Chapter 11 #2
It takes a moment, but then his smile spreads slowly across his face, something beautiful that I don’t know what to do with. I want Finn to be smiling all the time. “Alright, alright. I know when I’m beat. I’ll leave it.”
“And you’ll mention anything else that will make this house more livable for you,” I add, feeling bold.
“I’m fine. You have big doorways, and that’s always the sticking point.”
I consider that. “Okay,” I decide, taking him at his word. “Do you want breakfast?”
“If you don’t mind. But I can make us something.”
“Too late,” I say smugly, happy to have won this little battle this morning. I have a feeling it’s going to become a thing.
He walks over, and I back into the kitchen counter to get out of his way. “When did you have time to make muffins?” he asks, amused as he sits at the table.
“They don’t take too long. It’s a box mix,” I admit, going to make myself a lunch for later. “Anyway, butter and jam are already on the table.”
He looks at the jam consideringly. “Is this the one you make?”
It’s a mason jar with a little logo I doodled myself with a stupid looking dancing blackberry on it. “Mhm. It’s good, I promise. Better than the label.”
“The label is adorable.” He looks up at me and grins. “Between your movie choices and your cartoon blackberry, who knew my wife has such a whimsical side?”
It’s like my brain breaks for a minute, and I don’t know if it’s being accused of being whimsical or being called his wife without an audience that causes it. “Cassidy?”
“Eat your breakfast,” I manage to say.
“Yes, ma’am.” He splits a muffin in half and spreads a liberal amount of jam on it.
I put my sandwich aside and settle down at the table to prepare my own muffin. “Thank you for breakfast,” he says.
“It was my turn.”
“Then I’ll get dinner.”
“I’ll be home in plenty of time to cook tonight.”
“So will I,” he says, smirking slightly.
I roll my eyes at his stubborn insistence. “Alright, impress me then.”
“Gladly.”
He finishes his muffin in a few bites, and I push the plate closer to him. I can’t imagine how much food he needs a day to support his massive frame. And the flying he does surely has to burn a tremendous amount of calories.
He grabs another one, covers it with jam, and closes his eyes as he takes a bite. “Please take this as permanent permission to pick all the blackberries you want from my property,” he says, and I smile at the compliment.
“Thank you.” It’s one of my many hobbies, trying to find something that brings joy into my life. It had at least stuck. So had painting. I enjoy knitting, too. Soap making had been a massive failure, and jewelry making had involved me stabbing my finger with wires too many times.
“After you fell asleep last night, I was thinking,” Finn continues.
“Thinking what?” My chest tightens. I try not to rush into any conclusions, but there are a lot of things he could have thought about that wouldn’t go so well for me.
He could have realized this is a colossal waste of his time, or that he doesn’t like lying to his neighbors. I wouldn’t blame him for either.
“How to sell this to people. Make the town side with you at the town meeting.”
That’s not what I expected, although I should have. Obviously, once Finn commits to something, he goes all-out. He’s not going to quit until no one can throw me out of town—or until we lose. “Alright. Tell me what you got.”
“Well, we can start by me bringing you to work and picking you up,” he says. “That sounds like the type of thing a newly married couple would do, right?”
“Will it interrupt your day?” I know Finn technically sets his own hours, but he works hard for his art, and if I understand what he was telling me about his waiting list last night, people probably pay serious money for some of his stuff. He can’t go getting distracted all over town because of me.
He waves my concern away. “Don’t worry about it,” he dismisses, even though I am indeed going to worry about it. “The other part of what I was thinking is we should go on dates. And we should touch more.”
That does make some amount of sense. He has been touching me a lot, but mostly in ways people could construe as platonic. If we really want to sell this, we’ll have to step it up. “I guess some more… intimate touches would convince people,“ I agree.
He chuckles. “Yeah, you started that last night just fine. If we keep it up, they’ll never doubt you.”
I blink. “What do you mean?” I hadn’t touched him any more than he touched me, and it’d all been appropriate.
“My, uh, horns. When you stroked them.”
“When I cleaned the dust off them?” I ask. “What’s that have to do with anything?”
He’s not looking at me now. “Okay, so—my horns and my wings, they’re sensitive.”
“Does it hurt?” I ask, guilt bubbling in my gut. He should have said something sooner.
“Hurt isn’t the word I’d use to describe it, Cassidy.”
Oh. Oh.
“So I was, what, basically fondling you?” I demand.
“No, actually fondling me would be fondling me. But that was… yeah. Everyone in the pub believed we were stupid in love newlyweds, that’s for sure.”
I close my eyes, feeling the flush take over my face. “So, everyone knows about that except for me?”
“Yeah. It’s, uh, a thing. Going through puberty around a bunch of supernatural creatures—we all figured it out, trust me.”
And here I am, the stupid human who doesn’t know. “Anything else you want to clue me in on?” I manage to ask.
He tilts his head, considering it. “So, assume whatever makes a creature look different than a human is going to be sensitive. I don’t know why, but it’s a safe assumption.
My horns and wings. A vampire’s fangs. A harpy's wings. A selkie’s pelt.
If a shifter can hold a partial shift… that. You get the picture.”
I could sink right through the floor in my mortification. Only disappearing forever would make this better. “I’m so sorry.” Fucking human upbringing. I’d have known that if I grew up here.
“Hey,” he murmurs, brushing my arm and waiting for me to look up before continuing. “You have nothing to be sorry about. You didn’t know. And anyway, it’s the kind of thing we want people to see and believe, right?”
Me borderline sexually harassing him is not what we want people to see. “I think foreplay in the middle of the pub might be a step too far, even if it was consensual.”
“Getting hard in public isn’t ideal, yeah,” he nods, then snaps his mouth shut so fast that I doubt he meant to say that out loud.
Whether or not he meant it, now I can’t get the words out of my head. Hard. Did I actually make Finn hard? It’s probably a natural reaction, unavoidable because I touched his sensitive horn. Nothing to do with me.
Do I want it to be because of me? I can’t stop thinking about it, of him lying back in bed—my bed, if we’re being specific—naked and fisting his cock. He’d be so hard, so large—
I forcibly shake the thought away. I not only fondled him without his consent in public last night, but now I’m picturing him naked when he’s trying to do me a favor.
“So instead of that, I was thinking—how would you feel if I kissed you?” he asks after a long, awkward moment of silence.
“Like, right now?” I hope my voice doesn’t come out as squeaky as it sounds in my head.
“I was thinking, more like when I drop you off at work. And when I pick you up. And sometimes when we’re out on a date. You know, times where it’d be what people expect to see,” he explains.
“Oh.” I think for a second, then nod. “Yeah, that makes sense.” Does he have any idea how long it’s been since I kissed anyone? Will he be able to tell when he kisses me? What if I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew and I suck at it?
“But,” he continues, clearly unaware of what’s going on in my brain, “Maybe we should kiss right now. You know, for practice. And so it feels natural. Wouldn’t want people to see us flinch or something, not if we’ve supposedly been kissing for years.”
Of course he would say that. And he’s not wrong, is the thing. If we’re going to do this, it’d be a shame to do it wrong and ruin everything. We need to be comfortable enough with each other to kiss and make other people believe it’s real.
And if I suck, I guess it’s better to find out now rather than later, when we have an audience.
Would he be willing to help me practice to get better? I shake the idea from my mind. It’s definitely inappropriate. I need to focus.
“Yeah, okay,” I agree. “You should kiss me, then,” I add, and wait with bated breath for him to do it.