the stories?”
I told him. When I’d finished, he closed his eyes and exhaled. A moment later, he opened them.
“I don’t know what bothers me more. You turning to magic or you turning to Dorian.”
I beckoned behind me. “Have you seen my living room? I am not going to be responsible for inflicting Hurricane Eugenie on Tucson.”
That made him smile. “Tucson already deals with Hurricane Eugenie on a regular basis. But yeah, I get your point. What worries me…I don’t know. I don’t really use magic, but I’ve spent half my life around people who do. I’ve seen how it affects them. How it can control them.”
“Are you questioning my self-control? Or my strength?”
“No,” he replied in all seriousness. “You’re one of the strongest people I know. But Storm King…I saw him once when I was little. He was…well, let’s put it this way. Dorian and Aeson and Maiwenn are strong. Compared to other gentry, they’re like torches beside candles. But your father…he was more like a bonfire. You can’t use that kind of power and walk away unscathed.”
“I appreciate the warning, Gandalf, but I don’t know that I have a choice.”
“I guess not. I just don’t want to see you changed, that’s all. I like you the way you are.” A smile flickered across his lips and then faded. “And as for working with Dorian…well, that just makes the situation worse.”
“You sound jealous.”
“Of course.” He answered without hesitation, not really ashamed to fess up to his feelings. “But he’s power-hungry too. And he wants to see the Storm King conquest happen. Somehow I doubt he’ll be content to have you be his pretend-lover for long.”
“Well, hey, remember I’ve got a choice in there too. Besides, contraceptive technology is a wonderful thing, right?”
“Absolutely. But Maiwenn says-”
“I know, I know. All sorts of wise and compelling things.”
Kiyo eyed me warily. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just that I think it’s funny for you to talk to me about Dorian when-”
“When what?”
I set down my cup of coffee and looked him in the eye. “Honesty again?”
He returned my stare unblinkingly. “Always.”
“You two seemed…more than chummy. Is there anything going on between you? Romantically, I mean?”
“No.” The answer came swift and certain.
I reconsidered. “Was there anything going on?”
This got a hesitation. “Not anymore,” he said after a moment.
“I see.” I looked away and felt my own wave of jealousy run through me as my cruel mind pictured him and that beautiful woman together.
“It’s over, Eugenie. Has been for a while. We’re just friends now, that’s it.”
I glanced up. “Like you and I are friends?”
His lips turned up wickedly, and I saw the temperature in his eyes dial up a few degrees. “You can call it whatever you want, but I think we both know we aren’t ‘just friends.’”
No, I supposed not. And suddenly, after so much time with him and the fact that I’d made out with a full- fledged gentry, Kiyo being a kitsune wasn’t really a problem anymore. The lines that organized my life had all blurred. That scared me because I wanted Kiyo, and suddenly I had no excuses standing in my way. And honestly, I realized, it was a lot easier having excuses. Excuses meant you didn’t have to work or open yourself to someone else and be vulnerable. If I really wanted to be near and with Kiyo now, I was going to have to look beyond sex. Sex was easy-especially with him. What was going to be hard was remembering how to get close to someone and trust him.
I looked away, not wanting him to see the fear on my face, but he already had. I don’t know what it was about him, but sometimes he seemed to know me better than I knew myself.
He stood up and moved behind me, his hands kneading the kinks in my neck and shoulders. “Eugenie,” was all he said, voice warm.
I relaxed into him and closed my eyes. “I don’t know how to do this.” I referred to him and me, but considering the rest of my life, that statement could have applied to any number of things.
“Well, we stop fighting, for one. Let’s drop this other stuff and go out.”
“Now? Like on a date?”
“Sure.”
“Just like that? Is it that easy?”
“For now. And really, it’s only as easy or hard as we choose to make it.”
We took Kiyo’s car, a pretty sweet 1969 Spider, to one of my favorite restaurants: Indian Cuisine of India. The name sounded redundant, but the latter part of it had been a necessary addition. Considering all the local restaurants that served Southwest and American Indian cuisine, a lot of tourists had come in expecting to find Navajo fry bread, not curry and naan.
The tension melted between us-the hostile kind, at least-though he did have one pensive moment in which he asked, “All right, I have to know. Is it true you kissed him?”
I smiled enigmatically. “This is as easy or hard as we choose to make it.”
He sighed.
After dinner, he drove us out of town but wouldn’t say where we were going. Almost forty minutes later, we were driving up and around a large hill. Kiyo found an area with other cars but saw there were no spots left, forcing him to drive back down and park a considerable distance away. Twilight was giving way to full night, and it was hard to find the path up the hill with no lighting. He slipped his hand in mine, guiding me. His fingers were warm, his grip tight and secure.
It took us almost a half hour, walking until the path finally crested to a small clearing. I hid my astonishment. It was filled with people, most of whom were setting up telescopes and peering up at the clear, star-thickened sky.
“I saw this advertised in the paper,” Kiyo explained. “It’s the amateur astronomy group. They let the public come out and hang with them.”
Sure enough, everyone there was more than happy to let us come and look through their telescopes. They pointed out sights of particular interest and told stories about constellations. I’d heard a lot of them before but enjoyed hearing them again.
The weather was perfect for this kind of thing. Warm enough to not need jackets (though I still wore one to hide weapons) and so perfectly clear that you could forget pollution existed. The Flandrau Observatory, over at the university, had fantastic shows, but I loved the casual nature of this one.
While listening to an older man talk about the Andromeda galaxy, I thought about just how vast our existence really was. There was so much of it we didn’t know about. The outer world, the universe, spread on forever. For all I knew, the inner world of spirits continued on just as far. I only knew about three worlds: the world we lived in, the world the dead lived in, and the Otherworld, which caught everything in between. A lot of shamans believed the divine world was beyond all of this, a world of God or gods we couldn’t even imagine. Looking up at that snowstorm of stars, I suddenly felt very small in the greater scheme of things, prophecy or no.
Kiyo shifted beside me, and I felt his arm brush mine. My body kept an exact record of where we touched, like some sort of military tracking system. He caught my eye, and we smiled at each other. I felt at peace, almost deliriously happy. For this moment, all was right in the world between us. Maybe I’d never fully understand what pulled two people together. Maybe it was like trying to comprehend the universe. You couldn’t measure any of it. It just was, and you made your way through it as best you could.
“Thank you,” I told him later, as we walked back down the hill toward the car. “That was really great.”
“I saw the telescope at your house-er, what was left of it anyway.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Being up here had sort of taken me away from reality. I’d forgotten that my home was in a state of disaster. “Mine couldn’t really compare to any of these. Maybe I’ll have to upgrade now.”
We passed the other cars and finally finished the long trek back out to his car. The temperature had cooled
