The wings folded in off the lake wind, and Aria touched down on the balcony rail like she'd been landing there all her life — one hand catching the cold aluminum, sandaled feet finding the concrete, silver gown settling against her legs. Through the glass, Pancake sat in the exact center of the living room floor, tail curled around his paws, eyes on her. Not startled. Not hiding. Waiting.

She slid the door open and the warm air of the apartment came out to meet her — Dani's candles, the sharp green smell of something chopped on a cutting board, the low hum of a record she'd left spinning. "Did you get the wine?" Dani called from the kitchen, and Aria heard the teasing in it. She stepped inside and knelt, and Pancake walked into her hand without hesitation, pressing his skull up under her knuckles, purring like a small engine. "I think I can talk to him now," Aria said.

She cast it — no gesture, just the reach, the small click in the column — and the room went strange and doubled, sound layered over sense, and Pancake's purr resolved into words. You smell like the sky and the woman and the dead thing you carry in your pocket. You are late. I have been sitting here for an hour and the tall one keeps putting the bowl down and picking it up again. She is nervous. Fix it. Aria blinked at him. "Okay," she said out loud, to the cat, to the room, to the woman coming around the corner with a wooden spoon in her fist — "okay."

The spoon hit the counter with a wooden clack, and Dani came around the corner drying her hands on her jeans, brows up. "Okay, hold on. You're talking to the cat. Out loud. Like he's gonna answer." Pancake turned his head toward her with the slow, insulting deliberation of a landlord inspecting a tenant, then looked back at Aria. She does that. Talks at me. Never waits for the answer. I have stopped correcting her. Aria pressed her lips flat to keep the laugh in, and failed. "He says you talk at him," she said, and Dani's face went through three expressions in half a second — disbelief, then the dawning suspicion of someone who has learned this week that impossible things keep being true, then something flatter and more careful underneath.

"You learned it," Dani said. Not a question. She crossed the room and sat down on the floor across from Aria, knees up, back against the couch, close enough that her knee knocked Aria's. "Speak With Animals. You actually pulled it off the wall." Her voice had gone quiet in that way it did when she was doing arithmetic behind her eyes. "So what's he been saying. The whole time. Every time I've fed him and talked to him like an idiot." Pancake stood, stretched, and walked deliberately across Aria's lap to sit in Dani's, where he began kneading her thigh with his claws through the denim, purring. Tell her the bowl thing, he said. Tell her I know she is nervous and I am not going anywhere. Aria looked at Dani's hands, which had gone still on the cat's back, and understood the shape of what Dani was really asking — not what the cat said, but what else in this apartment Aria could suddenly hear. "He says he knows you're nervous," Aria said, "and he's not going anywhere." Dani's mouth twitched, and she didn't look up from the cat. "That's a lot of words for a guy who eats dry food out of a bowl I keep picking up and putting down."

Aria shifted on the floor, her back settling against the couch beside Dani, and looked down at the cat kneading dough into Dani's thigh. "Hey," she said, to Pancake, quiet. "Straight answer. When I come over — when I show up at the door, or the window, or wherever — are you happy? Sad? Do you even care?" The purring didn't stop, but the kneading did, one paw lifted mid-push, claws still hooked in denim. He turned his head and looked up at her with the flat, unbothered gold of a landlord who has been asked to justify the rent. You are asking the wrong question, he said. You come in smelling like sky and dead things and the tall one's soap, and you always go to the kitchen first, and you never check the bowl. Every time. I have learned to stop expecting you at the door. I wait at the window instead. He lowered the paw and resumed kneading, as if that settled it.

Aria sat with it for a second, the words landing somewhere low and unexpected, and then she laughed — a short, real thing that surprised her — and Dani's head came up. "What," Dani said. "What'd he say." Aria watched the cat's shoulders work, the small engine of him, and tried to find the honest version. "He says I always go to the kitchen first," she said. "And I never check the bowl. So he waits at the window instead." Dani was quiet for a moment, her hand moving slow down Pancake's spine, and something in her face went soft and then careful, the way it did when she was about to say a true thing and was deciding whether to. "Yeah," she said finally, not looking at Aria. "He does that."

She looked at the cat, the small gold eyes level and patient, and something in her chest went tight and honest. "Okay," she said, to Pancake, quiet, and the words came out before she'd decided to spend them. "Straight answer. Do you like me? Are we — friends?" Pancake stopped kneading. The purr kept running, a low steady engine, but his head came up and he looked at her for a long, unblinking moment, the way he'd looked at her through the glass when she landed, the way he'd looked when she'd asked about the bowl. Then he stood, walked off Dani's lap, crossed the short stretch of rug, and sat down directly in front of Aria's crossed ankles, close enough that his whiskers nearly touched her knee. You came in through the window and asked the cat if he likes you. He blinked, slow, deliberate. Nobody asks. They pick me up. They put me down. They leave and come back and I have to guess. He tilted his head. You asked. So — yes. I am the cat. You are the sky-smelling one who checks the window. That is what friends are.

Aria didn't realize she'd put her hand out until Pancake pressed his forehead into her palm, the same way he had when she came in — deliberate, claiming, a small warm weight of a thing deciding she was his. She scratched behind his ear and he leaned into it so hard he nearly tipped over, and the laugh that came out of her was wet at the edges, embarrassing, real. "He says yes," she told Dani, not looking up because her face was doing something she didn't want examined. "He says I'm the one who checks the window." Dani was quiet for a beat, and then her hand came over and settled on the back of Aria's neck, warm, thumb resting at the base of her skull, and stayed there, no words, just weight. Pancake purred against Aria's knee and closed his eyes, and the record spun on, and somewhere in the kitchen the wooden spoon was still on the counter where Dani had dropped it.

Aria pulled her hand back from Pancake's head and sat up straighter, wiping the wet corner of her eye with the heel of her palm like she could pass it off as dust. "Thank you," she said, to the cat, quiet and formal, the old elven cadence surfacing without her permission. "For the answers. All of them." Pancake regarded her with the flat gold patience of a landlord who had been paid and now expected the tenant to leave, then stood, turned a full circle on the rug, and lay down with his back pointedly to both of them, tail tucked over his nose.

She got up off the floor, knees popping, and crossed to the kitchen counter where the wine bottle sat sweating against its own ring of condensation. She picked it up, checked the label the way she'd learned to check things now—not that she knew a Merlot from a Malbec—and carried it back to Dani, who was still sitting against the couch with her knees up. Aria held it out. "Here. The wine. I got it." Dani reached up for the bottle and their fingers overlapped on the neck, and Aria didn't pull away, and Dani noticed that she didn't, and neither of them said anything about it. "You know," Aria said, letting go and dropping back down onto the floor beside her, the silver gown pooling around her crossed legs like something spilled, "I have wine magic now."

Dani's hand paused on the bottle, thumb on the foil. "You have—" She stopped. Started again. "Wine magic."

"Prestidigitation," Aria said, and let the word out slow, savoring it, because it had been sitting in her chest all afternoon waiting for a moment worthy of it. She reached over and touched the rim of the bottle, and the wine inside went from lukewarm to cellar-cold in a breath, the glass fogging faintly under her fingertip. Then she touched the cork, and it loosened in the neck with a small, satisfied pop, and she drew it out and set it on the rug between them. "I can warm it, chill it, flavor it, clean the glass, make the pour echo like a cathedral, and —" she turned her hand over and a thin thread of violet light curled up off her palm and died — "I can make it look like a wizard did it." She looked at Dani, deadpan, chin lifted. "The Midwestern Elf Princess of Melodrama has wine magic. It's the only magic that was ever going to suit me. I don't know why I didn't think of it first."

"You have wine magic," Dani repeated, flat, thumb still on the foil. Then she laughed — the real one, the loud one that came out of her crooked and unguarded — and twisted the cork the rest of the way out herself. "Of course you do. Sera would lose her entire mind. She spent six months of our campaign rules-lawyering whether a cantrip could change the taste of something, and you're just —" she gestured at the bottle, at Aria, at the whole silver spill of her on the rug "— out here doing it to Merlot." She poured two glasses without asking and handed one over. "Tell me everything you've done with it. Every crime. I want the whole ledger."

Aria took the glass, held it up to the lamp, and chilled it again just to watch the condensation bead. "I turned red wine into sweet sparkling wine at Mike's," she said. "Like an hour ago. He had a bottle of something he'd been saving for a bad day, and I was standing in his kitchen being — a lot — and I just reached out and made it taste like the good stuff. Fizzy. Sweet. Better than it had any right to be." She took a sip, and it was cold and clean and exactly what she'd promised. "He stared at it for a full minute. Then he drank the whole glass and didn't say anything, which from Mike is basically a standing ovation." She set the glass down on the rug and looked at Dani sideways. "I can do it with water, too. Plain tap water into something that tastes like it came out of a spring in a fairy tale. But I'm not doing that in public."

"Why not?" Dani said, and then answered herself before Aria could, tipping her head back against the couch cushion with a slow, dawning grin. "Oh. Oh no. Because it would look exactly like —"

"— like you turned water into wine at a wedding," Dani finished, and her grin went crooked all the way to the corner. "Jesus. You'd be doing parlor tricks in a parking lot and every phone in a hundred yards would be pointed at you, and by Monday there'd be a whole denomination arguing about your hair color. You'd have a church by accident." She took a long drink, swallowed, and pointed the glass at Aria like a gavel. "So that's the rule, then. Wine magic in private. Water magic never. Write it down."

Aria picked her glass back up and held it under her nose, breathing the cold off it. "I already have a list," she said. "A real one. It's in the coat." She didn't get up for it. The coat was on the chair by the door where she'd left it, and getting it would mean standing, and standing would mean Dani's hand was no longer two inches from her knee, and she wanted the hand. "It starts with a birth certificate. And a social security number. And every single thing a person is supposed to have by twenty-four that I have exactly zero of." She watched Dani over the rim of the glass. "I'm going to read it out loud on Sunday. In front of the stadium. That's the whole speech. Here is what I don't have, and here is what I am anyway."

Dani went still. Not the careful still from before — the other kind, the one where her whole face closed like a hand. "Sunday," she said. "The Bears game. You weren't kidding." She set her glass down without finishing it and turned on the rug to face Aria square, one knee up, and Pancake, displaced from his spot, walked off with his tail high and his dignity intact. "You've got three days. You've got no lawyer, no agent, no — " she counted on her fingers, fast, the way she did when she was doing real arithmetic " — you've got a name that isn't on paper and a face that's on every screen on the planet, and you're going to stand in the middle of Soldier Field and hand them a list of reasons you shouldn't exist." She looked at Aria hard. "What happens when they ask you to prove it. What happens when somebody at that podium says show me the magic, right now, on camera, and you do it, and then the government shows up with a folder."

"Beer magic," Aria said, and the words came out before she'd finished the thought behind them. She set her glass down on the rug and turned to face Dani square, the silver gown bunching against her knees. "If Sunday goes sideways. If they get ugly, if it turns into a thing — I put my hand on a cup of Bud Light and make it taste like something a person actually wants to drink, and suddenly I'm not the elf who doesn't exist, I'm the elf who fixed the beer." She shrugged one shoulder, and the strap of the gown slid half an inch and she let it. "Football fans love beer. That's the whole pitch. I walk out, I do the list, and then I do the beer, and by the third quarter there's forty thousand people who'd vote for me if I ran for something."

Dani pulled the cork the rest of the way out of the bottle and set it down, and didn't drink. "You're planning a crowd-control pivot around fermented grain," she said. "That's —" she stopped, tilted her head, and something in her face did the arithmetic and came up with an answer she didn't like. "That's actually not the worst idea you've had this week. Which is a hell of a sentence to say out loud." She picked her glass back up and held it without drinking, watching Aria over the rim. "Except you don't even like beer. You've told me that. You told me that the first night, at the Kettle — you said you used to drink it because your brother did, and then one day you just didn't want it anymore and you never went back." She set the glass down again, slow. "So what are you going to do, stand in Soldier Field and pretend to like something for a crowd you've never met. That's the plan."

Aria picked her glass back up and didn't drink it either, just held it cold against her palm and looked at the wine in it, dark and still. "No," she said. "That's not the plan. The plan is I stand up there and I tell the truth, and the truth is I don't like beer anymore." She turned the glass a quarter turn on the rug, watching the light move in it. "I used to. God, I used to. Jason used to sit on Mike's porch with a twelve-pack of whatever was cheapest and drink it warm because we were too lazy to walk back inside for ice, and it tasted like — I don't know. Like being nineteen and having nowhere to be. Like my brother laughing at something stupid I said." She took a sip, and it was cold and sweet and nothing at all like that. "And then one day it just tasted like beer. Like the can. Like the aluminum. And I stopped, and I never missed it, and I never figured out why."

She set the glass down and looked at Dani. "It's because I was already her. I just didn't have the body yet. Jason drank beer because Mike drank beer. Aria drinks this." She lifted the glass an inch off the rug and set it back. "Sweet wine. Cider, in the fall, the kind that's basically a dessert. That's what I actually want, and I've wanted it the whole time, and I spent ten years drinking something I didn't even like because I was standing in the wrong kitchen waiting to be somebody else." She shrugged, and this time the strap stayed up. "So no, I'm not doing beer magic for a crowd I've never met. I'm doing it for me. If Sunday goes bad, if it gets loud and ugly and somebody starts throwing things — I put my hand on a cup of Bud Light and make it taste like the good cider, and I hand it to the guy who threw it. Because that's the pitch. Not that I'm the elf who likes beer. That I'm the elf who knows what you actually want better than you do."

Dani stared at her for a second and then laughed through her nose, short and unwilling, and picked her glass up off the floor. "You're going to hand a hostile football fan a magically improved light beer," she said. "On live television. And that's your de-escalation strategy."

"It's a great de-escalation strategy."

Dani poured the last of the Merlot into their glasses and got up to start dinner, and Aria stayed on the rug with her back against the couch, watching her move around the kitchen with the small, proprietary ease of a woman in her own house. The record had run out and Dani put on another one without looking, some low, brassy thing with a horn in it, and the apartment filled up with the smell of garlic going soft in oil. Pancake reappeared at the exact moment the chicken hit the pan and sat down in the middle of the floor with his tail wrapped around his paws like a man waiting for a bus.

They ate at the low table by the window, cross-legged on cushions, the city going dark and blue behind the glass. Aria drank two glasses of water and turned both of them into a cold, bright Riesling without thinking about it, and on the third Dani caught her wrist mid-reach and said, flat, "No," and went to the sink and filled a glass from the tap and set it down in front of her with a look. Aria picked it up, held it, and it went sweet and faintly effervescent in her hand before she'd even decided to do it. Dani watched the bubbles rise, closed her eyes, and took the glass away.

"You're not even doing it on purpose anymore," she said, and went back to the sink and filled a fourth glass and drank it herself in three long swallows, standing there with her hip against the counter, watching Aria over the rim like a woman doing a math problem she already knew the answer to. "Okay. Fine. New rule. You get dinner and one glass of wine and then you're cut off, because I have now personally watched you turn four glasses of water into four different wines in under an hour, and I'm starting to think the elf is a little bit drunk." She came back to the table and sat down and pointed a fork at Aria. "You're a lightweight, aren't you. You've been a woman for three weeks and you weigh a hundred and ten pounds and you've had most of a bottle. Say something in Elvish."

"I don't speak Elvish," Aria said, with enormous dignity, and then hiccuped, and Pancake looked up from the floor with the flat gold judgment of a landlord who had seen this before.

The hiccup sat in the room for a second, and then the whole thing landed on her at once — the Merlot, the four glasses of water, the low brassy record, the fact that she was sitting cross-legged on a rug in a city she'd never legally entered, hiccuping like a freshman at a house party. She set the glass down very carefully, the way you do when you suspect your hands have stopped taking instructions. "No, but that's —" She held up a finger. The finger wobbled. She looked at it with mild betrayal. "That's the problem. There's a spell for it. There's a spell for everything and I keep forgetting."

Dani's fork stopped halfway to her mouth. "For what."

"Tongues." Aria said the word like it was a revelation and a confession at the same time, which, given the wine, it was. "Comprehend Languages. Or Tongues, one of the two, I can never keep them straight — one of them you understand everything anyone says for an hour, the other one you can speak it back at them." She was already reaching into the column the way you reach for a light switch in a room you know by heart, and she could feel it there, sitting behind the wall with the other three, patient, waiting to be asked for. "One hour. That's the duration. So I could just — pull it, and then actually speak Elvish, like an elf, instead of standing there saying 'I don't speak Elvish' in a human accent while my own ears twitch at every sound in the room." She looked at Dani with the enormous, glassy sincerity of the very drunk. "I've been an elf for three weeks and I've never said a single word in my own language. That's — that's a crime. That's the actual crime. Not the funeral home. Not the stadium. That."

Dani put her fork down. Slowly. The way you set down something you're going to need both hands for.

"Aria." She said it in the voice you'd use on a toddler holding a lighter. "You are drunk off a bottle of Merlot and four glasses of water you keep turning into wine, and you want to teach yourself a language. Tonight. Right now. On the rug." She pinched the bridge of her nose under the wire rims. "Do you know how many languages are in the world? Six thousand. Seven. You pull that spell and you're gonna be fluent in Klingon and Farsi and whatever the fuck they speak in — I don't know — Paraguay, all at once, with a head full of Merlot, and tomorrow you're gonna wake up able to order breakfast in eleven languages you didn't ask for and you won't know which one is Elvish."

"It's not —" Aria started, and hiccuped again, and pointed the wobbling finger at her own chest like it was evidence. "It's not a language. Elvish isn't on the list. It's not a real language, Dani, that's the whole point, it's mine. It was never on any list because there was never anybody to speak it to. So the spell has to — it has to reach for the thing that isn't there. It has to make the thing that isn't there." She was leaning forward now, both hands on the low table, the silver gown slipping off her shoulder and staying there. "Which is either the most beautiful thing I've ever thought of, or the stupidest. And I genuinely cannot tell right now. So you have to tell me."

Dani looked at her for a long second. The record had gone quiet in the run-out groove, the needle ticking against the label, and the kitchen smelled like garlic and cold chicken and the wine they hadn't finished. Then she dragged the bottle across the table by the neck, poured the last inch into her own glass, and drank it standing up.

"Fine," she said, and set the empty glass down like a verdict. "But you do it on the couch, not the rug, because I'm not picking elf off the floor at two in the morning. And if you start speaking in tongues — actual tongues, the church kind — I'm calling Mike."

Dani didn't move toward the bedroom. She crossed to the sink instead, ran the water, and started scrubbing the pan like it owed her money, and Aria watched her from the rug with the slow dawning horror of a woman who had just been told the party was over. "You're cleaning," Aria said, in the tone of someone identifying a body. "Dani. You're standing at the sink cleaning a pan at eleven at night, and I just offered to pull a language spell out of thin air, and you're — you're doing dishes." She pushed herself up off the rug, the silver gown sliding off her shoulder entirely now, and she didn't fix it, and she padded across the kitchen in bare feet and stood directly in Dani's path with her arms crossed under her chest, which given the gown and the wine and the two glasses of water she'd made into Riesling was less a posture of authority than a small, wobbling act of war. "You don't want to take me to bed," she announced. "That's what this is. The pan is a lie. The pan is a whole lie. You'd rather scrape garlic off a nonstick than — than." She waved a hand, gestured vaguely at herself, the entire silver spill of her, and then hiccuped again, which rather undercut the indictment. "Than that."

Dani set the pan down and turned, drying her hands on the towel over her shoulder, and looked down at her — down, because Aria was barefoot and Dani was not, and the difference was a couple of inches and all of a sudden it was the only number in the room. "Aria," she said, and there was a warning in it, the flat one, the one that meant she'd already done the math. "You've had most of a bottle and a language spell on deck and a stadium in three days. I'm not putting you to bed drunk and calling it a good idea." She reached past Aria for the towel bar and Aria caught her wrist — both hands, no magic, just the grip — and tilted her head back and did the thing she had not yet tried on Dani, not once, not ever, because Jason had never been any good at asking and Aria was still learning. She opened her eyes wide. Violet, luminous, the pupils blown a little from the wine, the whites catching the kitchen light, and she held them on Dani's face and did not blink and did not let go of the wrist.

She didn't say anything. She just held the eyes on him — on her — and let the pout build slow, the lower lip pushing out, the corners of her mouth pulling down in an expression that had no business being on a face that old and that beautiful at the same time. "You don't want me," she said, and it came out small, theatrical, pitched for an audience of one. "That's what it is. I'm too much work. I'm a project. You'd rather scrub a pan than take the elf to bed."

Dani's jaw worked. "That is not—"

"You'd rather do the dishes," Aria said, and widened her eyes another degree, and there it was — the puppy thing, the thing she'd never tried on anyone because Jason had never had the face for it and Aria had never had the nerve. Violet, enormous, wet at the lower rim from the wine and the laughing and the late hour, trained up at Dani from two inches below and not wavering. "Please. I'll do anything." She let the words sit. Then, slower, one syllable at a time, the way you spell a word for someone who's pretending not to hear it: "A-n-y-thing. Whatever you want. Tonight. In the bedroom. You name it, I do it, and I don't argue, and I don't use a single cantrip to cheat." She lifted one hand off Dani's wrist — just one — and pressed it flat against her own sternum, over the gown, over the humming three-note chord of the coat on the chair across the room. "Elf's honor."

Dani looked at her for a long moment — at the violet eyes gone glassy and enormous, at the gown strap hanging off one shoulder, at the hand pressed flat over her own sternum like a pledge. Then she looked at the wrist Aria was still holding, and something in her face gave up the argument without surrendering the ground. "Elf's honor," she repeated, flat, tasting it. "You've been an elf for three weeks. Your honor's got a learner's permit." But she didn't pull her wrist free. She reached down instead with her other hand and hooked two fingers under Aria's chin, tipping the face up the last two inches until they were eye to eye, and held it there — close enough that Aria could smell the wine on her own breath coming back off Dani's mouth. "Say it again," Dani said. "Not the anything. The please. Say the please again and mean it."

Aria caught her lower lip between her teeth, slow, and let it drag free before she answered. "Please." It came out lower than she meant it to, rougher, stripped of the theatrical pout — just the word, spent like a coin. Dani's thumb moved once along the underside of her jaw, a small deliberate stroke, and Aria watched her throat work around a swallow she didn't bother to hide. The towel was still slung over Dani's shoulder and she pulled it off now, one-handed, without looking away, and dropped it on the counter behind her. Her jeans had gone tight across the front, the denim pulling at the seam, and Aria's eyes dropped down the length of her and stopped there — the shape of her pressing against the fly, unmistakable, already half-hard from nothing but a look and a word — and when Aria looked back up, Dani was watching her watch it, and neither of them said a thing about it.

"The pan can soak," Dani said, and took Aria's wrist in her turn, firm, and steered her out of the kitchen — past the low table, past the record still ticking in its groove, past Pancake, who lifted his head from the rug, judged them both, and put it back down. At the bedroom door Dani stopped and turned, and Aria bit her lip again, and Dani's breath caught in her chest like a door not quite shut. "Anything," she said — not asking. "You said it."

Dani didn't wait for permission she already had. She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans and shoved them down past her hips in one motion, stepping out of them and kicking them toward the hamper with a foot, and then the shirt came off over her head — no ceremony, no slow reveal, just the quick, practical economy of a woman who had decided. Underneath she was all long lines and soft curves, the wide flare of her hips, the full heaviness of her breasts, the flat pale plane of her stomach, and lower down, where the jeans had been, her cock hung half-hard against her thigh, thick even soft, the head already dark and glistening at the tip. She stood there in the lamplight with her hands loose at her sides and let Aria look — no folding her arms, no hiding the parts of her that didn't fit anyone's neat little box. Just Dani, undressed, waiting.

Aria's hands came up to the strap of her gown and stopped there. She found the edge of it, the place where the conjured silk met her shoulder, and she held it, and then she pushed it down. Slow. The fabric dragged across her collarbone, over the top of her breast, and she felt the cool air find the newly bared skin like a fingertip. She caught her lip between her teeth and watched Dani watch the strap go, and then she found the other one and pushed that down too, and the whole neckline sagged away from her chest, catching on the points of her nipples before sliding free, and she had to bite down harder to keep from making a sound at that alone — the drag of silk over sensitive skin, the way it made her back arch half an inch without asking.

She worked one arm out of the sleeve first, then the other, and the gown slipped down to her waist and hung there, a silver puddle around her hips. She crossed her arms over her chest — not shy, not quite, more like she was holding the last of it in place a second longer, the bunched fabric pressed flat to her sternum by her own bare forearms, her breasts pushed up soft and heavy above the line of them, the underside of each one catching the lamplight pale and warm. She looked at Dani through the fall of her own silver-blond hair and let the arms drop. The gown went with them, down her hips, down her thighs, all the way to the floor in a whisper of conjured silk, and she stood there in nothing at all — ivory skin from throat to ankle, the narrow waist, the generous flare of hip, the small neat triangle of pale hair below her navel, every inch of her lit up and offered and hers to give.

The gown lay in a silver coil at her feet and Aria did not bend for it. She looked at Dani instead — all of her, the lamp catching the long sweep of thigh, the soft heaviness of her breasts, the dark shape of her cock settling lower now against the muscle of her leg — and Aria felt her own mouth go dry in a way no glass of water could fix. She had seen Dani naked before. That was not the thing. The thing was that tonight Dani was not hiding any part of it, not angling her hip, not keeping one arm across her chest, just standing there with her hands loose and her chin up and letting Aria take the whole inventory.

"You're staring," Dani said, and there was no mockery in it, only the plain fact of it laid down like a card.

"I'm cataloguing," Aria said, and heard her own voice come out lower than she'd aimed for. "Elves do that. It's a whole thing."

Dani's mouth pulled sideways. "Uh-huh." She crossed the two steps of lamplight between them and stopped close enough that Aria could feel the heat coming off her skin, could smell the wine on her breath and the soap from the sink and something underneath both that was just her. She reached out and took a strand of Aria's silver-blond hair between two fingers, rubbed it once, let it fall. "You're shaking," she said quietly.

Aria looked down at her own hands and found that Dani was right. Not much. Not the way you shake when you're cold. The other way. "I know," she said. "I'm not going to stop, though."

"Water," Aria said. Her voice came out dry and thin, and she was already laughing at herself. "I need water. Real water. Not — I mean I know I'll turn it into something, I know, but I want to start honest. Bring me a glass of water."

Dani looked at her for a beat longer than the sentence deserved, then went to the kitchen in nothing but her skin, hips rolling easy under the lamplight, and came back with a tall glass sweating in her hand. Aria took it with both hands like it was the last one on earth and drank — and on the first swallow the cold tap water went warm and round and dark on her tongue, cherries and oak and something low, and she kept drinking anyway, eyes closed, throat working, until the glass was empty and tilted and she had to tip her head back to get the last of it. "That's it," she said, and set the glass down on the nightstand with a wet click, and looked at the bed where Dani had already stretched out on her back, one arm behind her head, watching the ceiling and saying nothing at all.

Aria crossed the room on bare feet and climbed onto the mattress, and the whole of her came down over Dani — wine-warm, loose-limbed, silver hair spilling across both their chests, mouth landing first on the corner of Dani's jaw and then missing and then finding it, wet and unaimed and tasting of Merlot. "Favorite cock in the world," she mumbled into Dani's neck, and kissed her way down the long pale plane of her, down the soft slope of belly, past the dark neat thatch, until her lips closed over the head of it — warm, heavy, already slick at the tip — and she took it into her mouth with a drunken, grateful sound, one hand curled at the base and the other flat on Dani's hip, holding on like the bed was rocking.

She took it slow because slow was all she had left — the wine had sanded the edges off her coordination and left her with nothing but intention, and intention was enough. Her lips sealed around the head and slid down, wet and warm, her tongue flat against the underside where the vein ran, and she felt it jump against the roof of her mouth and made a low, pleased sound that vibrated straight down the length of it. Her hand worked the base in a loose fist, twisting a little on every upstroke, and she pulled off just far enough to breathe across the wet head and then took it again, deeper this time, until it nudged the back of her throat and her eyes watered and she didn't stop. Dani's hips lifted off the mattress an inch and came back down. A hand found the back of Aria's head, not pushing, just resting there, fingers sliding into the silver-blond fall of her hair like they'd been looking for it.

"Look at you," Dani said, and her voice had gone low and ruined already. "Three weeks and you eat like you were born — oh." Aria had done something with her tongue on the way up that cut the sentence off. She did it again, deliberate, and Dani's fingers curled tight in her hair and stayed. Aria came off just long enough to lick a wet stripe up the shaft, root to tip, and then the words came out of her before she'd decided to say them and they came out in French — tu es belle, tu es toute chaude, laisse-moi, laisse-moi — soft and slurred and shaped wrong, a language she had never studied in her life, and she heard it happening and did not stop, because her mouth was full and her mouth was busy and the spell had apparently reached for the first thing it could find. Dani laughed, breathless and disbelieving, and then Aria took her deep again and the laugh broke into a sound with no humor left in it at all.

She kept at it, unhurried, sloppy, her jaw aching and her chin slick and her own hips grinding slow against nothing, and the French kept spilling out between strokes — endearments, filth, nonsense, all of it in a voice that was not quite hers — until Dani's thighs went tight under her palms and her breath came in short broken pieces and her grip in Aria's hair turned from resting to asking. "Aria — chérie, where did you —" and then she stopped trying to ask, because Aria had stopped trying to answer, and the only word left in the room was the one Dani said over and over, half in English and half in something neither of them had ever learned,

— fuck, and Aria, and s'il te plaît, which she had not put there and could not have put there, and Aria took the whole of it down her throat and stayed, nose pressed to the dark thatch, swallowing around the stretch of it while Dani's heels dug into the mattress and her whole body bowed up off the sheets like something plucked. The hand in her hair went tight enough to hurt and Aria hummed at the pain, low and mean, and felt Dani's cock pulse against her tongue, thick and hot and one breath from gone.

She pulled off. Deliberate. A wet sound as her lips dragged the length of it, and she held the head against her lower lip and breathed on it, and the French came out of her again, softer now, wrecked: pas encore, pas encore, je veux te goûter — and she had no idea what she was saying and knew exactly what she meant, which was that she was not done and Dani was not allowed to be either. Dani made a sound like a woman arguing with gravity. "You don't — do you know what you just —" Aria licked the underside, root to tip, slow, and the question died in her mouth.

Dani's hand slid down out of her hair and found her jaw instead, thumb hooking at the corner of her mouth, smearing the wet there across her cheek like she was checking that Aria was real. "How do you know French," she managed. "You've been an elf for three weeks. You said you don't speak Elvish. So where the hell did —"

"Tongues," Aria said, and her voice came out hoarse and ruined and pleased about it. "Told you. Pulled it while you were doing the dishes." She kissed the head of Dani's cock, almost chaste, and then took it back into her mouth before Dani could build any kind of argument, and the argument turned into a long shaking exhale instead. Voilà, she thought, or maybe said, and the word arrived in her head already shaped, and she stopped caring which.

Aria let the cock slip out of her mouth with a wet sound and crawled up Dani's body like she was climbing something she intended to stay on — knees bracketing Dani's hips, hands planting on either side of her shoulders, mouth finding the soft underside of one breast on the way up and closing over the nipple, drawing it in slow, tonguing it until it pebbled hard against her lips, then releasing it with a soft pop and moving to the other one to do the same thing, deliberately, like she was taking inventory of every part of her and leaving her mark on each. Dani's hands came up to Aria's waist, thumbs pressing into the hollows above her hipbones, and Aria felt the heat of her palms like something she'd been missing without knowing it. "Tu es si belle," Aria murmured against the underside of her breast, and the words were French and she didn't know where they'd come from and didn't care, and she kissed her way up across the flat pale plane of Dani's sternum, over the collarbone, up the long line of her throat where her pulse beat fast and warm against Aria's lips.

She reached Dani's mouth and kissed her deep, open, tasting herself and Dani both on Dani's tongue — wine and salt and the particular musk of a cock that had just been in her throat — and Dani made a low sound into the kiss and pulled her down by the hips until Aria's soaked cunt pressed against the length of her, slick and hot and grinding down along the shaft without meaning to, without being able to stop. Aria reached between them, took her in her hand — thick and heavy and still wet from her own mouth — and lifted her hips, and guided the head of her along her slit, once, twice, dragging it through the wet folds until her breath broke against Dani's mouth, and then she sank down onto it, slow, the stretch of it opening her inch by inch, her cunt gripping and yielding and gripping again as she took the whole length of her in one long, shaking descent.

Dani's whole body went rigid under her — not a flinch, the other thing, the way a bow goes rigid when the string's been drawn past where it wants to go — and her hands snapped up to Aria's hips and held her there, seated, full, not letting her move an inch. "Attends," Dani said, and then caught herself, because the French had jumped ship somewhere around the second nipple and come out of Dani's mouth instead, and she laughed at herself with her breath still ragged. "Wait. God. Wait."

"I'm waiting," Aria said, and her voice had gone strange and low, and she was not, in fact, waiting — she was rocking, small, involuntary, the heel of each stroke grinding the head of Dani's cock up against something inside her that made her vision go soft at the edges. Her hair hung down around both their faces, a silver curtain, and Dani reached up and pushed it back behind Aria's ear with two fingers, tucking it, and Aria turned her head and caught those fingers in her mouth and sucked them, slow, watching Dani's eyes go dark. "You're not waiting," Dani said.

"I'm a terrible liar," Aria said around the fingers, and let them go, and leaned down and kissed her — deep, unhurried, the kind of kiss that has nothing to do with where the bodies are and everything to do with the fact that they're there at all — and started to move. Slow at first, long rolls of her hips that took Dani all the way in and all the way back out to the head, the wet sound of it filling the room between them like something being unwrapped. Dani's thumbs dug into the hollows above her hipbones, hard enough to bruise, and Aria hummed at that and went faster, riding the length of her with her back bowed and her hands braced on Dani's chest, and the French came back — broken, breathless, half of it swallowed — mon coeur, mon coeur, ne t'arrête pas — and Dani's hips came up to meet her, driving deeper, and neither of them could have said afterward who was doing what to whom.

"Aria —" Dani's voice had gone thin and high and nothing like her. "Aria, I'm going to — if you keep —"

Aria caught both of Dani's wrists and pinned them to the mattress, one on either side of her head, and the elf strength that could bend rebar did it gently — which was the whole trick of it, the way she could have crushed and chose not to. "No," she said, and rode down hard, seating Dani to the root, and held her there. "You don't get to come yet. You said anything. I'm collecting." Dani's arms strained once against her grip, purely to feel the shape of the trap, and then went slack, and her laugh came out cracked down the middle. "That's — that's not how anything works —" Aria rolled her hips, slow and deep, and the sentence turned into a sound with no words in it at all.

She leaned down close, hair falling around them both, and the Elvish arrived the way the French had — uninvited, already shaped, older than the body that spoke it. Amin merna lle tyava en' templa, she breathed against Dani's ear, and did not know she knew it until it was out. Lle naa a'maelamin. Le ta en' gwaith, le ta en' aldë, le ta en' — She broke off, because Dani had gone still under her, listening, and Aria heard her own voice the way you hear a recording of yourself: not Jason's, not the game's, something that had been sleeping in the column all along. "What did you just say to me," Dani whispered.

"I said I want you to plant yourself in me," Aria said, and the English came out rougher than the Elvish had, like a translation losing something. "A seed goes in the ground and the ground keeps it. That's — that's what the word does. That's what it means." She let go of one wrist and brought that hand down flat over her own lower belly, pressing, where Dani was still buried deep and throbbing against her, and she watched Dani's eyes track the gesture and widen. "So do it. Put it in the soil. I'll hold it." Dani's hips came up off the mattress — one sharp, involuntary thrust that Aria took and held — and her freed hand closed over Aria's wrist in turn, over the belly, over the place where the promise would land.

Dani's hands closed around Aria's hips and locked, and she moved — not a buck, a heave, the whole long body rolling up and over like a wave deciding to break the other way, and Aria went down onto her back with a sound that started as a laugh and ended as something else entirely. The mattress caught her, silver hair fanned out across the pillow, and Dani was above her, braced on both arms, still buried to the root — she had not pulled free, not an inch, not a breath of it, and the whole turn had been one long grind along the inside of her that made Aria's heels dig uselessly into the sheets. Dani settled her weight down, hips to hips, and the length of her pressed deep and flat against something that made Aria's vision go white at the corners, and she did not move, just held there and looked down at her, breathing hard through her nose.

"You and your filthy dead language," Dani said, low, and the words landed like a hand on the back of Aria's neck. "I've been listening to it for ten minutes and I don't understand a word and it's been going straight down my spine anyway." She pulled back — slow, deliberate, all the way to the head, watching Aria's face the entire time — and drove back in, one hard stroke that seated her completely, and Aria's mouth fell open around a word that was not English. Dani did it again. And again. "So keep talking," she said, and set a rhythm that had nothing gentle left in it, hips slapping against Aria's thighs, the wet sound of it filling the room. Aria's hands found the headboard and held, and the Elvish came out of her in a rush, urgent, cracked, no longer the soft thing she'd breathed against Dani's ear — Aria heard her own voice climb and break around words she had never learned and could not have stopped saying, amin mela lle, amin mela lle, harder, rougher, pleading in a language that had no word for please because elves did not beg, and she was begging anyway, in Elvish, on her back, with Dani Hope's cock buried in her and Dani Hope's hands pinning her wrists to the pillow like she'd finally figured out how the trap worked.

Dani pulled out to the head and stopped there, breathing through her teeth, and Aria felt the absence like a held note. Then Dani's hands slid up from her hips to the backs of her knees, lifted, and folded her — slow, deliberate, no rush in it — until Aria's knees pressed toward her own shoulders and her cunt tilted up open under Dani's eyes and the whole long length of her came down again in one unbroken stroke. Aria's spine left the mattress. The Elvish tore out of her throat, no longer breath, no longer whisper — amin mela lle, amin mela lle, lle naa a'maelamin, a'maelamin, a'maelamin — the same three words over and over and over like a bell rung by a hand that would not stop, and she did not know what they meant and she meant every one.

"That's it," Dani said, and there was nothing soft left in her voice, only the flat hot certainty of a woman who had stopped arguing with the thing she wanted. "Keep saying it. I don't need to know what it means. I just need to hear you say it while I fuck you." She set the pace herself now — no more asking, no more waiting on Aria's hips — driving down into her in long, deep, punishing strokes that slapped skin against skin and punched a wet sound out of Aria's cunt on every withdrawal, and Aria's hands came off the headboard and scrabbled at Dani's back instead, nails raking down the pale skin between her shoulder blades, and Dani hissed at the sting and went harder. The Elvish broke apart in her mouth — a'maelamin, amin mela lle, le ta en' gwaith, le ta en' gwaith, amin mela lle — half of it sobbed, half of it snarled, the words arriving faster than her ruined throat could shape them, and Dani caught Aria's jaw in one hand and turned her face up and made her say it to her mouth.

Dani drove down into her and stayed, weight settling, and Aria's whole body answered — heels locking behind Dani's thighs, arms snapping up and around, both legs cinching tight around Dani's waist and both arms crossing over her back like she'd been built to clamp and had only now found the thing worth clamping. The elf strength that could bend rebar closed around Dani Hope and did not let go. Dani tried to pull back to the head and the trap simply tightened; she tried to roll her hips and the trap took that too, ground it down deeper. "Aria —" she got out, and then Aria's cunt clenched around her in one long rolling grip and the sentence ended in a sound with nothing human in it. Amin mela lle, Aria sobbed into her shoulder, the words arriving on a breath that had nowhere to go, and Dani felt them land somewhere behind her sternum like a hand closing. Amin mela lle, amin mela lle, le ta en' gwaith — the same three words, a bell rung by a fist, and Dani's hips were moving now whether she'd told them to or not, short and hard and trapped, no withdrawal left in it, nothing but the grind.

"I can't — you're not letting me —" Dani's voice had gone high and cracked and she was laughing and not laughing at the same time, forehead dropping to Aria's, the whole length of her pinned and moving inside a grip that had stopped being an invitation and become a fact. Aria's answer came back in Elvish, wet against her ear, and Dani didn't know the words and didn't need them — she knew the shape of them, the way they came out ruined and glad, the way they meant stay. She bit down on Aria's shoulder, hard enough to leave teeth, and drove in one last time and came, and the Elvish broke apart into a scream that had no translation — a'maelamin, a'maelamin — and Aria's cunt clenched around her in waves, taking it, holding it, the two of them locked into a single shaking thing on the bed.

The grip held long after Dani had stopped moving, long after the last aftershock rolled through Aria and her heels finally slid down the backs of Dani's legs to the mattress. Dani lay collapsed across her, breathing into her neck, and said, muffled, "You have got to teach me what that means." Aria turned her face into Dani's hair, eyes closed, tongue thick with wine and Elvish and the taste of her. "I don't know what it means," she said. "I just know it's true."

Dani lifted her head, and her face was close enough that Aria could see the whole of it — the flush across her cheeks, the sweat at her temples, the mouth gone soft and used. Dani brought one hand up and cupped Aria's jaw in it, thumb at the corner of her lips, and held her there like something worth holding. "Say it again," she said. "Slow. I want to hear the shape of it."

Aria felt the words come up before she reached for them, the way the French had come, the way the Elvish had come — but this time she caught them and turned them over and looked at them, and they had a seam. Amin mela lle. She knew mela — she had written mela on a character sheet three years ago and never once said it out loud, because Marcus had told her it sounded like an allergy. Amin was I. Lle was you. The verb sat between them like a stone in a stream and she had been walking over it all night without looking down. "I love you," she said, and her voice broke on the second word, and she said it again in Elvish with the meaning attached now, amin mela lle, and it did not sound like an allergy. It sounded like a bell finally being told what it was for.

Dani's thumb moved once along Aria's jaw, slow, and her eyes were wet and she did not blink it away. "Okay," she said, quiet, and then, "Okay," again, like she was setting something down carefully where it wouldn't break, and she did not say it back — not in English, not in any language — and Aria understood, in the small cold room behind her sternum where the column lived, that Dani had heard it and was not going to hand it back tonight, and that this was not a no. It was a keeping. Dani kissed her once, closed-mouthed, and then rolled off onto her back and pulled Aria in against her side with one arm, and the two of them lay there in the dark with the wine and the smell of each other and the words still ringing in the air between them, unanswered and not refused.