would be something he should want. He should have listened. He trembled, deep down where he didn’t want Flor to see, but he was so warm too. “I’m glad we’re friends now.”

  The black in Flor’s eyes was utterly still when he
looked down. “So am I,” he answered quietly, then drew his eyebrows together in a brief, slight frown. He pushed a strand of hair from Clematis’s face. “Want me to read about something else for a while?”

  Clematis’s heart kicked hard against his ribs. He reached out to carefully, just for a moment, touch Flor’s ankle. “Whatever you want,” he said again and closed his eyes as Flor began to read a story he didn’t know, possibly an obscure fairy tale he’d collected from David.

  His last thought was that Mustardseed was a very old-fashioned name for a fairy. Probably even older than Hyacinth.

  EXACTLY AS Flor promised, he hadn’t left. He came by Clematis’s place a few nights during the week and dragged him out to the arcade again or to the deli to get more donuts. He popped up next to Clematis when Clematis came onto the campus and had to walk past the hateful group of humans. And he talked about his day or plants or the thrift store where he’d found the tight dark denim shorts that left most of his legs bare to the sun, and the movie he had gone to see with Virgil.

  He watched Clematis more now, sharp glances whenever someone teased him or Clematis began to flirt, but when Clematis would look back at him, Flor would smile and look away. Unless Clematis flirted with Tarō or Mishi, but since they laughed about it, Flor kept his grumbling mostly to himself. Maybe he had finally realized that all Tarō did was talk, and all Mishi did was blush and then scold him, so obviously Clematis wasn’t going to seduce either of them.

  He didn’t feel the need, not with them, and not really with anyone else, although of course now he got to have lunch with Sasha nearly every day.

  It made his work days seem lighter, as he had explained to Flor, who had nodded and pursed his lips and then picked up another cassette from Clematis’s collection and taken a long time to read the label. Flor had been fascinated to discover the stacks of cassettes when he’d finally gone through Clematis’s bedroom to use the bathroom. He kept going back to them and staring, but had temporarily given up on trying to get Clematis to put more songs on his phone.

  “The Working Girl soundtrack?” he had exclaimed once in disbelief and sat on the floor with a dazed look in his eye while Clematis told him about Carly Simon and how he’d owned a used copy of that movie on VHS.

  Sasha was trying to get Clematis into more digital music as well, but Clematis wanted to wait to purchase any devices like that until at least Christmas, when they’d be marked down.

  To show them all that what he had worked just fine, Clematis had brought the Walkman with him to the campus one day, and Annabeth of all people had called him a hipster nerd but also loved it and spent ten minutes ejecting tapes and then popping them back in.

  “He’s not a hipster,” Flor had groused at her. “He genuinely uses it.” For all his irritated tone, he’d been smiling.

  Flor was still there, and he did not seem to mind that Clematis wasn’t ready to trouble him about anything else yet.

  But he did ask if Clematis would mind if he asked the others if they knew anything practical about the subject. He didn’t say he’d mentioned it to David yet, but if he had, Flor would have told him.

  Clematis allowed him to go ahead, spent most of the first conversation about it with his headphones on and his eyes closed, his head once again on Flor’s knee.

  The gist, Flor had explained later and in a subsequent discussion, was that Annabeth was considering anthropology as a major but had done some reading about dissociative states, and Jacqui, a were who ran with her sometimes and who filled in at the MCC table, said there were therapists in the area who worked with beings, but they were still mostly human.

  Clematis couldn’t afford therapy and the word itself made him remember the grade school counseling office with smug or disinterested humans. But Flor had listened attentively and glanced at him and seemed to read from his expression how comfortable he was with what was going on.

  Since then, and when Clematis had let her borrow his cassette player, Annabeth had started to regard him without laser eyes. Mishi, with a flustered sadness he didn’t understand. And Tarō showed no reaction to the news whatsoever, which was very sweet of him. The only thing he did react to was seeing Flor sitting up on the grass with his legs stretched out, and Clematis lying next to him, trailing his hand through his glitter. Whatever Tarō was going to say then was cut off by Mishi reaching out to pull him toward the table to hiss something at him.

  Halfway through the week, Clematis received a text from Stephanie, asking if he was avoiding her. So he’d left some apples in a basket outside her door while she was out at school or at work.

  Her response at finding them was People are supposed to leave offerings to the fae, not the other way around. But with a red heart at the end.

  Clematis smiled to think about it, even though Flor turned up his nose.

  Fall was still weeks away. The skies were clear and warm, and if Clematis didn’t think about work, he felt light. Not quite empty. Buzzing and hot and rested, but still lazy, like he could keep lying in the sun under the trees with Flor for hours and only feel better. He beamed at Lis when he went in to visit her, and she gave him a funny smile back and then two salted caramel brownies.

  “One for now and one to share,” she whispered, handing him the box. He didn’t know why, but he’d kept it untouched all through work, debated offering it to Sasha before remembering Flor liked caramel, and then dropped the box on the MCC table in front of Flor before continuing on to their spot on the grass.

  He didn’t end up sharing it, although Flor offered. He smiled at Flor’s glee, and then at Mishi for being there, and then at the sky, for no reason other than it was so beautiful.

  Chapter 10

  “SO CATHY says this guy gives lectures at different colleges all the time. He’s a famous intellectual and is taken seriously even by humans. Which is funny because I’ve actually seen him and he’s a dork.” Flor paused thoughtfully. “A well-dressed, elegant dork, it’s true. Better than most of the professors and wannabe professors David knows. And his boyfriend—or treasure, I guess, shined like the sun. So he must be something. Humans also tend to respect dragons a little more than they admit to.”

  Flor did not explain who Cathy was, but Clematis nodded anyway, since it was probably irrelevant to Flor’s story, which was less of a story and more of a complaint.

  “But suddenly now it’s a big deal that this Dr. Jones is going to guest lecture at the university.” Flor furiously bundled his socks up into balls and tossed them into his laundry basket. Clematis considered telling him that this stretched them out of shape, but Flor didn’t seem to be in the mood. He also didn’t know why Flor even wore socks when the temperature was still summer hot. Maybe Flor’s socks were necessary for the boots Flor sometimes wore at work.

  “So instead of going to some boring lecture and learning something about being history, those assholes at the Human Heritage table are complaining that the university is funding someone who is antihuman.” Flor shifted restlessly at the other end of the couch. “First of all, Human Heritage? That’s the name they chose when they merged with some other group, and who are they fooling with that? No one, that’s who. This isn’t about their heritage. It’s about fear and hate. No one was taking anything away from humans. And secondly, this dragon isn’t antihuman, for fuck’s sake. Even if I hadn’t seen him dote all over that one human, I’d know that from how much he adores David. Of course,” Flor was momentarily appeased enough to quietly grumble, “it’s difficult not to adore David.”

  Clematis did not disagree, but thinking of the hateful humans on campus was enough to make him shiver.

  “I’m sorry,” Flor said immediately, making Clematis look up from his phone. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You didn’t scare me. They scare me.” Clematis smiled for a second at the sight of Flor in white boxers and an off-the-shoulder T-shirt with lines cut up the back for his wings. Plain, for him, but he was doing his laundry. “You wear a lot of clothes
for a fairy.” He wasn’t complaining. Flor looked good in them, made being dressed more interesting than being naked. Although Clematis wouldn’t have minded that either. Clematis was currently naked, but he hadn’t expected visitors, and anyway, Flor didn’t care.

  “Hmm?” Flor seemed distracted for a moment as he looked over at Clematis. But then he blinked. “Humans want us to wear clothes. And clothing can be fun.”

  Clematis steadied his hands over his phone and waited. “And?”

  “And.” Flor appeared to be trying to look grouchy and failing miserably. “And if I have to wear clothes, then I like wearing stuff I know bothers some of them.” He was almost smug. Trust Flor to rebel with floral print.

  Clematis smiled to himself before staring back down at his phone. The small pile of notes and opened envelopes sandwiched between him and the arm of the couch crinkled as he changed position.

  “Where did you even get white boxers?” Clematis kind of enjoyed the look of boxers on certain men, so he’d bought himself a few pairs. But Flor did not seem like he would bother with underwear unless his outfits required it, and then never boxers.

  “I found them in my apartment and washed them, and I finally got desperate enough to use them.” Flor sighed. “I hate getting stopped by the police just for being a little naked. I do have some briefs, which are okay. But I wish they came in more patterns than camo or plaid.”