It felt something like delirium. A fever dream. The heat that everything was associated with didn't help, as I woke feeling something like hungover.

Well, less hungover, I guess, and more like I'd worked my body to exhaustion and I was sore and worn and maybe dehydrated. My whole self complained with every whisper of Manu's sheets as I shifted as though trying to inch away from the agony.

Manu was extremely asleep beside me, and the sun wasn't up yet. I was almost naked, which was nice, though the feeling of the sheet on my skin wasn't entirely comfortable. He was still completely nude, and had a hard-on, and I wondered if he was was dreaming of me.

I was tired, I hurt, but I didn't really want to stay in the bed. I wanted to process everything, but I didn't even know where to start. So much happened after we—Rita and I—got to the café. I had asked her about the flowers, the ones I had made on the mirror with only a few lines of almost-improvised poetry, and she kind of smiled mysteriously, and asked if I wanted to know what it was like, listening to me, feeling the effects of my—she called it 'raw'—poems.

And after that, the whole world turned sideways and jumbled itself up, and I was left staring at the ceiling, feeling a little chilled and a lot restless, trying to piece it together.

Achy. I was 'achy.' That's what I was thinking of. Achy and tired.

I slipped carefully out of the bed to not disturb Manu, and walked out to the living room, wondering if my headache was a result of too much use of, or too much exposure to, the Presence. Or maybe I was just exhausted. Or maybe Rita slipped something into my drink and I was feeling the aftereffects of being drugged.

I laughed the idea off. Like Rita needed to drug me. We both knew how much power there was in art, she didn't need narcotics.

Idly I grabbed my phone from off the kitchen table where for some reason I'd left it. The lock screen image had changed. The picture was nothing I recognized. It looked like a painting, a blur of colour, of blue, green, red, orange, strongly outlined here and deeply pooled and mixed there. It was abstract, but there was a strange feeling of familiarity to it. It looked like music. For some reason, I could see edges of the Presence in it, or maybe I was imagining it, or maybe I was just starting to see Her in any work of art. It wasn't Lyric's digital work, it was a picture of a physical painting, and there was something about it that called to something in me, or... It was difficult to understand. It was something in the painting that called to me via the call to someone else, like there was—like I was an interruption on the line, hearing only little snippets of a conversation meant for someone else.

I figured I'd have to ask Rita about that, if I wanted more information. I wasn't sure that I did, at least not about that.

Little memories stood out to me from last night's ... whatever-it-was. I remembered kisses. From people, plural. Two people.

Rita.

And Manu, of course, but...

A text message.

Awake yeah?

Rita.

I'd ask how you know but I'd only get a sermon, I replied.

Might have gone a bit overboard last night.

Might? I asked.

Heh yeah.

You kissed me.

There was a pause.

Actually YOU kissed ME, came Rita's reply.

Entirely my own idea, I'm sure.

I could almost see her faux-innocent grin. Oh, entirely.

You said something about how we could indulge ourselves?

I thought about that, waiting for the reply. That sort of indulgence felt a bit... I shivered, uncomfortable. It was a little rapey, that idea. But... but I wasn't raped, not even close to it. I was a willing participant, of course I was, it was that willingness itself that wasn't entirely normal for me.

But... again. It was Rita. I knew what she could do, what I could do, and that alone was seductive. I'd had that thought before, and it kind of lingered with me, and now I'd had a taste of it, of how she could make me do things I normally wouldn't.

But then! If we're talking about things I normally wouldn't do, masturbating in a public park at three in the morning under cover of poetic sorcery is pretty damn high on the list. Kissing a girl and letting her fondle my chest hardly rated against that. Not to mention I was standing all but naked in the living room of a man I'd only met a week before and who I'd enchanted with my own artistry. And that didn't really feel rapey, at least not to me, and Manu hadn't complained; if anything, he'd enthusiastically begged for more, and helped me to pull him deeper and understand better what I was doing.

It was the idea that was bothering me. The concept of suspending the will like that. I thought of Zeyla, roofied on the couch in the lounge. This didn't feel the same. I mean, for one thing, I did ask Rita to do whatever it was she did.

Her reply made my phone beep and shook me out of my thoughts for a moment. So what did you think about indulgence?

I glossed over my thought process. More I'm curious about what and how and I dunno.

Trying to hide from a seer?

I felt my own smile twisting over my face.

Rita sent another message. I learned some stuff myself.

Yeah? Like what?

Seer things. Actor things. Presence things.

That's amazingly unhelpful.

Well your not a seer or an actor.

I laughed. That was fair, sure. You saying you wouldn't understand poetry things?

Not the way you do.

That was also fair.

The next message arrived. If you wrote it tho imagine if you wrote it and i read it...

I blinked. That could be something. Whatcha up to now?

Texting a friend while sharing a bed with Soleil.

I got out of bed to figure out what the fuck is going on, I replied.

Uh huh and that's kinda what woke me up.

You heard me pacing from here?

Nah i just knew that you would be at your phone and trying to figure stuff out.

I sighed. Part of me really hated how casually Rita could just know things. Probably jealousy on my part. I wondered how that would fit in with writing papers and exams.

You wanna talk? she asked.

I wasn't sure if I did or not. I decided not. I'm kinda on a bit of a roll as it is, and you keep telling me how I have to solve these things on my own.

There was a long break. I wondered if I'd hurt her feelings or something. I tried to do what I said I was doing, but I kept worrying that I'd done something wrong. Again. The blip was a relief, and the long message explained the pause.

Hey, uh, about that. I may have to reassess some of my thoughts there. Something you said yesterday, in the middle of everything. You said you thought maybe I was coming at this all wrong. We talked about it a while, I don't think you really remember a lot of it? Anyway, I have a lot of think about, and I talked about it with Soleil and this girl is fucking brilliant sometimes, and I had a little chat with my clan though we didn't have much time they're gonna think about it too and we'll have a meet about it at Thanksgiving so maybe I'll have something to tell you in a couple weeks?

I remembered that moment, or at least saying that, though I thought maybe I'd heard it? I wasn't sure which of us said it. Maybe both, or all three of us, did. Maybe some variation of it. I didn't know. Muddle and fuzz was pretty much the order of the day, and it being somewhere around four in the morning wasn't helping anything.

It's nice to know I'm not the only one doing something wrong, I sent back.

Hey! It's not like I have a whole lot more experience in this than you! :D

It was a joke, but there was still that truth in it. It occurred to me that for all Rita's talk about 'radical honesty,' I was trusting an actor who had only been a seer for a few months. It seemed maybe the actor was good at faking things, big surprise. Which, after a moment's reflection, made a lot of sense: it wouldn't really have helped her be a seer if she presented poorly. She may not have even really been aware that she was faking anything. She had to present, or guard, her mystical knowledge in a way that lends her the aura of ancient wisdom, or else it wouldn't feel right. It's definitely understandable that with that kind of pressure, she might slip up from time to time, either being overenthused in sharing or (what seemed more likely, in her case) overly conservative in what she metes out to the rest of us. For all that Rita had changed, she was still fundamentally a mathematician, trying to solve a problem with logic and clarity even if the problem wasn't logical or clear.

I realized that Manu and I were trying to do the same, even if we called it 'mad science.' Maybe that's what I'd meant by coming at things all wrong?

I wish I could remember more of last night, I typed in, but before the message arrived at Rita's end, one of her messages arrived at mine:

I'm sorry this isn't more straightforward.

Something about the self-described 'sapphic' girl who let me kiss her being worried about things being straightforward made me giggle. I couldn't think of a proper reply before Rita sent an answer to my small complaint.

Yeah, I guess that can happen, right? It happened to me my first night, we all get swept up in the moment sometimes. A lot of this is about the present I think but that can make it hard to keep track.

That 'I think' in there twigged something in my head. Rita was faster than my thoughts, though, and the night's penultimate text message arrived.

Hey Soleil is waking up, think I'm gonna be busy for a bit then too tired so I'll catch you later kay?

I sent back a simple OK to end things and put the phone down, letting my brain go back to processing. I sat down on the couch, tapping my fingers on the arm, feeling the rhythm of disconnected lines of poetry criss-crossing in my mind. Flickers of fire followed a few of them as they wandered across the starlit sky in my head, and I realized that maybe I wasn't all that awake. I stood up to pace again, trying to fix myself on the subject at hand. I didn't recall speaking any poetry into the night, but I was able to walk around that little meeting room without any of the other students in the class even noticing that I was nearly naked. I'm not sure that they even knew that I was there, all of them talking to each other while I could only grab snippets of conversation, like with Oscar's dual poem recordings, coming from all directions. Less intentional, more background noise, none of it directed at me, because I was invisible to everyone else. There was no shame in that room, not even as Kat looked up towards and through me.

Or wait, no, Kat could see me, but not the body me, the soul me. It didn't matter if I was naked or not, because that's not what Kat was looking at. And I could see the start of the same look from Doctor MacLeod, and it made me shiver. My arm went numb, and I wondered if I was having a heart attack or something, which was ridiculous; I wasn't anxious or stressed out, I was dancing. It was arousing, not just sexually, but creatively, emotionally. I gave Todd a kiss on the cheek, and he didn't react outwardly, but I could see he knew, somewhere inside himself. The smell of unusual spice filled my nostrils and made me happy. Happier. I moved so easily between people who couldn't see me and who could see the real me, below the surface, even if it was just parts of me, even if it was parts of me I didn't know about myself.

Which meant Rita.

And sure enough, there she was, there we were in the field, spinning, dancing, laughing like schoolgirls. The flowers were made of breath as we tumbled into the grass, not as lovers, not exactly, but as something... something else, something both more and less than that. Deeper, more intimate, even as she got on top of me, as naked as I was, and pressed her bare chest down onto mine. My arm tingled as she looked into me, through me, seeing hidden depths that I couldn't possibly understand in ways that I couldn't possibly fathom. The heat of the burning fields around us seemed to pass from her into me, and everything was all wood-smoke and anise and ginger and the scent I hadn't known I knew that was the pear-and-cinnamon of her hair conditioner.

It was the kiss that woke me, slow, sensual, loving. The kiss that started as Rita with my eyes closed and ended with me opening my eyes to see Manu, to feel his naked warmth near me, pressing close, to smell the spice of his supper and his home and just of him.

The arm I had been resting my head on was numb, but that still left me one to guide him closer. He nibbled at my neck like a vampire on a diet and I squirmed gleefully, and there on the couch, in the sleepy haze of the early morning, we started making out, hot and heavy, Manu still naked, and me very nearly so. And then, me completely so. No words were needed, just us. Just companionship and care.

He looked in my eyes, and I could tell that he could see me like Kat did in the dream. Or maybe he saw the fire there that I saw in Rita's eyes. Or it was something else entirely. But what I knew, for sure, was that it didn't matter if he understood what he was looking at, he loved it all the same.

The two of us tumbled down to the floor in slow motion, alternately supporting each other and ourselves, until we cuddled nude and happy on the floor. Legs tangled together and hands explored. Kisses, both gentle and deep, continued. I felt him getting hard against my stomach, and felt my own want rising in response.

Two pillows came down from the couch. One ended up under my head, and one under my ass, and Manu was inside me. Briefly I wondered how his knees would hold up against the floor, and then he started to move and my mind slipped into his rhythm and nothing else mattered.

It was slow, and calm, and quiet. So much like the last week, like the last month of my life hadn't been. Between exhaustion and sleepiness and the mood of the moment, words wouldn't come to me, and that was absolutely perfect.

We came together, silent and breathy, more of a long still embrace than an explosive climax, and he lay his head on my chest a while. I could tell he was listening to my heart beating, and I willed it to be louder for him.

The fire played around the edges of my vision, and I knew that I was starting to fall asleep again, and I didn't care. I knew I would when I woke up. The flames felt more like a warning, then, not a threat, though I couldn't really understand the difference. It was possible that I was hearing those seven dreadful words again, but at that moment, I didn't care.

I let the fire engulf me, warming me and comforting me. I tried my best not to be afraid, but it was the future, and there's nothing that scares anyone like the future.

So I looked behind me, and I knew what I'd find there: more fire. It was all fire.

The words I knew too well burned into my eyes and ears. I could smell them in the smoke. But...

But I wasn't... upset. Or afraid. Not of the words. I wasn't even really angry at them.

Curious, of course. That was a given.

I let myself bathe in the fire. I didn't ask it any questions, I didn't call out to it, I just pushed my lingering discomfort aside and dove in. I had been diving in to so many new things, what was one more? A dream of fire was harmless. Sex with a near stranger? Late-night walks? Masturbating in an open field? That was dangerous. So bring on the fire.

Rita was right, I thought in the dream. We need better metaphors.

I felt my self burn, and no, the space is not a mistake. It wasn't my skin, my body, being scoured by flame and turning to ash. It was my being.

When I realized what was burning, my first instinct was to go in the other direction, fast as I could. Having the core of your identity scorched in divine creative fire is far more terrifying than lying naked in the park at three in the morning.

Manu woke me gently, leaving me staring at the ceiling feeling more than a little singed at the edges. His hands on my hips rocked me gently back and forth in the half-glow of the hallway light invading the living room.

"You're alright?" he asked.

Groggy, I stammered. "Yeah, uh, I... um..."

"You weren't fussing or talking or anything, but I could feel that you were having a nightmare."

I blinked, trying to shake the thought loose enough to speak it. "You... could feel...?"

"Mhmm. I was dozing on you, mostly asleep, and then it..." He paused. "Then... I..."

"What was it?"

"It... wasn't my dream, I could tell that. It was yours. I'm sure of that. And I didn't see or hear anything, not really, but I felt..."

He backed away from me, just a little, and I could tell he was tense.

"You felt what?" I had to ask, though I didn't want to. I put my hand on his, where the flame mark had appeared, both to comfort him and so he wouldn't move his hand away. I don't think he noticed, but his hand was burning hot.

He hesitated, wondering if he ought to tell me or not. A single word escaped his lips, half-whispered into the darkness, and it hit me like a physical blow, knocking the air from my lungs and sending a shiver through me that left me paralyzed and desperate for his embrace.

"Hell."