Providence

He had anticipated catharsis from the moment he stood from his chair and plucked her out of the crowd. When she permitted his hand to embrace hers, even for a few chaste seconds, he affirmed at once every thought he had sustained and even those he had yet to imagine regarding the frail and frolicsome, feeble and fantastic young woman. The slightest twinge of her demure claret lips inspired infinitesimal inquiries that demanded answers upon inception. Every dramatic shutter of her thick eyelashes resulted in a silent plea for her to cast those thoughtful blinks in his hemisphere. His fingers intertwined respectfully behind his back, for fear he’d scathingly ensnare her freezing hand once more, without the luxury of consent.

Deep set and remotely fatigued ochre eyes tentatively shadowed the actions of the careful creature beside them. Her attention wandered patiently across the fog obscured terrain as they traversed the land in tandem. She smiled keenly at the sparse fronds of barley fluttering limply in the weak gale and ascribed an eager and certainly accidental peep to the threadbare coppice of exotic brush to the graveyard’s eastern verge, visible only by silhouette as projected through the vapor.

Gomez chortled at the diminutive, girlish sound. “Do you garden?”

For the first time since they had departed from the party, she turned her attention to him. In one swift movement, she turned toward the man, targeting him with an almost accusatory glance, though a noncommittal corner of her mouth bowed heavenward. “Mostly poisonous herbs and thorns. I’ve been raising an African Strangler for some time.”

“We have a conservatory here at the house,” he gestured nebulously in the direction he thought the manor to be, “We aren’t getting much use out of it, however. Mama tried to keep a trellis, but these garish petals kept sprouting up out of the vines.”

“I usually prune those when I can, but Ophelia just gets so upset.” The girl’s eyes broadened and her already sunken, sallow cheeks grew paler and thinner. She took an elaborate step away from the Addams boy as her courtly smile transmuted into a guilty scowl. Shaking her head indignantly, she drew a palm along the curvature of her cheek and wound her free arm across her midsection.

The young man advanced without hesitation, breaking the tenuous link of his fingers and halting them in midair before embracing her forearms with his hands. He grated his jaw in frustration and seethed something incomprehensible betwixt strained ivory teeth. He softened as he spun his eyes upon the distraught woman and dropped his arms to his sides in defeat. He sighed, purging himself momentarily of the desire to envelop her petite frame with those same arms, lying inert and purposeless in favor of reverence.

“What’s the matter?” he conceded.

“I left my sister at the reception,” she cringed, “She wanted to meet you, this evening.”

“Another time,” the man proclaimed dismissively. He strode forth an ample many paces before whirling about with the grace of a seasoned dancer. Without confirmation of any form, Morticia decided it was true.

His hand was protracted cordially, coaxing her along as the dense ashen clouds pooled fervently behind him. The girl smiled and accepted the offering, but allowed the link to hinder.

Guided by the hand, the two ventured further into the labyrinthian burial gardens. Gomez was only remotely conscious of the vivid tales he recounted to the attentive creature poised still in his hand. With every gravesite, epitaph and marble statue in memoriam, a brief and whimsical history waltzed into the air from his lips in a murky cloud of nostalgia. The soothing vibration of his voice, full of bravado and the charm that only his peculiarly stark Castilian accent could convey, complemented the romantically abysmal realm erected around them. The dry and wheezing pleas of arid and unattended vegetation underscored the Addams’ man’s musings whilst the whistling breeze accented every articulate flick of his tongue.

The soil whereon the pair rocked collapsed in subjection to the respective soles of the man and the girl. Her eyes, luscious and wide as the bulbs of the greying flowers laid upon the mounds of earth all around her, were drawn sporadically with the course of her chaperone’s artful storytelling. His free hand gestured from grave to grave with an enviable affluence.

Their fingers disengaged one another as the man leapt with a spritely fervor atop the base of an explicitly extravagant stature – a man with an enticingly reproachable face. The stranger’s likeness was not clad unlike the young man strung about its foundation. Garbed from the similarly athletically sloped shoulders with fine and expensive fabrics such as the vintage double-breasted overcoat, the subtle suggestion of a satin waistcoat buried somewhere beneath its thick predecessor and trousers spanning the entirety of the men’s lengthy legs and disappearing beneath the hem of its correlating jacket, all decorated with ivory streaks no thicker than the width of a needle. The effigy was of a man of a certain age, the sort that appeared boyish with the unsubtle implication of wrinkles and a chin that, had it been comprised of flesh and bone and blood, would be stippled with black and grey. The statue had to have been generations senior to Gomez’s estimated early twin decades, though a tangible charisma radiated from the lifeless marble of the dead man’s artifice.

Something in the air seemed to ream Morticia’s politely withdrawn smirk into an entity a tad more sincere.

“And it was then that my father took the liberty of perishing the poor bastard on his rapier. The very one I spar with today, in fact.” His large brown eyes were illuminated by the light generated only by the human spirit. He jabbed a calloused thumb behind him. “Charles Addams, I mean. That’d be this fellow.”

The girl’s brow hooked on a pressing query. “Charles?”

“I suppose he went by ‘Chas’ more than anything else.”

“He’s your father, then?”

“Well, Fester’s too.”

She smothered a laugh with her plush scarlet lips. “You look like him, I think.”

“Better.” he grunted amiably as he dismounted the prestigious family’s patriarch’s likeness. “Are you still thinking about your sister?”

Morticia was surprised. “It’s expected, isn’t it?”

“Are you?” he stole a few paces closer, all remnants of excitement and unabashed glee absent in his suddenly stern expression.

She felt challenged. “Concerned, yes. She’s marrying you, so I can only imagine what she’d think if she knew what I was doing.”

“Walking?”

She frowned at him, though her heart convulsed weakly at the visible response it incited. “This isn’t a routine stroll.”

“It doesn’t feel that way?” his lips reeled downcast in discouragement, though his tone seemed entirely too hopeful.

“Certainly not.” She began to walk in another direction with no intent of leaving. His immediate presence was too much for her to match with apparently inalienable savoir-faire.

The girl heard him advance toward her still. Her heart disrupted the sedentariness of her ribcage, brittle and thin. She bore feckless teeth in an unbridled grin, protected from the imploring eyes of her companion, and clasped a hand to her chest. She waited.

“Tish, can I ask you something?” His breath seemed strenuous to maintain, and the evident falter of his powerful tenor furthered the degradation of the cemetery. Her head tilted curiously at the foreign and endearing moniker. “You can’t be upset with me, either. I don’t know what I’d do with myself if that happened.”

He hadn’t waited on an answer, regardless. “When I saw you, something brilliant and horrible happened.”

“That isn’t a question.”

The man ignored her wholly correct observation and gently guided her in a slow and friable pirouette so that she might face him. He craved the duress of his beating heart when under the surveillance of her tactful gaze. A flavor of urgency pervaded the sentiment on his tongue.

“My insides have become some ornery beast and, frankly, I’m finding it hard to breathe. It’s strange, considering air has never tasted sweeter to me, before. I’m talking a whole lot this evening; that’s not unlike me. However, the only thing I want to say, it seems, is your name. Even now that I have your attention, I feel this pressure as though I might vomit some Steinbeck or Shelley. Do you understand?”

He nodded expectantly at the girl lingering of her own accord in his expert grasp. Morticia pretended for a moment that it was a language barrier betwixt them – him and her – but thought better of it. Never before, had life been such an absolute privilege. She beheld the abject, happy desperation smeared across the comely bronze slab of Gomez’s countenance with a sorrowful scoop of her brow and a covetous smile.

“Yes, yes I do.” She wondered if it would be inappropriate at all for her to shed a tear.

He grinned. “Then you’ll be merciful when I tell you I love you.”

“Gomez.” She had nothing to say beyond that. He understood.

Abruptly, their connection was pried asunder as the aforementioned man fell to his knees atop the loathsome, damp earth. His hands hadn’t the luxury of idleness as, immediately, he spun his large fingers about the soft and innocent plane of porcelain flesh gilding his companion’s hand. He stroked the upper surface of her palm with one of his thumbs as though he were pacifying the incessant wailing of his overwrought soul. His eyes scoured her face in idolatry from the ground, an unassailable and artless toothy smile occupying his maw from beneath his mustache. His burly chest heaved as he forced himself to take another breath.

“Marry me.”

That wasn’t a question, either.