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There are paper lanterns in the apartment, which should be a fire hazard, but foxfire burns cold and its effect is properly atmospheric: a warm and phosphorescent glow that lights enough to see the room, dispelling shadows, but not enough to dazzle with brightness, a beautiful twilight dream.
There are creeping vines along the walls, which should be a building code violation, but void tendrils grow from shadow and magic, reaching from lines carefully drawn with water and salt and ether and soul; personal energy expended for the sake of a bower surrounding the sofa.
There are drinks scattered about – some familiar, some strange – in tumblers of cut crystal, glittering vials, and smokey flutes, some cups as small as acorn caps, some as large as a bowl, some as shallow as a dish, all curious and open to tasting as she wanders like Alice amid the shadowy plant life and spindly tables, half wondering if she’ll shrink or grow.
Sometimes it feels as if she does, the atmosphere and heady mixtures toying with her perception and her sense of space and time, and, in these moments, she takes a bite of one of the many delicacies offered for consumption for there is food here too: tiny cakes and savouries, fairy tale hors d’oeuvres beyond her imagination.
But she doesn’t have to imagine them here and that’s the finest thing about it. Here the fantasy is real and she is a part of it.
There is a formal dinner too, a sit-down meal more familiar, but no less fanciful, of chicken cordon bleu, just a little overdone, new potatoes and grilled vegetables, and a mixed green salad flavoured with rapunzel. The food is consumed in good time and good humour and they linger over dessert – a dark chocolate mousse in crystal globes – sipping wine and sharing stories. She doesn’t tell him that she’s touched, but she smiles, soft and warm, and the expression is so rare that he almost does a double-take.
But this is not a love story and she wants to make that clear.
“So,” she says after wine and warmth have loosened her tongue. “What is it that you want exactly?”
“Nothing,” he tells her. “Honest.”
Which is perhaps the most useless thing that he could say to her because, if ever he felt the need to be honest with anyone, it would be her. Even so, the fact that he did not proposition her, not even in a laughing manner, is somewhat odd and unexpected and, for all that he’s being honest and she knows that he’s being honest, she cannot help but react with disbelief.
“Nothing?” she says.
“Nothing,” he confirms.
“Then why all this? Not that I mind. Everything is gorgeous and I… I’ve never seen anything like it before. I’ve never tasted some of the food before. It couldn’t have been easy to put together.”
“Well, no,” he admits, “but it wasn’t hard either. It just took planning and timing, both things I can do.”
“So…”
“Because it’s Friday the thirteenth and, as you are disinclined to do the traditional thing and watch horror movies until all hours of the morning, I thought it would be more fun to spit in the face of superstition and do something light and fun that has, contrary to the curse of the day, gone off without a hitch.”
It’s the truth and yet, perhaps, not wholly the truth, but where the secrets lie, she cannot fathom. She knows him well enough, but that means nothing. As much as she knows, there is twice as much hidden in shadows, veiled in lies.
“So this is absolutely no attempt to cash in on Valentine’s Day tomorrow?” she says.
“No,” he says. “Unless you’ve got nothing better planned and want to use it to to check the holiday off your calendar.”
“And it has absolutely nothing to do with trying to get into my pants?”
“That wasn’t the intention, but if you’re offering…”
“I’m not,” she says. “I’m just making things clear and underlining them. Twice.”
“They’re very clear. Any clearer and they’d be transparent,” he says and hides his smile behind his glass.
“Which I prefer, frankly,” she says, not certain if she means it. “Transparency is good.”
But is it really, she wonders as she sips her wine. Too much transparency and there are no surprises, no alien delicacies, no containers like spun jewels. No being led to the sofa for the “entertainment”, which could be suspicious, but isn’t, or could be television, but isn’t, and involves leaning back, eyes closed, her life in the hands of another – because she doesn’t think for one moment that he isn’t capable of something terrible, should the mood take him, even if she doesn’t believe it will. It involves her leaning back, eyes closed, and slowly opening them to what she believes, at first, is a wide-screen display of a fantasy movie, high definition. She believes this at first, but there’s nothing false about it, nothing untrue about the spiralling towers of the city, nothing fake about the organically twisting cottages in the small villages as her view sails over valleys and meadows, lakes and streams. She realizes then that what she’s watching is not a screen, but the canopy of the void tendrils, laced together above the sofa.
“Vanaheim,” he says, and then adjust the view. “I tossed a magic drone of sorts out there, low power, not good for anything but pictures. Also limited control, so we might not be able to help everything we see. Sometimes that’s enough though.”
The landscape is beautiful and the architecture something from a dream, but parts of it are shattered as well – large swaths of it, as a matter of fact – the legacy of many wars.
“Asgard fought a few of them, not always on the same side,” he says, lazily tracing out the routes followed by armies in times past. He seems to dodge around certain details of more recent conflicts, but she doesn’t bother to call him on it. War is an unpleasant topic at best and if he wishes to avoid the gruesome details to preserve the tone of the evening, he is more than welcome to do so.
He switches topics to art and architecture and the rambling ballads that a certain subsection of the realm prefers, entering competitions with the bards of Àlfheim. He laughs at them, but the laughter isn’t entirely cruel. Ballads, too, are stories and all fictions he has a hand in. His voice is low and languid and, she thinks, he’s somewhat drunk – though no more than herself – even if he would never admit it.
He doesn’t ask her to sit closer, but she does all the same, partly because it’s easier to watch the lazy flight over this unknown realm and partly because she isn’t certain she can stay sitting up on her own any more. He accommodates her, reaches unconsciously around her to direct their view, never making it seem he wished to take advantage of her, never losing his train of thought.
At one point, she blinks, and when she opens her eyes, the view is gone. The canopy has begun to fade as the void tendrils shrivel slowly away, their lives spent.
“Is it over?” she asks, a ridiculous question, but it helps her ground and re-orient herself.
“A while ago,” he says, obviously amused. “You’ve been out for, like, twenty minutes.”
“Shit,” she curses softly and struggles to sit up. “I need to get home.”
“You can stay here, if you want,” he says. He makes no move to restrain her, nor does he help. “And don’t sigh at me. I said you could stay, I didn’t say it had to be weird.”
“Meaning?”
“You can take my bed and I’ll sleep on the sofa. I even did laundry this morning, so the sheets are fresh,” he tells her.
“That is, like, the worst idea ever,” she says, but when she gets to her feet, the room is spinning and she isn’t sure how far she’ll make it alone. “On the other hand, it beats trying to stay upright.”
“Okey-dokey,” he grins and stands with an ease that makes her jealous. “Your chamber awaits, princess.”
He bends and scoops her up, in spite of half-hearted protests, and she laughs when he repositions her by bouncing her in his arms as easily as he would a child. He’s ridiculously strong.
“You’ll make me throw up,” she warns.
“Oh, don’t do that,” he pleads with mock fear. “Not on me!” And he sways when he starts to walk. “Woo! Head rush!”
“You’re drunk,” she corrects.
“Nope. We don’t get drunk,” he tells her, and his pace is steadier as he heads for the bedroom. “We have great metabolisms.”
“A, you’re lying. B, you finished, like, a case of wine just on your own. You’re totally drunk,” she tells him, even as he staggers and must stop to right himself. “Oh God, don’t drop me,” she says, half-laughing, throwing her arms around his neck, and hanging on for dear life.
“Okay, I’m a little bit drunk,” he admits. And then, in a lower tone, he adds, “I won’t. I wouldn’t.”
She sobers a little because what if he can’t help it? but they’re already at the bedroom and she risks leaning out to grab the edge of the sheet – at his insistence – and the blankets are pulled back as he pulls her back, and then he sits on her on the bed and she’s laughing again as he tries to pull off her shoes.
“You’re probably stuck with your clothes,” he tells her, picking at the laces in a fussy, meticulous way before finally giving up and just slipping them off from the heel. “Unless you want some track pants and a t-shirt, but I don’t know if I could find them and I don’t know if you can get them on and I can’t change you.”
“That’s because change comes from within,” she answers jokingly, but he doesn’t laugh, only removes her glasses with care and sits them on the bedside table. “I’ll be fine. Thanks.”
“You’re… You’re welcome,” he tells her, drawing the blankets back up around her. He sways when he rights himself and she can’t help but smile.
“You aren’t going to make it back, are you?” she says.
“I’m fine.”
“You aren’t.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re lying.”
“It’s called courtesy,” he says with a flourish that nearly bowls him over. “You should try some.”
“Oh, just lie down,” she replies, but he doesn’t move. “Grab a blanket and lie down on top of the covers if you don’t want it to be weird.”
“I don’t need a blanket,” he says, surveying all possible routes, and then giving up and crawling over her to flump down on her other side. “I don’t get cold.”
“Right, right. High and mighty Norse gods don’t get cold,” she says, smiling. “I forgot.”
“Gods and giants. Half-breeds, too.”
He isn’t joking anymore, neither with good cheer, nor sarcasm, and she isn’t sure what to do. The awkward silence persists a few moments and then he shatters it with a laugh, half-hearted though it is.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. Terrible way to end a night.”
“It’s all right,” she tells him, rolling onto her side. “It’s been pretty amazing, all told. I… It’s really unfair, but, after that kind of effort, I half-expected you to be trying to grope me by now.”
“Sex is easy,” he says. “You can buy sex if you have to. Friends are… are hard.”
It’s a small hitch, but she doesn’t miss it.
“They are,” she agrees because, for all she tries to treat people fairly, civility is a masquerade and few people want to hang around with someone who can’t play the game.
“You can’t steal it,” he continues, “or force it, or fake it. Well,” he allows, “you can fake being a friend, but not having one. And you can’t buy it, although I try, because that’s all I have. I’m not good at friends.”
“You think you’re buying me?”
His profile, shadow and shape in the moonlight, tucks its arms behind its head.
“Well, yeah,” he says. “You say you can’t enjoy stories because they lie, so I give you all the things that make our stories. That way you’ll know them for yourself and, even if the movies lie to you, you can remember and know that, somewhere, there’s truth in what you’re seeing and you probably know it better than anyone. Then maybe you’ll smile and, if you can think of me and smile, maybe you’ll like me.”
“That is the stupidest, most convoluted, round-about logic I have ever heard,” she says, but she is, in fact, smiling. “I suppose you stole all the food?”
“Well, gathered,” he says, sounding worried. “You don’t really buy most of that stuff. It’s there and you gather it and prepare it or trade for it or something. Except dinner, I got all the bits for that at the store. Sorry about the chicken, by the way.”
“The chicken was fine,” she assures him. “The wine?”
“Okay, some of that might have been pretty underhanded.”
“Uh-huh. The canopy?”
“Made that myself.”
“Like the drone thing? Kind of a real-time home movie?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“My God, you’re dumb,” she says warmly.
“Thanks?” he replies, confused.
“What do you get out of it?” she says, propping herself up on one elbow. “How could I be worth so much as a friend?”
“You listen and believe,” he tells her. “That’s worth more than you can know. And maybe you’ll be more open to my fucking up.”
“Well, you do do that,” she agrees, “but don’t worry about trying so hard. You’re doing okay. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“All right.”
“You should sleep,” he tells her, pulling one arm from behind his head to thumb her jawline. “You don’t want to feel like trash in the morning.”
“Too late,” she says, grabbing his hand with her free one. “It’s after midnight and I’m already trashed. Happy Valentine’s Day, by the way.”
“Only one day better than Valentine’s Day,” he replies.
“What’s that?”
“Discount chocolate day.”
She’s laughing now and so is he and everything is right and good.
“I’ll save you some,” he tells her. “I promise. Girlfriends only get a box of chocolates, best friends get a crate.”
“I’m holding you to that.”
The room is warm and quiet as they both settle in, their fingers still entwined. She doesn’t need a bower, she thinks, or strange and alien delicacies, or fine wines, or inter-realm television, only these soft and gentle moments between times. She wishes they could last forever, but knows this is a lie. She would grow bored in time, and he more so.
It’s enough to take and hold them as they come.