THE MIST was cool on Shea's cheeks; sweet in each breath. He hanged the thin handle of his lunch basket by the nook of his folded elbow, and strolled along the unmarked-but-familiar path through the forest, toward the lake where he liked to sit. Its basin was open to the sky, a unique quality in that vast, dense wood. There, Shea could bask in the sun's warmth and light.

 

The bundle of sticks his mother had sent him to fetch was balanced across the brown-haired youth's pixieish shoulders. With his free hand, Shea explored the shapes and textures of the trunks and leaves that surrounded him. His body switched between hot and cold states as he strolled through sunspots and shadows.

 

It was a space and time in which the young human found it effortless to lose himself. Really, these were his favorite moments. Happy, alone.

 

An urge to sing struck Shea; he pursed his lips.

 

A gasp escaped him instead.

 

Another voice had burst into song. Deeper than Shea's, but with a soft inhuman grace. Hauntingly so.

 

It was an absolutely alien melody.

 

Shea did not understand the language in which the delightful voice sang. Yet its tune was beautiful in his ears all the same.

 

The ethereal call hooked Shea and tugged him along, toward the lake, and the edge of the shaded wood.

 

Shea crouched down as he drew nearer to the source of the siren song. His big brown eyes and small pink mouth were open, suspended: frozen excitement. There, sunken into the water up to its ribs, was a lithe figure with its back turned to the young man—who hid in the last, low barrier of bushes before the open ground of the lake's sunny shore.

 

Shea seldom espied others in the quiet pocket of the forest that he and his mother claimed as their home. Rarer still did he reveal himself to a stranger—and only then because his mother, Mia, needed some hard-to-procure essential.

 

Mia would certainly want to know about another body so close, Shea knew: with all haste.

 

Lip-between-teeth, Shea retreated from the bathing, singing, carefree visitor. He backtracked with slinking steps toward the cover of the towering trees and their heady pine tang, and entered the protective gloom under their canopies of moss, which draped between the branchless trunks like spiders' webs.

 

The youth glanced back at the lovely figure. And stared for several bars of its chorus. Roses bloomed just below the surface of Shea's pale cheeks. At once, it was impossible to take even one more step in the direction of the cabin where his mother waited—for him, and for the kindling he carried, to start their supper. It was his duty to warn Mia, and yet his legs would not allow it; so his brain floated there, helpless inside the stillness of his bodily confines.

 

Then—so abrupt that Shea flinched—the song ceased mid-note.

 

The stranger turned in Shea's direction; the youth clambered behind the bushline and nearly toppled his basket and bundle in the process.

 

An eerie silence settled across the lake in the absence of that indelible hymn, so quiet and still that Shea heard water that sluiced around limbs—the other person's wake. So quiet, that every breath of Shea's roared in his own ears.

 

Yet, scared as he was, trapped though he was, Shea could not resist peeking. He had glimpsed this visitor from behind, and now, mind full of wonder, he yearned to discover all of the rest of this mysterious form, for already he was smite-bitten.

 

Shea's greedy eyes mapped every little detail about the alluring form he beheld as the outsider emerged smoothly from the placid lake: the thin, vigorous face, hollow cheeked, sharp chinned; drenched blond-brown hair spilled overtop the prominent curves of the stranger's shoulders; a leanly muscled body with brilliantly colorful markings, like paint, ran up and down sun-kissed flesh. A man, Shea discovered, as the stranger's hips breached the liquid plane: his thick wet cock glinted in the sunlight where it hung. Shea blushed fiercely; he sank deeper into the sweet-smelling brush, which mostly obscured the oncomer from his view.

 

The tall, thin man drew ever closer, swaying like a willow while he walked. His bare feet hissed into the sandy scrub.

 

Worry pooled inside Shea with every violent tick of his heart. Would the man spot him?

 

Never before had Shea been caught flat-footed by an intruder in his own wood. Shea's mind raced to cobble together an excuse for his presence for when he was inevitably uncovered. It was a new and awful mode for Shea, and even in the homey stillness of his forest, reality galloped furiously by him—the world spun too fast.

 

Crush; crush; crush.

 

In the chaos of that moment, another whisper: he should sneak away before the lovely man was completely on top of him.

 

Shea was born in that forest. He knew its many amorphous paths as well as another person might the rigid halls of their life-long abode. For that was what Shea considered the timberland—not just the modest shack his mother had built, before his birth—but for as far out as he could explore, the forest itself was his home. His and his mother's alone. They were a part of that biome, as much as any of its beasts.

 

The footsteps halted as Shea's mind raced on; the spectral insides of his skull continued to whirl so, that Shea did not notice the quiet, at first.

 

Any aural evidence that there was, in fact, anyone beyond the bushline faded after a short final shuffle of movement.

 

As Shea stooped in the shade, the lake returned fully to its familiar and natural ambience. Birds called, and bugs chirped, and the wind stirred the water, and the disturbed water lapped noisily at the lip of the shore. In all that peace especially, the terminally curious human had a hard time staying down and sitting still. He was no longer aware of where the stranger was, or what he did. That unknowing was a real discomfort.

 

Could Shea leave?

 

Could he peek, one last time?

 

The young man chewed his lip. His hands moved. Before his eager eyes, his fingertips parted the obfuscating leaves. Slow. Steady.

 

There was the handsome visitor, splayed out, totally nude as he basked on the lake bank like a happy lizard. He was stomach-down on top of a kind of handwoven blanket, garishly pigmented; his long, straight legs were aimed in Shea's direction, slim and firm. At their apex, beneath arched cheeks, the thick trunk of the stranger's manhood rested under his hefty, marvelously rounded sack.

 

Shea's eyes lingered, cheeks lit. . .

 

His gaze dipped toward the stranger's feet—a rote movement—and his breath caught in his throat; he snared his lower lip between his teeth and held onto the soft flesh as he examined the other man's lengthy, slender soles. The skin there was a few shades lighter than the rest of him, gold brushed with pink. At the sight of those naked feet Shea spun deeper still along a spiral of bewitchment with no apparent end.

 

For Shea, soles were the most attractive parts of a body. He always took note of them. Just a glance over the bottoms of someone's feet induced pleasurable waves that tingled up and down his spine, and back again—soles launched his imagination careening into voids and dreamscapes.

 

And this man's soles were absolute, unearthly perfection. The sloped skin had a smooth appearance, and ended in long, wonderfully sculpted toes. Shea was mesmerized anew by each individual feature he appraised. He strove to memorize every distinct wrinkle and whorl—every curve of every toe—so in the future he could return to such heavenly topography even after this singular being moved on.

 

The human's heart beat in his chest so tremendously that he wondered if the organ might drum its way out of its cavity, smash through bone, bore flesh.

 

But the lithe figure continued to simply lie, and the way Shea's heart pounded slowed, if only by degrees. His mind wandered, lost to fantasy. His eyes roamed in the unchallenged stillness. The stretched-out body was right at home amid the calm wood; the man was as inert as a log on the bank, save for the steady, graceful movements of how he subtly breathed.

 

Behind Shea was the forest, and its density of trunks: impossibly long and straight poles that rose from the earth and into the heavens, made skinny only by their skyscraping heights. Their distant, leafy canopy formed a false sky—lines of light pierced through holes in the shifting layer; rays danced to currents far beyond the boy. Candied mist lingered from that morning's rain, and the spray cooled the exposed flesh of Shea's face and neck, and his arms and legs; droplets in the haze twinkled like stars as they drifted down. The shaded wood called to the young human: safety, shelter, cover—yet still his body was pinned there at the border of the sun-filled basin by the gravity of this golden man.

 

With the most careful movements of his short life, Shea put his basket down—for even the smallest noise might give him away—and he lowered the bundle of sticks from across his shoulders. Then, led not by conscious decision but erotic automation, Shea's body crept out of the bushes and into the open air of the bank.

 

The sun's rays kissed Shea's flesh directly, with no canopy to bar or filter its warmth. Up above, he could see her, his conspiratorial star, though she was too bright to stare at directly: a brilliant white orb—very faintly red, if he regarded her from the corners of his eyes.

 

Shea probed for twigs underfoot before he put his weight down, and walked in rhythm with the wind to mask the hushed crush of scruff and sand. Immediately Shea was flooded with fear and regret, but the sensations melted away more and more with each step.

 

Soon Shea passed over an invisible line. A division between realms. No longer did his magnetism pull him back toward the cabin home he had lived in his whole life, his mother, and all that he knew. The magnitude of this man compelled him forward. Shea dangled on strings, and they carried him forth.

 

As he drew near the lying man, it was as if Shea was enfolded by a pleasant dream. The visitor's beauty was inhuman; to simply gaze upon his form was an ecstatic act. Long of body and limb, slender but strong, with a vigorous countenance more narrow and angular than Shea was used to—yet all the more graceful for it.

 

Eyes closed, the outsider's gold-tan face appeared serene; his long blond lashes were lit like hot irons by the sun, and his pale hair stirred where the breeze captured its locks.

 

His ears, too, were unlike the ears of others, in Shea's limited experience: carved by the hand of an aesthete god into shapes like elongated teardrops, with rounded bottoms that swept upward into remarkable points. The recumbent being wore a small smile frozen in time, as if his mind was caught on some pleasant groove. And Shea—he swallowed the saliva that had pooled in his mouth while he took in all the other fine, elegantly etched details of the stranger's features. Oh, those cheekbones!

 

Shea walked his vision down the serpentine landscape of the body before him—followed along the vibrantly tattooed blue-and-orange shapes and patterns—over the precise curves of this man's lower cheeks, like two eggshells nestled side by side, and across long legs that were as straight as the forest's trees. When Shea's eyes snagged on the rounded crests of the stranger's heels, his gaze dallied—even just these heels, taken alone, were so very pleasing to study.

 

The short but harrowing journey from his bushy hideaway was immediately well worth it.

 

Shea imbibed on all the new details he sought: shapes, colors, textures; the specific webwork of shallow furrows printed on these inimitable soles. How the rosy flesh found on the queer man's teardrop heels, the smooth balls of his feet, and the undersides of his shapely toes blended into the innermost regions of his pale-gold arches to create hues delicate and wonderous. Shea's eyes traveled these lines with care, like an explorer who charted vestal pathways. The man's feet glistened with still-drying lake water; to Shea, these soles glittered like precious jewels.

 

At that moment, the stranger's toes curled. The flexing motion deepened the network of wrinkles that had enthralled Shea, robbed him of the breath he held inside. He was lost in those fine valleys engraved in the skin, as surely as a tiny ant would have been in that maze. The young human once again had to swallow, lest drool splash onto these gold-and-pink feet.

 

When all of those toes relaxed, Shea squeezed his eyes shut and tried to picture the soles as they were just an instant before. He wanted to remember everything about the sequence he had witnessed with as much clarity as he could muster—until an urgent nag reminded him not to waste even a bit of this transient window.

 

The thought was enough to knock Shea out of his trance. He checked, sheepish, if the stranger slept still.

 

All of the ember-tipped spears were arrayed gently against the golden man's cheeks.

 

Shea's vision caught on something else, out of the corner of his gaze: a nearby pile of folded garments, upon which was a pair of unembellished, simple moccasins. The shoes were long and slender in a telltale fashion. With his eyes, Shea traced the darkened imprints left by the stranger's soles; examined craters molded by heels and toes.

 

Shea imagined that those perfect feet pressed their shapes into him.

 

The young man was seized by drunkenness for the very first time, without any spirit within him—he was inebriated by fresh reality. Even the air was more agreeable: Shea pulled in the honeyed spice radiated by this other man's body. And as Shea ogled the shoes, he craved to know their perfume, as well. With specificity.

 

Warm salty substance gushed across Shea's tongue as his teeth clipped the lip he only dimly remembered was snared.

 

He exhaled a gasped breath between parted, bloody lips.

 

A stir—and moan—from the stranger drew the human's attention, and focused Shea.

 

The wheels of time never stood still.

 

To linger was to risk discovery, and as much as that concept appealed to Shea in theory, his love for this man's form and feet made the prospect of actually speaking with the visitor far too overwhelming. What if the man was angry at Shea's intrusion? The mere notion was enough to inspire real terror inside the youth. It might ruin everything to know that the subject of his raw, cascading affection rejected compulsions that Shea was entirely helpless to.

 

So: it was time to leave. Past time.

 

But Shea kneeled still, even as the birds all around tracked how his hesitation stretched with their chirped conversation.

 

Those well-worn shoes offered the young human a remedy of a kind to ease his parting sorrow, and to cure his paralysis. How dread crippled the boy when he considered moving even an inch out of his current orbit. This close to the sun, Shea's flight response only grew with each moment. And yet he gloried in the warmth.

 

With one last rueful look at the exquisite soles within an arm's reach—oh, how he wanted to touch them!—Shea shuffled by the reclined figure, and hovered over the pile of the man's possessions.

 

Shea frowned, confused by the bits and pieces he studied. There was a small bag of nuts and fruits that Shea knew were from his forest. A curiously elongated flute that appeared to be made from a single cylinder of wood. And, of course, the shoes. But that was all. The homey kit was nothing that would sustain someone for the lengthy journey required to traverse through the dense wood.

 

Shea scooped up one of the shoes. He cradled it with care as if it were a long-lost artifact. It was light in his hand. Flexible. Supple.

 

He brought the footwear up to his nose and breathed in. A cloying salty-sweet musk filled Shea's nostrils, hidden amidst the tang of leather. Greedily he huffed.

 

Shea's captivated nose clung to the tart aroma. He worked to keep that distinct air constantly in his pathways; pupils exploded darkly, pale eyelids slid together over glazed irises brown as dirt. Actuality dimmed, save for the visitor's scent.

 

Flesh. Sweat. Earth and water. Well-worn leather. It was divine chemistry.

 

The stranger murmured happily, and Shea's eyes darted, startled. Shea spotted how the man's toes curled once more, as if in pleasure. His fear gone in a blink, Shea barely suppressed another excited gasp at the wrinkled flesh; his ever-warming blush hot again.

 

But what if his eyes open, Shea's drowned rational center screamed in askance at the rest of him.

 

The youth squatted, alert, awkward, as if he might burrow into the earth should the sleeper before him awaken. Shea glanced between those feet and the curious being's closed eyes—and hoped those lids would not open.

 

The boy cast a forlorn look at the shoe cradled in his hands.

 

His arms rebelled, but Shea managed to place the moccasin next to its mirrored twin. He so dearly wanted to bring the shoe to his face another time, and take in its oddly pleasant bouquet before he left this singular creature once and for all.

 

As the youth rose, his eyes refused to gaze anywhere other than those flawless soles. Only the turning of his body as he did so ultimately ripped the pinkish flesh from his view. Then his bastard legs carried him from the stranger, and as if he had suddenly awoken there—as if none of it really happened—Shea again hid behind the bushline, where he gathered his basket and bundle.

 

It was real: he walked away.

 

Shea's heart drooped inside of his chest, as weighty as a laden pouch that had soaked through.

 

He experienced conflicting emotions; he straddled dimensions: in one, he shook with joy, for he had lived a beautiful dream so keenly. Shea's soul still lingered there and knelt over the beautiful man. Yet in another parallel universe, Shea was this broken wretch, no longer capable of true happiness; a flower that could only remember the sun, for thereafter the sun rose nevermore.

 

Shea wondered if that path through the wood would ever be as gay. Or would he remember it always as it was at that moment: no longer a stroll, but a retreat. Slow and painful.

 

He left a piece of himself with the stranger by the lake.

 

To Shea's mind, he would never get that piece back. There would always be a hole.

 

When he stepped through the door to his mother's hut, Mia was as she usually appeared: hair pulled up into a bun, held with twine, frazzled by the day's labor; in a simple frock speckled with dirt, just like her hands; bare feet. Her face clearly communicated her surprise at Shea's atypical entrance. Then, it told of her worry.

 

The woman could sense a deviant energy in Shea; he detected that she did.

 

Shea perceived himself differently. He was changed by that day—by the presence of the golden man. But how could he explain this metamorphosis to Mia? He had no words. In fact, he did not want to talk to her at all—that sensation was new, too.

 

He had transformed, and he was ready to molt. But he was shy to show Mia his fresh skin.

 

It was not for her.

 

"You were out so long! It's almost dark. Is everything okay? What's wrong, dear," she asked as she came over to relieve Shea of his load. With a hesitant smile, Mia schooled her voice. "Oh, this is perfect! Thank you."

 

His mother paused like an alchemist who waited for a reaction. Then frowned when Shea failed to speak, let alone look at her. Her eyebrows drew together.

 

Mia put a hand on her taller son's chest and called his name softly until he paid attention.

 

"Shea, what is it? Did something happen?"

 

He shook his head, but his voice choked. "No, it's nothing."

 

"No, it's something. I can tell. Shea, what is it?"

 

Shea swallowed. He had to force the words up out of his throat. Mia deserved to know that they were not alone—but how much else?

 

"There was"—Shea swallowed again—"someone. A person, down at the lake."

 

"In the basin," Mia asked.

 

"Yes," Shea confirmed, and when his mother's countenance clouded over he quickly added: "I don't think he means us any harm. It was just a curious man, bathing."

 

Curious.

 

He wished that he could recapture that word, even as it flew from his lips.

 

"And how do you know, Shea? That he's not here to harm us, I mean. Did you talk to him, boy?"

 

"No."

 

Mia gazed at Shea, dubious. "Well, what do you think this 'curious man' is here for, then?"

 

"He must be a traveler. Passing through, by the look of his belongings. He had, ah, plenty of supplies," Shea lied, "and he'll probably be gone after he's finished washing at the lake."

 

"So you got quite a good look at him! While he was bathing, no less."

 

"Well," Shea started, and had to say the word three more times before he reined in how his tongue misfired. "Of course! As good a look as I could manage. You taught me to do that. He was taller than me, but skinny. He didn't appear to be a bandit, or someone mean. No, not at all."

 

Mia's dark brown eyes drilled into Shea. Her stare cored through the facade of his face, searched his aura for those oh-so-precious little details she suspected he harbored.

 

"Yes, I got a good look at him! Okay? He was very handsome. He had these marks on him—from what I could see, um, around his odd clothing," Shea lied a second time. "And his beautiful long hair."

 

Shea had stammered terribly. His mouth had operated faster than it could be properly supplied by his mind with words. To stop to breathe was an impossibility. He fought to ignore how his blood tingled behind the veil of his skin; how his voice was so very quiet; how he might simply pass right out.

 

His mother's searching eyes tapped at his face like fingertips. Even the very knowledge of the sublime golden man he held in his head sizzled, as if Mia had the ability to read his thoughts word for word, and peered into that which he tried to keep hidden from her.

 

"But what made him curious, son?"

 

Could Mia see it? How he floundered, like a fish caught on a line?

 

"He was just so handsome, mother. Why, in a really rare way."

 

"But what exactly?"

 

"Oh," Shea hated how he stuttered. He squeezed his eyes shut in a bid to bring himself back under control. "Oh, nothing at all. Really, mother—"

 

"Shea!"

 

Never once, in all their years together, had Mia barked at him quite like that.

 

Shea swallowed a cannonball of spittle. "Just every little thing about him. Like his ears, long and tipped, which I found very interesting. And—"

 

Mia dropped the bundle that Shea had collected with a deafening clatter. It was so unexpected, and so sudden and loud, that Shea's feet left the ground as he leapt in fright. Mia gripped him by his shoulders and forced him to stand in place, to face her; his heart pounded powerfully in his chest.

 

"What did you say?"

 

"What," Shea stammered.

 

"He had pointed ears?"

 

"Yes!"

 

"Son, that was an elf. A dangerous creature. Elves hate humans—do not be fooled by his pretty face. If you ever see this beast again, you are to run away immediately. Do you hear me?"

 

"Mother!"

 

"Shea! Promise me you won't approach this elf—or any other! Do not let him see you. Don't let him know we're here! There are no beings more wicked than the elves. Elves are killers."

 

In the state he was in, Shea knew no words would leave him. He was too flustered by his mother's demand. And he was gripped by fierce hatred for Mia for her attitude toward the gorgeous elf that he had seen at the lake.

 

Surely she could not be right about him.

 

His mother knew far more about the world outside of their forest than he did—this was true—but she could not know everything.

 

"Promise me," Mia commanded, and shook him.

 

"Mom," Shea pleaded. He quivered: her stare; her tone. "Mother, I promise!"

 

Even as the oath came out of him, he knew his promise was not true. He had placated her. Shea simply wanted the moment in which he was trapped to end.

 

It had been awful enough, how he trudged back through the forest. That he left him.

 

Mia released her son, but held him with her gaze instead.

 

"I love you, Shea. More than anything in this world. If something were to happen to you, I couldn't go on. You are all that I have. You don't know what elves are like. Thank goodness he didn't see you. I hope to the spirits above and below that he didn't follow you home! No good can come from consorting with so vile a creature. Only misery."

 

Reluctantly, Shea nodded as his mother spoke.

 

But, in his mind: You're wrong!

 

His ire roiled at the way she was so set against the stranger. That she would not give him a chance.

 

Shea wished that the elf had seen him. Followed him, even.

 

Or—it was inconceivable, but—that Shea had mustered the courage to speak with the golden man.

 

If Shea could conquer his nerves, the youth considered, he could bring the elf back to meet Mia, and prove to her how wrong she was about so grand a person.