“Why would anyone destroy the woods?” Clay’s eyes glittered and he looked bewildered.

  “Come on up to my place and I’ll explain.”

  Clay came along meekly, his footsteps heavy on the stairs. When they reached the apartment, Ash settled him on the couch and brewed more tea. Some news simply went down more easily with a warm beverage.

  As they each cradled a mug in their palms, Ash told Clay about Zeke’s illness and impending bills. That required a conversational detour into the workings of American health care, a system Clay understandably found horrifying and unfair. Once Ash completed the tale, they sat for a while in desolate silence. The tea didn’t help as much as Ash had hoped.

  Eventually Clay sniffled and sighed. “I heard you say something about this when I first entered your home tonight, but I didn’t understand it then.”

  “I’m sorry to give you such awful news. You showed me… magic. Fairyland! And all I can give you is doom and gloom.” Which would have terrible anyway, because nobody should make a fairy depressed, but it was especially bad in this instance because Clay was special.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said.

  “No, but I wish I could do something. Anything.” Ash bit his lip. “Is it going to destroy your home? Will you need to go somewhere else?”

  Clay shook his head. “My home will be fine. Remember what I showed you with our entwined hairs? Chopping down your forest won’t affect my world. But it will mean we’re not connected here anymore.”

  That was a little less dire than Ash had feared. “But we’re still connected?”

  “Yes. In several spots. But the next closest nexus is….” He frowned thoughtfully. “A long way from here. Hundreds of miles.” Clay ducked his head and looked miserable.

  Selfishly, Ash thought of the impact on his own life. He’d just discovered Clay and now…. Well, Ash couldn’t just pick up and move hundreds of miles away, and he certainly couldn’t expect Clay to strand himself in Portland. But of course Clay would be affected even more, unable to travel freely between his old home and his new one. And what about Mahonia and Sam and the Pollys?

  Ash groaned.

  After a moment, Clay scooted closer on the couch, leaving only a fraction of an inch separating them. “Will Zeke really be all right?”

  “He and Troy said he would.” Ash had a sudden memory of Zeke’s recent obscure comments. “Do you know them?”

  “Not exactly, but a few of my friends do. When Zeke was much younger— Well, that’s not my story to tell. It was long before I germinated. I know he’s a good man, though, and so is his husband. I understand why they have to do this.”

  Great. So on top of being beautiful and magical and charming, Clay was also kind and empathetic.

  The heavy silence returned. It was growing very late, and by all rights Ash should have been exhausted, but his stomach and mind roiled with all that he’d seen and learned in the past few hours. Now, instead of Alice, he felt like Dorothy caught up in a twister and about to crash-land God knew where. He wasn’t usually the kind of person who had interesting adventures. With the exception of the horrible day when his parents died in a rafting accident, his life had been full of predictable beats and ordinary events. Until now.

  But Clay was holding Ash’s hand, which kept Ash slightly grounded. And it reminded him that he wasn’t the only one whose world was in turmoil.

  “There must be something we can do,” Ash said. He wondered if saying that phrase ever helped. Maybe it was sort of like a spell, and speaking the words made them a fact. Why not? Apparently the universe was a whole lot weirder than he’d believed.

  Clay gave him a long, serious look followed by a heavy sigh. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Ash seized on those two syllables like a pit bull on a T-bone. In fact, he repeated them, loudly: “Maybe?”

  But Clay looked less than enthused. “It’s a long shot. Probably won’t work. Could cause worse problems.”

  At the moment, Clay losing his connection to Ash’s world felt like the direst of situations. So, bleak alternatives be damned, Ash demanded, “What? What probably won’t work but maybe could?”

  “I could talk to the queen.”

  For a few moments, an array of confusing images flitted through Ash’s brain: Elizabeth Windsor. Freddie Mercury. Darcelle XV, the nonagenarian female impersonator who was a Portland institution. Then Ash remembered that Clay was a fairy—duh!—and that his world was ruled by a queen.

  “A queen! They’re rich, right? She could buy the woods. Might be a little tricky legally since she’s not, um, a citizen, but I know a good lawyer—”

  “My queen does not have money. None of us do.”

  Oh. “What about gold? Jewels?”

  Clay gave Ash’s cheek a tender stroke, making Ash shiver. “The things that my people value have little worth in your world. You’ve seen my home.”

  “You have a wonderful collection of things,” Ash said earnestly.

  Clay smiled widely and leaned in for a quick kiss. “And this is why I was drawn to you—because you understand the worth of items most humans would consider junk. But I doubt we could purchase the woods with fairy treasures.”

  Ash slumped morosely. “So if she can’t buy the woods…?”

  “I don’t know. She might have another solution. She’s very powerful. But….” Clay glanced around as if to make sure nobody might overhear, and he dropped his voice to a whisper. “She’s terrifying. Not cruel, but she does what she wants to, for her own reasons, and nobody can ever predict…. She made me and all of my friends, and that was an amazing gift. But she did it on a whim. And sometimes her whims don’t work out so well for others.”

  “Chaotic neutral.” Ash had spent his high school and college years playing Dungeons & Dragons. He was a paladin.

  Clay, who had spent his youth photosynthesizing, shrugged. “If she’s in the right mood, she might help. If she’s in a different mood, she might make things… more complicated.”

  Ash decided he didn’t want to know the specifics of what that meant. “Is there a way to help get her in the right mood?”

  Another shrug. “We mostly, um, avoid her whenever possible. Safest that way.” He sat up straighter and lifted his chin. “But this is important. I’m going to ask her to help.”

  “Will that put you in danger?” Ash tried not to picture Clay turned back into a plant. Or worse.

  “No. Probably not…. Maybe.”

  Ash liked this particular maybe a lot less than the previous one. He squeezed Clay’s hand. “Let me do it. Please. I’ll talk to her.” Perhaps the fairy queen might turn him into a shrub, but for Clay’s sake, he was willing to take the risk. Better to spend the rest of his existence as an azalea than to lose Clay forever due to inaction.

  Clay lifted their clasped hands and pressed his soft lips to Ash’s knuckles. “We’ll see her together.”

  AN AUDIENCE with a fairy queen wasn’t an easy thing, as it turned out. It took some arranging. So Clay insisted that Ash get some sleep, and with a final embrace and candy-sweet kiss, Clay left the house. Ash watched through the window as he crossed the backyard, paused at the tree line to wave, and then disappeared.

  And then, in an unlikely turn of events considering how exciting the night had been, Ash got into bed and fell asleep almost at once.

  He overslept the following morning, which was rare but not surprising, and he even considered calling in sick. But he had a couple of appointments that day, and he didn’t want to stand in the way of his clients’ job-seeking during a time of year when things were already pretty complicated for them. So he hurried through his morning routine, skipped breakfast, and nearly jogged the entire way through a light drizzle, arriving damp and out of breath.

  Fortunately there was a coffee machine at the office, as well as a cupboard full of snacks intended to keep clients’ young children occupied. Ash felt slightly guilty about eating his way through packages of fruit snacks, goldfish crackers, and raisins, but he vowed to replace them soon.

  Somehow he managed to get through the day, even though fairies frolicked in the back of his brain and he ached with eagerness to see Clay again. Luckily, nobody seemed to notice his distraction. The upcoming holidays meant that everyone had things on their mind—the feasibility of travel, limited financial resources, potential family drama, and gift shopping, among others. In fact, after the few morning appointments, Ash and his coworkers closed early, and for once he didn’t stay behind to catch up on paperwork.

  He didn’t stop at Mahonia’s either, although he was tempted. And when he almost bumped into his ex as Silas exited their former favorite coffeehouse, Ash grunted something akin to a greeting and hurried on. He didn’t notice or care whether Silas was with Mr. Abs.

  Back at home, Ash found a new gift on the table outside his apartment: a tiny snowman made of glass. It looked exactly like a miniature version of the one that had disappeared from the backyard when the snow melted overnight. It even wore a scarf that matched Ash’s. Smiling broadly, Ash set the figurine in the center of his kitchen table, where he’d be able to admire it often. Then he ran downstairs and knocked on his landlords’ door.

  Troy looked slightly alarmed to see him. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, no. It’s only… could we have a conversation about impossible things?”

  Grinning, Troy stepped back and ushered him inside. “Let’s talk after dinner.”

  Pasta was on the boil, and Ash helped chop salad veggies while Zeke made garlic bread and finished the sauce. Troy stood nearby, giving cookery advice that Zeke cheerfully ignored. As they all sat down to eat, Ash had to admit that toddler snacks were not enough to get a grown man through the day. Zeke’s pasta was delicious.

  At long last the three of them settled in the living room with tea and slices of the apricot fruitcake that Troy’s sister sent them for Christmas every year. Ash took a few steadying breaths before he began.

  “So, you told me to believe the impossible.”

  “We did,” Zeke replied serenely.

  “Well, the impossible happened. Last night I met a person—”

  “The one who’s been leaving you gifts.”

  Ash nodded. “He left another today. He’s…. I don’t have the words. Amazing doesn’t do him justice.”

  “You two have hit it off, then?”

  “I’d say so. But it’s complicated because he’s—”

  “Wait.” Zeke lifted his hands to stop Ash from saying more. “With his folk, it’s generally best to not talk too much with outsiders about the details.”

  “But he said you know about them.”

  Zeke exchanged a quick look and nod with Troy before leaning forward. “I do, sweetheart. But I know my story with them, not yours, and not your new friend’s. Everyone’s entitled to decide what they want to share. Besides that, sometimes if you poke around at miracles too much, they start to feel, well, less miraculous.”

  As Ash frowned, mulling this over, Troy joined in. “When I was a kid, I read all those Heinlein books about space travel and such, and I was dead set on becoming an astronaut when I grew up. That wasn’t even a real job back then—Yuri Gagarin didn’t orbit the Earth until a few years later. But my parents bought me a pretty nice telescope for Christmas when I was ten, and I’d spend hours using it. I had lots of charts.”

  “Of course you did.” Zeke patted his husband’s knee fondly.

  “One afternoon, though, it was raining and I was bored, and I decided to take that telescope apart. I wanted to see how it worked. Problem was, I couldn’t get it back together again. Neither could my parents when I asked for help. Maybe I lost an important part or broke something, I don’t know. Anyway, that beautiful telescope ended up in the garbage, and I didn’t become an astronaut.”

  Caught up in the story, Ash sighed. “I’m sorry, Troy.”

  “Aw, I got over it a half century ago, don’t worry. But the point is—”

  “Don’t dissect something wondrous,” Ash interrupted.

  “Bingo. It’s like believing the impossible—you just need to let some things be.”

  Ash considered this and decided it made sense. When he was a senior in high school, he’d discovered Allen Ginsberg—a gay Jewish poet!—and spent hours rereading Howl, wondering whether it was still possible in the twenty-first century to be a beatnik. His English teacher learned of Ash’s enthusiasm and, in a misguided attempt to make homework relevant and interesting, assigned Ash a paper critically analyzing the piece. By the time the paper was completed, Ash was tired of the poem, which had lost its magic and become nothing but mechanical syllables. He hadn’t read it since.

  “The starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” Ash quoted quietly. Although Troy and Zeke looked slightly confused, they nodded.

  “Look, honey,” Zeke said, “this doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it at all. You found someone interesting, and that’s wonderful. You deserve that.”

  “He found me, more like. But, um, this doesn’t sound weird to you? That I just met this, um, extremely unusual guy yesterday and I’m already feeling….” Ash struggled to find the right word. “Smitten?”

  His landlords laughed softly, and Troy set down his teacup. “That’s just everyday magic, Ash. Happens all the time. Zeke and I met when we both tried to buy the only copy of “Space Oddity” that Music Millennium had in stock. Instead of fighting over it, we went out for coffee, and by the end of the day we were planning our lives together.”

  “And we still have that record,” Zeke added, pointing toward their extensive vinyl collection.

  That was very sweet and also tremendously heartening. But it was one thing to have a meet-cute with another human being—and quite another to find yourself suddenly mushy-brained over a more-or-less-mythical being. Who used to be a plant. Then Ash had a nasty thought, one that felt mean and traitorous but had to be mentioned anyway. “He didn’t… put a spell on me, did he?” He couldn’t imagine Clay doing something that underhanded, but until the previous day, he couldn’t imagine Clay, period.

  Zeke’s expression had turned serious. “You have to take care with the folk in the wood. Their rules are sometimes different than ours. It’s… a cross-cultural thing, sort of. But they’re no more—or less—evil-minded than we are. And they don’t throw magic around lightly.”

  The new uneasiness in Ash’s mind ebbed away. He was generally an astute judge of character, which was one of the reasons he was good at his job. Even Silas wasn’t an awful person; he’d never done anything dastardly. He simply wanted different things than Ash did. So if Ash’s gut said that Clay was as good as he seemed, he wasn’t going to question that feeling.

  But that left another problem. “What if we fall for each other really hard but it doesn’t work out? Can’t work out, I mean, because… you know. Two different worlds.”

  “Always a risk,” said Zeke. “But it’s never gonna work out if you don’t even try.”

  True enough. But this particular situation seemed impossibly complicated. Ah, but wasn’t he supposed to believe the impossible now?

  Anyway, he didn’t want to go into detail because he didn’t want his landlords to feel guilty over having to sell the property. They had enough to deal with already. So he smiled and stood. “Thanks, guys. For the advice and the great dinner and the better company. I should get some sleep, though. I’m sorta wiped.” That was no lie. His eyelids felt leaden and gravity seemed to be exerting twice its usual force on the rest of him.

  Troy and Zeke walked him to the door, as if he might get lost along the way. But Troy stopped him before Ash could leave. “Hanukkah starts Sunday. What are you doing to celebrate?”

  “Oh. I’m not very observant, you know, and besides, Hanukkah’s actually a very minor holiday that only—”

  “I know. And how are you celebrating?”

  Ash shrugged. “Hadn’t given it much thought.”

  “Good. Join us for dinner on Monday. We have a thing on Sunday, I’m afraid.”

  “You’re not even Jewish. You don’t have to—”

  “Latkes. Zeke makes latkes every year because nobody should pass up the excuse to eat potato pancakes. And he always makes so many that we eat ourselves sick. So you’ll come down and protect us by eating your share.”

  Although Ash would have been fine spending his Monday night alone, he found himself liking the idea of a little celebration. “Fine. I’ll bring a salad or something. And jelly donuts for dessert.”

  “And bring your new guy, if he’s free and willing. We’d love to meet him.”

  A fairy boyfriend for Hanukkah? Why not?

  Eight

  ON WEDNESDAY morning, Ash woke up on time. His workday was entirely uneventful, aside from landing a solid job prospect for a domestic-violence survivor who was currently living in a shelter. She was a sociable woman who said she really enjoyed interacting with other people, and Ash thought she’d be a good fit for a women’s health clinic that needed a receptionist. She left Ash’s office looking optimistic and cheerful, and he spent the rest of the day feeling pretty good about himself.

  But there was no sign of Clay when Ash returned home, and no unexpected appearance in Ash’s apartment. Gazing through the window and across the backyard, all he saw was rain and darkness. He remembered Clay saying that Ash could call him anytime, and the temptation to test that out was incredibly strong. But maybe Clay was busy. Or maybe Clay had decided not to see him anymore. Ash probably wasn’t worth the hassle.

  “But phototropism,” Ash said to himself. “He said I glow.”

  And then he had an idea that made him smile. He ran into his bedroom, dug through his dresser drawer, and found a pair of brand-new socks still bound with a paper band. They were knee-high and rainbow-striped with metallic threads that sparkled in the light. He’d bought them the previous spring, intending to wear them to the Pride Festival. But by the time June rolled around, he and Silas had broken up and Ash wasn’t feeling very festive. The socks had remained unworn.