Page 7 of Madness Becomes Her

“Well, your room is for the hats. So, you’ll sleep with me.”

“Why would I have a room?”

He only sighs. “Rooms have angles. So does Eleanor, so she must have a room.”

Okay?

He leads me upstairs, all while losing pieces of clothing.

I’m thankful when he leaves his briefs and climbs into bed, patting the empty side for me to get in.

A candle illuminates the room on his bedside table, and I look at my filthy clothes as I hesitate. “Do you have anything I could wear? I don’t really have anything.”

Tossing back the covers, he gets out of bed. “You have everything.”

His riddles are getting on my nerves because I’m so tired. More so now that I’m in the presence of a bed, nevermind that I don’t know the man I’m about to sleep in it with. That’s the least worrisome aspect of my life currently.

When the Hatter begins to undress me, I swat his hands away.

The look in his eyes has guilt churning in my stomach, and I fumble with the front of my hoodie. “I’m sorry. I just… I can do it.”

He nods, tossing me a button-up shirt with mismatched buttons running its length before padding back to bed and getting inside.

Turning, I remove my clothes, shimmying out of my jeans, hoodie, and bra to get into the shirt Hatter offered.

I’ll have to convince him to let me wash them somehow tomorrow because wearing his shirts will not cut it.

However, his woodsy scent that wafts up my nose from it might not be so bad to have on my person.

I leave my panties on.

It’s probably not a great idea to leave that part of myself exposed while in bed with a man I don’t know who speaks in riddles and rhymes.

Once I’m in bed, Hatter seems satisfied. He blows out the candle and bathes us in darkness.

“Your head is perfect,” he whispers. “I’d very much like to hat it.”

What?!

The morning brings confusion.I wholeheartedly expected to wake up beneath the ruins in the park, shivering and soaked to the bone with rain, having dreamt up the entire fantastical scene last night.

Nope.

My eyes open, and I gasp.

I’m face to face with the Hatter from my new reality.

“What are you doing?” I manage as he leans over me further.

He’s between my legs, and a very delicate part of me is against a huge part of him, and I have no room overhead to wiggle away. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.

He’s got my head firmly in hand, a fabric measuring tape around my head, and he looks determined.

“I simply knew it.” He sits back. “The perfect head.”

“What?”

He scrambles off me, still in his briefs and looking even more deranged than he did last night.