What happens when you kiss a fairy?

I kissed her - it - because I wanted to. Because I was lonely and horny and had been for six months, and she - it - had breasts and a cunt and an alien beauty.

Unlike the movies and the cartoons she - it - didn't kiss back. The fairy went stock still, went even colder than she had originally been, until her lips were like ice. I pulled back and looked at her and she wasn't smiling in blissful fulfilment. She was staring with her round eyes with their gecko-like pupils and she blinked once, slowly.

"What that?" She - it - Marlie - asked.

I shrugged, suddenly bashful. "It's what humans do," I fumbled, stalling as I tried to think of an appropriate explanation. Uncomfortably, I blurted out: "Marlie, do you... do you guys have sex?"

"Sex?" she asked again, and the syllables were alien on her tongue. Most of my desire had vanished with the apparent lack of reciprocation from Marlie, but there was a backload of pent-up frustration that needed to go somewhere, and Marlie was as far away from a prissy human girl one could get. So I tried.

"You know, do you make new fairies? Have fun together?"

Marlie tilted her head quizzically. At least this expression was one familiar to me. With her head still tilted she shook it slightly, then paused in mid shake.

"You mean," she said, and gabbled out a many syllabled word I completely didn't understand.

"Sex?" I tried again. "Procreation? Make new fairies?"

Marlie nodded very unenthusiastically."Make new fairy," she said. "But no fun." She looked at me. Her lavender skin was hard and stretched thin and dry over her alien exoskeleton. At least she looked humanoid and had absolutely no body hair. I wondered if her reproductive system worked the same way a human girl's did. Then again it had been so long since I last touched a human girl, I probably would have to re-learn what to do, anyway.

The fairy scooted forward, closer to me. I could smell her saltwater breath, cool like the night breeze over my lips. It seemed like a precursor to sex, at least; but that was in human terms. Apart from looking humanoid, Marlie was completely alien. She blinked her limpid gecko eyes again, the second eyelid scootching lazily over them.

"You teach?" she questioned. "Human? Sex?" Even more gently than I had, she leaned forward and put her icy lips against mine. 

Happy birthday

"Happy birthday," I told him. We stood in the corridor of his soulless apartment block with its sterile white walls and prison-inspired window grilles and decor and I had nothing in my hands but my heart.

'Don't get me anything' he had said earlier, over the phone. And so I hadn't - not something that I had to spend money on, anyway.

I found the pretty black box stashed in a corner of my house, dug up a ribbon for it, then dug out my heart. I put my heart into the box, all of it, and tied a bow, accenting the blackness of the cardboard container.

Now I offered it to him as we stood there in the winter cold, the unheated building chilling our bones to their marrow. He looked at it, then at me, and half put his hand out, open.

And closed it at the last moment and pushed the box back to me.

"Take your heart back," he said, closing my outstretched fingers around the box. "I don't need it."

A bubble grew in my chest and refused to deflate. There was an ache high in my belly as I swallowed and asked him: "do you want it?"

And his delicate brow crinkled and his lips quirked, and he shook his head.

"Keep it," he said. "There are others who better deserve it."

And I looked at him, standing there before me swathed in a winter coat, his pale skin battling the snow outside for the title of the fairest in the land, and I swallowed again and managed a smile. The clouds cleared for a moment and shaft of weak sunlight grazed his cheekbones, illuminating the face I had come to know and love in the intimacy of dim yellow lamps on someone else's couch. I held that smile and I looked at him and said,

"I will."