A/N: I really can't seem to get enough of Jaenelle fluff, which is kinda weird since Jaenelle is my least-favourite character. There's just something about teenage!Jaenelle that's a bit universal to all girls; she's capable of amazing things, but seriously lacks the belief in herself to do it. I find that pretty interesting. About the end-- I'm more a fan of nostalgia than unrequited love, but you can read it whatever way you like. The title comes from Jaenelle admitting to Surreal that she had been kissed by men other than Daemon, but that they amounted to "teeth, tongues, and drool". If you liked this, I also recommend that you check out "Flesh and Stone" from Foxfire1.
Disclaimer: This is derivative of Anne Bishop's work and I take no credit for any characters or situations. No money is being made off this work.

"I just- well," Beron stuttered, groping for some semblance of the right words, "I thought you might like to go. To Kerian's party. That is, you're already going, but if you wanted--to go. With me."

Jaenelle stood very quietly, one hand still clutching her reader. She had been about to put it into her bag when Beron stopped to talk to her. Beron couldn't get any sense of her psychic scent, but he wasn't going to pry into a Lady's secrets, especially when a few other members of their class were still putting on their boots and coats at the far end of the room. For his part, he was sweating far too much for a winter day. Putting on his sweater before talking to Jaenelle had been a markedly bad idea.

"You want to go with me?" she asked hesitantly.

Hell's fire! Wasn't that what he'd just tried to say? "Well, yes. I mean, if you wanted to." He scratched at his neck slightly; the collar of his sweater was itchy. "I mean, if you didn't want to go, that's okay..."

She smiled, the tiniest of smiles, and Beron's heart twanged in time-honoured fashion of infatuated young men. "Yes," she said quietly. "I'd like that very much."

Beron actually didn't know all that much about Jaenelle Angelline. She'd moved to Halaway over the winter, he knew that. At first, she might have been the best-liked girl in the school, but the flock of girls and boys who had descended on her only seemed to terrify her. In many ways, Beron could understand that; she was new and alone, and her pale gold hair couldn't stand out any more in a room full of Dhemlan children if she wanted it to. Add to that a complete lack of fashion sense, and an eccentric way of looking at things...

It was really her lunches that saved her from total obscurity. All the children had to bring lunches from home, since only the real charity cases took the lunch served in the school's common room. Jaenelle's lunches were truly glorious works of art, optimistically packed to feed three waif-like witches to repletion. When she called in the large wicker basket they sent her out with every day, she was automatically surrounded by a small group, all dissatisfied with their lots in life, to whom she would quite willingly dispense some of her food. Out of that basket would come still-warm pastries and tea-cakes, soups, cut pieces of fruit, cheeses, and bread. In a way, she reminded him of a District Queen distributing largesse over Winsol. Maybe, he surmised, it was some sort of practice.

When she told him he could pick her up at the gates to the Hall, then, he was exceedingly nervous. Nobody, no matter how generous, would devote that kind of attention to a daughter of a servant. Beron recalled, with growing terror, rumours that some great and horrible demon had moved in over Winsol, and even if his mother laughed at them... well. You never knew, and Jaenelle was pretty odd. He peered through the wrought-iron gates, through the thin branches of trees just coming into leaf, but until Jaenelle appeared on the gravel drive, he saw no signs of life.

She'd dressed in an obvious attempt at imitation of the other girls in Halaway. That gold hair was tied back on either side of her face with ribbons; her dress had been awkwardly altered to come up above the ankle. She smiled very nervously at him, slipping through the gate. "Hi."

"Oh- hello," he said awkwardly. "I got you-- here." He drew from his back a pitifully small posy of spring flowers, smuggled out of his mother's garden." She smelled them, smiled again, and they set off down the road. Beron was painfully aware of the silence, as they went, and covered it with blustering speech. The only thing he could recall, suddenly, was his mother's saying how late the winter had run, and its likely effect on the crops, and all the work she had to do as Halaway's Queen to make sure all the seeds came up. Jaenelle listened with a polite, if strained, air, making Beron painfully aware that he was probably making a fool of himself.

Kerian lived in a charming manor a few miles away from the Hall. Jaenelle did gasp in true delight to see the little brook that crossed the drive to her home, and the daffodils that stretched across the banks and lawn. Kerian greeted them at the door, with a small askance glance to Jaenelle's dress that made Beron jostle against her as he came in. In the drawing-room (which was, he knew, somehow distinctly different from a sitting-room, but he had no idea how), the chosen girls of Menzar's school sat and chattered like happy little birds guarded over by boys every bit as awkward as Beron was. Jaenelle hesitated, and Beron took her by the hand (and oh! the little thrill of that) to seat her at a table where his friend Eltom nibbled at a pink-frosted cake.

They played games, and some of Kerian's favourites were called upon to play piano. They would have gone out into the orchard, but as they could see through the windows, the late winter had delayed the blooming of the apple trees and it was just cold and muddy without the added benefit of flowers. Kerian pouted over this excessively; her conceit extended beyond her own impeccable grooming, and she was vain of her china, her piano, her house and all its refurbishments, and the surrounding gardens and trees. To have any of them less than perfect made her cross.

It wasn't until an hour later that he noticed Jaenelle was withdrawn, tracing the rim of her teacup, and would not meet the eyes of anybody else. "What's wrong?" he asked, honestly confused.

"Nothing," Jaenelle said. "I just can't play piano very well, and I don't know the card-games. My sister was always good at them, but I'm not very good at all."

Beron was bewildered at the mention of a sister, but he still tried gamely. "Well, that's all right, Jaenelle. Not everybody's good at everything. I bet- I bet you'll find something you're really swell at. And then you can do that."

"What is it with Jaenelle?" Kerian asked him a few minutes later, in an undertone. "She's not talking to anyone at all. She just sits and looks at them oddly and won't play cards." She scowled, and Beron was at a loss to explain Jaenelle's behaviour. "Well, you might as well take her home if she's not going to be any fun. You should have enough manners to do that. Where is she, anyway?"

At the other end of the room, somebody cried, "Oh! Look out the window!"

The girls mobbed the drawing-room windows, looking out at an orchard which had suddenly exploded into a brilliant profusion of white and pink. Beron stood and gaped, until somebody plucked at his sleeve.

"The plum trees wouldn't come," Jaenelle said behind him; her face was flushed, eyes brilliant, hands dirty. "But the apples were getting impatient, so they came when I asked them to."

At the gates to the Hall, she let him kiss her, once, which he did, badly, before she disappeared back up the gravel drive. They drifted apart before summer had truly set in, and she left school and didn't return at the fall semester. Gradually, Beron understood her oddness, as well as her beauty. Perhaps it was because of that old sentimental attachment that his application to serve in the Black Mountain's sixth circle was accepted.

He did know that the Queen of Ebon Askavi smiled briefly, years later, to see his personal seal: an apple branch with both fruit and flowers, and the words because she asked.