Untamed
Page 16
“Come closer,” I plead.
His clean-shaven jaw ticks. “Bad enough I saw you. Who knows what havoc would be unleashed if I touched you.”
“Let’s find out.”
His expression grows fierce and hungry. He shoves the chair aside and starts toward me.
The gusts from the window pick up the scent of his cologne mixed with the rose he carries. He stops just a few inches away, free hand fidgeting at his side, as if considering his options. A sweet, torturous tension stretches between us—like the charged lull before a lightning strike. Three strands of my hair break free from the knot at my nape and twine around him and the rose. One brings the flower to me and I capture it in my right hand.
Jeb watches, captivated.
I try to contain my other strands of hair where they lock around him, but he grasps both my wrists and brings my left palm to his lips.
“Let it be,” he murmurs against my scars, and reaches behind my neck to loosen the rest of my waves. “You know I love you like this.” His voice grinds, rough and raw.
My hair whips around us both, rapturous to be liberated. It encircles his biceps, shoulders, and waist. With gentle force, it brings our half-clothed bodies together and his lips find mine. He tastes of the ocean, sparkling cider, and chocolates. He’s been sampling the reception food.
I drop the rose and run my hands across his chest. His skin is wet and warm and his muscles twitch with restraint.
“This is worth any amount of bad luck,” I whisper against his full, soft mouth, returning his feverish kisses.
“We’ve never had good luck anyway,” he whispers in return, dragging us down to the bed together while careful not to crush my wings. “But we’re damn good at making our own.”
He eases me onto my back, his weight ensnaring me in a most delicious trap. His knee wedges between my thighs, his damp pants snagging my underskirt. A breeze rushes over us, cool on my bared skin. So strange, to burn like a furnace, yet still get chill bumps.
Jeb’s hands glide along my curves—an intimate expanse that he’s familiar with, but has yet to fully explore. “You’re cold,” he says as his lips move across the chilled flesh at my neck.
My bones feel like they’re turning to liquid, my blood to molten lava. “Furthest thing from it,” I answer, breathy.
Eyes heavy with desire, he rolls away—freeing me. He reaches behind my back and drags a corner of the lavender and turquoise striped coverlet around to wrap my body and wings, separating my skin from his.
I groan. “Jeb. I don’t want anything between us.”
His fingertip traces the shape of my lips. “After the ceremony, there won’t be. I’m going to make you mine tonight, and it will be all we ever dreamed of.”
My body lights up, sparks of anticipation igniting in every part of me that he touched earlier. I’m about to tell him that it will be even more than we imagined—because he can literally share my dreams this one night if we can pull off our wedding—when the door crashes open.
“Oh, come on!” Jenara shouts.
Jeb boomerangs off the bed and gives me a sheepish grin as his sister herds him toward the door.
“Are they back? Did they find everything?” he asks her just before she pushes him out.
Jenara scowls. “Yeah yeah. Not that it matters, now that you’ve tempted fate by seeing her.”
Jeb ducks in one last time and smirks at me. “As if fate has anything on a fairy queen.”
I smirk back, still tasting his kisses.
“Meet me on the shore at sunset?” he asks.
“A stampede of wild Jubjub birds couldn’t keep me away,” I answer.
He laughs and then disappears around the corner, leaving me with a grumpy maid of honor, a thousand questions, and a glowing heart.
MEMORY THREE: STARDUST
Fifty-six years later . . .
Rain slaps the window in fat droplets curdled with ice. It’s only six o’clock in the evening, but autumn dusks come early in Pleasance. I stare through the glass, rain filling my skull by osmosis, blurring my thoughts as I lean against the chilled pane. The soft blue walls behind me close in, reaching for the dark grounds outside and forming a tunnel. Claustrophobia, my old nemesis, lurks in the shadows.
My curved spine hunches lower. Ammonia singes my nose. I taste the bitter purity in the back of my throat, and it stings.
The movement around Jeb’s hospital bed reflects back through the glass’s reflection. He’s surrounded by family: our two sons and our daughter, along with their spouses, children, and grandchildren. Jenara and Corbin are absent—she’s in a nursing home, and he’s in a cemetery. But our nieces and nephews have all sent flowers, plants, and well-meaning texts meant to comfort and give hope.
Hope is the last thing I feel.
Just two weeks ago, Jeb was perfectly healthy. Then, after a routine exam, our whole world turned upside down. Ugly words like malignant, aggressive, and inoperable ate away at our happy life, leaving it as crippled and depleted as Jeb’s body would soon be. The doctor said only six weeks at most . . . that to offer a chance for any longer would be impossible.
But he’s wrong, because he doesn’t know that my husband has a wish yet to be spent.
Clothing rustles and shoes clomp on the tile floor as part of the crowd leaves the room, headed to the cafeteria for dinner. All that remains are our three children, who—like me—have no appetite, and our two great-grandchildren, who’ve already eaten.
Jeb is being strong, making up silly stories about the bruised purple pinpricks in his arms. He won’t dare let the little ones know the truth: that they’re from his first bout of subcutaneous chemo treatments, which have only served to make him achy, nauseated, and miserable.
Our great-grandchildren, ages three and five years, take turns perching on the edge of his mattress, trying to be closest to him.
“No. Not beetle footprints, Pop-pop,” our blond and blue-eyed Alisia scolds as she pats the wrinkles on his face lovingly. The timeworn etches only serve to make him more distinguished and handsome—his almost eighty years in this world notwithstanding.
He smiles and kisses her plump fingertips. He loves both of our great-grandchildren, but Alisia holds a special place in his heart. She’s the spitting image of me as a toddler, with the same cynical and serious nature, which presents him with an irresistible challenge to make her smile and laugh.
“They most surely are footprints,” he teases. “They’ve been stepping in ink and trekking across me as I sleep. Drawing maps on my skin. They think there’s buried treasure in my hair. That’s because it’s made of magical silver thread.” Faint purple light streams through the window, dancing across his thick, silvery white waves. I dread to think of them falling out in clumps and leaving him bald.
Alisia giggles—a lovely, tinkling sound that echoes in the cold room and warms the ears—a wonderful reprieve from my morbid thoughts.
“Really, Pop-pop?” Scotty screeches, nudging his way into the conversation. The rough-and-tumble five-year-old tries to shove his younger sister aside to get a closer look at Jeb’s hair, nearly toppling her.
I spin, panicked, but our elder son catches her and settles her back into place by the pillow. “Scotty, I told you, no roughhousing around the bed. There’s too many wires and plugs. Be good, or you’ll get down.”
“Yes, Grandpa.” Scotty bows his dark head, his brown eyes penitent.
“Ah, he’s all boy, this one.” Jeb rubs Scotty’s head.
Lying beneath the blankets, pale and sallow, my husband seems so much smaller than I remember.
We both do.
I sigh and face the rain again.
The clock on the wall ticks out a dead man’s march. I wring my wrinkled hands.
How many hours do we have left? How many minutes and seconds to say our good-byes? I adore our family, but while they’re here, each private sentiment I want to share sits silent on my tongue—dormant thoughts, aborted whispers.
Our younger son—forty-four-year-old Jackson—sits in the corner chair not far from me, concentrating on the sketching tablet in his lap. He’s always been the most like me. Quiet, introspective, serious. He has a tendency to escape into his designs when he’s troubled or upset. He’s probably perfecting his latest assignment from the architectural firm.
“Mom, you have to see this one,” my daughter’s voice reaches out. I know that tone. She’s trying to pull us out of our emotional tailspins. She’s always been the family cheerleader and mediator.
I turn to face her and press my shoulders against the window, the chill numbing my dormant wing buds. Victoriana lifts a photo from the shoebox on the nightstand and holds it up. Across the bottom is a white sticker with black marker script that reads: David Nathanial Holt—fish out of water.
“Do you remember when Uncle Corb took this?” she asks.
I nod. It’s from forty-nine years ago. Jeb is thirty, and I’m twenty-eight. We’re laughing and wading in the ocean with our first child. My belly bulges with our second, and we’re totally unaware it’s a girl. The beach was one of our favorite haunts for family vacations. Mom and Dad would come, along with Jeb’s mom, Jenara and Corbin, and their two kids. I study the happy couple in the picture. It feels like a lifetime ago. Jeb and I hold two-year-old David’s dimpled hands between us, lifting him so his bare feet can skim the waves. He’s the only one of our three children who never liked to swim. He wasn’t afraid of water . . . he took baths and showers happily. He just didn’t like getting his swimsuit wet. It always “stuck to his skin” and made him grumpy.
Victoriana’s tear-streaked face begs silently for help as she looks at David where he’s still standing guard over his grandchildren. He scoops up Scotty and moves to the other side of the bed beside his sister, leaving Alisia to fuss over her pop-pop’s enchanted hair.
David taps the dimple in Victoriana’s chin reassuringly, then leans down to let Scotty dig through the pictures. David’s head almost touches his sister’s. They both inherited their father’s dark hair and green eyes. In fact, had it not been for the two years’ difference in their ages, and my daughter’s delicate loveliness—so different from her brother’s masculine, muscular features—people would’ve thought them twins.
Victoriana pokes his shoulder with the corner of the picture. “Ick, don’t get my clothes wet! It feels gwoss! You were such a wimp, bro.”
A bittersweet smile creeps over me. There are times she reminds me so much of her aunt Jenara, I ache from the nostalgia.
David snorts. “Well, at least there’s such a thing as nude beaches for people with my . . . sensitivities. On the other hand, there’s no escaping birds. They’re everywhere.” He finds a snapshot of his nine-year-old sister running from a chicken at a petting zoo and holds it up for everyone to see. Victoriana Violet Holt: learning to fly is written on the sticker. “Yeah, Vic.” David grins. “I was the wimp.”
“Hey,” she elbows her brother. “I don’t have ornithophobia, jerk. I like birds fine . . . just can’t stand for things to flap their wings around me. Especially bugs.” She shudders and turns to little Scotty where he’s propped on his grandfather’s waist. Joining her hands to form wings, she flutters them around the child’s chubby cheeks. He snickers and snorts, then grabs her hands and wrestles them.
David laughs again. “Right. All because a moth got stuck in the kitchen once. Most kids who live in the country survive that kind of trauma without any long-lasting effects. It didn’t affect Jack.”
Jackson sweeps a curtain of blond bangs from his forehead and pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, at last setting aside his sketch. Blue eyes like mine dance behind the round, brassy frames, and his mouth lifts to a wide smile with a crooked incisor that matches his dad’s. “Uh, I wasn’t born yet, Dave.” He stands and walks over to me, putting an arm around my shoulders. I lean into him, breathing in his cologne—a mature version of the little-boy scent of sweat and outdoors that used to cling to him in his skateboarding days.
“Yeah, our handsome Jackson Thomas was still tucked safely inside Mom’s uterus back at the time of the great moth caper,” Vic pleads her case, her dimples deepening as she casts a teasing smirk at me.
Jackson holds me closer, nose wrinkled. “Really, Vic? Do you have to paint such a vivid picture?”
I laugh halfheartedly.
“Oh, right,” Victoriana says. “David’s the famous artist. I should leave the painting to him.”
David rolls his eyes. “Sculpting and painting are completely different animals. Just like chickens and bugs.”
Everyone laughs—Jeb the loudest of all, which triggers another bout of giggles from Alisia.
“That moth was big enough to eat a chicken!” Of course, Vic isn’t letting it go. Her tenacity is part of what makes her such a good mechanic, and part of why she’s the official owner of her father’s garage now. “Also, I was five. Hard to get past a memory like that.”
“Tell me about it,” I say, under my breath. Jeb, hanging on to Alisia’s ruffled dress to keep her anchored on the mattress, catches my gaze. His green eyes are still as expressive and clear as they’ve always been, in spite of how pale his skin is and the weary bags under his lower lashes. He knows what’s going through my head. After almost sixty years of marriage, he could write on the pages of my mind without ever needing an eraser.
We’re both remembering secret things the children will never know. It was the only time Morpheus ever visited our family, and it was due to some emergency Red Court business I needed to attend. Had Jeb not been magic once, too, and come to love Wonderland as a part of himself, he might’ve helped our oldest son swat the giant moth with his plastic nunchuks, especially considering Morpheus had said he would steer clear of the human realm. Instead, Jeb captured the moth to rescue him from David’s “sticks of wrath,” then put Morpheus in our room until I returned from the grocery store and could fix things.
“Hey, here’s a shot of Dad’s marble run blueprints,” David blurts, shaking me from the memory. He raises the picture toward me and his younger brother. “Jack, you gotta check this out. They’re plastered like wallpaper all over the garage. So weird that I’ve never seen this . . .”
Jackson takes my hand and tries to pull me over with him, but I squeeze his fingers and start for Jeb’s bedside instead. I don’t need to see the picture. I lived it.
It was two years after we came back from our final Wonderland adventure, and Jeb had been cleaning out his mom’s attic while she was at work and I was at college taking one of my finals. He stumbled upon a trunk, and inside were all the sketches he’d drawn as a kid when he and his dad used to make marble runs. There were even some he’d sketched that he had one day hoped to make with his dad, before he’d lost him in the accident. Jeb hadn’t known his father kept them all those years. He figured he’d thrown them out. Each was so intricately designed and planned, Jeb didn’t have to do anything but follow the blueprints—no artistic vision required.
Jeb had plastered my garage walls with the hundred or so papers before I got back from college that day. When I pulled Gizmo in, I was surrounded by our future. I’d never seen my fiancé look more fulfilled, because he’d found a way to continue to create, and his dad had helped him do it.
Arriving at Jeb’s bedside, I touch his face and he holds my hand in place to kiss it.
“Nanna! Pop-pop talks to beetles!” Alisia sings.
I laugh—though it’s bittersweet at best. She stands precariously on the mattress with Jeb guiding her, and bounces along until I capture her and nuzzle her sweetly scented hair.
“Oh,” Victoriana gasps from beside the nightstand. “This one’s always been my favorite.” Her smile is both bright and trembling.
One glimpse of the picture she displays, and I’m at our wedding again with my groom, surrounded by white rose trellises. Every female in the wedd
ing party—even the flower girl—wore wings that lit up thanks to fiber-optic threads and battery packs. Only mine and Mom’s were real, with netting strategically wrapped around their bases to hide where they sprouted from our skin. I had a sparkling tiara, and all of the guys, including the ring bearer, wore chain mail tunics.
Jeb gave me a fairy-tale wedding on the beach, complete with knights and fairies, all of us glittering and gilded with the pinky-purple rays of sunset. The moment our vows were spoken and he kissed me, a small blue orb floated down from the sky and landed on Jeb’s head before bursting like a bubble. Those who attended thought it was some sort of atmospheric anomaly precipitated by the humidity and dim lighting, but they all agreed it was the most magical wedding they’d ever seen.
Little did they know how right they were: that the man who’d given up his dreams would be dreaming that night with his new bride—an unexpected gift from a netherling who had once been his bitter rival.
Jeb’s eyes trail over me like they did that evening, the first time we were together as man and wife, full of love, trust, hope, and desire.
Looking back and forth between us, David clears his throat and gathers up the photos that Scotty scattered across the nightstand. “You know, on second thought, I think I’m ready for some dinner. You guys want to come?”
Jackson skirts around the activity, clutching his sketchbook as he moves the chair behind me. “Sit down, Mom. Stay awhile.”
I give him a sad smile and he helps me settle at Jeb’s side.
Victoriana sniffles and drops the lid on the picture box. She leans over to kiss her father’s forehead. “Be back soon, Dad.”
He grasps her hand and presses his lips to it. “Okay, angel.”
Jackson and David hug him and gather the little ones.
“Wait, kids.” Jeb’s plea catches them just before they step out. “You all know I’m proud of you, right? How happy you make me and your mom?” His eyes sparkle with unshed tears.
They nod.
“Good. I love you.”