The Moon is on Fire

(A Titanic Fanfiction)

Disclaimer: Jim Cameron owns these gorgeous characters and everything to do with the 1997 film Titanic; this story is meant for entertainment purposes only!

Author's Note: Buckle up, strap in, whatever you call it, folks, this chapter is LONG and has SOME MATURE CONTENT in the back half so BEWARE or ENJOY (whichever be your take on things in life). xx

Chapter 9: We're Off, Dear

April 18, 1912

I'd ordered a Spanish mackerel smothered in paprika sauce and my eyes watered when the waiter laid the hot plate down in front of me, tears springing from the spiced aroma, from the steam. I could feel the capsaicin on my skin, smoking in my pores. It felt fitting, really, since my whole body had been on fire in one way or another for days.

Fire. Shivers down the spine. All these interchangeable sensations, sides of the same coin.

I came to, from some kind of existential reverie, and regretted my food choice immediately, for my stomach would not stop turning and turning and tying into little knots that I was sure were internal organs headed into ruin absolutely forever. An hour before I'd been hungrier than I could ever recall in my entire life (having sustained myself on almost nothing these past two days save for some stale crackers, sips from a ancient bottle of brandy, and perhaps the world's most atrocious tap water) but now, back in abundance, food was somehow my last priority. I was spinning. My mind was spinning and I wondered if I would ever feel truly normal again. Life moving forward, it might just be a graveyard of everything I thought I once understood. And me, traipsing through it and I should have been mourning, cloaked in black; instead I felt quite literally like lightness.

Would I survive, I half-wondered, without consuming this wretched fish? I'd had, after all, three pours of a buttery Chardonnay and the colors in the stained glass windows of the Waldorf restaurant were starting to bleed together. Tangerines and Tiffany blues. Prisms.

I'd never before been this tipsy and also this happy.

"Are you okay?"

He sat too far from me, mouthing it. His body, something that had been melted against everything of mine in uninterrupted fashion until just an hour ago, now much too far from me. He was bathed in a halo of dim light, people moved behind his head, it was busy, and he seemed blurry. The place settings were spaced generously, with only the three of us at the table. Molly spoke to the waiter and it was a little clandestine, his check-in, eyes bright and wide and his foot finding mine in the most subtle of grazes under the white-clothed table. To be here, with him, and how odd. Almost as odd as it had been to see him in the dining room on board the ship but by now I suppose I realized nothing could surprise me about where he ended up. How snug he became, in every scenario. Jack Dawson to my immediate northeast: mouthing words in the manner of how silk is silent and gorgeous and sensual, smirking, in a suit jacket the color of fresh honey (Molly's doing).

All I could do was nod. My body, now prone to periodic and random paralyses, failed me once again; no one tells you when you are young and innocent and imagining becoming a woman that part of the process is feeling like an absolute imbecile.

"Rose, darlin', eat, please, you look as if you might just fall over into the food and burn that porcelain face." Molly, then, loud and back in our orbit.

Jack snickered and because I had no choice, not on any front really, I laughed softly as well and stabbed the fish with a fork, looking down into the heat of it as I chewed and then back up to the heat of him. How was I supposed to concentrate on something as trivial as food after what we'd done? Red red red red on my cheeks. Burning! I'm sure they looked the color of bleeding pomegranate seeds. His eyes met mine dead-on and he raised his brows, said to me with no words something akin to "can you believe it all?" Incredulity, gone. Shame, gone. My heart from my chest, gone.

His mouth as he brought food to it. It was irresistible, like something I could ravage, eat in one bite. His lips, pink and also purple tonight with wine, the heart shape of them. I placed one hand on my right cheek, turned from him, blocked him from my view completely so that I could eat. So that I might think. I could not handle Molly seeing so much of this, of how raw we were. I thought I understood it, him and I, before yesterday, but good God.

I yelled for him.

I yelled and yelled as my feet burned from the running, and I remained astonished at his resolve to ignore me, to move forward through the crowded streets without so much as a glance back to see if I was okay. He paused a couple of times. Perhaps he could track my scent from behind. I think I hated him. For five seconds at a time, running inside that morning crowd, I hated him, and I could feel how paper-thin the line is, that line between love and hate and how they are fitful bedmates who will never give up the ghost. At one point I stopped, southward on Lexington Avenue, and stared at the gold in his hair as he got smaller. I contemplated stopping completely. Sure that he'd come back for me. Livid that he'd not waited for an explanation in the first place.

I was angry, wasn't I, angry even at the moment I'd spotted him on the deck of that monstrosity of a ship. You cannot erase the moment that woke you up but you can despise how it strips you bare.

But of course I persisted and when he cut through Madison Square Park from East 26th Street I sneezed from the pollen in the air, gasped out his name once more; he stopped, then, in front of a crabapple tree that burned a radiant pink because the blossoms had all been late this year. I'd heard that.

I walked to him and my limbs ached from the movement, by now something well over a mile. Sweat at my brow, down my arms, the most unbecoming I'd perhaps ever looked but the most womanly I have ever felt, approaching him with this complex alloy of love and repentance in my eyes.

Jack dropped his bag to the ground and stood with hands on hips. I sighed. He sighed. I was oblivious to how many people might have walked behind me. The distance between him and I, that's all I could feel.

"Rose, I think I had a heart attack back there." A vague smile broke through but his eyes remained as if a brewing storm. "I just thought you'd already said everything you needed to say to him, ya know? I can't...I can't compete with someone like that."

I had no water this morning. My throat felt caked with sawdust. I tried to swallow through it.

"Jack, I had, I thought I had. It's not..." My voice, it was a croak and I closed my eyes, "I had no idea he was there, he ambushed me." But there was no lying to him, was there? I steeled myself for the more of it. "To be honest, completely honest, Jack, when we spoke just now I suppose there was an unfinished feeling." Even outside, even still eight feet apart, I could hear his sharp intake of breath, hear how his chest startled. I had to stop scaring him! I felt then infused with conviction, more of it than had ever burned from my toes up to the tingling of my skull. "But it's...it's all said now, it's all done. Without a single question."

"Will you be convinced to save your grandmother's rings then, Rose?" Molly rattled a tiny glass of blood-red cordial against the rings on her right hand and looked us both over. Knowing eyes, through all of it; dare I say she seemed to pose for our benefit a perpetual wink in one of them. But she kept her figurative distance. "I've told you that I don't mind sponsoring an expedition out West if it's conducted...properly enough." Her hair was pinned with sapphire clips and her lips, glossy and burgundy, moved in the light, near-glinting. She smiled. It was late, past nine. She'd ordered dessert. "Save the rings, you'll miss them." She pivoted with a flourish. "Jack, she'll miss them."

"I'm not going to tell Rose what to do," Jack laughed and put his elbows on the table even though by now I'm sure he knew that wasn't what one did at a place like this; he just didn't care. He turned to me and I held my breath, feeling stinging in my lungs from the weight of it, of how he spoke directly to me. A man to a woman. A lock of his rich hair, honeyed, fell in front of his left eye. "You know I agree with Molly, but..." he intertwined all his fingers, rubbed his thumbs together, and it was hard to tamp down the want of them. Those hands. He simply shook his head.

It was a show, talking about it again at all, for of course I knew. We'd spoken about everything.

It became clear to me, as we walked finally hand-in-hand in open air and on solid ground that we wouldn't be turning back to the Waldorf. At least not right now. He needed that from me, to feel me walking away from the world I knew. From the safety of it. The numbing ritual of it. I didn't realize until that moment, the two of us among many, ambling down this crowded avenue, how truly frightened I was. I would never have gone back to Cal but I suppose somewhere in the recesses of my mind I'd feared that this passion between Jack and myself might burn me up and send me in some fitful rage of cowardice back to my mother. To the comfort of comfort itself.

"Fabri did it, not me," and he pulsed my hand inside his, "he made fast friends with a guy we met in the holding room on the island, we sat for hours with him and so the time wasn't wasted." He spoke straight ahead, his posture much too pointed, still scared to look at me. Even though I'd told him in more detail what had happened with Cal. Even though he swore he understood. Were the sharpened edges broken off now? Were the lines of us blurry? "He's a writer, he's been living in London, but he has a friend who owns a boarding house on Bedford Street, in Greenwich Village. There's a small artists' colony there." It was another mile. In my past life it would have been in a taxicab, a motorcar, a buggy, something, under a hat and with no exertion. "A few of them are working to open a theater a few doors down. It's…it sounds nice, you know? They sound nice."

"How did he even…" We had to speak of it, of the plans. Because they were, after all, plans. This is where I'd be living. I had a vision of myself sleeping smushed in some hot corner and I felt as if I might vomit.

"He's Italian." Jack's voice lightened, he looked at me and the freckles just beneath his lower eyelids were more pronounced. He's a child of the sun. "Someone who speaks Italian and English, it must have been meant to be, huh."

Suddenly it was all so very real.

Silence between us, but cut off of course by the shuffle of feet and the noise of the street and the cries of a lost warbler.

"Jack, I…" All I knew is that I had to try and say something that would convey how vulnerable I felt but also how excited, convey how those two emotions could live together. But he got ahead of me.

"I know it's scary." We waited at a corner, stood still as a line of oil-black motorcars (the apparent tail-end of a funeral procession) passed right in front of us, smoke everywhere. He looked down at me. "I haven't been in yet, but it's….well the way he described it, the way Aldo, that's his name, the way he described it, it's nicer than anywhere I've been lately. It's nicer than what you might be thinking, Rose, believe me."

I had yet to meet Aldo. But this little tale reminded me of something I'd learned about Jack when I'd known him for just hours: he meets people and he walks into their stories like they are poems and we are all poets.

"How do you even know where you're going?" I let out a long shaky breath and leaned in closer to him. He smelled like he'd nervously smoked seventeen cigarettes. And of strong coffee. The intrusion of Cal into our reunion had stolen our exhaling into one another. Inhaling one another. At once I became so acutely aware of our bodies close together and some of the giddiness took over again.

"He drew a map, I'm very good at maps."

But he wasn't talking about maps when he lifted my chin with his forefinger and thumb. When the slightest movement of that thumb took my breath away. Hundreds of people in our vicinity but we were the only two people in the world. On the back of the ship we had been and I suppose it was our destiny to feel the drama in moments such as these, two souls caught in a web.

Although I suppose the way his skin feels against mine, it is a type of map. A newborn one. The rustle of the April breeze, a line. His collar flipped inside out and how I fixed it with one comfortable gesture, a line. How we wanted each other, how it was palpable...oh, a whole ocean in metaphorical ink.

"How did you explain me, to him, what does he know?" I wanted my chin to rest in his hand forever. Was that possible? "How are we going to make it work, if it's…"

"One room, one space?" His eyes softened a bit and I saw humor but also arousal in them and it was almost too much. I nodded, my bones weakening, I could feel them giving up. "I told him you were my sister, obviously."

"Will you let me bid you goodbye with a gift, then?"

Molly had ordered caramel custards in tiny pink pots and glass goblets of frosty peach ice cream. Once when I was twelve I snuck off to the deep crevices of our pantry with my cousin Diana and we downed an entire bottle of Merlot she'd snatched from her father's wine cellar. We drank it much too fast, not knowing any better, after all, and then were expected back at the table for huge slices of chantilly cake. It was an hour at the table of holding back sickness. My father knew. He looked at me and worked to hold back laughter, keeping me there as some form of harmless punishment. I almost felt that way now, what with the wine preceding the food and the amount of sugar I was piling into my confused belly. I felt drugged by the past few days.

"No, Molly, your help has been enough of a gift already." I sat my fork down and surveyed the table. Ends of bread. Discarded napkins. Jack's hand itching as close to mine as proprietary would allow. Molly was a little drunk. We were all so, even Jack, who from what I can tell holds his alcohol like you'd imagine a four hundred pound man to. "We'll be fine. The boarding house is comfortable." I looked at Jack and he winked, which wrecks the core of me, so I had to look back away immediately. "It's a perfectly fine place for us while we plan. While I get a hold on things."

Molly took me aside before dinner. Held me in a wonderfully warm embrace. She wanted to make sure I felt safe. I'd lied through my teeth and told her that I'd been set up with my own rooms at the boarding house, which was in a building that the residents called The Boyd (after the original owner, whose granddaughter was an artist and left the property to artists in the spirit of the nascent bohemian kingdom emerging in Greenwich). I prayed she wouldn't attempt to visit. I blushed, thinking at what she'd find.

"When we head west," Jack spoke with his confidence back, "will you show us your Denver?"

"Good Lord, child, I'll make you both the center of the Denver universe, what anyone thinks be damned." She sighed. "I'm at a loss, with you both. I want to give you more. I want to offer more. But I understand, I think, that you have to figure out what you want, want you need, on your own."

Jack seemed grateful for her words, as was I. It was then that he reached for a slice of peach that lay atop his melting cream. It was ripe, a deep and cold orange color, and I watched as he brought it to his lips.

We had to get out of this damned room.

The Boyd House was a cavernous brownstone, four stories high and, to my shock, rather silent and seductive in its calmness. I'd been in the Bohemian districts of Paris, just briefly, just glimpses, and Jack had told me stories over these past few days. Of life on the road, with other artists. So I suppose I just expected chaos. I imagined filthy mattresses pushed against walls, or no mattresses at all, rats scurrying about, perhaps music carrying from room to room in merriment but with a film of dirt hovering across it all. It was hard to move past the preconceived notions in my head. I think that's what Jack was picking up on, what prompted his hesitation with me today. More so than seeing me with Cal, it was that, it must be.

Aldo and Fabri were off on some errand. We'd checked in with a woman crouched at an oak desk in a tiny alcove down on the bottom floor. She was beautiful, maybe forty years old but with smooth olive skin and raven hair worn in a short bob that moved and framed her face in a dozen different ways as she spoke to us. I waited for questions. I waited for judgment.

But none came. Jack and Rose Dawson, assigned room number 7.

Ours was on the third floor. The staircase was barren save for a string of gorgeous little lanterns that someone must have cut out meticulously from a thousand sheets of magenta-hued paper. I couldn't tell the difference between the thudding of our footsteps and my heartbeat as we climbed. I had nothing with me. All of my belongings were still back in Molly's suite. She'd be wondering where I was. In some ways I was wondering where I was.

I was blinded by the immediacy of clearing the air when we walked in, so much so that I didn't even see inside the room yet, didn't register any contents, just white light streaming in. I turned to him as he closed the door softly behind us, rushed to him in the small space and held both his forearms just a fraction of a second after he had dropped his bag to the floor.

"Jack, I would be here even if it were less, if it were worse, if it were harder than this," tears threatened in the corners of my eyes but they were the kind that send goosebumps down whole patches of skin, that feel heroic just out of their purity, "please believe me. I can feel your worry, I can feel it." I smiled gently at him and my eyes felt so wide.

"I don't want anything to be harder for you, good Lord, Rose, no, not to prove anything," he bent his head down, bringing his breath close to mine. "I want you to be happy, you know that. But it's so much that you gave up. And this…" He gestured around him to a space I hadn't even yet processed. "This is when it's easier, this is the nicer edge of things out here, out here where everything is fucking unknown. Horrible, sometimes. I have no idea what we're doing, do you?" I shook my head, felt the tears fall down my cheeks in hot, hot lines. He paused, lost control of his breath. The depth of him! "I don't either. But I promise to make it as easy as I can."

"When it's not easy, I'll push through, I'll pull my weight, Jack." I moved my hands to his face. I looked back, around, jolted into where we stood and a weight the size and shape of an anvil seemed to fall from my shoulders. The window was large. This room, it was a box but a well-lit one. Meant to sleep two (brother and sister!), there was a decently-appointed mattress on a platform in one corner and an ancient, jade-hued canvas-cloth daybed in the other. But things were so small in here that the distance between the ends of the two was possibly only about three feet. The third corner, a sink. The fourth...nothing.

When I went off to school and began to imagine my life beyond the walls of my parents' home there was a section of Jane Eyre I would recite over and over in my head and it came to me at this moment, for somehow I'd ended up entirely in its grasp, far away from the sheltered existence that would have prevented me from ever living it out in the before:

"I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst it's perils."

"The real world is wide," I whispered, and I'm not sure how much of it all I'd said aloud and what I didn't. The energy between us was like a drum, pulsing, it wouldn't stand not being able to explode anymore. It would hold no longer, like a dam with waters too heavy and spilling over. "Jack, I do know one thing that we're doing." And I stepped closer, brought my lips to his neck, felt his heartbeat there like a hummingbird and savored what it felt like to know he was nervous. I was nervous this time too.

"And what's that?" His arms came around me, took my waist, took all of it, with force, his forefingers dancing at the very bottom of my back and it was the first time he'd touched me intimately in a time, in a space, with no urgency; this was the first time we would be able to follow the prickling, delicious ends of it wherever we wanted to.

I darted my tongue against his skin. Just once. It was enough to take us ten thousand miles.

"This, all of this." I pulled back and looked up at him and it was as if some wire that had been waiting patiently to be crossed with another finally let loose, met its match, ignited. Jack Dawson with hungry lapis eyes, so hungry I groaned as his mouth crashed down on mine and he tasted like he'd never tasted before. It might have scared me, had I not steeled myself for how much I would feel in all this change; on the ship he'd tasted like salt and the sea and something forbidden, but now he tasted like some kind of earth I craved from the center of me. My sweat, his sweat, my tears, his tears, meeting in our mouths and his tongue like a centrifugal force that made itself, in an instant, home. I'd been taught to run from anything impure, unclean, but I wanted everything messy with him, for our bodies to lose any foresight and exist in some primal mode that scarcely knew the definition of shame.

I wanted to taste every single part of him.

It was not even noon. Bright light shone on us as we fumbled with our clothing, but thankfully the view from our room (our room!) was horrible, just a stretch of dull beige brick from the neighboring building across the alley, and so I thought that perhaps it was okay to show ourselves to this little sliver of the world without any reproach.

I'd wanted him again in every moment since the Renault.

My breasts were freed by his quick work just as I fumbled with the button of his trousers and we shifted to the center of the room, pulling on one another. Despite the density of the moment he stopped to smile, that broad smile of his, recognition from him that this connection was perhaps as pure as ever after all.

In just a few days' time I felt as if I'd learned how to handle a man and it was an invigorating feeling, reaching without hesitation to push every bit of cloth from him, to reach for the hardness of him first, before anything else, and feel him all the way, moving up and down to test his waters, so to speak. He gasped and rushed to push my dress the rest of the way down, kissing along my collarbone like butterfly wings; the heavy and the soft of it, the sensual and the pressure of it.

"Rose, Jesus Christ." He settled into my hand, pushed, relaxed against me, rolled his head and his tongue against so many little bits of my skin that I lost track. We stood completely bare and despite my newfound confidence I blushed at it after a few more seconds, put my lips at an ear and asked him to lay down with me.

The sheet on the mattress smelled, inexplicably, like lilies, and underneath him I felt like a fairy in a meadow, ripe if a person could be ripe. Can a person be ripe? I was so wet that I felt I could come undone simply from the movement of him on top of me, just from the friction of his naked limbs against my own. His legs were coarse with hair but somehow also soft. Life is so short and the world is so wide, I thought, and if this thing between us was a flame that could burn out I would take it all the same and put every bit of myself into it. Any minute of it. Every second of it.

"This is all I could think about." He spoke in between kisses, lips clicking, biting; I felt as if a bee had stung mine. "The last day on that damned ship, in that line last night." He left my mouth and took his to my throat, then down to the bridge of skin between my breasts, teasing but I don't believe he intended it to be. "You're all I think about, Rose." And then he moved blessedly to my right nipple, taking it inside his whole mouth so casually that I gasped at the familiarity, gasped at the reality of it. It was an excruciating kind of pleasure, his teeth there, something that skirted the line between a luxury and an ache.

"I thought about you as well," my voice was raspy, I barely recognized it. I had. I'd thought about him as an amalgam of course, of how much I loved every piece of him, but this had consumed me as well, our bodies together, stacked and pliable. How his tongue had slid along the edge of my abdomen before. How my daydreams had taken his tongue so many other places. He paused at my breast and planted one tiny kiss on it, I saw the paleness of it pucker, and then he looked up at me in wonder.

"What did you think about?" His hands journeyed with great purpose up my sides and one came to my face, thumb on my bottom lip and I brought it into my mouth first, kissed one finger first, before I had the courage to speak. He waited. Patient but worked up inside. I could see it.

"How astounding it is to want you." I touched his face too, felt for the very first time a bit of stubble that had formed on his smooth cheeks. "I couldn't sleep." I couldn't. Could I? Could I tell him what I'd tossed and turned thinking of, what had heated my body in the dark of night? I hitched my right leg around his torso, eliciting a low moan from his throat but his gaze did not waver. Why couldn't I sleep? He asked it. "I thought about kissing you." Breath trapped in my throat. "I thought about you kissing me, Jack," he settled back down upon me, face to face, lips hovering on lips. A ghost of a kiss. "Not just there." I searched his eyes. "Everywhere."

A beat.

Ten years.

"Everywhere huh?" A laugh, soft, effortless. Like the stress had gone away again. I could feel his breath all over me, along every centimeter of skin. I nodded and played along, giggling in a way I don't think I'd allowed myself to since right before Lovejoy found us in that corner on the deck. Those people, the hunters, hunters of us, they were gone.

An ear. "Here?" An elbow. "Here?" And I felt myself pressing back into the bed at the joy. No, no, no, I whispered frantically. But yes, yes, yes. He journeyed all over. Kisses that burned blissfully. We were a map. We were a map after all. He traced one all over me until I laughed and laughed with him but I was also in pain from it, from the building up of it. He landed between my legs very suddenly, but, I realized, he had actually done so in quite a calculated fashion, sitting up on his knees and bending over to kiss one of my calves. Seeing myself just there for him, nothing between us, the milk-white of my thighs, how they made a triangle for him up and outward from the patch of copper hair. I had never imagined every part of myself uncovered like this in the brightness of day, in the presence of someone. Let alone a man like Jack. (Let alone any man! Even though I'd been engaged to one, which is a thought not easily reconciled.)

"Here?" And he leaned forward more and his lips fell higher, upon my knee. I nodded. He asked again and this time the center of me was burning, wet and burning because the kiss fell inside my left thigh. Yes, please, I begged. A million times, yes. "You thought about this?" He looked up at me once more, almost laying down now and poised between my hips, almost exactly as he had been in my fantasy this morning. I was worried I might pass out but found the voice to answer him. Yes. "Rose." He was enamored of it, shocked by my having already taken us here in my mind. Perhaps he had already as well? He lost his voice, so close to where I was just simply vibrating for him, and all he could manage was a nod of approval before his mouth traveled the final inches and then it was on me.

I have never felt such exquisite torture or imagined that pleasure was something you could feel in the outline of you temples, in the curl of your toes. It was everywhere as he murmured into me, something I couldn't even understand, and then his tongue moved, dare I say, something akin to expertly, again, again, in different spots until I held his head and had the wherewithal to declare "right there, right there" when it reached perfection. Even the texture of his hair as I combed it with my fingers, it was almost too much.

I stopped him just before it all came crashing, mostly because I felt so raw that lines of searing pain throbbed into my thighs, then up into my belly like claws of a tiny creature. I was squirming and reached for him frantically, in disbelief, always, at the handsome angles of his face and particularly so when he is this close to me.

I tasted myself on him in the instant he entered me. Exquisite and mystifying, frightening, no way around it, and the world, even in this tiny room, stretched out within and beyond us.

Author's Note: OKAY, WHEW. Sorry that chapter took awhile. Hope to get back to it once a week or so!

A side question: I've gotten a couple of new reviews and some messages regarding Bird on a Beam as of late, requesting I re-visit that Jack and Rose for some kind of additional epilogue. I never anticipated doing so but I also never anticipated how much that story would continue to matter to people and really resonate (which I am so grateful for, by the way). If that's something you would like to see, feel free to give me some feedback about what you'd want from it. Way into the future? Or more in the 1920s?

Cheers xx RGD