One evening we ventured to the rooftop, mugs of my favorite peach-flavored tea in hand, and he made a frustrated sound when the door clicked shut. “It locked us out,” he announced with a sigh.
I took a deep breath and set my tea down on his potting bench. This was an inevitable eventuality with a door like that, and I refused to allow myself to panic.
“It’s okay. I can do this.” The thought of him flying me down from the roof of the fourth floor was terrifying, but I knew I could trust him. “Please don’t drop me,” I said anyway, my voice shaking as I squeezed my eyes shut, readying myself for him to pluck me from the ground.
But he chuckled and said, “No, darling. I will go down and prop the door open again.” He was still laughing to himself as helaunched into the sky and gracefully dropped toward the ground below, his massive wings thrumming powerfully.
I loved it when he called me darling.
I. Was. So. Smitten.
“Have you ever triedthe fuzz berry pastries?” Alistair asked me early one morning as we stood in front of the doughnut case at a little hole-in-the-wall cafe. I’d never been to this one, usually opting for the chain coffee shop on the way to work that the university students favored, but Alistair told me this one was a local institution. I’d woken up a bit early to be able to meet him here for breakfast before opening the nursery, since he’d just finished his work at the lab.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of fuzz berries,” I admitted. “Is that a real fruit?”
He puffed up with excitement. “Oh, yes!” he told me before turning to the barista. “Two fuzz berry pastries, please. On my tab,” he said, taking the puffy-looking confections carefully once the young naga removed them from the case, plated them, and handed them over.
“I can pay for my own breakfast,” I said as he led me to a little table by the window covered with a red and white checkered cloth. It looked like it might have been older than I was, the white squares yellowed with age and worn from heavy use. Alistair knew I loved to people-watch, and he always seemed to find some strange amusement from watching me as I watched the people. This cafe was a little off the beaten path, so the street was nearly empty except for a slow trickle of people stepping in to buy something from the counter before hustling out again.
“Hush,” he said, waving me off as he set one of the plated pastries in front of my chair. “What if you don’t like it? It’s a bit of an acquired taste,” he told me, “but it’s one of my favorites.”
“High praise, coming from you. What do you like about it?” I inquired, latching on to the opportunity to learn something new about him. His insights about food were always unexpected, and there was something about the pleasure he found in simple fruits that always made me smile.
“Oh, I love the flavor, of course,” he said with a happy buzz as he used his long talon-like claws to tease apart the crisp, crackled surface of the dough. “It’s very tart, be warned.” He popped a bit of the fruit filling into his mouth, bypassing the outer pastry crust all together, and gave a deeper, more rumbling buzz. “But mostly it reminds me of my childhood.”
Butterflies had threatened to overwhelm me at the sound of his pleasant, purr-like rumbling, so I’d focused on watching a little harpy child toddle down the sidewalk toward the cafe entrance with her mother, only briefly glancing at Alistair as he spoke, but now my gaze was riveted to the way his antennae twitched and his eyes warmed as he enjoyed his treat. “Tell me more,” I encouraged, feeling a smile threaten. The man could talk for hours about tree genomes and the best methods for breaking bud dormancy, but talking about himself seemed like a foreign concept.
“I grew up picking fuzz berries in the woods behind my house,” he said with a little shrug. “The bushes aren’t exactly rare, per se, at least not where I’m from, but the berries are quite delicate. They don’t keep, so you won’t find them in stores.”
I considered this as I took my first bite, enjoying the way the sweetened outer bun buffered the intense tartness of the berry. “Oh! That’s very good,” I told him sincerely. “That’s dangerously good.”
“It is, isn’t it?” he agreed. “I’ve never found any other shops that sell baked goods that use them. We’d spend every day during the summer searching for them, me and my best friend. Rampaged around in the woods like little berry-juice smeared primitives. And the flowers!” he exclaimed. “They only open at night, and they have the most delicious nectar. You can’t imagine the scent.”
“Hmm,” I murmured, enjoying the taste. “Do you miss them? Why don’t you grow them?” I wondered aloud, thinking of his big rooftop garden. Surely, if anyone could grow them, he could.
“Oh, all the time. I tried to grow them several times, actually, but they’re very specifically adapted to the region where they’re from. There’s not enough humidity here, and the nights just don’t get cold enough. They can’t have too much light, but they still need enough for their berries to ripen. It’s a whole ordeal,” he sighed. “These little pastries capture the base flavor, but all the nuance is gone.”
I frowned at my half-eaten sweet, noting the dark purple-blue compote and trying to imagine the way it tasted when it was fresh, but I couldn’t. “That’s sad.”
He smiled at me—a small secretive smile that hid something I didn’t understand. “It is, a little. I do miss the flavor, but I can still taste them whenever I go home.”
“Do you go home often?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“No, not often,” he said, confirming my hunch. “And even if I did, it would be quite a trial lining up my trip to match with their very short fruiting season,” he said, his smile rueful this time. “But, I think, somehow, that fleeting window of availability, their rarity, their uniqueness… It all makes them that much more special.”
I pondered this, my gaze resting on the way his hands skillfully dissected the baked good so that only the barest sliver sullied the berry filling as a vessel for carrying it to his mouth withoutdirtying his talons. How many delicious fruits would I never know because I only ate what was available in grocery stores?
“What kinds of things did you do in New Caelora when you were growing up?” Alistair asked conversationally. “What are you missing here that you loved back home?” There was an odd light in his eyes as he asked, as if he were afraid to know the answer.
Everything.
As soon as the thought popped into my mind, I knew it wasn’t entirely true.
Chapter 6
Lilith
The thick, handmade paperof the wedding invitation was rough against my fingers as I followed the looping scrawl of gold foiled letters with my eyes for the hundredth time. When I’d received the missive from an old college friend shortly after moving here, I’d been so focused on being miserable and getting the shop up and running that I hadn’t had room to be excited about the prospect of returning home to New Caelora for only a few short days. Obviously, I loved my home and wanted to be back there, but the exhaustion of the recent move and upending my life had burned out any desire to travel anytime soon, especially for something as short as a weekend. So I’d begrudgingly sent my RSVP, arranged for a friend to attend as my plus-one, stuck the note on my fridge, and put it out of my mind while I dealt with rearranging my life and revitalizing the new business.
