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She slipped out of the bedroom and down the hall like a thief with something to hide. The bass beat of the stereo system downstairs was shaking the floor, and high drunken laughter and the sour smell of kegged beer came bursting up the stairs to meet her.
Her coat was still lying in the big pile by the door. She went outside without even stopping and shrugged it on one arm at a time as she walked away in the sharp, bright November air, her breath frosting; the silence in the quad was loud in her ears. She shoved her hands in her pockets while she walked back to her dorm.
He'd had a kind of cheerful, easy confidence: almost a jerk, but without the stupid bluster a lot of the other football players fell into. That was what had caught her eye, in the physics-for-poets class they were both taking, where he sat with six other guys the size of refrigerators, and she sat in the back row alone, half-hiding behind her hair and sketching the costumes for the fall production of Midsummer Night's Dream. They'd ended up in the same TA group, and he'd grinned at her once as if he was entitled to her if he wanted her.
It had been something, so she'd come to the party tonight, and she'd found him in the pool table room with a beer in his hand and three different sorority girls laughing at everything he said. He saw her standing in the doorway and grinned at her again. "Hey, Sarah, right?"
The girls looked at her once and dismissed her: she was wearing a t-shirt from last month's Mamet show, streaked with wall paint, and a pair of ratty jeans. "Hi," she'd said, and, "Do you want to go upstairs?"
He'd blinked, and then he'd started grinning even more, and he said, "Sure," and put down his cup. In his room he'd gone to put on some music, saying something, and when he turned she drew the t-shirt off over her head and pulled herself free, letting her hair fall around her. She looked him straight in the face, and his smile had wavered a little; really she'd known right then that it was no good. He held himself off a long time before he finally came, trying, but his hands and his mouth were uncertain and anxious on her, and when she'd been above him she'd closed her eyes so she didn't have to see him looking up at her helplessly, both of them knowing she was out of his reach.
She had a single with a tiny bathroom all her own, with a crappy fluorescent yellow bulb. She showered in the dark, quickly, then lit a candle on the sink and looked at herself in the mirror while she combed out her hair: no makeup, water still on her skin, and Jareth shaped out of the dark behind her.
He smiled at her, cruel, and didn't ask out loud; he didn't have to. As his gloved hand moved over the wet bare skin of her belly, it took on weight, became solid, and there was heat behind the finger that pressed between her legs. She was already wet; the leather slid into her easily. His palm was cupped over her, and she breathed in and rocked her hips into his hand. "Ah, Sarah," he murmured into her hair, so pleased with himself, and it made her angry: made her twist against him and reach up her hand and draw his head down to her.
He bent curiously, as though he didn't understand but was willing to let her have her own silly way, and the curve of his mouth as he let her kiss him was infuriating. So she bit his lip, half-vicious, and he made a low startled noise like a hissing cat and kissed her back.
They struggled in front of the mirror for a moment longer, fighting for who would steal more breath, more heat; then she twisted around in his arms and pushed him back out into the room. Only the desk lamp was on, throwing odd shadows around, and small glittering eyes were watching them from the dark screen of her small television set, from the glass in the picture frame, from the window half open to the night air. He backed away from her, wary suddenly, clinging to his armor of dark velvet and red jewels until she reached her hands out and touched him, made him real, made him reel, and he let it slip away into smoke as she pressed him down to the bed.
His thin, bare shoulders were luminescently pale against her sensible navy blue cotton sheets, and his gossamer-fine hair clung crackling to her fingers. He didn't seem to know what to make of her hands on him, palms on his chest and the light scratch of her nails against his back: he caught her wrist in one hand and drew it up to his face, studying her fingers as though he expected to find an explanation. He licked at them one after another, and then licked the palm, experimentally, and finally the pulse of her wrist; and when she sighed, he sighed with her.
There were resentful muttering whispers in the dark corners of the room, objecting; he raised his head and hissed at them, and they fell silent. "Jareth," she said, tasting his name: saying it out loud felt like an invocation or a spell. He came into her, or she took him in; by then it was all the same. They moved together, and the bed beneath them wasn't a dorm-room cot anymore; strange stars rolled by outside the window, and there was a noise like the beating of wings rushing in her ears as she shuddered with him, rising, cresting, complete.
He raised himself up on one arm afterwards, naked and displeased in her hard narrow bed, looking over the room with annoyance: the hard cold November sun was just starting to come up behind the squat science library building, and she'd left a few dirty socks on the dingy-carpet floor; her lumpy bookbag was in another corner, and a bag of sewing on her desk chair. She was lying back against the cotton sheets drowsy and finally, finally sated, one arm behind her head, and she couldn't help laughing softly at his disdain.
Somehow he didn't feel as wrong and wildly out of place as he should have, and Sarah couldn't understand why until she realized he was doing it somehow: he was trying to make the room seem out of place instead. Wondering, she reached out and touched his shoulder; he turned on her with the same ferocity he'd once used to try and persuade her to leave him with a stolen child. "Come with me," he said. "What do you want with any of this? Come away to my kingdom, Sarah, and I will make you a queen; even if you do refuse to fear me."
"You could stay with me instead," she said, meaning it as a joke: whatever he was doing still couldn't hide that there was no place for him in the bright ordinary-ness of the world, mixing with the friendly sunlight and the mildly irritating sound of cars starting up in the parking lot outside her window, the acrid smell of that one cheap scooter with its diesel engine and the thick Turkish coffee brewing across the hallway.
Renee would knock on her door in a few minutes and offer her some, sweet and black, and they would walk to costume history class together; after that it would be off to the theater for a four-hour stretch, working companionably with half a dozen people, whoever had shown up today, last one in getting takeout for lunch. Of course she longed for magic; and it was always hardest in the dark, aching for the lack of it; but Sarah liked her life, her work, her friends; she didn't want to run away to fairyland anymore, even if she hadn't known better—even if she hadn't known she didn't belong there.
"You could stay with me instead," she said, laughing, mostly to say you know I can't, and stopped, because he threw her an angry, desperate look; as though he would—
"You wouldn't," she said, wondering if he even could. He was the goblin king; what would it mean for him to abandon his kingdom? And then she remembered the unhappy, muttering goblins, and fell silent.
"I will not go on this way—I will not be sent for," he hissed, and sprang from the bed; he went to the window and looked out at the world like it was a prison. Sarah sat up in bed, pulling the sheets up around her, and his back went stiff and prickly, as though he was fighting the impulse to turn around and look at her. She could see her reflection in the television next to him: her arms standing out against the dark sheets, dark hair down and loose over her shoulders. An ordinary girl, and he was more magic than the world could hold; and he would put himself in a cage for her. Or for her and his pride, but that was like saying for her and breathing.
"Would it help," she said, "if you could also send for me?"
His head tilted, like a hunting bird listening for prey.
"I won't come away," she said hastily. "Not forever; but if you would let me come and go back again—"
He turned; the air cloaked him as he did, in white samite and silver, and he stood looking down at her with his eyes bright again. "If you come into my kingdom, willingly, you will be in my power. You may only leave when I wish it," he said, with all his usual arrogance, but Sarah knew negotiation when she heard it.
"Then I won't come," she said, "so make me a better offer."
His mouth narrowed grudgingly. "If you have my promise before you come through, I will be bound by it," he said. "That time only," he added.
She didn't need him to tell her he would try, every time, to eel out of giving her that promise; that every time she took his hand and stepped through, she would be coming into the labyrinth again, with all its danger and not just all its beauty. She didn't ask him to make it any easier.
"All right," she said. "Ask me in."