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

9

Trent was determined to pretend the previous evening hadn’t happened. He ate his breakfast and sat in the office with his laptop before he had to leave for class, skimming the news while Ciaran made noise in the kitchen. When it was time for him to leave, Trent packed up his bag and pulled the strap over his shoulder, then headed for the front door without even looking at the fairy.

“Oi, you’re off again?” Ciaran called to him, and he stopped. “Where to?”

“Class.”

Ciaran stepped over to him with a mouth full of raisin muffin. “Hold on a tick. I want to come along.”

Trent frowned. “What? Isn’t the whole point of this stupid arrangement that you need somewhere to hide?”

“Aye, but I’m feeling a bit better, and I’ll go mad if I sit another day in the house doing nothing.”

“If you’re feeling better, why don’t you just leave? You don’t have to follow me around. I would rather you didn’t follow me around.”

“You aren’t going to be rid of me that easily,” Ciaran grinned. “I still need a little more time. But not much, I suspect,” he mused, his gaze drifting down to the tight fist Trent had made around his bag’s strap.

“And what about the hunter that’s after you? You aren’t afraid of him anymore?”

The fairy scoffed. “I was never afraid of him. Anyway, you’ve been out, right? And you haven’t seen him. It’ll be fine. He’s probably off chasing something far more troublesome than little old me.”

“I can’t wait for you. I’m going to be late.”

“Here, here; I’m ready,” Ciaran insisted, shoving the last bite of muffin into his mouth and trotting into Trent’s bedroom. He reappeared before Trent had time to gripe at him, wearing a dark blue hoodie that didn’t belong to him. He pulled the hood up, hiding his face reasonably well since the sweater was a bit big on him. “See? Incognito.”

“You’re an idiot. He knows you’re with me.”

“On with you,” Ciaran sighed, waving Trent ahead of him toward the door. He paused to pull on his worn canvas shoes, then followed the other man out the door and down the hall.

“You can’t just come into my class,” Trent pointed out. “Even if you could, I don’t want you bothering me while I’m trying to take notes. You’ll disrupt everyone,” he finished as they exited the elevator into the lobby, and he caught the curious eye of the doorman on his way by.

“Everything all right, Mr. Fa?” the guard asked, glancing past him into the empty elevator as though looking for someone.

Trent frowned at him in confusion. “I’m fine.” He pushed the lobby door open and stepped down onto the street with Ciaran on his heels.

“You’ll get strange looks talking to yourself like that,” the fairy teased.

“What? He couldn’t see you?”

“Not being seen is a fairy’s natural state, a chara. I let you see me, but that’s a special circumstance.”

“Lucky me,” Trent snorted. “What about the hunter? He clearly saw you.”

“I haven’t quite figured that out,” he admitted, standing so close beside Trent at the bus stop that their elbows touched. “There are a few things one can do to see fairies, of course, but they’re rather specialized. Holding a four leaf clover, wearing your coat inside out—silly things like that. He didn’t seem like a very silly sort. Maybe it was a one-time thing, and now he’s lost me again. You’d think he would keep a better eye on your building.”

Trent opened his mouth to answer and realized he would appear to be talking to himself again, so he said nothing. Ciaran got on the bus behind him—without paying, of course—and stood next to him in the crowded isle, both of them holding on to the same railing. Trent kept his gaze straight ahead as the other passengers pressed Ciaran’s body against his, refusing to look down even when a bump in the road caused the fairy to brace himself with a hand on Trent’s chest. Ciaran’s hand lingered far longer than was necessary, and Trent risked a glance down at his face in an attempt to scowl him into good behavior.

“Don’t mind me,” Ciaran murmured with a slow smile, his fingers curling into the younger man’s shirt. “You’re used to public transit by now, aren’t you? It can get a bit cramped.” He let his hand slip down to brush Trent’s stomach, feeling the tightness there.

“Stop,” Trent said under his breath. Ciaran couldn’t be sure if it was an order or a plea.

“Oh, that’s right,” Ciaran chuckled. “You said not to touch you again. My mistake.” He moved his hand from the other man and tucked it into the front pocket of his borrowed hoodie, instead letting the motion of the moving bus shift them together periodically.

By the time they stepped off of the bus, Trent’s jaw felt so tight that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to open it again. He walked across campus without waiting for Ciaran, taking such long strides that the other man had to trot to keep up with him. At the door to his classroom, he gave the fairy what he hoped was a suitably threatening look, and then he opened the door and stalked to his usual seat without looking back.

Ciaran took the seat beside him, slouching in the desk and stretching his legs while Trent pulled out his laptop and settled in for the lecture.

“Oi,” Ciaran called, leaning over the desk toward Trent. “What class is this, anyway?” Trent ignored him. “How long are we going to be here?”

Trent snapped a warning look over at him, but still said nothing. After the long bus ride with the fairy continually bumping against him, he had very little patience left. He didn’t know why Ciaran suddenly had problems keeping his hands to himself, but at least he had seemed to remember Trent’s order not to touch him. How seriously he was taking the request seemed to be another matter. He heard Ciaran hum at him but refused to look. He didn’t want to see him sitting in class like this was normal. He couldn’t let Ciaran get any more involved in his life than he already was.

Trent did his best to pay attention to the lecture even while Ciaran lounged next to him huffing out bored sighs. He wanted to tell the fairy to leave if he was so uninterested, but enough people had walked by without questioning him that the rest of the class clearly had no idea he was there.

It wasn’t until the class was half over that Trent realized Ciaran’s sighs didn’t seem to come from boredom anymore. He chanced a look over at the fairy beside him and almost choked. Ciaran was looking directly at him, his face flushed and one hand moving purposefully over the front of his straining jeans. Trent looked away from him instantly, but the fairy’s rumbling laugh sent a shiver up his spine.

“You see, I know how to listen,” Ciaran murmured, his breath hitching slightly as his back arched away from the seat. “You said not to touch you.”

Trent turned his head, prepared to give the fairy a look that begged for mercy, but the sight of Ciaran’s tongue wetting his lips as he gripped himself through the denim washed away any hope of coherent thought. He watched without considering how he must have looked to the people around him as Ciaran’s free hand slipped up underneath Trent’s hoodie, unable to keep from imagining the fairy’s rough fingers running over his nipple. Trent shifted in his seat in an attempt to hide his body’s reaction to the sight in front of him, but Ciaran’s playful smirk as he bit his lip only made his stomach tense.

“You just let me know when you’d like me to touch you instead, a chara,” the fairy teased, and Trent finally turned his eyes away and stared pointedly at his laptop screen. He couldn’t block out Ciaran’s quiet grunts and moans, and he was fairly certain that his imagination was far filthier than anything the fairy was actually doing, but he refused to look just the same.

At the end of class, he packed up his bag as quickly as he could and hurried out of the classroom, holding his messenger bag strategically in front of his hips. He didn’t look back until he felt a hand on his arm.

“Oi, what’s the idea running off?” Ciaran laughed. Trent jerked his arm away from him.

“Why are you doing this?” he hissed, knowing his voice sounded less confident than he wanted. “What do you want from me?”

“I’m just teasing,” the fairy said. “I didn’t know you’d be so bound up you couldn’t even have a bit of fun.”

“This isn’t fun,” Trent insisted, and he turned and continued walking back toward the bus stop with Ciaran right behind him.

“Oh, don’t be pouty,” Ciaran chuckled. He didn’t want to admit how hard it was to control himself around the other man. He just needed to have him and be done with it, he was sure. Every time Trent resisted, getting angry at him and telling him to stop with a flushed face and an obvious erection, it just frustrated Ciaran more. Why hold back if it was clear what he wanted? He let out a sigh. “Come on,” he said as he jogged to catch up to him. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“I don’t want you to make it up to me. I want you to go away.”

“I owe you for your hospitality,” Ciaran prodded, hoping to get Trent to finally admit what he wanted. If not sex, something—anything in return. Every day that went by without the younger man asking for recompense made him more anxious. “Let’s get something to eat at least. I’ll pay.”

“You don’t have any real money,” Trent grumbled.

“Then you pay. Lord knows you can afford it. But let’s go regardless. You’d only be going home and sitting around, right?”

Trent stopped walking so quickly that the fairy ran into his back. He turned and looked down at Ciaran with an untrusting scowl. “If we go, you won’t do anything. No touching. No teasing. Promise me.”

Ciaran sighed. “I promise. I’ll be real friendly-like.”

Trent hesitated, watching him for any sign of trickery. When Ciaran only smiled at him, he snorted and gave in. “Fine. We can get some food. But you’d better let people see you, because I’m not sitting there looking like I’m by myself while you chatter at me.”

“Sure, sure,” Ciaran agreed, and they walked together without speaking for a few steps. “So, where can we get some frozen yogurt around here?”

“Frozen—I thought you said you wanted food?”

“It is food! It won’t kill you to eat something other than rice and vegetables.”

Trent glowered at him for a long moment, then turned and started down a different pathway. “Menchie’s,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Menchie’s. Frozen Yogurt. It isn’t far.”

“What a pushover,” Ciaran laughed, and Trent huffed at him.

“I should have let the Quebecois upstairs and let him take you away.”

“Is that what he was? Huh.” Ciaran followed along beside him, his hands tucked into the front pocket of his hoodie. “I thought he was speaking French, but I suppose it did sound a bit shit.”

Trent let out a reluctant chuckle through his nose, and when they reached the frozen yogurt shop, he let himself inside without holding the door behind him. Ciaran grabbed it before it could close and followed him in. People milled around inside, waiting in line or filling their cups of frozen yogurt, and the few tables inside were full.

Ciaran stood on tiptoe to look past Trent’s shoulder at the offered flavors, impatiently bouncing on his feet. Trent sighed and ignored him while he filled his small cup of lemon and mango yogurt. When he stood at the register to pay, he turned to Ciaran to tell him to hurry up and stopped short at the sight of the fairy’s bowl. It was almost overflowing with yogurt of every color, though chocolate seemed to be the overwhelming favorite. Trent felt sick just looking at it, but Ciaran set the bowl down on the scale with a pleasant smile, as though half a pound of mismatched frozen yogurt was a perfectly normal thing to have for lunch. How could one person be so attractive and so nauseating in such a short span of time?

Trent paid anyway, and he pushed his way through the crowd and back out the front door, eager to get away from the press of people. They found a spot on a bench across the walkway and sat down to eat. Ciaran made a show of sitting as far from Trent as possible to prove he was keeping his promise.

“Is this far enough?” he said. “I could stand.”

“Is it so hard to understand that I don’t want you hanging all over me, or…” He trailed off, not able to look the fairy in the face without picturing him licking his lips. “Don’t you have any shame, doing that in a room full of people?”

Ciaran shrugged. “They couldn’t see me.”

“I could see you!”

“Yes, but it was for you, so that’s different.”

“For—ugh,” he sighed. “Forget it. Eat your disgusting yogurt.”

“What, you’ve never had chocolate watermelon cheesecake cookies and cream before?”

“Do all fairies eat like you, or are you just especially revolting?”

Ciaran stirred his yogurt into one brownish mass of incongruent flavors and swallowed a large spoonful. “Everyone has their favorites.”

Trent frowned down at his bowl a moment before glancing back at Ciaran. “So is any of the typical stuff true? About fairies, I mean. Little winged naked women who live in gardens.”

Ciaran’s brow furrowed slightly as he looked over at him. “Curious all of a sudden, are you? Looking to catch yourself a pixie?”

“You just don’t make any sense. And if fairies are real, what else is real?”

“Quite a lot,” Ciaran chuckled. “But I’m not an expert. I’m not even an expert on fairies. Fairly sure I’ve never seen any naked winged women, though.”

“So do they all do weird poison sex magic, or is that just you?”

Ciaran sighed. “I’m not the only sort what does this kind of thing, you know. The leannán sídhe do it just as well to men as I do to women, and I’ve not heard tell of any of them switching teams for safety’s sake, so I think I deserve a bit of credit, right?”

“The what? Is that like a banshee?”

“Sure, except I that isn’t what I said. A ban sídhe is a messenger, a leannán sídhe is sort of a…life vampire.”

“And here I was thinking there was only the kind of fairy that made messes in kitchens and irritated me,” Trent muttered.

“We’re a diverse bunch.” Ciaran took another bite of his yogurt and paused with his spoon in his mouth to press a hand against his bruise. He waved away Trent’s furrowed brow and carried on. “And a bit of a secret—fairy is your word. It’s Latin. Amongst ourselves, we’re the aes sídhe. Ays-shee-thuh,” he said again, slowly, before Trent could mangle the pronunciation.

Trent chuckled softly. “I’m going to just keep calling you Ciaran, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. It’s a grand name, if I do say so.”

They sat together and watched people pass by as they ate their frozen treats, neither of them feeling the need to speak any more. Trent finished his small portion quickly, but Ciaran savored each disgusting spoonful, scraping the bottom of the paper bowl to make sure he didn’t miss any melted drippings. When they were finished, Trent looked over at the fairy beside him.

“So, if you ‘switched teams,’ why is that hunter after you?”

“Well,” Ciaran began with a shrug, “I’m weaning myself, aren’t I? I won’t pretend I don’t have an appetite.” He grinned across the bench at him.

“Yeah, I could tell.” Trent stood and took Ciaran’s empty bowl from him to throw it in a nearby bin. “I’m going home. If you’re coming, let’s go.” He started back toward his bus stop without waiting to see if the fairy followed him or not. There wasn’t anything special about Trent, then. No real reason why Ciaran had been flirting with him other than that he was nearby. He could have guessed that Ciaran was promiscuous—and probably not particularly picky—but he still didn’t like the hollow feeling in his chest.