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Chapter twenty-seven

Miles High

P oppy scrolled through the pictures on her phone, trying to determine which of them might be acceptable to post on Instagram.

She hadn’t posted for weeks. When she’d first joined Instagram, she remembered reading some article that had said she absolutely had to post every day, and while that was a bit much for her, she did normally try for a couple times a week, at least. She’d been slacking.

But, to be fair, she’d been spending eight hours a day painting and drawing, and what seemed like eight more having amazing sex, interspersed with taking care of her mom and laughing and marathoning Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Rai’s delight. Which hadn’t left much time for social media.

She hadn’t really missed it. What with the sex and all.

Poppy had decided at the beginning of their affair not to post any pictures of Rai online, either in or out of his fae form, once she’d been introduced to it.

Besides the fact that she’d have to come up with some massively fake captions if she showed him all purple and wingy—cosplay and body paint would lampshade it, she supposed, but then she’d run the risk of the few followers she’d attracted wanting to know his secret techniques—she also just wanted him to be all hers.

She didn’t want to share him with anyone, or have to answer questions, or worst of all run the risk of Brendan noticing and deciding to send a little more vitriol her way.

She probably wouldn’t even post photos of the painting, even though she knew she should, knew she should try to leverage it to get more commissions.

The problem was, every time she looked at it, she felt…

wrong. Even though she’d taken pains to do everything right, from projecting the spiral of the golden ratio on the canvas for the composition to following the rules of painting her father had taught her, from the precise underpainting to the meticulous layers of glazing, taking pictures at every stage.

Even though she was painting Rai, who was male beauty incarnate.

Something was wrong, and she didn’t know what. But she couldn’t put it out for the world to see. For Rai to see. She wasn’t ready for that.

Not to mention the fact that her heart was bound to break when she had to go back to just posting art and photos of Tucson with snippets of florid prose.

She’d taken care to curate her Instagram feed, going through it every so often to make sure it had a good flow as a whole as well as good individual posts, and she didn’t want a whole big chunk of it to be a black hole of grief a month from now.

So she’d put those photos in a special folder, not for anyone but her, just to be mooned over later, when he’d left.

It wouldn’t be long now. They had just over two weeks left, according to the National Weather Service. Seventeen days until September ended, and with it the monsoon. Then the season would change to just fall, and October, and Rai would be gone.

Good thing October was the month when everyone got their goth on. She’d barely stick out in her mourning, no matter how pale and tragic and weepy she became after she’d sent Rai on his way.

But she wanted to post something today, just to get a good rhythm going that she could cling to when she didn’t want to do anything but cry, so she forced herself to look at her photos with a critical eye.

She could post the drawings she’d been selling at Café Legend.

Those were a no-brainer, though she should space them out a bit.

She could post the landscapes, too. Sure, some of the vantage points Rai had taken her to had been a little hard to reach, but not impossible for a dedicated hiker.

And of course the closeups of flowers, beaded with water or brilliant in the sun, sometimes both.

She had captured some truly amazing saguaro, as well, plump and green with more arms than she could count on her fingers.

The ones closer to town were so often scarred, damaged by the pollution the iconic cacti were so sensitive to, and while she saw the beauty in those scars, they also broke her heart.

She’d written about them once, when she’d first come to town to stay—what had she written?

She scrolled back through her feed swiftly to 2022, her first posts after moving to Tucson.

Ah, there it was. God, she’d been a drama queen.

But she supposed she’d earned it—she’d posted this photo right after she’d whittled everything prior to Tucson down to things that were just her, no Brendan-ness at all. There had been hardly anything left.

She lifts her arms to the azure sky, ever hopeful, ever reaching. Yet she cannot remove the poison from her heart. It spreads like pollution, its foul miasma eating away at her flesh, evidence of the crimes against her.

But she reaches.

She strives.

She lives.

She is stronger than her wounds.

Poppy ran her fingers over the words on her screen. She’d been so determined then. Broken, yes, but she’d thought everything was going to be fine. That she’d be able to rebuild a life on the ashes of her career, get her mom back to a level state of mind in just a matter of months.

That she would be stronger than her wounds.

And she had been, she reassured herself as she hit the back button, scrolled to the present day again.

Defiantly chose the proudest of her saguaro photos, one where she’d caught just the right angle and lighting to make it look almost like a Renaissance queen.

Maybe it had taken longer than she’d hoped, but she had healed from the wounds Brendan had given her, mostly.

She was painting again. She had a lover, gorgeous and kind and generous in and out of bed, and she no longer heard passive-aggressive insults-veiled-as-compliments in her head when she bared her body, spoke her mind.

That can of worms had closed, she hoped for good.

And on top of that, she’d flown, honest-to-Murgatroyd flown miles high in the sky, through rain and sunlight and clouds, and felt safe at the same time.

Rai had made it safe for her to fly. Now all she had to do was survive his leaving.

There was a knock at the door of the guest house, and she looked up in surprise. She hadn’t expected Rai back from his motel for another hour—although the forecast promised rain, it wasn’t due until three. But just as she thought that, she heard the distant rumble of thunder .

She hurried to the door and opened it. Rai was there, his white shirt speckled with raindrops, his grin even whiter.

“Curses unto the weather app!” he said joyfully. “The rain has come early!”

“Curses be unto the weather app,” she replied, feeling vaguely like it was some sort of religious ritual. She started to laugh.

“Come with me,” Rai said, holding out his hand. “It will be glorious.”

“Let me grab my poncho.” It was largely symbolic, the poncho.

After their first flight, Rai had been meticulous about keeping her comfortable regardless of the weather.

She knew that he could and would take care of her.

But Rai had also been fascinated by the poncho since she’d picked it out at the grocery store, the way it crinkled when he held her, its transparency, as if it were a special kind of sex toy designed especially for him, and she had to admit, after the time he’d taken her to the top of a distant hill, handed her his umbrella, and ducked his head under the poncho to lavishly eat her out while a torrential rain fell all around them, she was starting to have a Pavlovian response to that crinkle of plastic.

She hesitated briefly before shrugging into a hoodie first. Rai did his best to keep her dry everywhere except where he wanted her flowing , as he so poetically put it, but it still could get cold out there.

“Where are we going?” she asked as she stepped into his arms. “West or east?”

His stormy eyes flared at her, lightning in their depths. “Neither.”

Before Poppy could pivot to north or south?

he ripped his white shirt off and swirled it away, set his wings free, and bore her aloft.

She let out a little squeak at the strength of his grip—he hadn’t done his seatbelt-carry this time, just pulled her head to his chest and launched—but the squeak melted to a sigh as he pumped his wings, flying up and up.

It felt like miles, though she knew it couldn’t be, or she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

Rain pattered against the hood of her poncho, and then the rain gave way to gray mist, and at last they burst out into bright, clear light.

She gasped at the fluffy white vista around them, cottony mounds of clouds built high, cast into rich shadows by the afternoon sun.

The sky above it was a shade of blue she couldn’t describe, deeper and richer than the sky seen from the ground.

Was that due to the altitude or the contrast with the brilliant white cloudscape?

Or just the romance of the moment? She’d seen oceans of white like this before, from the safety of an airplane, but through a window it had felt sterile, like mounds of cotton balls in a diorama.

These clouds were anything but sterile. As she watched, lightning crackled through them, tentacles of it extending out into the sunlight.

She reached out to it automatically, as if it were an extension of Rai’s wings, before her brain caught up and reminded her that a, the lightning was untouchably far away, and b, it probably wouldn’t be as kind as Rai’s crackling aura even if she could touch it. So it was a good thing she couldn’t.

“Oh, my god,” she whispered. “Oh.” There should be other words. She was good with words. But the only words that came to her were from a different her.

She lifts her arms to the azure sky.