He twisted behind him—the muscles in his abdomen leaped at the swivel in the most interesting way—and turned back to me with his hand held out, a cupcake glistening with dark berries sitting incongruously small and dainty on his large palm.
“It’s a skyr cake, with blueberries,” he said at my bemused look, and for the first time he looked a shade uncertain. “A very small one, obviously. Usually they’re full-size, proper cakes. I thought you might like it; it doesn’t taste like anything you have here. We were speaking of flavors the other night, and your mother’s desserts . . . my mother always prepared this for my birthday. It tastes like home to me, more than anything else. The happiest of my home. So I thought I would make some for you, whisk you there with me for a moment.”
“I . . .” I swiped my hand across my eyes. At least it was too late to make a mess of any lingering eyeliner. The slim silver lining of these long days. “Thank you.”
The cake was little even in my hand; I peeled back the wrapper and took half of it in one bite. The blueberries burst across my tongue first, a bright dominance of flavor, crushed tart and sweet between my teeth. The cake’s base was crumbled butter biscuits and the frosting cold and densely creamy, something like cheesecake but much lighter, more air and less tang, with a startling, earthy hint of resin. Fjolar was watching me so intently he must have seen the moment I tasted it, that surprising, ghostly scrape of bark against my palate.
“Birkir,” he said. “Birch liquor. Unusual flavor, isn’t it? And the skyr is like your yogurt, but without quite so much zest.”
I took the second bite and chewed it slowly, rolling the cream across my tongue, savoring the grit and butter of the crust. As soon as I swallowed the last of it, I set the paper aside and nearly vaulted myself across the blanket, settling onto his lap with my legs wound around his hips. “Thank you,” I said again, against his mouth. “That was so kind. No one’s ever—”
Liar liar liar, a small, outraged part of me sneered. You know someone has. Think of all the flowers he gave you, for no reason at all. Think of all the quiet and strength, all those years of holding your hand and expecting nothing back.
“—done something so thoughtful for me,” I finished, nose to nose with Fjolar.
He exhaled once into my mouth, then buried his hands in my hair and kissed me, hard and deep. As soon as his tongue swept wet against mine I could feel everything inside me clench and rise up toward him, wanting deeper, wanting more. But he pulled back as soon as I leaned into him, brushing his lips lightly over my cheek and the lobe of my ear.
“Will you show me?” he whispered, his breath setting every minute hair inside my ear to tingling, like tiny lightning rods. “I’d like to see these flowers bloom, Iris. To see them burn as wild and beautiful as you.”
My heart beat frantically against his chest. I wanted to do it so badly, to call the flowers’ fractals for him, but I was so tired. Even abuzz as my body was, electrified from all his nearness, I didn’t think my muscles had it in me to power that bright surge.
“Fjolar . . . ,” I said hesitantly. “I’m not sure I can. . . . It’s been such a long day, I haven’t even told you all of it. . . .”
“Would you like to try? I’ll be here to help you, make you stronger.”
I considered it. Why not? Why not make something gorgeous out of this hideous day, show him what beauty I could muster?
I nodded, and he lifted me like I weighed nothing, like my bones were a hollow bird’s and not my own, then shifted me around so that I sat in his lap with my back against his chest. With one hand he swept all my hair over my right shoulder and sank his open mouth onto the tender space at the base of my neck. I arched against him like a strung bow, feeling all surging quicksilver on the inside, his lips and tongue the sweetest, tickling pleasure against my skin.
“Will you bloom them for me?” he whispered.
I could barely breathe, and I so desperately didn’t want him to stop. “Yes,” I said faintly. “Just let me . . . I just need a minute.”
I focused on the cluster closest to me, a pile of black-eyed Susans and pale crocuses, their colors both muted and strange in the LED light. My eyes nearly crossed with the effort as the flowers multiplied, murky yellow petals and muddy blues racing around each other, like spirals of falling dominoes tipping each other over. Fjolar chuckled into my ear, nipping at the lobe.
“Very nice, flower girl, so nice. Could we see a true spectacle, do you think? All of them together, rising toward the infinite.”
He gripped my upper arms until I gasped, and it would have been almost painful if he hadn’t run his lips down the line of my neck. I could feel the heat spread between my legs and flare into a pulsing throb, and even with my vision blurred I pulled at the flowers as hard as I could.
I would do it. For him, I would do it.
They burst into the spectacle he’d wanted, a fractal of component fractals like a massive, turning clockwork flower. It rotated like some steampunk dream, as if my glass sculptures had been used to build a gorgeous and infernal machine powered by petals. Gears of gum cistus, white with crimson-and-orange insides, notched into spears of violet larkspur, while silk vine and rose bay roped between and through them. Leaves, stems, and ferny frills spiderwebbed throughout in precise patterns, like an overlay of a stained-glass mosaic. And the fairy lights shed a luminous corona around it all—halo within halo of strung beads of light, shaping the fractal into a glowing orb.
I dimly wondered if somewhere nearby, a thoroughly mind-blown individual thought they were seeing a UFO hovering over the beach.
“Oh,” Fjolar breathed into my ear. “Oh, Iris.”
I sagged against him, my heart beating sluggishly, as if it were pumping bog water instead of blood. I was so tired my muscles fired twitches at random, and still I wanted him, the contours of his chest in sharp relief against my back. He feathered his fingers down my arms and gently flipped us so that I lay on my back, my hair fanned out as he hovered above me, propped up on his forearms. The ends of his hair tickled on my face, got in my mouth, made me want to sneeze. But I didn’t dare move for fear he would.
Exhausted as I was, I felt so lit by the way he looked at me, lips parted in awe, eyes heavy-lidded with desire. The flowers and loops of lights beneath me dug painfully into my spine, but they also reflected in his irises. Almost by instinct, I tugged at that too.
I’d never fractaled eyes before, had never thought to. Even as my own eyelids grew swollen-heavy, dragging toward sleep, his irises filled the space between us like a single compound eye. Silver and gray striations flickered above electric-blue orbs, like captive lightning bolts, and even his pale eyelashes were fringed throughout like transparent lace, around white sclera threaded faintly through with red.
It was stunning. It was also improbably grotesque, the ugliest thing I’d ever made.