Sarah rolled the orb idly between her fingers, a prayer lodged in the corner of her heart. It took her several minutes of rapping her fingertips against the tabletop before she could bring herself to open her mouth.
"Jareth, please, I'd like to know what you want of me."
Nothing stirred. The room continued in its static unity.
Gripping the ball now with some force, she looked starkly out the window into the crescent moon's silvery gaze.
"Jareth..."
"Ask for me once, ask for me twice, now what would happen if you called out thrice..." His voice cut through the deadening air.
"Sounds like turning an inquiring outsider from the temple," Sarah mused, smiling despite herself.
"Whose temple, would that be, Sarah?" He'd come around from behind, hooking his features over her shoulder. His delicate proximity struck her senses, leaving her devoid of any suitable quip.
Noting the effect his presence authored in her, the Goblin King decided to step back and lean against the table she'd been sitting at.
Released from the intensity of his nearness, she felt a sigh of frustration escape her lungs.
"Now, what's the matter, love?"
Love, she thought, how bittersweet to her these pet names! How could she be certain of anything anymore. And yet, whenever he spoke to her endearingly she could not help but revel in the strange wonder of it.
"Do things really have to be like this?" She gulped, hoping courage would help her to the point.
"Like what?" He purred and reveled in the deepness of his own larynx.
"Do you test me now, like this? Is there something I do which prevents me from understanding as I should?" Her palms lay pressed and sweaty over the glossed mahogany.
"Sarah, I asked you to clarify," his eyes glowed with an immutable intensity. Sarah swallowed again and prayed she wasn't barking up the wrong tree.
"You know, I mean with me here and...and..." her resolution faltered. She'd lost the magic train of argument that would perfectly reveal the condition of her heart.
"Are you unhappy?" he let his forehead dip as if to concede some measure of sympathy and genuine sincerity.
"I am conflicted."
"Oh, are you?"
"Yes."
"Go on."
"I don't know what you want from me. If I knew you fully intended to take me as your queen but that you were waiting for some reason, then that would be one thing. If I knew you were toying with me and had no intention of claiming my heart as a true lover, that would be another. If I knew it was through some oversight of my own that you have not had the occasion to claim me, still another. But the truth of the matter is that I do not know. And therefore do not even know where to go with myself from here."
"Do you want me to take you?" he murmured with a smirk blooming on cheeks.
"Well, yes, of course! I thought that much had been obvious."
Jareth took a moment to strut in a half circle around the room before facing Sarah once more.
"Remember, Sarah, it was your choice to fall in love with a Fae," he chuckled.
"I know..." she conceded slightly deflated.
He let her sit for a moment with hair slowly falling over her half-closed eyelids. He noted the curve of her shoulders, the way her spine folded forward limply, bringing her chest inches from the table's surface.
Lost for a minute in the vision of affection's ore, he started lightly as she jerked her head up toward him, tongue clearly bearing some new burning truth she could no longer contain.
"I really wish you would take me. Maybe I thought I was ready before. And maybe you were right in thinking I wasn't. But now, now it's all bound up together. Now the waiting and the sharing and the being and the loving are all one. I can't keep them separate in my soul anymore. I just confuse myself when I try."
He parted his lips to speak, but stopped himself when he saw she hadn't finished.
"And if you mean for me to walk away from all of this as mortals wake from dreams to go about their earthly lives, then it's best you make it exceedingly clear to me that that is your design. Otherwise, I'll forget to wake up and keep dreaming this dream that won't seem to leave me be...Jareth, this one thing I ask of you, please don't weave me a dream only to leave me spinning in it all by myself."
To Sarah's surprise, Jareth moved in and knelt beside her. His arms reached into her lap and carefully took her hands in his. Sarah's eyes grew wide, shining with sudden emotion. She shook her head, still confused.
"Oh, Sarah. You know, I'm not the only one who complicates things. But don't worry. I live inside you for a reason. And you in me. I didn't think it was possible to live inside another when I first had you in my Labyrinth. There was a lot I didn't understand about love then. And plenty still to learn."
He'd gathered both her hands in one of his, a free set of fingers now tracing circles down Sarah's cheeks.
"When can we be together? Why do I call out into empty silence most of the time?" her voice came out much weaker than she'd intended.