Ángel had embraced his gayness in the face of implacable family resistance, and he had long ago stopped trying to deny the direction his dick pointed him in. But lusting after Oberon? That was just creepy.

Trying to shake off discomfort and find a neutral topic, Ángel asked, “What is your real name?”

Oberon sang a rapid series of syllables, almost too quickly for Ángel to track, his singing voice low and pure and lovely.

“Again? Slower.”

Oberon sang it again, slower, and the notes echoed off the curved walls of the wine cellar. Ángel tried to imitate him: “Ke pa lo ro—”

“Ro,” sang Oberon, correcting.

“Ro— Wait, pitch matters?”

“Oh, yes.”

The man’s name was a song. Ángel groped in his pockets, found a ball-point pen but no paper. He wrote on his palm: the five parallel lines of a staff. He dotted in the notes: b4, a4, d5.

“Let me.” Oberon held out his hand, and Ángel passed him the pen. Oberon began to write on the white inside of his own forearm. Ángel got up and sat beside him, watching, as Oberon drew a staff on his arm, a tidy treble clef with an A-major key signature, and nine notes: alternating 16th and 32nd notes, with a 32nd rest after the seventh note and a slur connecting the third, fourth, and fifth. “This is imperfect, but recognizable,” he said, writing the syllables beneath each note, then tilting his arm so that Ángel could see it better.

Ángel studied it, brows drawing together. The rhythm was confounding, the sequence of pitches tricky. No wonder the Otherworld had made no effort to teach humans their language, if it was all like this.

Experimentally, he sang, “Daa da daa-a-aa da dah da daa.”

“You are charming,” said Oberon.

“I— What?” The momentary ease between them vanished; Ángel looked up at Oberon, his face flushing. Good God, he was singing the envoy’s name like a child learning a nursery rhyme. “I’m not. I wasn’t trying to—”

“I know you weren’t trying.”

Alarmed, Ángel scootched away, putting a few feet between them.

They sat in silence for a while, Ángel trying not to squirm with embarrassment, and then Oberon said, “You deliberately antagonize Chandler.”

Ángel snorted. Maybe Oberon, like himself, wanted something neutral to talk about. “What, you’re not worried that Chandler’s going to fall in love with my smiles?”

“Somehow, no,” said the envoy, and Ángel grinned.

“No, she finds me resistible,” he agreed. “Even though she strip-searched me.”

“She strip-searched you?”

“Uh,” said Ángel, wishing he hadn’t mentioned nakedness. “Yeah, when I first came. Not on your orders?”

Oberon gave a soft snort. “No. I am hardly so blind to my advantage.”

Did that mean what Ángel thought it meant? “I don’t really get the distinction,” he said. “With the cameras in my room, you can watch me undress any time.”