9. Chapter 9
DAREN
Daren dropped beside Lilo onto the bed, and they laid there quietly for a while, save their panting breaths. When Daren glanced at Lilo, he caught the beautiful dark-haired human grimacing down at his body.
“You okay?”
“Messy,” Lilo grumbled.
Daren laughed. “I know. The water makes clean-up easier. I got it.” He lurched off the bed to grab something to wipe them clean, finding a towel, and then stuffed it into his hamper when he was finished.
One thing he had missed when they were in the ocean was being able to cuddle afterward on a soft surface. He pulled Lilo to him, who tucked his head beneath Daren’s chin.
“Bed nice,” Lilo said.
“Especially with you in it.” It was also incredibly satisfying to have exhausted Lilo enough to reduce him to his old speech patterns again.
Lilo snuggled closer and shivered. “Cold in new skin without coat.”
“You’re cold? That’s one of the good things about a bed too.” Daren extracted himself from Lilo to show him that the covers could be rucked down and pulled up over them, making their renewed cuddling even cozier.
There was one thing still gnawing at Daren, and though he hated to say anything that might disrupt the afterglow, he had to ask.
“Are you sure you won’t miss the way you used to be?”
“Miss? Why? I will still swim.”
“Sure, we can swim, but you won’t have your tentacles anymore.”
“Yes.” Lilo lifted his head to look at Daren. “Lilo give coat. I… wish to give you my coat. But when I do, I can put it back. Much easier than the first time.”
“You can… you can take your coat on and off again to change forms?”
“Yes!” Lilo smiled.
“And there’s no catch?”
“Catch?” Lilo asked, with his familiar, curious head tilt.
“Um… nothing bad will happen in exchange?”
Finally, a shadow crossed Lilo’s face. “One thing. Only a little bad! I do not mind. I will live only as long as you do.” He took Daren’s hand and laced their fingers like before.
Daren gaped before he could ask, “You’ll die when I die?”
“Once you accept my coat,” Lilo said with a shrug, as if that was the answer to everything.
“But you would otherwise live longer?”
“Very long. Too long. Too lonely.” He pressed his forehead to Daren’s with a breathy sigh. “I love you, Daren. I want you. To be with you. I am glad to give you my coat, if you will take it.”
Daren’s eyes grew hot like when he’d thought he was saying goodbye to Lilo for the last time, only now, they were joyful tears because he would get to keep Lilo for as long as he lived. “I love you, Lilo. I promise I will spend every day making what you gave up worth it.”
Lilo’s stomach growled.
They laughed.
“Starting with lunch,” Daren said, and kissed the back of Lilo’s hand. “Come on.”
Daren lent Lilo a different set of clothes, ones that fit a little better than what he’d pilfered from the boat, and they returned downstairs for him to whip them up some BLTs.
Bacon had become one of Lilo’s favorite human foods, and he looked positively giddy to witness Daren cooking some at the stovetop.
Lilo wanted to help, so Daren showed him how to use the toaster. Knife skills for slicing tomatoes could come later—with a lot of careful practice.
“I cannot wear Daren’s clothes?” Lilo asked after Daren said they would need to go shopping to get Lilo clothes of his own.
“You can, especially for now, but we can find you things that fit you even better, things you pick out just for you, whatever styles and colors you want. It’ll be fun! Our first shopping trip.”
“Shopping,” Lilo repeated, committing more and more to his expanding vocabulary, “for new clothes for me. Oh!” He suddenly leaped up from the kitchen stool he had been sitting on after starting the toast. “Clothes! My coat!” He ran to the hooks by the front door to retrieve it and hurried back, holding it out toward Daren in offering.
“It will not be too warm, even on a warm day, I promise.”
“You really want me to have it, to wear it?” Daren asked, setting the last of the bacon on layers of paper towels to cool and drain some of the grease.
“It is tradition,” Lilo said, thrusting it toward Daren again. “You can take it off after and give it back when I wish to swim.”
Daren came around the kitchen island and ran a hand along the surface of the coat. It didn’t just look like suede but felt as soft as it too. “Accepting this and putting it on now is like sealing our promise to be together, right?”
“Yes. Mate. Husband,” Lilo corrected. “Me and you.”
Daren had never expected a proposal to come with magical outerwear, and it was such a huge commitment and responsibility to accept, but he had already confirmed this was what he wanted, so there was no answer other than, “Husband.”
Taking the coat with all its plush, downy softness and warmth, Daren fit his arms into its sleeves and wrapped it around himself. Lilo was right that it didn’t feel too stifling but cozy, like being at the perfect controlled temperature.
It was a soothing temperature that seemed to travel all throughout his body where the coat touched, with an added tingling warmth on the inside of his right forearm.
Daren pushed up the sleeve, amazed to see on his skin the same tattoo as the one on Lilo, showing Lilo’s lineage with each family member depicted using a different set of symbols.
There was a new pattern to it, one Daren couldn’t resist tracing with a finger—a repeating outline of a sideways triangle, followed by a sideways heart, like a spade maybe or…
A stylized fish.
“You accepted my coat,” Lilo said, rolling up his right sleeve to show that the new pattern had been added to his as well. “You are my mate, Daren, my husband. My family now.”
Daren wanted to ask how the tattoo had been added—with magical ink, some other substance, an unknown miracle—but for now, he simply said, “You’re my family too, Lilo.
It's beautiful. The symbol and the coat.
I mean, of course the coat is beautiful, it's you.” Daren marveled at the periwinkle coat then that also appeared to have embroidery stitched into it similar to the family markings with alternating patterns.
“This really is a part of you, which makes it feel so… monumental.” He looked at Lilo through blurred vision as his eyes grew damp.
Lilo tilted his head with a confused scrunch of his brow.
“Important,” Daren clarified, and Lilo brightened with a swift nod. “This is more than being husbands, Lilo. We’re part of each other now. I can feel it, this pull toward you, like our hearts are stitched together.”
“Yes! That is why I wanted to give you my coat. You are important, Daren. Even before, you were as much a part of me as my coat, as my being, and I never want to be away from you again.”
Daren’s eyes weren’t just damp, but hot. “You're going to make me cry. Good tears! It really is so beautiful, Lilo, and so soft, and... it smells like you.”
“Smell?” Lilo wrinkled his nose.
“A good smell!” Daren turned his face into the white down of the collar. “Like a clean ocean breeze and... lavender maybe? Thank you for sharing yourself with me.”
“Thank you.” Lilo threw his arms around Daren, and it was such a wild thought to know that while Lilo was hugging him, and Daren raised his arms to hug Lilo back, a part of Lilo was already wrapped around Daren, sandwiched between them, connecting them in more ways than one.
The toast popped up with a tinny ka-chunk, ending their reverie, but Daren squeezed Lilo tight before releasing him.
He kept the coat on as he moved to start building their sandwiches.
He was fairly certain a magical coat couldn’t get stained, or at the very least, could handle a machine wash and tumble dry.
“Now, this is just going to be a couple simple BLTs, but tonight, we can go back to Curtis's shop for supplies for dinner, or even eat at the restaurant—”
“Oh, Curtis!” Lilo leapt back up just as he was about to sit down again.
“Yeah? What about him?”
“Lilo… I have a question.”
“Okay. What is it?” Daren turned to get a couple plates down from the cupboard and set the toast on them before heading to the refrigerator for mayo.
“Why did you never tell me Curtis is like me?”
“Well, I… wait.” Daren whirled back around to face Lilo. “He what?
“You son of a bitch!”
“Whoa!” Curtis held up his hands after Daren and Lilo returned to the shop, Daren demanded to talk in private, basically dragging Curtis into a back room, and threw the accusation at him like a slap, at which Curtis responded, “Don’t you call my mother a bitch.”
Daren scowled harder. He was still wearing Lilo’s coat, while Lilo was wearing a more seasonally appropriate one of Daren’s. The exchange of coats, of skin, in more ways than one, and the meaning behind it all was everything he could have imagined for a happy ending for them.
But seeing Curtis’s nearly identical but coral-colored coat hanging on a hook in the back of the shop when they got in there—which Daren had seen many times before but hadn’t made the connection upon first seeing Lilo’s—made him even more pissed off.
Lilo might still be sporting his luminous smile, but Daren was two seconds from clocking his friend across the jaw.
“You mean your mother who was from a different world from your father because she was literally from the ocean!”
Curtis deflated, glancing at Lilo, at Daren, at the periwinkle coat, at his coat on the hook nearby. His expression definitely said he knew the jig was up. “Actually, my father was the cecaelia.”
“You asshole.” Daren shoved him. “And what the hell is a cecaelia?”
“Oh, yes!” Lilo piped in, still smiling away as if Daren wasn’t berating his friend. “I forgot word in human language.”
“It’s the kind of selkie with tentacles,” Curtis added, “which I am guessing you are intimately familiar with now.”
Daren shoved him harder. “You knew what Lilo was, you always knew, because you are the same thing!”
“No.” Curtis held up a finger. “I suspected, and technically, I’m half.”
“You knew they were real!” Daren shouted.