A thrill of excitement blazed down Nixie’s spine. He wanted to see her too. She almost couldn’t contain her excitement. Her heart fluttered in her chest with the expectation of getting to see him soon.
“Well then.” The lovely fairy dusted her hands off. “I’d say my work here is done. Enjoy your…”—she glanced around, eyes twinkling merrily—“incarceration. Though I’m not sure this is at all what the genies had in mind. But they should know better than to mess with a fairy godmother.”
Her laughter filled the winds with the tinkling of bells.
“Danika?” Nixie made a grab for her just before she vanished.
Her friend turned inquisitive blue eyes toward her. “Hm?”
“It was real. Wasn’t it. That intensity. You didn’t lie to me, did you? I really am his Marian.” Nixie didn’t phrase her words like questions, because they weren’t.
Her uncertainty of what’d been happening between her and Robin, the immediate and overwhelming strength of their passion…it’d transcended mere love or magic.
“Surely you did not doubt it.” She brushed a curl of hair behind Nixie’s ear. “Legendary love is both rare and one to be envied. And bloody hell is your wedding night going to be one for the ages when your twenty years are up.”
She vanished then, the strains of her merriment echoed through the warmth of those woods, wrapping Nixie up in a velvety embrace.
*
“Favorite color?”
“Red,” she shot out at him. “You?”
He narrowed his eyes, as if giving it serious thought, which she thought was ridiculously adorable.
“Green.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course.”
They laughed. A month into her sentence and Robin and Nixie still had so much yet to learn about each other. She’d gotten over the worst of the pain, over the knowledge that he was nothing but shadow to her, and she to him.
Now, it was just the pleasure of getting to see him each night, the warmth that flowed through her body whenever the veil between their worlds would part and he’d step through to her.
“Robin?” she asked, plucking up a daisy by her foot and stripping one petal off at a time.
“Hm?” His unswerving gaze seemed to drink her in.
“Is this real? Any of this? Do you really feel for me now what you did when I was flesh with you?”
Sitting up from the blanket they were sitting on, he lifted a hand toward her, as if wanting to caress the side of her face like he used to do.
The sunlit meadow they sat in sparkled and danced with life. The entire place might be crafted from his imagination, all of this imagined, but nothing had ever felt more real to her.
Not when she’d created her Chicago skyline. Not when she’d chatted with Danika and shared tea and biscuits. This setting, this world within a world felt more real than her life on Earth ever had.
Every morning she’d wake to wander the woods, to walk through the massive gardens of his castle home. Sometimes, if she were really adventurous, she’d tour the great castle.
His home when he’d been a child.
Robin had fashioned it to appear, not as it had under Crispin’s reign, but under his father’s. She passed as a ghost amongst the shades of people who wandered through it. He’d created everything to exacting detail.
And every once in a while, she’d even see a small child with blond hair and blue eyes that looked almost exactly like Robin might have when he’d been one. It’d been tricky at first to decipher which was Robin and which was Crispin, but remembering Robin’s stories, of how he was silent and shy, it soon became evident who was who.
Every so often, she’d follow Robin around looking at what he looked at. Coming to know and understand his likes and dislikes.
A swath of sun shone through Robin’s hand, tinting his blue colored skin an even lighter shade of translucence, so that she could almost make out the pattern of the fabric they sat on through it.
Robin squeezed his eyes shut, but not before she caught a flash of pain in them. “I can’t touch you, I can’t taste you, I can’t hold you, but even while I know this,” his eyes opened and he pierced her with his sincerity, “this is real. I will wait for you, my pet.”
She tilted her jaw just a little. “Hold your hand up.”
He moved it up, so that now it appeared only an inch separated them. She smiled and pretended to rub her face back and forth against it, pretended she could feel the heat of his warmth invade hers.
“Robin, if this ever becomes—”
He smiled. “It never will. Have faith in me, as I have faith in you.”
Wanting to change the subject, not because it didn’t make her smile and want to jump up with joy, because it did. But it also made her want to sob and that she didn’t want to do. She gave him a tight-lipped smile.
“I know you were worried about Crispin, Robin. How will you—”
Settling back onto the blanket, he gave her a careless shrug. “Well it seems I had more options than just merely wishing him away to make sure he stayed gone.”