In her adult, professional life, Sarah rarely swore beyond cursing traffic and the occasional stubbed toe. She used profanity only occasionally, when she couldn't fall back on better methods to relieve the tempestuous rages that had once led her to scream incoherently and wreck her room. Taking kickboxing classes had helped to drain the worst of her anger, and going to the gym to unleash her frustration on a heavy bag was both satisfying and a great way to keep in shape.

Without that physical outlet, she was left blistering the air for several minutes in Jareth's absence. She would have loved to show him a few of those kickboxing moves; her foot connecting with his chest, at full speed and force, might've taken that arrogant little grin off his face. And might've convinced him that her wanting him didn't make him any less of an entitled, obnoxious jackass.

He knew about her dreams. She hated him for that, her mind was a buzzing red blank of outrage. Her foolish imaginings were supposed to be private. Her little surcease from loneliness, a better way of feeling warm and loved than going out to bars and letting herself be picked up by smooth-talking strangers. In Sarah's dreams, Jareth truly did have feelings for her, and everything that happened between them came about because of that tenderness. The affection was first, before the passion.

It was a stupid fantasy, she had to admit, it always had been. A young lady's naïve imaginings, all begun out of misplaced emotions and maybe a little guilt for the way things ended. She'd had so many mixed-up thoughts in the aftermath of their battle. Even as she had stood in her own living room, as he flew away, beaten, she could remember tears on her cheeks as she watched him go, brushed hastily away along with the broken ache she had felt in her chest. And then, Toby. She had pushed away all of it in the moment, yelling out for her baby half-brother, up the stairs and away from the last chimes of the thirteen hours.

It had not been her last dream of the Labyrinth; she had gone back through the link to her friends and the adventures had continued, yet not nearly as grand as they had been that once. She had never seen Jareth again after that, not even as an owl. And for her part, if she even suspected his presence, Sarah had always awakened herself. It started as fear; then a flutter in her stomach. Sarah couldn't bear to see him and she knew it. Something was happening, something overwhelming. She always felt as she had in the final moments of their last confrontation.

The first dream had happened shortly after her sixteenth summer. The weather had been stormy and she'd been buzzing with fraught energy the whole day, blaming it on the lightning that had lit up the sky, gone night-dark with stormclouds. Fascination had her watching it from the safety of her bed most of that time, her mind racing. It had felt like a storm had been building inside her, too.

It had first happened that night, the dream coming to her so strongly. It had been a kiss, only a kiss, as they had danced in that ballroom. The words, his promises (mornings of gold, Valentine evenings), had twined into her mind, the feeling of loss that had pricked at her abating as she had let his lips meet hers. No, there was no place for her in the world of that dream, but she hadn't been able to help wanting a place with him.

Sarah practically growled at herself, disgusted that she was even allowing these thoughts in her head. As if she had had any clue at 'almost-seventeen' what he had truly meant by the two phrases. And now she did, more than she wanted to sometimes. There had been a reason she'd walled all of this off forever ago. It had never made sense anywhere but in that dream-state. He was a faerie king, surely he had his pick of mortals and fae. Why on earth would he love her? The human daughter of a lawyer and a theater 'star'? Why would he single her out? No matter what the damn book said. Want her, yes, he'd admitted that and Sarah had no trouble believing it. Men had paid attention to her from her mid-teens, creepy as that was, but it had never really occurred to her at the time. It had been harmless to her, never anything that had ever been acted on. She'd been too lost in her purple clouds and enchanted creatures back then to really notice too much. Secretly, she'd been thrilled to be thought older than she was, her development coming sooner than most of her friends. Nothing had been more amazing than someone older thinking her seventeen at fourteen. In reality, now, Sarah knew she had been lucky. No one had dared try to act on that oh-so-plausible adulthood. Other than Jareth, who seemed to see something more.

Love and wanting were two different things, though, and what she yearned for, always had, secreted away in her deepest heart, was the former. And she'd die before the words crossed her tongue.

And the reason why was all too simple. Now the asshole who ran this kingdom thought because she had wanted him once, because she might've wanted him to love her years ago in stolen moments, that she would love him at his command and yield to his will like she was some kind of romance novel heroine, all breathless flutters. Fuck that. Too much time, too many experiences, had scattered those chances like ashes. If he thought to control her with that, the Goblin King would learn otherwise, and at his own peril, soon enough.

The fact that he kept vanishing on her just proved he was too much a coward to face her. Sarah took heart from that, and turning her back on the treacherous doors, she took stock of the situation. There was still a girl to save and a Labyrinth to run. Her own issues with the king could wait.

Meanwhile, the castle in the distance seemed just as far away as when she'd begun. Fairytale answers and sensible advice were equally useless here. Maybe she needed to think outside the box.

Or above it. A crafty smile lit her features. That stone was put together quite roughly, and her gym had put in a climbing wall last year. There looked to be enough hand and toeholds to make it to the top … and she needed to make back that half-hour she'd just lost. Grinning triumphantly, Sarah scrambled to the top.

Traversing the tops of the stone walls was a whole other adventure, requiring balance and obsessive care over her footing. But Sarah figured using that route would significantly shorten her trip through the stone maze, where she could see everything. And stay above the traps. She was quite proud of herself, at least until she remembered she'd have to clamber down for the hedge maze. Even so, the aerial view from the stone section meant she would be able to plan her route in advance.

For a while, at least, Sarah didn't have to bend every ounce of her concentration on the Labyrinth itself. Predictably, her traitorous mind drifted toward the arrogant, obnoxious, gloating, glittery bastard who ran the place. And those damned dreams. Sarah felt her cheeks flush again, thinking about it. He knew. Of course Jareth had taunted her with the knowledge. He couldn't help being all smug about it, imagining those dreams were some kind of weakness he could exploit.

Little did he know.

She'd been lonely, dammit. Like a lot of teenagers, Sarah had been lonely even in the midst of a crowd, feeling as though no one really understood her. The fact that she had memories of an impossible journey through a labyrinth only set her apart further.

And curious. Right at the cusp of eighteen years old, with a steady boyfriend, and all that heavy petting and pawing in the backseat of his car had been thrilling. It had made her pulse race, made her head feel light, the way that ballroom hallucination had. When the handsome king had taken her hand and stepped into the dance, the two of them and every other dancer in the room whirling together, caught up in the same measured pace, Sarah had been exalted. With Kevin's breathless murmurs in her ear and his hands under her shirt, she'd felt the same anticipatory delight.

She'd hoped that finally going 'all the way' would be the culmination of that yearning. And like many a teenager with a boyfriend only a year or so older and not much more experienced, Sarah had been disappointed. Confused, at first, and when a second attempt was just as clumsy and unfulfilling, she'd felt cheated. Where was the rapture all the books and magazines talked about? Kevin acted like he'd had a religious experience, so why hadn't she felt anything more than awkward?

Sarah looked back on her own naivete with chagrin. She shouldn't have turned to her dreams for the satisfaction she wasn't finding with Kevin, but how could she have known the damned voyeuristic Goblin King would ever know?!

Realization struck her, and Sarah almost lost her footing. She should've known it wasn't just a dream. Because the dreams had continued to linger for over a year. Because her emotions were all a jumble where the Goblin King was concerned, even as she was sleeping with someone. Because when she'd caught his coat and pulled him to her for a kiss, whispering, "You know what I want, give me what I want," Jareth had known. The ballroom had vanished—replaced by the bedroom, and the black silk sheets that he'd made such a point of telling her were straight from her own mind—and Jareth had lain her down there and taken her with far more skill than Sarah herself should've been capable of imagining. She hadn't had the experience, back then, to know exactly what would make her toes curl and her nails claw down his back.

Jareth had, though.

"Son of a bitch," she whispered, shocked. It wasn't just that he'd known about her dreams. He'd been in that one. Oh God, he had to have been. How could she not realize?

Sarah had to sit down, stunned and horrified. It was bad enough thinking that Jareth had seen her dreams; she could call him a voyeur, be embarrassed about it, and go forth in righteous outrage. If he'd actually participated in them, if half of what was said between them in the night was true, then were they really dreams at all? Oh God, what was said…

She couldn't even hate him for it. There was no way to blame him or say he'd taken advantage of her. Sarah remembered too well that she'd been the one to push things beyond dancing and kisses. To be so blunt about what she had longed for. She'd even been of legal age at the time, for whatever that mattered in dreams.

In those dreams, she'd trusted him absolutely, and blithely believed those lines in the beginning of the book. Never imagining that he was real, that he knew she dreamed of him, that on some level her dreams might be true…

A snippet of song bubbled up from her memories: Oh my blue blue caravan / The highway is my great wall / For my true love is a man / Who never existed at all…

Sarah leapt to her feet as if stung, almost losing her balance and tumbling down the wall. "Nope, not remembering that right now. Not. Happening, " she said briskly, slamming a mental door on everything in the past. Whatever else was between them, Jareth had stolen a child—which was a weird damn way to get a woman's attention, come to think of it—and she had to make it to the castle to save the girl.

Nothing else mattered. And with her luck, Jareth might just be trying to psych her out so she'd lose.

She hoped.