Headless Over Heels ch 2.32 - Jessika (Patreon)

(A/N: This chapter comes after a rewritten conclusion to 2.31, which I have included at the top of this chapter for continuity. If you're caught up, you prolly ought to go back and re-read the ending of 2.31.)

Lisa plucked Seth off her and turned him onto his back. She stood from the bed, swiping a linen cloth from its place in a half-opened drawer and conducting a cursory cleaning of herself. “I will be right back,” she said, her voice carefully neutral.

“What? Lisa, come on. We have to—”

“I will.” A silvery gleam drifted down her thigh. She daubed it away and tugged a pair of panties on. “I promise. But if we are going to talk about Jessika, the wine from the reception will not suffice. I will require something stiffer and in larger quantities. Shall I bring you a glass?”

A name was much more, much earlier than he’d expected. He nodded.

“To be continued,” she said, and slipped out the door.

Seth lay on his back in her bed—in their bed, his and hers—and listened to the tap of her bare feet on the dark hardwood floor and studied the draping canopy above the bed. Was she formulating the right lie out there? Or only looking for the right wine?

She returned with a bottle whose opaque surface she’d studiously wiped the dust from, and two long-stem glasses, both etched with intricately rendered steeples. She handed one to Seth and filled with sweetly spiced garnacha.

“So,” she said, moving on to her own. “What did she tell you?”

“What did you think she was saying?” Seth asked. “About Alice, I mean.”

“We’ll get to that,” she said. “Let’s address this little yarn Desdemona spun.”

”She told me that Lisa’s donor was a companion,” he said. “Like Nik was.” Like I am.

“Mmm. She was telling…” Lisa tilted her head. “Two-thirds of the truth, just about. Which with Desdemona is the best you’ll get. The sorceress whose face I now wear was named Jessika.”

“You’ve mentioned,” Seth said, and drank. Vanilla, cocoa, drupelet. The stately aged timbres of oak and leather. He hadn’t had wine this fine since… well, since the last red Lisa had served him.

“Jessika had…” She rolled her fingertips at the rim of the glass. “Problems. But you know me. I see potential in places that a proper officer of the Legion would not.”

“Thieves, for instance.”

“Thieves now,” she said. “Hedge witches then. Her village had taken her in on dark suspicions. You already know, I think, that she traded in blood magic. They claimed she was a maleficar. That she was unlicensed.”

“Were they right to?”

Lisa brought her cup to her lips. Twice as much liquid as Seth had drawn, for twice as much the drinker. “She claimed she’d done her tours in the Winter War, and had received her decommission with honors. I found out later that wasn’t true. She claimed her assigned minder had passed of the weeping fever; another lie. But she claimed she knew the siege spell, and more besides, and that she was a prodigy. And that was honest. But it wasn’t the real reason I took her in.”

“What was?”

“She had the look,” Lisa said. “The look of someone whose life had been one slamming door after another. Of someone with a gift to give, and no one in the world who’d accept it.”

My look, Seth thought, and drank.

“I let her head stay on its shoulders, and told myself that I could keep her on the straight-and-narrow, and she would be useful.” Lisa took her crystal glass down to its halfway point. The red meniscus clung to the steeple’s belfry. “For a while, she was.”

“A season and a half, I was told,” Seth said.

“Give or take a few months.” Lisa wiggled her hand noncommittally. “But they kept coming up, those problems. A little thing here, a not-so-little one there. She began to fall back on unfortunate habits. She begged me now and then for access to my sword’s hexis. The dynamos were like little windows to the spells she’d learned and the experiments I’d halted. She said she only wanted to be useful, and I believed it, and still do. But every time I told her no, she took it worse and worse. I reminded her of the promise she’d made to leave it all behind. And I knew she was trying, it was just…”

She sighed. Remembering this hurt. The urge to tell her enough, that he understood, gnawed at him. But how many times had she ever opened up like this about her past?

“It was too far into her,” she said. “To the bone. And when she broke her promise, it burst with all the tension it had been holding.

“What did she do?”

“She seduced a man and then killed him for his hexis in a sacrificial blood orgy,” Lisa said.

“Oh,” Seth said. He took another drink. When had this glass gotten so low?

“On the scaffold she told me she was sorry,” Lisa said. “She told me she’d tried her best. But there was this noise there, always there, and my mistake was trying to surround her with quiet, when the noise was coming from inside. All the silence did was make it louder.”

In Seth’s mind, al Vhesse’s thin face melded with another. A man looking onto the horizon, muttering: Someone new. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard?

“That’s why you haven’t put a stop to it,” he realized. “My stealing. That’s why you let me do it.”

“Well, your vice is petty larceny and hers was blood sacrifice. So it’s not exactly a tidy one-to-one.” Lisa placed her cup on the nightstand and slid closer. “I learned a hard lesson with Jessika. I thought I’d turned her around; all I did was bend her further out of true. I will not make that mistake again.”

“I can’t imagine you running around with my skull on your shoulders anyway,” he said.

“As infatuated as I am with your cheekbones, no.” She caressed his face pensively. “No, I only really truck with the lady-heads, and only with ones whose previous owners permitted it. I tried an enemy’s head, once, and the resentment she bore me remained, scratching at my mind. It was all I could do to swap that mistake out again before I took the sword to myself in vengeance. A thoroughly unpleasant psychic experience.”

“So she told you to use her, like Nik did?”

“I think I’ve told you this part,” Lisa said. “She called it a horrible shame to let all she’d collected in it flow away with her and be threshed away by the Turning Wheel. I had my doubts. What if I inherited some of her predilections?”

“Did you?”

“I didn’t think so at the time,” she said. “But then I met a boy and kept getting the urge to do the most perverse things to him. So I suppose I did, in part. Though I do promise never to use you in a sacrificial blood orgy.”

“That is wonderful news.”

“But part of her. The avaricious part. The part that despises the idea of letting others have what she has claimed, or keep her from what she wants. I feel it, every time I’m Lisa. And even when I’m Annalise, it’s there. Whispering to me.”

“I thought—when you gave me meadowsweet, I thought it was all play.”

“It is play,” she said. “Some—most of it. But can I tell you? I didn’t want to give it up. Your soul. I wanted to keep it. There was a moment there on the Psychelith I wanted to stop you. Of course that would have been madness. Of course. It’s far safer in there. But…”

Her hand spread out across his heart.

“But to possess you,” she whispered. “All the beautiful things that make you yourself. To hold your existence in my hands and know it belonged to me. That you belonged to me. That you could never leave me. Even when I was Annalise, I felt it, stronger than I ever had. It intoxicated me. After everything I’ve lost. So much. A whole life. A man I thought I loved. And I thought I’d earned the horror. That I deserved it.”

“Never,” he said. “Never ever could you have deserved that.”

“I know that, now,” she said. “I knew it the very first time I put on Lisa, in fact. That voice of reason was so quiet whenever she was packed away and I was Annalise. And then something happened, Seth, on our first night. Something I still don’t entirely understand. Annalise and Lisa… they’ve blended. They’ve aligned.” She tapped her temple. “In here. I used to feel so bad when I had to become Annalise again. So resentful. Like I was disappearing. Changing too much, I suppose, and not into someone I liked. And that’s all done with now, thanks to you. Granted, she’s still a tall pint and I’m still—what did we call it?”

“A fancy foofy bubbly red.”

Lisa scoffed. “Fancy and bubbly do not belong as bedfellows with red. I’d call myself something velvety and smoky, thank you very much. Which reminds me.” She topped herself up. “More, lover?”

“I shouldn’t,” he said, holding his cup out to be refilled. “Cheers.”

They clinked and drank.

“But I know what you mean,” he said. “When you kissed me. You kiss the same. And you went a little Orwinese when you made me bleed.”

Lisa covered her face. “Don’t remind me.”

“And of course Annalise has gotten handsy.”

“Handsy is for fumbling teenagers. Annalise has gotten amorous.”

“What’s the difference?” Seth asked.

Lisa seized him, straddled him, and showed him.

With her tongue filling his mouth and her stomach pushing against his he realized how drunk she was, and in short order how drunk he was.

“I’m Annalise and Lisa,” she whispered, when she finally showed mercy enough to release him. Her breath was hot and wet and wine-sweet. “I’m both at once. I thought I already was, but there was discord in me, and you’ve ended it. And now, if I am keeping anything from you, any of the tragedies of my past, it’s only because both of me are so desperate not to lose you. And terrified of it. Of not being enough. Of showing you too much of the blood that stains my history, too many of the scars. Of making some mistake and seeing you run from me. But turning it into a… game. If I dress it up all frightful and garish, it can be a sexy joke. Something I don’t have to look at.”

“You won’t lose me,” he promised, between the kisses he was desperately raining onto her neck. “I swear to every Saint in the fucking house. I swear to the wheel. You won’t.”

“I don’t know what Desdemona told you.” She stretched his arms above his head, pressing his hands between the headboard and her sweating palm. “I don’t need to; it doesn’t matter. Only remember that you are not like Jessika, because I don’t need you to change. I don’t need you to be heroic or selfless or courageous or anything at all. I only need you to be mine. My Seth. That’s all you ever have to do. Just be mine.”

She giggled softly. A tear gathered in her eye.

“And isn’t that a pathetic thing to say?” she whispered. “What must you think of me? Still the lovesick Orwinese maiden after all this time. Still so desperately fond, so simple. How horribly I was hurt the first time, and how little I learned. How horribly you could hurt me, if you wanted to. How badly I’m rushing. How we’ve not even known each other a year, and… and already, all I want is…”

Her finger hooked around his. Right below the first knuckle, where a ring would sit.

“It’s quite pathetic, isn’t it?” she whispered.

His stomach backflipped. He wasn’t sure when he’d gotten hard again but there it was, as lost to its fierce yearning as his drunken mind.

“This is a Lisa thing.” She chuckled and shook herself off him. “A drunken Lisa thing. Ignore me. Let’s forget I said anything. All right? I already rushed us once and it nearly ruined us. I am happy. Deliriously happy with what I have of you.”

“I would,” he said, and Oh fuck, he would. He was drunk, but it was the kind that refracted the mind to a point, like a magnifying glass held to the sun. The kind that brings out an unassailable truth. “I’d marry you. I’d marry you today.”

“Let’s talk when I’m Annalise,” she said. “And we’re sober.”

“I wanna be Seth al Ydris.” His eyes stung. “I fucking hate how il Gutierre sounds. It sounds like someone’s getting ready to spit.”

“No it doesn’t.” She frowned in protest. “I love it.”

“I want to be rid of it.” He clung to her with the dizzying revelation. “I want to be an al Ydris. I fucking love the al Ydrises. I love Tiago and Ofelia.”

“They love you, Seth. I’ve never seen them open up to anyone like they have to you. Not since—not since I went to the Winter War.” She let out an adorable little burp and sat up. “Saints. I have to get out of this bed before I fucking propose to you. What time is it?”

He shook his head out in a doomed effort to banish the wedding bells from his brain. He craned his neck over her shoulder and saw the cabinet clock. “Five-ish.”

“Righto,” she said, and rolled off him. “Here’s the plan.”

“The plan,” he echoed.

“I’m going to pick you up,” she said, and picked him up.

“This is a great plan,” he said.

“And we’ll bathe together.” She carried him to the en suite bathroom. “And then we’ll have a late lunch or early dinner or whatever we’d like to call it, and then we’ll make love again.” With her foot she turned the spigot on her big brass tub. “And I’ll be back in stern mistress mode, but I want to suck your cock, so I need to root around in this brain and work out how stern mistresses suck cock.”

“I believe in you,” he said, as warm water drummed into the tub.

“But I won’t break your nose this time.”

“You didn’t break my nose.”

“My streak shall continue.” She placed him in the tub. “And tomorrow we’ll sleep in, and then I’ll buy you more clothes so you treat them worse and I can rip them off you.”

“Okay.” He pointed a warning finger through the rising steam. “But not the first uniform.”

“Fine, not that one. But the second and third and so on.”

She drummed her palms on the edge of the tub, then clambered in to join him. The water level rose to his chest.

“And then,” she said, scooping him against her with a slosh, “we’ll watch my son have his little swordfight.”

It wasn't until an hour later, Lisa's lips around his cock, that Seth dimly recalled she’d never answered his question about Alice, and it wasn’t until the next day that he understood why.