3. Chapter 3
Chapter three
“ I wish you’d told me you were expecting a friend,” Willow said as they drove back to the house. “I didn’t even know you’d got your cellphone working back here, yet.” Hallow had made a wonderful first impression on Willow. He’d bowed, saying it was an honour and he was sorry to have intruded in this way. Willow lapped it up.
“Oh well, global roaming.” Ash said, intentionally vague. He’d handwaved the ‘how Hallow had found him’ question by saying he’d texted. He’d also introduced Hallow as ‘Hal’ so he didn’t sound so otherworldly. “I should probably stop in and get a kiwi sim card though, it’ll be cheaper.”
“Sure, we could go to Kmart later on if you don’t fall asleep?” Willow glanced at Ash, as if she expected he might fall asleep again at any moment.
“I had a pretty good nap already but no promises.”
In the back of the car, Hallow was entranced by the view. He hadn’t understood the seatbelt, but Ash had explained it away as cultural differences. Now he had both palms and his nose flat on the window, watching the world whip by outside.
“This place is wonderful. There are so many trees! And houses!”
Ash cleared his throat to distract Willow from Hallow. “Don’t even worry. I’ll fix up the spare room for him, and I’ll go grocery shopping and stock up. I know you weren’t expecting an extra mouth.”
“Thanks Ash, I appreciate it.”
The drive home wasn’t long. Ash was relieved when Willow pulled into the driveway.
“This is our house, Hal.” Willow switched the car off and hopped out. “I’ll find you a spare key.”
Ash got out quickly so he could show Hallow how to undo the seatbelt.
“It’s a very beautiful house,” Hallow said.
“Thanks.” Willow stuck her hands on her hips and looked up at it. “I’ve done pretty well at keeping it looking nice. Hasn’t been easy on my own, but…” She gave Ash a sharp look.
Ash held up his hands. “I get it, I get it, I’m home now. I’ll help out once I’m over the jet lag.”
Willow’s expression softened. She nudged his shoulder with her palm. “I’m teasing you.”
Ash didn’t think she was, though. Not really. It couldn’t have been easy going through her marriage, her divorce and moving their father into a rest home on her own. He felt a jagged stab of guilt in his gut.
Ash took Hallow upstairs to what had always been the spare room, only to find it decorated with band posters and the bed made up with a teddy bear and everything. It must be Charli’s room now.
He closed the door again and went to the end of the hall to Willow’s old room. It still had a bed in it, he was glad to see. “You can sleep in here.” There were sheets in the closet and Ash got to work putting them on the bed.
Hallow leaned on the doorframe and watched him. “I have some questions for you, now.”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“Your sister implied you hadn’t been home to help out much.”
“I, yeah, I’ve been travelling most of my life,” Ash said. “Seeing the world, exploring other cultures. Here.” He pulled out his phone.
“What is that?”
“It’s a phone, um. Originally you could call people far away on them, assuming they had one as well, but now people mostly just use them to send text messages to each other or share pictures like this.” He opened up Instagram and started scrolling through his own feed. He had a lot of unread notifications. He hadn’t spent any time on there to respond to comments.
Hallow took the phone off him and mimicked the way he’d used his finger to make the feed update. “Your world has all these places?”“Sure, yeah.”
“This is amazing.” Hallow tapped something on the phone. The app closed and the display showed Ash’s homepage. Hallow turned to Ash. “It stopped working.”
They had already been standing close, Ash watching over Hallow’s shoulder as he scrolled, but when Hallow turned he’d brought himself even closer. As close as when he’d woken up and Hallow had been on his chest.
Ash’s breath caught. “You closed the app. We can open it again. You want to see more?”
Hallow nodded.
“How about we sit down?”
They sat side by side on the bed, Hallow pressing his hip to Ash’s and leaning on his hand right behind him. They were so close Ash could feel the warmth of Hallow’s skin through his shirt.
He opened Instagram again and started scrolling. “What’s your world like, if it’s not like this?”
“Well, it’s a bit all the same.”
Hallow reached for the phone and tapped on an image of a forest in Peru. “It looks a bit like this, lots of meadows, but it’s mostly forested.”
“That’s cool. How long has it been since you were there?”
Hallow leaned back, away from Ash and shrugged off his jacket. There, on his back, were two gossamer wings. They looked something like dragon fly wings, but gigantic, lavender and folded neatly on top of his white shirt.
Ash gaped.
Hallow sighed. “An age it feels like. The alleyway wasn’t responsive to what I needed, either. I think it was months, perhaps? The Quetch didn’t find me until recently though.”
“You. Have. Wings.” Ash reached out to touch them, then caught himself, dropping his hand. It surely wasn’t polite to just touch someone’s wings.
The wings fluttered and Hallow looked over his shoulder, laughing. “Yeah, of course I do.”
“What’s of course about it? You’ve got wings! That’s not normal!”
Hallow giggled and shook his head. “It’s normal where I’m from. Are you telling me you don’t have wings?”
“Yes!” Ash swivelled on the spot to show his back, T-shirted and flat. “See?”
Hallow’s hand stroked up and down Ash’s back. Ash forgot to breathe. What was it about Hallow that made him feel so off-balance and silly? Did he have a crush on Hallow? They barely knew each other. It had to be his looks. Hallow was so desperately pretty and ethereal.
Hallow dropped his hand. “I guess that’s why you need cars.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“There was something else your sister said, about you falling asleep? Do you have a sleeping curse or sickness?”
“No, jet lag is… because the places I’ve visited are all over the globe, the time zones are different and it takes our bodies a bit of time to adjust for it.”
“Globe.” Hallow looked down at the phone again. “You live on a globe?”
“Well, sure. Don’t you?”
Hallow shook his head. “I don’t think so. The forest goes on and on, as far as anyone knows. You can get to cities and rivers and the ocean and so on, but no one’s ever found the end, or a place where it loops back.”
Ash swallowed down the feeling of panic. “That’s… pretty amazing.”
A world with no end to it? Where you could travel forever? It was more than amazing, it was the dream. Could he ever go there? Would he get cell phone signals there? Was this a way to explore forever and never have to settle down?
“I think it’s amazing you can circumnavigate your world.” Hallow’s smile twinkled.
Ash’s heart fluttered but it could have been the concept of forever being able to find new places to explore. “Wait, but The Quetch. Why does it want you?”
Hallow shrugged. “I’m not sure exactly. It could have wanted to eat me, or it could just as easily be toying with me for its own pleasure. The Quetch is hard to understand.”
Ash rubbed his forehead and sighed. “Okay. Um. I don’t really know how to help, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, you’re already helping.” Hallow kissed Ash’s cheek.
This was so startling a development that Ash slapped his own knee when he dropped his hand. Hallow startled back at the sound. Ash’s cheeks warmed so fast he felt he must be bright red.
“Sorry, is that not a normal thing to do here?”
“Um. It’s… no, it is normal.” Ash chose his words carefully. “But it's the kind of thing that happens between people when they’re already together.”
“Like you and I are together, right now?” Hallow moved closer again. His smile anticipatory. He was going to kiss him again.
Ash had to clear this up fast. “More like, people who have made a mutual agreement to kiss and cuddle and sleep together. People who fall in love.” All of Ash’s blood was in his cheeks. It was a miracle he could still talk. “Like, they’ve got to know each other, and they like each other better than anyone else and have a conversation about it and they might decide to stay together forever.”
“Forever?” Hallow sat back, his expression now utterly confused. “That’s a very long time. Where I come from kissing and cuddling is part of conversation.”
“Oh? Well, it’s quite different here. If you kissed me, I’d assume it was because you liked me better than anyone else.”
“I do like you better than anyone else here.” Hallow leaned in again, his hand moving onto Ash’s thigh.
“You only met me and my sister, it’s not exactly a solid sample size.” Ash gently moved Hallow’s hand off of his leg and shuffled away a few inches. “I like you Hallow, although I barely know you. I’m flattered you want to kiss me, but it’s probably best if we don’t.”
Hallow folded his hands in his lap and nodded once. “I understand. I’ll keep my hands and my lips to myself, and you’ve made me this bed, so I’ll sleep in it alone.”
Ash felt like a monster then.
To Hallow kisses and touches were as natural as speaking and here Ash had told him he wasn’t allowed to. But he had to say that. He couldn’t take Hallow to a store and have him kissing employees or strangers, he’d draw way too much attention to himself. Ash swallowed, sure he’d done the right thing no matter what his heart was telling him.
“Right, and when we see other people, even my sister, is there a way you can hide your ears and your wings? She didn’t seem to notice anything just now, but it’s only a matter of time.”
“Yes. I can glamour them easily enough.”
“Glamour...like an illusion?” Ash had read enough fantasy books to be familiar with the concept. He was glad he’d read so widely. “Can you show me?”
Hallow blinked and in an instant his ears weren’t sticking out from under his hair. When Ash leaned to look at his back, it looked entirely smooth and round. “Okay, great. You can pass for human.”
“Human is the name of the residents of this world?” Hallow turned back, looking pleased with himself.
“Well, we’re one of the residents. We like to think we’re the most important, but we have millions of species of wildlife and plants that we share the world with. But… we’re the ones who build cities, and aeroplanes to fly around, write books and so on.”
“You have books here?” Hallow’s face lit up. “Oh, thank the stars.”
“You like reading?” Ash’s expression matched Hallow’s. “I don't have a ton of books here, but the whole time I was travelling I was reading. There’s this thing with backpackers where we trade books, or lots of places have little free libraries where you can leave a book and take one someone else has left. Got me through some lonely nights.”
Hallow was bouncing on the bed now. “Books aren’t very common back home, but I’ve read everything I could get my hands on.”
“I have one or two in here, but most of the books in the house are downstairs in the living room and you’re welcome to read them. Assuming you can read English.” A thought pinged in his head. “Wait, how can you speak English? Is it, like, a universal language or something?”
Hallow snorted, which somehow managed to be cute as well. “No, it’s translation magic. I learned it as a child. It allows me to hear, speak and understand any spoken language. The tribes and communities in my world are quite isolated with their own dialects, so market days were hard without it.”
“Oh man, something like that would have made travelling so much easier.” Ash rubbed the hair at the back of his neck, remembering the first time he visited Tokyo and tried to make sense of the Kanji. There was a lot of English signage in Tokyo but it didn’t cover everything. Then there were the smaller places he’d visited, the backwater villages in Indonesia, the rural Chinese villages, the small European countries … He could have learned so much more.
“Are you all right?” Hallow put his hand on Ash’s knee, his eyes wide. “Have I upset you?”
“No, it’s. It sounds like a really useful kind of magic to have.”
Hallow nodded, rubbing his thumb on Ash’s thigh. “It is.”
Ash looked down at the hand on his leg and felt his cheek warm again. He moved his leg aside and Hallow took his hand back. “Okay, well, this is where you’re going to sleep, so I can leave you to settle in a bit and then come downstairs for dinner with us.”
Hallow gave Ash a twinkling smile and his eyes closed to crescents. “That sounds wonderful, thank you.”
Ash felt a sudden overwhelming urge to pounce on Hallow and kiss him and kiss him. He quickly removed himself from the room. He closed the door to his own room rather more forcefully than was necessary and scrubbed both hands over his face, groaning softly.
How was Hallow so cute, and so interesting and so… touchy?
He’d said touching and kissing was part of conversation where he’d come from, hadn’t he? Which meant Ash shouldn’t read into it. He was doing what was normal. It didn’t mean he was into Ash, or wanted to sleep with him.
He had to remember that. He wasn’t special to Hallow just because it was his thigh Hallow had been rubbing. Ash was assigning meaning: affection, interest, sexual interest, but for Hallow it was conversation.
Ash breathed out heavily. Cultural differences were fine. He was used to those, he could work with those. He would keep his head on straight and not let his heart get overexcited. He could do that. He’d done it before and he could do it again.
He changed out of the smelly shirt and pulled on something clean. Laundry needed doing. He could do it now, get his mind off other… certain people.
He loaded up the hamper with his dirty clothes. While he was emptying his pack he found a gift for Willow buried at the bottom. He’d forgotten he’d bought it for her. A loose blue T-shirt from Thailand with an elephant batiked onto it. He tucked the hamper under one arm and picked up the elephant shirt in the other hand and made his way downstairs. Willow was in the kitchen, peeling carrots.
“Hey, I got you this.” Ash held the shirt out to her.
“You did?” Willow set down the peeler and the carrot, wiped her hands off on a tea towel and took the proffered shirt. She shook it out and held it up. “This is gorgeous, thanks, Ash.”
“Glad you like it.” Ash shifted the laundry hamper to the other hip. “Listen, I’m sorry about all this stuff with Hal. I really didn’t expect it, or I would have warned you.”
“It’s fine, he’s fine.” Willow folded the shirt back up. “I could tell you were shocked. We have room for him. We need more groceries.”
“Of course. I’ll go after dinner, for now I’m gonna run some laundry.”
“Laundry. It’s washing.” Willow rolled her eyes. “How long were you in the United States?”
“A while.” Ash snorted and carried his basket out. “And the word laundry is used in lots of places!”
“Whatever!”