And that was okay with her.
She didn’t hope for anything more.
Honestly, she didn’t know why her heart tried to eat itself when he abruptly spoke over his shoulder. “Is this how you would usually do it? If you were in bed with someone? Because you know, I want to get it right. I don’t want to have egg on my face over sleeping-with-someone etiquette.”
Though she suspected it had something to do with how it sounded. Like he wanted to do something, but didn’t know how to say it. Maybe he even felt embarrassed about asking, somehow. But that was okay. She didn’t. She knew exactly what to tell him, straight away. “Typically I’d do something like this,” she said. Then she slipped an arm around his waist. She laid her face against his back.
And he didn’t even hesitate when she did.
He felt it, and let out a broken groan. Already turning as he did so he could scoop her up, into his arms. Like after they’d done what they’d done, only better. God, it was better, because now he’d had some practice. He had gotten a feel for how he should go about this, and knew his instincts weren’t entirely wrong.
He even built on his earlier hug.
He put a hand in her hair. Pressed his face to the top of her head. Then, after a second, she realized—it wasn’t just his cheek or his chin there. It was his lips. He was kissing her, over and over. “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff,” he said, in between such a blazing display of desperate affection she didn’t know what to say.
And she knew even less so when he added, as he drifted off:
“This is just like I always hoped it would be.”
SHE WOKE SLOWLY,as if from a warm dream she didn’t quite want to let go of.
Though, for once, reality wasn’t too cold to stand once she had. She was in a big, soft bed that smelled like the man she was starting to think it might be okay to lo—to really like. If only for a little while. And though he wasn’t with her, she knew where he’d gone. She could hear him in the kitchen.
Rattling pans.
Making fat sizzle.
Brewing coffee.
And best and most astonishing of all: he was singing. She could hear him singing. That was his voice somehow making a song happen.Talking away, I don’t know what’s left to say, I’ll say it anyway, she heard, the words so familiar they made her heart stop. It was the one Cassie was always humming. The one she seemed to hear everywhere she went.
The one she remembered from her childhood.
That music video she’d found on YouTube with the drawings that came to life and the man the artist had invented, saving her from the bad guys. How it had fascinated her, how she had thought of it often.What if I could create someone like that?she’d wondered. Then once, in the middle of the night, it had struck her:
What if he already exists?
And all I need to do is call him.
It was the reason she’d half written that story about the prince and the girl waiting by her window. Why she’d thought, when she’d gotten out of that place, that someone had come for her.Someone did, her mind said abruptly. But before she could follow that thread down to somewhere insane, she noticed who was on the bed with her. Popcorn. Popcorn had somehow gotten up there—or more likely been put there by Jack after fussing for it.
And he was standing stiff on all four legs, grumpily staring at her. Like he fully disapproved of this den of sin and depravity.Sillyto think, she told herself. But that was before he suddenly opened that little mouth and spoke.
Hespoke. He spoke. He said words. Words came out of him, clear as the bell in the clock tower over the town hall. “Hello,Mother,” he said, so crisply and cleanly she could never have mistaken it. Heck, it wasmorethan crisp and clean.
Her dog had a whole accent. A tone of voice.
He sounded like an aging British actor, bitter that he’d passed his prime.
A really deep-voiced one, about to deliver a withering diatribe.Absurd, she thought. But as soon as she did, she made the connection. She’d seen it on Twitter—a clip of some British-sounding actor talking about hating some director. Storming about it, in fact. And she couldn’t remember his name at first.
But then it came:
Orson Welles.
Her dog sounded like Orson Welles. A very disdainful Orson Welles, who did not take kindly to this situation at all. “As if it were not enough to leave me alone in our home for hours upon end, with only my feeder and my litter box to fall back on, you now subject me to the indignity of an unfamiliar couch? A terrible one, I might add. And not even something I might enjoy in silence, oh no, no, no. Instead, I was forced to endure the cacophony that came with your series of ill-advised life decisions. I mean, really. That oaf? I’m appalled,” he said.
Then heshookhis tinyhead.
