She pulled away and retrieved her glasses from where they’d fallen during the—y’know—fucking and put them back on. Then she sat with her bare back against the cold wood of the headboard for a minute and gazed at me. “Wait a moment,” she said. “I really want to look at you with these on for a bit.”
That made me super self-conscious. I scrabbled for the sheets but got into an unhelpful tangle. “I’m not sure I do well in good lighting or with close scrutiny.”
She actually rolled her actual eyes at me. “Oh please. I know I said I’d cool it with the goddess talk, but you’ve got a body like a renaissance painting of Diana. Now stop being coy and let me see you.”
“Fine,” I humphed, sitting up with a sheet around my waist in something I hoped passed for a classical pose. “These are my tits, enjoy them.”
“Oh, I am, believe me.” She reached onto the side table and picked up a slim blue book with nothing on the cover but the words T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems. “Um, before I start, I should say that when you asked me what my favourite poem was, I made the mistake of telling you the truth. And I’m now wishing I’d picked something sexier. If you’re expecting this to get erotic any time soon you’ll be very disappointed.”
I crawled across the bed towards her and lay my head in her lap. “It’s cool. Poems that try to be sexy never manage it anyway. Like the one with the flea that we had to do in school.”
Seemingly without thinking about it, she reached down and started stroking my hair. “Part one,” she read. “The Burial of the Dead.”
“Hang on,” I murmured, “this thing is in chapters? How the hell long is it?”
“I did say it wouldn’t be particularly erotic.”
“You didn’t say it would be long.”
“Shhh, just listen a while.” And she read.
There was something magical about hearing a poem read by a person who plainly loved it. I let her voice wash over me, and drifted away to sleep.
I opened my eyes in the Dream of an Unreal City. By the riverside, a woman in green sat at a folding table dealing tarot onto a black tablecloth.
“Nim?”
She looked up. Not Nimue, not quite. I’d never quite worked out what the relationship between the green lady and my friend was—sides of the same coin or something. I was pretty sure she was flat-out evil, but that hadn’t stopped me striking a bargain with her in a failed effort to save Nim’s life. “It’s been a while.”
“I didn’t know if you could still—if she could still—my dreams have been quiet.”
She turned a card on the table in front of her. The three of wands—I hoped this wasn’t going to involve homework. “She can’t. I can. I have always been stronger.”
“You told me that if I worked with you she’d be safe.”
“And she is. She lives when she would otherwise have died.”
I looked out over the water—boats sailed past on what I thought might have been the Thames, but it was nowhere on the river that I knew. We stood in the shadow of a dream of London Bridge. “I suppose you want something.”
“I want you to bring her back.” She turned another card. The Wheel of Fortune. Yeah, I was going to have to start looking this stuff up in the morning. “You are tied to her. Call it destiny, call it loyalty. Call it love if you wish.”
“If I could bring her back,” I pointed out, “I would have done it already.” Somewhere in the distance I heard a sound like sixty hounds barking in the chase.
The green lady rose from her card-table. She was like Nimue in every way except that her hair and eyes were the colour of the deep ocean, or the colour you might imagine the deep ocean to be, and that mattered more. She came closer to me, and closer—personal space had never been a big thing with her—bringing her lips to my ear, laying a gently intrusive hand on my hip. “Wit you well, Kate Kane, that you are she that shall sit in the Siege Perilous, and achieve the Sangreal.”
Hurry up please. It’s time.
I woke up.
6
Mornings & Emojis
Penelope the divorced estate agent’s alarm clock was beeping at a frequency that seemed precisely calculated to feel like you were having a thin kitchen skewer stabbed into your brain just behind the eye sockets. She shifted beside me, rolled over and bit me on the shoulder.
“Ow! Seriously what the? Ow.”
She gave me what I thought was an inappropriately flirtatious smile for a woman who’d just technically committed assault and battery. “I wanted to make sure you were real.”
“By biting me?”
“I thought I should try using all my senses.”
I caught myself wondering how much time was left before she had to go to work. “And?”
“This is going to sound weird and like I read far too much poetry, but you taste like—I don’t know—something deep and wild and ancient. It’s …” She slid herself closer. “It’s hard to keep away from.”
It was early enough that we weren’t strictly into the cold light of day yet, but I was becoming increasingly confident that she absolutely should keep away from it. I didn’t quite realise that my mother’s hold over me had got strong enough that you could literally taste it. Still, Penelope was right there, and while I liked to pretend that a night’s sleep led me to make better decisions, it very seldom did. I kissed her.
She didn’t have quite the extreme reaction she’d had the night before—there was always a rush to first contact you could never quite recapture, but she sank into it all the same, pressing herself against me and giving me her fragile, mortal fire.
“I thought you’d have turned to leaves by now,” she told me when she finally broke away. “I’m glad you stayed, though. If I’d woken to find you gone, I’d have always thought I dreamed you.”
I sat up. This whole thing had a coming-to-an-end vibe I didn’t much like but was beginning to see was absolutely necessary. It had been fun. In a life where I was less fucked up and she was less liable to get killed by anything in my world it could have worked. But this was almost certainly going to be a one time deal. “You can dream better, I’m sure.”
“I doubt that. You were—it was—I’ll remember this for a long time.”
So would I, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. “This doesn’t have to—I mean—we could do it again some time.”
“Maybe.” She looked almost sad for a moment, then she turned away and started to fetch fresh clothes from the wardrobe. It would have been irresponsible of me to try to rip them off her again and, unusually, I decided against irresponsible.
“I enjoyed—I had—this was good. Thank you.”
She adjusted her skirt and began buttoning up a new blouse. “Don’t. It was”—she blushed, so deeply I almost felt flattered—“it was my pleasure. Very much my pleasure.”
“But you don’t want to…?”
She retrieved her jacket from the floor, came back to the bed and kissed me again—I could still taste the night before on her lips and she touched me with such passion and hunger that I felt almost shocked. “I don’t think”—she walked away again—“that is, I hardly know you, Kate Kane, but you don’t strike me as the sort of person who’ll be my plus one to the company Christmas party or pick my kids up from school if I’m late on a viewing. You showed me how to fly last night, and I probably can’t explain quite how badly I needed it. But I know where the sun is, and I’d rather keep my wings.”