“Hey, when am I ever going to have an actual prince in this situation after this?”
He shrugs. “I’d hope never.”
He takes my hand and we walk over the bridge, the castle getting a lot smaller the closer we get.
“My mother would like it,” he muses, looking around as we go through the entrance and into a courtyard full of shops and children running everywhere, most of them in little princess costumes.
“Oh,” I gasp. “I want one. Do you think they have adult sizes?”
He gives me a funny look. “You want to be a princess?”
“What girl doesn’t want to be a princess?” I ask and then I realize the question probably holds some real meaning to him. “I mean, growing up, of course you do. It’s a fantasy.”
“Am I a fantasy?”
I look him up and down, looking impossibly handsome as he always is. “You’re my fantasy, yes. Definitely.”
He seems to think that over as we head into one of the shops. “You know, if you came back with me to Sweden, and married me, then you could be a real princess.”
Oh my god.
I stop dead in my tracks.
My heart lurching to a stop.
“You do not joke about that,” I manage to say, my blood thrumming hot through my veins.
Oh my god.
What if he isn’t joking?
But I see the sly glint in his eyes, the hint of a smile and he is joking.
Thank god I didn’t take him up on it.
“Hey, I’m not desperate to be a princess, thank you very much,” I tell him, picking up a crown from a display. “Why should I be when I have all that I need to be one right here.”
I can feel his eyes on me, watching me intently. “I think we should buy you a crown,” he says after a moment.
I smile at him sweetly. “You’re really hell bent on making me a princess.”
“Actually I have a better idea.” He ducks around the corner and comes back holding a stuffed version of the reindeer from Frozen.
“Sven the reindeer?” I ask as he puts the plush toy in my hands.
“No,” he says, almost annoyed. “It’s a moose. Viktor the moose.”
“But it’s a reindeer,” I tell him and show him his name tag. “And his name is Sven.”
Viktor takes the animal from me and rips the fabric nametag off his collar, hiding it between a pile of Olaf slippers. “Now it’s Viktor. The moose.” He shoves it back in my hands. “Now when I’m gone, you’ll still have a Viktor of your own.”
Well, fuck. If this isn’t one of the cutest things ever.
Even though he just vandalized a Disney toy at Disneyland.
I look down into the reindeer’s big eyes and will myself to think of it as Viktor the moose.
After we buy the reindeer–moose–and the clerk wanted to double check with us that we were okay with buying a defective toy, we head over to Splash Mountain, because the wait times seemed somewhat reasonable.
That was a lie, of course. There are no reasonable wait times in the park, so Viktor and I are yet again stuck in a long line.
But I guess stuck is too strong of a word. The thing is, I’m positively delighted with just standing beside Viktor and doing nothing but waiting. We talk, about everything we can without getting too personal, because who wants to get personal surrounded by a bunch of strangers.
I lean back against his chest and he wraps his big arms around me and we shuffle forward, not wanting to be apart. He tells me about his pet rabbits he had while growing up, how he was so obsessed with Watership Down at the time that he named them after the characters and was convinced they were going to have an uprising when he wasn’t looking.
I tell him about my family’s tradition of giving weird names. Rosemary and Thyme, and Pike have always gotten the brunt of it, but Callum’s middle name is actually Danger, April has two, May and June, and my full name is Margaret Mayhem.
“Margaret Mayhem?” Viktor laughs loudly, the sound soaring over the crowd and making a few people in line turn their heads. “I’m sorry but mayhem means…”
“Mayhem means a little chaotic and crazy,” I say with a sigh. “Apparently both me and Callum were handfuls when we were born.”
“Or perhaps you both grew into your names like, what is it called again? A self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“That might be true for Callum but I am not chaotic or crazy.”
He raises his brow at me. “Well…”
I punch his chest. “Hey.”
He grabs my fist and kisses my knuckles. “You were a little chaotic and crazy last night,” he says in a low, silken voice.
I immediately blush and my body knows all too well. I’ve felt the ache of him between my legs all day and I know I’m walking a little differently.
Even though we end up boarding the log flume ten minutes later, my body is still feeling a bit hot and needy, especially as we end up sitting squished at the very back of the log and my ass is pressed into his crotch.
I glance at him over my shoulder, my eyes turning sly. “You comfortable?” I ask, wiggling my ass into him.
He just shakes his head, his jaw growing tense in playful warning.
As it turns out though, a lot of the ride is in the dark.
Now, I know that the dark in Disneyland is only dark to you. The place is famous for the amount of cameras they have set up, eyes on you at all times. They can always see you clearly, no matter what.
But from the way we’re sitting at the back, so squished together with his long legs bracketing mine, it’s almost natural for Viktor’s hand to be in my lap.
Unbuttoning the top of my jean shorts.
Slipping his fingers into my underwear.
“We could get caught,” I turn my head and hiss at him, hoping all the singing from the animatronic animals drowns out my voice from the other people in the log. Thankfully they are all adults.
“So?” he says lazily, sliding his fingers around and around.
My eyes close briefly.
This is so wrong.
But, god, it feels so good.
“So we could get banned for life.”
“That’s okay,” he says. “I live in Sweden.”
I’m about to tell him to stop, that it’s wrong, that we’re in public and we’re violating laws and probably Disneyland’s innocence but then the log starts to climb up the final hill and the gravity thrusts me further back into him.
And Viktor has skills.
He keeps his fingers going, rubbing me expertly and with the tick tick tick vibrations of the log as it’s cranked up the hill, I’m coming just as the log flume hits the crescendo. The world is open and bright in front of my eyes, all of the park in front of me, and my mouth is open, crying out his name.
And then we’re dropping straight down, down, down into the water.
Nothing like a cold splash hitting you in the face to bring you back on track.
After the ride we’re both soaked, me in more ways than one, and we pick up the large photo of us they took during the final fall.
Viktor is grinning like an idiot in it.
It looks like I’m screaming from fear.
Only the two of us know the truth about that photo.
That thing is going up on my wall.
* * *
***
* * *
When we finally get back to the hotel from Disneyland, we’re both exhausted. The traffic from Anaheim to Hollywood ensnared us for hours, so bad that even the Waze app on his phone couldn’t shortcut us out of there.
Our hotel room is freshly cleaned and passes my inspection (a housekeeper always knows what to look for) though I’m sad that the last signs of the lavender flowers have been swept away. I still detect a hint of it in the air, or maybe I’m forever smelling it like a memory that won’t go away.
“Get naked,” Viktor says, taking his shirt off over his head, displaying that hard, bare torso of his.
“You aren’t tired?” I ask him, my fingers already obeying his commands before my mind has a chance to argue. I take off my tank top, one that says Hakuna Matata that he bought for me in the park and I couldn’t wait to change into, then start unbuttoning my jean shorts. He strides over to the curtains that have been left open and pulls them shut just as the shorts fall to my feet.
“I don’t care if people see,” I tell him. After what happened on the ride, I feel like I’ve dipped my toe into the life of someone else, someone footloose and fancy free. I want to live like I don’t give any fucks. I want to get into a fuck bankruptcy.
I want to do that with Viktor, live this whole other life in this hotel room.
But when I lie down on the bed, naked, and he joins me, the exhaustion takes over the both of us. Viktor wraps me in his arms and pulls me toward him, his leg hooking over mine, so that we are a tangle of limbs and warm skin.
“Just a nap,” he whispers into my ear, even though it’s nearly midnight already. I didn’t think I would feel as comfortable just lying here naked with him as I am when I’m fucking him, but in seconds my mind and body start to drift away.
I’m awakened by the scrape of a lighter, a puff of smoke filling the air.
I open my eyes to see Viktor sitting up in bed, smoking.
It’s cinematic, with the light coming in through the crack in the curtains like a spear, lighting the edges of him up. There’s another light coming from the bathroom but the main one is off and we’re mostly in darkness. I don’t remember turning it off before I fell asleep.
“What time is it?” I ask.
“Sorry,” he says to me, glancing over his shoulder with a warm smile. “I didn’t want to wake you. But I knew if I went on the balcony, someone would see me. There’s been a party out by the pool all night.”
It’s only then that I notice the dull thump of music and the occasional laughter.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he explains, lying back down on the bed, facing me. “I thought this would help.”
He holds it out to me in offering and this time I take it, looking up at the ceiling as I do so. “Won’t this set off the smoke detector?”