"J-Jen?"
She stirred in his embrace. Her mind and body were exhausted from their powerful lovemaking. Words were a bit too complex for her at the moment. She hummed and turned her head to press a kiss to his bare chest.
"Jennifer," he said, a bit stronger this time.
That woke her. She realized she was still on top of him, and that couldn't have been comfortable. "Sorry," she mumbled, slipping off of his body and onto the picnic blanket.
Nick's grip on her tightened, but not in an affectionate way. Something was wrong. Jen looked up at his face and saw a very odd expression. "What is it?" she asked. Unless she was very mistaken, they'd just had rather incredible sex, and she was feeling wonderful. Well, she had been until he'd looked at her like that.
Only he wasn't looking at her face. He was looking slightly behind her. And then she realized what he saw. And icy fear gripped her heart.
"What are you?" he whispered. It wasn't perhaps the nicest way to phrase things but he was coming down from an orgasm and his mind was more than a little stunned by the entire situation.
Jen swallowed hard, trying not to let her shame overpower her magic and just disappear herself. He was staring at her wings, and she could not believe how stupid she'd been. Though she had never had to make them invisible during sex before. She didn't realize how it would affect her control. Steeling herself for what might be a very unpleasant conversation to have, particularly while naked, she blurted out the truth. "I'm a fairy."
His eyes went wide in a way that would have been funny if she weren't absolutely bloody terrified of what might happen. "Wh…how?" he stammered.
That wasn't really a question she knew how to answer. Asking her how she was a fairy was like asking him how he was a human. But from what Jen understood about humans, the very idea of fairies was regarded as something of make-believe. And that was thanks to rather conscious efforts by the fairies, as far as she had been told. But she would try to help Nick understand as best she could. As much as she was allowed. Though really, she did not really know how much she was allowed. "I come from the fairy realm. The portal is in this forest. That's why you keep finding me here. I do patrols," she tried to explain.
To his credit, Nick did not recoil from her. His arms were still around her and he was still lying in the same position she'd left him in after they'd finished sex. Jen knew better than to say too much. Overwhelming him with information that contradicted his beliefs of reality would not help the situation. And, strictly speaking, she'd probably said too much already. Terry was going to absolutely kill her, she knew. But Nick was just too important to her to try and lie to him, not when her wings were splayed out for him to see. And so she waited for him to respond.
Nick's head was spinning. His first thought was that fairies were not real. But Jennifer was right here. She had wings and she smelled like dirt and flowers and she seemed to appear and disappear like magic. She was magic. She was a bloody fairy!
He needed to go somewhere, that much he knew. He needed to be alone so he could think about this without distraction. With clothes on. He was far too exposed and vulnerable right now to wrap his mind around it all. This was all absolutely mad. Maybe Jennifer wasn't even real. Maybe he'd never seen her in the woods, never rescued her from that net. Maybe he'd gone out to dinner Dominic's all by himself. Maybe he'd never met Jennifer at all. Maybe he was going insane.
But he needed to find a way to get away from her, just for now. He needed to be alone with his thoughts before he said anything he shouldn't have. But he also felt the keen sense that if he let her leave, he had no way of finding her ever again. Was this the death knell to their time together? Was there some power that would prevent her from seeing him again now that she had told him the truth? Well, assuming that was the truth. Assuming this was real and happening.
Nick opened his mouth to speak but a familiar cry echoed through the trees. Jen rolled over to look up, searching for the source of the sound. One of her wings brushed against his arm and he was amazed that it was so soft. Smooth and fragile, like a butterfly's wing. Later, when he wasn't so overcome by insanity, he would have to touch her wings again.
"Cultivate, do not dominate!"
The sudden words shocked Nick. He scrambled up trying to find his pants.
"Settle down, it's just Jerry," Jen said calmly.
Nick was standing naked in the middle of the woods with that bloody bird perched on a tree branch about two feet above their heads. The bird cried, "Carry on till the sun falls from the sky."
"Did…did he just speak?" Nick asked. He was surely going mad. Jennifer was a fairy and now the bird was talking.
"Can you understand him now? That's interesting," she said. He'd not understood Jerry before. That had to be significant. Was there something that had happened between them that had given Nick this ability? She'd never heard of such a thing before. But then again, she was not sure that many fairies before her had done as much with a human as she had with Nick.
Regardless of the fact that Jerry was just a bird, Nick wanted to put his clothes on. So he did just that. First his trunks, then his trousers, then he had to go find his tshirt from where Jen had tossed it aside.
"Stop!" she demanded.
Nick froze. "What? Why?"
She stood up, seemingly unbothered by her own nakedness. "What is that?" she asked sharply.
He looked down and saw that he was pointing to the side of his ribs. "Oh, it's a tattoo. It's…it's inked onto my skin." He wasn't sure if she would know what tattoo was. He also suddenly realized that there were probably a lot of things she didn't know about. He'd think about that later. All the slightly odd things about her that could now be explained by the fact that she wasn't actually a human woman.
"Where did you get it?" she asked. Her expression was suddenly so serious and her voice so grave that he nearly forgot that a naked fairy was there talking to him.
Her line of questioning was odd at this precise moment, but Nick could not keep from answering her. "I got it when I was young. At a shop in town. I did it after my dad died," he explained.
She shook her head. "No, I mean the picture. Where did you get that picture of the tree?"
Nick glanced at the outline of the tree that spanned only three small inches of his side. He'd had it so long, he barely ever noticed it anymore. "I drew it myself," he confessed. "Why?"
Jen looked over to Jerry. "Well?" she asked. Everything was getting more and more complicated by the minute. As if her telling Nick the truth about herself wasn't enough, Jerry showed up—not a moment too soon—and now Nick could understand him. And now this…the tree on his body…surely this was all part of what Jerry had been on about, leading Nick to her in the first place.
The death watcher looked from Jen to Nick and back to Jen. "Two souls in one heart. Where you start. Shelter from the storm."
Nick had a very frightened look on his face, and she couldn't really blame him. It was all a bit much. In the span of about an hour, Jennifer and Nick had made love in the woods, he had seen her wings and learned she was a fairy, he had understood the death watcher's words, and now she had seen this tattoo. Jen herself was feeling rather overwhelmed by it all. She hardly felt like she was in her right mind, and she at least knew more than Nick did. She could only imagine how he was feeling. If it weren't for Jerry, she might have let him go home and have some time to himself and have a rest before she came to him again. Something told her that if she let him go, she would be able to find him again and they'd be alright. In other circumstances, that would be alright. But things were far too dire now.
"Right, hand me my clothes. We have to go," she announced.
"Go where?" he asked, though he bent down to pick up her dress as she'd asked.
Jen stepped into her knickers and said, "To the fairy realm. I think its time we got this sorted."