“So,” Jewel said, as she stood with Randy on the balcony of her apartment that evening, watching the sun set over the city, watching the gulls fly along the river below, on the way to their nightly slumber party on the lake. “Does this mean you’ve finally satisfied that stupid spell-curse-thingy?”
A shadow darkened Randy’s brow. “I scarcely know. Perhaps Lady Juliana had no intention of freeing me. Do you believe I love you?”
Her chest clutched up. The L-word. “Yes,” she admitted.
“Yet, now that you’ve freed me, she is to be the judge of my feelings for you! It’s unjust,” he said bitterly.
“There is that yuck factor,” Jewel admitted. “But it’s occurred to me that Lady Juliana isn’t, like, personally snoopervising you.”
He shot her a glance. “True. Such a curse would cut two ways. It binds the magician as much as it binds the victim.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. She’s probably out of your life for good.”
She looked down from the balcony on an unlighted ambulance crossing the bridge from Dearborn onto Wacker and turning the corner. He loves me. She could barely stand to think those words. Better to keep the conversation on the curse.
She said, “What’s the point of cursing somebody if you have to hang around to make sure it works? I think your mistress was a genius. Fiendish, but brilliant. She sets it up so that you have to curse yourself, because, I don’t know, because you have to. Because you want something she’s giving you so bad, you’ll torque yourself into a pretzel to make it work.”
He turned the thunder-brow toward her. “You agree with her? Have I failed to prove my feelings for you?”
“No, I mean yes, you’ve proved them.” Any second now he’ll ask how I feel about him. She was so nervous her ears were sweating. “But I’m saying it’s not up to me. I think she set up the curse so you would judge yourself. And if you thought you didn’t measure up, zappo.”
“Have we not argued this point to death?” he said, now looking steamed. “You accuse me of vanishing into a bed to inconvenience you.” In the last red rays of the sun, he looked harsh and desperate.
She took him by the shoulders. “No! No, I don’t. Don’t you see? This puts more power in your hands.”
He searched her eyes. “How?”
“It gives you control over your fate. If you can face it, and take responsibility for it, you can have that control.” She took his face in her hands. “The danger is when you won’t face up to your part. Then you’re giving control back to her.”
He seemed to think about that. “No. No, I’m giving control to you.”
“What? I make you pull a zapper? Oh, for—!” She turned away, but he caught one hand and held it strongly, pulling her to face him.
“When I ‘pull a zapper’ it is because you’re angry with me. I fear to lose you. In that moment, all I can think is that you will always come to me under one circumstance.”
“If you’re stuck in a bed,” she said. He bowed. She added, with irony to fight the word rising in her throat, “And when I’m in bed with you, you’re in control. So if you think I’m dumping you, you make me get into bed with you, and that restores your—”
“My place in your regard,” he said steadily. “You want me when we are in bed.”
Her breath caught. I’ll always want you. She couldn’t say it.
“I want you to have a life, Randy. I’ve been a selfish bitch and I’ve used you sexually and I haven’t regarded your humanity or your dignity. I didn’t treat you like an equal.” She sucked air through her tight throat.
The “L” screamed over the bridge, far below.
He bent his head closer to hers. “Have I not said that you are my equal in demonspace?”
She gave him a steady look. “You don’t want an equal in bed, Randy. You want to be Lord of the Nooky. You force intimacy on me in demonspace, when you know I can’t say no.”
He paused, then bowed his head. “I want to be — very well, you compel me to confront it — I want to be your lover, not your incubus.” Her heart thumped hard. “I don’t know if I can be your equal. I was not bred to be anyone’s equal.” He said with half a smile. “It has been my one defense, for two hundred years, that I am Lord Nooky in bed. And now I am Lord Pontarsais out of it.”
“This is America, bub,” she blurted. “I’m not comfortable opening my heart and my life to a lord.”
There it was. She swallowed hard.
“To whom will you open your heart, then?” His eyes were big and bright and quiet. The storm clouds were gone. “I can try to lower the social superiority that is my shield. What then is your shield? Can we ever be close?”
Her heart was hammering. She could barely hear her own voice. “We can try.”
Was it fear making her pulse pound? Or something else? She remembered what Randy said so often to her: Are you afraid because you’re aroused, or aroused because you’re afraid?
God, he knows me so well.
No point in struggling. What she wanted wasn’t sex, but something she couldn’t name, couldn’t see, couldn’t touch. Even now she wanted to run away, when he was under her skin in a way that made her shiver.
How can he love a wild animal like me?
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing,” she said helplessly. “I’ve never been in love like this.”
He smiled. “We shall have to be inventive.”
A laugh fell out out her. “We’re good at that.”
“I cannot promise I will never again be trapped in a bed.”
“I was wrong to ask if you wouldn’t.”
His shoulders sank and the tension seemed to leave him. “You will come for me? You’ll rescue me?”
Floating on air, she said, “Always.”
o0o