The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(3)

“The sea is too far,” said Indigo with a melodic sigh I could feel on my skin. “Maybe liquid gold? Or is that unappetizing?”

“Diane de Poitiers, a famous mistress of Henry II no less, drank gold to preserve her youth.”

“Did it work?”

“Supposedly she died of it, which is to say, she didn’t get any older.”

Indigo laughed. I caught her perfume. I thought she’d smell of amber and night-blooming jasmine, but she was adolescently sweet with the sort of synthetic, sugary green apple fragrance I associated with high school girls. On Indigo, it was like cover-up, a wolf rubbing sheep’s fat into its fur as camouflage.

She snapped her fingers and a waiter appeared, bearing two glasses of Champagne.

“To hope,” said Indigo, clinking her glass to mine. “And to all the beautiful ways in which we can forget its fatality.”

After a sip, she eyed me over the rim of her flute. “Are you not starved for something?”

That famished chamber of myself shivered. “I’m always starved.”

“Good,” said Indigo.

Platters of food began to arrive: tins of caviar in silver bowls filled with ice; quail braised in pomegranate molasses and wine; a rack of lamb so succulent the meat slid off the bone without protest.

Indigo made no mention of my request to see the grimoire from her private collection. Instead, she began by asking what I thought the eternal would taste like, which season I would want to live in for a decade and why. If I tried to speak about my life, her smile dropped. If I spoke about current events, she’d turn her head. About an hour or so into our meal, I grew too curious.

“It seems that I’m offending you every time I bring up reality,” I said.

“Reality?” she repeated, with a touch of scorn. “Reality is what you make of your surroundings. And the world outside my own cannot touch me.” There was a note of sadness when she said this, as if she were a ghost and her hands now passed through things once reached for with ease.

“I know you feel the same way,” she said in that smoked voice. “I’ve looked you up, Professor. I’ve even read your books.”

The thought of Indigo trailing her elegant finger across one of my sentences made me feel exposed. She had not laid a hand on me, but I already knew the texture of her skin.

“You’re fascinated with the world we cannot see, the creatures that might have lived within them but now only exist as fairy tales. I suppose that’s why I wished to meet you.” A shy softness flitted across her face. She hesitated, her full lips jutting into a pout before she continued. “You see, I wish to live a certain way, and I’m interviewing companions for that life.”

Whenever I think of our first meeting, I am reminded that the word “seduction” comes from seducer, to draw aside. But Indigo did not draw me aside so much as she drew aside the world I had always lived in and showed me a way of living a world apart.

She saw straight to my naked hunger and smiled. Her chair scraped back as she leaned across the table. The flames danced; candlelight gilded her skin. She became a question, and the answer she saw on my face made her close the space between us and kiss me.

In her kiss lay wonders—the humming of firefly wings and the secret of alchemy. On her tongue was the ghost of roasted plums, forgotten poems. I was so entranced that I almost didn’t notice when she bit down. When I pulled back, her teeth looked rusty.

And only then did I realize she’d drawn blood.





Chapter Two

The Bridegroom




I was convinced Indigo would leave the moment I ceased to entertain her. I could already picture my midnight walk back to the cheap student housing in the Latin Quarter. I’d probably wait a whole day beside the landline and never see or hear from her again. I would never be able to talk—much less gloat—about the encounter. No one would believe me.

That might drive another man insane, but I’d had more than twenty years to make peace with the lightless space between what you cannot believe is a truth and what you know must be a lie.

Here was one: I had a brother once.

Even now, I could conjure the smell of blown-out birthday candles, the rough cotton of my mother’s dress pulling tight over her belly. That was the day she told me she was growing a friend for me.

As a child, I liked this idea so much I tried to grow other friends so my brother and I would never be lonely. I planted sneakers, a book, and a whistle. In time, I figured they would become a warrior, a storyteller, and a musician.

When my brother was born, my mother taught me how to support his head when I held him. I marveled at the warm weight of it, the swirl of hair so fine it looked etched. He smelled like milk and dust.

“He’s yours now,” my mother said in her soft, rose-petal voice.

I grew taller that day. Or maybe it was that my soul shot up in size, trying to make enough room to hold him within it.

Growing up together provided endless adventure. There were quests through the woods, playtime as pirates, hide-and-seek with our father pretending not to see us under the bed. One birthday, my mother gave me a book of fairy tales. That was when I first learned about thresholds, places where the mortal world thinned into the realm of Faerie. They could look like anything: A door in a graffiti-covered alley, a dark shadow beneath an apple tree. An ordinary closet.