The Musician and the Monster

by Jenya Keefe

  Both impressions were probably equally misleading.

  Mendel was stroking Oberon’s bare shoulder, and the sight of it made the breath in Ángel’s lungs feel hot. He wanted to tell Mendel to take his hand off Oberon, and at the same time, demand why Mendel wasn’t doing more. Why wasn’t he in bed with Oberon? Why wasn’t he holding Oberon in his arms, why wasn’t he making Oberon better?

  He dropped to his knees beside the bed. The emotions Oberon was emitting were scorching his skin, the inside of his nose, gathering bitterly at the back of his throat and making his eyes water. Even if Oberon hadn’t turned the color of skim milk, Ángel would know that he was dying.

  “They told me he didn’t want to see me,” whispered Ángel, gently using a fingertip to push Oberon’s hair out of his still, distant face.

  “They told us you didn’t want to see him,” said Mendel. “He was doing all right—I mean, he was very anxious, and very sad, but he was not like this, until they told us that you didn’t want him anymore.”

  Oh, Oberon. “And—” Ángel looked up at Mendel. “And you can’t do anything? He said— He was so happy when he heard you were coming. He said, with you here, he would be safe. From, from this.”

  “I tried. I am trying.” Mendel ran a hand over Oberon’s shoulder, and this time Ángel saw Oberon flinch and shiver. “But we never got a chance to know each other, you know. And he will not permit very much from me.”

  The magic of Oberon’s grief was radiating out into the air. Were he surrounded by trusted friends, they would grieve together by touching, and their magic would meld, and change, and sing out for all to feel, and somehow this change would comfort them. But Oberon wasn’t permitting Mendel to share his grief. So Oberon was trapped in this excruciating song. A vicious cycle, he’d called it. A cycle that would just get worse and worse, until someone interrupted it.

  Ángel stripped off his shirt, then stood up to toe off his shoes and socks, saying, “Well, I’m not going to give him any choice.” His voice was trembling a little with fear and bravado. “I am not putting up with this passive-aggressive dying-of-a-broken-heart horseshit.”

  And he crawled into bed with Oberon, wrapping his arms tight around Oberon’s bare torso, pressing his chest and belly to Oberon’s back, his cheek to Oberon’s neck.

  It was awful. Everywhere their skin touched, Oberon’s magic penetrated Ángel’s body, filled him up with greasy, sick despair.

  “Oh, God,” he moaned, tightening his grip, hanging on for dear life as hot pain and fear and grief shocked through him. “Oh, God, Oberon. I’m here. I’m here.” Oberon shuddered, and the motion seemed to send waves of awfulness through Ángel’s body. “Oberon, please,” he begged. “Please stop. Oberon, stop, please.”

  “He might not be able to,” said Mendel. “He is very ill. Sometimes people don’t come back.” He paused. Sounding worried, he added, “If he dies, you mustn’t let it kill you too.”

  Can that happen? Of course, neither of them knew. “He won’t die,” whispered Ángel, starting to weep. “He’s going to come back to me.” He sniffed, wiping his tears on Oberon’s cold, clammy skin. “I hate it when I cry,” he complained. “Come back to me, Oberon.”

  He stayed in bed with Oberon for an agonizingly long time, rubbing his chest, stroking his face and neck, twining their legs together. Oberon, for his part, sometimes shivered, sometimes gasped, sometimes seemed to struggle weakly, but mostly lay still as the dead. Ángel took to singing his fae name: nine alternating 16th and 32nd notes, with a 32nd rest after the seventh note and a slur connecting the third, fourth, and fifth. Again and again. Sometimes Mendel sang with him.

  And, later: “Oberon, please come back,” cried Ángel, exhausted, not sure how much longer he could bear it. “Oberon, I’m here. I’m here for you. Oberon, can’t you hear me?”

  “He hears you,” said Mendel.

  “Don’t you trust me?” Ángel hugged Oberon tightly. “Oh, baby, I’m sorry. I told you I’d be with you as long as you needed. I’m sorry. I tried. I tried to come back as soon as I could. I’m sorry.”

  Eventually, he slept. He dreamed of a fairy tale: a witch, and a castle, and a forest. An evil spell, a princess, a talking clock. When he woke up he was groggy, his skin clammy with sweat and strange magic. He rolled Oberon onto his back, lying on top of him.

  Oberon was awake. His eyes were open, but glassy, some sort of yellowish crust accreting in the corners. Ángel wiped his lids gently with the corner of a sheet, and Oberon closed his eyes.

  The dream still in his mind, he said, “Oberon, do you remember how you were afraid to kiss me? Because kisses are important to my people, you said. All our stories about magical kisses that transform beasts to men and heal sleeping princesses. Remember?” He cupped Oberon’s face, stroking his dry lips with his thumb. “This is one of those magic kisses,” he whispered. “This kiss will wake you up, and heal you, and bring you back to life, if you’ll let it.” And he pressed his mouth to Oberon’s.

  Oberon shuddered violently. Then with a spasmodic lurch he wrapped his arms around Ángel, clasping him, opening his mouth and returning the kiss. They both moaned—Ángel felt like he was being injected with Oberon’s illness—but at the same time he felt a desperate hope, that as he took Oberon’s emotions into himself, he somehow eased Oberon’s agony.

  Oberon was speaking now, a fluid melodic stream of incomprehensible syllables, hands in Ángel’s hair, gripping him tight enough to drive the air from his lungs. After a moment, he regained enough control to switch to English: “Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me—”

  “Oberon,” gasped Ángel. “Shhh, baby. It’s okay.”

  “Ah, I am sorry,” cried Oberon softly, against Ángel’s neck. “I am sorry, but I want to live—”

  “Yes. Live. Live.”

  They clutched each other, murmuring pleas and reassurances, Oberon’s hands roaming roughly all over Ángel while Ángel cradled him.

  “You’re going to be okay now?”

  “Ángel—”

  “You’ll get better now, yeah?”

  “Don’t leave me again—”

  “No, no, no. I never left you.” He caught Oberon’s face in his hands, threading his fingers into Oberon’s hair, made him look into his eyes. “They took me from you, and I couldn’t get back. And you do not get to die if something like that happens, Oberon. You have to stay alive until I can get back.”

  “I wanted to. But it was hard.”

  Oberon’s skin, still grayish, had gone dappled with lust. While Ángel was grappling with surprise, Oberon slid his hands down Ángel’s body, pushing them into his pants to palm his butt. Ángel gulped in air as Oberon sucked on his throat and pressed his legs apart with a thigh. The movements were blatantly sexual, but the magic coursing through Oberon’s skin continued to speak of wrongness. Fear and desperation, mixed with the desire. Ángel squirmed, caught between arousal and discomfort.

  “Baby—you don’t—”

  “You still want me?” Oberon growled, his breath hot in Ángel’s ear, his hands kneading the cheeks of Ángel’s ass, making Ángel’s hardening dick rub rhythmically against Oberon’s thigh.

  “Ah, yeah,” Ángel moaned, needing to surrender to Oberon’s need, his legs falling open.

  “Is this what’s called a pity fuck?” asked Mendel.

  Ángel startled, going rigid in Oberon’s arms. He turned slowly to glare at Mendel, who was sitting in a chair near the bed.

  He had completely forgotten about the second envoy, had not imagined that he was still in the room.

  “This is not,” Ángel said, “a pity fuck.”

  He felt, rather than heard, Oberon gasp for breath.

  “You didn’t come back until you heard he was dying,” said Mendel. “You want to comfort him.”

  Mendel’s face and voice were all innocence, but his words cut.

  “How about you,” snarled Ángel, furious, “go the fuck away and leave us alone?”
/>   “Oh,” said Mendel. “I would rather stay.”

  Ángel opened his mouth to tell Mendel what he could do, and Oberon squeezed him. “Your anger,” he murmured. “I’d forgotten.” To Mendel he said, “I think the phrase is offensive.”

  “‘Pity fuck’?” asked Mendel. “But if he is having sex with you because he feels sorry for you—”

  “Get out,” said Ángel, attempting to struggle free of Oberon’s clasp, “before I break your fucking face.”

  “Privacy,” Oberon said to Mendel, hanging on to Ángel. “Do you remember? You learned about privacy.”

  “Yes,” said Mendel. “I know. But there’s no one else here, and I don’t want to be alone.”

  “You’ll have to get used to it,” said Oberon. “Go on.” Mendel made a meow of acquiescence and left the room.

  “Close the door!” yelled Ángel.

  Mendel closed the door.

  Ángel flopped back on the bed, panting, torn between laughing and punching something. Oberon lay beside him quietly. They just breathed for a while. Then Oberon began to smell like rain, and he slowly drooped his head and rested his forehead on the center of Ángel’s chest.

  Ángel felt his sorrow.

  “No,” he said. “No. Don’t think that.”

  “You didn’t come back until you heard I was sick,” said Oberon.

  “They told me you didn’t want to see me.”

  “You believed them?”

  “So did you,” said Ángel.

  “Because you never believed in my love,” said Oberon. “You didn’t believe in me. You only wanted to get away from me—”

  “Shh, no,” said Ángel, wrapping his arms around Oberon’s shoulders. “Don’t, please.” He held him, his cheek against the top of Oberon’s head. “Can you feel me?”

  He closed his eyes and called to mind the moment he fell in love with Oberon: the music room. The swan chair. Guitar and mandolin. Ángel’s sad melody, and Oberon: harmony, consonance, a perfect musical melding, a moment of perfect emotional understanding. And then Oberon had deepened the song, transformed it, infused it with hope—sweet, impossible, fragile hope. Ángel remembered, and the memory took his breath away, filled him with awe and admiration and helpless love.

  True love, for this strange and singular individual. Impossible love, undeniable, unworkable, but powerful and aching and true. Ángel knew he’d feel this way forever.

  Oberon shivered.

  “Yes,” whispered Oberon. “I feel you.”

  “I was scared,” said Ángel. “I’m still scared. I couldn’t believe you would love me, especially because I’m not fae, and I don’t have magic—”

  “You are overflowing with magic.”

  “Am I? Then it’s the wrong kind—so I was scared. And when they told me you didn’t want to see me, I believed it. For a minute. But oh, Oberon. Can’t you feel how I feel?”

  Oberon stroked Ángel, reverently. His skin color was coming back—pale taupe, only lightly tinged with gray. “You love me? You love me?”

  “I love you,” said Ángel. “Even if you—even if you decide Mendel is the one you love, I’ll still feel this way. It’s not pity, Oberon. I’m just not very brave. But I love you.”

  Oberon began, softly, to purr. “I am not going to decide that Mendel is the one I love. I only love you.”

  He cuddled Ángel close, rubbing his face against Ángel’s chest. The signals coming from his skin tingled, became warm, soothing; he began to smell faintly like ginger. They lay together, legs entangled, for a long time.

  “I read this magazine story,” said Ángel, after a while, “about penguins. That’s a kind of bird. They lived in a zoo, so, like, an artificial environment, but the zookeepers tried to make it as natural for the penguins as possible. And in the spring all the penguins mated and started laying eggs, and the zookeepers noticed that two boy penguins had mated and were trying to incubate a rock.”

  Oberon murmured, “How sad.”

  “Yes, but then there was an orphan egg, so the zookeepers gave it to the boy penguins, and they adopted it and they were like a little family. Total happy ending, right? But the article said it only happened because there were more boy penguins in the zoo enclosure than girl penguins. In their natural environment, they would have sought out female mates. And later, when there were more girl penguins available, the boy penguins broke up and mated with females, because that’s what’s natural for penguins to do.”

  “I am not a penguin,” said Oberon. He raised his head. “Ángel, you are not a penguin, either. This planet has millions of available human mates for you. Do you think you will find a human man you love better, and stop loving me?”

  “No.” Ángel was certain of that.

  “Why do you have faith in your own love, but not in mine?”

  Ángel gazed at him. “I guess that’s a good question.” He touched Oberon’s face, his lips. “I don’t know. Maybe because no one ever loved me before without wanting me to change.” He paused. “Although I think my dad is trying.”

  “I want you.” Oberon kissed Ángel’s fingertips, touching one with his tongue, and the sensation sizzled down Ángel’s nerve endings. “Only you.”

  Ángel smiled. “How can you be ready for sex so soon when you’ve been so sick?”

  “I was last time too,” said Oberon. “Remember?”

  The memory of Oberon’s couch made Ángel weak. “I remember I left you hanging.” He stroked his face. “Baby, you’ve kind of got a residue on you. Want to shower first, and then see?”

  Under dual showerheads of streaming warm water, they stroked each other, kissing softly. Ángel poured shower gel into his hands and massaged the lather over every inch of Oberon’s body, rinsing away the coating of spent emotion, burnishing the dappled golden-white skin. They stroked lathered hands through each other’s hair, drank running water off each other’s bodies. Oberon, clearly still a little sluggish after his illness, tasted Ángel’s neck, his jaw, his shoulders. They could feel each other’s desire through their skin, a feedback loop of pleasure fizzing in Ángel’s blood like champagne. He closed his eyes and arched his throat, rubbing against Oberon’s wet body, humming.

  “I missed you so much.”

  “Ángel.” Oberon nuzzled into the crook of Ángel’s neck. “When they told me you were gone, I was so afraid.”

  “I was terrified. The whole time, I just wanted to get back to you. God, Oberon—”

  They kissed. Oberon’s hands roamed, as if memorizing Ángel’s body. He ran his hands over the place on his back where the taser’s prongs had gone in and Ángel flinched; he opened his eyes, and Ángel felt the bitter wash of his surprise. “They told me you were undamaged!”

  “I am.” Ángel leaned against him, trying to preserve the mood, not sure how fragile Oberon’s recovery was. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re injured.” Oberon said the word with horror, brushing a gentle finger around the healing punctures. “Did the kidnappers do this to you?”

  “Yes, and it really hurt. But it’s okay now.”

  “And what is this?” Oberon traced the scabbed gash on Ángel’s hip.

  “I cut myself on some glass when I was escaping.”

  “You’ll tell me the whole story.” Oberon’s hands mapped Ángel’s body, finding every bruise and ache. His tone was grave, angry. “I want to know everything they did to you.”

  “Yes,” said Ángel. “But not now.” He went on his tiptoes and kissed Oberon, pushing them both back under the shower, cupping his butt and pressing his body close.

  The distraction worked.

  Oberon carried him out of the bathroom and laid him down on the thick rug in the bedroom, ravished him with hands and mouth, slicked his entrance and teased him to full panting arousal. And then Ángel was captured in Oberon’s strong embrace, his legs draped over Oberon’s big shoulders, and his ass nudged by Oberon’s cock.

  Oberon hesitated.

  Moaning, Ángel a
rched up, hands grasping Oberon’s arms, hips twisting. But Oberon, smelling cool and green, of snow on trees, didn’t move.

  Ángel looked into his face. Their gazes locked for a still, breathless moment. But as always, Oberon’s face told Ángel nothing. So he closed his eyes and felt his magic, breathed Oberon’s scent, palmed one curving bicep, cupped his face, ran a thumb over his lips. Ángel felt Oberon’s love and desire, thrumming like a musical note through his skin. Felt, too, his hesitation.

  Love, and desire, and fear. Because for Oberon, this moment was irrevocable. He was changing, the magic in his skin was tuning itself to Ángel’s, so that he could never communicate this way with any other. Ángel was, unintentionally, marking him, making him his own, in a way that could never be undone. And Oberon loved him, loved the change.

  But with his eyes closed, Ángel could smell and feel Oberon’s fear so clearly, he could almost put it into words: This has never happened before. This is something new, in all the universe. Would Ángel always love him? Did Ángel understand that this change was permanent, that Oberon would belong to him forever?

  “Yes,” Ángel whispered, pressing his hands to Oberon’s skin, hoping he could feel him as well as hear him. “I will. I do.”

  He felt Oberon’s joy, then, and his awe, and a little warm wash of something that tingled and tickled: Oberon thought he was cute.

  Ángel laughed. “Are you going to fuck me, or just admire me?”

  “Both,” said Oberon, and did.

  They got back in the shower to rinse off, and as they were toweling themselves dry Oberon opened the bathroom door and sang out in his own language. In a moment, Mendel came in without knocking. Ángel made a stifled yelp of protest and covered his groin with the towel, glaring as Mendel handed the naked Oberon some clean clothes. The second envoy leaned against the sink while Oberon began to dress.

  “Are you just going to stand there?” demanded Ángel.

  Mendel gazed at him. “Yes?”