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She made him promise, though the matter was already her guarantee, delighting in extracting it from his faltering voice even as he denied her in a thousand little ways before he built up the confidence to do it properly, the quavering whisper dissolving into a sotto voce declaration in the middle of the sentence: he would remember her into his dreams, into his nightmares.
Boys his age often professed a fear of women: but she had already understood it well by the time they were being called to her gauntlet—though this understanding had taken her time—as a girl-child herself she had not quite understood why they would be afraid, truly it was not until she stood before herself in a mirror, having grown terrible and lovely, that she could begin to fathom the terror that plucked at the boys who had clustered at the edges of the square and snickered cruelly at her with white-widened eyes, young studs and stallions fearful of even a wispish creature such as herself.
Jared—Jareth, as he styled himself—did not feel this fear the same way as those long-forgotten boy-men did, as it was not the white-hot lasering of divided social custom and learned behavior, but something that pulled him to the edge of her hidden grottoes not to merely lose himself in the whirling sensuality of her dancers (or at least, not only that, for her charms would not work half as well if there was not that more fairy-friendly fire that burned in him when he looked at her) but instead a desire to join the dance; and so she would carve her way into his dreams, whether he liked it or still denied her, that he might be borne away on nightly tides to frolic in the tides of her kingdom, that between-place, and she could remember what it meant to be gentle as well as terrible.