They have spent decades tiptoeing around each other; it will take years of such familiarity before a touch between the two of them is anything less than thrilling to Djinni. She feels him smile and does the same, feeling the warmth of his breath against her when he speaks even more strongly as the wind whips over them.
The buckskin mare watches the shadows of the gulls as they flicker across Walter’s yellow hide. She meets his eyes when he seeks her out and returns his smile. Giving him back his wings, making him – physically at least – whole again? This is what she wants to do. She had asked him because she is sure she knows he will accept, and so the moment that she feels him shift beside her rather than toward her has her doing the same.
Had she been wrong?
Does he not want his wings back? Or does he, and it’s something else she’d done or something she’d not done? Is this where they’ll end again?
Walter speaks up before panic truly overwhelms her and Djinni closets the emotions.
They no longer exist; she never felt them. She is not afraid of anything. She never has been.
They return in an instant and Djinni finds herself a bit farther from the palomino stallion, the buffer of his feathered wings between them when before there had been nothing. Rather than mourn the loss of their physical proximity, she sprout a pair of her own as well, feathered the same black and tan as her hide.
“Let’s go!” She says with a bump of her wings to his. Djinni disappears, and overhead a small speck appears in the sky. She falls forward in the empty air, gravity pulling her down, and then unfurls her wings in a wide sweep, catching herself an instant before she slams into the sea. Her laughter echoes over the crashing waves, and she soars a semi-circle over the green ocean before coming back to Walter. She hovers impossibly well (more support from wishes than from the wind), waiting with a smile for him to join her.
