Call this a position I never thought I'd be in, Sarah chuckled to herself.
She sat (lounged, really, his posture was definitely wearing off on her) in the large leather chair in the corner of Jareth's bedroom, a stack of thick parchment paper covered in elegant, looping script clutched in her hands. She kept her eyes focused on the pages, which wasn't easy when their author was alternately juggling crystals, pacing the room, and sighing dramatically.
She smirked but didn't look up. "I'm almost done. Stop acting like a goddamn toddler."
She could picture his innocent expression perfectly. "Whatever do you mean?"
"I did the same thing the first time I asked you to read something I wrote. It's unnerving, I know."
He sniffed. "Nothing unnerves me, Sarah. I only wish to have my papers back so that I might continue writing."
"You're the one who asked me to read them."
"I had not considered how long it would take."
"You're immortal, for heaven's sake. You can handle it. And I'd be done a lot faster if you'd just be quiet."
Amazingly, Jareth was silent, though the air practically hummed with his impatience. She laid each page on his desk as she finished it, noting new titles among the pile of old and new books stacked there: The Riverside Shakespeare, The Canterbury Tales, The Castle of Otranto. Some came from the castle library (probably plundered centuries ago, he admitted), and some she'd brought him from her own collection. He'd become particularly fond of Gothic romance, and after he'd torn through Anne Radcliffe and Horace Walpole she'd brought him some twentieth-century equivalents. Rebecca was a recent favorite.
Maybe not so surprising, given that he's a mysterious man who lives in an isolated castle.
She smirked as she laid another page on the desk. Glad he doesn't expect me to play the terrified virgin.
She finished the last page and then waited a few seconds, just for effect, before setting the papers aside and looking at Jareth with a carefully neutral expression.
His eyes were piercing, and she felt the corners of her mouth twitching at the sheer force of will it must be taking for him not to demand that she speak.
Finally, she let him win.
You're doing that far too often these days.
"It's really good," she finally said.
His face remained impassive, but she caught a glimmer of light in his eyes and the tiniest flexing of his left hand, which might as well have been a chorus of cheers and a victory dance. It was gone quickly, of course, and he cleared his throat.
"Of course it's really good," he said. "I was simply curious how a mortal mind might respond to it."
"Well, it needs some polishing—"
"Polishing?" He looked horrified. "Why would anything I produce need polishing?"
"Calm down, Jareth, every script goes through plenty of revisions—"
"Every mortal script."
Sarah rolled her eyes. "This may have been penned by an immortal, but if it's going to be performed in the mortal world and appreciated by mortal minds, then yes, it'll need some more work." She smiled at his indignant expression and crossed the short distance from the chair to the large, four-poster bed where he sat, enjoying a rare moment of looking down on him. She ran a hand through his hair, and his expression softened slightly. "Besides, you want it to be the absolute best that it can be, don't you?"
He pulled her down onto his lap and wrapped his arms around her. "I think it's quite good already."
She laughed. "Gods, grant me the confidence of an immortal man who's just written a first draft."
It was good, she realized, though of course she was biased. She'd worried that it wouldn't be, and that she'd either have to be brutally honest and break his heart or come up with some sort of mealy-mouthed praise to keep his ego from being deflated. Neither approach had really worked for her in the past when she'd dated artists.
She remembered seeing him that first time in the mirror two months before, not long after he'd come to see her play, hunched over a desk and furiously writing with a quill, a kind of focus and determination in his eyes that she'd never seen in him before, but one that she'd immediately recognized, because she imagined it was the same look she had when she was immersed in a new piece of writing. He'd been shy at first and downplayed what he was doing, simply saying that seeing her play had reminded him of the endless volumes of goblin-written stories collecting dust in the castle library, and he had wondered what they might sound like in English. Gently, she'd shown him samples of theatrical scripts, and the translation had evolved into something more, and…
And just like that, we were…collaborating.
Not that she'd ever used that word in front of him.
She nuzzled his neck. "Hang on to that confidence, you'll need it during Lori's first critique."
He pulled away. "Lori? You intend to show this to Lori?"
"Of course. I show her everything I write, and I've been telling her that you were working on something sort of Moon Gems-esque, and she really wanted to see it—"
He tried to snatch the pages out of her hands, and she held them just out of reach. "I wanted you to read this. I never said anything about anyone else reading it."
Sarah raised an eyebrow, her pulse quickening slightly. "Afraid, are you?"
His eyes narrowed. He reached again for the pages and she put them behind her back and backed up against the wall, her eyes never leaving his.
"Give those back," he said, his voice deathly quiet.
Her heart was racing now. "Make me."
He gave a short laugh and made to turn away, as though he were bored by it all…
…and then his hand shot out and closed around her neck, and she felt a genuine bolt of fear that quickly turned into a mix of adrenaline and lust.
His smile was cold. She could feel the pressure of his hand, squeezing just enough to leave a mark.
He could crush you. The voice in her head was husky. You know he could.
He pinned her to the wall with his upper body and pressed his cheek against hers. "You know I can always just take what I want," he whispered.
She licked his ear and felt him shudder. "Why don't you, then?"
He pinned both of her arms above her head with his other hand—fuck, he was strong—and pushed his leg between hers. "Because I love it when you give in," he purred. "And believe me…" he squeezed her wrists just enough to make her wince, "…you will."
She was panting for breath now, her eyes locked with his, wondering, as usual, which one of them would back down first…
…and then his eyes were suddenly distant, his body going still. Sarah sighed against him, knowing what that meant.
He backed away from the wall and adjusted his clothing, the spell broken. She pulled the papers from behind her back and smoothed them.
"What is it this time? A parakeet?"
He didn't answer, and when she reached out to touch his shoulder his body curled slightly inward. She heard him whisper something in Goblin that roughly translated to "this fucking place."
Wishes were rarer now than they'd been when she was a teenager, but they still happened. He joked that they were mostly inconsequential, but there were times when they made him quiet and taciturn. She'd never pressed much about those.
The brief conversations they'd had on the subject had taught her that he was bound to this place—and to the duty of dealing with wished-away things—in a primal way. When she'd gently suggested that maybe he could just ignore the wishes, or give the wishers back whatever they'd wished away, he'd laughed bitterly.
She'd begun to realize that she hadn't really seen a lot of it as real, even though Toby's disappearance had certainly been terrifying at the time. But now, even though she shied away from a lot of the details, she knew that it was real enough for him. And the wishers.
Sarah held the pages in her hands, glancing over the unusually elegant script, long, curving lines with only the occasional drip of stray ink. She tried to keep her voice cheerful without sounding fake.
"I could keep you company while they—"
"No."
She blinked at the harshness of his tone, catching a shadow across his face before it was quickly replaced by a faint smile. "I have no wish to keep you from what I'm sure are more amusing Aboveground pursuits."
She smiled back, the dark moment forgotten, as it usually was. "Your company's never dull."
His smile was more genuine at that, the mocking laced with real warmth. "Indeed."
Sarah went to put the sheaf of papers in her bag and then paused. "So…can I show this to Lori, then?"
Jareth grimaced. "If the path to a wider audience for my work must lead me through her, then so be it." He cleared his throat and drew himself up to a decidedly haughtier posture. "Not that I have anything to worry about."
She smiled. "Of course not." She slipped the papers into her bag and glanced at the clock on the wall, the hands of which had begun to spin. "Maybe you'll get lucky and they won't have any interest in running the labyrinth to get it back. Whatever it is."
"Maybe." His body began to shimmer. "You'll find your way home?"
"I always do."
He blew her a kiss. "Till we meet again."
She watched him vanish, leaving a heavy silence in the room broken only by the faint sound of goblins several rooms away. Her hand drifted to her neck, which felt tender when she pressed down.
You're playing with fire here, and you know it.
"I started it. I can put a stop to it whenever I want."
Yeah, not so sure about that anymore.
He'd been shocked the first time she'd goaded him in that way, really goaded him. And to his credit, he'd asked first—quietly, carefully—if she wanted what he thought she wanted. She'd said yes.
It had happened several times since then, a mix of teasing and threats and restraint. Some of it was a performance, she knew—she was no stranger to acting—but plenty of it felt real, or at least blurred the lines.
What made her flush with heat was how much he seemed to enjoy it.
Maybe he just enjoyed giving her what she wanted, she'd thought in the beginning. But maybe he enjoyed feeling powerful in the same way that she enjoyed giving up control.
There were rules, and they followed them. He'd never crossed a line, as far as she was concerned. But it didn't change the fact that he was, and always would be, far more powerful than her.
She shook her head. He'll always stop. He'll always stop when you tell him to.
She felt a sudden chill. "Will he, though?" she whispered. "Will he really?"