He dives into the air and then tumbles onto his nest, shakes his hair so it falls and frames his face perfectly, and then shifts the covers over himself. He peers up at me.
“Are you coming in?” he asks, and his voice has a curious innocence. And it is odd, admittedly. I don’t know how old he is, nineteen, maybe?§ “Older than me” is what he said. It’s strange that a boy older than me doesn’t know a thing about sex, doesn’t know why I might worry about what the nonexistent neighbours might say (if they existed) about us sharing a nest, but the fact that he doesn’t understand why it might be perceived a certain way makes me feel as though anything one might worry about in such a scenario is incredibly unlikely to transpire.
Peter nods his head towards his nest again, inviting me wordlessly now to join him, and against my better judgment, I’m feeling somewhat kicked in the stomach again.
I’ve never slept with a boy before either.
Not in this way and not in the other way either. I actually don’t know how many ways there are to truly sleep with a boy, but be sure of this: I’ve experienced none of them.
And it’s one of those things I’ve thought of—how nice it would be, especially in the winter when it’s cold and you can snuggle up close to them for warmth. But here, the coolest thing is the breeze, and it’s barely there. And I’m sure I’m overthinking things now, but I don’t even know how to casually lie down next to a boy in a bed, let alone a nest.
I swallow nervously and walk over, too distracted for happy thoughts to make me float.
I lie down slowly, next to him, and stare up at the ceiling. Peter’s watching my mouth closely, and then he pokes the top right corner of it.
“These are so hard to catch,” he tells me. “And rare!”
“Yes.” I give him a demure smile. “So I’m told.”
“I’ll catch yours,” he tells me, sure of it.
I cover my kiss with my hand, make sure he didn’t snatch it away while I blinked.
He doesn’t stop watching me still, smiling a tiny bit as he does.
“What?” I frown.
“You look nervous,” he tells me.
I frown more. “And why does that make you smile?”
“I don’t know.” He smiles more. “It just does.”
I lie back next to him, arms folded across my chest, stiff as a board.
He rolls in towards me and leans on his arm, looking down at me. His eyes flicker over my face.
“Don’t worry,” he whispers. “I feel nervous too.”
And I know my cheeks go pink in an obvious way because Peter touches them, and I love feeling his hands on my face like compresses.
“Peter.” I purse my lips and my eyes go wide. “Before, you said that you wouldn’t care to share me like you shared the others.”
He nods.
“Why?” I press.
“I don’t know.” He shrugs, settling in on his pillow. “There’s just—” He shrugs again. “I just don’t want to. And I never do anything I don’t want to do.”
Pause.
“Even just thinking about anyone else looking at you makes me want punch everything and keep you just up here where no one can see you.”
I give him a look. “Well, that’s not my favourite plan.”
Peter looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t sleep in someone else’s hammock, okay?”
I nod once. “Okay.”
He stretches his arms up over his head as he yawns. “Mine’s the best one anyway.”
* * *
* Both human and fae.
? Marin, beautiful olive skin, golden hair, purple eyes; Crystal, beautiful white skin, blue hair, blue eyes; Pania, beautiful dark skin, brown hair, golden eyes; Delphine, beautiful brown skin, blonde hair, green eyes.
* A lie.
? Or at least it would appear.
* I dare say that’s on purpose too.
* And I suppose he might just be.
? But rather messy.
* We being womankind.
? Evidently immunity runs in the Hook family line.
* I place my hand over my mouth and swallow. Oh, to die right now.
* Sorry, Charlotte!
? Thanks, Charlotte!
? Ever so much more than those stupid pecks on the back of one’s hand.
§ But for how many years was he twelve?
CHAPTER
FOUR
I suppose I probably should have seen this coming or at least toyed with the idea of it, that there are other people here who Peter spends significant sorts of time with, but it wasn’t until Peter Pan came right out and said, “I should go visit Calla, because I’m big now, and she will want to see.”
And then I said, “Who’s Calla?”
And then no one said anything, and they didn’t have to, because Peter’s thimbled a lot of girls, if you recall, but the small flick of Brodie’s eyebrows confirmed it for me.
Peter didn’t answer either, by the way. He just took flight straight out the window like he’d forgotten all about me at the mere mention of her.
I’ve been there a few days by now, I think? It’s hard to tell. You know the strange few days between Christmas and New Year’s on Earth, where real life feels suspended and you sort of drift through the days without any real notion of time? It’s like that here, only always. Time is incredibly slippery here. I think it has only been a few days, and I think that because I can count in my head how many times I’ve left out porridge for the Hobb, which is three,* not including today, and how many times we’ve had to take our medicine, which is also three,? I think.
First thing in the morning, no matter what.
Peter said it’s my job to make the littlest ones take it, so I take mine first to prove to the boys that it’s takable. Which it is. It’s mostly sweet, sickly almost. Like agave syrup. But there’s a bitterness that cuts through at the end.
“Come on.” Brodie nods his head towards the window. “I’ll take you.”
“Take me where?” I frown.
“To the Stj?rna.”
It’s not a terrible far walk to the Old Valley—as they call it—just maybe thirty or so minutes on foot. It’s where the Stj?rna people live. It borders Zomertierra. Most of their land is found in the springtime land, and it’s all lakes and pine trees and boulders and wildflowers, and I might have been lost to the beauty of it all if I wasn’t staring down the barrel of my worst nightmare realised.
Peter Pan diving off a rock and playing in the water with the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my whole entire terrible life.
Dark brown skin, chocolate eyes, raven hair. Beautiful jagua flowers crawling up her arm.? The biggest, whitest, widest smile I’ve ever seen—
The wonder of him dims a little as I watch them, and I remind myself that I’ve known him perhaps not even five days§ (dimming wonder can help you to remember things here), and then the wonder pipes back up again and reminds me that sometimes abstract things such as affections exist outside the pocket of regular space-time and actually dwell in the special corner of the universe reserved exclusively for the fated hearts.
The girl’s very presence around him is—and this is the best I could describe it—akin to watching a stranger deface a family heirloom.