23
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Okay, so at least I wasn’t the only one thoroughly exhausted from our day-trip to Uisge. Because as we approached Marazion, the closest human town to Uisge and Choilltean, Killian let out an agonized groan and nearly collapsed.
It was good timing, in a way, considering the light was slipping and I was almost certain no human shops would be open.
“Why don’t we find somewhere to rest, Killian,” I grunted as I tried to heave his shaking body upright. “One of the hotels here has my card on file–” please don’t ask me why, “–and then we can spend all morning tomorrow wandering around. Energized, too.”
He narrowed his eyes at me before ultimately giving in. “Alright. Alright! Yes, Olivia, take me to the hotel!” His voice was so loud and excitable that I laughed along while trying to keep him upright.
“Fix our sizes, first,” I chuckled, only to swallow the noise and nearly retch instead when the world shrunk around me. I was left feeling intoxicated and completely shit-faced as everything blurred, until the grass was not surrounding and towering us but was mere spikes beneath our shoes.
I released Killian, took a few steps back and stared at him.
“What?”
I had only seen Killian in a human-like size once. The day he found me, the day he saved me, and I was so filled with fear when I saw him that I couldn’t appreciate what I could appreciate now.
Everything about him was accentuated. His brashness was more apparent, his ruggedness tenfold.
The darkness of his hair was twice as light-sucking, the wildness of his smile thrice as powerful.
Instead of being surrounded by green or brown like we always were, Killian was outlined with a perfect balance of stretching green behind him and blue sky above him.
“Are you intentionally over-inflating your size?” I hummed as I assessed him, arms crossed over my chest. Because there was no way that he was that large. He must have grown us at different ratios.
His laugh was his, but tired. “No.”
“Whatever,” I scoffed, waving him off. “Come on. And if anyone asks you what the fuck you’re wearing, tell them you came from Ren-Con.”
“Fuck? Ren-con?”
“Don’t say that first word,” I grumbled, grabbing onto his hand and dragging him towards the faint outline of the real world against the horizon. “And don’t worry about the other one. Just say it quickly and look away.”
I wasn’t sure why he was laughing, if not for him simply being Killian.
~
It took all of twenty minutes to get into civilization, and I hauled Killian into the hotel before his eyes could widen any further with glee. In all honesty, he looked far too tired to take it all in, and I wanted to be able to appreciate it in the morning so that I could mock him relentlessly.
We stumbled into the hotel, a two-star looking thing that had always been easy to deal with.
The receptionist, a mid-forties man who always looked up from behind his computer and scoffed judgementally at me, did exactly that as the bell rang out above us.
“The usual, Olivia?”
Killian flicked a confused look in my direction but I rolled my shoulder and tried to evade it.
“Sure,” I ground out. Except this wasn’t the usual, and Killian wasn’t the usual. He was more and we were more.
“Fucking hell,” he, who I was sure was named Gerard, spat out. “Where the hell did you find this one?”
“Ren-con,” Killian said through a disgustingly-large grin, flicking both eyebrows up as if to ask if he did it right.
“Right…” Gerard sighed as he reached behind him and grabbed onto a set of keys, tossing them wordlessly in my direction.
“Thanks, Gerard!” I called out as I grabbed onto Killian’s hand and dragged him away from the reception before he could say anything else.
“It’s John!”
“Okay!”
~
There were a thousand horrors in my life, a thousand dark things and tortured things, a thousand things that I would have let Killian see. This hotel, this hotel-room, and the way I shuddered as I shut the door behind me, were not one of them.
His nose scrunched several times as he breathed it in. Quite literally. Apparent only by the way he said, “It smells like you in here.”
“Great,” I huffed, rethinking just how thoroughly they must clean these rooms. It must have been at least two weeks since I was last in here, and they must have had other patrons since then.
Luckily, nothing in here was super modern.
There was a bed in the center of the room, adorned with beige bedsheets that I was suddenly thinking were supposed to be white.
A window outlook the world beyond, but I quickly drew the curtains shut before Killian could peer out and start peppering me with questions.
The ensuite had a bathroom, the space that I spent most of my time in hacking my guts up over the toilet.
And the only other thing that Killian could easily look twice at was the TV on the far wall.
But I didn’t worry too much about that, mostly because it didn’t work.
With a sigh, I slammed myself down on the bed and kicked my feet up, crossing my arms behind my head. “Answer me something, Killian.”
There was silence for a beat, making me lift my chin to get a look at what he was doing.
Surprisingly and unsurprisingly, he had peered his head into the ensuite and was inspecting what a shower, toilet, and sink were.
After playing with the knobs for several minutes, laughing the whole time like a child, then gasping something about the temperature changing in the water, he finally sauntered out.
“Were you talking to me?”
“I have a question,” I said, watching him carefully as he dropped down on the edge of the bed, nearly catapulting me into the ceiling in the process.
He sucked in a sharp breath as he bounced up and down on the edge of the bed several times. “Magnificent!” he shouted, punching his fists into the foam over and over and over. “What is it!”
“A bed,” I said, far too tired to see so much glee on his face.
“Well of course it is a bed. But how splendid!” For extra measure, he slammed his body up and down several more times, until I placed my hand on his shoulder.
Frowning, he looked at the point of contact then to my face. “Sorry, you were saying?”
It was hard not to smile as I watched his eyes widen as something caught his attention.
“You said this room smells like me.”
“Sure does,” he hummed along, taking a few more deep breaths and letting a small smile climb over his face. “I’d know that scent any day.”
“Okay. Well… What do I smell like?”
I was relieved to see that he heard me, considering it came out as a whisper and a croaked one at that.
“I… I don’t know,” he admitted, falling down to his side and watching me across from him.
“Like you. Whenever I catch your scent it’s like…
Like walking into the sun after a day in the trees.
It’s overwhelming and it crushes my chest, but it’s the type of overwhelm that I want, that I welcome. And I just want to stand in it.”
That made absolutely no sense, but I couldn’t deny that seeing him talk that way, watching his face soften and brighten, made me happy at last.
“And this room smells like me?”
It was so fascinating, that my presence in a space could be marked for the pixies to follow me.
“Yes. And, like others, too. Strangers, I think.” He paused to sniff a few more times, his eyes shutting slightly as he focused. “But their scent feels like… Like a challenge. So I assume they are male.”
You would be correct.
“Men,” I reminded him.
“Men.” He nodded. “But I don’t like it. If you truly wish to know, it makes me angry. It’s taking most of my focus to stop from making fists of my hands.”
“So primitive,” I mocked, grinning even wider when he rolled his eyes at me. “You’re not going to go around pissing up the walls, are you?”
“Do you think that would make the scents go away?”
I was horrified that he was considering the suggestion, until he pushed at my shoulder and laughed.
“I jest. I’m not a complete animal.”
“Just somewhat.”
His eyes twinkled. “Just somewhat.”
~
There was something soothing, safe, and relieving to the way that we fell asleep. It was with a wordless comfort that we migrated closer and closer together, until Killian had his unnecessarily large body spread out across the mattress, leaving me the curve of his side to curl into. And I did.
The heat of him transferred in to me, leaving my body warm in the most cozy of ways as the two of us sank farther into the foam beneath us, allowing a day of water-travelling to heave heavier on our bodies until we were at last snoring next to one another, unsure of what was ahead but prepared for it nonetheless.