Chapter Twenty-Four #3
His breathing turns shallow against my ear, and he’s saying incredibly dirty things about what he wants to do with his hands and his mouth, and he’s made me take my Wonder Woman knickers off.
I am officially delirious. He’s saying things, I’m saying things, and he’s breathing so hard I can practically feel his breath warming my skin.
And then he’s not talking anymore because I don’t think he can, and that’s okay because I can’t either.
I listen to his ragged gasps, to the way he’s murmuring my name over and over like a curse word, and it’s enough.
It’s too much. I stop breathing with how good he’s making me feel, and I tell him I’m there, and he moans feverish encouragements that make my whole body shudder, and I can’t hold my moans inside.
He’s with me, heartbeat for heartbeat, and he tells me he can’t hold on, and he’s so gorgeously, almost painfully raw that I wish he was here and I could hold him through it as he breaks into a million pieces down the phone line for me.
Did I say phone sex felt less intimate? I was wrong. I feel as if he’s right here with me.
“You okay?” he whispers. “I’m wrapping my body around yours and holding you.”
I let his gentle pillow talk settle over me as I curl onto my side and pull the blankets up to my shoulders.
“I’m so tired, Fletch,” I say quietly, imagining he’s really here and holding me. It’s so vivid that I can feel his hand over my hip and his lips against my ear.
“Close your eyes, beautiful girl,” he says. “I’ll stay with you until you’re asleep.”
“Okay,” I mouth, because it’s an effort, because I’m already sliding under the coattails of sleep. My tired, sex-satisfied brain is shutting down, jumbling up my own complicated love life with Britannia’s.
“Don’t let me fall,” I sigh into the pillow.
“I’ll always catch you.”
He says something more, but I don’t register his words because I’m already halfway toward mixed-up dreams about late-night kisses and circus lions and life and death and deep, searching late-night kisses. Did I mention late-night kisses twice? I can’t help it.
I’ve just had the best sex I’ve ever had with a man who isn’t even here.
“Melody.”
It’s still dark, and I’m ridiculously warm and comfortable. Even better, I’m in the middle of a dream where I’m having dinner with Iron Man and he’s just taken off his helmet. Only it’s not Robert Downey Jr. under there, it’s…
“Melody! Wake up, I need to talk to you.”
I sigh and excuse myself from the dinner table because Britannia Lovell isn’t going to go away until I’ve listened to what she has to say.
Opening my eyes with reluctance, I see her perched on the side of my bed. Or is it her bed? I’m alive and sleeping in it at the moment, so I’m going to claim dibs. Reaching my arm out I flail around and flick the lamp on, bathing the room in a soft, creamy pool of light.
“What is it?” I ask, blinking myself awake as I tuck the sheet under my armpits and sit up against the pillows.
“Are you sleeping in the nude?” She arches her eyebrows. “How very avant-garde. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“Have you woken me up to insult me or was there something you actually wanted?” I grump, going pink at the memory of exactly why I’m naked.
She looks down at her hands and I take the moment to study her. She’s so striking in her beautiful costume, and her dark hair falls forward in perfect ripples as she bows her head.
“I’ve got a problem,” she whispers, and then sighs heavily.
Frankly, I can’t imagine what problem she could possibly have that necessitates me needing to be woken up to be told about it at four in the morning. I searched the castle for her after dinner and couldn’t find hide nor hair of her.
“Go on,” I say. I’ve talked to enough ghosts with problems to know the best thing to do is shut up and listen.
She buries her face in her hands and shakes her head. “I’ve been such a stupid woman.”
When, I wonder? Today, last week, a hundred years ago?
“How so?” I ask.
“I know you’ve spoken to Dino and Bohemia today,” she says, knotting her fingers.
I nod. “Yes. Bohemia told me how young you were when you got married.”
“He was a decent-enough husband, but not the man I would have chosen for myself.” She raises her solemn eyes to mine. “I tried. For my father’s sake, I tried, but I couldn’t love him, Melody. Not in the way a wife should love her husband, anyway.”
“And you couldn’t help falling in love with Dino?” I say, filling in the blanks as best I can.
“Well, no, not exactly.” She raises her eyes to the ceiling while she chooses her words. “Oh, I don’t know, Melody. Dino joined the troupe after my father died, and he was so passionate and intense and, yes, maybe I did let him think that I had feelings for him. I certainly let him…Well, you know.”
“Quite,” I say. For such a sassy one, she’s still a woman of her time who doesn’t like to go into the finer details of intimate relations.
“It was all terribly difficult, to be honest. Bohemia was suspicious and Dino was pressuring me to leave with him. I was twenty-five, and it seemed as if my whole life I’d been passed from one man to another.
I never knew what it was to be free. The only time I was ever really myself was up there on the trapeze.
” She looks at me dead-on. “I didn’t love them, Melody.
They both loved me, but I couldn’t love either of them back, not truly. ”
I frown. “I’m guessing neither of them actually know that?”
She shakes her head, miserable. “They won’t accept it. They’re waiting for me to choose. Even now, after all these years, they’re still here waiting for me to decide between them, like petulant, dueling schoolboys. I’m not even sure it’s about me anymore; it’s as much about being the victor.”
She looks thoroughly miserable, more so than I’d ever realized.
On the surface it’s been easy to make judgments.
Britannia is so effervescent and ravishing that it’s an easy conclusion to draw that she is leading on both of her lovers.
Piecing all of their statements together, a different picture is emerging now, one where Britannia is a victim of circumstance controlled by two strong, opposing men who each claim to love her the most.
“I was so very tired of it all, Melody.” She wraps her arms tenderly around her midriff. I watch her carefully, turning over the idea that struck me last night before I say it out loud.
“Were you pregnant, Britannia?”
Her face is agonized with pain, and I know I’m right. B didn’t stand for Bohemia on the cross in the garden. It stood for baby. Holding that tiny silk romper in my hands in the tower had felt significant, and now I understand why.
“How could I bring a baby into that situation? I wasn’t certain which of them was the father, but I was certain they would both claim to be. I had no other choice. There was no way for me to leave them or the circus, and I couldn’t bear to stay and condemn a child into that life with me.”
I understand what she’s about to tell me a split second before she opens her mouth again and I wish I could hold her hand to comfort her.
“It was the only way out,” she says quietly by way of explanation.
I don’t sit in judgment. It isn’t my place and I can’t begin to understand what Britannia’s life was like back then.
For all of her beauty and her spark, she must have been desperately lonely and distraught to have imagined that suicide was her only way out.
I can’t bear to think of the baby too; it’s all so very terribly sad.
“You think I’m a monster,” she mumbles, and I know that if tears were possible, she’d be shedding them now.
“No,” I say, sitting forward. “I wish I could hold your hands, or hug you, because I think what you did showed incredible strength and that you did it because you couldn’t bear for another child to live the same life you did.”
Her eyes are glued to mine. She’s just told me she ended her own life, probably the first time she’s ever said the words aloud, and my reply matters.
I’m not tired anymore. I feel wretched for her, for the loss of two innocent lives.
I need to find a way to help her. “I’m so glad you came here,” she says.
“All of you. I’ve been trapped here in this infernal loop and I’m exhausted by it.
I watch how much you laugh with your friends and I am so very jealous, Melody.
I never had any real friends. There was never the time. ”
My heart is in bits for her. “Come and lie down,” I say, patting the empty bed beside me.
She looks at me, quizzical.
“Come on,” I say. “Lie down and we can talk and laugh and then you’ll have had a friend.”
Uncertainly, Britannia makes her way around the bed and lies back on top of the blankets.
“Like this?” She looks at me sideways and I slide down on my pillows so I’m lying down too, much as I did earlier with Marina on this exact bed.
“And now we talk,” I say, matter-of-factly.
After a minute of silence, she asks me what we should talk about.
“Oh, you know,” I say. “Work. Actually, not that.” I change tack hastily, because talking about work with Britannia is a really bad idea. She died the last time she was at work and my work involves getting rid of her, so it’s a bit of a sticky subject all around.
“Clothes?” I say.
“No offense, but your fashion style is beyond awful,” she says. I don’t quibble; she comes from an era of floor-sweeping gowns and women who dressed demurely. Jeans and Converse must look completely alien to her eyes. Right, so fashion is out too.
“Boys?” she says tentatively.
“Well, yes, we could talk about boys,” I say, wondering where she’s headed with this.
“You seem very taken with the newspaper reporter,” she says, and I can hear the note of speculation in her voice. Because she is a ghost and we are temporary besties, I decide to be completely honest with her.
“Sometimes I am. He certainly gets under my skin.”
Britannia sighs, heavyhearted.
“You’re so lucky to know how it feels to be kissed by someone you love, Melody.”
“Oh, I don’t love him,” I say, startled.
“In fact, most of the time I don’t even like him.
We just have this sex thing going on that seems to be totally separate from how we feel about each other as people.
” I twist onto my side to look at her. “Maybe it doesn’t make much sense to you because times have changed so much. ”
“Some things never change,” she says quietly. “Can I tell you a secret?”
I nod. “Anything.”
She moves her hair back from her suddenly sparkling, feverish eyes as she props herself up on her elbow to look at me. “I’ve fallen in love with Leo.”
I stare at her.
“I know it’s wrong and that nothing can ever come of it but, Melody…
I can feel my heart. Even when I was alive I never felt my heart, but him…
” She lays a hand over her silk-corseted breast, over the heart that longs to beat faster for Leo Dark.
“It’s like nothing I’ve ever known. All of these years they’ve been waiting for me to choose, and all of these years I’ve been waiting for him, and I didn’t even know.
I couldn’t go without knowing what love feels like, and now I’d trade a hundred years for even one minute in his arms.”
Wow.
“He told me that he’s fallen in love with you too,” I say, and she almost cries out. “Even though it can never happen, please know he loves you too, and in a different place and a different time, you two could have been the world’s most-in-love couple.”
She smiles, wrapping her arms around her body and closing her eyes.
“Love feels so good,” she whispers.
I imagine it must.
“Thank you for being my friend, Melody,” she says, her eyes still closed.
“You too,” I whisper. To me she looks completely real, as if she’s just sleeping.
“He loves me,” she murmurs, full of wonder.
He loves me not, I think. We fall silent and I think about everything Britannia has just shared with me.
About her life, her unborn baby, and the bleakest of choices she felt compelled to make to bring it all to its dramatic conclusion.
It’s a terrible misfortune to go to such dire lengths and then still end up trapped here because her lovers weren’t done dueling for her heart, even though neither of them were ever in a position to claim it.
She’s different when she’s sleeping. She looks innocent, and really young.
Because she’s been stuck here for more than a century, it’s easy to forget she was barely twenty-five when she died.
Younger than me, and, God, I feel about sixteen most days.
All she really wanted was to experience true love, and even though she’s had to wait 125 years, her relaxed, blissful face tells me, right here, right now, she feels it.
She feels the warm glow of friendship and the deep, abiding joy of romantic love, and I’ll be forever glad that, however briefly, Leo and I were able to bring those things into her life.
I close my eyes. The memory of my unexpected late-night phone encounter with Fletch filters through my tired subconscious as I tumble toward sleep. Then I jolt awake again, wide-eyed and heart hammering, because all at once I know exactly what I need to do.