He beams at me. “Never taken anyone else here before.”
“Never!” I’m delighted. “Not even Calla?”
He pauses to think.
“Maybe her,” he says, then shrugs and keeps flying. “But I made her close her eyes.” I purse my lips, fractionally less thrilled till he zips over to me, nose to nose. “But you get to keep your eyes open.”
I roll them. “How lucky.”
He smooshes his nose into mine and gives me a smile, and I get butterflies so big they could fly me into a whole different sky, but then Peter grabs my hand and starts bringing me down.
“Almost there.” He looks back at me. “You’re going to love it, Wendy.”
That stings for a second, but then I spot something from afar that I cannot possibly be seeing.
I stop dead in the tracks of the sky.
I squint. “Is that—”
Peter hovers in front of me, hands on his hips, proud and tall like he built this place himself.
“A dinosaur,” he announces, then he grabs my hand, flying us down towards it.
A brontosaurus, to be exact. Blue. On the greenest grass I’ve ever seen, that’s covered in—
I look at Peter.
“Are those mushrooms?”
He holds both my hands as our feet touch the ground.
“Giant ones.” He nods.
I look around us. Flowers as tall as trees. Trees as tall as skyscrapers. Eagles overhead the size of a light aircraft.
“Is everything giant here?” I ask him as a lady beetle the size of a cat crawls by us.
Peter gives me a big grin. “Welcome to La Vie En Grande.”
“This place is amazing,” I tell him as I stare up at the sky. He’s lying next to me; we’re on a huge lily pad, the size of a pontoon.
“Do you think?” Peter asks, rolling onto his stomach, looking down at me.
I give him a look. “Are you crazy?”
Underneath us swim koi fish the size of orcas and blue whales their regular size, because Peter said the ones on Earth are the giant kind; they just escaped one day to our world, and we shouldn’t like them to be any bigger or else who knows what might happen.
“I love it,” I tell him sincerely.
And then all the fish beneath us scatter, and a shadow spreads in the water about the size of a lorry.
“Peter,” I say as I sit up slowly, tucking my legs under myself. “Something’s here.”
He looks around, unaffected. “Oh!” He sits up. “That’s just my kraken.”
I stare over at him. “Your what?”
He shrugs, dangling his feet in the water. “My kraken,” he says, looking back over his shoulder at me before he slips into the water, and I let out a little scream as I scramble after him.
“Peter!” I call for him, reaching into the water. Nothing for a long few seconds, then he pops up on the other side of the lily pad, elbows resting up on it.
“I’d stay away from the edge if I were you.” He gives me a look. “The kraken likes me, but he doesn’t like you.”
I scurry back into the centre, and Peter lets out a little laugh as he climbs back onto the leaf, lying back down on his stomach, warm under the sun.
He has a beautiful back. So brown, so broad, sprinkled freckles on it from all the suns here, a gift of a tiny constellation all mapped out on him.
I lie down on my side and blink over at him.
He watches me. He smiles a small bit before he rolls on his side, head resting in his hand.
And then he leans in towards me, eyes dashingly sure, and his mouth falls open as his eyes drop to my mouth. We’re close enough now that I can feel his breath on me, and it feels heavy. It hits me like that tired wave you get late at night to carry you off to the place where the dream lives. It makes me dizzy. Peter is like that though; he’s a free fall. Being with him can be scary and uncomfortable, but god, the view on the way down, the rush you get when he remembers you—it’s intoxicating.
And there are worse things than being forgotten accidentally.
Say, someone choosing to forget you, someone choosing to hurt you because you accidentally hurt them? That’s worse. Peter isn’t the villain. He might be occasionally misguided, and he might need a little bit of refining—he is inarguably in dire need of a mother—but he isn’t the villain.
He brushes his mouth over mine, lightly at first—it feels like butterfly wings and nervous feet—and then he rolls on top of me, kisses me heavily, and it spreads through me like flooding water. I feel it in every part of me. He’s like a dip in the ocean. You know when you’re in the water and you’re fully immersed, and you walk into a cold spot and you feel it everywhere, and it’s fresh and it makes you feel alive and startles you all at once?