Note to the readers: Thank you so much for the feedback! I'm embarrassed to say it made me start taking this work more seriously, which may have inversely impacted the quality of the last chapter. Let's try to get back to the fun stuff!
*****
The wedding was easy.
Noth wore a dress she loved - antique cream silk embroidered with platinum thread that caught the moonlight, topped by a fingertip veil borrowed from an older sister. All of her brothers and sisters came to see her there in Seattle, bringing gifts and kisses and slaps on the back when her father bragged about the Fulbright launch. Her father even made a show of turning off his phone for the night, to give her his full attention while she circulated among her kin, making her goodbyes.
"You'll love it there," her father promised. The vampire Max Ipomoea was over three thousand years old, though he looked like a man in his forties. He'd passed more than a few centuries in the land of the elves and sold it to her now like the businessman he was: "It'll be almost like daylight, sans the burning. You can lie around all day in some silly little nightgown, kick your feet up, take some well-earned time off."
"That does sound nice," Noth said. She was always nervous around her father, awed and flattered to have even a little of his attention, let alone his full attention when his phone was off. "But... it's a big change."
Leaving my job, leaving Eiri...
"Ah, ah, ah," he said, cupping her chin. "I raised you with better manners than to fantasize about another man on your wedding night!"
"Yes, Papa," she said, ashamed she hadn't hid her thoughts better. That was close...
"It's just a few decades, sugar-fang," he reassured her, chucking her chin as if she were still a human child he could bounce on his knee. "By then, the margins on Fulbright will be right where we want them and you can divorce, if you'd like - collect alimony."
"Alimony makes me a target for the next cull," Noth observed.
"Burn that bridge when you get to it," her father said.
"It's 'cross,' Papa," she said.
"Burn. Cross. Whatever." He took her arm. Dawn threatened the horizon with a dull gray band, and it was time to go. Like weddings before the Collapse, her father led her to her husband, and gave her away.
Faery was hidden somewhere in the mists that coated the world in the hours between light and dark. Humans sometimes blundered there, lured by elves and nymphs or unlucky with a wrong turn on a road somewhere. Vampires and demons - creatures of the dark - could only come or go by invitation.
So Noth took her husband's hand, and let him lead her away from her family. Before the dawn burst over the mountains to burn off the mist, she cast back one last glance at her father. He was already checking his phone, back at work.
...
Marriage was harder.
Eldunord took only a short time off for a honeymoon in Faery, to show her around her new home. The hidden land of the elves was a forest, forever shrouded in mist. The otherworldly light that shone through it didn't penetrate a thing, not the air, not the shadows, and not Noth's delicate vampire skin. She walked together with her husband through a maze of thick-trunked trees marked with whorls identical to the ones on his skin - the copse that belonged to him alone among all the elves. He took her a little ways beyond it, showing her grassy meadows and deep, still ponds that reflected the hazy refracted by the mists.
Other elves outside Eldunord's copse bowed to them as they passed. They lazed by the ponds and in the meadows, mostly women singing and dancing. Sitting around and braiding each other's leaf-strewn hair like in the children's picture books humans published about them. Her husband drew her to them, bid them join hands with her and dance in their fairy circles. But when he went back to work with the rest of the married male elves, the elven wives left behind avoided her.
Racist as ever, Noth thought. But they had good reasons to dislike her - she married one of the oldest and richest elves in their race. And she fed on the humans they seduced into Faery. They didn't appreciate the competition.
Marital sex, at least, wasn't horrible. When she was younger, Noth fantasized about being thrown up against the trunk of a tree, fucked so hard the leaves fell from the branches. She was disappointed to find Eldunord wasn't so forceful - the elves respected their trees - but he did lean her against the smooth bowl of an ancient oak for their first coupling and take her from behind at her request.
One of her sisters warned her: elf cock, especially old elf cock, could have a bit of flaky bark along the shaft that could scratch. But her husband groomed well, smoothing his phallus to a pleasant, almost velvety texture that slid easily into Noth. She had to wet herself - dipping her fingers into her mouth before slipping them between her legs.
She pressed her cheek to the wood, feeling her husband's hands caress her, spread her. She wrapped her arms around the tree and pretended they were tied there. That it was Eiri behind her.
They experimented, finding positions where he could sit with her straddling him or logs or branches she could bend over. She found new ways to pretend she was tied up and helpless, winding her wrists in hanging vines, closing her eyes and pretending the leaves and twigs scratching her were the tips of Eiri's fingers.
She never asked her husband to pull her hair.
Marriage is compromise, one of her older brothers counseled her. Vampires stayed married longer than most other species - famed for their patience and good interior decoration sense. Noth had no house to tend here in the woods, but she could be patient, she thought.
...
They fought the most about two things: work and sleep.
She gave up the former when she became his bride, storing all her records and personal administrative devices in a locked safe at the Seattle apartment. Noth left her phone behind, too. She thought of keeping it with her, but where in the fairy woods would she have plugged it in to charge?
In the back of her mind, however, she still thought about business, planning what her next venture would be when her marriage inevitably ended. She would have liked to discuss it with Eldunord, for lack of anyone else to bounce ideas off of, but he focused entirely on Starbucks, showing no interest in other ideas or industries.
At first, this was enough for Noth. He'd come home and she'd ask him about work. Far beyond how his day went, she wanted to know how filled it. Who he met with, what was said, how it impacted business. She wasn't so gauche as to ask about Fulbright directly, but she was always alert to any hint that he might be meddling with its formula again, or that sales were flagging.
Her husband indulged her at first, but gradually began to answer fewer and fewer of her questions. His answers grew shorter. Finally, one day he said it was unseemly for an elf's wife to ask so many questions about what he did when he wasn't with her.
"Let it be, my love," he said. "Give your attention to Mother Earth, the flow of things here. Seek to move with Her rhythms. That is how a good and modest elven wife should be."
She rolled her eyes at his back when he turned away.
Sleep played a role in the tension; they kept different schedules. Faery had no night or day - always misty, never a sun to move across the sky. So Noth fell into a habit of sleeping when she felt weary or feeding whenever she was hungry. She wasn't always tired when he came home wanting to sleep beside her in the bowl of a tree or spread out on soft grass. And he couldn't sleep while she wandered off alone - he was always anxious to behold her, to strip her diaphanous gowns from her and hold her naked body against him.
They argued about it. Once, he even played a mean trick on her, using his elven powers to enclose her in the trunk of a tree while she slept. He meant to be beside her when she woke to tease her, but Noth hadn't slept in a coffin slumber in so long, she didn't wake up before her husband left for work. When she did, finding herself trapped, she tore open the trunk of the tree. When Eldunord came home to the mess, he gave her the silent treatment for three days, heartbroken over the maimed tree.
The sex dried up.
Noth wanted to shout at him, to tell him to be a man and confront her if he was unhappy, work something out. If this were a business relationship, she'd lock them in a room until compromise was reached. If he were at all attuned to her nature, her desires, he would know she responded to strength, answered to it.
And if he would just touch her - brush up against her in a moment of heated exchange, grab her for a moment while they argued, she would swoon in his arms like a "good elven wife." He had strength in those sinewy arms, she knew. When she straddled his lap, he sometimes cupped her shoulders, keeping her in place for his thrusts. And it was like being dominated. It was adjacent to exerting his power over her.
But the silent treatment, the evasiveness, refusing to share all the parts of his life with her... It seemed calculated to drive her mad. Cutting her off from things that made her feel alive.
...
I miss Eiri, she admitted to herself, alone by a scrying pool. If she'd had a reflection, she could have used it to find him. To watch him go about his life, or even talk with him, if he caught sight of her in a mirror, looking out of Faery.
She stretched out beside the cool water, trailing one hand along its surface. The other, she slipped down her leg, gathering up the folds of her fairy gown between her fingers. The air was cold against her naked legs, but it no longer bothered her. The valley between her legs, where the hair curled against the tops of her thighs was warm. She wormed her hand in between, feeling her heat melt and spread.
I wish he were here, she fantasized, cupping her swelling nether lips, feeling them split over the ball of her hand. She pictured him standing over her, his foot on her chest, pressing down. Telling her to beg.
Fuck me, she thought, giving herself more attention in the fantasy. Picturing herself writing under him, trapped, she began to move her hips, arch her back.
"Please," she whispered softly to herself, pushing her fingers inside - first one, then two. Rubbing the inside of her knuckle against the swelling nub above the moistened hole. Fuck me, fuck me, Master...
She fed her fantasy, supplementing with memories of being tied to her bed while he burned her feet in his hands. Bending her over in the shower, the hot spray beating against her slippery cunt. Picturing him there in the forest, using a small, springy stick to whip her tits there on the ground while commanding her to finger herself. His black, sparkling eyes. The high cheekbones, the smooth skin stretched over them flushing.
