PREVIOUSLY:

By the time they escaped her grandmother's wedding-mad clutches, Lydia and Beetlejuice had been subjected to a rigorous interrogation about every single person they had ever met in their entire lives and/or existences who might possibly be invited. The most auspicious dates for weddings had been debated with the intensity of a life and death battle. They had been grilled about color choices. They'd been given the third degree over flowers, put on the rack over the style of invitations, gone through the wringer picking a location, and told to come back tomorrow after they had perused a stack of magazines and brochures that towered over both of them.

-SCENE BREAK-

If she had waited and thought this through when she hadn't been up all night worrying and studying that book (which at that very moment was not very carefully hidden under more crispy-fried bridal magazines), she might have worked out a way to express the freedom she wanted to give him that couldn't be taken the wrong way. "You can feel whatever you want about me," she said, to forestall whatever she was unintentionally compelling him to do at the moment.

"Gee, thanks! That's sweet of you," he practically chirped. "Why don't you let me show you," he continued in his full throated, gravelly timbre while pulling her in towards his face, finally mumbling, "how sweet you are?" against her skin.

On the other hand, then she would have missed out on his extremely creative interpretations of feeling whatever he wanted about her and changing what she was wearing.

AND NOW, ON WITH THE STORY!

Chapter Thirteen: Meditation is Supposed to be Calming

Lydia sprawled limply on the magenta sheets of a black and white striped four-poster stuck upside down to the ceiling. Any doubts she'd had about her fiancé's willing participation had been banished by the extraordinary and filthy nature of the things she'd just been party to. On her best day, she wouldn't have been able to come up with half of that.

She was panting and her toes were still curling, but she couldn't really say she regretted letting Beetlejuice heal, even if it had already come back to bite her in the backside. Several times. Being too tired was also apparently curable, and she shuddered when she felt the rippling cessation of exhausted and sore go through her limbs.

"You want to go again? !" she demanded, propping herself up on one elbow to face the poltergeist lounging at her side. The top sheet was artfully, and just barely, draped over his essentials. Like the cover of a romance and/or horror novel titled, "Sexy Beast from the Beyond," she thought, and then disavowed ever thinking that. Maybe the real problem here was that he was subconsciously influencing her, not the other way around. She needed her head examined.

"You're insatiable, babes." He took a drag on his cigarette and leered at her. "But no, we gotta meet up with Grams and I wanna teach you how to meditate first."

She fell back flat bonelessly, not even bothering with the sheet. "You – You! want to teach me to meditate. So we can go see my grandmother."

"I'm not any more thrilled by the idea of spending the next stretch of forever in a snow globe than you are. At least the wedding planning has an expiration date. Bearding the lion in its den is better than it jumping on ya unawares, amirite? The women in your family seem to be real go-getters, y'know what I mean."

"My grandmother who you think is attractive. Am I hallucinating? That's it." She threw up her hands. "I'm actually catatonic or something and none of this is real. It explains so much about the past 24 hours of my life."

"So, ya dream about me often? I might like to hear about that. In all seriousness, though…." He clamped the smoke in the corner of his mouth and sat up, dragging her with him. He quickly arranged her limbs into a classic lotus, rasping in her ear, "Start a dream diary. I want all the juicy details. Or maybe I'll just wander in and take a look myself, eh?"

"Don't you dare!" She shoved him off, hoping that particular order would stick. For a while she had tried to avoid ordering him to do things, but it had become apparent in the midst of...certain activities...that if she wasn't actively powering her voice he didn't have to do what she said. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.

Cackling, he slumped against the headboard and got comfortable again.

She looked at her exacting pose, then at him, and raised an eyebrow.

"Sugar lips, when you're as talented as I am, then ya get to ditch the training wheels. Now I want ya to breathe – nice and slow."

Rolling her eyes as she closed them, Lydia took a deep breath while counting to seven. She held it for seven, let it slowly out…one…two…three…four…five…six…seven, ignoring his muttered, "Ooo, just like that," while he honked her breast.

She said, "I know how to meditate, by the way. I took a class with Delia. Step-mother/daughter shared bonding time."

"Sounds super fun. Why doncha open your third eye, then, and we'll get this show on the road."

"…Open my third eye."

"Don't know how, do ya? Here, let me help." He poked her forehead.

"Ow! God, get your finger out of my eye!" Her breathing rhythm broke and she winced. Two eyes stayed closed, but a third in the space between her wrinkled brows hesitatingly blinked open as her hands came up to shove him away. That was…different. "Basic Necromancy For Dummies" hadn't said anything about having an honest-to-god third eye and not some metaphysical chakra thing.

Looking straight at him hurt. It wasn't that he was glowing like a TV angel, he was just…more. He was vibrant color against a washed-out monotone world. He sat still and she saw echoes of movement, him now and him five minutes ago and him ten minutes from now and him a century ago and, dim behind the larger than life monstrous forms and carnival performances, a faded and barely recognizable man with a mocking laugh in the curl of his lip.

Squinting, she tried to shade her eye (the extra one!) with her hand only to discover that her hand actually was glowing like a neon sign. And so was the rest of her. She struggled to regain that easy feeling of calm and deep breathing that she had taken for granted before. "Beej. I know you don't do straight answers. But. What. The. Fuck."

She could see that he was going to pull some bullshit routine, peering into her eye and telling her to watch his finger as if he was checking her vision. Now that she was looking for it she could see every damned second of it at once. Her head beginning to ache, she gritted out, "And I can see you waving your finger around fine from here so just…don't."

The orderly sequence began to fray and branch off: maybe he would do it anyway, maybe he would play innocent, maybe he would haul off and kiss her, maybe, maybe, maybe – "I dunno what's up with that," he said.

"You don't know?" she sputtered. "You told me to open my third eye and then stuck your finger in it and expect me to believe—"

Now the possibilities narrowed down, as myriad protestations of ignorance lead into a single monologue. In her vision of the future, he shrugged and said, "Usually a third eye's nothin' but twisting your energy around. How was I s'posed to know you'd take it so literally? I guess you could be a mutant. Fall into any vats of ooze lately? Been hanging around A-bomb test sites? Or you're not all human." He spoke with an entirely unworried air, as if he couldn't care less about delivering what, to her, was a shattering realization.

Absorbed in the increasingly difficult task of making sense of what she saw, Lydia hardly paid attention to the present as Beetlejuice started acting out the third scenario from the upper left-right back quadrant. If she had to comment on his choice, she might have ranked it as one of the more dramatic options and aired her doubt that he was ever a boy scout, given when that organization was founded.

Grabbing his hand, she cut him off before he could do more than flash the three-fingered salute. "What do you mean – not all human?" Her grasp of the immediate future slipped and it sank into the confusion of before- and afterimages haloing him.

"Ngh! Hasn't anyone ever told you it's rude to read people's goddamned thoughts?" he snarled.

"I am not! And you threatened to gatecrash my dreams!"

"That's different."

"How?" Her normal eyes popped open to eye him incredulously. They blinked furiously as she tried to reconcile the familiar appearance of the world with the surreal, all-encompassing and unblinking vision of her third eye. Her stomach appreciated it even less than the drunk goggles from health class. Firmly closing two eyes, she said, "Ugh. Whatever. If it annoys you so much, help me turn it off!" She wanted this to go away, and never come back.

"Now that could get complicated." Beetlejuice nonchalantly scratched at his moldy stubble, then snapped his fingers. "Have you tried, uh, hm…closing it?"

"Great solution, genius, I never would have thought of that." Scrunching up her nose and exercising her eyebrows, she tried to get the damn thing to close. Tentatively, she poked around her forehead with her fingers, feeling the lash-less edges of the vertical slit. She tried to push it closed, but as soon as she let go it snapped open. "Why the hell was this necessary again?" she asked, pinching her third eye shut at the bridge of her nose.

He slowly sat up straight, his twisted eyebrows flattened in a glower. "Lydia. You let me take you to the Neitherworld. Twice."

"Yeah…?"

"Now tell me somethin'. Didja know it would kill you? Still want to 'get in'? Suicide via poltergeist?" he bit out. Suddenly he clutched at her shoulders, bringing her in nose to nose with her hand trapped between their foreheads. "The Neitherworld's not just where dead schmucks hang around wailing and gnashing their teeth 'cause they wanna. Dammit, it's a fucking dimensional roach motel. Once ya check in, ya don't check out again!" he shouted in her face. "Tell me you ain't that fucking stupid, you didn't just prance down there with no idea how to protect yourself, la dee da. What the hell were you thinkin'? !"

"I…I didn't know," Lydia breathed out, her chest brushing against his.

He wound his arms around her, crushing her closer. His eyes searched her face. "The first time, maybe. The second time, babes? You gonna tell me ya didn't even guess what was goin' on, while luring me Above with yer rack and take out?"

"I – there was no luring!"

"Ya little liar," he hissed out through his teeth, burying his face in her neck. "You were cold. Dead cold." A hand drifted down to trace her breast, warm and soft and alive. "Ya would've been dead if I…if ya weren't…"

"If I weren't what?" Lydia said slowly. Not all human, his unspoken words echoed through her brain, a vision of what never was etched in her memory. If she couldn't feed on him, unknowingly, like some kind of energy vampire... What did being a natural mean? Where did her necromancy come from? It was in her blood, her grandmother had said. Her hand shook, holding the eye closed.

Mapping her body with his rough hands, he desperately searched for all the places he could feel her heartbeat. There it was under his cheek as he pressed his face in the hollow of her collarbone. It resonated in her joints, it reverberated in her ribs. The pounding rhythm was alien after centuries of silence in his own veins. He hadn't even recognized it at first; a pulse sounded a lot different when it was absolutely terrified and jack-hammering through the neck of yokels he was scaring the skin off of.

"Why?" he asked.

He sounded so honestly bewildered, just like he had the last time he questioned her self-destructive wishes in that dusty old attic four years ago. He sounded like he actually cared. He'd hurried past it then, pushed it away as unimportant. Now?

"Beej," she murmured into his wild mane of blond hair, the scent of pond scum and smoke filling her nose. It wasn't bad, per se…okay, the combination was awful, but she was getting used to it...used to him. "Beej, look at me."

He let her lift his chin so she could peer in his eyes.

"I got better," she said. "I guess I just didn't think it was a big deal after all."

Blinking, he said very reasonably, "You got better. You didn't think it was a big deal." Then he flung himself backwards on the bed and positively yowled, "AaaaOOUuuuU, LYDS! Lyds, why ya gotta do this to me, baby doll, devil-cake, honey bat – you're gonna give me a heart attack even though it don't even work in th' first place! You'll be the second death of me!"

"What is your major malfunction?" Lydia exclaimed, sitting on him to make him stop thrashing around before he knocked her off the bed and she fell ten feet to the floor. "Don't pin this all on me. You took me there, thinking I was a ghost. I mean, what the hell is up with that, huh? You can – I mean, poltergeists can usually turn themselves inside out and break the laws of gravity, but you don't even have ghost-dar in there?" She rapped the knuckles of her free hand on his noggin.

"Hey, babes, why d'ya need a microscope to see germs?" he snarked, yanking on her arm so she lost her balance and sprawled over him, her naked thighs falling on either side of his hips. With the twitch of a thought, the bed sheet was gone and his hips were naked too. They could take a little break...

"You can't be serious," she said, wide-eyed.

"Ya looked like a ghost. Ya acted like a ghost. The energy that summoned me felt…deathy. For fuck's sake, who was it went around wrestling with me all over the place?" He twisted his hips up into her and waggled his eyebrows. "I was incorporeal and ya shoved me through the floor! D'ya think breathin' Joe Blow down the block can do that? I happen to be shit at reading auras because mine," he said while rubbing his growing erection between her thighs, "is massive."

He was difficult to fend off with two hands. With one tied up keeping her third eye closed, she didn't have a chance.