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“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yes.”
He really doesn’t seem okay, but he can’t exactly lie, so…
“Are you mad at me?”
“No.”
“Is the food not good?”
Finally, he smiles as he stabs the hacked-off triangle of his sausage. “I am in the unique position whereby I can compare it to dog food and confirm that it is worse.”
“You’re joking.”
“Fae jokes still can’t contain lies.” He stuffs the bite in his mouth. “Whether this is a testament to extremely good overpriced, human-grade, all meat dog food or extremely poor, underpriced, probably for humans, hopefully mostly meat sausage is anyone’s guess.”
I giggle. “The toast isn’t bad.”
“The toast is edible.”
“You compared your brothers to royalty. Are you actually a prince in the world you know?”
A sardonic, slow chuckle moves through him. “I would in no way give myself such an elite title. I am friends with a prince.” He points his fork at me, another pitifully dry bite of sausage on it. “Zy’s that prince’s knight. He helps keep Mountain Vale safe.” His words muffle around his chewing. “Also, he’s a vampire.”
“What?” I say, a little too loudly. Nobody so much as glances our way. Even though, according to what I know, it should look like I’m talking to myself. Maybe glamour falls across a range, eliminating all manner of strangeness involved with the fae.
“Yeah. Vampire. Manipulator of shadows.” Ollie waves a hand, droning the details. “Can turn into ink dark creatures. Prefers a feline form. Needs blood to survive. He’s my best friend.”
Feline form, huh? No wonder Willow’s cat could find his own way home and had the same name as her…husband. “Oh my goodness.” I can’t believe I’m only putting it together now. “Willow and Zy are mates.”
“Yep.”
“That’s why they’re so impossibly cute together. They’ve got that whole this is destiny confidence. They don’t have to worry about being rejected. They can just be themselves.”
Ollie snorts. “Oh, sunshine. Willoughby rejected Zy adamantly for several months after she found out the truth.”
My nose scrunches. “What? Why?”
“She’s from your world and didn’t want to be in a vampire romance. She gets overwhelmed easily, and the concept was entirely too much for her to handle. It freaked her out, and she wanted nothing to do with it.”
I eat an egg; it is terrible. I drown it in more ketchup. “So…it took up all her…spoons?”
“I guess you could say that.”
I chew my lip and lift an incredibly dry danish. I should stop somewhere with better food once we get back on the road. Poor Ollie’s been eating wet meat patties for a literal year and deserves something nicer than this. What was I… My gaze snags on the neglected plastic spoon sitting on my napkin, and I remember. “Do you know what’s…” Wrong with her doesn’t seem like the right thing to say. “Let me try again. She’s chronically ill, right? Do you know in what way and if there are any accommodations I could be aware of?”
Ollie blinks at me. “If anyone’s chronically ill between them, it would be Zy.”
“Isn’t the spoon thing something chronically ill people use to explain how much energy they have and when they run out?”
Confusion ripples through Ollie’s eyes. “To my understanding, it’s used in a lot of communities as a way to imply that the person bringing it up needs to be dealt more kindly with. It’s a human sort of explanation. With faeries, you just say what you mean or what you need. We don’t have that…” His eyes narrow, and his brow furrows. “Thing. The…” Air fills his lungs, and he lets it out, scouring the room behind me for words. “You know. Like. The doubting thing.”
“The doubting thing?”
“Well, I don’t think you have it, so it might be even more difficult to explain. Often, when one human attempts to communicate an inconvenient need to another, the other filters the experience through themselves and disregards it. ‘It’s not that bad. They’re being dramatic. They’re trying to be lazy. If I can do it, so can they.’ A lot of humans are wired to assume they’re being lied to. Existing in a culture where lies are physically impossible means when someone says something simply in a direct way, we kind of just believe them. No clarification including spoons is necessary.”
That is so beautiful, and I want it. I want it so badly I’ve got chills. Either that, or this danish is making me nauseous. I set it down and scoot forward in my booth. “So…in human terms…what community does Willow fall into that lets her use the spoon thing?”
