Stumbled across your blog and love what I read so far. Prompt: How about a story about a human and unseelie lover? Maybe where the fae is trying to make them stay in the fae realm by eating food from there?
“You could stay,” the unseelie said the first time, and offered the human a cupcake.
The human had always thought that there was something about cupcakes that felt a little inherently fey. Most people would no doubt think of pomegranates, or forbidden apples; something red and sweet and natural that had featured in a fairy tale once. But for them it was a cupcake.
Cupcakes, just like their unseelie lover, could look like perfectly crafted concoctions. They were beautiful towers of sculpted sugar and icing and, in the grand scheme of baked goods, always somehow disappointing for looking much better than they tasted.
Fairies were like that. Lovely, until you took a bite.
And then you told yourself that, next time, you’d buy something more humble than a cupcake, but then you would look at all the cupcakes on a tray and think ‘this cupcake will be different.’ This cupcake won’t leave me with sticky lips and an aching heart, and a slight sense of nauseous too full longing.
“I could,” the human said. “But then I wouldn’t be able to leave. Love requires a choice. We’ve talked about this.”
“Staying is a choice,” the unseelie countered. “And love is a commitment.”
“Staying isn’t a choice when you can’t choose to go again.” The human gently declined the cupcake and they went about their date. They figured, for a while, that was that.
***
The unseelie kept offering them food every so often. Sometimes, it was obvious, a request shy and hopeful enough to make them remember why they loved the difficult and wonderful creature they had made their lover.
Other times, it was with a sneaky sort of cunning. The unseelie would hand them something in an almost absent minded-way and not so absent-minded eyes, hoping that the human would take a bite without thinking about it.
Those days always led to arguments.
“Every time you go into the human world,” the fey said, pressing them up against a tree, “you come back a little older. A little more tired. A little less mine. The doors don’t stay open forever, you know. People concerned with taxes and ordinary life become much too mortal, much too grounded, for a while.”
“And dreams aren’t made for the living in,” the human replied. They pressed an appeasing kiss to the fairy’s brow. “We have time still. Don’t worry. I love you.”
“I still dream of you.”
And then you wake up.
The human didn’t say it, that would have been mean.
***
“You should stay,” the unseelie said. They offered the human a cupcake. “Why do you want to leave me?”
“I don’t,” the human said. “I just don’t want to leave everything else.”
The unseelie’s eyes narrowed. Something crossed their face then, that the human had only ever seen flashes of before.
It was nice being looked at like something precious, something worth keeping, until you crossed the line into actually being something treasured. Treasure never got much say in the matter.
The next moment, the unseelie smiled, and it was easy to think that the expression had never been there at all.
***
The unseelie kissed them and their lips tasted like sugar, sweetness, frosting.
The human startled back.
The unseelie’s fingers tightened on their hair, holding them close. The kiss became more insistent, more suffocating. The human had the monstrous image of a bird feeding its young; caring then, grotesque now. They swallowed before they choked.
They felt dizzy.
The unseelie licked icing off their fingers with a smug smile.
“Stay with me.”
The final time, it was not an offer.
