Kai nodded.“Yeah.Let me take these, and, yeah, just a few things.Sorry.I’ll go fast so your arms don’t fall off.”
Fian snorted and lifted his chin.“Preposterous.My arms wouldn’t just fall off.They are strong.Also very symmetrical.I am not vain about them like my brother about his teeth, but my arms are really good arms.”
That made Kai laugh even though it really wasn’t particularly funny.“You are just so weird.”
He closed the curtain before Fian could respond.Then he went about getting out of his clothes and nearly tore the damn shirt, actually managing to rip off the topmost button of the pants.Destroying things had never felt so good, and when he was finally wearing nothing but his underwear, Kai felt like he could finally breathe again.
He did so, looking at himself in the mirror.
It was the oddest thing.Kai saw himself, but also saw a stranger looking back at him.He wasn’t like he knew himself to be.His hair was different, something in the set of his mouth was off.He ran a hand over his belly, feeling and not feeling, there and not there.
When something warm and slightly rough tickled his ankle, he yelped and jumped, his old fear of oversized arachnids raising several of its eight legs.
“Hey, you guys okay in there?”someone asked, and Kai fell back into the present, into where he was, a changing room with a man he barely knew but trusted more than Nick who, who—
“We are okay.It was just a small sea breeze,” Fian said.
“Uhm.All right.Let me know if you need anything in a different size.”
“Absolutely.”
The salesperson went away presumably.Moments later, the curtain was pulled open, and with his armful of stuff, Fian walked inside the cramped space.
All humor was gone from his features.“I realize I’m intruding, but this is an emergency.You tasted like panic and the fear of certain death just now.Something isn’t right with you.It’s the magic and—the magic and everything else.But the important thing is that it doesn’t matter.Kai, you are not alone.I am here with you.Last night, what we did in the ocean, it wasn’t a dream.I told you, and you wouldn’t believe it, but it wasn’t a dream.I’m forcing you to believe now, because if you’ll let me, I think it would be best if I held you for a while, just until your skin tastes normal again.”
Kai’s mouth had fallen open.“Last night…I don’t know what you mean.At all.We did nothing.”
Fian’s mouth pressed tight.He crossed his arms, and the clothes, all the clothes, they were just being lifted by…
“Tentacles?”
One appeared in front of Kai’s face, the suckers kind of blinking, undulating.
“Yes.I kept telling you.But you told me to take my pants off.Maybe I shouldn’t have.”
Kai poked the tentacle.He had no idea why he was so fucking calm about everything.But I know.This is a mental episode of some kind.But there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it except roll with it.This is much nicer than thinking about Nick, how he smelled and those grunting sounds when he—
“Okay.”
Fian’s eyes widened and his mouth fell open.“Okay?Just like that?”
“Sure.Why not.Oh, this is why you were going on about the bathing suit?I get it.Funny.”
“I don’t like that you are being like this, but I really don’t know enough about humans.Kai, either way, can I hold you?Not like last night, of course not.I just want to hold you until your body knows it’s safe.”
That was a strange way to phrase it, but it hit a mark, somewhere in Kai’s heart, somewhere in his nervous system where thoughts couldn’t easily reach.
He nodded and leaned forward, and all of a sudden, there were arms, so many, so warm, the suckers rough but grounding him in his own skin with their roughness.
It didn’t take very long at all for silent tears to come, buckets and buckets of them.
Fian truly became an anchor then.He didn’t say anything, barely moved except to hold and tighten his grip as needed.At some point, he started cooing.
They stood there for a long time, for a very long time.If he had been alone, Kai might have lost himself, a broken kite tossed to the wind, but as it was, he floated, floated.
For the first time in a long while, Kai felt safe.
13
