A/N: This story isn't abandoned, half of this chapter has actually been written for…over a year? But anyway if anyone still cares here is another chapter! Totally un-betaed, I reserve the right to update with a fixed version and if you notice any mis-spellings or stuff that doesn't make sense, please tell me! Also, dun dun DUN, one big truth about Heidi is at the end, at LONG last you can know part of what I know, just don't skip to the end to find out because you will be disappointed. Ok, that's enough author note, I love reviewers, go read the story!
PREVIOUSLY:
Chara rapped on the counter with a series of spastic movements to get the unlucky couple's attention. "We can fit you in today at seven after three afternoon. Go to the thirteenth office when the time is right." The appointment book flipped open and their appointment bled onto the page from within, squeezing between two lines and into the margins. Jerkily, she pointed down a hallway, barely avoiding putting her finger up Lydia's nose.
-SCENE BREAK-
"Chinese?"
"Fine!" He threw up his arms and rolled his eyes. "That's fucking great! I like egg rolls, dammit!"
Through half-mast eyelashes she considered him. Her toes were still kind of cold. And if he hadn't noticed her heartbeat pounding practically right under his ear…. "'Allow 45 minutes for delivery,'" she read off the back of the menu. "I wonder what we could possibly do to pass the time?"
AND NOW, ON WITH THE STORY!
Chapter Seven: In Which An Appointment Is Reached On Time
"Yes!" Lydia shouted. "Alright!"
Smirking victoriously, Beetlejuice grabbed her ass and crowed, "I knew you'd see reason!"
Not surprisingly, her rule of 'Nothing Below the Waist' was a bone of contention between them that he was worrying at like a hound dog. Mere begging and pleading had not swayed her, and his puppy dog eyes made her go 'Ew!' So he'd resorted to a tactic near and dear to his heart – waiting until she was preoccupied and half-naked to ask. But she was too canny for that. 'Do you like this?' 'Yeah.' 'Like it like that?' 'Mmhm.' 'Like for me to go down on you?' '…No!' However, negotiation had worked. Or, as Lydia would put it, whining so much she couldn't take it anymore, especially since it took his mouth away from other, more pleasant, activities.
So when he'd said, 'Can't I just, y'know, touch your legs a little? Gimme a fucking break, here!' she jumped at the chance to try to mollify him without sacrificing the spirit of the rule, which was no actual sex of any kind.
At the feel of his hands on her ass her eyes popped open and she sat up a little from where she had been languidly floating half under him, the chair having been abandoned about five seconds after they started making out. "That is not my legs."
"Says who?" he retorted brilliantly.
"Me!"
He moved his hands three inches lower. "What about here?"
She supposed that was about a third leg, but before she could answer there was a loud honk from outside. "That's probably the delivery guy."
"I'll get it!" He leapt to his feet and started to sink through the floor, leaving her to fall on her rear.
She reached out and grabbed at his arm – her hand went straight through, but there was something there, like an itch in her brain, that she managed to latch onto to haul him back up. "Aren't you forgetting something?"
He stared at her blankly.
"The money?"
"Oh, yeah, right! The money. 'Cause the dead are so well known for paying their bills." He rolled his eyes.
"Stuff a sock in the sarcasm and just take it, ok?" Scooping up the pile of cash near the phone, set out for just this purpose, she took his hand and shoved it in before pushing him through the floor.
He groaned and started picking bills out of his palm as he drifted down through the building, making several people shiver and shorting out a refrigerator he passed through. "Damn pushy broad…"
Lydia waited a second to make sure he was gone and then made a frantic dash to the bathroom down the hall, ignoring the strange looks her dress got. The worst thing about pretending to be a ghost, she thought as she washed her hands, was that there was no polite way to excuse yourself for a moment alone. What was she supposed to say, I need to haunt people for a bit? He'd probably offer to help, choosing precisely the wrong time to be chivalrous, or at least leaping at the opportunity to spread chaos.
Relieved as she was to find that he was not back yet on her return to her dorm, she also worried about what was taking him so long.
Meanwhile, Beetlejuice had reached street level and snuck up to the delivery boy's car. He had invisibly spirited all the bags of Chinese from the back seat of the fancy drop-top with the triangular plastic sign stuck on top and was headed back with the takeout bobbing along behind him like ducks when a thought occurred to him. What Lyds, didn't know, couldn't come back to bite him in the ass. And he wasn't ever going to tell her.
A snaggle-toothed grin stretching his face, he turned back to the mohawked delivery boy, who was tapping his foot along to his walkman and snapping his gum as he checked his watch.
Up in the dorm Lydia was taking the opportunity to change into the most hideous pair of granny panties she owned in the hope that they might, if not turn off, then dial down a certain someone's libido. Certainly they would give Lydia the fortitude to keep saying no – no way was she letting anyone ever see her in these! She was convinced they made her practically immortal, because she refused to be caught dead in them. She'd got them half on when she heard the girlish shrieking and the insistent honk of a car alarm, but she resisted going to look as she struggled to get the horrifying support underwear the rest of the way on and her dress adjusted before Beej floated through the wall.
He flung out his arms, shouting, "Hi honey, I'm hoooooome! And I brought dinner!" The bags of takeout floated in and dropped to the floor.
She blinked and sighed. "You – that's way more than we ordered. What the hell are we supposed to do with it all?"
He rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, ya see, it's like this-"
"No. I really don't want to know. Either your excuses or what actually happened. I just don't want to know." She sat down and grabbed a bag. "Let's just eat, ok?"
He blinked. "Hell, that's fine with me." Shrugging, he sat down too, although he missed the floor by a few inches. "Where's the Szechuan Chicken?"
This seemingly innocent question was, in fact, the start of a half hour long search through the take-out bags, which were only labeled with the order numbers, which were apparently assigned according to some arcane technique known only to Chinese restaurant employees. Perhaps they consulted fortune cookies, which would explain both the series of random numbers in two digit clusters and the one that said only, 'Beware of shrimp today,' which had made Beetlejuice snicker rather loudly.
There was much taste-testing and questions requiring deep thought, such as, "This is Mu Shu, alright, but Mu Shu what?" and, "If you eat two fortune cookies, and they had conflicting predictions, which one comes true? Or, if they're totally unrelated, if you eat the cookies at the same time, do both of the predictions come true at the same time?" By the time they actually found their own order, they were reluctant to actually eat it.
Lydia lazily opened the very last brown paper bag and peeked inside. Three white cartons, wax paper thing of eggrolls. "Here, Beej, I'm pretty sure this is the double Szechuan Chicken." She took out one of the cartons oozing brownish sauce and thrust it in his general direction, letting herself fall flat to the floor where she proceeded to hug her stomach with her other arm. "Oof."
"Don't ya want it? You're the one that ordered it." Beetlejuice didn't even look over as he waved it back at her before patting his paunch contentedly, laying prostrate in the air.
"I seriously couldn't eat another bite. I'm stuffed. And you ordered it too."
A mischievous glint sparked up in his eyes as he turned toward her. "Stuffed, huh? I—"
"Don't even dare to finish that sentence. Seriously. I'm not so full that I won't get up and hit you. Or just throw something at you." She groaned.
"Hey, is that a cockroach?" he said brightly.
"Change the subject why don't you…." She rolled her eyes at his lame attempt at a distraction, then rolled her head to the side to look at where he was pointing. She shrieked at the huge beetle moseying across the beige carpet barely a foot away from her face and scuttled backwards into Beetlejuice, was now avidly leaning forward. "It's a cockroach!" she whispered very forcefully, having modulated her tone by an extreme force of will. Bringing the neighbors running because of a bug was silly. She knew that keeping any building pest-free was an iffy prospect, but did her dorm really have to be infested with…with…! She didn't give a damn about a lot of different insects, ladybugs and moths were alright in her book and crickets and flies were mostly annoying because of the noise, but cockroaches were just dirty and gross.
Time seemed to stretch like taffy as she watched in gaping horror as his molding hand reached out past her, grabbed the cockroach up between his long, yellow fingernails and brought it, as she leaned out of the way and her head swiveled to watch like something out of the exorcist, up to his mouth! Where he proceeded to eat it! In two chomping bites, with all signs of evident enjoyment. He even licked his fingers afterwards and let out a belch.
She was staring, and she knew she was staring, but she couldn't stop. She couldn't even make herself blink, her eyes were fixated on his mouth. His dirty, dirty mouth. That had done things to her. And had just eaten a bug! She wondered why she was so surprised by that, given that she'd seen him do it before, but the memory of him chomping on the aphids crawling around on the model seemed to have been one she'd willfully suppressed. Otherwise she never would have let him stick his tongue there! A shudder worked its way down her spine, from the base of her neck to her tailbone.
"Whazza matter, honey?" he said, perfectly obliviously.
"I thought you were full," Lydia managed to say.
"Aw, I'm sorry, did you want some?" he sing-songed and playfully went for a kiss.
She recoiled desperately, throwing out, "Hey, what's the time? Don't we have somewhere to be?"
Beetlejuice thankfully paused in his efforts to plant one on her to nonchalantly check his timepieces and pronounce, without even a twitch, "We got all the time in the world, babes."
"Lemme see that," she said and reached for his arm.
He tried to twist away while at the same time entangle her in his arms, which resulted in him tying himself up in knots and made it easy for her to get the arm in a lock and pull up his sleeve.
"Holy -! It's three o'clock already. Beej, we're gonna be late!" She dragged him up, marched him over to the door and demanded, "Do that portal thing you do."
As she looked at him expectantly he slowly untangled himself and drawled, "Maybe I will, maybe I won't."
"Beej!" She crossed her arms. "We have an appointment!"
He somehow insinuated his arms through hers so that they were holding onto each other and gave her the ol' bedroom eyes trick, the dark pits under his brows smoldering with green fire. "We don't need no counselor to get busy, baby-doll." But she managed to block the incoming kiss with her hand sprawled over his face and shoving his chin back. He scowled.
"Don't you want to marry me?" she said, making her eyes wide and pouting at him. Time was of the essence. Normal tactics wouldn't cut it.
He mumbled, "Sure," through lips smushed up against her palm. "But we can just see a preacher—"
"Do you want to touch my ass?" she interrupted.
He nodded as far as her grip on his face allowed.
"Then get us to the marriage counselor on time!"
-SCENE BREAK-
Lydia fussed with her tousled hair and dress and tried to calm her breathing before she opened the prosaic door with frosted glass window and brass name tag inscribed with 'Heidi, Counselor Senior Rank, Special Circumstances, Department of Marital Relations.' She didn't remember precisely how they had gotten here in nearly the blink of an eye, but she didn't think she wanted to, either. Beetlejuice was sulking somewhat off to her left and had his hand on her backside, but she had promised after all. She would just have to block sight of his arm with her body.
Taking one last deep breath, she knocked and swung open the door.
The lady at the desk looked up irritably and snapped, "What is it? I'm on my…Lydia? Is that you?" She stood up, and moved towards them, holding out her arms and smiling. "Lydia!"
Lydia's jaw dropped and Beej's hand on her ass actually froze in place. "G-grandma?"