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There was a story about how they met at a funeral and instantly fell in love as their eyes met over the casket. As they told it, they became engaged that very night. It was a beautiful story and it seemed right, so much so that even people who had been there and knew better still believed it.
Before they were Mr. and Mrs. Addams, they had been young once. He was lonely and grieving and terribly handsome, and she was anxious and prickly and so determined to become a powerful witch that she hardly had time for anything else. The true story was romantic if you looked at it sideways, if you were the type of person who thought that thorns were the most beautiful part of roses, but it was private, almost painfully so.
Their real first meeting was just outside of a morgue. It was an appropriate location, at least. Morticia was trying to decide what her best plan of approach should be when she heard the front door open. She stood up and turned, ready to recite the strongest bewitching spell that she knew, when she saw that the person who had come out of the building was not an employee but in fact a young man wearing an old-fashioned suit. He couldn’t be much older than she was.
“You’re crying,” she said. “Not that I don’t appreciate the beauty inherent in misery, but are you all right?”
“I am not crying,” he said, trying to scrub tears off his face with his sleeve. He was good-looking, but he seemed like the type of man who was very aware of how attractive he was and thought it meant that every woman he met would be interested in him.
“If you need to kill someone, I can help.” She lifted the book that she’d been reading to show that it was called The Big Book of Poisons.
“You're sitting outside of a morgue and reading about poison?" He sounded intrigued.
“I need to capture the stale breath of a corpse as it leaves the body.” She gestured to the recipe in the book that she’d been trying to make. “The morgue staff wouldn’t let me do that even though it’s not like they need their breath anymore. My next plan was to try casting a spell that makes people do your bidding.”
“You’re a woman of culture, clearly.”
She smiled at him, in spite of herself. “I answered your question. Now, why were you crying?”
He glanced away, like he was looking for an escape route, then looked back at her. “It wasn’t my brother,” he said. “They said that it was probably him but it’s not.”
“You came to the morgue to identify him?”
“I don’t even know if he’s dead, for sure. If he was then I could at least bury him in the family cemetery.”
Her instinct was to say something about how dramatic and exciting this all sounded, but he still looked upset. “Where would he be if he isn’t dead?”
“We got into an argument and he left. I haven’t seen him since then. I thought that maybe he had died and that was why we haven’t heard from him, but if he’s alive then it means he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.”
A morgue employee poked his head out the door. “Do you two need anything?”
“I need a dying man’s last breath, I told you that,” Morticia said at the same time that the young man mumbled something about his brother and started crying again.
“Well, you can’t loiter here. I need to ask you to leave.”
Morticia glared at him “I’d like to see you try.”
The employee gave her a strange look and went back inside.
“He’s probably going to call the police,” the man said. He looked slightly cheered-up at the thought.
“Do you want to help me find nightshade? I can’t let today be a total waste, poison-wise” She thought that he looked like he could use a distraction.
“There’s some growing in my family’s cemetery.”
“Your family sounds wonderful.”
“Gomez Addams.” He stuck out his hand and she shook it.
“Morticia. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
She assumed that he was taking her to a small plot of land, or maybe a section of a large public graveyard, but it turned out that the Addams family owned a large mansion with an even larger, sprawling cemetery on the grounds. It was the most beautiful thing that Morticia had ever seen. He showed her the area where he’d seen nightshade growing and told her stories about his brother while she collected the beautiful, deadly blossoms.
“It all falls to me now,” Gomez said. “I’m the heir, unless Fester returns. I’m supposed to have children and carry on the family name but I don’t even know if I want to do any of that. I just want my brother back.”
Gomez invited her back the next evening. She was concerned that he was starting to misunderstand the nature of their relationship, but he had promised her rare and highly toxic flowers that only bloom at night and she couldn’t resist.
He greeted her as soon as she arrived at the tall, wrought-iron gate. “Tish! It’s so good to see you!”
“Tish? Never mind that, I need to make something clear. I have no time for men right now. My only goal is to master the dark arts.”
“You certainly have your priorities in good order.” He grinned and bowed to her. “Right this way, I’ll show you where the flowers are.”
“You aren’t trying to court me? I thought you were looking for a wife so that you could marry and continue the family name.”
“I don’t- it’s complicated. Let’s talk about poison, that’s a much more pleasant subject.”
He helped her collect plants this time, and she told him about her education in dark magic, and how she’d been largely self-taught over the past few years as Mama’s mind had been elsewhere. “She isn’t senile,” Morticia explained. “She’s older than anyone can remember and I’m convinced that she will outlive all of us. It’s just that she’s been cursed so many times that she has trouble sometimes, and then I have to do everything on my own.”
“Is she all right by herself?”
“Oh, she’s more of a danger to anyone unlucky enough to cross her path than she is to herself.”
“She sounds like a charming woman. I’d love to meet her sometime. Can I interest you in some wine?”
“That sounds wonderful.” She thought she’d collected enough flowers but she didn’t want to go back home yet.
Gomez led her into the house and through a labyrinthine series of corridors. She didn’t know if the house had been designed to make things difficult for intruders or if the Addams ancestors had simply liked it this way, but Morticia approved.
“Do you plan to trap me behind a wall?” she asked.
“No, but I like your thinking. Maybe another time.” Gomez grinned and led her into one final room, which turned out to be a wine cellar. He selected a bottle and retrieved two glasses from an ancient-looking cabinet. Everything in this house was very old, and probably cursed. She almost didn’t want to leave.
Morticia took the glass that he handed her and swirled the wine around before taking a sip. The dark red color reminded her of blood. It was good, she thought. She didn’t know enough about wine to know whether or not it was good wine but she enjoyed the taste. “Un verre de vin,” she said, mostly to herself. “Or is it une verre? Or am I thinking of tasse? I always get those mixed up.”
“What was that?”
“French. I’m trying to remember the gender of the word for glass. I need to put more work into my language lessons.”
“Do all witches learn French?”
“We're encouraged to learn it. Apparently a lot of old spellbooks are written in French. It also helps to write your own spells if you have more than one language in which to do it. I know some Latin too.”
“French is a ridiculous language.”
“Je pense qu’elle est une très belle langue.”
“What are you doing?” He sounded incredulous.
“Je dois practiquer mon francais.”
“That’s annoying.”
“Ton visage est ennuyeaux.”
“I need more wine.”
They finished the bottle, and a second one, and spent most of the rest of the night trying to throw knives at the wall. Gomez declared that she seemed to have a talent for it.
“Is this what you do all day? Drink and throw knives?”
“I also practice fencing and judo and acrobatics.”
“Don’t you have a job?”
He shrugged. “There’s enough money to keep the family going for a long time, and I have people to manage it for me. I don’t have to do anything except for keeping track of when it’s time to discuss old business and new business and making sure that the vault stays locked. I don’t even know where all the money would go if I was the last one of the line. Probably to some distant cousin somewhere.”
“Is this about how you are apparently not looking for a wife?”
Gomez set his glass down. He looked like he was almost crying again.
“I’m sorry, if you don’t want to talk about it-”
“It’s not your fault. That’s actually what led to Fester disappearing. There were two women, and I wasn’t even interested in either of them but I flirted with them, just to prove that I could seduce someone as well as he could. He got angry, we argued, he stormed off to the Bermuda Triangle, and now I’m all that’s left of the family.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t know what to say.
“The idea of our family dying off could be quite romantic, if I died in a suitably dramatic fashion, but wasting away in this house with only Lurch for company isn’t anywhere near the ending that my family deserves.” He sighed. “It’s not that I don’t want a wife, or children. I’ve actually always wanted to be a father. I’ve just never met anyone who really interests me. It sounds selfish when I put it like that, doesn’t it?”
“Not at all, I think it’s quite reasonable. That’s why I don’t bother with men, a husband would expect me to cook and clean for him and I wouldn’t have time to study magic.”
“Perish the thought.”
Morticia just showed up the next day without being invited, and Gomez’s very large butler let her in without even questioning her.
It became something of a ritual after that. She didn’t visit every day, but very nearly, and Gomez was always delighted to see her. Morticia told herself that she only came because of his selection of poisonous plants and other ingredients that were useful in her magic, but she had to admit that she was also concerned about him being so lonely all the time. And even more secretly, she enjoyed his company. Gomez was strange, not quite in the same way that she was but similar enough that they could understand each other. He cherished the things about her that made most people uncomfortable and she realized that he’d quickly become the best friend that she’d ever had.
She had planned to visit Gomez again, to show off a new hex that she had mastered. She was looking forward to it until she woke up with a pounding headache and aching throat and a feeling that she would either vomit or just die in agony. She’d always hoped to have a grisly death that people would tell stories of for generations, but “Morticia was a second-rate witch who died in her twenties from a bad cold” wasn’t a story that anyone would bother to remember.
She didn’t even remember her meeting with Gomez until ten minutes after she was supposed to be at his house She managed to stagger over to the phone to call him. Morticia didn’t want to think about what her voice sounded like as she made some kind of excuse before she hung up and collapsed on the couch.
She was in a half-awake stupor when she heard the front door opening. “Thing, is that you?” she called out.
“Tish?” It was Gomez’s voice.
“Ughhh.” Morticia rolled over to face the couch. She couldn’t bear to look at him.
“Thank you, my good… hand?”
Morticia glanced over her shoulder to see that Gomez and Thing were shaking. “That’s Thing,” she said, even though it was more of a groan. “He’s an old friend of Mama’s and he should know that I don’t want company today.”
Gomez ignored her. “I brought you some soup? It’s not poisoned, but you’re welcome to flay me alive if the taste isn't to your liking. In case that helps you feel better.”
“It might.” Morticia smiled in spite of herself.
She forced herself to roll back and sit up on the couch. So that she could try the soup, not because she wanted to talk to him in this state. She tried not to think about how small and cheap-looking her house must seem to him.
“You look awful,” he said cheerily. “Like you’re about to drop dead any minute. Or perhaps like you’re already dead? Undead, maybe…”
Morticia knew that her hair was a mess and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She was wearing a long, Victorian-style nightdress because she had to maintain some sense of style, but it was old and faded and she was fairly sure that there were stains from where she’d wiped her nose on it.
Gomez was beaming at her.
“All right, I’ll try your soup.” She didn’t feel like a mysterious, alluring practitioner of the dark arts. She didn’t feel like anything other than awful, really, and maybe slightly grateful to him for thinking of her.
The soup was actually quite good, and the heat of it made her throat feel better. “Thank you,” she said. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I was worried about you. We’re friends, aren’t we?”
She didn’t know how to explain that she’d thought Gomez was friends with the neighborhood witch who gathered poisoned flowers and threatened anyone who bothered him, who was apparently one of the few people outside of his family who was weird and dark enough to understand him. They got together to talk about torture and curses and, occasionally, their fears that his brother might never return and she might never accomplish anything with her magic. They didn’t have conversations about normal things like being sick. If Gomez wanted to have a normal conversation with a nice, normal woman, he could talk to literally anyone else he’d ever met. But he was here, with Morticia, passing her a silk handkerchief without the slightest hesitation.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Honestly, I just need sleep. The soup was very nice, thank you. I’m afraid that I’m not very good company right now.”
“You’re always excellent company. Here, how about I sit here and read, and then I can leave you alone to rest or bring you something if you need it? No offense intended to your roommate, but I can carry more with two hands.”
Morticia thought she saw Thing in the corner, flashing him a rude gesture. “That sounds nice, actually.” She let herself lay back down. She felt exhausted, but she thought that she was probably too achey to actually fall asleep. She watched Gomez take out a book and start reading, looking like he actually intended to keep her company for the rest of the day, and possibly longer.
“Actually, do you mind reading to me? You have a nice voice.”
Gomez started reading out loud without acknowledging what she’d just said. She didn’t know what she would say to him if he had. Morticia settled down, smiling as she listened to him read. She wasn’t sure when she fell asleep.
“Tish, I need a favor,” he said. “Please don’t be mad at me.”
“What is it?”
“Will you be my date to my cousin’s funeral? It’s just that my whole extended family will be there but I will be alone, and I know you already have a black dress.”
“That sounds lovely.”
“Oh, you’ll do it? Thank you, I owe you one.”
She’d been under the impression that Gomez had a large family, but she hadn’t realized how large. He was alone there in the big house after his branch of the family had all died grisly, dramatic deaths (or had disappeared, in Fester’s case), but the rest of his family was scattered throughout the world and was apparently involved in a lot of exciting and strange pursuits. It was easier to see where Gomez had come from now. Morticia wasn’t trying to impress anyone because she didn’t need their approval, but it pleased her to notice that everyone seemed to like her.
There was a moment when they lined up to view the casket and she ended up on the opposite side as him. Gomez caught her eye and smiled at her, and she would almost swear that she felt something change.
He walked her back home after.
“C’est une jolie mort. Un mort? No, I’m sure it’s feminine.”
Beside her, she heard Gomez gasp. She glanced up to see that his mouth was still open.
“I’m sorry, I know it’s annoying.”
“No, it’s- lovely, actually. Could you say more?”
“Uh, Je ne sais pas quoi dire. Tu me fais heureuse.”
She looked over and noticed that his eyes were closed. “Gomez, are you all right?”
“So this is what it feels like.” He opened his eyes and stopped walking.
“What’s wrong?”
He took one of her hands in both of his and she didn’t try to stop him. “I have something to ask you,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“Could I kiss you?”
It would change things between them forever, she thought. “Of course you may.”
She expected him to lean his face down toward hers but instead he lifted her hand to kiss the back of it. His mustache tickled her skin. Gomez pressed another kiss to her hand, then a third, then he started trailing kisses up her arm.
“What are you doing?” She laughed at him but she didn’t dare try to pull away as he continued to leave a path of kisses. Finally he reached her shoulder, then her cheek, and finally her lips. His mouth was softer than she’d expected it to be.
It was a gentle kiss, not like the scream of someone being burned to death but more like the soft thud of a flower being beheaded when it is in full bloom. She thought that she never wanted it to end.