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She wakes in a bed of flowers to the sound of quiet snoring somewhere to her left. For a while, Izzy just drifts in that peaceful liminal space, her body warm and loose and suffused with a bone-deep contentment. The light is filtered in dimly, the soft smell of incense, bells in the distance. She’s naked, she realizes eventually, but that doesn’t seem like cause for concern. The flower petals are soft beneath her, and while there’s no blanket, the air is warm.
It doesn’t seem like cause for concern, that is, until she finally opens her eyes and gets a look at her softly snoring bedmate.
Clary isn’t actually naked, but the light blue boy shorts that are all she’s wearing don’t leave much to the imagination, either. Her hair is a loose tangle, half over her face and moving softly with her snores, and Izzy has the distracted, ridiculous thought that it’s going to take her an hour to get all the knots out now. Her bare shoulders are dusted with freckles, but the skin is paler lower down—
Izzy flops onto her back and puts both her hands over her face. Fuck. Oh, fuck.
Unfortunately, the motion must have jarred Clary awake. She makes a soft snuffling noise, wrinkles her nose (adorably), then opens her eyes. For a moment, her expression is soft and content. She blinks slowly at Izzy, a sleepy smile curling the corners of her mouth.
Then her eyes go suddenly wide. “Oh. Oh, my god.”
Izzy winces. “Good morning.”
“Oh my god,” Clary says again. She looks down at herself, then at Izzy, and then blushes a bright and painful-looking shade of red. “Did we—?”
“I don’t remember,” Izzy admits. She squeezes her eyes shut, partly to concentrate, mostly so she isn’t tempted to look at any part of Clary that she really shouldn’t be looking at right now. It’s all just a confused impression after the festivities got started. Laughter and a crackling fire, the sharp, honey-sweet taste of Seelie wine on her tongue, dancing with Clary, hand in hand and laughing wildly, the firelight turning Clary’s red hair into a ribbon of flame—
“I remember dancing with you?” Clary says cautiously.
“Me too.”
“And then…”
--holding Clary’s hand, a smiling Seelie woman she didn’t know looping a length of red silk around their wrists--oh fuck.
She lifts her wrist, and, sure enough, there’s still a length of ribbon wound around it.
Before she can even begin to process what that means, there’s a soft rap at the door frame. Clary yelps and dives deeper into the bed, hauling piles of flowers over herself, and the curtain moves aside to let in--oh, great. Meliorn. She really should have recognized this particular Seelie cottage, although he’s redecorated recently.
He’s wearing an expression that looks entirely too amused when he pauses just inside the door, although at least he keeps his eyes on Izzy’s face. She folds her arms and glares at him but doesn’t bother to try to cover herself. He’s seen it all anyway, and at this point scrambling would be more undignified than brazening it out. “Get out.”
“Oh, is that any way to greet an old friend?” He grins sharply. “Especially since you are in my bed. I just wanted to congratulate you on your nuptials, anyway.”
Under the pile of flowers, Clary makes an appalled-sounding noise. It makes something in Izzy’s chest clench a little, painfully, but that’s not the main concern right now. “I mean it, Meliorn. Unless you’re here to tell us where our clothes are, go away.”
“Still out at the dancing glade, I expect,” he says. “Or scattered down the path, anyway. You were both…” he trails off suggestively. “Extremely eager to celebrate. Don’t give me that look. Your brothers tried to dissuade you from going through with the ceremony, but you were very insistent.”
“I notice you didn’t say that you tried.”
Meliorn shrugs, graceful and unrepentant. “As I said, you were very insistent.”
“Get out,” she tells him again, and he laughs and tosses a pair of silky robes that he produced out of nowhere obvious in her lap.
“Call it a belated wedding gift,” he says, and takes himself out before she can throw something at him.
She waits until she’s sure he’s gone before flopping back against the bed with a sigh. “You can come out now.”
Clary peeks out from under the pile of flowers. A lily is caught in the red tangle of her hair, spilling pollen across her cheek, and she looks ridiculous and so beautiful that Izzy can barely bring herself to look at her.
“Here,” she says, holding out one of the robes. Clary takes it and pulls it on; it gapes loosely when she belts it, showing her delicate collarbones and a creamy expanse of skin beneath. She tugs at the flower in her hair and only manages to succeed in getting it more tangled. Izzy yanks her own robe on, something aching in her throat, and reaches out. “Just let me—”
She’s half-expecting Clary to duck away from her, but she doesn’t. She holds herself very still as Izzy tugs the flower carefully loose from her hair and sets it aside, smoothing the tangles out with her fingers. Her hazel eyes are wide; without their usual coating of mascara, her eyelashes appear nearly translucent. She barely seems to be breathing. It would be so easy just to lean in those extra few inches and kiss her.
Izzy clears her throat loudly and sits back instead. “There. Good as new. Although it’s going to take you forever to get the tangles out. You should have braided it last night.”
A slight smile tilts Clary’s mouth. “Pretty sure that was the last thing on my mind last night.”
“Yeah,” Izzy breathes. And then, “I am so sorry.”
“What for?”
“All--this.” She waves her hands vaguely at Meliorn’s lovely sunlit cottage, the wedding bed covered in drifts of flowers, the red ribbon still twined around both of their wrists.
“Nuptials, huh?” Clary says.
Izzy buries her face in her hands. “We never should have gotten into the Seelie wine.”
“That last bottle was probably a bad idea,” Clary agrees thoughtfully. She sounds--less upset than Izzy was expecting. Amused, almost. That’s good. That’s a good thing. Izzy has had way more than her fair share of ill-considered hookups with people she has to work with, and if Clary is willing to have a sense of humor about it, that’ll make things easier.
If it makes her heart feel like it’s trying to turn inside-out, well, that’s not exactly new. She’s pretty damn used to feeling like that around Clary. “Yeah.”
“Well,” Clary says eventually. “Maybe it’s not legally binding?”
Izzy groans into her hands, because that was something she hadn’t even thought about. Actually, now that she is thinking about it, she’s surprised that Alec hasn’t left her a stack of aggravated fire messages already. “Alec just finalized the alliance with the new Queen last week. It’s legally binding.”
“Huh,” Clary says. “Well. That complicates things.”
“Yeah.” She takes a shaky breath, then lets it out into the small dark space cupped between her palms. “I’m so sorry. I should have known better.”
There’s a soft sigh, and then Clary’s warm hands wrap around her wrists and tug them gently down. Izzy lifts her face to look at her, and she says, “I don’t think this one is all on you, Iz.”
“Yeah, but I’m the one who wants—” she snaps her mouth shut, about five seconds too late. Damn it. Damn it. “Never mind.”
“What?” Clary says softly. She sounds--stunned, actually. “Izzy, what did you say?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Izzy says desperately, “we can get it annulled, it’s not a big—”
Clary kisses her.
It’s quick and hard, misaimed, and she pulls back almost as soon as she does it, eyes huge. Izzy stares back at her, and the silence between them seems to stretch to a brittle point before she can finally make herself whisper, “Why did you do that?”
“Because I—” Clary stops, swallows visibly, then says, all in a rush, “because I’ve been wanting to for a while, and I must have last night but I don’t remember it, and if you want--you don’t have to, it’s a lot, and obviously we need to get this annulled, this is, like, marriage, we can’t do that, but if you wanted, we could—” she breaks off again, takes a shuddering breath, then says, “we could go out sometime? Like a date, I mean.”
Izzy breathes out a laugh that sounds more like a sob. “Yeah,” she manages. “I would love to go on a date with you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really,” Izzy says, and there’s a wild kind of joy rising up inside her. “You don’t think I’d marry just anyone, do you?”
“I mean, I don’t know,” Clary says, “you married me,” and Izzy has to reach out, to cup her cheeks between her palms and pull her back in for another kiss. A better kiss this time, slow and soft, Clary’s lips parting against hers, and there’s a lick of fire down her spine, a hint of sense-memory that she can’t quite grasp—
--pressing Clary down onto the bed, the smooth slide of her skin—
--and Clary shoves her onto her back suddenly, swings a leg over her hips, straddling her. Izzy laughs out loud, something fizzy and bright sparking through her. “I thought you wanted to take it slow.”
“I never said that,” Clary says, leaning down to kiss her again, and Izzy slides her hands into the loose silk of her hair as Clary pulls back and adds, “But we can if you want to.”
“I never said that,” Izzy says, and tugs her back down.