A chill in the air and a delightful smell woke me. The chill was because Manu wasn't there and I'd somehow managed to get myself unblanketed, and was lying naked, ass in the air, on top of the sheets.

The smell, meanwhile, seemed to be coming from the kitchen.

It wasn't coffee. Or, it wasn't entirely coffee, there was coffee there, in the undertones, but I was more interested in the scent of the spices floating through the apartment. It was both similar to, and completely different from, the pizza I'd had the night before.

I got up, my stomach growling, and walked naked to the kitchen, following the smell.

Manu spotted me immediately. "Seeing you naked is maybe the best way to start the morning."

I blushed. "Only maybe?"

He walked over to me, his soft body covered only by a pair of boxer shorts, and squeezed my ass while leaning down to give me a gentle but deep kiss. I could taste the spice on him, and it was a wonderful change to his flavour, still decidedly him but with a tasty addition.

I was definitely starting to appreciate tasty additions. Though thinking about it, I'm not sure when I didn't. I was starting to appreciate this spicy-sweet sort, though.

We separated. "You've been sampling as you cook," I said, and he nodded. "What's up for the morning, then?"

The toaster popped. "Toast and eggs," he said. "I don't have any flatbread, I'm afraid, so you get multigrain."

'Eggs' turned out to be a single omelette made in a large frying pan—I think Manu must have used at least six, maybe eight eggs—full of fresh vegetables and those wonderful spices that filled the air and his breath.

"I hope you don't mind," he said as I went to the sink to refill my glass of water, "but I left out most of the hot peppers I would usually have in there."

"Oh you did?" I replied, sitting back down. "Good to know that your cooking might just make me explode."

He laughed. "It's not that bad, I hope?"

I shook my head. "Manu, it's delicious. It's just hot."

"Then it's it good company," he said with a look I could only describe as 'hungry,' despite the fact that most of our breakfast was finished. Unnecessarily, he added, "'Delicious and hot' is a very accurate way to describe my breakfast companion."

For some reason, the rage demon inside me didn't want to hear it. Maybe it was the spice. I tried to keep my tone light. "Do you ever let up?" I asked, my flush a combination of spice, embarrassment, arousal, and mild frustration.

"Not if I have a choice," he replied, taking his plate to the sink and waiting patiently to do the same for mine while I finished eating.

Something about that struck me as odd, him just standing there while I had my last few bites of the food he'd made. It was almost like he was my valet. I tried to eat as quickly as I could, but the spice restricted me some. I supposed I'd get used to it, if he kept making me meals. And that thought sounded amazing. I hadn't really learned to cook anything beyond the basics. My mother wasn't too interested in teaching me how to be a homemaker and I had no need to make my own food while living on campus.

And despite the heat and unfamiliar flavour, the taste was wonderful.

"So," I began once I'd finished my scraps and he took my plate, "how did the whole 'mad science' thing go last night?"

He paused, maybe hesitated. "Great, I think," he replied. "I learned a few things." He turned back to me. "What time is your class? Do you want to go over them? Do we have time?"

"One, sure, and I don't know, I guess it depends on what time it is now and how long it'll be." I looked at his hand, something I only just then realized I'd been avoiding. The tattoo-like flame on the back of his hand jumped out at me, triggering a small twinge of guilt. "Does your hand hurt or anything?"

"Huh? Oh." He lifted his hand to look at what I'd seen. "No, it's all good. I hardly even remember it's there most of the time." He shrugged. "When I spot it, it reminds me of you. Why?"

"I thought that tattoos itched or something."

He chuckled. "I don't think it's a tattoo."

I scratched my head. "What is it, then?"

"Dunno. Kind of like a birthmark, or something? I've never had a tattoo, so I don't know to compare. And I'd guess from having multiple good looks all over your body that you haven't, either."

The lascivious tone in his voice was so casual that I both flushed and laughed, which I think was the reaction he was going for.

"But," he continued, "we're getting off track, right? We were about to discuss the experiment of last night." He, subconsciously I think, put his left hand over his right, covering the flames that had drawn my attention, and leaned against the counter.

"Sure," I said, suddenly feeling my nakedness. Between us, the only clothing was one pair of boxer shorts, and it wasn't on me, and this felt like a very present reality.

"So, uh, first, what do you remember?"

"Oh." I shook my head. "Not a whole lot, I think?" I tried to recall the evening, after the class. "The music came on, I remember the music... pounding in me, I guess? The music seemed to resonate in my whole body. I felt... weird. All over. Not bad weird, just unusual. I was kinda dragged back into thinking about the poetry class? More about... uh, well, at the start of the class, and I mean by the start of the class it took about an hour all told, the other six students all presented poetry in a style that they don't normally engage in. And I was pushed into... reliving it? It wasn't bad, not at all, it was great, the first time, but it was like all of them all at once, and for some reason it wasn't really overwhelming? I mean, I was overwhelmed, but it... I just... that sounds stupid, right?"

Manu shook his head. "No, it sounds really interesting."

"Oh, uh, okay. So, um, it's more like it was... all-encompassing. Like, if I was trying to process information from my own eyes and ears and stuff it would have been maddening, but everything shut down and my whole world became... no, that's not right. My world was much, much bigger than the music, but it was all contained in the music, I guess? It's..." I shook my head. "It's a Doctor Who thing, I guess."

"Bigger on the inside?"

"I'm impressed you knew that."

"Guy with a science degree is a nerd. Shocking."

We laughed together. 

"But yeah," I continued. "That's the best analogy I've got. It's like the music unlocks something so much bigger than itself."

He looked at me. "You, ah, you know you do the same, right?"

"Huh?"

He stood up, got closer to me. "You're so small, but there's so much more inside you."

The PMS decided that I should take offence to being called small. I pushed it aside, but I couldn't keep all the strain from my voice. "Anyway, that's what it felt like. Not just for space, but—well, not for space at all, really. Space didn't really exist in that moment. Just... just time."

"Okay." Manu sat back down at the table. I could tell that he knew he'd touched a nerve. This didn't make me feel better, but it did make me pay a little more attention to my tone.

"And time was... okay, hm, so imagine two things happen at once, but instead of experiencing them at once, I was feeling them happening in order. And the sensations weren't... didn't make sense. I knew I was looking at something on the screen, but—and I was staring at it! The whole time, right? But I don't know what it was. It was part of the whole... thing. And that's what it was, right? It was a whole thing, an entire act, not just the song, but the picture—"

"Pictures," Manu interrupted. "A little slide show."

"... Okay, pictures, a-and the words, and you, your voice, and—"

I can't just make a series of sounds with my breath and my mouth that will convey everything that goes with the name. Everything around it matters. The feeling between us, the space we occupy, the wind, the temperature, what colour you're wearing. It all matters.

"... oh."

"Oh?" Manu's eyes widened curiously.

"I think I just understood something that Rita said to me, about... all this."

"Which was?"

"I'm... not... really sure. I just understand it better, I don't really know it." I took a breath. "She told me that trying to describe the force behind all this, it's more a matter of context, of the surroundings—or... or not more, just also. It's..." I let my breath out through my lips, making a weird noise like a soft horse whinny, and I'm not sure why I did, but it conveyed my inability to properly grasp the concepts I was trying to explain.

"File that away for later?"

"Yep."

"Okay. So... there was everything, and then?"

"Um... I melted? I... everything that was me, that is who I am, kind of became... soft, and... weak? I don't know, it felt like I became the raw material of creation. Uh, how familiar are you with the Bible?"

"Not really at all."

"Okay, well, there's this passage that stuck with me from the brief time I spent in Sunday school when my parents were trying to be religious for some reason. 'Before I made you in the womb, I knew you.' Which I mean, it didn't... it never sat right with me? Because we're constantly... changing, right? You don't know who a baby is going to be when they're a kid, and what a kid will be like as a teen, and... But that's what I felt at that moment, that I was... well, I wasn't being remade, but I could be remade, that I was all that... stuff that gets made into a person without any shape to fill. And it... it tore me away, right? It just... ripped through my... my skin, my shell, my... y'know..." I made awkward circling motions with my hands over my bare chest. "All this. Just... got sliced up. Torn to ribbons. And filled with that... creation-stuff. I was being... I don't know, rebuilt? Refined? Transformed? Reconfigured?" I shrugged. "And then... I heard myself. And you. And, uh, was I... reciting at you? Did I do something to you?"

Manu shook his head. "No, but the fact that you didn't know what was going on is... well, let's say, interesting."

"Okay?"

"You heard yourself, and then me?"

"I dunno. There was just a lot of... yeah."

"Okay, because on the third loop of the song, I added a voice track on top of it. My voice."

I tilted my head. "Yeah?"

He nodded. "I looked up some scripts for calming, meditative recitations, to see how you could be influenced through that sort of blank state you fell into. I added them into the loops as we went, along with soft, mostly abstract images designed to be... well, yeah, calming."

"O—kay..." I considered what that might have meant.

"And you," he continued, "in the middle of that trance, I asked you how you felt. You—much more slowly—answered pretty much all that. I took notes."

"You took notes?"

"I was doing science!" He laughed. "Of course I took notes. That's why I prerecorded everything. I didn't say a word through the whole evening. I just sat, watched you be all sexy and blank and shivery, and wrote everything down."

"'Sexy, blank, and shivery?' Are those scientific terms?"

"Close enough to them."

We smiled at one another.

"Anyway, you said some really interesting things. Mostly what you just told me, except, like I said, slower, and more coherently. And less poetically."

"And then we fucked," I added.

"And then we fucked. I stopped taking notes about then."

I giggled.

"So... uh... conclusions, now? In the aftermath?" he asked me.

"I was about to ask you the same."

He sighed and got to his feet again. "I've got nothing. I mean, apart from the fact that I'm a biochemist, not a psychologist, physicist, or theologian, this is kind of out of my field of expertise."

I grimaced. "Not thrilled that you put psychologist at the top of that list."

"First thing that came to mind."

"That I might be crazy?" That came out more upset than I had intended it to, but not more upset than I felt.

Manu shook his head. "I've seen way too much in these past few days to believe that."

"Then why—" I stopped myself, taking a breath. "Sorry."

"Rage demon?"

"Yep. It's a little much right now. Sorry, I'm jumping to conclusions."

Manu nodded in understanding. "It's alright. We can talk about something else, if you like."

"No, no, this is good."

"Then as for why," Manu explained, "it's more because that's what I was looking at for making those relaxation tracks. I'd like to know more about what if anything I actually did to you."

I nodded. "Okay, sure. That makes a lot more sense than me being crazy." I took another deep breath.

"Look, if you're crazy, than I'm at least as crazy."

"Yeah, I guess." I stood up and walked around the table to put my arms around his neck. "I'm sorry, again."

We kissed lightly. It was sweet. Except that his lips still had the extra spice from his omelette on then and they made mine tingle and burn. I somewhat ashamedly wiped my face after the kiss.

He grinned. "A bit spicy?"

"I'm glad you know why."

"Yours are not the first white lips I've kissed."

I snorted a bit. "Okay, so... now what?"

"Wellll..." Manu's hand wound up on my hip, somehow. "If we have time..."

"With the mad science, I mean."

"Darn." We grinned at each other again. His hand didn't move. "If we had another subject, I'd love to observe as you recited at a third party so I could keep my senses about me."

"And now you're thinking about threesomes."

"Only a little."

We kissed again. The spice wasn't so prevalent, or so shocking, this time, and the tingle kind of felt nice. A very unfortunate spot in my brain wondered how that tingling would feel during cunnilingus and I immediately decided that was a terrible idea.

Probably.

"Right now," Manu said, "I'm thinking about taking you back to bed."

"I'm thinking about letting you."

"Mmm... Thinking of mad science..."

"Yeah?"

"I... can I try something?"

I pressed into his hand. "Sure."

And Manu said, "Float into the night sky," which I knew was a lyric from Tempest's song, but it was also something I'd heard him say a few times last night, and my body recognized the words and I felt so warm and relaxed that I nearly slipped to the floor.

"What..." I shook my head. "What was..."

"An observation," Manu said. "Maybe something to play with later." Manu stood and held me up. "Your body and your mind remember those words."

"Yes," I said, and I wasn't really sure why.

"And in the middle of all that fire and broken glass they can help you relax, and be calm."

"Right," I said, finding my feet under me. "What... did you do to me?"

"I think," Manu said, holding my ass in a way that wasn't strictly supportive, "that it's some basic hypnotism."

"Huh." I stepped a little closer, and there wasn't much room to do that. "Well, I'm not really looking for relaxation at the moment..."

He leaned down to whisper in my ear. "Some of the things I read about weren't about relaxation," he said with a suggestive tone and a strong squeeze.

I imagined what some of those things might be. I remembered Rita in the shower room, or all the girls in the dorm lounge, and I shivered.

"Sounds like someone wants to do some more mad science later."

"When we can," I confirmed, and then kissed him again, and again, and again, again, again...

And I was on top of him, somehow, and he didn't have his boxer shorts anymore, and he was deep inside me and I was loving it, and loving him.

And the words started to come.

They weren't my words, though. And that was a little distressing.

First came the two poems that Oscar had sent into two different corners of our minds, the night before. The cacophony wasn't pleasant, not this time, and it wasn't really understandable among the grunts and moans and squeaking bed-joints. I could tell the words didn't make sense, and I could tell that they didn't make sense to Manu, too.

Kat's perfomance. James'. Haven's. Meaghan's. Son's. All of them pressed on me, and I pressed down on Manu, and he pressed back, and my words weren't right, and our connection wasn't right, and as the sexual energy between us built up, our movements became a little more desperate, a little more insistent, a little less coordinated. When he tried to stop, my hands found his shoulders and pushed him down, trying to get us finished before—

"I should stop, yeah?" I said, slowing.

"If you think so, too," he replied, and I could hear in his voice that he was maintaining his composure for me. The old 'lie back and think of England' protocol for Victorian woman, updated for a modern Indian man.

I was slick with more than just my usual wetness as I got off him, and I realized that my period had come in its normal (under treatment), spotty way. "I... I don't know what to say," I said, and I didn't. Everything felt so overwhelming, right then. I was swamped in emotion, from the class the night before, from our experimentation, from the discussion... I sat on the side of the bed, fighting the tears back, until Manu wordlessly wrapped his arms around me, and I could feel his soft cock sticky with everything pressing against my butt, and the crying began then.

He knew not to say anything. It was better that he didn't. I didn't say anything either, and I think that was probably better, too. We just sat there while I wept more or less silently.

I finally got to, "Sorry. I'm just..."

"Your overwhelmed at the moment," Manu said, and his tone of voice said how much he understood.

And that just made things worse. I didn't want to be understood, not then, I wanted to be alone, and mad, and banging my head against the wall, and—

"Want some water?" he asked me.

"Oh god, yes," I answered, and meant it. I had pretty much regained most of my composure. "H-how," I stammered, "How about I start the shower and..."

I felt him nod. "Okay, yeah, we should probably clean up before I take you home, right?"

"Yeah."

I didn't want to go home. I wanted to be alone, but I wanted to be alone with him right there, for when I was ready to not be alone anymore. I didn't want to go to class, for that matter; too many people there who weren't Manu.

I took a breath. "Okay. Sorry." I was calming down. "Maybe I'm just... in too deep or something."

"There is a lot going on." He rubbed my shoulders. I didn't want him to stop. But I just wanted his hands there, the rest of him...

I sighed. "Not even a week."

"A week tomorrow," he added.

"Are you dealing with this sort of shit too?"

"Nope." I felt him shaking his head. "I'm just absolutely, completely, totally in love, and I want to help you any way I can, and I want to find out more and more about you."

"So, uh... obsession?"

"To say the least." He leaned in and kissed my cheek. "Whatever happens, beautiful Chameleon, I will be by your side, if you'll have me there."

Rage Demon didn't like this, but Rage Demon can go suck a lemon. My anger doesn't dictate who I am.

The echoes of Tempest's music spun dizzily in the back of my mind.

"Let me get you some water," Manu said as he pressed close. He let me go and scrambled off the bed, and I slowly stood up. In a bit of a haze, I went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Manu came in with the glass he promised me, and we stood there while I drank pretending things were normal.

Not that anything was, or had been, normal.

At least I knew that he was sincere about his statement that he would stay by my side. It was maybe a little scary; I could do more or less anything to this man and he would still be there. I thought of my own parents' relationship, and what it would have been like to be as devoted as Manu to a partner as indifferent as either of them.

I promised myself, then, as the two of us stepped into the warm spray of the water, being very gentle with each other, I promised myself that no matter what, I would never show that indifference. And while we softly cleaned each other, we were tender. I was apologetic, Manu was caring, and eventually the two of us were just there, in love, wet, clean, and still. The confidence I had lost, that wasn't reclaimed in that frantic, desperate lovemaking of a few minutes before, was there in our relationship, just hiding beneath the surface, behind the Rage Demon and the confusion and the class performances and my parents and my lost Thanksgiving plans and even behind the fire and those seven haunting words.

What I couldn't reclaim with an anger-fuck, I had found in a simple mutual shower. The water put the fire out, at least temporarily, and let the two of us connect without it between us. And nothing was missing.

We didn't make love—we didn't have time, and I don't think we had the energy or the inclination—but Manu dried me, slowly, languidly, with a warm towel, testing every part of my skin with his lips after his hands had passed. Even as his tongue slid lightly over my nipples, it didn't feel sexual, exactly, but connective. There was no urgency in it, either. It felt like the build up for something that would happen, but didn't need to happen right then. Given the urgency that had coloured a lot of activity of the past month, it was perfection. That feeling of wanting to be alone, and of wanting him at hand for when I didn't want to be alone anymore, felt like it could be perfectly accomplished for the rest of the day after that.

I sat once more on the edge of his bed as he brought me my bag. I got dressed, and so did he, and the two of us walked down six flights of stairs and out into the warm autumn afternoon to drive me back to the dorm. We hadn't said a word to each other since he went to get me water. It didn't matter. It wasn't the awkward silence of the aftermath of a lovers' spat, it was the beautiful, comfortable silence of two people totally in a moment of ease, and the warm, tender silence that came with a promise of more.

I gave him a small kiss when we reached the dorm. Neither of us had to say that we'd meet up again that night.