The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes Read online

  ‘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?’

  ‘I like it.’ He let his face drop back into the pillow.

  She patted his back and found another butterfly so she peeled it off and set it free to fly back to the curtain.

  ‘It must have been something to see in here,’ she said, pulling her hair off her sweaty neck and piling it on top of her head, loving the stretch in her back, and he said, ‘It was,’ into the pillow.

  ‘I mean for everything else, too,’ she said, laughing. ‘I bet there were blue sparks everywhere.’

  He moved his head so his face wasn’t buried. ‘What blue sparks?’

  ‘My magic,’ she said, setting free another gold butterfly. ‘It’s blue sparks.’

  ‘I didn’t see any blue sparks.’

  She shook her head at him. ‘You were distracted. Look.’

  She waved her hand at the cheval mirror, and it rose and minced across the room on its three curved legs. No blue sparks.

  She straightened, letting her hair fall back down. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘That wasn’t like that, was it?’ Crash said, squinting at the mirror.

  Mare looked at the freckled mirror. The freckles were all in spirals along the edges now, the center clear. ‘No. Never mind that. Where are my sparks?’

  He rolled over on his back to watch her, putting an arm behind his head, and she was momentarily distracted by how gorgeous he was, but then she looked around. ‘Maybe I have to do something… more complicated. Like… all the butterflies.’

  ‘Butterflies?’ Crash said, but Mare concentrated on them, visualizing all the little gold filigree wings and then threw them toward the drapery they’d come off of.

  Crash yelped as dozens of little gold wings went hurtling across the room to splat on the fabric, some of them peeling off him, but there weren’t any sparks.

  ‘I want my sparks back,’ Mare said, flustered. ‘When I make magic, there are blue sparks, damn it.’

  ‘Weight?’ Crash suggested, looking over his shoulder for more butterflies. ‘Maybe it has to be something heavy.’

  ‘Yesterday morning, I got them lifting muffins,’ Mare said.

  ‘Well, things have happened since yesterday,’ Crash said. ‘Maybe you’ve gotten stronger.’

  Mare nodded. ‘Okay. Hold on.’ She took a deep breath, wrapped her mind around the bed, and lifted. It got about a foot off the floor, some blue sparks shot out, and then it thumped down again.

  ‘Ouch,’ Crash said, holding on. ‘But I saw blue sparks.’

  ‘This sucker was spinning when we were coming,’ Mare said, disgruntled. ‘I should be able to do that again.’

  ‘Hey, anything I can do to help-’

  ‘Shhhh,’ Mare said, and sat back against her beautiful new headboard to think.