Chapter Twenty-Two
She suspected they’d laid there for about an hour before he finally got up. So it didn’t surprise her when he did. It made sense that he needed to—most likely he was getting tired of the feel of the mess still on him. Plus, he was still wearing his jeans. They had to be getting uncomfortable.
But then he spoke.
“Okay, then, I’ll leave you to sleep, night night,” he said. As if he expected her to be alone here in his bed, while he… well, she wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Take a nap on his broken-down sitcom couch? That seemed deranged, and yet there weren’t exactly a lot of other options.
She had to say something.
“Jack, where do you think you’re going?”
“To get some shut-eye. And you should, too—got a long day of learning how to kill hellhounds ahead of you. Heck, you’ve got a long day of learning anything. I want you to be able to clean those clothes my bullshit ruined.”
“Right. Right. But why again do you think we can’t do that here?”
He paused there, one hand still on the bed. Expression a maze of trying to work that one out. “Because… well, I mean… you probably… we haven’t really established—” he tried. She had to put him out of his misery before he got to the end of whatever nonsensical thought he was brewing.
“Established what? That two people who’ve had sex shouldn’t sleep together? I think the rules of dating and being in a relationship are pretty clear on what you should be practicing here, even to you.”
“Okay, first of all, we haven’t had sex. I’ve touched your pussy, and licked your pussy, and you’ve… done that to my… you did that to me. And second of all, I never said we shouldn’t. Or that it wouldn’t be good practice for anything. I assumed that you wouldn’t want to.”
There , his expression said. Get out of that one.
Even though nothing had ever been easier.
“So you thought I would expect you to take the couch. After that.”
“Well, it sounds nuts when you say it in that tone of voice.”
“It would sound nuts in any tone of voice, Jack. Here, look, I’ll say it like a funeral director trying to announce the world has ended. I regret to inform all persons here gathered—” she started, and now it was his turn to cut her off.
Exasperated about it, but he went ahead.
And he started stripping off his jeans as he did.
“All right, okay, I believe you. Move over.”
“So you’re going to actually sleep with me, then.”
“I am. But be warned: I snore.”
“Oh, I’m sure you do.”
“And I roll around a lot. I could crush you in the night.”
“I promise I’ll be totally, totally fine,” she said—which seemed to satisfy him, at least. He clicked his fingers and the lights went off.
And then there was just silence, and the shape of him in the darkness.
His back to her, as if, yeah, okay, he had agreed to do this.
But he didn’t want to go any further than that.
This was his limit—lying next to someone with a space between them the size of the Grand Canyon.
And that was okay with her.
She didn’t hope for anything more.
Honestly, she didn’t know why her heart tried to eat itself when he abruptly spoke over his shoulder. “Is this how you would usually do it? If you were in bed with someone? Because you know, I want to get it right. I don’t want to have egg on my face over sleeping-with-someone etiquette.”
Though she suspected it had something to do with how it sounded.
Like he wanted to do something, but didn’t know how to say it.
Maybe he even felt embarrassed about asking, somehow.
But that was okay. She didn’t. She knew exactly what to tell him, straight away.
“Typically I’d do something like this,” she said.
Then she slipped an arm around his waist. She laid her face against his back.
And he didn’t even hesitate when she did.
He felt it, and let out a broken groan. Already turning as he did so he could scoop her up, into his arms. Like after they’d done what they’d done, only better.
God, it was better, because now he’d had some practice.
He had gotten a feel for how he should go about this, and knew his instincts weren’t entirely wrong.
He even built on his earlier hug.
He put a hand in her hair. Pressed his face to the top of her head.
Then, after a second, she realized—it wasn’t just his cheek or his chin there.
It was his lips. He was kissing her, over and over.
“Oh yeah, that’s the stuff,” he said, in between such a blazing display of desperate affection she didn’t know what to say.
And she knew even less so when he added, as he drifted off:
“This is just like I always hoped it would be.”
S HE WOKE SLOWLY, as if from a warm dream she didn’t quite want to let go of.
Though, for once, reality wasn’t too cold to stand once she had.
She was in a big, soft bed that smelled like the man she was starting to think it might be okay to lo—to really like.
If only for a little while. And though he wasn’t with her, she knew where he’d gone. She could hear him in the kitchen.
Rattling pans.
Making fat sizzle.
Brewing coffee.
And best and most astonishing of all: he was singing.
She could hear him singing. That was his voice somehow making a song happen.
Talking away, I don’t know what’s left to say, I’ll say it anyway , she heard, the words so familiar they made her heart stop.
It was the one Cassie was always humming.
The one she seemed to hear everywhere she went.
The one she remembered from her childhood.
That music video she’d found on YouTube with the drawings that came to life and the man the artist had invented, saving her from the bad guys.
How it had fascinated her, how she had thought of it often.
What if I could create someone like that?
she’d wondered. Then once, in the middle of the night, it had struck her:
What if he already exists?
And all I need to do is call him.
It was the reason she’d half written that story about the prince and the girl waiting by her window.
Why she’d thought, when she’d gotten out of that place, that someone had come for her.
Someone did , her mind said abruptly. But before she could follow that thread down to somewhere insane, she noticed who was on the bed with her.
Popcorn. Popcorn had somehow gotten up there—or more likely been put there by Jack after fussing for it.
And he was standing stiff on all four legs, grumpily staring at her. Like he fully disapproved of this den of sin and depravity. Silly to think , she told herself. But that was before he suddenly opened that little mouth and spoke.
He spoke . He spoke. He said words. Words came out of him, clear as the bell in the clock tower over the town hall. “Hello, Mother ,” he said, so crisply and cleanly she could never have mistaken it. Heck, it was more than crisp and clean.
Her dog had a whole accent. A tone of voice.
He sounded like an aging British actor, bitter that he’d passed his prime.
A really deep-voiced one, about to deliver a withering diatribe.
Absurd , she thought. But as soon as she did, she made the connection.
She’d seen it on Twitter—a clip of some British-sounding actor talking about hating some director.
Storming about it, in fact. And she couldn’t remember his name at first.
But then it came:
Orson Welles.
Her dog sounded like Orson Welles. A very disdainful Orson Welles, who did not take kindly to this situation at all.
“As if it were not enough to leave me alone in our home for hours upon end, with only my feeder and my litter box to fall back on, you now subject me to the indignity of an unfamiliar couch? A terrible one, I might add. And not even something I might enjoy in silence, oh no, no, no. Instead, I was forced to endure the cacophony that came with your series of ill-advised life decisions. I mean, really. That oaf? I’m appalled,” he said.
Then he shook his tiny head .
It was the most unsettling thing she had ever seen in her life. Even though she’d watched magic come out of her the day before, then split a creature that shouldn’t exist in two. And even stranger than that: she didn’t want to gasp how or oh my god or what the fuck .
She wanted to explain herself.
“Now, just you wait a minute. Jack is not an oaf,” she said.
But Popcorn wasn’t having any of it. He scoffed . He turned his back on her.
“You say that, and yet he emerged from your den of iniquity wearing only his unbuttoned jeans. His hairy stomach was on full display. I saw his feet . I should not have to suffer such harrowing sights, no matter what apologies and feasts follow.”
“So he said sorry to you.”
“He may have.”
“And then he fed you.”
“That is irrelevant to the point. No enormous quantities of delicious bacon can make up for his unbrushed mop of hair or his slurping from the tap or the cigarette he had hanging from his mouth when he returned from outside after what I can only assume was him doing his business,” her dog said, sniffily.
Her dog. He said it. In a sniffy manner.
And now she had to somehow reason with him.
“Popcorn, come on. He doesn’t do his business outside.”
“How do you know? You weren’t there. You were in here, reclining on your bed of sexual excess.” He tossed a disgusted look over his shoulder at said bed.
She wasn’t even sure how he did it. He didn’t even have a neck.
“I think maybe you’re more annoyed about that than his feet and cigarettes.”
“I resent such a suggestion. My concern is purely for his character.”
“Come on. We both know it isn’t. You liked him before,” she insisted, after which he fell silent. Stubbornly silent, it seemed like to her. And apparently she knew her dog well enough just from her life with him before this—before he found his voice—to understand that much.
Because after a moment he turned and flung himself into her arms.