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I’m dating a forest god.
“Dating” still feels like such an odd word for it. An ancient, cryptic, more-than-human entity like him calls for grand words like “lover,” “betrothed,” “husband,” not “boyfriend” - but that’s what he is. My boyfriend.
Today, we’re just lying, side by side, in the dappled late-summer light that filters through the leaves of the huge bay tree, the landmark that’s the same in his world and mine. With one hand I lazily caress the center of his chest. At home I can barely hold still a minute without something to keep me distracted and entertained, but here, the sound of the breeze in the branches and the feel of his skin under my fingers is all I need.
“I want to take you on a date,” I murmur into the soft earthy smell of his neck. “In my world.”
He rolls onto his side to face me, eyebrows raised in surprise. “In your world?”
“Is that okay?”
He knits his brows a little, thinking. “Not this part of your world, you mean. You mean…”
“The city, maybe? Or at least my home. Would you be okay with that? I’d like… I don’t know, I’d like you to be a part of my life, not just somewhere I escape to when I have the time.”
These past weeks, I’ve been escaping to him every spare hour. Carrying my sleeping bag up to our meeting place for overnights in his forest otherworld, showing up to work late with leaves in my hair and the smell of woodsmoke lingering on my clothes. Thoughts of those spare hours make the mundane hours bearable, but neither kind of time feels fully real.
“I’d like that too…” he says, hesitation still obvious in his voice.
“But?”
Something like a pained expression twists his face a little. There’s something he wants to say, but either he can’t find the words or he can’t get them out.
“People?” I guess. He nods, relieved. He sees people often enough, hikers and rangers, but he never lets himself be seen. Except by me.
I think a moment. “My roommates have a gig this Friday; I’ll have the house to myself for the evening. You could come see where I live; we could cook dinner together, maybe watch a movie?” I’ve told him a little about movies, but as far as I know he’s never seen one. I’ll have to choose carefully.
He nods again, and smiles a shy smile that’s so cute, and so real, that I scrunch my shoulders in delight before cupping his face in my hand and kissing him fondly, both our mouths still smiling as much as kissing.
“It’s a date, then. Meet you here around sundown and we can walk to my place?”
—
There are some things I have to do before I can bring home a forest god.
I have to get him some clothes, for one thing. In the forest he sometimes goes nude, sometimes covers himself with leaves and flowers, but neither of those options is going to work if I’m going to be walking him down the suburban street to my home, even if we’re not planning to encounter any other people directly. On Tuesday evening I bring a measuring tape and a catalog up to our meeting place in the hills; he chooses a simple flannel shirt and dark jeans, and I measure his lean waist for his pants size. The store doesn’t have exactly the same styles as the catalog, but I find something close enough.
I have to choose a movie for us to watch, and a meal for us to cook. It occurs to me that I don’t know whether he eats meat. In his world he helps me find berries and edible plants, and I’ve seen him chewing on leaves and grass while I eat whatever snacks I’ve brought with me. I only know a handful of vegetarian recipes, and only one that makes enough work for two pairs of hands. Usually I’ll get some of the ingredients canned or dried, but for this occasion, it only seems right to buy everything fresh.
I have to check in with my roommates - via the group chat, of course; I’ve hardly seen any of them in person in weeks. I’m either at work or asleep or up in the hills; they’re either at work or asleep or out practicing their music. “Okay if my boyfriend comes over Friday evening?” It feels so funny to say “my boyfriend.” A word for, well, boys, not ancient gods. One “sure” and two thumbs-up emojis later, and it’s official.
It’s a date.
—
“You ready for this?” I ask.
“I think so.”
“Still want to?”
“Yes.”
I give him a quick thank-you hug, then step back and watch as he closes his eyes and runs his hands through his hair, combing out the leaves and flowers and smoothing his antlers down into nothing. In his human guise, his nakedness seems less like a given, harder to ignore, and I can’t help watching with interest as he pulls on the underwear and jeans I’ve brought for him.
He has no ass. But hey. Nobody’s perfect, not even minor nature gods.
He pulls on the flannel shirt, and I grin, amused. I’ve never seen him look so human. With his long curly hair and short scruffy beard, he looks just like any music hipster in the city, albeit an exceptionally beautiful one. He looks like he could be the fourth member of my roommates’ band.
I haven’t brought him any shoes, but he doesn’t need them. Maybe he still has hooves, under the illusion of feet. I’m still not sure how his human glamor works. I’ve never asked.
There are so many questions I haven’t asked, can’t ask. How old he is, really. Why he speaks with an Irish accent, when we’re halfway across the world from Ireland. Why he inhabits this forest, in this part of the world, where the locals would surely have had a very different idea of what any god would look like. What his otherworld is, and what he does there when he’s not visiting with me.
Why he ever noticed me, among all the humans who wander through this wild space in search of a little respite from their hectic modern lives.
I worry that if I ever ask, the spell will be broken and I’ll lose him.
—
It’s only about a mile’s walk to my home once we leave the shelter of the trees. No one pays any mind to a young couple walking hand in hand along the sidewalk, but I feel his hand tighten in alarm every time a car passes us. I offer to distract him by telling him a story, but he shakes his head - he knows he’s safe with me, but he’d still rather be alert.
I’m glad I’m only taking him home, not for a night out in the city. I try to imagine being this completely out of my element, but I can’t. Not in my own body, at least - I remember the fear that mixed with the joy on our last big date, when he transformed me into a bluebird and taught me to fly.
He relaxes, but only a little, when we make it to my front door and inside. “So yeah, this is where I live,” I say, awkwardly, painfully aware of how ordinary it is. He has a whole forest of his own - two, if you count the one in my world and its mirror in his unspoiled otherworld separately - whereas I share this cramped space with three other people.
But the art that covers the walls is mostly mine, and I show it to him proudly. “I’d love to paint you, too, sometime. If you’ll let me.”
“I’d like that,” he says, so earnestly that I consider throwing out our dinner-and-movie plans and just spending tonight painting him, in gold and brown and green. He reaches one long hand toward one of my paintings, a buck’s skull wreathed in flowers, then pauses and looks at me for permission to touch it. I nod, and he runs two gentle fingers along the texture of the paint. That’s one thing we do have in common, the constant need to touch.
Now he’s examining Ben’s rack of guitars. “Those aren’t mine, but I don’t think my roommate would mind,” I say, not because I know Ben won’t mind but because I really, really want to see what those long fingers will do with a guitar.
I’m not disappointed. He takes to it like a duck to water, like an owl to darkness, like a wolf to howling. He plucks and strums and noodles; he pauses, hums, makes a face, noodles some more. He’s lost in the sounds the guitar makes at his touch, and I’m lost in the ways his face moves as he listens.
...Hey. I love you. The words build up behind my lips but I can’t bring them the rest of the way forward. Can’t interrupt the magic that’s happening.
With my next paycheck, I am definitely buying this man a guitar.
He often sings to me, by our campfire in his forest world. He’s taught me so many songs, some with words I understand and some in a language I can’t identify. He’s so patient with me, gently encouraging me to sing along, gently correcting my pronunciation of the foreign words, gently laughing when my voice cracks or when I completely bungle the rhythm of the clapping and snapping we use to accompany ourselves.
I try not to wonder too hard, why would you choose me? If you wanted a companion, why not one who could sing as beautifully as you can? Why someone who barely knows what harmonies are and doesn’t believe in octaves?
“...All right, beautiful,” I say, carefully leaning over and kissing his forehead when my growing hunger finally overcomes my entrancement with his music, “are we going to make some food or what?”
“Oh right. Sorry.” Reluctantly, he returns the guitar to the rack and follows me to the kitchen.
“Don’t apologize! It was wonderful! We’ve got to get you one of those to take home with you!” He grins at that. God, I love his grin. “Do you want me to put some music on in the background while we’re cooking?”
“Sure?” He blinks - confused? Does he know about recorded music? I’m always so afraid to pry, I know so little about what he knows of this world.
I don’t have a music collection of my own, but Ben has a shelf full of vinyls, and once showed me how to use their record player. Oh I am going to have to play all of these for you sometime, I think as I flip through the thin cardboard envelopes, Aretha Franklin, Johnny Cash, Simon and Garfunkel, Nina Simone, Tom Waits. I haven’t even heard most of them myself, or if I have I wasn’t paying attention, but now I’m brainstorming ways to get him the opportunity to hear them all. For now, though, I pick a jazz piano record - I want us to be able to talk, not be distracted by lyrics.
Back in the kitchen, I give him a quick kiss and start getting out the ingredients - tomatoes, onion, garlic, veggie sausage. From my pocket, a couple of bay leaves I picked from the ancient tree we use as a meeting place up in the hills. Then I take his hand and lead him out to the patio to pick some herbs. I could do it myself, but why be apart from him even for a moment?
I trim the last leaves off my struggling basil plant - I’ll have to get another one next time I’m at the store; somehow I can never keep basil alive for long. But then a long white hand reaches out and buries two fingers in the soil, and the sorry little plant begins to regrow before my eyes.
Oh right. Nature god. Not just a beautiful man with glorious hair and an affinity for music. An actual supernatural otherworldly being, here, on my patio, healing my mediocre herb garden with literal magic. Turning to me with a mischievous smile, delighted with the little stunt he’s just pulled.
I laugh and shake my head in wonder. “You wanna do that to the tomatoes, too?”
I’ve seen him do bigger magic, of course. He’s done bigger magic on me. But that was in his world, and in his godly form, mystical and dreamlike. It’s something else to see it here, like this.
We return to the kitchen with hands full of oregano and basil and arms full of home-grown tomatoes that had not existed minutes before.
We tell each other stories as we peel the tomatoes and dice the onion. This is how we talk about the past - everything is stories, no claims that the stories are true or that they’re about ourselves.
“Once,” I begin, “there was a woman who had two children, a daughter and a son. And she taught them both how to cook, so that they would eat well when they left her home to seek their fortunes.”
“Did she teach them this recipe?”
“Yes, although the recipe has changed since then.”
“What else did she teach them?”
“She taught them to read, and read to them every evening until they were grown. She read them stories of wizards, and talking cats, and dragons, and detectives, and vampires, and children lost in the wild surviving by their wits.”
“Mmm… I love it when you read to me.”
“Maybe while you’re here you can choose our next book.”
“I’d like that. What else did she teach them?”
“She taught them the names of the trees and the flowers, and she taught them how to set up a tent and how to roll a sleeping pad, and she taught them how to build a fire and keep it burning late into the night. Here, let’s start the pasta.”
I make a nest of flour in a bowl and crack two eggs into it. He sets to kneading them together with those beautiful hands while I fill a pot with water and set it on the stove.
“Once,” he says, “there was a fox who learned to climb trees so she could eat the eggs and chicks from the nests. And she taught her kits to climb trees so they could eat well too.”
This is how we talk about the past, I remind myself. No claims that the stories are true, or that they’re about ourselves. Besides, in a way he is the forest. Maybe that story is more personal to him than it sounds.
“Did she teach them anything else?”
We each take a lump of dough and begin to roll it into thin sheets.
“She taught them catch voles and grasshoppers. She taught them to dig holes to live in.”
I wonder if I seem as cryptic to him as he does to me. If it goes both ways, this slow, careful process of coming to understand each other.
In silence now, we cut our sheets of pasta dough into noodles and drop them in the boiling water. As he washes his hands, I wrap my arms around him from behind and press a kiss between his shoulder blades, as high as I can comfortably reach.
Sometimes we communicate better through touch than through words.
He turns around to return the kiss, gently pressing his lips to my forehead and then, when I tilt my face up toward him, to my mouth. I twist my fingers into the loose flannel around his waist and slowly back away, pulling him with me, until I’m pressed between his body and the wall. I keep one hand at his waist, holding him close to me, and bring the other up to his hair. Warm desire rises in me as we kiss, but right now we’re aiming more for intimacy, for smoothing over the awkwardness our storytelling brought between us. Soft kisses break frequently for smiles and eye contact and forehead presses.
We’re interrupted by the beep of the timer. Food’s ready.
—
“Mm, wow, nice job on those tomatoes, babe.” The pasta sauce is an explosion of flavor. How could it not be, with tomatoes grown by literal godly magic?
I’ve lit a candle at the table. This is a date, after all. And it feels more like a date than any of our previous rendezvous have. Here, at my kitchen table, in his baggy flannel shirt, he feels less like a secret fantasy and more like someone real. Someone who could meet my roommates, my friends, my family. Someone I could move in with, eventually, adopt a dog with, raise a child with. Maybe, just maybe, I won’t someday have to choose between leaving him and leaving everything I’ve ever known.
He’s not human, I remind myself. You could never have a normal life with him.
So have an extraordinary one, I respond.
The conversation flows more smoothly, now, as we talk about the present rather than the past. I tell him about the band; how they’ve been getting more and more gigs recently and even started to be paid for some of them. About Ben and Michael and Katrina, and Katrina’s girlfriend Sophie who trains dogs. He tells me about the tadpoles growing their legs and losing their tails at this time of year, and about the walnut tree that split in half suddenly, and the owl that died and the dozens of rodents that therefore lived.
Our free hands lie together on the table between us, his fingers absentmindedly stroking my palm, my wrist. It’s comforting, and also exciting - I can’t help remembering, and anticipating, the feel of those fingers on other parts of me.
My phone buzzes. It’s Ben - “gig went well, on our way home now.” Considerate of them, to give me a heads-up. I hadn’t realized how late it was getting.
“The roommates are coming back. I’m guessing you’re probably not up for meeting them tonight? They’re usually kind of rowdy after a gig.”
“Ehm, probably not tonight.”
“So what would you like from the rest of this evening? Do you want me to walk you home, or we could hide out in my room, maybe still watch that movie, maybe just cuddle?”
“Doesn’t seem right to go home,” he says. “This is about bringing me into your world. You wanted me here.”
“You sound tired...”
“I’ve done... a lot of new things today.”
I remember how tired I had been after my first flight as a bluebird. Exhausted not just from the effort of flying, but from the mental strain of so much novelty and strangeness, as exhilarating as it was.
How great the gulf between us, if a few quiet hours in my life were as taxing for him as learning an entirely new body plan, and a new relationship with physics, had been for me.
“Okay, so let’s stick to what’s familiar from here on, tonight - maybe curl up in bed and read for a while?”
He nods. I tuck a lock of hair behind his ear, stroke his bristly jaw, press my thumb to his lips in an approximation of a kiss. I’ve got you, I try to say through touch. We can go as slow as you need. Thank you for trying. Thank you for being here with me. It means so much.
I should say those things with words, I know. But I can’t. Not right now.
I lean close, press my forehead to his, then tilt his face to bring his mouth to mine. Our lips meet softly - so softly the rest of the world seems to fall away, and for a moment there’s nothing in the universe but his face and mine, his eyelashes brushing my cheek, my hand where his neck meets his hair. We kiss slowly, gently, then more deeply, and when we finally part his lips are wet and very red and his voice is no longer tired, but husky and purposeful.
“Let’s go to bed.”
—
In the morning, he’s still there.
He’s always still there, beside me - not once, in all the weeks we’ve been sleeping together, has he left me to wake up alone. But this time, in my own bed, it feels different. Like a confirmation, a reassurance, like proof that this is real.
We must really have worn him out - I’m never the first one to wake up.
He is somehow even more beautiful in sleep than he is awake. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. His soft eyelids closed, peaceful, lashes casting feathery shadows on the skin below. The gentle curves of his mouth, relaxed, lips parted. A stray lock of hair stuck to his cheek, other curls splayed every which way across the pillows, dark rich brown glowing brilliant auburn-red where the morning sunlight touches them. Hey. I love you.
My turn, now, to wake him up gently, as he’s woken me so many times. I stroke his hair, exploring with curious fingers the place where an antler emerges from his scalp - he shed his glamor last night along with his clothes. His eyelids flutter, but do not open. I run a thumb along one eyebrow, then bring it to his lips, which move - just barely - to kiss it.
“Good morning, gorgeous,” I whisper, pressing a light kiss to his temple.
“Mmmmmmmm,” he hums, a sleepy, satisfied, resonant sound, and rolls to bury his face in my shoulder, antlers scraping slightly against the headboard. I hold him, and stroke his back with long, slow movements. Warm love swells in my chest like a physical sensation, like a physical object, crowding out my heart and lungs, aching, unbearable, perfect.
Hey. I love you.
“...Once,” I murmur at last, unable to say it directly but unable to hold it in anymore, “long, long ago, before people were people, they lived wild and naked in the forests and on the plains.” I’ve told this story before, but not quite like this. “And when they were wild and naked they could not speak, and they could not tell each other that they loved each other.”
“Mmm?”
“But though they had no language to say it, they did feel love.” I move my hand to his hip, gently scratch the coarse, animal fur there. “And they showed it through touch, by grooming each other’s fur with their fingers.”
His slow, steady breathing pauses. Sleepy as he is, he’s caught my meaning. His movements less lazy now, he pulls away from me just enough to look me in the eyes. There’s a question there.
I hold his gaze as best I can, and bring my hand up again to play, deliberately, with his hair, sliding a single strand between finger and thumbtip to feel its texture, then combing through the curls and feeling the warmth of his skin beneath. My mouth forms a small uncertain smile; my eyes return his question.
“Once…” he says at last, his voice quiet and morning-low, “there was a god who loved a mortal.”
“Why?” I can no longer bear the unknowing, the feeling of undeserving. If the spell breaks, let it break. But he is here, with me, in my world and in my home, telling me he loves me, and for once whatever is between us feels more solid than fragile.
He wraps his arms around me, pulls me close to his chest. “Once… once there was a mortal who laughed and sang and caught frogs and climbed trees, just for the love of it.”
“Lots of people do that,” I object. “Children - “
“Children, yes. And drunken youths seeking to impress their friends. Far fewer who do so alone, for joy’s sake only. And once there was a mortal who lay on the ground and gazed into a puddle and saw a world of life there.”
Larval newts, I remember, their bodies glassy clear, their gills feathery and ethereal. Water beetles carrying bubbles to let them breathe below the surface. Nymphs of dragonflies and caddisflies and others I did not recognize.
“And once there was a mortal who wandered far from the paths.”
Following creek beds and deer trails. The first really hot day of the year, sweating, stripped to my underwear and hiking boots. The day I wandered deeper into the forest than ever before, and met the forest itself in the form of a man. I remember.
“And once there was a mortal who spoke to the bones on the forest floor, asked them for their stories. Who sat half-naked against a maple tree, and listened, and let the flies lick the sweat from their skin and let the mosquitoes taste of their blood, and did not brush them away. Who sat so still that the wrens and the chickadees were unafraid, and drew near. Who saw the forest and did not need to possess it or alter it or record it, who was content to simply be.”
I don’t ask how he knows all this. For now, it’s enough that there’s a reason he chose me. We hold each other, human and forest god, content for now to simply be.
Maybe today I’ll paint him. Maybe we’ll go back to the hills and be birds again, or try on new forms, or stare into a puddle and watch the tadpoles growing legs. Maybe we’ll stay here in my bed all day, and watch a movie and read to each other and listen to music and make love.
Maybe it’s time, now, for a grand word like “lover.”