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Wednesday, he murmurs. Wednesday, what do you want?
He slides against her, and everything is wet. Everything is wet and she is drowning.
Wednesday, he repeats. She would say he croons, but he doesn’t croon. He doesn’t have enough guile for that. My Wednesday.
She arches against him as his lips pepper butterfly kisses against her cheekbones, and she feels his nose bump against her ear as he licks against her pulse point. He crooks his fingers – such long, long fingers – inside her, and he smiles into her neck as she clenches around him.
Le petit mort?
Wednesday shudders.
She wishes she could say that she didn’t know when it started. But she does. Wednesday remembers, and she knows enough not to bury the memory away.
It was a bleak Tuesday when Xavier had come to New Jersey for a surprise visit – because of course it had been Xavier who would come to New Jersey. I don’t have friends, she’d lied, crisply. He’d pursed his lips, and she knew he knew she was lying. She did not care.
“Friends visit each other,” he’d reminded her, and she didn’t think there was anything else to say.
She took him to her favourite cemetery. He found Nero’s headstone embarrassingly quickly.
“Of course you’d bury him,” he’d said, gently, fervently. Unjudgmental. Kind.
Maybe because it was a particularly gloomy afternoon, Wednesday had let him loop his arm around her waist. She had let him rest his head atop her own for a time while he sketched, and she almost smiled when he brought a whole colony of tarantulas to life over Nero’s grave.
Nero would have loved it, she thought. Which was why she told herself she allowed Xavier the liberty of holding her hand on their way back to the manor. Which was why she told herself she was allowed to sidle into his room in the dead of the night, when all but Uncle Fester were asleep.
Which was why she shut the door behind her when Xavier sighed, mouthing Wednesday in his sleep. Which was why she stepped across to his bed, sat down, and waited for him to wake.
The flagstones have been scrubbed of soot over the months that Nevermore stood empty, but some burns cannot be removed. The spot where Crackstone had disintegrated remains as an ugly blot in the quadrangle, but Wednesday is pleased that no one had done anything as stupid as erecting a plaque explaining its existence. Crackstone deserves nothing less than complete obscurity.
The students, however, have not forgotten, and Wednesday finds herself at the centre of more attention than she’s ever used to having. People look. People point. People whisper, and some are bold enough to come up to her to attempt to make small talk.
She hates small talk.
It’s Xavier who rescues her from the third person asking about her summer and asks, very solemnly, if he could escort her up to her dormitory.
She discovers that people would much rather hang back when she walks with Xavier Thorpe – all the better to speculate about them – and she does not care what is said as long as they don’t say it to her.
Some of the speculation might even be accurate. Probability. And all that.
He asks about her parents, Pugsley, and gives Thing a fist bump. All gentlemanly, all very polite. A lock of hair has escaped his bun and she itches to pin it back. She wants to touch his face; she wants to scream.
He glances at her then, at the threshold of her room, and his eyes soften. Bedroom eyes, she thinks, and does not blush at the memory of his gaze on her in the dark of her family’s guest room.
“I wasn’t sure if you wanted people to know,” he explains. She bristles, and he laughs. Takes his hands out of his pockets and waves Thing away before tilting her chin up to him.
“I don’t care,” she says, and she isn’t lying when she says she doesn’t care what people think. Wednesday has never wanted a person as much as this, and she does not want to think about it. She doesn’t know what she thinks.
She tucks his hair back behind his ear and runs her thumb under his eye. Wonders how long he would survive on the rack. Xavier is too soft for her. He should not be here, and he should not be touching her.
He should not be kissing her, and she shouldn’t already know how it feels to be held so gently.
“Tell me what you want,” he whispers, and all rational thought flees.
Wednesday has been courted before, and it had not turned out particularly well. Xavier, who had been on the sidelines for the entirety of that disaster, appeared to be determined to completely avoid everything Tyler had done (even though it had, admittedly, worked well enough).
He doesn’t ask her out. He doesn’t bring her coffee or flowers, and he doesn’t take her to crypts smothered in fairy lights. He texts her good mornings and good nights, sits next to her in classes they share together, and chivvies her along to lunches and gatherings with Enid, Ajax, and occasionally Bianca. He doesn’t intrude on her time at the apiary, and his geniality towards Eugene has worked miracles for the latter’s street cred.
Sure, he still looks incredibly pinched whenever she goes into Jericho, and he always throws a little hissy fit whenever she does it without him, but by and large, Xavier has learned to let her come to him. She goes down to the shed on most afternoons and kisses him, learning the lines of his body. It feels that it is only when they are like this – alone, skin to skin, that Xavier lets himself be greedy about wanting her. He clutches at her pigtails, gasps into her mouth, and memorises her tells and pressure points astonishingly quickly. Wednesday lets him grasp at her – only because he knows how to make her feel good, she rationalises – but something about their tete-a-tetes feels off. She feels off.
In some ways, she appreciates that he’s giving her space, but she can’t help but compare how he is now to how he was before: always around, broody and jealous of Tyler, overt in his interest. She remembers his easy smile when she’d asked him to the Rave’n before it had all gone downhill.
You seem to like me.
What’s there to like?
Wednesday’s hands pause in their exploration of Xavier’s torso, and he steps away immediately, as if stung. She doesn’t look at him; can’t look at him as she buttons up her blouse and tucks it back into her skirt with steady fingers.
You’re toxic.
Yes, he’d apologized, but hadn’t he turned the faucet of his affection off once before? Couldn’t he do it again?
Brusquely, she turns on her heel with a promise to see him tomorrow. He sighs, and she leaves before he can say anything else.
Her birthday comes around again, as birthdays are wont to do. Enid knows better than to arrange for another surprise birthday party, so they all just hang out in their dorm room and assemble a honey badger skeleton instead. It’s Wednesday’s favourite kind of jigsaw puzzle.
Halfway through the evening, Wednesday looks up to catch Xavier watching her. All his feelings are always on his face. All of them. Suddenly uncomfortable, Wednesday turns back to the rib in her hands. Such naked longing was not meant for her to witness.
I don’t care what you think of me.
She’s realises that that is no longer true.
They are in his shed, clothed only in a thick woolen blanket Thing had thoughtfully left in a corner. She leans against his chest, idly counting the spires in a gothic little castle he’d just sketched as he quietly numbers the notches in her spine. She shifts, suddenly cold as he pauses in his count, distracted by a stray thought.
You can’t choose when your visions take you. You can’t choose when your mind demands to be heard. She busies herself with studying the other sketches in the shed: all the frantic, angry sketches of the Hyde had been burned, and Xavier seems to be in a nesting phase – lots of manors, fortresses, a couple of ravens, and a handful of her portraits – all dark, all brooding, all inscrutable.
There is too much of her in Xavier’s work. There is not enough of himself. It should worry her, but Wednesday cannot find it in herself to wonder more about his feelings. At least, that’s what she tells herself.
Except for one thing.
“Have you ever brought any of – any of them to life?” she asks when he comes back to himself. The portrait of her playing her cello has been pinned to a wall unframed, and she feels him turn to look at it and smile against her hairline.
“Why would I?” He sounds amused. He sounds bitter. His hands roam freely against her bare back, the smooth shelf of her shoulders. He shifts his body around her and brackets her thighs with his own. She has never felt so warm.
“Why would I,” he repeats, and she pulls herself back in to her body to focus. “Why bring my paintings of you to life only to have them turn to dust in my arms? You do that already in the flesh.”
She huddles into herself, feeling unexpectedly and inexplicably small. Xavier drops a gentle kiss on the base of her neck just atop her spine. “You can go if you want,” he says, and it only comes out a little resigned.
She fits her head underneath his chin. He freezes, unsure.
She turns her head to mumble into his Adam’s apple. “Ten more minutes.” Ten more minutes, she allows him. She allows herself.
Xavier resumes his study of her body, hands hungry against her skin. She turns in his embrace and presses an experimental kiss to the jut of his left collarbone. His ribs collapse on a breath, and she finds that she likes that.
He’s too wise to point out that she’s softening.
Wednesday lets him hike her leg up over his hip. She presses another kiss to the hollow of his throat and closes her eyes when he notches up into her. Wednesday.
He moves slowly – or maybe it’s the time that stretches out like taffy, sweet and smooth. She hides her face in his chest and sucks a constellation of little bruises into his skin each time he brings her to a little death. She stays an hour more.
Sometime in the spring, she asks about his dreams. Tyler is still alive, and still a Hyde. Does Xavier dream of him still?
“No,” he says, but looses an arrow a little too aggressively. It strikes the outermost ring of a target, and he scoffs. Impatient again.
Wednesday readjusts his stance, and bites down something mean about insecurity making him weak. She had been fooled, too. It still rankles that she cannot pull Tyler apart limb from limb. That she is not allowed.
She steps back and waits. Xavier looses another arrow – it strikes closer to the centre of the target, but again, not by much. He really is abysmal at archery; she reckons that he only joined the club because it fit the whole brooding tortured artist schtick that he's clearly going for. Ridiculous. Ridiculous that she would feel fond.
“I wasn’t psychically linked to him,” Xavier finally says. He’s grown a little pink in the face, and she wonders if it has anything to do with the weather. The sunlight is abhorrent. She misses winter with a vengeance.
“I am psychically linked to you,” he continues, and Wednesday’s world stops for a minute. “Maybe it started when you saved me all those years ago. Maybe I’m your Hyde.” He glances over, self-deprecating. Wednesday frowns. What need does she have for a slavering monster?
Xavier shields his eyes against the sun and squints at the target, as if he could will his arrows closer to its centre. “You were obsessed with the Hyde and its victims. I couldn’t stop dreaming about them because you couldn’t stop thinking about it. About him.”
Still sour. And no wonder.
“I would flay him and make a jacket out of his skin for you if you asked,” is what she offers, and she isn’t joking.
Xavier knows she isn’t joking. He laughs as Thing hands him another arrow.
“No, Wednesday.” He sounds fond. Ridiculous. “You just stay right here. With Thing. With me.”
He looses a third arrow, and this one actually strikes the ring just outside the bullseye. Xavier looks a little stunned at that, and Wednesday decides right then and there that if she’s going to – date – anyone, it honestly might as well be him.
The ghastly sun continues shining overhead. She blames it for the heat in her cheeks as Xavier turns to grin at her.
He comes down to New Jersey over the summer again and stays a whole week. Her parents are ecstatic. She heads up to New York to see him, and shockingly, her parents are ecstatic about that as well.
She reminds her mother that most parents would at least be a little stern about allowing their teenaged daughter to head to New York alone to visit her boyfriend, unchaperoned, for two weeks.
“You aren’t going unchaperoned,” Morticia exclaims. “Thing’s going with you.”
Wednesday and Xavier spend the entire fortnight decidedly unchaperoned after Thing makes it extremely clear that it intends to spend the entire vacation on Broadway watching every single show at least once, and Hamilton twice.
Wednesday learns what it’s like to sleep in the same bed with Xavier. To wake up warm, to clean a living body with careful hands in the bath.
On their last evening together in their little bubble, they decide to have a romantic night in. Xavier combs her pigtails out while they lounge in the living room of his father’s brownstone, eating takeout and watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the third time on loop. He wraps the length of her hair around his fist and pulls her up to kiss him, lips soft and at odds with the pull in her scalp. Is this what you want? He waits for her to nod before tightening his grip.
Wednesday wonders if this is what it’s like to love someone.
They start their last school year. There are no murders, no mysteries. It’s almost dull, except that their entire class appears to be infected with the same anxiety about what they’re going to be doing after graduation. Do those able to pass as normies want to go to college? Sell psychic services? Look into making a career out of taxidermy?
Enid, ever supportive, brings back live squirrels after full moons. Wednesday, who has learned to be considerate, practices her taxidermy in the shed while Xavier paints. That being said, she already knows she’s going to be a Great Novelist. Maybe taxidermy will pay the bills if her parents ever decide to cut her off. They probably won’t, but it doesn’t hurt to keep her skills sharp.
Xavier sits back in his chair and yanks the cuff of his pants up, staring intently at his ankle. “I wonder if I could bring a tattoo to life if I applied it myself.”
She shrugs. He probably could. He’s talented and he knows it. “No hearts or cupids. Or colour. I don’t think I could stomach you in any more colour.”
He smiles, easy and smug. “Maybe a viper. I’ve always wanted a pet snake. And this one won’t bite.”
“You like it when I bite.”
“You love it when I bite.” He rolls his cuff back down and reaches for a blank sheet of paper. “Let’s give it a shot.”
By the time they graduate, Xavier has a glossy black viper coiled serenely around his left ankle, a clever little black widow sitting comfortably in the crook of his left elbow, and a fat black and white bumblebee poised to buzz on the back of his left hand.
He also has a sheaf of fresh sketches and an Instagram page for his hot new tattoo parlour in Brooklyn.
“Move in with me,” he suggests when she grumbles about having to return to the manor. She loves her family, but three years of living away from her (loudly, constantly) amorous parents have given her a great appreciation for distance. “I’ve got that little space above the shop; it’s not a manor, or a castle, or a brownstone, but it’ll be ours.”
She quirks an eyebrow.
“I’ll paint it all black and white for you,” His dimples should be illegal. “You could get your own little room for your taxidermy. You could play your cello out on the fire escape and piss all my neighbours off.” Xavier never takes no for an answer. It’s one of his many, many flaws.
“We can finally have sex in a bed on the regular.” He really does not stop. It suits her just fine.
“Move in with me.” He phrases it like a statement. Presumptuous. The black widow does a friendly little wave.
It’s not nearly enough to make her smile, but a corner of her mouth quirks up as well.
They’ve been living together for about two years when Wednesday wakes in the middle of the night to find Xavier missing from their bed. She pads downstairs to his studio tucked into the back of the tattoo parlour and lets herself in.
Xavier is hunched over an easel, and she can see in the warm light of the tungsten lamp swinging overhead that his pupils are slowly contracting as the dream-vision leaves him, the darkness of prophecy retreating into his bloodstream. She doesn’t touch him until he blinks, green-eyed and human again. Xavier again.
He looks up at her and she can still see him struggling to focus, so she slides into his lap instead, pressing as much of her body as she can against his. After a beat, he relaxes around her, breathing heavily into her unbound hair, cradling her face against his sternum.
“What did you see?”
Xavier doesn’t move for a very long time.
Eventually, he releases her, and she turns to the canvas in front of them.
And just like it did that sunlit, horrible, wonderful spring day all those years ago, her world grinds to a halt for a moment.
It’s her, lying on her side in their bed. Xavier is spooned behind her, peering over her shoulder at a little swaddle of cloth that she’s curled around. A small, chubby hand is thrust up towards her. In the sketch, Wednesday is smiling.
Xavier is speaking. “It’s a dream, Wednesday. Only a dream.” And she knows that his dreams, prophetic as they are, only show possibilities. She’s not bound to a future with him, and a child, and a life so domestic it nauseates her a little to even think about it.
She’d not thought about having children before now. Hadn’t considered it. Hadn’t even wondered if Xavier wanted them.
She looks up into his face and does not shy away. He’s still staring at their maybe-child, expression unbearably sad. For the first time in her life, Wednesday understands what it means to yearn.
“It’s only a dream,” he says again. “Let’s go to bed.”
There is still too much of herself in Xavier’s work. Wednesday packs an overnight bag, kisses Xavier goodbye, and visits her mother. Xavier’s expression closes off as she leaves, and Wednesday – Wednesday aches.
Morticia takes one look at her before bundling her off to her conservatory.
Wednesday cools her heels, sullen and preoccupied, while her mother swans around, cooing to her venomous pitcher plants.
“It’s not such a bad thing, to need someone.” Morticia strokes a particularly ugly Venus fly trap. “You’re not any less of yourself for loving him. You’ve loved him for so long.”
“I snared him.” Wednesday glares at her shoes. What’s there to like? You’re toxic. She hadn’t realised that the words could still cut that deep, all these years later. “He doesn’t know what he wants. He certainly doesn’t want it with me.” I’ve been selfish, she doesn’t say. I’ve kept him for too long.
Morticia reaches out to take her hand. Wednesday flinches away, but Morticia’s quicker – just a close of fingers tight around Wednesday’s wrist, and Morticia’s head snaps backwards, pupils blossoming with the Sight.
Wednesday sighs, irritated. How intrusive. Always so intrusive.
Morticia snaps back to the present in another five breaths, and cheerfully rights herself.
The future isn’t set in stone, Wednesday reminds herself as Morticia clearly fishes around for the right words.
“Why don’t you ask him?” Morticia hip checks Wednesday, and crowds herself into the single window seat that Wednesday had deliberately chosen for its limited capacity.
Wednesday raises an eyebrow.
“Ask him what he wants,” Morticia clarifies, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You know what you want, my little viper.”
Wednesday recoils, but Morticia only leans in further.
“You know what you want.”
Wednesday hops off the window seat and takes a turn about the conservatory. “I’m taking a plant.”
Morticia beams.
She returns to Brooklyn the day after, arriving late enough that Xavier has already fallen asleep. She stops to drink him in as he is: shirtless, comfortable, and vulnerable enough to throw an arm across her side of the bed. As if he's reaching for her, even in his dreams.
The moment passes, and she moves to sit beside him. “Wake up.”
Xavier stirs, green eyes still hazy. Still green. “Wednesday.” The muscles of his back bunch, and he raises his head halfway off the pillow, clumsy with sleep. “What in the bright screaming supernatural is that.”
“Dendrophylax lindenii.” She deposits the pot on his side of the bed. “You never listened in class.”
He groans and sits up proper, sweeping his bangs out of his face. “For the love of everything unholy, please. Small words.”
He’s still upset at her for leaving. She sighs and prods at him; he automatically makes space for her, and she clambers up into the hollow of linens warmed by his body.
“A ghost orchid.”
He blinks again, perplexed. “I’m going to need more.”
Honestly. He really did never listen in class.
“It's known for its resilience and adaptability. It’s able to thrive in the most hostile environments.”
His lips thin. For obvious reasons, he does not think back on their botanical science classes with great nostalgia.
Also, he’s still dense.
Wednesday exhales, exasperated. “You’re the ghost orchid. You. It’s you. You’ve grown in my extremely hostile environment. You’ve thrived. I’m giving this orchid to you.”
Xavier’s just radiating confusion.
She tries again. “I’m giving you. This orchid. Because you are my ghost orchid. In my ecosystem. And you can grow here if you want. With me. Do you?”
The light finally dawns. It’s like all the sunshine in the world descends to set Xavier’s face aglow at the ungodly hour of 3:42am. “Are you proposing to me?”
It’s her turn to purse her lips. “You’re not seriously-”
“Ask me.” He reaches out to wind a stray lock of hair from her pigtail around his index finger. “Ask me properly.”
The man is gloating. But let it not be said that Wednesday is not brave. She grits her teeth and fixes her gaze on the hollow below his right eye. “Xavier. Will you participate in the ritual of marriage with me.” The whiplash of deja-vu is almost a physical blow; she’s half ready to bolt straight out of bed and home to the manor when -
Xavier moves, fluid as a lynx, and cages her between his forearms, teeth flashing white in the darkness. The bed barely even squeaks. “Yes, Wednesday.” She can feel his heart beating, quick and wet. Or maybe it’s her heart. “I’d love to participate in the ritual of marriage with you.”
“I’m not sure about children, yet,” she says in a rush, and he dips his head to kiss her.
“We’re barely past being children, ourselves.” He slides his palm up her ribcage, and it’s like she’s sixteen all over again. Wednesday.
“My parents will want a big black wedding.” She lets her knees fall open, and he hitches her thigh up around his waist. “They’ll want it in the family crypt.”
“What do you want?” he presses against her, and she forgets how to breathe. “Tell me what you want.”
You.
Wednesday smiles.
In the dark, Xavier swims towards wakefulness. Wednesday leans over him, sixteen and uncharacteristically unsteady with it.
Wednesday. His eyes are black. You were dreaming.
Wednesday rubs her thighs together, and Xavier’s eyes drop to track the movement. She jerks her head up, belligerent. So were you.
His palm is larger than her entire hand. I could taste you, wanting. She blinks, and suddenly he’s over her, large and warm and hesitant. His eyes are green. You want. He’s hopeful. Do you want me?
She gathers all her boldness and nods. Once.
Wednesday.
She presses a kiss against his bare chest. Against his heart, drumming loud against his bones.
My Wednesday.