Magic

You are twenty years old and he is an adventure. That's all you need to know, all that you do know. There are a hundred things you don't, a hundred missing pieces to the puzzle—where does he live, where does he work, what is his life outside of you? Because he shows up on your parents' doorstep and grins at you and as far as you know, he has no life outside you, he ceases to exist when he disappears—always on foot—around the bend in the road. You are twenty years old and unabashedly self-obsessed; you like that illusion. No one's ever even pretended you were the center of their universe, and it's gorgeous to feel like you are.

When there are times between his appearances on your doorstep, you casually ask—"What have you been up to?" thrown into the conversation when he asks about your day at uni, or "Where did you disappear to?" when he hasn't come around for a week. He never quite answers, but you never quite notice.

You're too blinded to notice much, notice how he fumbles with the notes when he goes to pay, like he's on holiday and handling some foreign currency, notice how he never, ever rings you, notice how he glosses over the aspects of the shop he owns. It never occurs to you the way he stumbles in conversations sometimes—unfamiliarity with bits of information you thought hardwired into the brain at birth, like Star Wars and The Beatles and Shakespeare. He tells you he grew up quite isolated, and you run with that excuse and apply it liberally.

You're remarkably unobservant. Your mother told you that at eleven when you gave yourself a black eye walking into a closed door, your best friend told you that at fifteen when you failed to notice that she'd bleached her hair blonde. You tell him that on your second date when he asks if you like the shirt he's wearing—it's the one you approved on the day you met, when he asked for your opinion in Selfridge's. You wouldn't have known it from a rag, you tell him; "My dad uses the phrase 'terminally unobservant', usually following up with a speculation that my obituary is going to include the phrase 'giant hole' or 'unexpected flight of stairs.'"

He kisses you while the both of you are still laughing, and cheekily asked if you noticed that. You say no, you must've missed it. You can't even pretend to miss the second one.

You love him before you mean to, and say the words even before then. It's a rush, an exhilaration, an accident, but he seized on the words with such a gleeful fury you know he's been waiting for them. You only notice after the words are out of your mouth that they're true.

Your parents don't like him—they notice all the things you're blind to. "No car, no mobile," your father says after he watches you walk back in the house one day. "And what does he do?" your mother asks fretfully. You feel stupid when you can't answer, can't answer any of the sensible questions they're asking.

"He's nothing to build a life on," your father warns ominously out of the blue at dinner one random Tuesday.

Your mother is gentler about it. "We all have those boys, darling," she says while you're shopping for antiques one day. You look up from the jewelry displays to find her looking at you, sympathetic but determined. "But you don't marry them," she finishes. You'll remember the moment exactly for all its irony, you're holding a silly, expensive silver hair comb in your hand while she says it.

A few months later, you wear the comb as 'something old' when you stand by him in Gretna Green. Your parents are there, it's not quite a runaway wedding, but there's doubt and disappointment creasing lines around your mum's eyes and you don't like to look.

Her look haunts you as you sit down to the wedding dinner, saps away some of your conviction and you curse her a little for it. You look over at him as he grins brightly at your side and you really hope he's smarter than you, that he's given this a lot more thought.

Your parents sit across the table and are a little quieter than normal through the dinner; you haven't quite burned your bridges, nothing so dramatic as that, but you're chopping away at the support, day by day, splinter by splinter. They do not approve of this, not at all. They think you're young and stupid and impetuous, and their doubt is puddling under the table and wicking up through your white satin shoes.

You hope—because in a blood-freezing moment of terrible clarity you realize that you don't know—that he's worthy of all this trust you are putting in him.

Your wedding night isn't much fun at all, and you're still a virgin in your pristine wedding white, sitting on the unrumpled bed when the sun rises. It all makes a lot of sense, what he's told you, in some strange post-wedding reality where 'making sense' means 'making none whatsoever'. It all really sucks, too. You tell him so.

He looks sick, sitting next to you in his black suit with the waistcoat unbuttoned and the tie undone. You haven't spoken to him in two hours, since you finished screaming. Not fair, you think.

You tell him that, too.

"We could get it annulled," he whispers, not even daring to look at you. You crush one of his roses—one of the thin-air roses—in your hands and bat away the emerald and amethyst butterfly that's settling into your hair before you laugh, ugly and rough at that picture, marching down to some government office still in your wedding white. You could, you think. Fill out some papers—laugh crazily when they ask you why and lie—and chalk this all up to some extended flight of insanity.

You haven't scuttled your escape yet. You could go back, go home and repent and submit to some subtle 'I told you so' and move on like none of this happened, like he and everything he is never ever was.

You really don't want to, and it's very surprising. You don't want to cross those bridges behind you, it's not a matter of can't. You're walking blind on a path but—fuck—you love him more than you thought, and going back on this would be burning something else entirely.

It occurs to you that someone else—someone lovely, someone easier—could make you just as happy. But you love this one, sitting wretched and guilty and almost rejected next to you.

Well, fuck.

Somehow, walking back into the known seems scarier than stumbling blindly forward. At least you'll have a hand to hold, going this way.

You take it and a hesitant but painfully beautiful smile lights his face and you try to quell the queasy sensation in your stomach. There's just enough doubt and fear in the moment that you know, someday, you're going to look back and wonder or, worse, know, you fucked this decision up.

Sex isn't that great and you lay there, panicking, with your head on his chest as he sleeps.

He has a very nice cottage in the middle of nowhere. Literally—it's miles from the nearest road, a little cottage in the clearing in the woods, something out of a fairy tale. There are barely any paths leading to it, they're all rough, twisting and barely even noble enough to be called paths at all.

He promises to buy you a car that can handle the terrain. That's the nice thing to write home about—he owns a store in London. Not one your parents will ever, ever find, but the…flying broomsticks he sells make him a lot of money—well, the strange, heavy gold things he exchanges for money.

He has to warn you not to try to use the big gold coins or exchange them at any bank you can find. You get a little angry—well, obviously, you think as he explains all this with an infuriating glaze of primary-school-teacher condescension.

It's all a big secret and no one's allowed to know. You pretty much got that straight off, as if you'd run to anyone. Ha, yeah, because that all would roll so well. You envy them their ignorance, anyway. It's a fantastic, unbelievable world and you have no place in it. You feel it keenly, too, even in your own house.

You hate the fairytale cottage he carried you into.

You can't turn the lights on or off in your own house. You can—and do—scream lumos or nox until you're hoarse (but only when he's not at home, it's embarrassing.) The orb fixtures in the ceiling are completely indifferent to your voice. You can't cook in your own kitchen—all the appliances are controlled by something you can't control.

You wonder aloud one night while you help him make dinner if you might buy some new appliances—normal ones, ones you can use. You find out there isn't any electricity wired in the house. So much for that idea—he's a better cook anyway, you rationalize.

You decide not to ask about the plumbing.

Honestly, though, you're happier than you thought you'd be on that long June night when you found out your world was sort of a huge joke and that you were way more mundane and unimpressive than you thought. You wake up to his face and you always find him waiting for you, propped on one elbow and looking at you like you're the best thing in his inconceivable world.

He is something new every day, he is still that grand adventure. A bedroom full of flowers, glittering jewel-toned hummingbirds that settle in your hair, a ride on the fastest broomstick he owns (and he owns a lot, they're his obsession.) Some things are so wonderfully lovely that you almost don't resent it all.

And then you come home from work and have to sit in a dark house until he comes home to turn on the lights and make you dinner. Feeling like you don't belong in your own house is ugly and uncomfortable, like you don't belong when he's not there to smooth your way. Dependency rubs you the wrong way.

Driving to work in your Range Rover through the woods and into the nearest little town is like driving out of a fairy tale and into the real world. You leave your prince and your crown behind to work as a secretary for the local doctor.

People seem surprised to find you utterly normal after they find out your surname. The village busybody who works alongside you kindly informs you that you've married the mysterious eccentric in the strange house.

"Really," you reply, deadpan and dry, completely unimpressed in a way that obviously disappoints her. You grow to loathe your shared lunch hour—she can barely find the time to put food in her mouth, it's running too quickly, telling you increasingly disturbing (and increasingly fictitious) gossip about the man you married and his family, god rest their poor dead souls. It's more annoying than anything, and borders on amusing on the slower days at the office.

She has no fucking idea, anyway.

You don't realize all the choices you had until they're in the bin with your unopened box of tampons and a positive pregnancy test.

He's so happy (and you are too, really) but this is a bridge burning if ever there was one. Once upon a time, before this baby, you could have walked away and left this world behind you and never looked back, ever. Not that you ever wanted to, but that option was always there.

You've tied yourself down now, though. You've tied a piece of yourself to his world, sculpted your own flesh and blood into something that's going to belong to it in a way you never will.

That thought scares you. Even now, when you are your baby's world, there's this other one waiting for it and you're already anticipating the loss. That fear spoils a little of your happiness as he whirls you around the kitchen to some unfamiliar music on an old-fashioned radio that doesn't pick up any radio waves you've ever listened to.

The sex is better. A lot better. You fall asleep without that nagging, latent panic sticking in the back of your mind.

Being pregnant is nice, you think. The morning sickness passes quick and you breeze through the rest of the unpleasantries like they're nothing. He is lovely, too, holding your hair back while you're being sick, learning to drive the car so he can take over when you get too big (he's actually not too bad), pressing his cheek to your slowly thickening stomach and talking to the baby, acting all sweet and treating you like you're delicate porcelain.

Six months into the pregnancy, you're sitting reading a book while the sun sets and the room falls dark. When it's too dark to see anymore, you look up from the words and curse, already trying to remember where you left your battery-powered torch. "Fucking lumos," you sigh, already hefting yourself out of the chair--you nearly fall over from shock when the lights flare on.

You whisper 'nox.' It doesn't work the first few times, but then the lights gutter and extinguish. He comes home to find you flipping the lights gleefully on and off--it works about one time in five, and the lights aren't always terribly bright, but it works. You jump on his back and scream the words a few times for good measure. The lights flicker very obediently and you kiss his cheek. He seems decently impressed, but there's a sad guard over his face as he carefully and gently explains the phenomena of 'normal' pregnant women 'borrowing' from their unborn babies.

It's nothing to do with you. You're utterly ordinary, embedded in the fringe of a world that is anything but.

You whisper 'nox' and the room goes dark. There's a long silence. "Fuck this house!" you cry, all of the brilliance and excitement ripped away into sick, strange disappointment, mourning a dream you never even really dared to entertain. "Fuck this house, fuck my life, fuck you!" you shriek in a fury of resentment and hormones and the stark and painful certainty that you are never ever going to belong.

You get in the car he bought for you and drive, the tyres of the Range Rover bumping over the rough path towards town, towards the nearest motorway. You nearly smash the car into a tree when he pops in the passenger seat on your left. "Fuck!" you scream again; you're wearing the word out today. You burst into new tears, slamming your palms against the steering wheel. You end up with your head in his lap in the backseat of the car in the middle of the woods, crying incoherently between gasps of breath while he strokes your hair soothingly, his spare hand gentle on your stomach.

Three days later, you're moving into the big house in Hale he bought for you and the baby. The lights are electric and you can cook in your own kitchen and park your car in the drive and walk to Tesco and order in pizza and go to The Unicorn for dinner with your ordinary friends, invite them back to your ordinary house for chocolate gateaux. It's less painful to be ordinary when you're in a beautiful ordinary house and not some fairytale cottage in a clearing in the woods.

You don't want a thing to do with any of the strange midwife sort of people he brings into your house, making a huge sooty mess of your clean pretty parlor in the process. You much prefer to walk down to a normal doctor with the clean, familiar disinfectant smell, all the sense and science the world has to back up medicine. It's really not to hurt him--he seems to think it is, he seems unhappy when you tell him a little more snappily than necessary that, really, who knows how effective their...well, you hesitate to call it medicine, but whatever they do that passes for it--how effective it is on ordinary people. But he never says a word and patiently sits with you in every waiting room, holds your hand and gets excited over the ultrasounds.

He apologizes for the first house as the two of you try (and fail) to assemble the cot in the nursery--he reaches for his stupid stick when something falls apart, and you're sure it's only the way you get stiff and uncomfortable when he uses it that freezes his hand. "That wasn't fair of me to bring you there--I can learn to do things this way, I can learn to belong here," he says, so earnestly that you try to smile through the sick sinking feeling that the words unsaid leave you with.

He says he can belong here, and he's apologizing because you both know you can't belong there. You can't do things his way, you can't learn to walk in his world.

You watch him carefully over Tab A and Slot B and the million tiny metal screws that litter the floor around you, the sick feeling fading away as you study the frustrated furror in his brow, leaving behind an affectionate smile at the beautifully reaffirming love that floods you.

"All of this Tab A into Slot B nonsense may actually be putting me off sex!" he explodes, tossing a piece of the puzzle onto the floor, carefully aimed away from you're sitting across from him.

You wonder, laying in bed idly and vainly trying to see your own toes over your stomach after a session of making sure poorly written directions haven't put your husband off sex forever. You wonder if he ever doubts like you do, if his mental picture of you is sometimes filed under "Oh, God, what have I done?"

You're grateful you don't know, grateful you got lucky, because he is endlessly generous and patient and it's the first time in your life you know what it is to be first for someone.

You are a little more than twenty now, and he is a little more than an adventure.