Sometimes Ellie wondered how anything could feel significant when there was a hole in a person’s heart. A hole in her memories? She could manage. A hole in her heart? She obsessed over it.
Romantic date with my wife coming right up.
Ellie felt like a thief in the kitchen. This was Bernice’s territory, but the fastidious hob was absent right now. For that Ellie was grateful. Ellie pulled open the old-fashioned refrigerator. It didn’t hum with electricity but with magic.
“I forgive you,” she murmured aloud, testing the words for their truthfulness. The tendency to fixate on truth pre-witch was apparently a sliver of magic insisting on notice. Now, Ellie understood what it was. Magic. Plain and simple.
The words Ellie spoke ran true. Shehadforgiven Prospero. Now, she needed her wife to understand that.
Ellie walked up to their once-shared bedroom. Prospero stood in the room, staring into her wardrobe. She wore a purple dressing gown with embroidered edges. Water dripped from her hair. Beside her was a smalltable and chair where Ellie remembered sitting and brushing her hair, thinking about the way her wife avoided her.
Right now, Prospero was present and looked a bit desperate.
“I figured almostallof it out, and Iforgiveyou.” Ellie stared at her, not closing the distance. “Tell me why I can’t love you fully, Prospero. Because right now, you have no arguments left… unless you simply don’t want me. Is that it?”
“No.” Prospero untied the belt holding her dressing gown closed. “I wanted you to remember because we’d fought. I didn’t want to take advantage of you, love. I wastryingto be a good person.”
“Thank you.” Ellie stepped closer. “And now?”
“Now, I just want you to touch me, let me touch you, whatever you want. I hoped… Iwantedthat the whole time. I was never trying to reject you.” Prospero’s hands folded into fists at her side. “I didn’t want you to forget our quarrels—or the quarrels we’ll have over the years in front of us. Ilikethat my magic doesn’t work on you.”
“Me too. So can we never do that again? Never fight? Never turn me out of bed?” Ellie removed her shirt, dropping it on the floor. Her bra followed.
Prospero’s gaze was fixed on her. “Yes.”
“To which thing?” Ellie asked.
“Never again.”
“Not to the fact that I’m half-naked?” Ellie teased. “Can I get a yes for that, too?”
“Always that.” Prospero’s voice was low and veered toward desperate. “I thought of you like this.”
“When you touched yourself?” Ellie asked as she was a hand’s length away from her wife.
“I didn’t… do that.” Prospero caught her eyes this time. “Not at all. If you didn’t know what I did, you couldn’t consent, and I needed to…”
“Suffer?” Ellie finished breathlessly. She dropped to her knees and parted Prospero’s dressing gown. “My poor love.”
Ellie kissed Prospero’s thighs, and then she pushed her backward, so she was leaning against the wardrobe.
Prospero didn’t resist as Ellie took her ankle and directed her to brace one foot on the chair beside the wardrobe. “Ellie…”
“Hush.” Ellie let the warm breath of her word out in a sigh, gratified to feel the tension in Prospero’s thigh. “Let me taste you.”
Prospero made a sound that was somewhere between a whimper and a moan, and Ellie set her mouth to reminding Prospero what she’d been missing in their separation. After several moments of attention, Prospero was trembling. Her hands gripped Ellie’s hair as if afraid she’d vanish.
“There. Please.There.”
Instead, Ellie paused and stared up at her. “Never lie to me again. Swear it.”
“I swear. I’d swear it even if you never touched me again,” Prospero promised.
Ellie grinned at her. “Such a good girl.”
The sound Prospero made was the exact one that Ellie had imagined when she was alone in her bed, but tonight she wasn’t alone at all. She slowly licked Prospero’s folds before teasing, “Maybe we should pause. I gave you no foreplay, no kissing, no admiring looks. Maybe I was too hast—”
“Ellie,” Prospero whined. “Please.”
