Chapter 16 #2
The high-pitched scream that cut him off was alarming until the woman abruptly stopped to say, “Oh, Omnimancer! I’m awfully glad you’ve called! My friends are going to be so jealous!”
“I’ve got news he’s been waiting to hear. Can you reach him tonight? It’s important.”
“Sure thing!”
“I—”
“My name is Olive, by the way.” Now she was giggling.
“Um—”
“You and Miss Harper are simply the most romantic couple, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” he said dryly. “Regarding that—we’ve just gotten married.”
Olive let out another high-pitched scream, followed by an exuberant “yay!”
He gave her a few details, which she ooo’d over as she wrote them down. He emphasized how spur of the moment the wedding had been, and how Rydell was their first call.
Olive gave a blissful-sounding sigh. She promised to pass the message on. “Call anytime, Omnimancer! And congratulations!”
He hung up, shaking his head. Then he rang the papers in Baltimore and Washington, getting reporters stuck with the Saturday night shift who perked up considerably when they found out who he was and why he was calling.
Yes, he said over and over, he was very happy.
Yes, Mrs. Blackwell was very happy as well.
(Mrs. Blackwell was actually laughing to herself at the repetitive nature of the questions, but amusement was a form of happiness, surely?) Finally, he hung up for the last time.
“Well, Omnimancer Blackwell,” said his longed-for wife, her crooked smile making promises that sent a jolt down his spine, “Mrs. Blackwell would be very, very happy to go home with you. Ecstatic, in fact.”
They covered the ground to his—their—house at a rapid clip.
He unlocked the door with hands trembling from nearly six months’ pent-up desire, and only just had enough forethought to change the message on their answering machine to confirm that yes, they were married, and turn off the ringer on their phone so they would not have to face the flood of media calls that was sure to come.
Up the staircase they went, his heart racing from the memory of their first trip this way dreamside.
This time—for real, this was real—his lips were not on hers, and his hands stayed demurely at his sides.
It was too dangerous to have Beatrix check the entire house for magiocracy spellwork.
They simply had to assume they were being watched in most of it.
Beatrix, leading the way, reached the top of the stairs and came to a dead stop. “Your—that is, our—”
“I moved it,” he said, smiling as she stared at the empty space that used to be his bedroom. “Down the hall.”
Her amazed expression when she saw what he’d done was ample repayment for the hours he’d put into it.
The walls were a forest, trees reaching their branches to the ceiling on wallpaper he’d leveled several dozen curse words at while putting up.
The lights from his Christmas tree, repurposed to line the floorboards, glimmered like fairies in the semi-darkness.
His bed and other furniture were gone, exchanged for a somewhat battered but beautiful maple four-poster, with nightstands and two wardrobes to match.
“Oh,” Beatrix said, more gasp than word. “Peter, it’s beautiful.”
He closed the door, locked it and switched off the lights.
Beatrix cast the shielding spell and spell-detector while he loudly pretended to do it, too euphoric from the wedding and what awaited them to feel anything but the barest pinprick of regret over his magical incapacity.
They found nothing in the room or its attached bathroom, which, given their previous emptiness, was exactly what he had expected and why he’d picked them.
He turned the fairy lights back on. Beatrix stood before him, dress glowing, face rapt, looking at his handiwork. Then she turned and gazed at him with exactly the same expression.
“Am I really here?” she murmured. “Is this a dream?”
He again had the dizzying sensation of being back in time—in an actual dream—and asking her that. He took two steps forward and brushed his fingertips down her cheek. “I remember walking here. Running, in fact. And I distinctly remember marrying you.”
She kissed him. It was still such a new experience beyond dreamside that his stomach swooped and his heart raced, not in the disturbing, all-consuming fashion of the Vows but in the sweaty-palm manner of a teenager who couldn’t believe his own luck.
She wanted him. She married him. Dayside Beatrix was in his arms, unbuttoning his shirt, her fingers—her real fingers—brushing his bare chest for the very first time.
He had a constellation of freckles under his collarbone.
She had never seen them before—his dreamside chest was unmarked.
She put her lips to them, charmed by the discovery, wondering if perhaps what she’d seen of him dreamside was simply her sleeping mind’s attempt to fill the gaps in what she knew he looked like.
Then she realized with dismay that he would have done the same to her.
Conjuring a version of her without moles.
Without the scar on her left knee, without the dry skin and razor burn and breasts beginning to droop.
Or maybe each of them created their dreamside bodies for the other to see, which was equally bad, for surely her unconscious mind wouldn’t faithfully recreate all her imperfections?
“Turn around,” he whispered, and she stared at the striking wallpaper, trembling with mingled desire and anxiety as he undid the buttons down her back.
Rydell’s insults about her looks she could shrug off, but there was something truly demoralizing about falling short of an idealized version of yourself.
He peeled off the wedding dress, untied her corset, slid off her slip. She stood before him in only stockings, garters and underpants, shivering.
“You’re cold,” he said, putting his arms around her from behind, kissing her neck. “I should go out and turn up the heat—”
“No,” she said. “I’m not cold. I …” She struggled to think of how to put it. Then he reached the spot where her neck met her shoulder and the touch of his lips sent shock waves down her spine, pooling between her legs. “Oh God.”
He kissed her there again, setting off more tremors. “Have you pictured this—what this night would be like?”
“Yes. Over and over.”
“What did you imagine?”
She shuddered as he ran a hand lightly down her side, just missing her breast and bottom, the closeness somehow more arousing than if he’d touched her there.
“Did I undress you?” he prompted.
“Yes,” she said.
He walked around and knelt in front of her, looking dissolute with his shirt gaping open and a few strands of silver hair hanging loose from his queue. “Did I tear off your stockings or go slowly?”
“Slowly,” she whispered, feeling as if her heart was beating in every square inch of her body.
“Oh good,” he said, unhooking her left garter. “That’s what I imagined, too.”
His fingers brushed her leg, all the way down to her ankle, as he slid her stocking off. She bit her lip. She was certainly not cold. She was feeling warmer by the second.
“I’m not trying to recreate that dream,” he said as he removed her other stocking—not needing to clarify, because there was only one dream in which she’d started off so fully dressed that she’d had stockings and garters—“but this …” He kissed her inner thigh, drawing a moan from her throat.
“I want to do this every day for the rest of my life.”
He slid her underwear down, down. She now had not a scrap of clothing on—nothing to hide behind.
“You’re overdressed,” she said. Her voice quivered. “Let me take care of that for you.”
He took her outstretched hand, lips quirked in an endearing smile, and got to his feet.
She removed his coat and shirt first, then unbuttoned his pants with fingers made clumsy by his decision to nibble her ear.
When the last of his clothing lay on the floor, she pressed herself to him, largely to feel his body against hers but partly to keep him from staring at her.
His breath hitched in exactly the way it had in dreamside whenever she’d done something especially right. The newness and familiarity of it all was making her lightheaded. This both was and was not the first time they’d stood together in utter nakedness.
“Beatrix,” he said, pulling the pins out of her updo. “Lie on the bed. I want to see you—I want to look and look until I can’t stand it.”
She could handle the comparisons between her real self and her dreamside approximation when they came—it wasn’t as if Peter would be cruel.
In fact, he probably wouldn’t say a word, and it wouldn’t change things between them, she had faith in that.
But there would be comparisons all the same, and she didn’t want them tonight.
So she said, “I already can’t stand it,” and pulled him into bed with her.
His huff of laughter tickled her ear as they fell onto the pillows.
Then she took him in hand and he groaned, the sound reverberating through her.
“I defer to your superior plan,” he said, and kissed her, one hand drawing circles on her inner thigh, closer, closer, until she was exactly as worked up as she’d insinuated.
Her hips jerked as he finally touched her there, there, but just as quickly he circled away. He kept doing that—there, gone, there, gone—until she was writhing beside him, trying to stay in contact with his fingers, his tongue in her mouth preventing her from crying out in frustration.
“What do you want, Beatrix Blackwell?” He pulled back just enough to look her in the eye, his own unsteady breathing suggesting that her handiwork was having an effect.
“Do you need me to do … this?” He plunged a finger inside her and tightened the circling of his other fingers to exactly the right spot—there, there, there, oh God—
And apparently what he’d needed was to watch her and hear her and feel her in that moment of complete abandon, because he followed her over the cliff with a cry that gave her tingling aftershocks.
“Oh,” he said, catching her in a long kiss and settling her in the crook of his arm. “It’s a good thing we’re married. Really, just in time. Otherwise, the next time we were left alone in the other room, I would have ravished you on that disgusting floor.”
She ran her palm up his chest. “I beg to differ.”
“You’d have put a stop to it, madam?”
“It would have been a joint ravishing, my dear sir.”
He laughed, the sheer joy of the sound making her laugh, too. He shifted her closer, his free hand twining with hers, his face tilted toward her so she could look deeply into those brown eyes flecked with green. This man who, against all odds, was her husband.
Surely there was no one anywhere as happy as she was now.