EDIT! I'm very sorry for anyone who tried to read this when all the quotations and things were deleted. I don't know why that happened!
DISCLAIMER: I am obviously not Tim Burton, Geffen, or any of the other parties that own the characters I am borrowing. Otherwise, y'all would have had to buy a book to be reading this :D Internets /= books.
A/N: This took a while, because…well, because. School, my crippling fear of failure, that other story I'm working on…anything could be the culprit ;) But, for those of you who were waiting for a new chapter, here one is! Quality yet to be determined.
Feel free to skip this part if you don't see your name here:
Rocket Happy, Jessica, xKayla xKatastrophe, Darbanville – your reviews delight me and are in a very direct way responsible for the making of more story.
Charm Shadow, also, your review is totally cool, though it does leave me wondering – is capturing a bad quality perfectly a good or a bad thing? Inquiring minds want to know!
PREVIOUSLY:
Turning around to find him glaring at the corner again and scuffing the shag carpet with his moldy bare feet, she said, "We need to talk."
He turned the glare on her now that she didn't have any interesting distractions visible. "No shit."
AND NOW, ON WITH THE STORY!
Chapter Three: In Which There Is Much Shouting But Little Talking
Beetlejuice pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, already lit, and took a drag, breathing it out heavily through his nostrils.
Lydia wrinkled her nose, but since it was one of the least offensive of his habits (the worst including vanishing her clothes without her permission), let him smoke without a word. And, now that she was no longer consumed with fear for her virtue, tiredness crept in – it had been a long day even before her best friends had almost been exorcised, she'd been strong-armed into marrying a ghost six centuries her senior, and dumped to wander in circles on a deserted island in an entirely different time zone.
They looked at each other and then away as soon as their eyes met, and she debated just curling up in a corner and crying herself to sleep. Talking could wait – assuming he could keep his hands to himself while she was asleep. But he probably couldn't.
He was fidgeting, flipping the cigarette around in his hands, and she wondered what was holding him back from saying whatever was on his mind. It couldn't be that he was feeling bad for what he'd done, could it?
The uneasy silence was getting really oppressive.
He burst out with, "What the hell's your problem now?" just as she blurted out, "You didn't show me the kitchen."
"The hell?!" His crazy eyebrows furrowed in bafflement and he violently tapped the ash off the end of his smoke. "You don't wanna do it because…I haven't shown you the kitchen?!" he said, starting in a strained quiet and ending up shouting.
"No, that's not…I was just pointing it out." She hugged her arms around herself miserably. "I don't…."
"Don't what?" He flicked his cigarette away, stalking towards her. "Don't want me touching ya, my own little wifey?" He got right in her face, with his bright green eyes blazing into hers, his lips scraping over hers with every word. She couldn't breathe, her eyes as wide as saucers. "Don't want my mouth on ya, don't want…" He rasped out the dirtiest things she'd ever heard, a filthy monologue of everything that he could do to her, barely touching her at all. Her eyes got even wider.
She stumbled back and slammed her hand over his mouth, trying to cut off the fascinating obscenities. "No," she denied shakily. "I don't!" He dragged his alarmingly long tongue across her palm, making her leap back, frantically scrubbing off the slobbery trail that wouldn't stop tingling. "Ew!"
"You're gonna hafta give in eventually," he said, slamming a splayed hand onto an invisible wall over her shoulder and leaning over her. "Ya agreed to marry me, part and parcel, the whole shebang, that includes sealing the deal, if y'know what I mean, and I think ya do." He leered and plucked at the satin coverlet where she was clutching it to her chest.
Narrowing her eyes, she straightened her spine and said, "That isn't the truth, is it? I mean, if the marriage was incomplete, you'd have been put Back when the Maitlands said your name." She almost wished he'd prove her wrong, that the marriage could still be annulled or dissolved or something, but she just had a terrible inkling dripping through her brain. There would be no daring rescue by the Maitlands, there was nothing Juno could do. The deal was already, so to speak, signed, sealed, and sent off in triplicate. "That kiss at the end of the ceremony DID something, didn't it?" Just now, his lips against her own, had had none of that stinging, absolute freeze that had stuck them together. No, his mouth was just chilly and kind of chapped. She rubbed away the raw feeling he'd left behind.
He reared back and stuffed his hands in his pockets, with an incredulous smirk and a quirked eyebrow. "What? Nah," he scoffed, "Would I lie ta ya, the apple a' my eye, the light a' my unlife, my very own precious sugarlips schnookums sweetie pie?"
"Yeah," she said dryly, scrubbing at the circles under her eyes.
He scowled. "Geeze, give your hubby the benefit of the doubt, why don't ya?"
"Besides the fact that I will never, ever call you 'hubby,' I AM giving you the benefit of the doubt – in fact, I have so many doubts that it's difficult to choose just one!" She took a step away, turned back with a frustrated look, then started pacing, dragging the red and purple coverlet around like a patched royal cape. "Everything you say is a lie! It's like…you lie just to keep in practice!"
"Why not?" he said, sounding genuinely puzzled.
Stopping stock still, she whirled around with a dramatic flare of satin coverlet. "Why not? Why not?!"
He quirked his furrowed brow. "What the fuck's wrong with hubby?"
She choked. "That's…? You – because it's stupid, that's why."
"It is not!"
"Another lie!"
"It's a perfectly good pet name!"
"Pet names are stupid!"
"Ya didn't fucking complain when I used 'em for you!"
"I had bigger things to complain about, or I would have!"
"Dammit, there's just no pleasin' ya!" He threw up his hands in exasperation, and rolled his eyes for good measure.
"Obviously!" she huffed sulkily, breathing hard. A drop of sweat trickled down the side of her face.
"Fine! Great! Y'know what?" He made an expansive gesture. "I'm free. I can do whatever I want, and there's not a single goddamn thing ya can do about it!" He stuffed his hands in his pockets and leaned over her, grinning nastily.
She shrank back into the quilt shrouding her mostly naked body, her knuckles gripping whitely, shivering despite the intense heat smothering everything.
When, after a moment, she had said nothing, he jerked his head in a sharp, satisfied nod, and marched out the door.
She stared after him, wide-eyed. When he didn't come back right away, she gave herself a shake and hurried after him.
He was in the living room, pulling on a striped, fringed poncho over filthy grey pants and an open-necked shirt more dirt than white. He turned around when he heard her push aside the beaded curtain and smirked at her as he jammed a sombrero on his head. "I'm going out. Don't wait up, wife."
And then he was gone.
She went and waved her arm through where he had been standing. Nothing was there, of course. "He left me. That bastard…LEFT me here. While wearing a sombrero!" She stomped her foot, then yelled at the ceiling, as if he could hear her wherever he was. "Fine! I hope you don't come back at all!"
There was, of course, no answer.
Shuffling back into the bedroom, she flung the stifling quilt aside and wrapped up in a marginally cooler sheet, tying the ends together in a huge knot to make it stay on by itself. Then she flung herself face down on the bed and just screamed her heart out into a pillow which smelled excessively of cheap hotel. Eventually the screaming dissolved into tears, which softened into sleep.
She dreamed of Beetlejuice getting eaten by a sandworm, and smiled.
-SCENE BREAK-
He hadn't left, of course. Beetlejuice might love having the last word, but he also wanted to be there if she started crying and saying, 'no, please come back, don't leave me alone,' so that he could 'comfort' her. He'd had a great line picked out and everything. So it was extremely annoying to hear her declare that she didn't want him to come back at all. He wasn't quite sure what to make of her tantrum afterwards, but supposed that it meant she was just too stubborn to admit that she wanted him.
He floated, intangible, above her sleeping form, invisible chin propped on invisible fist, and wondered what was wrong with him. He should be gone already, vamoosed, to see the world, find some liquor, have some fun with more agreeable chicks. But, well, this one was his. She belonged to the numero uno, namely himself. And he hadn't even had to try real hard to get her to marry him. She'd thought about his offer for less than a minute, hadn't even tried to talk him down. She'd said, 'I do,' of her own free will, let him put the ring on her, hadn't slapped him before he could kiss her or tried to bite him or knee him or a hundred other ways women had played hard to get with him before.
She had smacked him with her bouquet, but she'd explained that she was upset about not getting to say goodbye. He'd hadn't thought she'd care that much – after all, if she'd gone with her first plan to get away from them by jumping in a river, she wouldn't have gotten to chat a lot before being carted down into the paperwork mines. He thought she'd gotten over that after talking to them, but maybe she hadn't.
Or she could be upset that he didn't show her the kitchen, though she denied that being the reason she wouldn't put out. Maybe she'd expected more romancing first – a little wining, a little dining. Hell, most women expected that, even if they'd swear up and down they didn't. He might have been just a teensy, weensy little bit too hasty in his desire to finally (finally!) get a piece of Lydia. At least he hadn't tried to get it on in the sand out on the beach like he'd wanted to – he winced, imagining the spectacular fight that would have been. Unless, y'know, she'd have liked that? It was probably romantic.
He stared at her like she had scribbled the answers to his questions on her skin somewhere in order to cheat on a personality test. His fingers itched to perform a full body search for said answers.
This was probably the most amount of time he'd ever spent figuring out how to get in a girl's panties, and it was getting him nowhere fast. Usually, he didn't waste time on the prickly ones after they'd rebuffed him once or twice. And the easy ones…were easy.
A successful con man is an excellent judge of character – they know exactly what buttons to push. Beetlejuice, on the other hand, had an impish tendency to mash them all because he suffered from Big Red Button Syndrome. You see a big red button – you push the big red button.
His dilemma here was that Lydia seemed to have an infinite array of shiny buttons and he had no idea what they did. However, there was a simple way to find out – push every single one of the damn suckers.
Mind made up, he decisively thumped his invisible fist on his invisible palm, ignoring the fact that they went through each other instead of colliding when he was like this. He vanished again, this time from vicinity of the island (and also the entire hemisphere the island was in). He did have some errands to run, after all.
