Fade into You: Chapter 8 - Snug
Jareth set the tone for the weekend by delivering a preliminary "Hey, bear!" out the window as soon as they pulled into the campsite. Sarah was glad to see they were the only campers there. Her secret spot was hers to share with him alone. They unraveled from their seats and stretched in the fading sun of late afternoon. Jareth was lankier than ever, balancing on tippiest-toes, arms overhead, urging the long drive from his achy muscles. Sarah watched him and giggled with pent-up energy from being crammed behind the wheel for so long.
It felt good to laugh. They hadn't exchanged many words on the tail-end of the trip, alternating between reflective quietude and musical outbursts. That was fine, but Sarah was bubbling with anxious fizz—and endless questions. She had so much she wanted to ask him, so many things she hadn't realized she wanted to know, needed to know.
Jareth took a deep breath through his nose as he took in his surroundings. "It is beautiful here," he told her. "And it smells"—he searched for the right word—"unique."
She laughed again. "It's a pond. You can't really get around that stagnant water smell. It won't be so bad when the breeze comes through in the evening."
"Oh, dear, an impending chill," Jareth exclaimed with faux concern. "However shall we keep warm?"
It wasn't the first time Sarah had imagined sharing body heat with him, and the thought of it set free an unruly fluttering of wings in her abdomen. She tried to ignore the suggestive curl of Jareth's lips, but it was becoming more difficult the closer they drew to confronting their sleeping arrangements.
She tapped a mock contemplative fingertip to her chin. "Let me think." Cartoon lightbulbs sparked in her eyes. "A-ha! We'll set up on higher ground where it's dry enough to build a fire." She framed the word with her hands like it was a novel concept. "That should keep us warm."
"Genius!" Jareth crowed, grasping Sarah's shoulders and giving her a ferocious congratulatory shake as if she'd circumvented their inevitable glacial demise.
"Experienced," Sarah amended, shoving him away with a grin. "I've put my tent in too many places I've later regretted," she explained before hoisting the tent and sleeping bags over her shoulders and setting off to find a spot to set up. "Come on."
"I trust you to make my first time something I don't regret," Jareth told her sternly, following behind with an awkward armful of lanterns, firewood, and an ice chest.
Sarah quirked a brow at him over her shoulder.
"My first time in a tent," he clarified, nearly losing one of the lanterns.
"I see," Sarah said, her whole face a smirk that she did nothing to hide. "I'll make sure it's something to cherish."
"So generous," Jareth hissed. He scowled at Sarah when he realized they had spoken the phrase in unison. His lips pressed and rolled together in that brewing-up-a-comeback way.
Sarah trudged onward, letting her smile linger even as she felt him glaring a salty hole through her back. "This is perfect," she said as they entered a clearing. "We can put the tent here." She dumped her stuff in a level area shrouded by a rainbow of sugar maples. "We'll be able to see the pond down below from our sleeping bags."
When she turned and saw the intensity with which Jareth was staring at her, Sarah knew she was in for it. He glided closer, impossibly noiseless on the leaf litter like an owl on silent wings. "How romantic," he drawled. "Snug as two bugs in a rug." He stopped a breath away from her, his smirk stretching competitively wide.
"Rugs," Sarah corrected, her heart beating like a wild, caged thing. She could feel her smug expression slipping with his nearness, but she refused to let it fall. "We each have our own sleeping bag," she reminded him.
"And they each have a zipper," Jareth pointed out. "Extraordinarily customizable." His teeth flashed in a too-sharp grin.
Determined to maintain some semblance of the upper hand, Sarah stepped forward. She pressed her open palm to his chest and leaned in just a little. "Did you come all this way to fuck me in a giant sleeping bag?"
"I'd let you fuck me in the pond if you wanted, and I think you know it," he told her, tapping her temple where she did, indeed, know it.
"I didn't mean where we—" Sarah started to say before snapping her mouth shut.
Jareth hummed happily. "I know," he admitted. "Really, Sarah. Allow me my fun."
His hands slipped up her shoulders. Fingers kneaded needy muscles that responded to his touch without her say-so. But she didn't settle under his hands. Sarah coiled and uncoiled and coiled again. He felt it, for his fingertips stopped pressing, and instead, his hands cupped in a grounding squeeze that held and held.
When he spoke again, the teasing edge was gone from his voice. "I'm here to help you find lost love," he confided. "And, perhaps more selfishly, I'm here because you're going to be happy this weekend." Squeeze. Hold. "I want to see what your face does when you're truly happy."
Jareth smiled at her in that way that let Sarah know she had been released—free to move about the campsite like he hadn't just had her snared. But Sarah had never wanted to kiss him more than she did then. He was already pulling away, and her fingers tightened in his shirt reflexively. He looked down at her hand for a moment, something like surprise on his face. When his eyes rose to meet hers, a grin was spreading across his sharp features. "Let's make a home, Sarah," he said, his voice low. "Tell me what to do, and I promise I will do exactly as you say."
"We'll see," Sarah told him dubiously, though she somehow believed him. And she liked the way his promise sounded. A warm buzzing pulsed as his words turned over and over while they started to unpack.
She had set up camp more times than she could count, and she'd never considered it a particularly intimate act. And yet, working together to create a shared space for the weekend was undeniably personal. And the air was so still—the atmosphere unnervingly quiet.
Where was the frenetic cacophony of song that invariably exploded just before sunset? Where were the insects? The bullfrogs? Her red-winged blackbirds?
Jareth allowed Sarah to instruct him without comment. His face looked almost smug while he did so, hammering this and tying down that. Their knuckles brushed as they threaded the poles through nylon loops. He wasn't wearing gloves. She caught his eye, and he smiled at her, his bare hands a show of commitment to this roughing-it thing. The sleeves of his linen shirt rolled past the elbow, exposing the lean, corded muscle of his forearms. Sarah tracked the flex of tendons in his wrist—how they pushed hidden veins to the surface. She wanted to press her open mouth there.
It might have been the sweat that started it. Sarah craved the salt of it. That barely-there sheen at his temples and brow.
And then it was the teamwork: the you-push-that-way and I'll-pull-this-way of it.
His eagerness did her in. Jareth had made no protest about giving up his magic and seemed content with Sarah in charge. And to make it worse, the tiniest of knowing smirks clung to his lips as he followed her orders.
Sarah was so distracted as she built the fire that she forgot to give a proper demonstration. Flames caught the wood and held firmly—the last of the kindling smoldered to ash, its job done. She stared into the fire for a long moment, willing her thoughts to clear. When she finally looked up, she found Jareth perched on the hammock they had stretched between two oaks nearby.
Only Jareth could perch on a hammock, Sarah thought.
He made no effort to hide that he'd been observing her fire building. "You really would just… not die out here. Without magic," he marveled, looking genuinely impressed. "Remarkable."
"I used a tampon to get a fire going once when I was really in a jam," Sarah reported, ignoring a familiar tug of nausea.
"You're lying," Jareth told her. "Terribly. Even if I couldn't taste a lie on you, you would never use the phrase 'in a jam.'"
"You got me, Gangles," Sarah confessed before unfolding from her crouch by the fire and making her way to his hammock perch. "But I carry one with me just in case." She forced severity into her voice. "And so should you."
"I always do," Jareth assured her, slipping into the hammock and indicating a Sarah-sized space beside him.
Sarah laughed and climbed in. "So prepared," she praised, stretching with a squeal at the thrill of her new weightlessness, her legs dangling with his. She inhaled deeply, reveling in the familiar smells of the old forest and the pond below. "Are you sure you weren't a Scout?"
"I doubt it," Jareth said. "But I can't be sure. My boyhood was so long ago; I'm unconvinced it happened."
"You don't remember?" Sarah asked. She couldn't be sure if he was joking, but she felt her eyebrows knitting together all the same.
Jareth appeared unexpectedly pensive as he looked down to toy with the laces of his shirt. Delicate veins webbed across his lids, making him appear alarmingly mortal. Sarah watched his lashes flutter against his cheeks, unfairly dark despite being spun from silver-gold thread.
When he glanced up and caught her expression, he licked the pad of his thumb and smudged out the crease between her brows. "They don't have Scouts in the Underground, Sarah," he said with the patient exasperation of someone who has explained this a hundred times.
"Shut up," she told him, but her voice was gentle. "I meant your childhood."
Jareth's thumb slid down the bridge of her nose before he gave the tip a brief pinch. "I know," he acknowledged, and a smile slipped through.
But it wasn't a happy smile, nor was it altogether sad. Whatever it was, it hovered there over Jareth's face as he slipped his boots off and tucked his feet in. When he opened his mouth to speak, Sarah thought he would elaborate, but instead, he said, "Be barefoot with me, Sarah."
She shot him an incredulous look. He was being evasive, and his commanding tone was such a juxtaposition to his earlier performance of submission.
His happy-sad smile melted at the look on her face, his eyes glittering with the dare.
"Fine," Sarah conceded, deciding not to press him. She unlaced her sneakers and peeled her socks off. "Enjoy my road trip stench."
Jareth chuckled as she tucked her bare feet in beside his, stretching her toes indulgently as the edges of the swing folded in, cradling them in their private cocoon. They tipped back in a full recline—their knees and ankles pressed together comfortingly.
Sarah inhaled deeply again, but all she could smell this time was Jareth. A light tang of sweat clung to him from the day's heat. It was reassuring, somehow, but it also stirred something primal in Sarah that had her wanting his smell all over her. Her smell on him.
Her eyes locked on his bare feet, long and pale. Sarah had never seen them before, and they suddenly seemed more precious a reveal than his hands. How had she never wondered about them? "Your feet are fucking cute," she blurted. "Jeez, Louise."
Jareth stretched out a well-manicured foot for them both to admire. "These?" he inquired with feigned humility.
She laughed. "Put those away. You're going to hurt someone."
"As you command," Jareth said obligingly, looking pleased with himself. He nestled the foot in between hers.
Sarah cursed internally when her breath caught at the intimate contact—and again when Jareth sent her a sly smile. She felt compelled to portray a bravery that belied the blush creeping up her neck. She allowed the bottom of her foot to brush lightly over the top of his. Like she couldn't be bothered. Like they did this all the time. A couple of casual foot cuddlers.
He raised an eyebrow at her, impressed. Sarah held his gaze for a long moment before they both broke into giggles.
"Why are you laughing?" she asked him.
Jareth toed at her ankle with a cute toe. "I'm happy," he confessed. "Why are you laughing?"
Sarah's smile threatened to split her face in half. If this was what happiness looked like on him, she wanted to see it there, always. "I feel like a little kid in a fort with my favorite person in the world."
"Worlds," he corrected, stretching contentedly in the fading sun with a lion's groan and a lion's teeth and a lion's mane. An arm fell around her shoulders. Sarah could smell moss and lichen on him as he nuzzled the top of her head. When he spoke again, his lips were in her hair, his voice a low purr. "Nap with me."
Sarah let Jareth enfold her. Her arm and leg curled around him instinctively. They breathed in only each other and made no secret of it, their bare feet a languorous slide. Sarah wanted to press her body closer even as it was all she could do not to be lulled into a dream. She wondered if his heart thrummed as insistently as hers. She burrowed her face a little closer to listen, but it was difficult to hear over the growing din of the insects. And bullfrogs. And birdsong.
And the rumbles of Jareth's stomach.
"It's time for dinner," Sarah grumbled unhappily, her voice muffled by his shirt.
"The nerve of you to tell me what time it is," Jareth groused. "I didn't see a badge denoting punctuality on that vest."
A/N:
Special thanks to Geliot99 for beta-reading this for me. You are amazing.
I poured a lot of love into this chapter. I hope you like it!
I have so much more in store for them, and I'm stoked to share the rest of their trip with you all. Thanks so much for coming along on this journey with me, and as always, thank you for sharing your thoughts and reactions.
*drives off into the sunset listening to Carole King*