"Hi, I'm Kasey."
The mysterious girl lifted her luminous eyes to Grayson's, and he was irresistibly pulled into their grasp. Her eyes were like nothing he'd ever seen before, shifting in every second from shades of moonshine blue to shimmering emerald, with dancing flecks of gold. Her entire aura was otherworldly, and he found himself robbed of his ability to speak. All he could do was gaze at the girl in awe, while his head spun in pursuit of a logical explanation for the phenomenon before his eyes.
A sound startled him out of his trance, and he looked to find the girl laughing, a golden laugh that seemed to take shape and surround them with delicate mirth - something you could sense, almost touch, but wasn't quite there.
"I'm Kasey," she said again, and her smile grew as she watched him gape in confusion. At last, Grayson found himself and forced out a sort of strangled "H-hello." He mentally slapped himself at his own awkwardness, and lamely added, "I-I'm Grayson."
"I know. I was a fly on your wall, remember?" She giggled softly and smirked, but then grew serious and leaned forward as though anxious to say something. "I . . . I have to tell you something. Well, a lot of somethings." She tucked her hair behind her ear and drew herself closer to Grayson, starting to explain.
Grayson still wasn't entirely sure that he wasn't asleep and dreaming, and he discreetly pinched himself while he listened to her pour out her story. Am I really so desperate for love that I'd dream up a magical fly girl? he wondered, but he shook the doubts out of his mind and focused on what the girl was trying to tell him.
"I know this is probably really weird and freaky for you that an insect just turned into a girl and now that girl is sitting on your bed and telling you that she's actually not a crazy voodoo witch but you know, I'm actually not a crazy voodoo witch." Here she laughed her golden laugh again, and Grayson gave up on doubting her existence and smirked back. For some reason, he found that he trusted her.
"So if you're not a crazy witch, then what are you?" he asked, genuinely curious.
"It's a pretty complicated story."
"Tell me," he said, and impulsively he caught her hand and pulled her so that they were sitting side by side.
She smiled, blushing slightly, and started again.
"Well, obviously by now you've gathered that I'm not really a normal person. I don't belong to . . . your 'world'? And I'm not usually a fly either. Where I come from, people have . . . I guess in your place they'd call it 'magical' powers. But we don't really consider it to be magic, just special gifts that we're given. I think you'd call us . . . faeries."
Grayson caught his breath a little, and a thought flickered across his mind - he'd somehow felt that her beauty was otherworldly, and the confirmation didn't surprise him.
"I know this is going to be hard for you to believe, so I won't be shocked if you think I'm a freak after I'm done explaining everything to you - just bear with me." She said the word "freak" somewhat bitterly, but hurried on as though determined to not let some distasteful memory get to her. "I guess the simplest way to put what happened to make me a fly - and a fly in your world for that matter - would be to say that I was 'cursed' and outcast. I was cursed to be a fly in your world until someone 'named' me, which as no one really names flies, was more or less a death sentence." She grew quiet, and half whispered the last sentence. "Flies don't live that long, you know."
"So - so I set you free? Or something?" Grayson was still trying to wrap his head around everything she'd told him. He wasn't entirely sure how much he believed, but for her sake, he wanted to believe everything. Her face was truthful, and again he found himself inexplicably drawn to trust her words.
"Somewhat. I'm still a fly during the day, but you've partially freed me. At this point, since you were the one who named me, I'm going to need you to help me. I know that's asking a lot, and since you didn't really apply to be a curse-breaker, it's a pretty selfish thing to ask of you, too." She looked down, and the lamplight caught her golden hair, and gave her an enchanting halo. "I don't want to force you to -"
Grayson had been gazing at her as she talked, and the more he watched her the more he realized that she truly was the prettiest thing he'd ever seen, dream or no dream. He put his arm around her lightly, causing her to break off in surprise as he began to say earnestly, "Actually, I think I want to -"
At this moment the bedroom door opened, and the two of them sprang apart in surprise, just in time to witness an extremely caught off guard Ethan, darkening the doorway.
