Chapter 15

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Apparently, I'm a narcissist.

Endless water. I'm dreaming again, after what feels like both only a few days and a thousand years since the last time I fell into a world of my own design. Breathing deep, I look up at the infinite blue sky and feel the caress of the waves around me. It's all so…blue.

Melancholy.

Within my dream, my thoughts are fully awake, and I see Zahra begging the silence around us to pay attention to her in the woods. It worried me in ways I don't know how to explain. Zahra is my best friend, and she's so stable and confident that sometimes I don't see how utterly shattered she is.

She's little more than a million fragments melted down and turned into something else.

I haven't heard the half of her story, but the parts I have heard are horrors concealed as morbid jokes.

She grew up as the lesser of two children in a family that barely took care of either. Her mother was controlling. Her father was an addict. He drank. He gambled. He smoked. He did drugs. Anything that let him chase a high. Zahra was the accident after her older brother, so she was taught to obey, obey, obey, take up as little space as possible, and serve, serve, serve in order to earn basic human needs.

I've never seen her like she was in the woods.

Broken.

The quiet around me stirs, and I sit up in the ocean, wading effortlessly. The air shifts, bringing with it an amount of heat that overrides my thoughts. My breath catches as tar invades my perfect blue waters, giving way to a large masculine form. "Dreamboy," I whisper as he fully takes shape.

While monster-Pollux gathers his bearings, I skim through the rainbow of oily dark water to him.

"The sea?" he asks, deep voice a rumble that raises the hair on my arms and neck. "Why are you…" He stills when he finds me so near. Lifting one claw-tipped hand, he cups my cheek. "Your hair."

"I know. I lost my nightcap. It looks a lot longer when it's wet, doesn't it?"

His fingers slip through the soaked waves of deep auburn. "I've never seen it down before. It's so much darker." He swears. "You're so beautiful, Kassandra. I can hardly believe you're mine."

"You're so beautiful I can hardly believe my dumpster fire of a brain didn't make you shirtless in this environment."

A slash of heat weaves itself beneath the streaks of ink marring his cheeks.

I lose my air as I fit myself into the safe cocoon against his chest and wrap my arms around his waist. I've missed him so much more than I want to admit given that my brain has Pollux of all people playing this role in my head. "It's been such a day."

He holds me, and his arms are exactly as strong as I remember.

"I'm going to hate myself in the morning for all of this…"

"Why?" he murmurs into the crown of my head.

"Because my mind's in the gutter."

"What does that mean?"

I laugh against the damp shirt he simply should not be wearing. "It means it's not very ladylike to entertain scandalous dreams about one of my student's fathers. And yet I'm so tired right now, I kind of just want to drop all my efforts into the bottom of the sea." I let the lull of his heartbeat create a whisper of music in the background. "I try so hard, Pollux. Sometimes, it feels like I'm a shadow of what I could be. There are so many rules and rights and wrongs standing in the way of everything I want to do. I couldn't get CPS to help me with you. I couldn't get my school board to approve new equipment. Who knows if I'll be able to get any help from anyone if I can prove you're part of a cult. And…Zahra. What am I even supposed to do for Zahra?"

His fingers plunge into my hair, grip, and tug my head back. "I'm sorry. Kassandra. Could you…back up for just a moment or more…?" He meets my eyes, utterly bewildered. "Did you just say I'm part of a cult?"

"Yeah. You're in, well, real world Pollux is in a weird cult that believes faeries are real and follows the law of a guy named Cael. Who claims to be a prince. The stupid thing is how not-creepy nice the members I've met have been. Andromeda adores them all. But that's how cults get you. They paint this glorious picture of acceptance until you're too far in to leave. Then the leaders use their early love-bombing against you so you're always questioning and reaching for something that never really existed."

Pollux opens his mouth and shuts it. He looks elsewhere, then back at me. "So I'm abusive to my daughter and also in a cult now?"

"I'm not sure about the abusive thing at the moment. You've been too cute with Meda lately, and I'm starting to wonder if that time you shook her was just a panic response. Maybe single guy dads toss their kids around a bit more than I'm used to. I don't know. I've seen her scale two people like a chimpanzee. Maybe she's one of those special kids who can go flying over their handlebars and laugh it off as their knees gush blood."

Pollux has removed his hug in favor of clamping one arm to his body and one hand to his mouth.

I want my hug back, but unlike most things in my dreams from what I remember when dreaming was a usual thing, I can't seem to control him. Lifting my hand, I touch his wrist. "Are you all right, dreamboy?"

"I'm managing unfamiliar emotions."

"Oh. Okay." I tilt my head. "It's just… Not to be rude or anything, but this is a very disappointing spicy dream so far."

"Pardon?"

"You're here because my brain has given up on dignity. Your job is to already be ravishing me on the bottom of the seafloor surrounded by glowing fish and brilliant coral until I forget why I was one poorly-placed thought away from crying myself to sleep."

He glances down through the murky puddle clinging to him. "If I go down there, the sea life will morph into horrors."

"Cool. Like angler fish? They glow. Very atmospheric for ravishing."

He frames my cheeks in his hands. His claws just barely prick my skull, and my eyes might half-lid in response to the sensation of it. He says, "I love you."

My heart erupts, and the sky slashes pink, red, fire.

He swears and shakes me gently. "I love you, but I have no idea what to do with you." His lips tip down at the corners. "Faerie is a real place. Faeries are real people. You are my soulmate. I love you. And I already know you won't believe a word I say here, but you…" He hefts a sigh. "You make me want to abandon all caution and reserve."

A nervous laugh spills out of me. "Yeah…yeah…" I drop my attention and draw circles into his shirt. "You're obsessed with me. Going to the ‘elf party in the woods' really did a number on my brain cells. I'm so worried for Zahra that I would love to believe the faeries are real narrative. But, if they are, why didn't they talk to her?"

"You went to the elf party in the woods tonight?"

"Yep. I went to a clearing in the woods tonight and watched my best friend have a breakdown. It was a real…party."

"The average fae in Cael's domain are charged with responsibly interacting with humans, which often means not interacting with humans they are unfamiliar with."

"Oh for Pete's sake," I mutter. "Do not attempt to rationalize this. Just, I don't know, kiss me. Give me something that'll haunt me when I wake up so I don't have to think about anything else in the morning. If I can't get my head off you, I won't have to deal with all the other stuff."

He sweeps me into his arms, rocks me against his chest, and steps from the water onto an ink-dark surface that pulls free from the depths and shines like polished obsidian. His lips graze my forehead. "You are a temptress, but I cannot in good conscience do what you're asking when you think this is only a dream."

"Please?"

He swears. "If you beg, I don't know what will happen to my morals."

Stretching, I kiss the rough edge of his jaw and whisper in one sharply pointed ear, "Please?"

His hold on me flinches, tighter. He glances sidelong into my eyes and growls, "You are a unique torture. Give me more."

More?I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here. The handful of my dates rarely got past goodnight kisses in front of my college dorm. After I came back home, they happened in the car before I went to bed in my baby-blue childhood room with my stuffed animals tucked around me like sentries. Now, I spend my days picking up after small gremlins who occasionally still eat paste.

Sexy, I am not. Seductive, I am not. A touch desperate…yeah…I might be that one.

"No more?" he murmurs so softly my stomach flutters.

"I'm not entirely sure what comes next."

He wraps his fingers in my hair and tugs my head back to expose my neck. Planting a tickling kiss firm against my skin, he rewrites the programming in my brain. I nearly hiss a curse as I grip his clothes and tremble.

"Do you want more?" he asks into my flesh.

"Pollux…yes. Please."

He nuzzles, rough skin grazing the most sensitive parts of me. "Your scent is a drug. I'm addicted. You're a miracle. A fantasy." He sets me in a seat of warm darkness, kneels at my feet, and takes my bare ankle in one hand. He stares up into my eyes. "Why don't you want to believe in the fae? Simply because you don't think they're real? What could gently convince you I'm real, and I'm yours, and I want to make your every dream a reality? What could I do that might ease you into my world and my life, where you belong?"

My heart lunges as he bends his head and touches a kiss to the top of my foot.

My brain shuts off so violently I'm astonished I don't wake up. The hairs on my arms and legs prickle as a shiver plunges out across my every nerve ending.

His red eyes flash as he lays his cheek against the bridge of my foot. "Did I break you?"

Wow.

Just wow.

Who knew I was capable of such disgrace?

Honestly, I'm appalled with myself.

He is so pretty.

But what is up with my ego if I'm having him kiss my feet and sit me on thrones? Genuinely, I am concerned for the state of my soul.

Closing his eyes, he dots kisses up my shin, and I tug against his hold.

"No?" he murmurs without lifting his lips or loosening his grip. "I thought you wanted something to haunt you. I may not understand many things, but haunting is something I'm decent at."

I clear my throat. "Well. It's just that. I, um. I may not actually be cut out for a raunchy dream tale, you know? To my surprise, I am embarrassed."

"Embarrassed? Why? We're married."

"We… Okay." That's not a leap I was prepared for. What is my subconscious setting up in my marriage-first mindset? This is a chair. Not a bed. Thank you very much.

"Don't worry. I won't go so far until you come to terms with the truth, but—" He mutters a curse. "—you are an aphrodisiac like no other. I've missed you so much it hurts."

My heartbeat thunders in my ears as the lines between dream and reality blur. All at once, I'm little again and asking friends I made up in my dreams for phone numbers so I could call them when I woke up. "You could come see me," I say. "You know where I am."

"You'd want that?"

I don't know. Maybe? And isn't that a terrible thought? I want him to come see me, not because I'd like it if he'd walk his child to school, but because I want these thoughts to jumpscare me in real life. When will I ever learn that the way things are will never be the way I want them to be?

I better change the subject before I make myself sad when real world Pollux doesn't come to see me. "I'm told you blew something up this morning," I say.

"It happens."

I'm curious what my suddenly, you're married! brain will come up with, so I ask, "What exactly were you doing?"

"Running tests on the durability of an, arguably, very powerful enchanted item. I had to make sure nothing could hope to break it before I gave it to Meda. So. I blew it up a little. Perhaps a little more than expected since another experiment caught light and turned into somewhat poisonous gas." His brows dip, pensive. "Is this…one of those things you don't exactly approve of?"

"A little bit, yeah."

He curses against my skin and snuggles. "How do human children survive if they can't be around explosions even a little?"

"If I'm quite honest, I think it's the absence of explosions that helps them."

Frowning, he stares up at me. "Do you let children have any fun at that daycare of yours?"

"You mean my school?" I roll my eyes, slip from the chair onto the floor so we're at the same level, and smile as he frees my leg. "No. None at all. I tried to let them have some fun, but my stupid school board says we don't have money for fun."

"Can you not make more money?"

"We're small. We rely a lot on donations. We need to always be thinking ahead and watching our expenses so we can make sure we're able to stay open." Pulling my knees up, I wrap my arms around them. "I've been wanting to get a playground set for the kids for years. All we have is four boring swings, a sandbox without any sand, the gym, and a slice of cement for chalk."

"Can the kids not make things to sell?"

I blink, lift my gaze to my monster companion, and arch a brow. "I know a fragment of my brain is not suggesting child labor. Why don't I just send them to the coal mines? Wouldn't their parents love that?"

He stretches one leg out and braces his arm on his other bent knee. "I'm afraid I don't much understand the rules. If it's something for the kids, why shouldn't they help provide it?"

"Because they're children. They're supposed to be provided for."

For several moments, Pollux stares at me, dark eyes transfixed and still. Finally, he says, "Oh. Okay."

"What? Don't tell me I've given you a horrific backstory with a terrible childhood. Parents who beat you, maybe? Why stop there? I bet they sent you to the coal mines with nothing but a crust of bread in your lunch pail." My eyes narrow. "If you were lucky enough to have a lunch pail."

He grunts. "Many faeries don't have parents."

"It got sadder. Way to go, me."

"That's not really the sad part." His gaze drops to the dark sheet of stone beneath us. "I am made of fear. For humans and the brighter fae, my presence is revolting. The unseelie can handle me since we are made of similar dark pieces, but there are very few unseelie who don't bear ill will. Fewer still who are more than beasts."

"Sounds lonely," I murmur.

"It has been. When you spend so much time isolated, you start to break inside." He closes his claw against his chest, in the fabric of his shirt, and releases a tight breath before lifting his gaze to me. "You are salvation, Kassandra."

I chuckle. "I'm really on an acid trip tonight. Humor me, though. How?"

"You are my soul's mate. You are something powerful enough to override the fear of a dream eater. While I am a nightmare come alive, you hold reality in your palm. You can craft dreams and nightmares, truth and lies. You are the sun that eclipses me. The cure I've been searching my entire life for."

My ego's being a real drama queen tonight. Maybe I need something heavy to help with my no, you can't have a playground bruises. "So I'm special?" I flutter my lashes. "And pretty? And powerful? And cool?" And, ultimately, totally deserving of my playground?

"You are something so feared I worry about giving you too much information all at once when you are so keen on rejecting it for reasons I am only beginning to understand run deep. You are something so dangerous I hesitate to share the truth with my best friend before I am able to make certain you understand how to handle the depths of your own self."

"Best friend? You mentioned a best friend last time we ‘met,' but that doesn't match up with the narrative tonight." I arch a brow and challenge the ability of my subconscious to maintain consistency. "I thought you were a lonely boy all by yourself in a sad corner."

Sighing, he drags his fingers through my damp hair. "Cael is my best friend. He is also unseelie, and we have faced many ages together; however, he was able to mingle in places I could not and forge a home for himself in the light. He took on many responsibilities in an effort to build a better world for the people he cares about, including me, but his ambitions left little time for visitation."

"Makes sense. Weird this is how my brain is breaking down the prince title. I like it better than cult leader, though."

Pollux kisses my cheek. "We're not a part of a cult, dearest."

"That's exactly what someone in a cult would say."

"What am I going to do with you?"

"Tell me more about how cool, pretty, and interesting I am? Maybe? To make me feel better for not getting my playground."

"You deserve an amazing playground."

I grin. "Why, thank you. I know."

He swears, drawing closer. "Thanking me while I'm this wrapped up in you and your soul is so cruel…"

"Should I do it again?"

"I am so tempted to say yes."

"Thank you," I whisper.

His lips graze the divot beneath mine, and my breath holds. "Do you want to give me your soul? If, for a moment, you can pretend this is all real, would you give me your soul?"

"Give my soul to you or to Pollux?"

"Yes."

"I really shouldn't give my soul to cult members. I don't think that's very wise."

I taste the heat of his sigh on my tongue. "Your humanity frustrates me. Or, perhaps, it is the fact you have been raised so human that frustrates me. Humans are too mistrusting while the fae cannot lie. If you believed what I say I am, I could calm every worry you have as soon as I find the right words to say. It is easier to talk to you here, without all the false attitudes you present in the real world. I prefer seeing you as you are."

"That sounds beautiful, dreamboy. Do you think I could run away with you to Faerie? Would your prince fund my playground? Could someone talk to Zahra and let her know her brain isn't broken and she's okay?"

"Okay is a pitiful descriptor. Words like fine, okay, and all right imply the lowest level of adequacy. They mean nothing. If this Zahra is your friend, she deserves better than okay."

Deflating, I rest my head against his shoulder. "Yeah…" I lift his hand in mine, play with the darkness on his fingers. "You want to know something crazy?"

"Always."

"For several, breathless moments, I hoped I might hear a faerie respond in those woods tonight. I want a beautiful little world that makes sense. I want the care I felt at movie night to be something safe and real. Heck, clearly I even want a cute monster boyfriend to talk to me in my dreams."

"Husband," he corrects.

I laugh. "Right. Husband. Goodness, we're moving so fast."

He mumbles, "That is what I thought. I'm beginning to think you aren't entirely aware of some human customs, and I'm not certain what to do about it, because I know I'm very unfamiliar myself, but I have checked my sources. When you spend so much time in the trenches of the subconscious…things get…weird."

"I'd imagine so." I tilt my head to look at his profile.

He catches my eye once he pulls himself from calculations I can't begin to decipher, even if we are in my own mind. He murmurs, "What is it?"

"Nothing." I lace my fingers around his talons. "I'm glad you came to visit me again. It's stupid. Especially given the cult vibes."

I feel him sigh as he squeezes my hand.

Giggling, I continue, "But I kinda like being around you. And Meda. But obviously Meda. Everyone else, too. I felt it at dinner that one night, and then again at Willow's. You're surrounded by something so warm."

"Am I?"

"Yeah." I huff. "I just hope it's love and not, like, you know, goat blood or something."

He exhales a laugh. "I think it's just the blessing of people who care about me, regardless of the things that make it difficult."

Silence broken by the sound of the waves sweeps in to caress my skin. Being cared for. Regardless of anything that makes it difficult.

What a concept.

"Hey," I whisper.

"Yes?"

"Your poor daughter doesn't know about holidays."

"Because human holidays are stupid and concerning."

Ah, well, nice to know I've put some genetics into this head canon. "It's Thanksgiving next week."

"Is it really?"

"You're depressing me."

"Sorry. Thanksgiving. Wow. Next week? Incredible. There are going to be so many dead birds. And this, obviously, excites you—a vegetarian—doesn't it?"

I laugh. "I just wonder if you're doing anything for it."

"I won't be killing birds. I've never been able to find a taste for the sort of fear that comes instinctively from creatures that are too innocent to have complex thoughts."

"Maybe I should invite you and Meda over to my house. Mom makes the best mashed potatoes in the world. And we're a gourmet mac and cheese family, otherwise known as superior to all the families that don't have mac and cheese on Thanksgiving."

"I was not aware there was a prejudice."

"Please. We're humans. We'll find some way to feel entitled, and if we can't, we'll make one up."

Pollux runs his thumb over mine. "How…sad."

"Is it different in Faerie?"

"At least in Cael's domain it is. He doesn't let anyone in if they don't align with his code of care."

I close my eyes. "A code of care. I love that. Arguably, it also sounds communist."

"Arguably, communism works if all the people involved actually care about one another more than themselves."

"Pity," I murmur, "that we're all too human for that."

"Pity—" He turns his lips against the top of my head. "—that you think you are."