Northstar Vale you've made a pig's ear

Dismissal!

She was the bold-browed artiste with sunken kohl eyes and petulant pout; had bartered her flapper’s pleats for latticework of pearls; shoved sequins into drawers brimming with underthings, other things; eyes, the silvered bullets of that pocket pistol, tucked away in her garter. Feverishly, foolishly, she wants to make him her Arórëlen  –  look at him! look at him! She’s clutching at those pearls, putting her knee the cherrywood of his desk; taking his thumb, rouging it along glossred mouth, printing, claiming him in her own way—
her breast is bursting with cottony things  (never falsies! ... though rumor and measuring tape certainly beg for it)  and she wants to get her hands on that ridiculous belt; wants to mark herself down as the only name that should be known there; wonders what the burn of it ‘round her wrists would feel like.

And she wants the stupid things.

Bubble baths and Piaf; Kashmir shawls and tabu incense; a white-picket fence. A little greenhouse, for a littler cottage where the littlest hearth in their antiqued-out living room is the main attraction. An engagement; an unnecessary, unbelievable, unfathomable elopement for the obvious. Children that she hasn’t jumped a train from, headed an entire world away with a brand-spankin’ new passport and pledge that helps her sleep at night. She’s wanted them for so long that the khol’s been smudged, stubborn to too-red cheek. She looks at this gangster’s son and remembers why her heart still beats. He’s air tight. He’s a blue serge. He knows her even when she’s dolled up for diplomacy.

Oh.

She wants to tweak his tie into place come morning rush; wants to tug him back through that damn door and kiss him goodbye another time, another, another, with hands cut up with striped kitten scratches and waffle-syrup gooey. She doesn't think he would mind it too terribly.

Oh, no.

She’s gone. She’s starstruck. She’s that far, faraway land and, hell with it: he’s her starkindler. Her magick-maker. Her breath comes soft, butterfly-fluttery—
childbirth, says the gnome; spellbroke. Tonttu doesn’t know if she would kiss the nisse out of stumbly relief, or kill to be mesmerized for melitse again, again. Always;
I should call him that each morning. I want him to smile.  Blinking, in a dumb way, a dazed way, a dazzled way; her eyes wobble to the scandalized and shying Astynome. Her voice is doe-eyed, fawn-thin; cloven-clumsy first steps:

“Is that so?”
Marvelous answer, really. Mama would be proud.