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Above, Rogue sat in a chair, watching me and laughing. He kept shaking his head at me, as if he found my efforts ridiculous. When I slid, once again, all the way to the bottom of the blood-slicked surface, he peered down at me from his lofty heights and sighed, exasperated.
“Don’t look for me, stupid Gwynn. When will you learn?”
“Never!” I shouted defiantly. “You’re mine!”
Titania appeared, wrapping her naked self around him, pale eyes full of pity. “No, he’s not.” The intense musicality of her voice wrapped around me. “He never was.”
“He’s mine!” I cried, but I slid farther down, unnoticed as they kissed.
*
Starling shook meawake and I blinked blearily at the pity in her brown eyes. “Gwynn—you’re dreaming. You were yelling out—” She bit her lip on saying anything more, but her thoughts were clear. Poor jilted me.
I sat up and scrubbed my face with my hands. The sunlight shone bright through the windows. “How long until high noon?”
“A while yet. Walter sent us outfits to wear.” Her lips twitched in amusement. “But the party apparently begins soon. The duel is to be the culmination.”
“He came by and talked to you?”
“Yes. And brought more hot cocoa, along with cinnamon rolls. He wanted to talk to you, but we told him you were preparing for the duel and couldn’t be disturbed. It sounded better than sleeping in.”
“Yeah. Thanks. Let’s see this outfit.”
Starling went to get it and I took the time to steady myself and clear out the last dregs of the nightmare. These were like and yet unlike the dreams I’d had before with Rogue. Unlike because, in many ways, I could trace the fragments of memory and the day’s events flowing through them, the normal dreaming mechanism of my brain washing away the flotsam and jetsam of my experiences. But, as with the dreams I had before with him, these felt guided, as if they occurred in that semi-real plane where we’d first come together. That was the part that really ate at me. That he—or worse, Titania—were present and cognizant in these semi-dreams where I cried and pleaded for him. Him, the man I’d never wanted in the first place.
And now couldn’t bear it that he’d been torn from me.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t have anything better to do than moon over some guy. Such as, say, win an impossibly stacked magical duel, rescue my companions and get us the hell out of here and back on track. “Stop being such a pitiful fucking loser,” I muttered, forcing myself out from under the covers.
“What?” Starling looked a little shocked.
“I said I hope I won’t be the loser today.”
“Geez, me too. Please don’t make me spend an eternity with Walt the Weird Boy.”
“And here I thought you were bemoaning your fate as a virgin spinster. Walt could be your ticket out of that dreadful future.”
“Suddenly the virgin spinster fate is sounding much more appealing.”
“No doubt.” I picked up what she’d tossed on the bed. It was a Princess Leia slave costume. If Walt wanted to be coy about his origins, he was doing a lousy job of it. “Never mind, I’ll just wear what I had on yesterday.”
“He was pretty insistent.”
I shook my head. “Not part of the bargain—no dice.”
I’d slept in my underwear, so pulling on my traveling dress didn’t take much effort. Walt hadn’t thought to give us things like hairbrushes, so Starling did the best she could to make me look presentable. Finally I stopped her. “That’s just gonna have to do.”
“If you say so,” she fretted. “Why don’t I have a task, like the others?”
“It’s nothing personal—just how it worked out this time.”
She fingered her hair and I knew she was resisting chewing on it. “I have no skills.”
“That’s not true. You do an amazing job of keeping me organized.” As I said it, I realized how lame that sounded.
“Gee thanks. I wanted to go on an adventure so I could be something more than an efficient housekeeper.”
“You will. You just haven’t found your thing yet.”
