Archive of Our Own ^beta

Aubrey pauses. Her thumb stops gently rubbing over and over Dani's knuckle, and only then does she notice that she's been repeating that same gesture the whole time, absent-minded. She remembers that she has to pee. Truthfully, she's sort of had to pee for the past hour, but kept refusing to make the fifteen-foot trek from the bed to the bathroom. It would mean overcoming her inertia enough to leave the comfort of the soft duvet, and it would mean her bare feet on the cold tile, and it would mean no longer holding Dani's hand. 

"Good normal or bad normal?" she asks. She can hold it. 

"What do you consider 'bad normal'?"

"Well, you know. Like boring. I feel like normal things are usually boring." She shuts her mouth, then, and swallows. Is this boring? Was she bored?

"Well, I wouldn't call  you  normal," Dani answers, and her grin makes the freckles on her cheek shift.

Aubrey glances at the box of nails. "I wouldn't call you normal either."

"I guess not. I was just talking about...this." She goes quiet after that. Both of them are submerged in the hum of the mini fridge and the air conditioning. Aubrey looks away and holds onto the air inside her mouth, just behind her closed lips. Dani, she has learned, is the type to get her words all in order before she says them. She has also learned--is still learning--not to interrupt the process by blurting whatever comes to mind, which, as it happens, is her usual response to silence. 

If she stares at the ceiling long enough, it starts to look fuzzy. Like there's a grainy film of static over the surface of the plaster. It makes her think of mist outside a window, of the big old tube TV that had sat in the living room of her house for her first few years of life and that had tingled warmly when she pressed her hand to the screen. Everything feels a bit fuzzy now, maybe because it's 3AM. Everything feels warm and a bit familiar. 

Finally, Dani says, quietly, "This is what I imagined it would be like if...if things had gone differently."

Aubrey shifts to nuzzle underneath her chin and nods slowly against her, lips brushing her neck. "I know what you mean." As she says it, she knows that it both is and isn't true.

Aubrey had always been good at getting used to things. She had to be, in order to drift in the way she did, navigating unfamiliar towns and faces. The novelties of the new places she visited, the disorienting change of scenery that made her pay attention to everywhere she went, things like storefronts with shells in the windows and residents who all still referred to fridges as "iceboxes"--all these things turned into background noise before long, things she stopped seeing. Sometimes, she thought she was too good at adapting. Boredom always lumbered up behind her, would glom onto her if she stopped moving for too long. Her general rule of thumb was that if she managed to memorize the major street names in the latest podunk little place where she had settled, it was time for her to move on. She'd go and do her best to shake off any moss she had gathered.

So, typically, she wouldn't have chosen to stay in Kepler for as long as she was. But getting accustomed to monster hunting, moon-activated portals, and her own actual magic was its own kind of challenge. This, she guessed, was the new normal, this hotel and these people. But she was used to that too. Her life had been full of new normals the past several years. It had become normal for her, at the end of a long day, to crave the protein kick of a cheesesteak sandwich from a roadside stand, when before she had hardly ever touched meat and a fig and pear salad had been her favorite meal. Hell, it had become normal to be homeless.

Being unable to sleep through the night had been normal for awhile. It was fine, whenever she lay down to close her eyes and instead felt her heart running too fast and hot for her to relax. In that case, she just threw off the sheets and went for a walk anywhere. 

While most of the lodge's halls were familiar to her by now, they were harder to navigate in the darkness. She got turned around and backtracked a couple of times. That was alright. Nobody was up to see her fumbling around at this hour of the night, or, rather, the morning.

Or that was what she would have assumed, until she wandered into the kitchen. 

The first thing Aubrey noticed about her was what she always noticed, which was the fact that she was gorgeous. The second thing was that she looked as if she'd just been caught in the act. Frozen in shock, she stared wide-eyed, with her arms wrapped around a stack of take-out boxes freshly plundered from the open fridge. She hunched over it awkwardly, like an Igor in an eighth-grade production of  Frankenstein,  her chin pressed on top of the pile to steady it. All in all, there was a certain frantically-stockpiling-squirrel-in-autumn quality about her, which, Aubrey knew well, could only derive from the early-morning munchies. 

This was to say that, for once, she looked like even more of a hot mess than Aubrey. Given that up until now, she, with her lithe body and smell of fresh earth, had resembled more of a fey creature than a person, this came as a strange relief. So she was human after all! Or, well, not human, but capable of imperfection. On the other hand, it just so happened that Aubrey was currently wearing a Snoopy-themed nightgown that she hadn't bothered to wash in a month and almost surely had a comical case of bedhead, so it wasn't like she was winning the Dignity Olympics. 

Fuck. She'd been staring. 

When Aubrey finally kicked her brain into gear enough to speak, her voice sounded an octave or two higher than normal. "Hi! Hey, uh, Dani, sorry to walk in on you like that! I hope I didn't freak you out, I was just--"

"Are you supposed to be down here?" 

"Oh." Dani had said it quickly enough to make her jolt back. The sound was loud and bounced off all the chrome in the large space, hitting her like an accusation. Within moments, the tips of her ears felt so hot it was a wonder that they did not ignite. "Sorry, I, um, I can go--"

"No! No, I..." She exhaled heavily and placed her bundles on the chrome countertop. "Sorry, that was rude. You don't have to leave."

"Oh," she said again. "I mean, it's fine, though. I can if you want."

"I don't. Really. That, uh, wasn't what I meant to say." Dani glanced away and did not elaborate.

"Oh," she said, and now this was getting ridiculous, and she thought about how much she really ought to think of something better to say, quick, before this got to be any more awkward than it was, which was hard, because the only thought running through her mind right now was  Don't blow it.  

"I love your--"

"I love your hair," Aubrey said almost simultaneously, then quickly added on, "Sorry, what were you saying?"

"The same thing." Dani breathed out through her nose, something that was not quite a laugh but approached it. When she grinned, her canines showed, noticeably longer than her other teeth, disguise or not. That was kind of hot, though she couldn't say why. "And...thanks, but there's nothing special about mine, I don't think. I just like the way you dyed yours."

"Yours is really pretty, though! It's cool that you're able to keep it that long and still have it look nice. And you've always got that, like, strategically disheveled thing going on. Like, you don't even need to look in the mirror every morning and it still just looks good."

Dani blinked at the end of her rambling. "Well...I don't have a reflection, Aubrey."

Well, dunk. "Right! Right, 'cause, vampire, so you're--right, sure."

"I mean, it's not just me. It's something about the human disguises. Don't ask me how it all works--the disguises are made of illusion magic, and I guess they interact with light in weird ways. It happens in pictures and video too. Sometimes we just show up blurry, but my form's never shown up at all."

"So, wait, but how do you know what you look like, then?"

"I kind of don't?" She shrugged. "I know some things, obviously. But not so much what my face looks like. At least, no more than you know what your voice sounds like if you never hear a recording of it."

"Wow. That...that's kind of a shame."

"I mean, it's whatever. It's not what I really look like anyway."

"Yeah, sure." Her fingers tapped rapidly against the pad of her thumb as she considered. "But like...would you like to know? What you look like, that is. I mean, I could try to tell you, if no one else has."

Her eyebrows shot up, in what, thankfully, looked like curiosity rather than judgment. Aubrey accepted that as an okay to stay for a bit, seating herself on the metal of the kitchen counter, cold even through her clothes.  Dani hopped up to join her. 

The inherent problem with this idea, she realized too late, was that she would have to look Dani in the eye for an extended period of time, and, as it happened, the last time she had done that, she had nearly started an all-out bonfire in the middle of the lodge. All she could do was try to think cool thoughts, which, of course, made it more difficult to give a decent answer. She kept tapping her fingers together, this time to snuff out the tiny flames she felt budding at the ends of her fingertips. "Well..."  Don't just say 'cute.'  "You kinda look like Florence Welch." 

Dani's mouth quirked upward, and a half-second later, giggles came up out of her. She turned so that her expression was half-hidden by the curtain of her hair, but not before Aubrey saw the way the smile changed her whole face, softly crinkling and brightening her eyes, lifting her slightly sunken cheeks. She looked lighter, somehow, than she did before, and it had nothing to do with the kitchen fluorescents. With some of the tension gone from her chest, Aubrey went on, "But, like,  Lungs  Florence, you know?"

"I can live with that," she chuckled. "I like most Florence + the Machine."

"Me too! I'm doing a bad job of this, though. Fuck. Um, you've got a sharp jaw and a square chin. Your nose is kind of narrow. Green eyes, but you probably already knew that. A really nice, light green, though. Kind of--hang on, don't blink for a second. Kind of like...duckweed? No, shit, I was trying to come up with a good plant simile but I fucked up."

"Oh my god, please keep going. You're doing great."

"Like matcha, then? Yeah, I'd say matcha. Okay, sorry, we can stop having a weird staring contest now."

She laughed softly again, then quieted, eyes cast downward. Then, without warning, she reached into her back pocket. She flipped through the pages quickly, but Aubrey still saw, flitting before her, the gray graphite faces of other residents of the lodge. Just about everyone, except for one. 

As she sketched, Aubrey leaned over the page and watched her create a new person out of nothing, weaving an image out of crosshatchings as thin and delicate as spider silk. Although knowing next to nothing about drawing, Aubrey gave her some pointers. "Your lips are a little bit thinner than that." "Your cheekbones are a little bit higher." "Don't forget to draw in the freckles below your eye. They're kind of faint, but they're there."

Aubrey went to look in a little closer and felt her forehead knock against something hard. By the time she realized that her head had collided with Dani's, both of them had jumped back a little, instinctively. She hadn't realized how much they had been leaning in with their heads turned toward the sketchpad. 

Dani blinked once, twice, as though dazed. "I'm sorry, I should...it's late. I should go."

"Um," she called to Dani's back, "are you usually up at this hour?"

Dani stopped walking, then turned with a small, sheepish smile. "Well, I don't strictly have to sleep."

"Rad! Me neither! I'll probably see you around then."

"Yeah, you probably will."

Aubrey kept sitting there for some time after she left. She wasn't tired, and her heart was still pounding too much for her to sleep.

A few nights later, as she wandered the lodge in the wee hours, she rounded a corner to find the door to a single suite open, drenching the otherwise dark hallway in the golden lamplight from within. Considering that no one left their doors open even during the daytime, this was decidedly weird.

When she walked by and looked inside, Dani was there to meet her gaze. As if she had been waiting. 

"Hi," she said quietly. 

Aubrey, whose exhausted brain was even more deficient in the attention department than usual, replied after a delay of six full seconds, "Hi."

More moments of silence passed as she tried to figure out whether she should just keep going without being a bother, or whether her addled mind could manage a conversation right now. She couldn't figure out which Dani would have preferred. Maybe it was a fault of the disguises or maybe it was just how she operated, but either way, she was hard to read.

"So...do you have your bunny?"

"His name is Dr. Harris Bonkers, PhD, and no."

"Can you get him?"

"Huh?"

"So he can hang out with us. I probably should've asked if you wanted to hang out first. Sorry, I don't normally do this."

"Uh...no, that's fine. That's great. I'll...I'll go ask if he wants to come."

She brought him, and then, in the following weeks, made sure to bring him every time. More often than not, they passed the first hours after midnight together. For the most part, Aubrey did not remember the conversations in particular, at least not the specifics of them. They were long and meandered and doubled back on themselves. Instead, she remembered what she learned from them, from Dani. That the light orange-ish mushroom that grew on large trees in the forest were mildly poisonous to some and tasted like chicken to others, and that you'd never know unless you tried. That Barclay and Mama used to have regular competitions to determine who could handle the spiciest food. That she was, in fact, not to hard to read at all--that she picked at the stitches in her quilt when she was nervous, that she sometimes rocked back and forth a little on the bed when talking about something that excited her (though never enough to disturb the rabbit resting in her lap). 

Aubrey remembered what she learned in the pauses, too. There were large in-between spaces of nothing, when neither of them spoke. She learned, to her surprise, that she didn't mind it. The sound of Dani's deep sighs and the bags of slightly stale Goldfish crackers she kept under her bed had become part of a routine. Predictable. She hated predictable, usually. But the rest of her life--her new life of monster-hunting and magic-using--had stopped being predictable awhile ago. So this was alright. Nice, even, to have one space where she knew what was what. 

"I kind of don't want to leave," she mused into one of these silences. 

"The room, you mean? You probably should. My bed's not big enough."

"No."  Yes.  "I mean leave Kepler. Normally I would've moved on by now."

Dani nodded. "I guess you did travel a lot before. You've got a lot going on around here, though."

"Yeah, I guess that's it. So much is new I haven't gotten used to it yet. I'd hate to live somewhere I'd gotten used to," she said with a chuckle. 

"You always wanna keep moving?"

"I think so."

It might have been several minutes before Dani spoke up, though she didn't keep track. All Aubrey knew was that she heard her say suddenly, "Aubrey, don't take this the wrong way, just...how could you ever want that?"

The "how could you" pricked her. Aubrey  slowly turned to look at her, eyebrows raised. 

"It's an honest question," Dani went on. "I just...I can't relate. Maybe because I left home so early and...well. Suddenly."

Aubrey glanced away. She asked, "How early?" before she could wonder whether she wanted to hear the answer. 

"Oh, I don't know. I was a teenager."

"And remind me again, how old are you?"

She had to think about it. "Twenty-two."

"How long have you been twenty-two?"

"Awhile?" She gave a small shrug. "But years are different on Sylvain than on Earth. Keeping track is hard for me. That's what I'm saying. I miss being used to where I live, and understanding it, and understanding my place in it. I'm barely acclimated to Kepler. I can't imagine having to pick up and do it all again, all the time."

The forest green hotel carpeting was rough under her toes. "Yeah, I hear you," she replied after a bit too long. She wanted to say it was easy for her to do it, over and over. She would have said that, normally, to anyone else. But now, in the early morning hush, she thought it might not have been what was easy so much as simply what she did, what she felt she had  to do. "I guess...I mean, I had a home I left early too. And I don't think I'll feel that way about any place ever again. I never even wanted to try. Why stay anywhere when no place is ever going to feel the same? I don't know, I'm not making sense, probably. It's too late. Or too early."

"No, I think you are."

"Yeah." She took in a breath and tried a smile. "I could be wrong, though. I've, uh, found out I was wrong about a lot of things since getting here."

Dani glanced at her and, gradually, returned the grin. Aubrey had also learned not to look for too long, or she might get self-conscious and hide her face behind her hair again. Not as often, though, lately, and not now. She had been unfolding over these nights, slowly. "Like what?" she asked.

"Monsters being real was a big one."

She laughed this time, albeit from behind her palm. "Guess so." With one hand stroking Dr. Bonkers, she let the other rest on Aubrey's thigh, fingers lightly tapping. Aubrey tried not to squirm. Her body seemed hypersensitive under the touch, almost pricked by it. Or maybe that was the heat traveling just beneath her skin, out to her extremities, like it did just before flames burst from her fingertips. After holding it back for awhile, her hands stung like they had when she had touched a hot lightbulb as a child. Dani was still touching her, and she wanted to shift away but also desperately didn't want this contact severed. She tried to quench the heat radiating from her and hoped Dani would not notice. (Surely, she had to notice, and that thought only made her burn more.)

Later, she tried to hide the round scorch marks left in the quilt by her fingertips. She realized then that she was in what one might call deep shit. 

So she had been less than proactive in the romance department for the last few years. She had had work to focus on. A blossoming career in entertainment, in fact. And anyway, she had never stayed anywhere long enough to make a real connection. Aside from some flirtatious moments in bars, a few teasing strokes, there had been nothing since high school. She was touch-starved, probably. Liable to crush on any living soul who so much as brushed arms with her. Did it really even count as a crush if all you wanted to do was sit together while touching? Maybe she just liked hanging out on her friend's bed in the middle of the night while the two of them took turns resting their heads in each other's laps and spilling their darkest secrets, and that was all fine and very platonic.

These were only some of her considerations as she sat, one evening, with Dani's fingers loosely interlocked with her own.

If she weren't careful, she knew she would just up and ask. She tried to distract herself instead. "Oh! I thought you might like this." She pulled out her phone and opened up her photos, which was about the only thing the device was good for in this quiet zone. "Saw a snail today."

Dani, who was already leaning against her shoulder, came even closer, tickling her clavicle with her hair as she looked at the picture. She grinned and nodded. "Effervescent."

"Can you ID it?"

"Virginia bladetooth, I think. I see them all the time in the garden."

"You're like a walking field guide, you know that?"

She giggled quietly, idly flicking the buttons on Aubrey's vest. "I think I've just spent way too many hours reading them." The metal jingled as she jostled it. 

"You're amazing. Hey, by the way, what are we?"

After saying it, Aubrey immediately wished she had taken more distracting snail photos. 

Dani, for a moment, looked as if she had not quite heard or understood. She gave her a curious look before the meaning of the question occurred to her, and her soft smile collapsed under its own weight. Her mouth was open. She seemed to take in a lot of air without breathing out.

She was just about ready to laugh it off, to make a gal pals joke, when Dani started, "We're friends, Aubrey." Aubrey didn't think she imagined the way "friends" had been enunciated. "Why? Were you...did you think we were more than that?"

Her whole mouth tasted of sour spit. "Well," she said, with an impressive lack of shaking, "we could be, if you wanted?"

"No."

The answer was instantaneous. She didn't say it in a mean way. Just an honest one. 

"Ah." It sounded, even to herself, like the wind had been knocked out of her. "Right. I, uh, think I made this really goddamn awkward just now! Bad joke. I should probably go back to my room anyway, so--"

"No, hang on!" There was a tug on her sleeve as she went to stand up. 

She sighed. "Listen, it was dumb. You really don't have to try and--"

"It's not dumb. I just...it's got nothing to do with who you are or anything..."

"It's not me, it's you, right?" she muttered. Suddenly, she felt exhausted. 

"No! No, that's not what I...it's only even kind of about me." Her eyes snapped frantically this way and that, as if searching for a way to explain herself, or for an exit. They looked in every direction but Aubrey's. Her fist clenched and unclenched rapidly, over and over. 

"Hey," Aubrey said in the softest voice she could. She sat back on the bed and considered, for a moment, wrapping an arm around Dani's hunched-up shoulders, then decided against it. "Hey, it's okay. Really, it is. I...I didn't want to make you worry."

"I'm sorry." Dani's breath shivered. "I'm sorry, I don't know how to explain...okay, look. I want to date you. I do."

Within half a second, Aubrey went through whatever the opposite of the seven stages of grief is. "Oh. Good to know."

"But I don't think I can."

"Can I just ask why, though?" She waited for an answer that she did not receive. "Listen, you're, like, really sending me a lot of mixed signals here, and I wasn't gonna push it but I feel like at this point you owe me some kind of--"

Dani slapped her hand down onto the bedspread and, far too loudly for 2AM, shouted, "I can't bring you home to my mom!"

The silence that followed was not one of the comfortable ones. It hit her like cold.

"Sorry." Dani's voice was a whisper, now, one that came out cracked. "I'm genuinely sorry. For all of this. I just don't know how else to explain it. This could never be a normal relationship, you know? I can't introduce you to my family, I can't take you on the dates I would've taken you on back at home..." She trailed off, swallowed loudly. "Maybe it's stupid. It's definitely stupid. I...when I was younger, I always imagined having a stupid romance like you see in teen movies or whatever, something really sappy and typical, and then I left home and resigned myself to the fact that I'd never have a chance of a normal relationship like that. Or a relationship at all, really. I don't know."

Aubrey let the quiet stretch on for a good while longer. Then, almost to herself, she murmured, "I couldn't bring you home to my mom either." Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dani's head snap towards her. She kept staring at the floor anyway. "It's hard. She won't ever know the person or the people I decide I want to spend my life with, and that's hard as shit."

"Yes," Dani answered, barely audible. 

"It'll always make relationships feel a little weird, I think." Finally, she glanced in Dani's direction. "I feel like that's not really a reason not to have them, though. I don't even know what would qualify a relationship as not-weird, honestly. Or what counts as 'normal' in your book."

"Maybe," Dani sighed. "But it's also like...you really don't know how much you still don't know about me. About Sylphs in general. You might find it too weird."

"Are you serious? Try me."

With a huff, she reached under her bed to pull out a small, jangling cardboard box. Making eye contact all the while, she pulled out an iron nail, held it up for Aubrey to see, and then bit down on it, running it back and forth so that it grated against her teeth.

"What, is that a stim? You don't honestly think I'd judge you for--"

"No," Dani interrupted with a tired tone. "That's not it. You'll see some Sylphs doing this when there are no humans around to comment on it. You know how my kind are rumored to drink blood? That myth started because we get insane cravings for iron, and so a lot of us will just spend all day sucking on literal metal."

"So? Still not that weird."

"But that's just an example. There's a million little things like that you don't know about. I just think you're going to find something about me too bizarre one day."

"Oh yeah? Well I can hang," Aubrey said, and with that, pulled an inch-long nail out of the box and gulped it down.

A pause.

"You don't swallow them whole, do you?"

"Aubrey, what the fuck.

"Huh. Why did I do that?"

"Oh my god." Dani laughed, and kept laughing, high-pitched and uncontrollable. It was the incredulous sort of laugh that comes from being so delirious with panic that the feeling loops back around to being hilarious. Not that Aubrey could relate or anything. "Oh my god, Aubrey, you're insane! How did you manage to make this night even more ridiculous than it already was?"

"Am I weird enough yet?" She had started to giggle too. It wasn't like there was much else to do at this point. 

"I'm gonna die." Dani wiped tears from the corners of her eyes, trying to catch her breath as she continued to laugh. "Or you might. I'm really scared for you actually."

"Yeah, this is bad probably, huh?"

"No, seriously, we have to go to the actual emergency room now because you just ate an entire nail."

"Wait, no, I hate hospitals!"

"Me fucking too, but you just swallowed a sharp chunk of literal metal! It could, I don't know, puncture you or something!"

Aubrey groaned. "Fine, but only if we don't tell Mama."

Dani stopped giggling for a moment, thinking. "We still need her car, though. I know where the keys are."

"You have a license?"

"I don't show up in photographs, remember? Of course I don't have a license."

"Right. Cool. Well, I don't either, so..."

"Don't worry. I drive the landscaping cart around the lodge's grounds all the time."

"Well, that's probably basically a car. You know what street signs and shit mean?"

"Probably."

Three blown stop signs, two unheeded red lights, and several screeching turns around bends on the highway later, they both came stumbling up to the sinister red glow of the EMERGENCY sign and the automatic sliding doors below it. "Stop laughing," Dani kept saying as they walked in. She tried several times to bite her lip in order to stop her own hysterics, but it only resulted in her snorting loudly instead. "Stop it! You're injured! We shouldn't be having a good time!"

Given that most cases of ingested foreign objects occur in individuals under the age of five--a fact of which the doctor felt the need to inform her--Aubrey figured she could at least take some pride in being a novelty. All the same, it was difficult to get her story straight. She ended up with several brochures for therapy to treat pica. It was at least preferable to admitting, "I ate a nail in a misguided attempt to prove a point to my anxious vampire not-quite-girlfriend."

Dani stood up the moment Aubrey walked back into the waiting room, as though she had been watching the door. She had sobered up some, it seemed. Nervously, she pulled on each of her fingers as though to crack the knuckles, though there was no sound. "How'd it go? What'd she say?"

"So apparently, most people just pass this stuff on their own. They took some X-rays, but apparently I'm not at a huge risk for being perforated or whatever, so they're not gonna put me through surgery. She just said to monitor it."

"Well, I guess that's good." Her tone was doubtful as she wrapped her arms around herself. "Still, I wish they could do more for you than just tell you to wait. Where'd you get the Jello cups?"

"The nurses will just give them to you if you ask! I guess they felt bad for me. Want one?"

With a faint smile, she took it and sat back down. "So," said Dani, peeling back the lid.

"So," said Aubrey. She tapped the side of her plastic cup with her forefinger. Of course they had to talk about it. It might as well be at this hour, she supposed, like all their other important talks. "Maybe you had a point, huh? You'd never have a normal relationship with me as your girlfriend." She forced a small chuckle at the end. 

Dani didn't laugh in return this time. She poked at the red gelatin. Aubrey noticed that she liked to watch the chunks of it jiggle on her plastic spoon before eating it. That was important. "Maybe not," she said thoughtfully. "Though I was thinking that sneaking out and stealing Mama's car is pretty teen rom-com."

Aubrey recognized that as a hint of hope. "So is sharing Jello, I think." She looked out the window at the streaks of yellow on the horizon, signaling the coming sunrise. Mama would be up with the sun, surely, and possibly wonder where her car went not long after. "We're going to get in so much fucking trouble. Also very teen rom-com."

That time, Dani giggled. Then she stopped, not lifting her eyes from the tile. "I really do care about you."

Aubrey blinked. "I...I care about you too."

"Could we...would you be okay with taking it slow? I'm not sure I want to call it a relationship just yet. But I like what we've been doing. I really like it."

Slowly, she felt a grin spread across her face. "Just tell me something: can I do more than what we've been doing? Am I allowed to kiss you?" She brushed aside Dani's hair before it could fall in front of her cheek. 

With a small smile, she asked, "Are you going to make fun of me if I tell you I've never kissed a girl before?"

"No. But I think it's worth a try."

"This can't be exactly how you thought it'd be, though."

"What do you mean?" Dani asks. 

"I mean, for one thing, you probably imagined you'd be dating a Sylph. And that you wouldn't be living in a hotel. This probably isn't anything like you imagined a  normal relationship being, is it?"

"Well, that's true." Another pause passes by. Matter-of-factly, she goes on, "Nothing in my fucking life worked out the way I wanted it, actually."

"I know," Aubrey says quietly.

She feels a graceful hand card through her thick curls. "I feel like that might be okay, though."

Aubrey had no idea if this relationship qualified as normal or not. Normal, she guessed, was not the word for it. It just felt a bit like home.