Wordsworth – Chapter 20

The greatest romances were always mired in tragedy.

“Lisa…” I say, trailing off as she twists the key to her apartment, and the door swings open.

She turns to me, a nervous smile on her lips, and I can see the brief twitch in her eyebrows as she suppresses her power, as she tries not to get an answer before she asks the question.

“Tay… I… It’s the end of the date, isn’t it?” she says.

And something inside my chest that now pumps inky words rather than blood hammers against any restraint as I step forward and rest my lips on hers.

Her hand rises to glide between dark tresses before she pulls me against her, pulls me inside her apartment.

I close the door behind me, almost tripping as I push it with my foot, and then my hands are around her waist as she walks backward with me following her touch, her warmth, her scent, more faithfully than I would any leash.

We don’t turn on the light, letting the city on the other side of the windows provide it for us.

“You know I love you,” I whisper breathily against her lips.

She goes to answer.

And I take her words away.

My hands lie between her shoulder blades, over her denim jacket, pressing her to me, asking for her touch, her warmth, and my lips are on hers. Not… hungry. But demanding.

She bends back, and I lean forward. Over her.

Her fingers pull off the purple scrunchie, and my ponytail spreads out into wavering locks that have a bit of petrifying gorgon in them.

Then those very same fingers trail across my scalp, between inky strands, and across satin pages, and I shiver around her.

“Tay…” she pulls away, her eyes wide with far too many things for me to name except under my breath and at a speed only I’ll ever understand. “This isn’t… the third date, is it?” she finishes with the grin of the fox.

Of a fox unsure of itself, masking insecurity with humor and wit.

And so, I…

There’s a struggle in me. The part that wants to stop, the meek Taylor who’d never do anything to risk Lisa pulling away from me, abandoning me, and the bold Wordsworth who’d never allow that to happen

The Lost Girl, and the Girl Who Was Found.

But there was a point where the two met, when they reached an agreement as they beheld a city that should have had more lights wandering through the dark of night.

“There once was a beautiful nymph,” I say.

And Lisa’s eyes widen.

But her lips don’t part.

And so, slowly, deliberately, I divest myself of the bulky jacket she gifted me, my borrowed top and purple-stripped sleeves revealing my shape in far more detail even as my inky gloves crawl up from my black nails and beneath the stretched fabric.

My boots grow the kind of heel I’m now comfortable with, and Lisa takes precisely three steps away until she meets the back of her sofa.

Her steps were hurried, almost panicked.

Her eyes are… eager.

And so I slowly chase her, one foot in front of the other, my hips swaying, their curve enhanced by the black, ripped jeans clinging to them.

And I speak.

Of a beautiful nymph, far too beautiful. Of somebody who had sworn off love and desire, who had deemed to emulate a virgin goddess of the hunt.

And of the brother of that goddess.

I tell her of bright, shining Apollo, of his beauty and might, and my words clad me in the radiance of a black Sun that nonetheless shimmers over the wooden floor of her home.

I tell her how Apollo burned for Daphne.

And of Daphne’s ultimate rejection.

She knows. Of course she knows.

And her mouth opens to say something, to maybe protest, maybe deny the parallel.

Then I take the last step, and I’m in front of her. Above her. Until my words lift her.

They crawl up her body, over her jeans, in smooth bark that should be pale yet isn’t, until they encase both her knees and slither up her sides.

Lisa could be paralyzed with horror. She could beg me to stop.

Her hands reach to my cheeks, cupping them even as I keep speaking of the chase and its ending, and her thumbs go over what once were my cheekbones as she closes her eyes and bites her lip.

“Tay…” she whispers in the kind of agony I know far too well.

And then the myth reaches her arms and pulls them up and to her sides as hanging branches sprout down from them, laden with swaying leaves and the breeze of a river that would’ve been Daphne’s father.

Her back arches as wood made of ink supports her body, and her chest is offered to me, stretching her top in far too tempting ways as her jacket falls open by her sides.

Then I get on my tiptoes and kiss her shut eyelids with as much delicate tenderness as I can manage.

“There once was a nymph,” I repeat, “who was too beautiful not to be loved. Even if she didn’t want to be. And her fate was terrible, because such are the whims of the gods, but… It didn’t have to be. Because Love inflames, drives one to madness and mad deeds, but… It also elevates. And so, the beautiful nymph who was honored through the whole world, the woman whose hair became leaves, and whose leaves became crowns… could’ve been admired. Could’ve been left alone. And the god could’ve left.”

“I don’t want you to leave,” she whispers, eyes still closed, lips brushing against my fingertips.

“I am not a god,” I answer with a wry smile as I keep feeding my power, my words, through the mere emotion of seeing Lisa’s body offered to me as if floating down a stream, as if peaceful Ophelia had always been alive and well after leaving the madness and cruelty behind.

Lisa giggles. Her eyes open.

“Aren’t you?” she asks.

I almost laugh.

But that is as much of an opening as I could’ve asked for.

Because then I tell her of a hero who stole from the gods, who revealed their secrets to mortals.

I can see her smirk glint at it.

And I answer it.

Because the roots of her laurel tree spread into a pool that covers her entire apartment, soothing water rising up our bodies as the bark becomes rougher even as it disentangles from her body, only her shoulders remaining bound in branches that are now weighted down by fragrant fruit whose smell is only enhanced by the blossoms floating on the surface of an inky black pool that reflects a Moon that is not inside her home, but should always be.

And then I tell her more of Tantalus, and of the punishment the gods gave him.

To always crave what was almost in reach of him.

To thirst, and have water recede from his lips. To hunger, and have fruit dangle just out of his reach.

In truth… It’s not Lisa that’s Tantalus. It’s not her that’s been punished with unfulfilled yearning night after night.

Or… Or maybe she also is. And that’s what I need to find out.

“Tay,” she breathes out, her tone almost feverish despite the black water reaching up to her chest.

Through waters of ink, I swim toward her. And then, impossibly swiftly, I stop just before I reach her skin.

Our chests are so close the water warms between us, almost boiling to my senses, but each of her deep breaths pushes me away, each of her shuddering exhalations pulling me back in as her body shrinks.

And we remain precisely the same distance at all times, never touching, always seeming like we’re just about to.

And… that could be it. That could be the end of it.

The Tragedy that Romance is always mired in.

But her eyes meet mine with a hunger I didn’t expect, even if I desperately craved it.

“You’re going to drive me mad,” she says as a single white petal from an almond tree drifts between the two of us.

“Turnabout is fair play,” I tell her with a pale imitation of the Clever Fox’s grin.

“Nothing that makes me feel like this could ever be fair,” she says as her hand reaches to my face and the myth pushes me away at the last second.

I have to close my eyes and take my own shuddering breath, unneeded as it should be. And, even then, I can feel the ghost of her finger on my cheek, the absence of her lips on mine.

“I agree,” I tell her, meeting her gaze with my own, seeing a mirror of a craving I could no longer hold back.

Except… I had to.

And she needs to understand why.

“There once was a scentless man,” I tell her, with my own phrasing and making sure my words don’t stir, that they remain a placid, fragrant pool and a cruelly beautiful tree. “That was both his gift and his curse, as others recognized him as… different. Somebody set apart.”

Lisa’s eyes widen, and I force myself to look away. To continue talking.

“He wasn’t a good man. No, in the end, he was a monster, obsessed with what he lacked. He set out to brew the ultimate perfume, the scent to clad himself with so that others would accept him. Or worship him.

“And he found it.”

I remember the novel. It was something I found by chance in the public library, even if I later learned how famous the book was, how embarrassing it was for me (me) not to have heard of it.

But it wasn’t a book Mom would’ve cherished. It was… interesting. Well done. But…

But.

It was a book filled with that.

“He discovered the scent of beauty. And he killed for it.”

And that was… a mild way to describe the horrors of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille’s story, of the abandoned orphan who turned her victims into the very essence of beauty and desire.

I… I don’t know if I can make his perfume. I’m not sure.

But there’s… the ideaof it. And I don’t even need that particularly terrible incarnation. I could brew the potion that tied Tristan and Iseult, that brought a love mired in tragedy into their lives.

“In the end, he doused himself with the whole of it, the entire vial of stolen radiance, and he walked among the homeless and destitute. He walked among those who saw in him an angel so pure they needed to take him down, to devour him, to be filled with his grace.”

I wait, the pool and the tree still sustained by my power, still swaying in an unseen breeze and reflecting an absent moon.

And then I force myself to look back at Lisa.

Her hand is languidly reaching toward me, not pushing forward, not straining against her bounds. Just… there.

Extended.

And her eyes are tender. Open in a way that hurts deep inside.

“You would never do that,” she says, hand still offered in a caress I can almost feel.

“I… I don’t want to. But I also want to. I fantasize about it, Liz, about making a world where you can’t refuse me, where you don’t want to flee from me. I… I dream of you accepting me without the choice not to do it.”

“You’ve been hurt. Betrayed. Of course you want to stop that from ever happening again.”

I glide forward, around her stretched hand, until our chests once more almost brush together.

It’s… It’s a two-fold barrier. It was meant to tease Liz, to tantalize her, yes, but also…

It was meant to stop me.

“Yes, I know. I know how much sense it makes for me to want these terrible things. It still doesn’t make it right to want them.”

“Doesn’t it? Is it wrong for me to want to murder Emma?”

“Liz, you don’t—”

“Oh, I do. I want to make her pay, I want to make her bleed a glowing drop of ever-changing blood for every cruelty she piled on you. I want her to suffer, to crawl down on her knees and beg for a mercy she doesn’t deserve and will never get. I want her to live with a shame that won’t ever be erased. I want her to be a better person, one that won’t ever hurt you again. I want her to be a hero who will forever despise her former self. I want a thousand and one things, Tay, because I’m human.

“And so are you.”

The tree dissolves in drifting syllables, and the pool lowers us to Lisa’s hardwood floor.

“Huh. No water damage. Neat,” she says.

And then she launches forward and clings to me with all the strength of her body.

We fall down, Lisa on top of me, her face buried in the crook of my neck.

“Never. Never do that again,” she says.

“Liz—”

“Promise me.”

“I—I don’t know what I’m promising.”

She pulls back, her eyes radiant in fury.

“Neverdisrespect yourself like that. Never tell me you’re afraid of mebetraying you. Never doubt that I love you.”

And, before I can answer her impossible plea…

Lisa kisses me.

Fifty marvelous words flit over my lips plush with poetry and song, and her tongue parts them to tease mine out, to pull it inside of her as her hands cradle my cheeks, as she forces me to accept that she wants me at least a fraction as much as I want her.

Lisa kisses me.

My hands glide beneath her jacket, beneath her top, and over smooth skin more yielding than satin paper as she shivers, as she takes my touch and makes it part of the undulating dance of her body over mine.

She presses down, her breasts over mine, both of us taking of the other’s shape, and her legs glide down at the sides of mine until her pelvis rests on my own, until I can feel a heat that mere cloth cannot stop from trying to bridge the distance between us.

Then she pulls back, blonde hair falling down the left side of her face, blocking the sight of the window from where the light of the city tries and fails to frame her ethereal beauty in insufficiently golden, nocturnal light.

“I love you. And even if there came a day when I wasn’t in love with you, I’d still love you. And that’s why I was so afraid to take this step, Tay, because I don’t want to… It’s me that doesn’t want to hurt you. You say you could make me drink a potion and have me yearn for you all of my life? I say that’s the most frivolously useless application of your power you could come up with. You say you could curse me to love you? I say that it’s far too late for that, and that I’ve been blessed to. You say you’re afraid you could be a monster, that temptation could drive you to extremes you both desire and dread?”

She leans back, sitting upright over me, and her hands pull up my top to bare my belly so that her hands can rest flat over it.

“Well, let me tell you, Tay… There once was a little girl who wandered through a forest,” she says.

And my eyes widen.

“It was an ancient place, and through it, two rivers met, or separated, depending on which way you went. The girl liked the sound of the rivers. Not because it was peaceful but because it was busy. Because the roar of clashing waters drowned the girl’s ever-shifting thoughts, and so she could pace at her leisure without being interrupted by her own mind.

“Because her mind was all too easy a betrayer, you see. The girl, after all, had yearned to be loved, even as she found herself alone, denied the possibility of even a mere pet. She would’ve been glad to have a cat. Happy to have a dog.

“And there, beneath the dripping rock between two rivers, she found a dragon.”

I know this story. Of course I do.

“It wasn’t a powerful beast. It wasn’t a dreadful, terrible monster. No, it was merely a pup. A seed of something greater, easily put down by anyone who may have feared what it could grow up to be.

“But the girl didn’t fear it.”

Lisa leans forward as her hands glide up my sides, beneath my top, and her eyes briefly open when they slide over my ribs, just by the side of my breasts.

She licks her lips, and I almost interrupt her with a tremulous kiss before she opens them to keep the story going.

“No: the girl fed it.”

She dives down to lay a brief peck on the side of my neck, and she continues in a heated whisper.

“The girl never feared the dragon. She loved it, and it her. She fed it, protected it, caressed it, and thus, when the dragon was great and terrible, when everyone in the town near the forest and the two rivers had grown to fear its power and hunger, the girl alone could walk up to it with a smile on her lips, secure in knowing that a brush of pale fingers over sharp claws would get the monster to slither around her, to secure her in its embrace.

“The girl loved the dragon, and the dragon loved the girl. And everybody else could fear them without the two of them caring for it,” she says, finishing her tale and biting down on my earlobe, the paper-flesh both yielding and crinkling around her teeth as a gasp is torn out of my throat.

“Liz… That’s… that’s not how the story ends. The Dragon of Mordiford devoured cattle, and then men, and then was killed by—”

“Wordsworth… That wasn’t the story of the Dragon of Mordiford. This is the story of the Dragon of Brockton Bay,” she tells me, green eyes once more above mine.

I blink up at her, at the slowly spreading smile of the Clever Fox.

And I laugh.

My power surges around me, happy to be fed yet another tale, one that didn’t exist until this very moment, and Lisa’s carried around by my own laughter as hers, softer, musical, drifts in tolling notes that lift me higher and higher.

And then she takes her jacket off, and I my top.

She kisses my breasts, going from left to right and back again, and I pull at her shirt.

She rises, allowing me to undress her, to have her be briefly clad in a white bra full of satin and transparencies I can’t believe are meant for my eyes before her arms twist behind her, and her bare chest is freed in front of me.

I rise up to meet her lips, and then she hugs my neck, and I slide my gloved arm beneath her knees and stand up, her weight as far from a burden as I can conceive as I carry her to her bedroom.

And then we shuffle in uncertainty before I let out another laugh and have her stand up as we unsexily and almost ridiculously jump up and down to take off our shoes and boots.

Then… then only jeans remain. Black and dark blue, and I admire once again how hers hug Lisa’s hips, how her thighs look round and full in the stretched cloth, and she coquettishly bites a smiling lip as she teases me with her bare torso before her hands slide along the waistline of her pants and she slowly undoes a metallic, golden button that can never outshine her hair.

Then… Then Lisa leans forward, and I…

I can’t undress fast enough. Can’t wait to feel her skin on mine, to have a leg between hers, to—

She falls back on her bed, embracing me, carrying me down with her.

Her body bounces atop a soft mattress I know too well, and she giggles when she catches my eyes on her moving breasts.

Then I… I kiss them.

I kiss the smooth skin, the gentle swell, and my lips trace fiery spirals that converge on her right, erect nipple before I gently take it between my lips, my teeth pressing on them and around it as harshly as I can without hurting any of us as my tongue darts in to flick it, to take Lisa’s breath away as she buries her fingers on my hair and sends a thrill down my spine that can’t be any milder than what she’s feeling, because it’s Lisa doing things to me, accepting me, wanting me, and I…

She pulls on my hair, dragging me up in front of her, above green eyes that should have slit pupils and be full of mischief.

“I love you. Don’t make me repeat myself so much,” she says.

Then the grin comes.

Then the kiss.

And I let her. I let Lisa take as much as she wants from me as my left thigh slides between hers, as I feel the wetness at the peak of her valley stain my skin, permeate through my pages, become part of my history.

Of our story.

It’s a good thing I no longer need to breathe.

Because something hammers inside my chest, fast and hard enough that my eyes become blurry before I’m forced to close them, to only have my touch and smell and taste convey to me the beauty of the moment, the intensity of it as Lisa’s left leg wraps around my right, and she slides down and pushes up, her sex meeting my own, our kiss above mirrored below.

I have to let go of her. I need to take the bedsheets in my hands as my fingers close around them tightly enough to bruise delicate flesh when she steals control away from me, when each teasing lick across my tongue becomes ecstatic agony as Lisa’s body writhes beneath my own, and none of us have any control, any understanding, of where we’re headed.

I wrap my arms around her, sliding over satin sheets I now realize weren’t there when we left on our date, that she must’ve changed them while I wasn’t looking.

That Lisa planned ahead. That she meant for me to moan and cry in this bed.

The world fades, and only Lisa remains.

“Tay?” she asks, surprised.

For once.

And I…

I am standing. She’s in my arms.

And my hands go below her, sinking in her flesh, in the round bottom her suit stretches around so perfectly.

I…

“I love you,” I tell her, just to see how her gaze melts, how her grin comes back just to soften at the last moment.

“I know. I know, you dork,” she says affectionately and almost, but not quite, teasingly.

I pull her against me, and her legs wrap around my waist as her arms tighten around my neck, her green eyes never wavering from mine.

“I… I want to sing Gleipnir into being, to tie you down with the roots of a mountain. I want to see your flesh bound as I pleasure you beyond what you can take. I want to tell you about the Tales of the Alhambra, to take you to the water gardens and have you moan your pleasure between the poetry of melodious fountains. I want to take you to Eden, and have you to myself in the only place worthy of your beauty. I want… I want to give you not the world, but all the worlds, all the dreams of mankind. I want… I don’t have the words, Liz,” I finish with a rueful chuckle.

Her fingers barely brush my cheek, her touch more a ghost of happiness than its presence, and her smile turns into something complex, a thousand notes underscoring a symphony I can’t understand, a music I shouldn’t understand, because its existence is more than enough.

“I do, Tay; I have the words: I want you. Just… you,” she says.

And she kisses me.

Lisa kisses me.

Fifty beautiful words, a reminder of the purity of Jenny’s kiss, flit between us, and then, even they step away.

I fall back on her bed, and Lisa’s hands drift down my body, between my legs, and she pushes them inside of me. The first person to do so.

The only one I ever want to do so.

I bite down on my own forearm, the almost pain grounding me, anchoring me to the moment of Lisa doing nothing else than devoting her beautiful, fragmented mind to my pleasure, and then I force myself to answer in kind, to slide my own hand down her body, over her back, around her waist, and down her belly until my gloves of words met her wetness below and I push inside as she… as her body accepts me, as she arches her back, her breasts dragged over my own as she keens in the almost agony I feel welling in my own chest.

Then… Then we don’t kiss.

We just stare at each other as our hands move, as we explore and prod, me briefly circling her clitoris with my thumb as she presses the heel of her hand on my own, her fingers rhythmically going in and out of my lips as I strive to rub over the rough patch of flesh slightly above her entrance.

We both bit our lips, holding back the moans that could so easily overtake us, and we struggle to keep our eyes on the other’s.

I almost forget to blink.

I do forget to breathe.

A silly smile pushes her cheeks up, and tears of something I understand all too well brim on the corners of emeralds far more precious than any ring ever was graced with.

And then she sees something, and she lids those very eyes, only a sparkle of gleaming green coming through as her lips part and she breathes a few more words I longed to hear:

“Come, Tay. Come for me.”

And I do.

It’s… It’s not lighting burning down my mind. It’s not a blaze engulfing my very self.

It’s a wave.

It travels up my body, subsuming every part of me with it, with the… the release of months of lonely longing, the breaking of a dam made of doubt and fear. It rushes over any barriers, any remaining obstacles to me trusting Lisa with my heart wholly and forevermore.

It washes over me, and its passage leaves behind someone new. Someone… cleaner.

And then it goes back, and her wrist twist just so, and I have to scream as the new wave crests before crashing down on my senses, taking away my sight for a brief moment that makes me unforgivably miss a second of Lisa smiling down at my pleasure before I manage to twist my own wrist and take that precious smile and turn it into surprise and ecstasy as she falls down on top of me, her breasts flattening over mine, her wet breath seeping into my throat.

Then we…

It’s… slow. We don’t slump after it; we just… accompany one another, our movements slowing down as the waves gentle, caresses turning feather-soft as we let the moment stretch and finally fade out.

“I love you,” one of us says.

“I know, you dork,” the other answers.

And we both giggle before laughter turns to kisses, and we roll on top of satin sheets, our hands wet with the other as they wander over every unexplored part of our skin.

When morning comes, it finds us resting in one another’s arms, smiling tiredly, exhausted.

And unwilling to go to sleep and let go of this dream.

Then, in Lisa’s tired eyes and silly smile, I find another truth I longed for:

Romance is often mired in tragedy.

But it doesn’t have to be.