A family, the night breeze whispered into my ear.
A life, a hot lump of wood crackled out.
A future, a flame spelled out as it danced above a coal.
Now, I wondered if my old goals had ceased being enough.
Because I wantedmore.
39
KALI
Awhite-and-purple cloud on a thin stick floated before Gedeon as he weaved between the-swaying-to-the-music hips and stomping feet. Spinning around a couple lost to the thrum of the drums, he turned his back to me, and the strawberry patch on the back of his t-shirt caught the firelight.
Zion might have been right. Gedeon truly resembled the fruit. The seeds were like the protective armor he’d established around himself, but if you cut through it, you’d find a smooth and squishy texture, similar to Gedeon in the mornings, when he would squash you with his weight while he battled drowsiness.
“Here.” He offered me the strangest… Yeah, I had not a hunch on what the thing was. It literally looked like Gedeon had dragged a cloud down and stabbed it onto a wooden stick.
Hesitant about poking it—although I itched to do it—I asked, “What is this?”
“Cotton candy.” He wiggled the sweet, and it slightly bounced. It didn’t look edible, not by far. “They didn’t have any chocolate bars, but they had a booth making these.”
I dissolved into a puddle of goo. He’d promised he would bring us a dozen chocolate bars after Zion had learned I’d neverhad one last night. And now, he tried to make it come true to the best of his ability. Just…because.
They’d spent days convincing me,showingme they didn’t andwouldn’trequire reciprocation for anything they did for me, but sometimes, it was still difficult to grasp the concept of others doing something for you out of nothing but kindness.
I flipped my hands so the blaze could warm their backs. “That can’t be candy. It looks like an overgrown cotton boll on a stick.” Only a dozen times bigger than those I’d seen pictures of—tiny clumps of white dotting a field of bushes.
“It’s a spun-sugar confection.” Gedeon peeled a strip off the top. “Try it.”
“I’m supposed to eat this?” I rolled the white bit between my fingers. It diminished in size, getting smaller and smaller until it was no bigger than a tendril. “It’s gone.”
His chuckle wrapped around me like a comforting blanket. It wasn’t contemptuous, the rumble too free to be anything else but genuine amusement.
“Perhaps you will like the purple.” He tore two more pieces off the cloud and passed me one. “Place it on your tongue and let it melt.”
Following his example, I stuffed the strip into my mouth. As the piece rapidly disintegrated, an explosion of sweetness overwhelmed my taste buds.
It was sugar. He hadn’t lied.
I studied the confection he held while I licked my sticky fingertips to collect any leftover crystals. Would the flavor of the white part of the candy be the same?
Gedeon’s smirk emerged for the hundredth time this evening. “Want more?”
“Always.” Popping out of nowhere, Zion clamped his teeth around the top of the cotton candy, wrenched a third of it off, and grinned around the confection.
My shock quickly melted into a glare, but he simply sucked in half of the giant shred.
Instead of issuing a reproach, Gedeon grabbed Zion’s nape and slammed their mouths together, ravaging both the sweet and the man before him.
Why was it so hot? They were eating candy. The fluffiest kind I’d seen, but that aside, the pure, undiluted need in them loosened the lid on my…
Yup, my panties were about to get drenched.
Withdrawing, Zion spotted the rest of the candy Gedeon had been holding on the ground, right next to the bonfire, the cloud quickly shriveling into nothing. “You dropped it,” he said with a pout.
Gedeon picked up the stick with a few tendrils stuck to it. “Did you like it?” he asked me.
