Archive of Our Own

She stopped seeing Jareth when she was nineteen years old.

It was a rainy spring day in algebra class her sophomore year in college and between lines, between notes on the page in the file folder spread out on her desk, she realized she hadn't seen him in weeks. He hadn't been there in busy corridors as she hurried between classes, hadn't been there six rows down and ten rows over in her Tuesday morning physics lecture, hadn't passed by the window in her calculus tutorial and made her smile despite herself before she tamped the feeling down. She wasn't sure how she felt except conflicted once the realization dawned. He'd been there just around every next corner for so long that apparently she'd gotten used to it, and now he was gone.

It was later that night, back in her shared room over a book of algebra exercises and a cup of coffee so strong it was probably going to keep her awake all night, that she realized why it bothered her, why she felt conflicted. She'd finally gotten what she'd wanted ever since that night there in the labyrinth and she should've been elated by it, but it had taken her weeks to notice. He'd become part of the scenery, part of the backdrop to her life, never really there but never really absent. And now he truly was absent and she didn't want him back, she really didn't, she'd left literature and theater and all the fairytales she'd loved behind, put them in a drawer so maybe she'd be rid of him, but somehow she knew she'd miss him anyway.

Jareth was gone. She could move on with her life, almost like she'd never seen the labyrinth at all. She'd thought she'd miss him more.

---

London wasn't all that different to Boston when it came down to it, she thought.

It was, of course, the streets weren't the same at all and when it snowed in winter it wasn't kind of like the end of days was nigh, but they all spoke the same language and in her department that language was mostly math. Of course, they called it maths instead and poked well-meaning fun at her Americanisms. She took it with a pinch of salt and found she liked the place. It felt like home.

She was a doctoral candidate by then, mid-May before her twenty-fifth birthday, in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at a fairly prestigious London college who'd snapped her up around about forty seconds after she'd made her application. Her supervisor was a thirtysomething wunderkind called Sean who wore Converse to work and did yoga on his office floor every lunchtime, whether there was anyone else in the room or not, and she shared an office with his Argentinian postdoc research assistant who had a background in astrophysics and kept telling her all about quasars each and every opportunity he got. It worked out at an average of twice per day, when they were both in. More often than not, they were both in.

Astrid from the office down the hall, who was getting her PhD in particle physics and ate lunch with her every Thursday, said it was just Santi's overzealous astrophysicist version of flirting, and Sarah figured it probably was. Maybe she should've been interested; he was good-looking and smart, spoke four languages and told the truth even when the truth was her blouse made her look like someone's eighty-year-old grandmother or the calculation she was scrawling on the whiteboard in their office made about as much sense as the time their boss came in with his hair dyed lime green and no one even thought to mention it till three days later. But she wasn't interested. It didn't seem right to pretend she was when he was so nice and she'd just be leading him on. She'd been dating amateur rugby players from the School of Engineering instead, big guys with crooked post-broken noses who didn't want her for her mind and so they didn't mind when she had no interest in theirs. Besides, at least none of them made her think of Jareth. That was sort of the point.

She was in the library when it happened. She'd been there for an hour, flicking through theses and making quick photocopies in the stacks on her supervisor's recommendation, and had just stopped by the physics section to finally pick up the book on quasars that Santi had been recommending to her for over a month. There she was at the issue desk, library card in one hand and her newly stamped physics book in the other, and when she turned to walk away she caught the elbow of the next person standing there behind her in the queue. She dropped her card, she dropped her book and she dropped her photocopies, watched them drift to the floor in all directions as she knocked the books from the guy behind her's hands; she gave a muttered little damn under her breath as she went down to a crouch to pick everything back up again and when she looked up to apologize, the guy looking back at her was the Goblin King. It was Jareth, with three worn library books on literary theory that he scooped up into his hands.

"It's you," she said, and she pushed back up to her feet a fraction too quickly.

He tucked his books under one arm and swept together her photocopies. He was still down on one knee as he held the copies up to her and she stared at them and stared at him, like it was him but it wasn't him but it had to be. It was him but his hair was different, normal, still that unnatural shade of ash blond but shorter, and the tights that had seemed so perfectly sensible at the time but then ridiculous when she thought of it after were nowhere to be seen, the open-necked shirt, the heeled boots, the sweeping coat all gone with them. He was wearing a brown checked tweed jacket and a tie and worn blue jeans, a messenger bag looped across his body, absolutely no makeup, but it was him. His eyes said it was, the heterochromia iridum because when she said it that way it sounded scientific and not remotely magical at all.

"Have we met?" he said, with a hint of a frown, and she took the copies from him, warily like they might turn to snakes in her hand at any second.

For a start, she wasn't sure what to say. She wanted to say yes, of course they had, surely he hadn't forgotten? She wanted to say it was useless pretending, faking it the way he was, because she knew who he was even if they weren't dancing cheek to cheek at a masquerade ball in a glorified snow globe. She wanted to glare and stare and scowl and curse him for making her think he was gone just to turn up again, there of all places when her guard was finally down, a bad penny, did pennies in the Goblin City have King Jareth's profile on them?

"Just for a second, I thought you were someone else," she said instead, and she held out her hand to help him up to his feet. He took it, his palm warm against hers, and he stood. She didn't apologize. He didn't appear to expect her to, just held her gaze a moment longer, nodded curtly and then stepped past her to the desk.

"I hope you find whoever you're looking for," he said, over his shoulder, leaning against the counter as the librarian readied the stamp.

"Oh, I'm not looking for him," she said, and smiled tightly. And though there were a million things she'd have liked to say or ask or do, she walked away. She wasn't sure what she'd have done if she hadn't.

---

The afternoon passed slowly, and not just because once Santi had spied the book sitting there on the corner of her desk he launched into the latest chapter of Santi's Quasar Obsession. He showed her images on his work PC and printed in a journal he'd been published in back just before Christmas and they were stunning, sure they were stunning, but Sarah's mind was elsewhere. Her mind was in the labyrinth, and in the wake of what had happened she wasn't sure that it had ever left.

She hadn't thought about it in months by then. She hadn't even dreamed about it the way she'd used to, about the walls that changed and shifted all around her, crystal balls like bubbles on the air and Jareth at the center of it all, biding his time till the clock struck thirteen. She used to dream about dancing till she was dizzy with it and she'd wake convinced that she'd been back there, that she could still smell him on the air, that she was still warm under the sheets from being so damn close to him, and she'd squeeze her eyes shut and pretend it wasn't him she was thinking of when she touched herself. It was always him. She hadn't met anyone else like him, and she was terrified she would, perhaps more terrified she wouldn't. She blushed as she sat there in the office. Santi probably thought she was enjoying quasars just as much as he did.

As she worked at the board after lunch sitting at her desk, she wondered if she could find him if she tried. He was maybe there pretending to be staff, if he'd been in the library by human means and not by way of some rather sadly mundane goblin magic, might be listed in the staff directory if he were, or maybe he was posing as a student. Maybe just saying his name three times aloud would be enough, like in the fairytales, but why would she want him to be there anyway? She went back to work instead of staring blankly at the numbers she'd scrawled on the board. She made very little progress.

And then, around four, just as she was rubbing the marker from the whiteboard ready to leave and go home for the day, there was a knock, a sharp rap on the open office door. It startled her and she turned quickly, board eraser still in hand. Of course, it was Jareth standing there in the doorway. Apparently she hadn't even had to say his name to summon him.

"Are you following me?" she asked.

He raised his brows, clearly amused. "You dropped this," he said, and plucked her library card from his inside jacket pocket, held it out to her between two fingers.

"Oh." She frowned.

He started toward her across the room. "Perhaps this is forward of me--" he said, trailing off briefly to glance at the card in his hand, "--Sarah, but I'd like to take you to lunch one day."

She reached out and took the card from him, the plastic warm from sitting there pressed between his jacket and his shirt, and the idea that he'd touched it almost made her drop it like a spider in her hand. She tucked it into the hip pocket of her jeans instead. She looked at him. She considered his words.

"Tomorrow?" she said, not quite sure if she'd meant to say it or not. He looked pleased. Perhaps it was magic.

"I'll meet you here at one?"

"Sure." And she paused for a moment, and he paused for a moment, and she almost said I know it's you. But what she said was, "I'm sorry, I haven't asked your name."

"Jared," he said, and smiled. "Jared König. I'm in the English department."

"Sarah Williams," she replied, and she held out her hand. He shook it, still just as warm and solid and disconcertingly real as he'd been there in the library. "I'll see you tomorrow. Jared."

"I'll look forward to it," he said, and he gave a brief nod and he turned and he left. It wasn't long until she left, too, ignoring Santi's questioning gaze. It would have taken far more explanation than she had the will to give to make him understand.

Jareth had no power over her then and he never had, she told herself as she watched the traffic through the window of the bus she rode home, and Jared König was just another of his tricks. Jared König was another attempt to manipulate her, to make her doubt herself, but she wouldn't be fooled. Jared König was meant to rattle her, make her angry that he wouldn't say he knew her, make her seem like the irrational one when ever since the labyrinth she'd been nothing but. She was the most rational person she knew.

Her life was ordered, neat and tidy, without him in it. He wanted to cast that life back into disarray.

She'd show him. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

---

Sarah's flatmate was a solicitor called Alison with a schedule - both work-related and then social - so busy she was rarely home for longer than it took to shower and change her clothes. That suited Sarah; she hadn't exactly been looking for company as much as she'd been looking for a place to live in a nice enough area that wasn't totally beyond her means. It seemed to suit Alison, too; she made her mortgage payments every month and when she came home the place wasn't a total wreck. After all, Sarah was neat and tidy and kept to herself.

Sarah had the attic bedroom, the biggest in the house since Alison was rarely even there. She had a big comfortable bed and a big skylight window, a desk they'd fought up the stairs with the help of an obliging next door neighbor, a bookcase stacked with textbooks and a wardrobe that looked like it might well take her straight to Narnia if she just wished hard enough. She made a sandwich in the kitchen when she got through the door and took it up to her room, ate it while she was on the phone with her stepmom back in the States. She called twice and week and once she was done telling her how her dad was and how Toby was, how her grandparents were and what the neighbors were doing, she always asked if she was dating, if she'd been to church at the weekend. She always said she'd tell her if she met someone and yes, definitely, she'd been to church, though she hadn't been even once in two years since she'd moved overseas. She told her about the readings and the hymns and the little old couple who always invited her over for tea afterwards, making up stories just to prove to herself she still could if she tried, if she needed to. If her stepmom knew she was lying, she didn't breathe a word.

She did some work at her desk, ate some fruit, made some cocoa with marshmallows even though the weather had been turning a little warm for her to justify it. She took a shower, washed her hair, hummed to herself though she couldn't place the tune. Then she read for an hour, the book about quasars, and thanks to her frequent conversations with Santi and Astrid she even followed most of it. And finally, before Alison had even set foot back inside the house that night, she slipped into bed and went to sleep.

In her dream, she stepped out of bed into a library.

Her feet were bare and the worn gray flagstones beneath her feet were icy cold as she walked down the aisle between the shelves. She didn't recognize the place at all; it wasn't the university library, wasn't the British Library where she'd spent some time, wasn't any library she'd ever been in in her life and honestly, considering the strange faces of the few patrons she glimpsed in the alcoves at the end of the aisles between tall shelves, she wasn't sure the place she was was in the human world at all. Certainly no one seemed to notice that she was passing them by in the panties and the camisole she'd slept in. They barely glanced up at her at all.

When she saw him, he was sitting on the bottom steps of a winding spiral staircase, metal painted black and rising up from the huge central atrium to a long, high series of mezzanine-like wooden floors above. He watched her walk toward him, just sat and watched her in his tweed jacket and his odd new normal hair as he turned a crystal ball this way and that over one bare hand. When he dropped it, quite deliberately, it bounced down the ironwork steps and over the stone floor, lower and lower till it rolled to a stop by her foot and she stooped to pick it up. When she held it up, held it out, when she looked at him through it, Jareth was his old self again, not a swatch of tweed in sight. She went closer. He watched.

She should have turned and walked away. She should have handed back the ball or thrown it, let it bounce away between the shelves and out of sight. She should have felt embarrassed by the state of undress she was currently in, by the way his eyes moved over her, by the way they lingered on her nipples that were hard with the cold underneath her thin white camisole. But she didn't leave and she was in no way embarrassed, wouldn't let herself be goaded into it, objected strongly to it. She didn't hand back the ball, either; she ran its smooth surface against her cheek, against her lips, tilted up her chin and ran it slowly down the length of her neck. It was cold and made her shiver but that didn't feel bad at all, and so as he watched she ran it down between her breasts, over her stomach, between her thighs. She lingered there just for a moment over the top of the fabric of her underwear, rubbed herself with it with a slow shift of her wrist, watched as he watched her. Then she threw it away.

Jareth laughed. Somewhere not too far away, someone shushed him and he quieted, mock-chastened. The Goblin King could not, of course, be truly chastened. He didn't have it in him.

"You've changed," he said, neither accusation nor simple statement of fact but somewhere in between the two.

"You left me," she replied, quite flatly, quite simply, as if that were any kind of answer for it.

"Yes," he said, just as flatly, just as simply, and offered no further explanation.

She slapped him then, as hard as she could; the sound of her palm against his cheek echoed and the same voice shushed the two of them again.

"You left me," she said, more hotly now, more angrily.

"But I came back," he said.

---

There were classes to teach in the morning so she dragged herself from bed after a poor night's sleep and went to work.

She was a good TA with good reviews, liked to think she knew the material, liked to think she was approachable and friendly but still ultimately professional, knew the answers, could explain the theory. She was the go-to girl for over half the school when they needed a pair of hands in a class or had a stack of assignments to be graded and she was mostly glad of the work. She might've had a scholarship for her tuition but living costs came out of her savings unless she earned to cover them.

And then lunchtime came, and with it came a knock on the office door. She hadn't forgotten, but she was grading assignments at her desk even so.

"Are you ready to go?" Jareth asked, and she said that she was, but she took her time locking her things into her desk, tucking her wallet into her jeans, putting on her coat and retrieving her umbrella. She made him wait for her, accidentally on purpose. He didn't seem to mind.

"So, where are we going?" she asked, but he just smiled a faint little smile and tapped the side of his nose like their destination was a national secret. She didn't push for more as she unfurled her umbrella and stepped outside. He could have his little secret. She was going to show him who had the real power between them, and it most certainly was not him.

The English department was part of an older building, one side of a grassy quad that he led her into. Students sat on the grass in the summer, played music loud enough that the staff complained and the porters shooed them off, but it was raining that day; of course, a little rain could hardly stop the Goblin King. There was a huge umbrella set up by the stone-sided fishpond, a low little table underneath with two camping chairs and a picnic basket waiting there for them. She folded her umbrella and she took a seat, wondering if he'd set this up himself or if he'd somehow had the goblins do it for him because the thought of Jareth doing work seemed so out of place. He folded his own umbrella and joined her.

"This was your idea of taking me to lunch?" she said, as he poured her a cup of tea from a thermos. "People are staring."

He sat back in his seat in his strange tweed jacket as he sipped his tea. "Does that bother you, Sarah?" he asked. And when she thought about it, she found it didn't at all. Perhaps she had changed. He didn't have to be wrong all the time, at least, just when it mattered.

They spent an hour there, all told, listening to the rain drumming down on the umbrella above them, the sound of the rain on the surface of the pond, as he plied her with cucumber sandwiches and sweet, milky tea. He handed her a peach for dessert and she took it from him, smelled it, felt the fuzz of its skin with her fingertips, then watched him as she bit down into it and let the juice run over her wrist. She didn't fear him. She would not be his Persephone, trapped in his world against her will. After all, he had no power over her.

And afterwards, he left the big umbrella where it was and he walked her back to her building. He made conversation along the way just as he had back there by the pond, told her who he was and what he did like she had any faint belief in what he said to her. He said he was a professor there, that his area was literature, that his research focus was on folktales and fairytales from all across the world. He asked her if she'd ever dreamed she was a princess, if she'd ever been afraid of monsters who hid under the bed, and she said no, she never had. She said she was a mathematician. She said she believed in what could be proved.

"I'd like to see you again, Sarah," he said, as they came to a stop outside the door.

"I'd like that too," she said, and she folded her umbrella in the pouring rain. She stepped in under his instead, stepped right up close and rested one hand against his chest. "Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," he said, and she leaned in. She pressed a brief kiss to the corner of his mouth and then she turned and walked away, her heart pounding in her chest.

Jareth would not conquer her. She wouldn't let him.

---

In her dream, she stepped out of bed into a library.

When she turned around the bed was still there in the middle of the floor just like it belonged there somehow, like she could get back into it and pull up the sheets and no one would think anything of it at all, like it was part of the décor. But she turned around and she walked away. She was looking for Jareth and she knew that she'd find him; he wouldn't be hiding.

He was at a table, behind a stack of books that had no particular place in any human library, a stack of books with titles in alphabets that didn't strictly speaking exist, bound in things that might have been cloth and might have been leather and might have been something else besides. They were the oldest books she'd ever seen and Jareth's tweed jacket didn't look at all out of place there with them, but in the mirror hanging on the wall behind him he was himself and not this strange new human facsimile. In the reflection he was Jareth, not Jared.

She hopped up onto the table and sat there on the worn old wood that was like something from a movie set, like something from a castle, maybe something from his castle. She swung her bare legs and she drummed her fingers on the books and he looked at her, smiled at her just faintly, closed his book and sat back in his high-backed chair.

"Why did you come back?" she asked. "You let me believe you were gone for years. I forgot you."

"You didn't forget me, Sarah," he replied, and seemed quite sure of it indeed.

She went down from the table then. She stepped around behind him and she leaned on the back of his chair, toyed with his hair with her fingers. She trailed the back of her hand against his cheek, ran her palm over his throat and down, down.

"You didn't forget me either," she said, murmured, bending low by his ear. "I think you might want to, but I don't think you can."

She knew what she was doing. Maybe for the first few years after Jareth she hadn't felt much like dating but then she'd thought it might even help her if she did. And so she'd dated, back home in the States once she'd gone away to college, football players, swimmers, all big guys well above six feet tall because that way she'd thought she wouldn't think of him in bed instead of them. She'd enjoyed it, the sex, how she'd teased them, intrigued them, kept them interested in more long after her own interests had waned. She'd learned how to do it, how to make it good, make it last, make it memorable, at least for them. For her, one orgasm had always seemed much like the last, enjoyable but hardly dependent on anyone else's concerted cooperation.

She stepped around the chair and she settled herself down astride his lap. She nuzzled his cheek and he stroked back her hair. She pressed her mouth to his throat and he tilted back his head to let her. Her hands went down over his chest, slid inside his jacket, felt the warmth of his skin through the fabric of his shirt and she kissed his jaw, kissed his cheekbone, kissed one corner of his mouth. She felt him take an unsteady breath. She ran one hand down between his thighs and felt rather more than that was waiting there.

"Why did you come back?" she asked, shifting back to meet his gaze though all the while her palm rubbed slow circles there over the front of his jeans. "Why now?"

"You weren't ready to meet me when we met," he said, his pale face faintly flushed. "You had attachments. You couldn't stay. I hoped a few more years might change your mind."

She popped open the button at the waist of his jeans, dragged down the zipper. She slipped her hand inside, pushed in beneath his underwear and pressed her palm against him, felt him harden, felt him shift.

"Nothing's changed," she said.

"I think everything's changed," he replied.

"You're wrong."

"Then tell me to leave," he said. "Tell me to leave, Sarah, and I'll leave you forever."

"I said nothing's changed," she said. She smiled and she pulled back her hand and she patted his cheek with it. "I didn't say I wanted you to go anywhere."

She left before he said another word. She went back to her bed. She slept to wake.

---

Lunch the next day was a second picnic, spread out on a red and white checked blanket that he unfurled across her office floor. There was a cake stand with scones and clotted cream. There were elegant little finger sandwiches. There was tea that he brewed with hot water from a thermos poured out into a delicate teapot, colorful macaroons and pork pie and cushions for them to sit on while it rained outside, lashing down hard against the office window. Santi said something about going out for lunch while Jareth finished setting up, left his homemade sandwich on his desk and made a swift exit. Sarah could only make herself feel slightly guilty for it.

"He likes you," Jareth said, almost conversationally, as he settled himself down and poured her a cup of tea.

"I dreamed about you last night," she replied, cross-legged on the cushion once she'd shed her shoes, like she actually believed that was any kind of a reply at all. Jareth just chuckled and sipped his tea.

"Would it be ungentlemanly of me to ask exactly what you dreamed about me?" he said, a glint in his eye.

"I dreamed we were old friends."

"Just friends?"

"Maybe a little more."

He raised his brows. He cocked his head. "A little isn't very mathematical," he said.

She shrugged and she looked at him over the rim of her pretty little porcelain teacup, holding her saucer like it might actually break in her hands. "Dreams aren't very mathematical," she replied. "All kinds of things happen in them. They break all kinds of laws."

He smiled with a nod to concede the point and they ate their sandwiches, they drank their tea, they shared a scone from the same little porcelain plate. He told her about his work, about a collection of old Bavarian folktales he was editing together for publication, about the school's creative writing competition he'd been asked to judge and she thought perhaps once upon a time she might have liked to enter it. But since that night in Jareth's city, she'd put all those dreams away and focused on reality, on the sciences that explained the world and then on the math that underpinned it all. She went back up to her feet and wrote the most elegant expression she could think of up there on the whiteboard for him to see, said those were the stories she told now. He had folktales, fairytales, the whole corpus of literature and mythology to draw from; she had mathematics.

And afterwards, when the tea was drunk and the sandwiches reduced to crumbs, she leaned over the cake stand and the leftover scones and she pressed her mouth to his so very close to chastely.

"Thank you for a lovely lunch," she said.

"We should do this again."

"I'd like to."

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow."

It was settled just so and they packed away the blanket and the cushions and the leftovers inside the picnic basket, Sarah's hands brushing his, making her smile, making him shiver. Then he passed by Santi in the doorway as he left and Santi frowned as he sat back down at his desk.

"He's too old for you," he said, not even looking at her, not close to facing her, as he booted his computer to go back to work.

"You have no idea," Sarah muttered, and then told him, "I'd really prefer not to talk about it." She wasn't sure what she'd have said if she had.

She dreamed of him again that night, after work, after dinner, after an hour with the book about quasars before bed. She dreamed of him back there in the library.

She dreamed settling in his lap just like she had the night before, dreamed his hands on her bare thighs then his hands at the small of her back, underneath her camisole. She dreamed her own hand wrapped around him, pushed down beneath his tights that looked like something out of Shakespeare now she thought about it, dreamed her free hand tangled up in his long hair, fingers twisting tight, making his eyes go sharp but not quite warning. She dreamed stroking him as his head fell back, as his lips parted just ever so slightly, as his breath began to catch, as his hips began to shift. She dreamed her mouth at his neck, sucking there, biting there, dreamed the rumble in his chest as she did it.

She dreamed he came in her hand in wild pulses, hot and wet and hard, that his delighted moan echoed against stone walls and high ceilings and that everyone there heard. They had to have heard. He wasn't even close to quiet.

"Do you love me, Jareth?" she asked him, after, as she ached for her own release but she wouldn't let him touch her. She slapped his hands away until he acquiesced, though she'd have liked him to touch. Maybe later, she thought, but not just yet. Not now.

"Of course I do," he replied. "Why else would I have come back?"

"Do you even know what love is?"

"The goblins invented love," he said, as if this were a very well-known fact plucked direct from the historical record. He said it like something she should've known if she'd known anything at all and not just like so much makebelieve.

"I think the goblins invented lying, too."

"Of course we did," he said, amused. "And laughter and tears and shame and joy. Anything a human feels, we felt before your world was even born."

"You don't look that old."

"Older than you."

"But not older than the universe."

He smiled sharply. "Looks can be deceiving," he said, and he lifted one hand to stroke back her hair from her face. She let him, just that once. "You know that, Sarah. Or didn't my labyrinth teach you anything?"

"It taught me not to trust you."

"Sometimes I don't quite trust myself."

She kissed him, maybe just to make him stop. Somehow she'd forgotten just how exhausting Jareth's riddles could be but there they were again, talking in circles, answers leading into questions, always changing, just like the labyrinth. But she'd break him in the end, and break his hold on her.

"I'll see you again," she said.

And she went back to bed, to sleep, to wake.

---

They ate lunch in the English department the following day.

There was a room in the attic, long and thin and tucked right up there underneath the eaves, with a polished wooden floor and strange tiered bookshelves that fit snug against the slanting walls. Professor König's office was two floors below, Jareth said as he slipped an old brass key into the lock to let them in, but he spent hours up there alone, between lectures and seminars, tutorials, supervisions. He worked downstairs but he read upstairs.

"Your department treats you like a king," she said, teased, once lunch was over, standing by the little window that overlooked the leafy green quad below, with its little fishpond and fountain and odd crazy-paved path across the grass. It was raining outside, again, maybe just still because she wasn't sure she'd seen it stop, and she had to open up the window to see out past the rain against the glass. A few moments later, she closed it up again and turned to him, her hair swept back by the wind, drops of water in it, drops of water on her skin, and Jareth stepped close to brush them away with his fingers.

"You're very beautiful," he said, his hands cupping her jaw, his thumbs stroking her cheeks.

"You're very flattering," she replied, and she took his hands in hers and laced all her fingers between his. "My friend says you're too old for me."

He smiled a faint little smile. "Perhaps I am," he said.

"Do you think you are?"

"I think you're old enough to decide that for yourself."

"I think you're deflecting."

"I think you're right."

She kissed him. She squeezed his hands in hers and she leaned in and kissed him, softly, quite demurely.

"I think my friend has some outdated ideas about relationships," she said when she pulled back. "And I think I ought to get back to work." She let his hands go and she stepped away.

"Lunch tomorrow?"

"Oh, I can't tomorrow. Friday?"

"Friday, then."

She nodded, and she turned to leave. She showed herself out and she left him there as he sat back down on his cracked old leather sofa. She didn't say that every Thursday she met Astrid for lunch and that was why she couldn't meet him. She didn't explain. She'd let him draw his own conclusions.

She just went back to work, and wondered what her dreams might bring.

---

"Let me show you the library," he said that night. She couldn't see anything objectionable in the idea of it, and so she let him show her. When he draped his brown tweed jacket there around her shoulders to keep her warm against the chill, she let him do that, too.

The place was immense. She'd known that already, of course, from the times she'd walked through it to find him, but it was somehow even bigger than she'd given it credit for; there were rows that stretched out as far as the eye could see just like the labyrinth had, there were rows only as long as her arm before they reached a solid wall, there were staircases that wound down into the ground beneath, little oil lamps burning along the bannisters all the way down so far they twinkled out of sight.

And everywhere there were books, more than she'd ever seen in one place in her life, ones so big she couldn't have lifted them, ones so small she couldn't have read the text without a magnifying glass at the very least. She saw two or three that were as tall as she was, taller, thicker, heavier. Some were in cases, sealed behind glass. Some were locked inside boxes that Jareth opened up with shiny silver keys that dangled from his belt. One was made entirely of sheets of etched crystal. One was written on the petals of finely-pressed flowers. One oozed. One spoke its own words aloud when opened until the other patrons shushed it down.

Every now and then he'd pick up a book and he'd tell her what it was, and in his shirtsleeves and the eyeglasses he took from the pocket of his jacket that she wore he was almost just like a curator, a librarian, and not a king. There were storybooks, picture books, huge folios of artworks nothing like she'd ever seen before, strange maps that changed every time she looked away, parchment pages inked in rusty red, delicate scrolls tied up with a single hair. This one was an early history of the goblin kingdom, this one a goblin philosopher's treatise on the human world from its start to its end. This one was a goblin physicist's guide to the vicissitudes of architecture. This one was Shakespeare, because even the goblins had Shakespeare, it seemed.

Then, although they'd worked their way down the winding staircase several floors and walked steadily ever forward, never even turning back just for an instant, Jareth opened up a door and they were back where they'd begun.

"The vicissitudes of architecture," she said, with a shake of her head.

"Once you understand the physics of my world, yours don't seem at all perplexing," he told her in response. She didn't doubt it. He probably understood human math even better than she did.

He sat himself down at the table, on his high-backed chair, and she leant back against the table's edge. She shrugged his jacket from her shoulders, let it fall over a stack of books behind her that he'd left there, piled open one on top of the other.

"Do you love me, Jareth?" she asked, like she hadn't asked that same question before. "What do I mean to you?"

"I found a way into your world from mine," he said. "That's what you mean to me." And the way he said it clearly said it meant something, that it had some depth of meaning to him, but that meaning escaped her completely.

"But I saw you in my house that night," she said. "Is that meant to impress me when you've done it before?"

He tutted, shook his head mock-sadly. "That wasn't your house," he said. "You'd already crossed the border when we met. You were there the instant that you said the words."

"So you couldn't cross, before."

"Only as an avatar."

"The owl?"

"The owl."

"Then what changed?"

He gave an exaggerated shrug, more suited to the Goblin King than it was to the professor. "Any door will open if you spend enough time knocking," he said. "I had time. You don't imagine time here and there are tied together, do you?"

"I don't understand."

"I don't expect you to."

"You're insufferable."

He smiled what Sarah couldn't describe as anything but smugly. "But are suffering me."

She stood abruptly and for a second his smile faltered. But she didn't intend to leave.

She leaned over and untied his tie, slid it away from his collar, wrapped the ends around her palms and snapped it taut and he watched her do it, apparently intrigued. She knew what she was doing when she walked around behind him, when she drew back first one of his hands and then the other, when she tied them there behind him, behind his chair, tightly enough that he couldn't lean forward at all, let alone move away. She was thrilled by it, having him captive, and as she stepped back around in front of him, as she unbuckled his belt and unzipped his jeans, as she curled her fingers in beneath the waistband and pulled down, as she bared him completely from hip to knee, she briefly considered leaving him there. Someone would have found him, of course, but the idea amused her. When she teased him erect with long, light strokes of her fingertips, she considered leaving him there like that instead. Someone would have found him, of course, but the idea of them finding him hard for her, and angry that she'd left him, made her flush with warmth.

She didn't leave. She stood back against the edge of the old, heavy table instead and she watched him watching her toy with the hem of her camisole, watched his eyes moving over her, watched them widen just a fraction when she tugged the hem up, watched the pupils dilate in those strange eyes of his when she pulled the hem up higher, pulled the camisole off over her head and set it aside, leaving herself bare down to the waist. She cupped her bare breasts and he chuckled tightly, watching, rapt. Then she trailed one hand down between them, over her sternum, her ribcage, her abdomen, tucked her fingertips down under the waist of her panties. She watched him watch as that hand moved down lower, watched him watch as her fingertips found her lips and stroked them, parted them, teased between them. She watched him watch her as she touched herself, obscured by the thin white fabric. She watched him strain against the tie around his wrists.

"You think I couldn't break free from this and ravish you in an instant if that was what I wanted?" he said, his voice strained, his eyes sharp.

"Do you mean to say you don't want me, Jareth?" she said, and gave him a little mocking pout. And he glared at her but his cock was straining, moist at the head. She licked her lips quite deliberately as she looked at it, watched it give a little kick or arousal.

She watched him watch her tease herself until she came, still standing there against the table, flushed and moaning. She watched the flustered look there on his face as she drew back her hand and held it out to him, as he sucked on her fingers, as he jerked and came without so much as a touch. She put her camisole back on, smoothed it down, took her time about it, let him sit there messy and disgruntled as she did so. And then, in the end, she untied his hands.

She came again when she woke, touching herself, so wet and so ready by then that it took no time at all. Just knowing how desperately he wanted her was enough.

---

"Santi says it's moving really quickly," Astrid told her at lunch the next day, turned sideways on her seat to lounge against the wall. "He's not sure you seeing him's a good idea."

Of course, Astrid being Astrid, she didn't seem to agree with that sentiment in the slightest. She'd had a different guy on her arm almost every time they'd gone out, in the evening and not just meeting up for lunch - they'd been tall, short, fat, skinny, a postdoc from biomedical science, a tube train driver, a banker, a semi-pro soccer player - and she seemed pretty ecstatic with that situation. Sarah couldn't say she blamed her.

"It's complicated," Sarah said, and sipped her post-lunch coffee. "I knew him before. Back home, when I was younger."

"Santi said you'd only just met."

"Santi really doesn't know the whole story." She raised her brows meaningfully. "And since when do you spend so much time talking to Santi?"

"Well, it wouldn't be the first time he got the wrong end of the stick," Astrid said, and deftly avoided answering the question. Sarah decided not to push.

They were in the little café in the basement of their building, tucked away in a corner like they always were on Thursdays after their odd little interdisciplinary reading group had finished. She liked Astrid. She was down-to-earth and never seemed to care very much what anyone else thought of her, baked cakes once a week and always brought a slice down the corridor from Physics, through the strange double doors that connected what was nominally the Department of Physics to the School of Maths. Astrid said cake was important. Sarah had definitely come to agree.

"So, you know him pretty well?"

"Sure, about as well as I know anyone."

Astrid passed her a cookie. "And it doesn't bother you that he's as old as your dad?"

Sarah pretended to consider this, tapping the cookie against the edge of her plate in contemplation. "Actually, I think he might be older than my dad," she said. "No, it doesn't bother me. Does it bother you?"

"I went out with a guy who could've been my granddad when I was an undergrad," Astrid said. "I'm kind of the wrong person to ask." She wiggled her eyebrows halfway between ridiculous and suggestive the way Sarah had never quite been able to and made her smile.

They made an afternoon of it, blew off the office and went out, had drinks watching the rain through a pub window, stopped by an Indian restaurant for dinner on the way home and Astrid flirted with the waiter till he finally asked her out. Then Sarah caught the bus back home, stopped in for groceries then drew a bath and soaked until the water started to get just a bit too cold.

She didn't suppose she'd lied when she'd said she knew him, or said she'd known him back home at the other side of the Atlantic, before she'd left. She liked to think she knew him from his actions, knew him from a hundred books of fairytales she'd read as a girl, from the book, The Labyrinth, because sometimes she thought it was like he'd sprung to life straight out of it, or at least from the way she'd thought about it. She'd read the book again back home, in college, told herself it was safe because Jareth had been gone a while by then, and it turned out it wasn't how she remembered it at all. The king had no name and in the end, the king had won.

And when she dreamed that night, she dreamed of him. When she dreamed that night, she tied his hands behind his back and she took off her clothes. When she dreamed, she watched him watch her touch herself, watched him watch her hop up onto the table and spread her bare thighs, watched him watch her part her lips and push her fingers up inside herself, rub at her clit and make herself moan. She watched him, watched his eyes, watched his cock, watched the way he strained toward her. She watched him come when she came, without a single touch.

"I knew who you were before we met," he said as she dressed, his hands still tied.

"Of course you did," she replied, and leaned back against the table that had become so quickly quite familiar. "You'd been watching me."

"I'd seen your whole life from start to end. That night was the only piece missing from it."

"That's impossible."

"For you," he said. "Not for me. Goblin physics tend to break your rules."

She crossed her arms. "I don't see how."

"It's all there if you turn the crystal ball this way and that," he said, like that was obvious, and shrugged against his bonds. "I've seen everything that's happened in your world and everything that ever will." He shook his head, he clucked his tongue. "Didn't I tell you our time and yours aren't tied together? And I thought you were so clever, Sarah."

"So you saw me in the labyrinth before I was even there?"

"I can't see the future in my own world any more than you can see it in yours. That's just not how it works."

"But you saw mine."

"Yes, I did. More than once. It's always been a favorite of mine."

"So, what did you see?"

"A long career. A long life. Success." He raised his brows and paused for a second, apparently for effect. "Maybe even happiness."

"Without you."

"Without me."

"I never went back."

"Never."

"We never met again."

"Not once."

"But you're here."

He smiled. Slowly, he smiled. It spread broadly, darkly, full of Jareth's self-assured self-satisfaction, and it left her unsettled the way it always had.

"Yes, here I am," he said. "I thought I might try changing history."

---

On Friday, they had lunch in the library. In a part of it, at least.

There was a room on its third floor, long and wide and lined in paintings of all the old prominent, eminent professors, a long table there down the center that might've seated forty, a banquet table like something out of a movie with knights in shining armor. It was covered in a thick old dusty cloth while out of use, but one end was pulled back and two places were set for afternoon tea. It was raining outside, heavy against the windows, and there was no other sound to hear except for Jareth's voice, not even the library beneath them.

Afterwards, she strolled around the room, looking up at all the stern-faced paintings, old men in their caps and gowns, and Jareth watched her from his seat back at the table as he poured himself another cup of tea. He took it very sweet and very milky, sugar cubes he plucked from a bowl with tongs, milk from a milk jug, everything just so. She wondered if that was what he was like back in his castle in the goblin city and he'd only ever been wild and cruel for her. Either way, cruel was likely true.

"This one looks like you," she said, her voice echoing, louder than she'd meant it.

He chuckled, and that sound echoed too. "Perhaps a little," he said.

Perhaps a lot, she thought.

When she dreamed that night, he didn't speak. He sat there dressed just like the Jareth she'd known before this time, hair and tights and black leather gloves, and while there was no tie at his neck, there was a length of fine rope lying there between the open books spread out on the tabletop. She tied his hands with it, made it tight, then she took off her clothes as he watched her. She straddled his bare thighs, pressed her bare breasts against his chest, caught his hard cock against her abdomen. She touched herself there, straddling him, so close she could feel his breath on her skin, and she she was done she leaned close by his ear and she murmured, now you. He clenched his jaw as he came, just like he wished he hadn't, like he wished he'd been able to resist. When he came, he looked like he resented himself for it.

She spent Saturday shopping for clothes for a conference. She remembered once upon a time she'd loved to shop, how she'd spent hours trying on shoes and dresses, putting on lipstick in her bedroom mirror, playing with her hair till she'd thought she'd looked like a princess straight from one of her books. She wondered sometimes if her stepmom still had the dress she'd liked back then, the one like something from a renaissance faire, like a medieval princess, but she didn't quite have the heart to ask.

When she dreamed that night, he didn't speak. She used the rope again then she unbuttoned his flouncy shirt and she bared his chest, she pulled down his tights right to the tops of his high boots and bared him waist to knee, ran her nails down over his skin, made him shiver what was very clearly in spite of himself. Then she bent low; she let her long hair brush his thighs, let the tip of her tongue tease the tip of his cock and he took a sharp breath at the contact. She didn't touch him again except to untie his wrists after, but she couldn't have called him unsatisfied.

She spent Sunday morning with Astrid, wandering an art gallery they'd not been to in a while. Astrid's first love might have been physics but she also loved art; she painted sometimes, had an easel in her office just in case inspiration struck and had started a second undergrad in art history back while she'd still been enrolled for her masters. It was like having a private tour guide, the way she rattled off names and dates and styles and anecdotes sometimes, stuff Sarah mostly hadn't even heard of though she'd never exactly shied away from learning.

And then, there in the temporary exhibition, up on the wall behind its little velvet rope, there was a painting Sarah frowned at while Astrid spoke, oblivious to the situation. It was a British Army general from just before the first world war in his full uniform, painted standing in his office with a back that was just as straight as a ramrod. His face was familiar, just like the painting on the wall in the college library. His eyes were familiar, too.

They had lunch in an overpriced but welcoming little café nearby when they were finished and then Sarah caught the tube, then the bus, and went home. Alison was out, of course, so she read by the living room window, listening to the rain on the glass, the splashes of puddles as cars went by. When her stepmom called later, she told her she hadn't been to church and faced the expected onslaught of righteous disapproval. Then she told her she'd met someone and stunned her into silence. She didn't think she could call it a lie, not really, because she had met someone. She just wasn't entirely sure she could take him home to meet her family, even if he'd already met her brother. Technically, at least, because there was no way at all that Toby could have remembered it.

When she dreamed that night, she didn't tie his hands.

"Stay still," she said, when she opened his shirt, when she pulled down his tights. "Stay just like that," she said, when she took off her camisole, when she undressed herself right down to her skin. Then she straddled his thighs and she took one of his leather-gloved hands and she trailed it down between her breasts, down and down and down between her legs. She pushed one gloved finger up inside herself, pushed it in sharply, and sighed as she squeezed around it. She pushed down against it as she touched herself, pushed in a second and then rode them slowly, tilted her hips and moaned between soft breaths. And when she came, pulling tight around those fingers, Jareth clenched his jaw in his anticipation.

"Not tonight," she said instead, with a hint of a smile, and left him most unsatisfied indeed.

They had lunch the next day. They walked through the rain to a museum nearby and had soup poured from a thermos with crusty white bread rolls in a back room with all the items they kept there for cataloging. Jareth had a friend who worked there, he said, who'd let them in, and the place was like a treasure trove, gold coins and medieval jewelry, little Egyptian statuettes, parchment under glass, and a dusty stuffed owl up on top of a shelf that seemed to make Jareth at least moderately uncomfortable.

He told her stories about the items after, walked around the room just by her shoulder and told her this sword had belonged to a French cavalry officer during the Napoleonic Wars, that brooch had been given to a great Elizabethan lady by her lover but was whisked away soon after by a highwayman who robbed her coach. He read a few words of Greek from a scroll, a few words of Latin from a book, pointed out the name of a king there in its cartouche on a shiny little stone scarab.

And then, that night, she dreamed of him.

"Who's in charge while you're playing human?" she asked as she unbuttoned his shirt.

"I am," he replied. "I dream myself back here each night, just like you do. How do you imagine the clock chimes without me?"

"So time stands still while you're away?" Her hands went down, trailing over his chest, caught at the waist of his tights.

"What need would there be for time to pass if I'm not here?"

"You have subjects. I'm sure at least some of them enjoy living."

"And how would they know the difference?"

"I suppose they wouldn't." He lifted his hips; she pulled down his tights, watched his cock spring free, already hard for her. She wrapped her hand around it. "How long have you been gone?"

"Does that make a difference?" She squeezed her hand; he frowned. "Years."

"Centuries?"

"Perhaps."

"Why?"

"Does that matter?" She squeezed again. He sighed. "A miscalculation."

"And you think if you go home, you might not get back through."

"Let's just say it took longer than I care to think about to find my way here without wings and a beak," he said. "More than centuries, Sarah. It's not an experience that I wish to repeat. Even for you."

"So it's now or never?"

He pursed his lips and so she kissed them. Then she straddled his thighs and rubbed the head of his cock between her thighs, rubbed it up against her clitoris and watched him squirm.

She wouldn't honestly have minded all that much if he'd pulled her down, if he'd pushed up into her and had her then and there; after all, they'd been skirting the issue rather poorly since the day they'd met. She wouldn't have minded if he'd pushed her up from his lap, pushed her back and pushed her down over the tabletop, pushed inside her like that, too. She almost wanted to tell him to do it, almost did it herself, almost parted her lips with her fingers and held him in place as she teased the tip of him against her, settled down, took him in. But he didn't move, just like he was still tied to the chair and not free of the rope at his wrists, so she just rubbed him against her, the head of his cock and her own fingers against her till she came with a soft little moan at his shoulder.

"Now you," she murmured, and caught his gaze as he came. His cock jerked and pulse against her abdomen, hot against her skin, and he clenched his jaw so tightly she could see the muscles work.

He was a king in his world, she thought as she sat there, her hands in his hair, her bare skin hot in chilly air against his. He was a king of somewhere magical, both real and yet unreal, where laws existed only to be bent if perhaps not completely broken. It was a place where the Goblin King ruled absolutely; he was dark and cruel and terrifying, and filled with a strange allure that might have been entirely magical in nature but then again it might have not. He was willing to kill or at least to threaten it convincingly to make a point, to put her in danger just because she'd expected to be. And now he'd entered her world, left his own behind, reordered time and lived through centuries in a strange land with strange rules away from his home, and he'd done it all for her. To be with her. Out of all of human history, she was the one that he wanted. The thought made her warm. She should have been disgusted by it. She wasn't sure that she could have ever been.

"Why didn't you just fast forward through time?" she asked, as she reached for her clothes. He didn't answer as he rearranged his own. "I know we have twelve hours on the clock here and not thirteen but I've seen you do far stranger things. Of course, maybe you just enjoy the first hand experience of wars and plagues and famines."

He looked at her. She looked at him. And in that moment, the expression on his face said every word he clearly didn't mean to. It spoke entire volumes. Perhaps, she thought, the goblins had felt emotion first.

"You have no power in my world," she said, filled up with wonder, near incredulous. It was a statement, not a question. "You have no power in my world at all."

He didn't deny it.

---

Once she started looking, Jareth was everywhere throughout history.

There were paintings and there were photographs, sketches, even an old film reel from the second world war when he'd apparently flown a Spitfire for the Allies, looking dashing if less than impressed for the camera as they introduced him as Captain King. He'd been Leroi, Rey, Rex, Király, apparently less than imaginative with his last name considering his former occupation. He really had lived centuries in her world.

They had lunch on Tuesday and Wednesday, skipped Thursday, hit Friday. When they met, it was almost as if he didn't recall what she'd done, what they'd done, didn't recall the labyrinth or the city or the castle there are the center of it, either, but she didn't wonder for a second if it was all just her imagination because in the end she knew it wasn't. She didn't wonder if it was really him, because she knew it was. There'd never been a time when she'd questioned what she'd seen that night, after all; her work was rooted in reality, in expressing the world mathematically, in quantifying life because she had an absolute belief that it was possible, but that didn't mean she doubted what she'd seen was real. It just meant she hadn't the science for it, at least not yet.

"Was anything there real that night or did you invent it all for me?" she asked him in her dreams, on Saturday night. "Everything was so familiar."

"You're special, Sarah, but you're not that special," he told her in reply. "Did you ever think perhaps you had one foot in my world already? Perhaps you chose the things that reminded you of me."

She rolled her eyes just as obviously and dramatically as she could manage. "Or maybe you planted them," she said. "I know what seems more probable." But she wasn't sure she'd have minded very much if he had done it, if he'd pulled strings in her life from behind the scenes, behind the borders. He neither confirmed nor denied.

They had lunch on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, skipped Thursday, hit Friday. When they met, he took her places she'd never thought to go, places she'd never known existed, odd little museums full of curios, coffee shops with strange, smiling staff who may or may not have been goblins themselves. In her dreams, he said the lesser sprites could come and go at will, though barely anyone would ever see them, barely anyone would know that they were there, only the ones who'd been there to the goblin city, the ones who'd already seen beyond the borders of their world. Like she had. He said there weren't many of them.

"You know none of this is real to me, though," she said, at night, in the library. "You know I think it's just a dream."

He smiled at her, the expression sharp-edged. "There's no such thing as just a dream," he said, and maybe he was right, but she pulled down his tights just like she did every night. She trailed one finger up over the vein there in the underside of his erection, base to tip, just like she did every night. He shivered, just like he always did. She watched him take a deep breath as she sat herself up on the edge of the table there in front of him. She watched him try to steady himself, with only moderate success.

"Touch yourself," she said. "I want to watch."

So he did, and she did. She watched him take off his gloves and drop them down to the floor, watched him wrap his long fingers around the shaft of his cock, and watched him stroke. He pinched the foreskin of it up over the head for a moment, rubbed the pad of his thumb against the tip in a long, slow circle, made his own eyes drift closed with it. His other hand dipped down and cupped his balls between his thighs, squeezed as he stroked as his eyes opened to look at her, eyes hooded, heavy-lidded. She watched as his chest began to rise and fall more quickly with his breath, as he shifted in his seat, as his hips rocked against his hands and his eyes were on her, never left her for an instant though that instant seemed to stretch and stretch as he touched himself just as she'd asked him to.

"Tell me when," he said, his voice tight, his face flushed, his cock straining. And in that moment she knew, with all the certainty that she'd ever known anything, that he'd have done anything for her. He'd have done anything at all. He was hers to command.

She made him wait and watched him struggle, saw his motions turn just as tight as his muscles were, watched sweat stand out on his pale skin in the library's low lamplight. She watched him spread his thighs as wide as the tights around his boottops would let him, dip his fingers fingers down and rub hard at the stretch of skin there behind his balls till he was on the verge of shuddering with it, muscles so tight he was almost shaking with it. She watched him watch her watch him.

"When," she said, and he leaned back, he gritted his teeth, he stroked once more, twice, then he came in long, hot ribbons all over his bare chest. He came with a shout that echoed, pained, ecstatic, loud enough that everyone there must have heard and she flushed with it, knowing they all knew exactly what he'd do for her. The library had eyes, after all. There were creatures around every corner, watching, whispering.

She left the table and his eyes followed her. She pressed her lips to his forehead, slipped her fingers into his hair, and his eyes closed.

"Do you love me, Jareth?" she asked, murmured against his skin.

"Everything I've done, I've done for you," he said.

---

They had lunch on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, skipped Thursday, hit Friday. Her stepmom seemed oddly cheerful about it all when they spoke on the phone, even when she said she thought maybe the professor looked around forty, maybe even fifty, it was hard to tell. She didn't bother checking his staff biography, asking the staff in his department or his students, though one lunchtime she went over to his office and found a group of fresh-faced freshmen leaving so apparently they did exist and weren't a figment of his so very clearly very active imagination. He said he supervised three PhD students, four masters students and a slew of final year undergrads, and from the conversations she overheard in the corridors as they walked through the English building, as they wandered through the quad in the rain both tucked in under his umbrella instead of separated out and under two, he was apparently a firm favorite.

Astrid seemed strangely proud of her; Santi stopped talking to her about quasars in the office. She returned the book to the library when she'd finished reading it, wondering if she'd given him the wrong impression by taking his advice and having it around, and it turned up three days later on Astrid's desk under her well-travelled cake tin. Perhaps Sarah wasn't quite a genius, not like her supervisor, not like Jareth likely was in his own way, but she didn't really have to be one to see what was coming there from at least a mile away.

When they met, he took her places she'd never thought to go, places she'd never known existed. There were other rooms around the campus, a private study room in the library filled with a collection of odd caricatures from the Napoleonic Wars where they drank tea as they discussed her work, a storeroom underneath the theater studies studios where costumes going back at least a century all hung in bags for the students to pore over on occasion. He put on a long coat and top hat like something from a British costume drama, pulled on a pair of white gloves and held out his hand. She put on a long dress over her jeans and they waltzed around the picnic basket, careful of the teapot, while he hummed a tune to keep their time. She didn't say it was familiar. She supposed she didn't need to, and he'd have just feigned ignorance if she'd pushed.

They spent an afternoon in his study up the winding stairs in the English building, both free from classes, playing hooky from work. They sat on his old leather couch and he read to her while she stretched out with her head resting back on his denim-clad thigh and she watched him there with the book in one hand, the other toying with the ends of her long hair. They kissed less-chaste kisses that afternoon, his hands cupping her face, her fingers tugging at his belt loops. His hands moved down slowly, his palms brushing her clothed breasts and she blushed with it, the whole thing absurd when in her dreams they'd done so much more besides, but in the waking world it felt somehow different, in a way she couldn't quite seem to place though it was right there on the tip of her tongue, or perhaps on the tip of his.

They spent an afternoon there again the next week, listening to the rain against the glass as they stood there by the window. Torrents of it had given way to occasional showers across the weeks, the sun breaking through just every now and again until she almost missed the drumming of it against her window in the night. She leaned against his back and wrapped her arms around him, spread her fingers out against his stomach there over his shirt, rested her head against his shoulder. She ran one hand down, rubbed it over the buckle of his belt. Then she ran it down lower, rubbed the heel of it down the line of the zip in his jeans, felt him take a sharp breath.

"Sarah," he said, not quite warning but not quite not, but that was far from enough to change her mind, especially when she felt his cock start to fill against the denim beneath her palm.

He turned. He leaned back against the window's high sill and he reached out, pulled her back in toward him, his hands catching the waist of her skirt. She rubbed her palm back down there, pressed it in with an obvious purpose, and he licked his lips, leaned back, let her do it. But then his hands went down, found the hem of her skirt and skimmed her bare thighs beneath and she shivered just lightly as he did it, as his fingers moved up slowly, lightly, as they slipped between her thighs then reached her underwear. He traced the outline of her lips there with his fingertips over fabric, made her take a soft little breath and steady herself with her free hand up at his shoulder. He rubbed there as her palm rubbed against him, made her flush straight through with warmth, made her wet and then wetter till she was sure her panties were completely soaked. She came with a judder, a gasp of surprise. He came with a jerk and a muffled moan, still inside his jeans. He chuckled. She smiled.

"It's a good thing I have nothing else scheduled for this afternoon," he said, both of them aware of his predicament, and she stepped back in to kiss him.

She spent Thursday and Friday away from home at the conference with colleagues and even there, away from him, in a strange bed in a hotel in a country half a continent away, she dreamed of him, dreamed his gloved fingers that she pushed up hard inside herself, dreamed the way that he looked at her, dreamed the lamplight in his eyes as he fought to restrain himself. It made her heart race. It made her stomach tighten. She'd tried to deny how she'd wanted him for years now there he was, the Goblin King, entirely at her mercy.

Then another week began, more lunches, Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday all in his attic study with its high window and its slanting cases full of books. Tuesday they didn't even manage to eat, they let the tea go cold, they left the scones abandoned and they kissed and they touched and she untucked his shirt, ran her hands over his bare skin beneath. Wednesday she straddled his thighs right there on his couch and raised his hands to her breasts, kissed his neck, made him come again straining up against his jeans. They ate afterwards, once he'd run down to his office to change into clean clothes. Somehow it was different outside her dreams, not that he was more real at all, perhaps just that they were each on somewhat more equal footing. Her dreams still felt absolutely real.

"Can I see you tomorrow?" he asked at the attic door, her fingers laced with his.

"Tomorrow's Thursday," she said. "You know I have plans on Thursdays."

"Then let me take you to dinner."

And that was something new, something she hadn't quite expected though she supposed she should have, in the end. For a month, they'd seen each other in the daytime, in the workday, never afterwards. So she said yes and not without some trepidation she gave him her address, wrote it out on a scrap of paper, so he could pick her up.

Alison was home, one of her rare passing visits for a shower and a change of clothes before heading out to hobnob with her friends, after what she said had been a career-making case. She was all smiles and didn't mind a bit when Sarah asked if she could borrow a dress from her; she took her upstairs and they went through her rather extensive wardrobe, racks and racks of skirt suits and pantsuits and dresses and shoes, high-powered business attire, some of which had pads in the shoulders that looked like they belonged on Sarah's stepmom ten years ago. But there was a little black dress that fit like a glove and when she'd changed into it, Alison gave a sage nod of approval and then disappeared into a taxi almost like she'd never been there at all. She looked at herself in the mirror. For once, she thought, her stepmom wouldn't have been ashamed of her sense of style.

He knocked on the door at 7pm on the dot and when she opened the door there he was in a gray silk suit that seemed to shimmer in the dying light, like something more Jareth than Jared.

"You look beautiful," he told her, as he took her hand at the doorstep and took her to his car, some ridiculous classic thing like a prop from a movie that she should have guessed would be his taste if not some souped-up bright red supercar. All she could do was say thank you, and she settled into the passenger seat, put on her seatbelt.

She'd half imagined the drive would be just like a rollercoaster, breakneck and screeching, but he drove carefully, albeit with the radio playing some kind of old classic rock so quietly she could barely make it out at all. She didn't ask where they were going because she was so sure he wouldn't tell her and then there they were, pulling into a square somewhere in West London, lined on all sides around a little green park with tall, white Regency townhouses. He pulled up in front of one of them; apparently that was his, an unassuming double-fronted thing that maybe didn't seem terribly special from an objective point of view but, of course, Jareth didn't do anything by halves; it had to have cost him millions, judging by its size and its location. Not exactly a professor's typical residence, though after the castle beyond the goblin city, it seemed unsettlingly mundane.

He showed her around while they waited for dinner, climbing stairs, turning corners, this way and that about the place like a maze and that somehow didn't quite surprise her. It turned out he had a housekeeper who lived downstairs in the basement flat and then also a cook who came in twice a day. She was a fifty-something Frenchwoman with a penchant for pastries, the very one who'd been so diligently providing lunches to the two of them for the past month, though Jareth said she'd been despairing - in French - of the leftovers. And when they went upstairs, through the first landing window she could see out over the garden in the square, behind its tall iron railings all covered in climbing roses in full bloom. They'd turned it into a hedge maze. She shouldn't have been surprised.

"Happy birthday," he told her after dinner, after she'd thanked the cook in halting French for a lovely meal, and he pushed a small, wrapped box to her across the table.

"How did you know?" she asked.

"Your friend Astrid came to my office," he said, looking rather amused about it. "I think she was trying to sound threatening."

Sarah smiled. "I'd take her seriously if I were you," she said. "She knows people. And I hear she does karate."

She untied the ribbon, tore away the paper and found a wooden box inside with a small brass catch. She opened it; there was a crystal ball inside that shone under the lights of the dining room chandelier, a Regency chandelier and most definitely not goblin. She took it out, held it in her hand to show she wasn't scared of it, of him, turned it this way and that, then she rolled it clear across the tablecloth straight back to him. He chuckled as he caught it in both hands.

"Am I meant to see my future in it?" she asked. "Can you?"

He held the ball in his hand for a moment, perched it on his fingertips and peered at her through it. Then he rolled it back to her.

"I'm not sure that's what it's for," he said. "At least I'm not sure the future's set."

They went upstairs, climbed the staircase to the top and then took the winding spiral stair up to his attic room. Another attic, tucked out of sight under the eaves, she thought, like her bedroom, like his study, secret, not quite of the world. And it was lined with books, of course, old ones, fragile ones, languages she couldn't speak but no doubt he could. She kissed him to stop his mouth as he started to tell her a story, a fairytale, felt his arms around her waist and then kissed him again just because she wanted to.

"Can I stay the night?" she asked, her pulse quick, a fraction anxious the way she'd never been with him when dreaming.

"I have a spare room downstairs," he said. "I can ask the housekeeper to make up the bed."

She raised her brows and stepped in close. "That's not what I meant," she said. He smiled.

She wasn't sure what she expected from his bedroom but the old wood panels and the fireplace that was apparently still in use, the heavy curtains and the big old four-post bed weren't it. It was like a scene from a movie, like a bedroom in a country house with rolling hills outside the window and not a hedge maze behind iron rails in a strange old square in London. He closed the door and she kissed him, pushed the jacket from his shoulders and let it fall down to the floor. She pulled open his tie, unbuttoned his shirt and she kissed him again and again, perhaps a fraction giddy from the wine or at least that's what she told herself it was. He untied his shoes and stepped out of them, pulled off his socks. She unbuckled his belt and pushed his strange gray suit pants down over his hips. They pooled at his feet with his underwear and he stepped out of them, naked except for the watch at his wrist and then he took that off, too.

"What now?" he asked, a small smile at his lips as he looked at her, half-hard, intrigued.

"Lie down," she said, and gestured to the bed, and so he did as he was told.

He watched as she undressed, as she pulled down the zipper at the back of her borrowed black dress, as she toed off her shoes, as she unhooked her bra.

"You're beautiful, Sarah," he told her as she pushed down her underwear, as she stepped out of it, as she went to him there on his bed. His eyes were on her, moving over her, lingering here and there, at a nipple, the side of her neck, between her thighs, so she crawled up over him from the foot of the bed, let her hair brush his skin, dipped her head down to tease his cock with the tip of her tongue. His hands went tight around handfuls of sheets, his back arched just a fraction, so she took the head of it into her mouth and sucked, tasted him, albeit briefly.

Then she moved. She went up higher, straddled his thighs, straddled his hips, let his cock press there between her thighs, against the lips of her sex. She ran her hands over his chest, shifted against him, felt him angle his hips against her and she leaned down, kissed his lips, caught his hands and drew them up above his head.

"Like that," she told him, and left his hands there, then she moved, took his cock in her hand and stroked, held it still, caught his gaze and kept it. She nudged the head of his cock up between the folds of her sex, nudged it back and into place and her cheeks flushed pink as he watched her do it. Then she settled down, sat back, felt the length of him push up and in, inside her. It was heady. She was almost dizzy with it, giddy with it, his chest beneath her hands, her thighs spread wide, every inch of him pushed in deep and she felt herself tighten around him, sighed with it right at the verge of moaning. Then she moved.

She couldn't say that she'd never wanted anyone else but him, because she had. She couldn't say she'd never had anyone else but him, because she had. But she leaned down over him, laced her fingers with his and rode him slowly, kissed him, felt him brace his heels to the bed and push up to meet her, push into her deeper. She rubbed at her clitoris with one hand while she watched his face, while she watched the fingers of his free hand clutch the pillow, made herself gasp and pull tight around him, made herself buck down against him and when he came in her, his muscles taut, breath caught in his throat, it was just moments then till she came, too, her skin all flushed and slick with a sheen of sweat.

She caught her breath still there on top of him, sweeping back her hair, feeling him still there inside her.

"Happy birthday to me," she said with a smile, and he chuckled, still very nearly breathless.

He read stories to her after, once she'd stretched out there naked by his side in bed, from a big old book that looked like it could have been as old as he was, and maybe came to the world from the same place as he did. He told her stories of kings and princesses, tall castles, witches, fairies that bit at little girls' fingers. He told her about the labyrinth, and when she closed her eyes she could almost believe she was back there in it. His voice took her there.

Then they turned out the light and they slept, to dream.

---

The bed in which she woke was not her own, nor was it in its usual location in the library. Of course, when she turned and found Jareth there beside her, stretched out on his side with his head propped up oh-so-casually on one hand, she understood. It was his bed, from his room, from his townhouse.

"Well, this is an interesting development," she said.

"Please don't tell me you're surprised," he replied, a hint of a smile on his face. "I'll be so disappointed."

She gave a faint little shrug and she leaned in closer, slipped her hand over his chest and down and down and down, found him naked beneath the sheets, found him already half-hard for her.

"You don't feel disappointed," she said, with her own innocent little smile, and teased the whole length of him from base to tip with her fingertips. But then the smile dropped slowly from her lips. She wrapped her hand around him, held him firmly.

"Fuck me," she said, eyes on his, and he tutted at her language though his smile went sharp, though his eyes went dark. He didn't require any further persuasion.

He threw back the sheets and went up on his knees and the chill in the air made her shiver. He pushed her down on her back and she let him do it, wanted him to. His warm hands skimmed her calves, skimmed her thighs and then parted them, his fingers stroked the hair between her legs, stroked down lower, one fingertip following the line where her lips met and then teasing between. She wanted him to touch her. She'd wanted him to right from the start, ten years ago, before she'd been ready at all.

"Put your mouth on me," she told him, so he did; he bent down low and pressed his lips to the inside of one thigh, bit down lightly with his teeth and made her hiss in a breath that made him chuckle, perhaps because he knew she wanted it. He put his mouth on her, between her thighs, pressed a kiss against her lips then teased between them with his tongue. The tip of it teased her clitoris, flicked against it, made her draw a deep unsteady breath as her fingers wound into the sheets, as she spread her legs wide and pulled up her knees, rested her feet flat to the mattress for support, for leverage to push down against his mouth, against the fingers that teased between her lips and pushed inside her slowly. She reached down, tangled her fingers in his hair and he chuckled against her, glanced up at her from there between her thighs, made her blush more from desire than from embarrassment with the expression on his face.

He still wanted her, after all that time, after all the tricks and the games and the effort he'd gone to, still desired her so strongly, with such fierce will that he'd left his own world and made himself vulnerable. But here, in his world, he was an ardent, angry king, a deity of space and time who'd bent all the laws of physics that she'd ever known to be with her. She knew he hadn't wanted to; he'd needed to. Because he loved her. Because no one else had ever said no.

She came with a gasp, clenched tight around his fingers, his tongue teasing at her clitoris all through the waves of pleasure that tingled through her, even after that as pleasure turned and twisted almost to the point of pain. She didn't tell him to stop though he would have, she was sure of that; she pushed against his mouth, against his fingers, arched her back and moaned and writhed and then she came again, her fingers in his hair.

"I want you in me now," she said then, almost hoarse, certainly breathless, and he pushed up, crawled up, settled on his knees and pushed her thighs wide with his palms. Then he rubbed the head of his cock against her, the feel of it making her muscles clench with something part way between aftershock and arousal. He rubbed the head of it between her lips, pushed down, spread his knees, then thrust into her. He did it hard, one sharp jerk straight up to the hilt, almost jarring, then he drew slowly back out of her and then did it again. They were being watched, eyes around corners, behind shelves, between books, but she couldn't find it in her to care, not when he pinched her nipples tight and made her moan aloud and buck down against him.

His fingers found her clit again, made her damn near growl with it, made her writhe with it, made her clutch at his thighs or his wrists, his arms, desperate with it, barely in control with it.

"Harder," she told him, her voice catching, and he seemed perfectly happy to oblige, picked up the pace, thrust into her harder, faster, sweat standing out on his pale skin just like it did on hers. She braced herself, palms flat against the headboard, took the full force of him, the full length of him, shuddered and came and came and came, her eyes squeezed shut against it, twisting, thrashing, fucking wild with it.

"Now you," she gasped and that was all it took before she felt him buck once more, twice more, push up deep inside her, felt him pulse and jerk and spill inside her, heard the twisted growl down deep in his chest, saw the look on his face like rapture, like delirium. He gasped in a breath, then another. He looked down at her. She took his hands.

"It's my birthday," she said, her voice still strained, her body still trembling, still twitching tight around him. "Aren't you going to give me a gift?"

He laughed breathlessly. "I've nothing else to give," he said.

---

In the morning, she left while he was still asleep. She put on the little black dress and she tiptoed down the stairs, let herself out and called a taxi from the phone box down the street, huddled in there against the rain. She left the crystal ball in its box on the dining room table. She wasn't sure what else to do.

She went home and she showered and she changed and she ate a piece of buttered toast, drank coffee on autopilot, left to go to work. Santi was mercifully immersed in his work and left her to hers though concentration seemed unsurprisingly elusive. She left before lunchtime and she hid herself away in the library, in the Politics section where no one could possibly have thought to look had they had the inclination to do so.

There was work to do in the afternoon that took her mind off things at least a little, tutorials she taught, computer labs where she assisted. But in the back of her head she was thinking of the day she realized he'd gone, sitting in algebra class her sophomore year of college, staring out of the window and knowing Jareth was gone. Suddenly he wasn't in her head, wasn't in the coffee shop or the corridor or her Tuesday morning Physics lecture. She wished he'd stayed gone. She wished he'd never gone.. She wished he'd remained the voice in her ear and the glimpse she could never quite be sure wasn't just a trick of the light. But she'd seen him. He'd been there. He wasn't her imagination running wild.

She thought about going to see him, after class. She wandered back to her office via the English building, wondered if he was there, wondered if he'd want to see her after her ridiculous departure, wondered if she even wanted to see him or if she'd gone a step too far. She thought about lunch in the quad by the pond under a big umbrella, about his study up there in the attic, about his hands on her, about his brown tweed jacket that she'd apparently, somewhere along the line, grown to like. But she didn't go in. She went back to her office, tidied her things away and left for home.

She ate dinner at the kitchen table, a microwave meal from the corner shop that could have been anything for all the attention she paid it. She took another shower in case that might clear her mind and sat in her room under the window in the eaves, listening to the rain against the glass. She wondered if it ever rained in the goblin city. She wondered if it snowed, if there was really weather at all of if that was just another illusion like the rest.

Then she went to bed and she slept, to dream. And it wasn't until he wasn't there that she realized.

He wasn't in the usual spot, at the table with the books, reading, waiting. He wasn't at the staircase, either, and she frowned, shook her cold hands, only part of the chill from the air. She wandered between the shelves, took the stairs down, took them up, knew she was searching for him, that he was probably watching, hiding around the next corner or the last just to laugh at the idea of it. She called his name, apparently past caring. She called louder, heard it echo, heard the readers' customary shushes. He wasn't there. She couldn't find him. There was some kind of irony in that.

"I'd think you'd know where he is, dearie," said the worm on the shelf, the bookworm, with his little worm-sized glasses, there in front of an open volume just his size. "Seems to me it's obvious."

Sarah smiled. Perhaps it was.

The staircase wound up and up and up, far past where the roof should have been, past floors she was sure she'd passed already, past cavernous spaces where giants sat reading, past floors so tiny only worms could have squeezed inside. But there as a top to it, and end to it, a door with a knocker that asked her what she wanted and she said, "I want to see the king."

"He said he doesn't want to be interrupted," said the knocker.

"Does he always get what he wants?"

"He's the king," said the knocker. "That's generally how it works."

She knocked anyway. The door opened at least somewhat reluctantly.

"I've been looking for you," she said, walking toward him there at the end of the long, narrow room tucked away there under the eaves. An attic study, oddly-stationed bookshelves lining its wall, oddly familiar.

He looked up from his desk, from the book he wasn't reading. "Well, now you know how I've felt," he said, and he was petulant about it, disgruntled, leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. He was a deity who'd never been told no, she thought. Not comprehensively. Not for long. She put her hands on her hips. She tilted her head.

"Don't think I don't know what you've been doing," he said. "I'm not a fool, Sarah."

"I never said you were."

"I'm the king of a world so much older than yours that you'll never understand it." He snapped shut the book and on its cover was her name. "I think it's time we stopped playing games."

"You're going home."

"You won't come with me."

"No."

"Then why waste my time?"

She sighed. She rounded the desk, leaned there against its edge in the moonlight and the lamplight, so close she could feel the warmth of him in the chilly air.

"Do you love me, Jareth?" she asked.

His eyes flashed angry. "Yes," he said, for once a straight answer, the simplicity striking, though he looked every inch like he resented it.

"Then why would you leave?" she said.

It took a moment, the question hanging in the air like the mist of her breath in the cold, a moment where he frowned and then he stood and then he shook his head and scowled and laughed. She watched him, the genius of him working through the meaning of it like an unfamiliar language and she guessed in a way it was. He hadn't had to want before.

"You're asking me to stay." She nodded. "But you won't leave with me." She shook her head. "Why?"

"I don't know if you've noticed, Jareth," she said, "but I'm already here."

He smiled, wide and smug and self-satisfied but she let him have at least that much, for once. "My world at night," he said.

"Mine in day."

"No bargain? No quid pro quo?"

"No bargain. No tricks. No stolen children. No poisoned peach."

"And you'll be my queen?"

She stepped in closer, rested her hands against his chest. She slipped them higher, to his shoulders, and she pushed him down. He went to his knees on the dusty wooden floor, went willingly, looked up at her with that same smile there on his face and she ran her hands through his hair, bent to kiss his cheek, his forehead, one corner of his mouth. He'd do anything for her; this much she could do for him.

"I think I have been since we met," she said.

And whether trick or not, whether she'd found her way there through his manipulation or she'd done it for herself every step of the way, she found she didn't care. Maybe this was the happiness he'd seen in her future. Maybe he'd been there all along. Maybe he just hadn't been able to see it.

Jareth's bed was at the other side of a door that hadn't been there twenty seconds earlier.

She tied him down; he loved her for it.

---

In the morning, she ate toast.

She sat at the kitchen table and she ate two slices of it with a cup of coffee and then she showered and she brushed her teeth, she dressed and wondered how the world was going to change because of what she'd done. It likely wouldn't, at least not hers.

Afterwards, she went out in the rain and she caught the bus. She took the tube six stops down the line, changed six stops later, walked the last half mile because the air was crisp and somehow felt clean even there in the middle of London. She turned into the square and walked by the garden with its iron fence, its climbing roses all in bloom, the maze that lay beyond it. She folded her umbrella at his doorstep, let the rain catch her hair as she rang the bell.

"I wasn't expecting you," he said, standing aside to let her in.

"Are you disappointed?"

"Never."

When they went upstairs, climbed the stairs up to his bedroom, he didn't close the heavy curtains. She undressed herself while he watched her from his knees in pants and shirtsleeves, in very proper gentlemen's slippers that made her smile at the mundanity of it. He made a strange but beguiling human. She wondered how she'd fare as the Goblin Queen.

"Call me by my name," he said, when she pushed him down on his back on the floor, when she eased out his cock and she straddled it, rode it, while he was still fully clothed.

"Jared?" she said, with a small, teasing smile.

"My real name," he said, almost hissed, almost growled.

She bent down low by his ear and said, "Jareth."

It took very little more to make him come.

Later, after, she took the crystal ball out from its box and held it up, turned it around, and tossed it to him across the table. He turned it about his hand with ease, passed it deftly from one to the other, and then tossed it back.

"So it is you," she said.

"Well of course it is," he replied. And when she lifted the ball, when she looked at him through it, she could see him, the other him, right there in front of her. But neither man was an illusion, or perhaps they both were.

"Am I meant to see my future in it?" she asked.

"I'm not sure the future's set," he said.

"Then let's change it."

---

They were married in the fall after her viva. She wore a fairytale dress and they danced and they danced, spent their honeymoon at a conference on the continent, Dr. and Prof. King. Toby seemed wary. Her stepmom approved.

And at night, in her dreams, she felt her power grow. Queen was not an honorary position.

"Do you love me, Sarah?" he asked, in the home they shared by the maze, by the labyrinth.

She tied his wrists and stroked his cock and kissed his mouth, and said, "I love you, Jareth."

She meant it.