Though the thoughts that spin behind his dark eyes are out of her reach, there are some things that Djinni can still read. She’d cheated – they both know it – but he does not call her on it and she does not apologize. Stillwater had asked for the games to end, but Djinni’s entire existence is a cosmic jest; the game can’t ever end.
She was never meant to be like this.
The pied grullo body was just an empty shell, a tangible dwelling for an intangible creature. Aseret hadn’t given birth to a daughter, she’d labored over a stillborn body. The deal she’d made had brought the tiny body back to life, but Djinni wasn’t ever what she should have been. She had never suffered for it (and nor did the real Djinni, who hadn’t died because she’d never really existed). She had never felt anything, because djinn do not feel.
They simply are.
The Reckoning had ruined that. Beqanna had thought it was being kind, keeping the bodies alive even while stealing the magic. It might have been kind, in situations that were not her own. For her, the body came with emotions, sensations that had never had a chance to form because there had never been a need for them. It had been an infection, slow-growing and unstoppable. By the time she had a cure – by the time she’d found her djinn – it was too late.
This night would have been so simple before.
It is not before though, it is after.
She wants more than what she knows she will get. The hunger in his eyes, the way he follows her to deep water: this will be enough for now. When the sun rises it will not be enough, and she knows this. She wonders if he does, too, but now isn’t the time for asking things. Now is the time for forgetting, for utilizing these useless feelings for the only thing they’re good for.
‘It’s best when you love them,’ Priam had told her, but young Djinni had laughed away her father's wisdom with youthful folly. Sex was sex; even bad it was better than nothing. Yet now, even when she’s tried (more than just that doe-eyed pegasus; there have been dozens), nothing is enough anymore.
It’s better, she admits to herself as Stillwater presses her beneath the water, its best.
They sink down together, down until she has to look at him from black eyes rather than brown when he faces her. The moonlight is dim this deep, but she doesn’t need her eyes to see anymore. He is beside her, pressing bubbling kisses to her neck. She leans into them as she feels the sediment at the bottom of the lake press against her hooves.
Does he know that a decade ago she’d have taken him apart, piece by piece to find out what he was? That she’d have killed him just to see what color his eyes would settle into as the life left them? Her endless curiosity has been tempered by unwelcome empathy, though with Stillwater it is something worse. She wants him more than happy, she wants him happy enough to sacrifice her own happiness.
He doesn’t want the same thing.
She doesn’t want to think about that.
Djinni’s dark eyes meet his, and she doesn’t have to guess where he looks when he alternates between her gaze and her throat. When he comes closer, her dark mouth moves in something that is almost a smile (it would have been something bittersweet if her cetacean eyes were capable of expressing emotion). Weightless in the water, she’d have drifted away from the pressure of his chest against her shoulder were it not for his foreleg across her back.
“Sometimes,” she replies honestly, turning her head so that her muzzle rests just beneath his own. She can’t help the sharp teeth when she kisses him (she needs too much of her other self to bother with minutiae), but she tries to be gentle. It is different here; everything is smoother, slower, colder beneath that water.
Djinni does not want to be cold anymore.
Her lips move more quickly now, pressing burning kisses that are no longer gentle along the bottom of the closer side of his jaw. She moves to the other side, pulling herself farther beneath him as she does so. Sliding easily in the water, hot and sleek against his own smooth skin, she is well aware of what she is doing as the heat of his chest warms her back. Djinni pauses there, her frantic kisses stopping as she waits for a reaction. She does not wait long, barely a heartbeat before she’s pulling forward, turning in the water with unnatural (unequine) ease to face him.
She watches him, her grey head tilted for just a moment before she comes closer and presses a single soft kiss to his dark lips.