Page 39 of Spelunking Through Hell

“My questions can wait.” He picked up the revolvers, placing them gently on the floor beside the bed, his eyes never leaving mine. “Can yours?”

“I’ve waited this long,” I said. I expected him to sit beside me, but instead he slid down to kneel on the floor in front of me; from that position, he was still tall enough to be able to reach out and rest his hands on my hips.

“So have I,” he said, pulling me toward him.

I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck. “So we can finish this discussion later?”

“You were always less prone to prevarication in the afterglow,” he said, and kissed me.

Kissing Thomas was like visiting a place I knew well but hadn’t visited in years, long enough that everything was familiar and strange at the same time, that I felt like a tourist again, when I would have expected to feel like I was coming home. He pressed closer, still kissing me, and I responded in kind; my split lip protested, but in the rush of endorphins flooding my body, it was nowhere near enough to make me stop. Honestly, the sting just lit me up more.

I shoved myself backward to the middle of the bed and pulled him down on top of me, fumbling with our clothes. My robe was easy enough to remove, a simple tug on the knot letting me shrug out of it, but his clothes were a bit more complicated, trousers tied at either hip and shirt requiring us to pull apart long enough for me to work it off over his head.

A bruise was already forming where I’d kicked him. I wanted to touch every inch of him, to relearn the taste and texture of him with my fingers and tongue. The smell of swamp bromeliads hung in the air, and only the absence of an Aeslin choir celebrating our reunion kept it from feeling like home.

Except that it did. Everything about it felt like home and simultaneously like a dream, but I had had this dream so many times and this was too vivid for that.

Too real. Everything was magnified, my mind struggling with the disconnect; even the overwhelming pleasure felt like too much. I tried closing my eyes, but that just took me deeper into the feeling of the dream, and opening them was like double vision, reality overlaid by memory. His hands on my body felt as new as if he were touching me for the first time, and yet everything he did was so familiar, so right, that soon what was the same and what was different stopped mattering as my mind and body finally came together, and I didn’t know where I ended and he began.

By the time he rolled away from me, panting and staring at the ceiling, I was no longer a stranger in that once-familiar country; I was back where I belonged. We both were.

I laced my fingers through his and rested my head against his shoulder, luxuriating in the mere warmth of his presence. He was here. He was real. This was really happening. I’d been right all along. That, orthis dimension was a honey trap of hitherto undiscovered quality, and I was going to while away the rest of my life in a happy illusion of fucking, eating food that wasn’t really there, and feeling like I’d finally found what I’d been looking for all this time. Under the circumstances, I’d take it.

If my choice was a perfect lie or continuing to run long after my quest turned hopeless, I’d take the lie. Maybe that makes me weak, but I honestly don’t care.

Thomas turned his head to kiss my temple, burying his face in my hair. “You still smell right. God help me, you smell like yourself.”

I pulled away slightly, not far enough to make him think I was going anywhere—not far enough to make my own skin start longing for him again, which seemed like a genuine danger right now—and looked at him. “You sound like you weren’t sure. Were you not sure?”

“Alice...” He sighed and smiled wryly at me. “The crossroads stole me from my home and family and threw me so far away that even the hope of homecoming faded. I know how much time has passed here. Sally’s arrival...” His smile faded. “I won’t say I had beenveryhopeful before she came, but Sally’s arrival carried with it something terrible: a date. The year the crossroads took her, which was so far in the future of our lives together that it was unbearable. She was able to tell me precisely how many years I had been away from my family, and when she spoke, I knew that you were long gone. I love you too dearly to have any illusions about whether you’d ever have learnt how to be careful.”

“Not a skill of mine,” I admitted. Being careful isn’t something we Healys have ever been particularly good at. Both my mother and my grandmother died alone in the woods after going out on what had probably seemed like perfectly normal hunting trips, too commonplace to need backup. I know better than most how easy it is for a moment of carelessness to cost you everything you have.

“So when Sally told me a woman had appeared, and told me about the weapons you’d been carrying, I knew you had to be an assassin. And then you came to me, and you fought like my Alice, and you spoke like my Alice, and when you got angry, you even glared at me like my Alice, and I wanted so badly to believe that you were the woman I had lost. I wanted it badly enough to lie to myself, if necessary, but not badly enough to betray her if I was wrong. And I knew I had to be wrong. I knew there was no way. But then I kissed you, and...”

He stopped, and I held my silence until it was obvious he was going to do the same. Finally, I asked, “So that’s why you slept with me?”

The idea was like a knife to the gut—and that’s something I’ve experienced more than often enough to have a solid sense of what it feels like, and to be a lot calmer about it than I probably ought to be. I took a deep breath, tamping down my initial reaction, which involved assaulting him, and wouldn’t have been a polite way to say, “Thanks for not being dead after I spent five decades trying to find you.” My second reaction was similar, if less violent, and by my third, I was able to pull away and sit up, gathering the blankets around me as I looked at him.

To his credit, he knew he’d fucked up; I could see it in his eyes. He sat up, widening the space between us, and let his hands rest between his knees, staring down at them. “You’re not the first, you know,” he said. “Only the most recent. I’ve had an ‘Alice’ show up here on a fairly regular basis since I arrived. Some of them were even human, people who’d made their own crossroads bargains and been convinced that killing one little villain would let them go back to their lives. Most weren’t. Humans are rare, pan-dimensionally, but people who look like humans are common as rocks. The crossroads... I always wondered why they cared so much about me, when they didn’t seem to care about anyone else they left here.” He chuckled, mirthlessly. “They were afraid of exactly this. That you’d beat them somehow, and find me, and bring me home. You terrified a cosmic entity by being too damn stubborn to give up when it should have been the right thing to do. So they sent their assassins, and I thought...”

He sighed. “It’s been a while since the last one. I thought it was finally over, and then you asked me why I had kept Fran’s guns, and—I used torepairthem for you, Alice. Iknowthose guns. I knew they were yours. And them being here meant that either they were here with you, or you were gone. They were the proof that you were gone. By the time you put me on the floor, you were either the best imposter they had ever sent, and I was a widower, or you were the woman I’d been grieving for all this time. Either way, there wasn’t anyone for me to betray.”

He looked back at me and winced. “Say something. Please.”

I took before I took another breath and asked the only question that still mattered: “Andnowdo you believe me?”

“I believe you eitheraremy wife, or such a good imitation that even she wouldn’t blame me for being fooled,” he said, looking briefly,deeply weary. “Or at least I hope she would forgive me, but I couldn’t... I just missed you so much. I tried, Alice. I tried so hard to get out of here and come home, but I couldn’t. The walls are all but unbreakable. I couldn’t find a way back to you, I couldn’t find—”

“It’s all right,” I said. “You found a way to wait for me, and now I’m here, and we’re going to find a way home together.”

He looked at me, and his face fell, and with no more warning than that, he began to cry. I pulled myself closer and wrapped my arms around him, and just let him weep against my shoulder for as long as he needed to. If nothing else, I could do that much for him. I could be here.

Finally, after everything, I could be here.

Twelve

“My God, Enid, you beautiful fool. What have you done? How am I supposed to keep on doing this without you?”

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