Jennifer Crusie - The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes

He sat up on the edge of the bed and looked around. ‘Anything in here I should know about?’

Come back here. ‘I don’t know.’ She leaned forward and put her chin on his shoulder, refraining from biting it only by Herculean control, and looked around with him. ‘I’ve never had sex in here. I mean, there’s loose stuff like hairbrushes and shoes and my jewelry, that stuff, and I collect a lot of things, but I’ve never done an inventory. I wasn’t expecting to invite you tonight, so I didn’t go through looking for projectiles, you know? I didn’t, like, sex-proof it.’

Crash looked over his shoulder at the dressing table.

‘We can go up on the mountain,’ Mare offered, praying he wouldn’t take her up on it. The mountain was minutes away.

‘Oh, no. It’s taken me years to get in here, we’re staying.’ He looked at the pointed witch’s hat on the bedpost. ‘This is the first time in my life I’m wondering if it’s a good idea to be naked for sex.’

She bit him gently on the shoulder.

‘So that’s a yes,’ he said, and kissed her, and she kissed him back as he slid his hand up her thigh, and the kiss lasted longer than they’d meant it to, neither one wanting to stop.

‘We could start slow,’ she whispered against his mouth, when they broke for air, breathing hard against him. ‘See what happens.’

‘Uh, Mare?’ he said, looking over her shoulder.

She turned her head. Her Corpse Bride veil was floating behind them. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘No pins. That crown thing is a headband. Kiss me again.’

He kissed her again and she closed her eyes and sighed against his mouth, letting the kiss seep into her brain as his hand moved to her breast, her blood hot now, breathing with him, but when she opened her eyes, he was looking up, his mouth still on hers and his hand still curved around her, but not really paying attention. She pulled away and looked up, too.

The veil was spiraling above them. ‘Is that good?’ Crash said.

‘I’m happy,’ Mare said, but she snapped her fingers and the veil fell down into her hand. ‘You know, you’re going to have to just let go and ignore this stuff or we’re never going to get anywhere. You sure you don’t want to go to the mount-’

‘I’m sure,’ Crash said, and bent her back onto the bed onto cool blue sheets that were infinitely better than the rocky ground up on the mountaintop.

This could bring a whole new dimension to sex, she thought and dropped the veil and tilted her hips, rolling him over so she could be on top, straddling him and looking down with her hands on each side of him. He looked new, too, with pillows all around him instead of grass and leaves, and then he shifted under her and she felt him hard against her and shuddered as the heat flared, and she smiled and rocked against him until he grabbed her neck and yanked her down, snagging her crystal ball with his other hand as it zinged by her ear.

‘Whoa,’ she said. ‘Good catch.’

‘Jesus.’ He hefted it in his hand. ‘This thing is heavy.’

‘Well, it’s solid crystal’ She took it from him and rolled it under the bed, stuffing the veil after it.

‘A crystal ball. Did you look in it for us?’

She sat up and looked at him sternly, which wasn’t easy because he was naked and beautiful and hard between her legs. ‘Crash, I can’t see the future, nobody can. Human beings have free will. The crystal ball is just a joke. I got it in New Orleans because I liked the dragonfly stand.’

‘Right,’ Crash said. ‘But you can do magic. How am I supposed to know the difference?’

‘Because magic makes sense.’ Mare slid her hands up his chest. ‘It’s like sex. It’s too good to be true, but it works.’ She bent to kiss him and then started working her way down. ‘Every. Single. Time.’

‘I believe in magic,’ Crash said and closed his eyes.

He was hot under her lips and her hands, hotter as she moved against him, and then he moved, too, and the night grew darker and the stars came out and Mare sighed against him as he took her in his arms and she wrapped herself around him as he slid inside her, hard inside her, and became part of her. She felt the draperies shift on the wall as their bodies slipped together, felt the room begin to throb as her blood began to pulse, but mostly she felt Crash, breathing with her the way he always did except this time it was in the quiet of her room and this time he was holding her tighter, this time when she said, ‘I love you,’ he said, ‘I’ll never leave you, I swear, I’ll never leave you,’ and she bit her lip so she wouldn’t cry, and he kissed her, and she cried anyway, and it didn’t matter, he didn’t stop. He held on and rocked her until the heat wiped everything else away and there was just him and his rhythm in her blood, the bubble and the shudder there, the weight of him on top of her and the backbeat of the crystal ball bumping against her butt under the mattress, and she dug her fingernails into him, gasping for breath in the heat, rocking against him harder, and harder, the whole room rocking, the walls moving with them, the black roses rustling in their vase, the zebra couch dancing across the floor, and then something gold glittering in the air like the blue sparks she saw behind her eyelids when she scrunched them closed, and then Crash rocked and hit something good and her eyes flew open and there was gold everywhere, fluttering everywhere, and Py was pulsating on the windowsill – tiger cat, tiger cat, tiger, cat, tiger, cat - and the cheval mirror was spinning, and Crash was looking into her eyes, his eyes so blue she fell into them, into him, his eyes spiraling into her, his hips spiraling into her as he moved closer, higher, harder, the heat built and built and built inside her, and then she cried out and grabbed the headboard and it writhed under her hands, and she looked up to see the ceiling spinning around and around, closer and closer as she came and came and came and came…

When the bed landed with a thump, she held on to Crash, gasping for breath, and realized the ceiling was fine, it hadn’t moved, it was the bed.

A few minutes later, when they were both breathing evenly again, when they’d come unstuck from each other and were curled together and Mare was so happy she thought about weeping from sheer exuberance except she was too damn exhausted, Crash said in her ear, ‘So we bolt the bed down.’

‘Maybe,’ she said, rolling onto her back, taking a deep breath just to feel her body ache from all the places he’d touched, all the places he’d been. ‘That was really good.’

‘There was a tiger on the windowsill.’

She smiled at him and then picked something gold out of his hair, a tiny awkward butterfly that fluttered in her hand briefly and then flew back to the drapery and stuck on. ‘Huh.’ She let her head flop back and saw the headboard. It looked different.

She eased herself up on one elbow, feeling fat with satisfaction.

The iron headboard was now the same on both sides, no broken places, no missing pieces, and the pattern was different, more intricate, more beautiful. It took her a minute, and then she realized that she’d straightened out all the pieces of it with her mind, rebent them so they’d matched. Whatever rhythm she and Crash had been moving to, the headboard had gotten caught in it, and her mind had moved and curled the two halves to match.

‘What?’ Crash said, looking up at her, exhausted, while she tilted her head, looking at the iron twists and curls. ‘We just did that,’ she said, pointing to it. He squinted at it.

‘That’s how we make love,’ she said. ‘That’s what the way we make love looks like. Isn’t it beautiful?’