#evilcharmingweek

My offering for @evilcharmingweek :  Online Dating. I hope you enjoy it!

She wasn’t one to drink alone, well, at least not in public. But it’s been one hell of a day topping off one hell of a week, so she’s here at the closest pub she could find to the courthouse, staring at divorce papers finally signed, half-afraid there’s a disclaimer she may have overlooked in the fine print.

There’s not. She’s checked--several times, in fact. Her dragon-woman of a lawyer has checked. But she wouldn’t put anything past Leo and that smarmy sycophant of an attorney of his. Just being in the same room with those two men makes her feel dirty. And to think that she’d been married to one of them for the past five years.

So she stares at the papers once again, feeling her pulse race as she wobbles between being elated that she’s finally free and terrified that her ex is just waiting to mess with her yet again when she least expects it. She takes another sip of her martini, half wishing she could just order a pitcher for herself when she spots him.

Tall. Blonde. Blue eyed. Nicely cut. And he’s staring at her from the front door.

She sits up taller when he moves towards her booth, licking her lips nervously as she toys with the rim of her martini glass. Is he actually coming over to talk to her? God, how long has it been since she’s actually flirted with someone--since she’s actually been tempted to flirt, she wonders?  He smiles as he gets closer, and she tries to swallow down butterflies that assail her out of nowhere. He’s just an attractive man, she reminds herself, and she’s a single woman now, a single woman who still has a decent ass and knows how to color stubborn grays.

Then he’s there, standing beside her table, his nice-fitting jeans right at eye level, his cologne tickling her senses in all the right ways. He licks his lips and clears his throat, and she wonders what he’s going to say to her. Will he use a tired line? Pay her a compliment? Ask if he knows her from someplace else?

“Mary Margaret?”

Shit. Her heart sinks as she looks down at her martini. He’s looking for somebody else. She opens her mouth to correct him, but he speaks again before she can.

“Black hair, blue dress.” He looks at her, somehow taking her in without making her feel self-conscious. “But your hair is longer than I anticipated.”

Her tongue catches on the roof of her mouth as she puts two and two together. He’s been set up on a blind date, or perhaps matched to this Mary Margaret by an online dating service. Either way, she should do the decent thing and tell him that she’s not his date, that her name is Regina, that she’s just divorced, usually bad luck for men who dare to date her, and she’s currently out licking her wounds after a week she’d just like to put behind her.

“I’m David,” he says, extending his hand. She takes it and likes how it feels on her skin, how it encompasses her own hand, how his palm feels just rough enough to hint of strength but soft enough to feel nice. But she hasn’t said anything yet, and his brow creases in a show of concern.

“Am I at the wrong table?”

She swallows, looking him over, liking what she sees. He’s attractive, this David, sexy as hell with a boyish charm, and she’s half-tempted to climb him like a tree. Then she sees it, a flash of desire in his eyes, controlled but there, and it frees something inside of her, something primal and wanting, something that makes her feel sexy and powerful for the first time in years. To hell with this Mary Margaret, whoever she is. That woman’s loss is her gain, and for the rest of the night she’s going to enjoy herself, perhaps even enjoy him, indulging herself in a manner that is long-overdue and practically making her drool over in anticipation.

My late offering for Day 3 of @evilcharmingweek:  Dreams.  Rated A for angst, just so you know. I hope you enjoy!

It’s odd how one moment changes everything.

A last minute decision before the casting of a curse, one of impulse rather than conviction. The husband of her enemy becoming her own spouse in this land without magic, one final slice of revenge directed at the woman who’d spilled a secret and ruined her life.

She’d believed David would be a push-over of a mate, one she could easily control and mold into the man she desired him to be. But his strength of character surprised her, as did the little things he did, such as fixing her coffee just the way she liked it, rubbing her shoulders after a rough day at the mayor’s office, transforming a late night dinner into a romantic picnic by the fireplace, and kissing away her stresses until she couldn’t think.

And his hands--God, she loved his hands. How they stroked and caressed, leaving a trail of goosebumps in their wake, preparing her body for the onslaught of his mouth as her lips and legs opened for him, anticipating touch that brought pleasure without pain, the sort she’d never before known in the arms of a man.

Then there was the way he said her name, how it would drop from his mouth in moments of intense pleasure when he’d come hard inside her, how it would soothe what hurt when nightmares attacked under the stealth of darkness, how it held her when she’d wept over the fact that she couldn’t carry his child, how it proclaimed her Mommy for the first time when they brought Henry home.

But by far the most dangerous thing of all was how he listened. It didn’t matter what she needed to discuss, how interesting or mundane, it was important to him. Many an evening he’d take her hand and lead her to the sofa, pulling off her heels as her feet were placed into his lap and his thumbs began to work wonders on her arches. His eyes did things to her, things she shouldn’t have allowed as stories of her childhood snuck up her throat and over her tongue, stories she modified by removing the magic involved as she told them. But he heard her pain, absorbed her insecurities, hugged away verbal lashes inflicted by her mother even as he kissed away hidden bruises left by a husband who had taken what most had believed to be his right.

But David always asked, even though he believed them to be married, even though he lived in their house and shared her bed. His touch questioned before his body pressed in, and Regina began to feel safe, truly safe and cherished for the first time since Daniel’s life had been ripped from his chest and crushed into dust.

She should have known better than to let David breach her walls. She should have remembered that love was weakness. But God help her, it was also the sweetest of poisons.

As Henry grew, so did her feelings of security and happiness, all because of this man she’d intended to use as a pawn who now warmed her heart as well as her bed. She’d been stupid in letting him penetrate more than her body, for now he held the power to hurt her, a power she’d sworn never to give to anyone again but had surrendered to two people--her husband and her son.

She now knows loving them will be her downfall.

For she stands immobile as a curse is broken, as what was created in a plume of purple smoke is destroyed by a force she cannot see. But she can see her small, perfect world unravel around her like a sweater caught on a nail. Blue eyes that had once looked upon her with love now gaze upon her as if she’s a stranger--no, worse than that. For they’re not strangers to each other--they’re best friends, lovers, parents to one child they’d adopted and to one who shouldn’t exist but now grows secretly in her womb.

But to David, she’s no longer all of those things. No, she’s the woman who hunted his true love, who robbed him of his memories, who deceived him into adopting his own grandson even as his seed took root inside her. His Regina is gone, the woman she’d allowed herself to become under the shelter of his adoration, and she feels adrift now, wondering just who she really is as everyone else in Storybrooke wakes up from her trance.

To them, she’s the enemy, the Evil Queen, the one who must be made to pay as the dream she’d allowed herself to believe in morphs into a nightmare of her own making. To her son, she’s the root of all evil just as his birth mother is the savior who will right all she made wrong. And to him, to David, she thinks she must be a phantom, the ghost of a lover from a life now gone, one who will now sleep on cold sheets and brew her own coffee.

This is my contribution to @evilcharmingweek--Day 2:  Evil Charming and children. It is a part of Remnants verse and will make more sense if read after reading the first two installments, but it can be read independently, as well. 

If you’re new to Remnants, it is a story of how life moves on for David and Regina after losing Snow and Robin in different ways. 

It hits him sometimes, a feeling he recognizes even in its oddity, like a new leather boot that fits but has been crafted by a different cobbler. It strikes him when she touches his arm as she’s prone to do--odd how he never noticed just how physical a being she has always been, how she reassures herself through touch far more than through conversation. It washes over him when his son snuggles into her lap for a story or gives her a kiss on the cheek, or when her daughter burrows her dark head into his neck. It rushes over him like the most delicious magic when his name tumbles from her lips as he moves inside her, as her nails scrape the surface of his skin, as she flutters and clenches around him until he empties himself inside of her and they both fall panting into a sweaty, sated heap.

 But there’s something about watching her nurse Nadia that freezes him in time.

 He’d stumbled upon them and watches quietly from the still dark shadows of the hall, feeling a bit like an intruder as the baby sucks at her mother’s breast. Something primal aches as the image of Regina morphs into one of Snow, as memories of Neal feeding from his late wife’s breast crash into what is happening in front of him now.

 “You can come in if you like.”

 The present draws him back, and he smiles and shakes his head, wondering how in God’s name he could even think he’d been hiding from her. One doesn’t hide from Regina, he thinks. She’s the expert, one who has spent much of her life hiding from everyone else. She’s adept at reading the shadows.

 “You don’t mind?”

 Her eyes find his from across the room.

 “It’s not as though you haven’t seen everything,” she whispers with a wry grin.