41. Swans
Swans
T hanksgiving morning dawned a few days later—crisp, clear, and with so much promise.
The autumn sun and blue sky filled the Great Room of the penthouse condo with golden light. Behind me, Teddy had already been up for a few hours working on the feast for later today. He and his pale green magic seasoned, stirred, chopped, placed, and prepared ingredients for all sorts of entrees and sides. He did the work of a team of professional chefs with the cheery attitude of someone’s grandmother cooking for her family. It was adorable.
Everett was knocked out, having come home later from work the night before. The girls, Talli and her family, Rhois, Izzy, and Journee, would arrive later, closer to dinnertime. For now, I stretched on the couch, keeping Teddy company with my presence rather than my words. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade watched me more than I watched it at the moment as it played softly in the background. I stared out the windows onto the rooftop terrace overlooking Little Salem, lost in memories. My real memories.
Mom and Pops used to love holidays like this. With everyone on break from work and school, every holiday was the perfect reason to bring everyone together. Thanksgiving was Mom’s favorite. She would get up early to start cooking, and Pops would get up with her to heat up the sausage balls she had made the night before for our breakfast and to sous chef as best as he could. Mom loved cooking and seeing the joy her cooking brought to everyone’s faces. Pops loved seeing her happy and supporting her, knowing how much of a burden it was to do all on your own, even with fire powers to help brown the mac and cheese. I would race down the stairs to put on the Macy’s Parade and marvel with excitement at the floats. As soon as Santa appeared, I would start playing Pops’ Motown Christmas album, declaring it was time for the season of cheer. Mom and Pops would laugh every year. Uncle Everett, Aunt Max, and Talli would arrive a few hours before the dinner was served, and the house would be full of so much laughter and joy. Remembering it made my heart ache with longing for those times again.
After we ate, we wouldn’t sit down and watch football. Instead, we would gleefully head outside into the forest. I would lead, skipping along, despite being full from Mom’s cooking. Once we reached the perfect spot, Mom and Pops would shift into their full forms, Mom being engulfed in flames and Pops being encircled by a misty cloud. Then with a mighty roar, they would show off their full forms. Mom and Pops would both take flight with me and Talli onboard to fly over the trees and mountains. Everett would shift to fly next to us, too. Once Mom and Pops got tired of flying, they would land and run next to a shifted Aunt Max through the trees. My throat would be sore the next day from my giggles and screaming, but I loved it and looked forward to it every single year.
At the end, once everyone had shifted back, I would always exclaim how excited I was to be able to join them one day, to fly with them over our home. I wanted it so much now my wings threatened to come to life behind me.
But it would never come to pass for me.
My phone vibrated in my lap, making me jump and taking me out of my thoughts. Seeing the Caller ID, I immediately got excited.
“Happy Thanksgiving, pumpkin!” I smiled as I answered Quinn’s video call.
“Happy Thanksgiving to you, too, gorgeous,” Quinn appeared on my screen, smirking and looking as fine as ever. Her stunning curls were in a ponytail today with strays stubbornly hanging out that I wanted to touch and push back. Her apron today was orange and embroidered with her name on the top pocket like her navy one. It took everything in my power not to watch her muscles flex under the rolled sleeves of her t-shirt or her large hands handling her knife with precision as she chopped vegetables into various glass bowls in front of her.
Oh, I was so in love with her.
“Hi, Miss Queenie Quinn!” Thompson called from the kitchen. I got up from the couch and flipped the phone to show a waving Teddy with his multiple bowls and magicked utensils. “I’m Byrd’s Uncle’s boyfriend and the Thanksgiving King! It’s nice to meet you!”
“Nice to meet you, too! Good luck with your Thanksgiving! I wish we had some magic on our side.”
I turned the camera back to me and walked back over to the floor-to-ceiling windows in front of the terrace. “You do have magic on your side. Have you tasted your cooking?”
“Yeah, but no matter how much prep you do the night before, it’s still so much that needs to be done before dinnertime.”
“What all do you guys make?”
“Mostly the usual. Turkey, ham, stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy, mac and cheese, green bean casserole, rolls, and we cannot forget about the pies. Everything made from scratch, except for the rolls. We use frozen yeast rolls for that.”
“Oh, that sounds delicious, but I definitely understand what you mean by work. That sucks! Is it just you?—?”
“Oh, my goodness, is that my sweet potato pie, Byrdie? Hi, sweetheart! How’s your Thanksgiving going?” Quinn’s mom practically pushed Quinn out of the way to take up the entire phone screen. She waved cheerfully.
“Mama, you are smothering again.” Quinn rolled her eyes from the side.
“Hi, Mama!” I greeted. “Happy Thanksgiving! It’s going great!”
“What do you and your family do for Thanksgiving? Any fun traditions?”
My smile faltered for a moment. I had forgotten my thoughts from earlier about how much I missed how Thanksgivings once were and how much I missed my parents. I pushed those worries aside as much as I could. “My Uncle’s boyfriend is cooking Thanksgiving for the first time! Usually, Uncle Everett and I would have ordered some turkey, ham, and sides. The most cooking I would have done would be making some box stuffing.” We chuckled. “This year, we are inviting over our friends, since our family is so small.”
Quinn watched me talk. I could tell that she easily saw through my ruse, like only she could. Her mom, on the other hand, wasn’t as observant. “That’s so sweet! Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday! Bringing the family together, cooking for them, and seeing them enjoy all the food?—”
“Mama? I think the noodles are boiling over.”
“Oh! Of course! It’s good talking to you, honeybun! I hope you have a good Thanksgiving!” Mama scampered away to the stove behind them.
“I’m going to go take a few hits, Mama. I’ll be right back.” Quinn lifted her phone and walked to the balcony outside. Once she sat down, she did take out her case for her blunts, lit one, and took a puff. Then she locked eyes with me. They were a soft honey that I could just drown in.
“I’m so grateful for you, pumpkin. Thank you for that. I love your mom, and I know?—”
“She didn’t mean anything by it. She just… She just gets caught up in things sometimes. But I knew something was wrong. I could just tell.”
“No one gets me like you do, babe.”
“Are you okay?” Quinn asked, taking another hit.
“The holidays are hard. They always have been, but they feel harder this year. I think it’s because your mom reminds me so much of my mom, especially with how she loves Thanksgiving and everything. I don’t know. I just miss my parents a lot this year. More than I have before,” I said, not lying fully, but not telling the absolute truth, either. It just wasn’t the right time yet.
Soon.
“I’m so sorry, my love. I can’t imagine that. You know, after my grandma passed, I really would miss her in the summer because we would spend the most time with her then. But Mama suggested we start going on trips and stuff, and that made missing her easier and lighter. It never went away, but it wasn’t as painful. Maybe that’s what you need to do? You will always have those memories from your parents, but maybe it’s time to make some new traditions?”
Maybe it’s time to make some new traditions. I liked the idea, and she was right. I had my real, true memories now, and they weren’t going away ever again. I could miss those I had lost. But I could also enjoy those I still had, and those I had gained. I had a future, one that I had always dreamed of. It was time to live it.
“Maybe next year we can make some of our own traditions, then?”
“Oh, that’s a brilliant idea.” Quinn took another inhale of her blunt.
“I could help you make dinner! I would be the cutest little sous chef.” I smirked.
“You would be absolutely adorable with the apron and everything, but I would definitely do everything myself still.”
My jaw dropped. “Why? I could help!”
“Baby girl, you don’t know the difference between a dice, mince, and chop. Not to mention, you struggle with cooking something that doesn’t have a recipe on the box.” Quinn snorted.
“Wow, and here I thought you loved me unconditionally.”
“I love you so much, but I have seen your kitchen. There was all of one pan that wasn’t collecting dust, and it was big enough for one person. You don’t cook, which I love because it means I can cook everything for you.”
“Don’t you have some carrots to julienne or something?”
Quinn smiled slowly. “You learned that from Hell’s Kitchen , didn’t you?”
“You get on my nerves, Quinn Garcia,” I stuck my tongue out at Quinn. “For the record, I learned julienning from Good Eats !”
Quinn threw her head back and laughed. “I love you, too, sweetness. Text me while you watch someone else cook.”
Our call ended then, but the fuzziness from our conversation lingered long after. I wished Quinn could be with me this year, but I was so excited for the future. I could see us in this kitchen together, me trying to help and Quinn making me sit on a barstool to just watch her instead. I wasn’t a fan of being told what to do, but when Quinn did it, it didn’t feel like being controlled. It felt like she just wanted to take burdens away from me and purely take care of me. She cared for me, and that affection presented itself as telling me what to do. I loved it.
Plus… it did things for me.
“Your mate is really good for you. Y’all are almost like fated mates.”
I turned around to see Teddy glancing at me with a knowing smile on the other side of the counter.
“My mate?” I asked, coming to sit in front of him and tilting my head. “Don’t you mean my girlfriend?”
“The terms aren’t mutually exclusive, honey. No matter the gender, supernatural beings have mates. They are like the human word for partners in a way, but it’s more intense than that.”
I paused for a moment in thought. “My parents talked about being mates when I was growing up. I just thought they were talking about soulmates or something.”
Teddy shrugged as he prepared to layer up the green bean casserole. “They could have been talking about mates or they could have been talking about fated mates.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well, mates can be permanent or temporary. They are regular relationships. Maybe they last for a season, maybe they last forever. You can take or leave the person. A fated mate, though?” Teddy shook his head, smiling. “You can’t live without them. They are forever. They are your person or people that the universe decided you would be linked to no matter what. If a fated mate dies, their partner will wither away and die with them shortly after. It takes longer if they have procreated because there’s that piece of their mate still within reach, but their passing is inevitable. It’s hard to recover when someone dies and takes the best parts of you with them.”
Thompson’s magic lifted the completed casserole and put it in the oven. He threw his head back and wiped at his eyes. “Fuck, I can’t cry into the food. That would ruin everything.”
I smiled at his effort to lighten the mood, but I still reached out for his hand. “You sound like a man with experience beyond what you’ve read in a romance book like me.”
He rewarded me with a chuckle. “It was my Tia and Tio . It happened recently. When my Tia passed, my Tio just became a shell of a person without her. He never recovered. Within days, he passed, too.”
Tears stung my eyes. I remembered how hard Pops had taken Mom’s murder. He was only present in body, but his heart, soul, and mind were with my mom. He was lost without her. I knew if the situation had been reversed, she would have been lost without him, too. They had to have been fated mates. “Oh, Thompson, I’m so, so sorry.”
Teddy shook his head with his smile back and wide on his boyish face. “Don’t be. They were married for over two-hundred-and-seventeen years. They lived a life of love. It’s honestly a dream—my dream. I want what they had.”
“That’s so beautiful. I want the same thing, the kind of love that lasts for an eternity, that outlives death.” I wiped at my eyes now. I wanted the kind of love that Mom and Pops had, someone to endure, no matter what happened. “So, how do you know if someone is your fated mate?”
“Well, from my understanding, it’s different for shifters like us. We are lucky enough to have a creature in us to tell us immediately that we have found the person. There is a response. They know before we do because they don’t have the same anxieties and things that we do. I don’t know about your dragon, but my jaguar is very… blunt, I guess, is the word? He’s straightforward and simple whereas I’m emotional and, like, five wet cats and a possum in a trench coat trying to be a person?—”
“Honestly, same, but keep going.”
“Everyone else has to go by feeling or something, but my point is that you know when you have found your fated mate. The connection is instantaneous. You just get each other. Suddenly, you want to be with this person all the time, and you never get tired of being around them. You just want to be in their presence even if you do nothing but sit in silence the whole time, which you can’t do because one of you will find something that you want to tell the other person and you can’t focus on anything else when they are around, anyway. It’s like the honeymoon phase never ends. They ride passenger seat in your mind always. You think about whether they would like something when you are out and about, you learn their coffee order to buy it for them every morning when they wake up, and you just need them to be happy, like you need water and air to survive. They may drive you absolutely insane to where you want to start crawling up walls, but you know that they make you better and vice versa. That’s just what love is: being the best for someone and bringing out the best in that someone.”
When Thompson finished, we both stared at each other. We were slack-jawed. All the magicked items paused what they were doing, frozen. I think the realization and truth of his words hit us both hard, at once, and at the same time.
“Everett is my fated mate.”
“Quinn is my fated mate.”
“ Hostia puta .”
“Holy fuck.”
We both leaned back in absolute shock at the revelation for ourselves and each other. It wasn’t just that I was in love with Quinn. I was mated by fate to her. My dragon roared and huffed at the idea as if in confirmation and to say “I told you so.” That’s why we had that instant connection the night we had met. She had awoken my dragon, and she constantly roared at me to claim her as ours. It also had to be why I couldn’t imagine a life without her. When she did the most mundane things, I had to watch and be around her. Quinn was my world, my other half, because the universe had built us for one another.
“I can’t believe it.”
“This is insane.” I shook my head. “I mean, what’re the odds that we would find our fated mates at the same time? Are fated mates that common?”
“Not among the general populace, I don’t think. I think I remember reading somewhere though that fated mates are most likely to occur in supernatural creatures that are rare. Something about it being a biological defense, nature’s own safety in numbers?”
“But in different species of supernatural?”
“Well, fitches have to come from somewhere.” Teddy shrugged, his magic picking up its work once more.
“But I don’t even know what Quinn is…”
Teddy’s eyebrows furrowed. “Wait, you don’t know what Quinn is? How long have you two been dating?”
“Like, three months? Every time I would try to ask her about what she was, she deflected. She said it was too dangerous for me to know.”
“Interesting.”
“I mean, that means she could be anything, right? Why would the universe fate me to someone that it might be too dangerous to fall in love with?”
“Why did the universe give me a man with the emotional awareness of a five-year-old at times?”
“I’m being serious, Teddy.”
“I am, too, honeybee.” Thompson leveled me with a look that calmed my racing thoughts. “Listen, everything happens for a reason, but you cannot control who you are mated to anymore than you can control your gayness. You are what you love, not who loves you.”
I snorted. “Okay, Fall Out Boy.”
“Hey, they rock out loud. Bite me.”
“So, what should I do?”
“Well, has she tried to kill you?”
I shook my head. “No, quite the opposite. She has killed for me and threatened anyone who has ever tried to hurt me. It’s… pretty hot, actually.”
“Oh, girl .” Teddy rolled his eyes. “You are so sprung. Ve amo esa chola . Go love that chola.”
“But what about?—”
“Hey, what does Big Frieda say in ‘Break My Soul’?” Thompson interrupted.
“Forget this trade, leave the rest?”
“And has Queen Beyoncé ever led us astray?”
I smiled. “I’m going to need Everett to marry you ASAP.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying.” Teddy winked.
I couldn’t wait for him to be my Guncle-in-Law. We were going to do such great crimes together.
We hung out for the rest of the day as he finished preparing Thanksgiving dinner. Everett soon woke up and got dressed. He offered to help, but Thompson banished him to sit next to me on the other side of the counter and just entertain him while he worked.
Soon, the others arrived, and we ate. As could only be expected from Thompson at this point, the food was ridiculously delicious and inspired. It was so good that I was excited for the leftovers. Given Uncle Everett’s and my appetites, I doubted they would last longer than two days, despite Teddy making enough for an army.
After dinner, we decided to play some games while we drank and chatted. We all played Cards Against Humanity in teams of three, and we ended up in tears from our laughter as the Archive Threesome demolished us with their twisted sense of humor and excellent matching skills to the prompts. It was very domestic but still so fun. This was definitely a new tradition I wanted to maintain.
Hopefully, I would be able to maintain it with my fated mate, too.
I couldn’t wait to tell her.