Chapter Eleven #2
“It looks a lot like a date to me.” Britannia laughs, then casts a longing look toward Fletch.
“Don’t be such a schoolgirl, Melody. He’s divine, and he wants you so very much.
Even I can feel the sexual energy between you and I’ve been dead for a century.
God knows how he’s keeping his hands off you. ”
“Will you just piss off?” I mutter. “This is difficult enough without you hanging around whispering claptrap at me to wind me up!”
A pulse flashes along Fletch’s set jaw and his cutlery rattles as he puts it down. “Jesus, you’re like a faulty air-conditioning unit. You blow hot, you blow ice cold. What the hell did I do so wrong here tonight?”
“Uh-oh. You’ve upset him now,” Britannia whispers, her coal-dark eyes flashing with glittery excitement. “What on earth can you do to smooth his feathers, I wonder? I think drastic action is the only way.” She looks at him, her head tilted. “Straddle him, perhaps?”
And then she disappears, laughing, and I’m quiet for a moment while I contemplate what she said.
Is he really so pent up with wanting that he’s having a hard time keeping a lid on it?
Or is Britannia doing what she seems to do so well, stirring the pot for her own amusement?
The word vixen could have been invented just for her.
He’s staring at me. What was that about an air-conditioning unit? I’m confused. I reach for the wine and refill my glass, and while I’m about it, I top his up too.
“Sorry,” I murmur, aware that what I said to Britannia must have sounded rude out of context.
He shakes his head as if to clear it, then picks up his knife and fork again. We eat in silence for a few minutes, then I lay down my cutlery.
“There are ghosts from a circus here in the castle and one of them, Britannia Lovell, was here just then. She’s a terrible flirt and she was being a pain in the ass, so I told her to piss off, not you.” I take a good mouthful of wine. “She’s gone again now.”
“Will she be back, do you think, or can we finish our dinner in peace?” he asks mildly. I think what he’s really asking me is if I’m planning to be randomly rude to him again, as if I have a split personality and my head might start rotating 360 degrees on my shoulders at any moment.
“I don’t know,” I say truthfully, because he’s here to shadow me and the ghosts, and he’s going to find that pretty damn hard to do if I don’t tell him they’re there.
“She said that she could feel your sexual energy even though she’s been dead for a hundred years, and that it’s a wonder you’re keeping your hands off me. ”
He’s staring at me again. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because you can’t see them and I can, and I thought the whole bloody idea of you shadowing me is to know what I do, how I feel, what I see, and what I hear.”
“Right. And did she say anything else or can we eat dessert now?”
I shrug. In for a penny, in for a pound, otherwise known as I’ve drunk two large glasses of wine in quick succession and my tongue is loosening dangerously. “She said that I should consider straddling you to smooth your ruffled feathers.”
“And there you go again, flicking the switch over to hot,” he huffs, looking at the ceiling. He’s breathing in that measured way people do when they’re trying not to fly off the handle. “So which is it to be, Ghostbuster? Peach cobbler, or would you like to climb into my lap?”
I guess I asked for that. “Cobbler. Definitely cobbler.”
I get up from the table, relieved to have something to do.
It’s an indication of how skittish I feel that even the idea of dessert isn’t enough to relax me.
I scoop dollops of the golden crunchy-topped peaches into a couple of bowls and carry them to the table, then ferry across the accompanying jug of warm custard and sit down again without looking at him.
“It’s good,” I say after a couple of minutes. And it is; fabulously sweet and comforting. I can feel the sugar whizzing around my blood and restoring my equilibrium.
“I don’t really have much of a sweet tooth,” he says, laying his spoon down, his dessert half eaten. “Frankly, I’d have preferred it if you’d straddled me.”
And he says I blow hot and cold. I feel as if he’s just used a blowtorch on my face.
“Fletch—”
“I know,” he sighs like a man resigned to his fate. “It wasn’t your idea, the dead woman told you to say it.”
When he puts it like that, I sound crazy. “Is that really how you see me?”
He looks as if he’s struggling to articulate himself, which is unusual for him. “You probably don’t want me to answer that.”
“Yes I do.” I swallow and I wait because, actually, I really, really do want him to answer me.
“We’re just very different people,” he says diplomatically, opening the second bottle of wine. “I’m straightforward and analytical, and you’re…you’re neither of those things.”
“So what am I then?”
“Fishing for compliments?” he says, filling our glasses.
I pull my glass toward me and drag my finger down the chilled condensation on the side of it. “I’m not. I just don’t like the thought that I come across as bonkers.”
Fletch appears as if he’s going to say something and then looks pointedly at the empty chair beside him.
“Stop pissing about, will you?” he snarls at it. “I’m trying to have a conversation here.”
Turning back to me again, he smiles with an apologetic shrug. “Sorry. There’s the ghost of a merry monk from the castle’s days as a monastery here and he keeps lifting his cassock and showing me his hairy knees. Oh, and he’s just suggested I ask you for a lap dance.”
I look at the empty chair and then back at him in horrified silence, then I push my dessert bowl aside and lay my head on the table and close my eyes, because he’s right.
For the last minute or so he looked like he’d completely lost it, and that is precisely how I must appear to him and pretty much everyone else in the world, speaking to thin air and saying ludicrously random things that make no sense.
How absolutely depressing. I’m protected—lucky, I guess you could call it—because I’m insulated by the fact that I spend most of my time around people who either see the world as I do or believe in me implicitly and don’t make me feel like a crackpot.
Fletch isn’t being deliberately unkind; he’s just showing me what it’s like to be him around me, and I feel like a prize fool.
“I’m tired, Fletch,” I say, because I realize I’m not just tired, I’m actually exhausted.
Today has been a long and disjointed day, punctuated with some moments I won’t forget in a long time.
Was it really only this afternoon that Fletch threw me over his shoulder? It feels a week or more ago at least.
“Get your head up off the table and defend yourself, you lily-livered ninny.” Britannia, right on cue.
I don’t open my eyes or answer her, because I’m now acutely aware of how ridiculous I look through Fletch’s eyes.
“It’s half past ten,” he says quietly. “Maybe we should call it a night.”
His fingers lightly smooth my hair back from my face, and when I finally open my eyes, he’s standing up.
“Come on.” He holds his hand out to me, and the expression on his face is almost impossible to read; the closest I could get to a description would be longing. “Let’s go to bed.”