Author's note: Thank you for reviewing the story so far, and for writing such lovely reviews. I hope you continue to enjoy it.
He didn't want to visit, really, but it had been over a week since the engagement dinner and it was starting to look, his aunt had warned, like he'd forgotten he was affianced at all. So he took a bouquet of roses, though they were not to his taste, and girded himself and was able to face the prospect of seeing his new fiancée after his breakfast was digested.
He declined Lurch's invitation to drive him, and Thing's offer of company, and in an unusual move drove himself. He was suspicious of their motives too; they trusted him as little as he trusted himself. It was hard to concentrate though and sleep was so scarce these days that keeping his eyes on the road proved more difficult that he'd imagined.
His dreams, in the intervening nights, had been so full of her.
She would invite him to her, hands and eyes and body beckoning and devour him softly, inch by inch. Throughout the dream, he would weep with pleasure and anguish and then suddenly he would jolt awake in an agony of arousal. His sleep would come fitfully time and time again, and each time it was the same. The same desperate hands on him, clawing and pale and soothing. The same disastrous smile.
When he reached the house he rattled the door and the ancient, decrepit butler answered.
"Mr. Addams," he bowed lower than his already folded back insisted, "A pleasure."
"Hmmm, yes," Gomez looked around the silent hall, "Are they in?"
"Miss Ophelia is out, and her parents are…" the butler paused, trying to recall, "They are lunching. Miss Morticia is-"
He thrust the flowers at the butler and was about to turn.
"Miss Ophelia, master, will be home soon. And Miss Morticia will keep your company, I am sure."
"It's alright, truly."
The butler slammed the door, determined to seem like a decent host, but then pushed the flowers back into his hands and scurried away. He waited for about five minutes in the silence of the hall before calling out and no one answered. With a frustrated sigh he strode forward, heading towards the back of the house.
The melodious humming wasn't immediate and he heard it in increments. A note, a bar, a phrase, then realisation; Claire de Lune in the voice of a siren.
He stopped at the sudden light as he turned the corner and she was there, her back to him, framed against the blinding light of the day which filtered into the conservatory. She was tending to a plant but another was curling around her arm, its spiked vine digging into her arm, and then trailing in red scratches over her shoulders and round her neck.
"Mama missed you too," she cooed as the plant pressed itself to her cheek.
A pale hand, delicious as a contrast to the vivid green of the petulant plant, came up to tickle the bell of the vine's flowering, gruesome mouth. Something else stirred then, an appreciation or the womanliness, the maternal purr, of everything she was in that moment.
A vivid, deceitful vision flashed into his mind then; her, cradling an ebony haired child with his moustache. She was older, but no-less beautiful, and he was beside her bed as she presented the baby to him. It wasn't the first, he knew instinctively, maybe the last. It was years from now – it was after years of marriage.
The lump in his throat grew and began to choke him.
She turned suddenly, as if the plant had given him away, and the vine slithered down from her arm and wrapped protectively around her middle.
Her fingers stroked the shuddering verdure around her impossibly small waist.
"Oh Cleo, calm down," she said to it, then turned round and looked up.
Her face was blushing with the colour of the day and there was something vulnerable about it too. What was ordinarily perfectly set hair was curling into tendrils around her face and her lips were, if it was possible, even more plump and bloody in the flush heat of the sun.
He wondered if he'd ever be able to find the words to convey such beauty, to put what he witnessed into prose.
"Forgive me," he bowed lowly, the words pressing out, "I did not mean to startle you."
There was a pause but as he lifted his head she said:
"You didn't."
Despite the gentleness of it, it carried over the space between them. She may as well have screamed it at him for he heard every breathy syllable.
"But you did startle Cleopatra," she purred as she stroked the trunk of the plant, a gesture which made his vision blur, "Didn't he my darling?"
She stayed exactly where she was and so did he.
"I-I…" the words wouldn't come as he watched the rhythmic motion of her hand, "I…she's incredible."
He didn't know who (or what) the compliment was addressing.
It seemed to please her though and the sharp lines of her body appeared to soften a little.
"Isn't she? I've had her since she was just a seedling," the plant wrapped around her proudly and she trailed a gentle finger along the spiny thorns, "Yes I have."
He swallowed audibly again.
"My sister," she said softly as she turned back to the table, "Will be home soon. You should wait in the parlour."
"I-" his response, in the face of such a humiliating dismissal, disappeared as he spun on his heels.
He didn't go to the parlour though; he bashed past the ancient butler, nearly knocking him clean off his feet, and fled.
The things he would do to her? He'd murder her slowly, agonisingly, for the pain she was inflicting on him. How dare she dismiss him? He thrashed around his own study as these things ran through his brain. His paperweight crashed to the floor in a million slithers, his books lay ripped and strewn across the room and it was only when Thing entered that he stopped.
The pet had scurried backwards though, from an airborne first edition of 'War and Peace'.
Gomez, his ire seeming redundant now, slumped on to the floor beside his desk.
"Oh Thing!" He flung himself, prostrate, on the oak floor and thumped his feet.
Thing, used to these fits of mania, simply drummed his fingers in questioning sympathy against the wood.
"I'm in love," he groaned, "And she despises me."
Thing tapped out his platitude on the floor.
"Not bloody Ophelia," Gomez snapped, lifting his head and slamming it back down onto the surface, "I couldn't care less about her. I really couldn't. No, no, no. Morticia, Morticia, Morticia."
Thing jumped onto his back and started to scuttle up and down his spine soothingly.
"It's no use," he quickly flipped, so Thing was forced to jump 90 degrees to land on his chest, "She doesn't want me."
Thing tapped his disapproval.
"I know, I know," he groaned, "Not to mention that she is my fiancée's sister. You needn't remind me."
Thing just tapped his cheek lightly and then swiped away his tears.
