A minute passed between the two with a comfortable silence, passing by unnoticed as Liam closed his book and set it aside with careful motions, as Daniel reached ever so slowly, almost hesitantly, across the tabletop to bring one of Liam’s hands into both of his. He cupped the hand gently, caressing the top of it with the calloused pads of his fingers. Liam breathed in sharply at the touch, and their eyes jolted together in a meeting of shared surprise.
There it was again, those foreign emotions skipping in at the lightest of touches.
Daniel’s eyes widened as he felt a hint of underlying fright and urgency, something he had not felt only mere milliseconds before. The feelings made his heart begin to beat with an unfamiliar rhythm, his blood to flow a bit faster. He was feeling short of breath, but not from excitement or confusion—from an unprecedented anger. But at what? At whom? He did not know. But he felt his blood pressure rising with the unwarranted emotion, the feelings he had not the slightest clue of how to explain.
But his breathing normalized after a short moment, and he felt a dash of something he could only identify as giddiness. Light-heartedness. A hint of hopefulness that made him feel overly optimistic, as though he had stepped into the mindset of a child who felt no worries and had no upright fears.
The lightness made his lips curl into a soft smile, and he squeezed Liam’s hand in response. Liam’s lips held a similar smile.
Feeling confident, Daniel blurted out, “Let’s go out tomorrow. Like on a proper date.”
But his confidence plummeted as he felt a sudden surge of hesitancy and uncertainty rush up from the tips of his fingers, where they lay touching Liam’s hand.
“Or we can just hang out,” he backtracked, biting his lip.
The hesitancy transformed rapidly into guilt and remorse, and he raised his eyes to find Liam’s features distorted by the same emotions.
“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” Liam apologized naturally, apologizing for the feelings he knew Daniel had felt. But he did not think of how unnatural those words would sound to Daniel at that moment and instead added on, “I’d love to go out.”
Daniel looked uncertain. “Really?”
Liam smiled and Daniel knew the answer before the young man even parted his lips to give a formal response; he felt the approval, the desire, and the want for some time alone, together. He felt Liam’s interest, and not in the same way he had ever felt anyone’s interest ever before. He was not interpreting someone’s signals—he was feeling them. It made his heart pump a little faster with excited adrenaline at the unknown, but his mind twisted in confusion. Surely he was imagining things.
But Liam felt the boy’s confusion as their hands ran together and intertwined atop the table. He felt it, and he had never wanted more than to tell a human about the Maeroksigne. About him. About the emotions he was feeling. About the kokoarsi. About everything. But he couldn’t, not then, not there, not out in the public in a coffee shop, surrounded by humans who had not even the faintest idea that anyone like the Maeroksigne even existed, let alone walked among them on a daily basis.
And Daniel was one of them. Daniel’s fleeting thoughts bounced around crazy ideas of the impossible as he felt little jolts of emotions he could have sworn were not his own, little zaps that scampered through his body like little shocks of electricity. His mind was carried away and overwhelmed with so many ridiculous ideas—chemical warfare with bombs that carried emotions to rile up feelings of support in foreign lands; perhaps a natural occurrence of changes deep within the earth that caused human chemical imbalances; schizophrenia; ghosts; aliens; maybe that odd bite he had woken up with held a new virus that sent one’s emotions to go haywire—that he almost missed the one emotion that fell over him with the lightness of a feather floating down onto the ground. It was a feeling of comfort. A feeling of compassion. A feeling that told him that everything would be okay.
And as he looked up and met Liam’s golden eyes that bore into him like a summer sunset, he knew—perhaps from instinct, in his gut, in his every bone, or perhaps he was merely going entirely bonkers—who was the owner of the foreign feelings.
