Hallo, Aro: Steel - K. A. Cook
Hallo, Aro is a series of flash fiction stories about allosexual aromantic characters navigating friendship, sexual attraction, aromanticism and the weight of amatonormative expectation.
Contains: An aplatonic, loveless allo-aro needlewoman; a too-handsome companion; and a fairy tale ending more inclined to historical grimness than modern happily-ever-after.
Length: 1, 276 words.
Content advisory: This story contains sexual touch, kissing and physical intimacy depictions and mentions along with depictions of sexual attraction and desire. In addition, please expect misogynistic language, general aro erasure, amatonormativity, multiple mentions of words like “love” and “dear”, and the expectation that one must experience some form of love. The protagonist uses the word “broken” to reference how people describe her.
This story has a potentially-triggering ending. Please scroll to bottom of post for spoiler-containing advisories.
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He raises his lips from hers. Locks like corded moonlight spill over his bare shoulders and chest, his eyes gleaming from a chiselled face too intent for youth and too free for age. Words like “handsome” or “beautiful” are too common, human, to encompass the faerie lord who rests long-fingered hands upon her hips as though existence contains nothing else of import. “Say, my love, that you will come away with me.”
They met a month prior. He perched upon a mossy log, playing a pipe as sweet as his words; she, berrying, strayed beyond the forest’s edge in search of the idling musician. She visited him whenever daylight duties permitted, for he listened with grave seriousness to her frustrations with grandmothers, employers and gossips. Once the stars cast their light across night’s void, he scaled her window to lie upon her patched sheets as though she were his queen—his only need the indulgence of her giddying desires.
She draws an unsteady breath, yearning still afire in her every sinew. “Yes.”
They delay only to throw on yesterday’s clothes and tidy her tangled hair. Dawn crests the eastern hills as they leave her boarding house, creeping along muddy streets with a wary eye for dogs, cockerels and farmers. No suspicious neighbour can be permitted to query a man, and by consequence her, so foreign to mortality; she must vanish, wholly and utterly, like misty remnants after the coming sun.
What crudities, in a world wrought of clotheslines, barrels and outhouses, deserve her farewell?
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