3. Three - Friends and Full Moons
Three - Friends and Full Moons
Ana
The room we reserved in the bathhouse is normally set aside for those who want a quieter experience.
But the three of us who have taken up occupancy for the last two hours chose it for the exact opposite reason.
Leaf ties off a braid in my hair while she goads Celese.
The elfin woman, for her part, blushes so prettily, I consider joining the little gnome.
“Not all of us are as brae or as brazen as you are.” Celese’ azure skin turns sapphire at her cheeks
“If you don’t work your whiles on Sabine soon,” Leaf says. “I will lock the two of you in one of my rooms and I won’t let you out until both of you have come.”
“You will not!” Celese looks mortified. “I would die. Worse, I’d be homeless!”
“I’m not sure your priorities are in the right order,” I say, twisting away from Leaf to grab the incense stick and swirl it closer to Celese.
Our sweet school teacher lives with the woman who owns the tea shop and what started as a crush recently turned into something that hurts.
“As much as I would love to see you and Sabine together, I won’t allow any more stress inside these walls. We’re here to pretend that no school kids or mothers or boundary-pushing customers exist. And we’re not talking about sex. Or about those of us who aren’t having it.” I swirl the shallow water covering all our feet.
“I mean, your dry-spell is entirely a choice,” Leaf says, taking the incense and inhaling as deeply as she can. “You could tear yourself apart if you wanted to.”
She and Celese both giggle.
“You do have all the things you need to fix it,” Celese says, smiling apologetically.
“But I don’t want to have to fix it.”
“What are we talking about?” Morganna says from the door, shutting it quickly so the smoke and steam don’t escape.
My sister is in a towel dress, her hair is damp, and a sweet fragrance wafts from her sparkling skin.
“Sex and who isn’t having it.”
“Oh.” She sits between me and Leaf. “You can add me to the list.”
“When would you have time?” Leaf chuckles and then falls back into a mound of pillows, feet still swirling the water.
“How were the cinnamon stone baths?” I ask.
“Nowhere near as nice as this one.” Morganna offers me a pained smile and I know not to ask what happened as she adjusts her towel.
“Did you make this?” I ask, toying with the weave at the hem.
“Yes, don’t go looking for all my mistakes. You will find them.” She grimaces and takes the incense stick from Celese, inhaling the heady smoke before stabbing it back into the sand with the others. “The weavers keep telling me I’ll get better. But it is so frustrating not to be good at something from the start.”
“You can always come work for me.” Morganna might have chosen to join the weaver’s guild instead of joining me in the potion trade, but our father taught us all the basics. My other sisters had different ideas of their own happiness and they seized them.
“Thank you, no. I’ll get better.” She doesn’t sound like she believes herself.
“I suppose,” Celese says with a little pout. “The rest of us will have to go without orgasms.”
“Speak for yourself.” I kick a tiny splash of water at her. “If you don’t take the time to get yourself off, that’s entirely your fault.”
They all giggle and Celese falls backward into the enormous fluff of pillows with Leaf. “I need to go to the city next week.”
Leaf groans as I remind Celese, “No stress.”
Morganna is the only one of us who likes the Queen’s city
“It’s a good thing.” But she grimaces as she says it. “I promise.”
“When was the last time something good came from the city?” We dislike it so much, we don’t even use its real name—most people don’t divorce it from the Queen, anyway.
“Misses Scoggins?” Morganna suggests.
She’s not wrong. Our dressmaker is a miracle worker.
Leaf raises her hands above her head and stretches more than her small body should be able to. “The sun has set. It’s time for me to walk you home,” she says to Celese. “And time for you to get back to work.”
“It never ends.” I grab a glass of lavender water and raise it in a mock toast.
“Especially on the night of a full moon.” Morganna looks at me and then over to Celese. I don’t have to tell her I’ve noticed.
Our father taught us several things we’re not likely to forget.
Things like apricots will always bring you luck and moon berries are poisonous unless harvested under a full moon. Never, under any circumstances, burn fairy broom and don’t sit on star moss unless you want to clean brown beetles out of your garments for weeks.
But the most important thing he taught us was to know our limits and to keep track of others’ for them.
Celese is teetering on the edge, and I don’t want to have to sell her a potion for an incense hangover tomorrow.
We help Celese to stand and Leaf teases her about being a lightweight as we dry our legs and feet, but Morganna stays put waving goodbye as she lights another stick of incense.
She’s always kept her worries to herself... But I may send Mina to talk to her tomorrow.
Sometimes two years younger is an easier gap to span than ten years older.
“I promise I’m fine,” Celese says, straightening when we step out of the bathhouse and into the fresh night air.
Snorting, Leaf says, “I’ll believe that when you can walk fifty yards in a straight line.”
Celese glares at her. “There are no straight fifty yards between here and home.”
Leaf helps her down the stairs, asking if that was the kind of sentence she’d let her students use.
I leave them bickering to grab the basket from where I’d hidden it on my home’s porch next door, but they wait for me and I accompany them to the point where the road splits. Kissing both their cheeks and watching them walk north toward the square and the temple, and Celese’s home beyond it.
She and Sabine will eventually sort themselves out, one way or another.
But when I turn away, I wish I had taken the small trail that leads behind my house—even with its uneven ground and ugly roots—instead of the main road past the inn.
The branches of that trail are close and I would have gotten out the other side with more than a few scrapes and scratches, but I would also have avoided Bibble.
“A lovely night, isn’t it, Miss Eventide?” He sweeps a deep bow and I imagine his nose touches the ground as he does so.
“It is certainly a night for stargazing, isn’t it?”
He looks up at the clear sky overhead and sighs. “Would you like some company?
“Company” in that tone doesn’t mean company. Especially when it comes to horny gnomes.
“Have you changed your mind?” I ask, my gaze dropping involuntarily to the front of his trousers.
“I had hoped that maybe you had changed yours.” He steps closer, his voice lowering to a sultry baritone. “We had fun before... If you’d only let me try …”
I take a step back. “My objections still stand.”
Bibble had courted me for a month before we wound up in his bed. And what a disappointing encounter that had been.
I had known that we weren’t a match before I’d found out his cock was pierced with a line of short, sharp bones.
“If you’re not willing to remove them, there’s no reason to even pretend we would work.”
Tearing up my insides is not a price I am willing to pay for a roll in the proverbial hay.
And he had been such a promising prospect.
He doesn’t want a wife and I don’t want a husband who disappears for months out of the year, leading travelers on quests. Quests that half of them don’t come back from.
But he’s here, asking again... Tonight.
“Bibble?” I know he hears the suspicion in my tone.
He looks up at me, eyes wide and sparkling with the reflection of the stars overhead.
“What are you doing?”
There’s a reason Leaf isn’t working tonight.
Full moon fucking means more to certain types of creatures—Lycanthropes, most notably, but gnomes are one of them, too.
“Why are you asking me for this tonight?”
“I just…”
“Oh, no!” Leaf bustles up beside me and swats at the man before shoving him back three steps. “You don’t even get to talk to her tonight.”
Bibble backs away, looking faintly horrified.
“ What is going on?” I ask.
Gnomes don’t talk about why the full moon is special.
“He is a cretin.” She swats at him again and Bibble finally puts his hands up to defend himself.
They argue so fast, I lose track of the conversation.
He screeches something about not wanting to take gullible travelers out to the dragon stones anymore. She shouts that I am not his meal ticket and then it turns into sounds I’m not sure are actually a language.
“I’m going to let you two figure this out. I have moon berries to collect.”
Bibble looks like he wants to come after me, but Leaf stops him and I let her continue to berate him.
Villagers start leaning out their windows to glean morsels for tomorrow’s teatime gossip. I look forward to hearing Mina’s retelling tomorrow, but I don’t breathe easily until I pass the inn and can’t hear them anymore.
“Maybe I need to go to the city with Celese.” I mumble under my breath and take the path that leads east and then south away from the village.
Or maybe a traveling party will come through town and I can take out my needs on a willing stranger.
Whatever pleasure I manage to find, I won’t find it tonight.