“You tricked me!” She paced back and forth in frustration. Every single one of her steps rang softly, as if she was walking on a giant gong. I wondered briefly if they were all like this, or if she was the only one. Every step played a different note, her frantic, annoyed steps playing a beautiful melody that stood in wonderful contrast to her mood. I tried not to smile. 

“Does it displease you?” I asked. She stopped pacing and put her hands on her hips in a huff. I wheeled myself forward a little bit and looked up at her. She looked odd. In a sense, it would be easy to call her ‘unnaturally beautiful’ and be done with it, but that didn’t entirely do it justice. Her eyes were unpleasantly cold and harsh, her cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass. Her whole face looked like you’d hurt yourself touching it. Except that there was one thing that disrupted the picture. Her mouth was permanently curved up at the corners in a playful, youthful and most importantly kind smile. She could try to look as imposing as she wanted to, it was all I could do not to smile wistfully looking at her, and it had been that way since I first laid eyes on her. I’d always wished I had a face like that.

“Yes! No! I mean, that isn’t the point!” she said. “We agreed…” Her voice petered off as she remembered what we agreed on.

“We did. And I am incredibly grateful.” I smiled. The deal had been simple. My mother, in the best of health. In return, the first child I would conceive. I’d just gotten off the phone with the hospital. Mom, on death’s door eight hours ago, seemed to be in full remission. The doctors were stunned. The fey was furious.

“You didn’t tell me you were infertile,” she fumed. I rolled my chair around the table and rummaged in a cupboard until I found two cups. 

“I also didn’t say I wasn’t. If I ever have a child, it’s still yours. Tea?”

“But you can’t,” she said with an exasperated sigh, and then plonked down on a chair. The wood sounded like a softly ringing bell when she touched it. “Yes, please,” she conceded. 

“Not through normal medical means, no.” I put the two cups on the table and rolled into the kitchen, waiting for her outburst behind me. She was as reliable as I’d expected her to be.

“Oh no!” she yelled from the table. “I see where this is going, and I’m not playing along! You tricked me once already!” I hummed quietly to myself as I put the kettle on, and then went back into the living room. 

“It’s a simple proposition,” I said. “Just one more deal. You give me the body I should have, instead of this broken one. I’m lucky to see forty like this. If I wasn’t so… mangled, I could make it to twice that, easy. So why don’t you take, say, half?” I smiled innocently. 

“Half of your life?” she said, her eyes wide. “It… would give you the time to give me the promised child…” She seemed to mull things over in her head while I got the kettle and poured us both tea. I had time. I had all the patience in the world. I wasn’t going to ruin this by pushing her. Finally, she stuck out her hand. “I make you as you should have been, but in return, the next forty years of your life are mine. Deal?”

I made a show of mulling it over. 

“Deal,” I said, smiled and reached out to shake her hand, but instead she pulled me upright, out of the chair. I was taken aback. I could stand up for short moments, certainly, but anything over a minute I’d pay for in pain. But this time the pressure was much lighter. I could feel my joints, or rather, couldn’t feel them. The agonizing, grinding pain was completely absent. It wasn’t easy, certainly but it didn’t hurt. Instead, there was a light, a light I could hear, could feel, that played like blossom bells and made my teeth tingle. When it finally receded, I looked her in the eyes. I would’ve had to look down, but not anymore.

“You did it again!” She screamed, her face contorted with enraged confusion, and pushed me back into the chair. It wheeled backwards with me in it, but I didn’t care, just staring at my hands. They were so small! She seemed to be completely stupefied. “How are you supposed to provide me with a child now?!”

I looked up at her and, out of sheer force of habit, rolled the chair forward again with a cheeky smile on my face. When I spoke, my voice was soft, softer than it had ever been. It was like music. I wondered what I looked like but, for the first time, I felt like me. And I did have the last part of my plan to work out. 

“Well,” I said. “You have forty years to work it out.” I slowly got out of my chair and walked over to her with all the confidence I’d never had. I knew I was beautiful. I could feel it in my bones. I knew she was too vain, too proud not to make me into the kind of person she herself would find beautiful, attractive. I stopped right in front of her and looked her dead in the eyes. “I’m all yours.”

“Oh,” she said, and blushed. 

I woke up in the middle of the night. For a moment, all I heard was my own soft breathing as my senses came back to me. The darkness slowly pulled away as my eyes adjusted. I looked at the alarm clock and immediately regretted it. I sighed softly and next to me, the sheets shifted. I heard a groan and a hand landed on my face.

“Babe,” I mumbled between the fingers.

“Mmmmmf,” she said. Eloquent as ever. I couldn’t help but smile, took her hand and put it over my chest instead. There. Much better. I heard her make an appreciative noise and a gentle squeeze. 

“Ah! Are you even awake?” She lifted her face from the pillow with one of the most self-satisfied grins I’d ever seen. How could I do anything, anything at all, other than kiss those stupid, beautiful lips of her. She moaned against my mouth and before I knew it her arms were around me. Her legs gently pushed between mine and I wrapped myself around her. I wasn’t going to waste any more words. I was rapidly waking up but not about to spend a single brain cell on anything other than whatever she was doing with her left hand at that moment, the thing that made it really hard to be coy and confident. 

That’s when I heard it. I knew, I was sure, she heard it too. Neither of us wanted to hear it but we couldn’t really ignore it. She tried, of course, her teeth almost managing to make me forget. But not quite.

“Love… the baby.”

She pressed her forehead to my chest and sighed. While it was good that we’d never lost our… vigour, the timing wasn’t always ideal. 

“I think it’s your turn, babe.”

“Why do I have to? It’s my fifth time this week!” She complained softly. Her hands roamed around still and I really didn’t want her to stop. 

“Because,” I said, and very gently cupped her face and kissed her nose, “she is, bound by contract, entirely yours.”

“Are you sure you’re not part Fey?” She said with a glittering grin, and kissed me hard and fast, before rolling out of bed. I sighed wistfully and took all the blankets.