Those Words I Dread (Tales of the Tuath Dé #1)

4

Trent pushed his apartment door closed with his heel, spotting Ciaran on the balcony with his hands on the railing. Trent set the bags down on the counter and watched the other man’s back for a moment, frowning. The fairy seemed to be looking for something, though what he expected to see nineteen stories up was anyone’s guess. He definitely wouldn’t have been able to see his exchange on the steps. When Trent opened the refrigerator door, Ciaran jumped and turned to look at him with a bright smile.

Ciaran stepped around the sofa and immediately began to dig through the bags. “Oh, grand. You’re a blessing, lad.”

“That’s me,” he muttered. “What were you doing out there?”

“Just a bit of precaution, lad. Never you mind.”

“If you’re doing weird fairy magic in my apartment, I want to know about it.”

“I was sending a message to a friend.”

“You’re not inviting anyone else to stay here.”

Ciaran waved away his concern. “I won’t strain your hospitality, don’t you worry.”

Trent made a face as the fairy poured himself a glass of whole fat milk and emptied a solid third of the honey bottle into it, but Ciaran swallowed it down without hesitation. “Wow,” Trent said as the other man set down his glass with a satisfied sigh. “That was truly disgusting.”

“Never had honeyed milk?”

“No.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing.”

Trent pulled the rest of the food from the bags and gathered them up for recycling. “I ran into your friend downstairs. The one you said was after you.”

Ciaran paused. “Did you, now?” he asked warily.

“He knows you’re here. With me.”

“Damn him,” Ciaran sighed, absently reaching up to touch his wound. “What did you tell him?”

“Nothing,” Trent admitted after a moment. He hesitated before bending under the counter to put away the ball of plastic bags. “We had a deal, right?”

Ciaran’s brow furrowed. “We did,” he answered quietly. “Not that I would’ve blamed you for not keeping to it.” He slipped around the kitchen island to stand in front of the younger man. “I wouldn’t have been your problem,” he said. “You could’ve brought him straight to me, and there’d have been nothing for me to do about it.”

Trent frowned, refusing to back away as Ciaran inched closer to him.

“But you didn’t,” Ciaran went on. He tilted his head as he looked up at the other man with a pensive frown. He knew where it was leading. Trent was doing him a favor, and would be well within his rights to ask for something in return. It may not even be true that he saw the hunter outside. It would be typical. He might not even have minded doing something for him in thanks, but he resented being treated like an idiot.

“Why?” Ciaran asked. Trent frowned at him, and a taunting smirk curled the corners of the fairy’s mouth. He could practically feel the coiled tension in the other man, and he had to restrain himself from reaching out to touch him. He had to admit how soft his hair looked, and how his frowning put a pleasant little crinkle in his brow. He would ask for something, definitely, and Ciaran could guess what it would be. “Why keep quiet? You see something you like, lad?”

“Shut up and eat your stupid food,” Trent said instead of an answer. He pushed Ciaran away by the shoulder and moved by him, dropping onto the sofa and turning the volume down on the television. He rubbed idly at the sore spot on his cheek where the door had hit him. “That guy shouldn’t be able to come up with the security downstairs, so I don’t think we need to worry about him. Unless you get too annoying and I decide to kick you out. Which seems pretty likely actually, so maybe you should worry.”

“You’re a kind and gentle soul, a chara.” Ciaran helped himself to the food Trent had brought, devouring an entire pack of cheap, pre-packaged brownies and washing it down with a second glass of milk. He sat on the couch near Trent with a bag of miniature powdered donuts, pressing his hand to the sore bruise on his stomach as he settled, and he let out a satisfied sigh.

“You’re still eating?” Trent observed with a slight sneer.

“Aye, and I’m feeling much better. Except in the stomach area,” he added, lifting his palm to look at the spiderweb of black veins.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have stuffed it with so much garbage.”

“A fairy’s insides are delicate, lad. You have to put the right things in.”

“Like donuts?”

“Aye, like donuts.” He reached across Trent’s lap to take the remote control from the coffee table, pressing his shoulder against the other man’s arm. He seemed pleasantly solid, and Ciaran momentarily considered touching the smooth skin where his shirt showed his collarbone. A silver chain hung around his neck, his shirt barely hiding the simple ring pendant of softly mottled jade. He would likely get snapped at if he touched it, but it might be worth it to see the angry flush on the other man’s face. He restrained himself for now, and for a few moments, only the crinkle of the donut bag and the shouting voices from the television filled the room.

Ciaran could feel Trent breathing beside him. He shifted to cross his legs under him, and the other man didn’t move when the fairy’s knee came to rest lightly on his thigh. They sat quietly for a while, watching the shrieking women on the television. Ciaran let out a short curse as one of the donuts slipped out of his fingers and rolled underneath them. He bent to try to reach it, but when he couldn’t, he stood and moved to the end of the sofa, lifting it with one hand so easily that Trent almost slid off of the other end.

“What the hell?” Trent said, stumbling to his feet as the couch rose to too high an angle to sit on.

“Don’t worry; I’ll get it.” Ciaran held the sofa with one hand and stretched underneath it, snatching up the rogue donut and checking it for dust before popping it in his mouth. He let the end of the sofa back down to the ground with a soft clunk and took his seat again, oblivious to Trent’s stare.

Trent stood warily for a few moments until Ciaran looked up at him in confusion. Trent had moved that sofa before; it wasn’t the heaviest piece of furniture around, but it definitely took two hands, and he definitely couldn’t have lifted it over his head. Just when he started to think that it felt normal to be around the fairy, he reminded him how decidedly un-normal he was. Trent didn’t know anything about what fairies were really like—but he at least knew now that they were light, strong, and had black blood. Not exactly the image he’d had before Ciaran had shown up.

He scolded himself for wondering how easily Ciaran could have lifted him if he really wanted to, and he took his place beside him again with a small frown. Ciaran settled in as though nothing had happened, chewing on his small powdered donuts with his knee pressed against Trent’s thigh.

“What is this, anyway?” he asked eventually around a mouth full of donut. “That one’s not half noisy, is she?”

“ Bridezillas ,” Trent answered with more than a hint of disdain. “They find these women who are getting married and think that entitles them to be loud and obnoxious, and then they follow them around and film them being loud and obnoxious. It’s ‘reality’ television,” he finished with a half-hearted set of air quotes, resting his arm on the back of the sofa behind Ciaran rather than squeezing it back between them.

“Isn’t that charming,” the fairy snorted. “Nothing like true love to warm the heart, eh?”

“More like a paycheck,” he scoffed. “Make a fool of yourself on television and let the world believe you’re insufferable, but it’s money toward that white wedding she so desperately wants, I’m sure.”

“Don’t forget the free movie of the wedding day,” Ciaran pointed out. They watched for a while longer, until the bag of donuts was empty and Ciaran was forced to lick the powdered sugar from his fingers. “Why do they stay, do you think? If these women are half as bad as they seem, how on Earth did they find men to marry them?”

“There will always be people who like to be ordered around, and there will always be someone willing to order them. I don’t understand the dynamic; treating your spouse like a servant just to make yourself feel important.” He shook his head while Ciaran scoffed.

“Get a dog,” they said together, and they both paused. A faint smile threatened to touch Trent’s lips, but he cleared his throat and returned his attention to the television.

“Anyway, it’s ridiculous,” he said. They kept watching it anyway.

Ciaran managed to behave himself while Trent got his school work done, even if that meant spending most of the afternoon dozing on the couch. When Trent emerged from the office to make himself dinner, he found the fairy sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, a cup half-full in front of him as well as a plate holding a large slice of apple pie.

“What is it you’re studying so hard, at any rate?” he asked before Trent could comment on his food choices.

“Finance,” he answered, unable to pull his eyes away from the thick residue on the side of the glass as the fairy drank from it.

“Sounds exciting,” Ciaran snorted. “What, banking and things?”

“Sure. Banking and things. Is that milk, or are you actually just drinking the heavy cream?”

“Well I have to have something with the pie, haven’t I?”

“You’re disgusting. How are you not fat?”

“Fairy magic,” Ciaran chuckled with a mouthful of cake.

“What kind of stupid magic just makes you want to eat cake all the time? And you still owe me money for all this crap,” Trent added, ignoring the non-answer. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten that fairy bullshit you pulled with the leaves.”

Ciaran shrugged, taking a large bite of pie and talking around it. “ So what do you want to work for a bank for? System never made much sense to me. ‘Here, take my money so that you can loan it to other people and make a profit, but don’t worry, I won’t expect to see any of the money from it.’ Why bother?”

“Because it’s better than keeping gold boullion under your bed?”

“Is it? I can scarper with my gold boullion whenever I like, but I understand it’s a bit more difficult to get all of your money out of a bank whenever you like.”

“I guess when you’re a fairy you don’t have to worry about taxes.”

“Can’t say that I do, no. So you’re in it for the money, then? Them bankers do quite well for themselves, eh?”

“It’s a family business,” Trent said, turning his back on Ciaran to search the fridge for food other than pie. “My father works for HSBC in Hong Kong. That’s a bank,” he added over his shoulder.

“Thanks, I gathered.”

Trent shrugged one shoulder and picked a plastic container of leftover white rice out of the fridge, then set a deep pan on the stove to heat up. “How do I know what you learn frolicking in your fairy garden?”

“Do I look like I spend a lot of time flitting my dainty wings, a chara? You need an education.”

“I’ll pass.” He gathered a few vegetables from the refrigerator and set them near the warming pan. “And what’s that you keep calling me? A car?”

Ciaran drained the glass of heavy cream before he answered. “What, a chara? It means friend, mate. I don’t mean anything by it. Just a habit.”

“It means friend in what, fairy-speak?”

Ciaran gave a short sigh through his nose as he stared across the island at the younger man. “Or, you know, Irish. Shall I let you get all of this out of your system, so that we might move on from the race issue?”

“You can’t tell someone that you’re a fairy and not expect them to have a few preconceived notions.” Trent dripped a bit of oil into the hot pan and dumped his chosen ingredients in along with the rice.

“Aye, so I’ve learned,” he muttered, wiping up the last of the crumbs on his plate with one finger and licking it clean .

Trent paused in stirring his fried rice to look over his shoulder. “ Do you have wings? I mean, are you hiding them, or something?”

“Aye, but I only show them to the people lucky enough to visit me in my wee glen, where I live in gentle harmony with the little creatures of the forest in downtown Vancouver ,” Ciaran finished with a deadpan stare.

“You know, that’s another thing,” Trent said, apparently choosing to ignore the fairy’s sarcasm. “Shouldn’t you be off bothering Stonehenge tourists or something? What are you doing in Canada?”

“First of all, Stonehenge is in Wiltshire, which is in England ,” Ciaran pointed out. “I’m from the Brú na Bóinne.”

“That means so much to me.”

“Ireland, is all you need to know. Can’t a man travel, see a bit more of the world than where he was born?”

“A man can. I’m not clear on the rule for fairies. Don’t you have a forest clearing to protect?”

“At least change it up a bit,” he muttered. “And anyway, Chinese folk literally making fried rice in front of me shouldn’t throw stereotype stones.”

Trent frowned at him. “There was leftover rice,” he grumbled, turning his back on the fairy to focus on his cooking. When he was finished, he scooped the mixture into a bowl and sat cross-legged on the sofa with it, doing his best not to notice Ciaran’s lean torso as the fairy stretched nearby.

“Is that bed in there mine, then, or shall I find a nice corner of floor to curl up in?”

“I literally could not care about anything less than I care about where you sleep.”

“It’s so strange how you live here alone and don’t have any friends.” Ciaran ruffled the younger man’s hair on his way by the sofa, causing a growling protest and a swat at his hand, but he only smiled and stepped into the guest bedroom without shutting the door behind him.

Trent sat still and listened to Ciaran settle into bed in the next room, letting out a small sigh only after he was certain the other man was asleep. His inclination was to turn the television up loud and put on an action movie, but it was in his best interest to let the fairy rest and get gone—the sooner the better.