“There’s plenty more fish in the sea, bro.”

Pete let that sentence sit awkwardly in the air for a few moments before replying, taking a pull from his pint in the process. He settled the tall glass back on the beermat and centred it carefully before he allowed himself to speak.

“I know you’re just trying to help, but that sentence really made you sound like a wanker.”

Leo laughed. “It was adding ‘bro’, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well… OK, I’ll admit to trying to get a reaction out of you. But you get why, right?” When Pete didn’t answer, Leo pushed on. “It’s healthy to have a reaction, man. It’s healthy to take a while and process it all, sure. But there comes a time when you’ve got to move on, and you can’t do that while you’re still moping over her.”

“She’s worth moping over.”

Leo hesitated for a moment. “I don’t know if the right move is to lie and tell you she’s not or to point out that you managed to get five years with her. Either way, I know it takes time to be comfortable being single again-”

“Unless you’re her.”

“- sure, unless you’re her, but the point is this. It’s been six months. And that’s fine time for you to still be single. It’s probably even fine time for you to not be looking. But Emi is still living rent-free in your head, and it’s really obvious. Leo sighed. “And, man, I’m not the only one who’s tried pointing this out gently. It’s just that gently hasn’t been working.”

Pete hadn’t looked at his friend since this topic had come up. Mostly he’d been focused on his glass, but if he kept his head tilted down, the tears were more likely to come, and he didn’t need that. He leaned back against the pub wall and looked across the bar, where he saw Kendra flirting with the barmaid as she pulled more pints, and Tim loitering behind her waiting for his own turn to order. “She was…” he began, and trailed off.

The fact was that he still thought of Emi nearly constantly, not just in the habit-forming ways that relationships gave you, like hearing her favourite band mentioned in a podcast and making a mental note to tell her later, but also in the ways he knew he had to break, like reaching out absently when sat on the sofa to put his hand on her leggings-clad thighs just for the sheer joy of being in physical contact with her. Every time he put his toothbrush away after brushing, the lack of another brush next to it pained him afresh.

He’d fallen for her long ago, loved her short frame, the deep colour of her skin, the unusual cadence of her speech that came from only regularly speaking English after moving halfway around the world following her career, the bright amusement that lit her eyes, the sudden and passionate enthusiasms…

If he closed his eyes he could still picture the exact lines of her body, unblurred by memory or time, as familiar to him as his own and far more welcome.

He had made her happy for years. And then one day she had told him she was unhappy, and that her mind was made up.

Pete wasn’t stupid. He had gone over the months leading up to that day in his mind countless times since, and he had singled out in his head four or five times when it was, in hindsight, obvious that Emi had wanted to discuss this, and when he hadn’t responded in a way she would have wanted. Something had been happening that had his attention as a priority, perhaps. He had put it off, expecting her to raise it again once the opportunity presented itself, or in some cases he had not realised how seriously she felt.

Hard to recognise this had happened and not think, at least a little, that he had let her down. He was even honest enough about it that in the darkness of the night, when he lay in bed and wondered when sleep would take him, he could acknowledge that if they got back together he would eventually slide back into those habits again.

But there was still part of him that clung to the idea that he could make her happy. And it was fuelled by the fact that Emi hadn’t, so far as he or his friends could see, even thought about dating again, and by the plausibility of her wanting him to try again that this set up in his mind. And yet he knew any such attempt would be a failure.

A braver Pete might have tried again, and been shot down, and taken in that the closure he needed.

“She’s still right there,” Pete said. “We could even still talk. Like, we don’t, but we could. And I just feel like… like if I try and move on, I’ll always wonder if I should have waited just a little bit longer, you know?”

“Oh, Christ,” Tim said. “This again?”

Pete blinked twice, clearing his vision. Tim and Kendra weren’t still at the bar. They’d finished, collected their drinks, and got back. And he hadn’t noticed. The brief moment Leo had waited for, watched for, to try and talk to Pete about the topic without their friends hearing, it was squandered.

He’d fugued out thinking about Emi. Again.

Which was the problem in a nutshell, really, wasn’t it?

Kendra was watching him with some amusement.

Pete got up. “Anyone up for pool?”

*

That evening, Emi was less than a mile away, inside her new rented flat, the one where everything she owned stayed where she wanted it to, where the transparent plastic of the measuring jugs wasn’t stained orange from being used to microwave tinned beans, where the the only music that played was the music she put on and where she could be the one sprawled across the sofa with a controller in hand, playing her favourite games, without hoping that someone else hadn’t beaten her home at the end of the working day.

All of these aspects to her flat delighted her, but none of them were at the top of her mind at that moment, in spite of the fact that she was sprawled across half of her sofa, one foot hanging over the armrest, with a controller in her hand while Zagreus darted around the screen staying out of the way of attacks.

The game was mostly proceeding under reflex reaction, and one of the things mildly annoying her was an awareness that this meant her progress in this playthrough would mostly be all but wasted.

On the other hand, the fact she’d been propositioned by a co-worker wasn’t going away, and what exactly - if anything - she was going to do about it was always going to be at the top of her mind under those circumstances.

It wasn’t that he was unattractive physically. She didn’t know Derek all that well, the two of them only having worked on the same project for a couple of months now, so she couldn’t judge whether she found his personality attractive yet, but certainly it hadn’t stood out in either direction enough to have registered quickly.

Emi just didn’t want to think about personal matters at work. She spent her day deep in spreadsheets and she was happy with that; the occasional meeting to discuss her findings was about as much contact as she wanted, and the fact she routinely had to deal with more wasn’t a positive in her eyes.

It was, she thought, definitely possible that if she just pretended he’d never asked he might accept it as a polite out, but he was just forthright enough that she wasn’t confident. And the trouble with it as a strategy was that if it didn’t work, it would create more drama than any of the other options.

Then her doorbell rang. Her train of thought abruptly interrupted, she paused the game and got up. She hadn’t ordered anything, so what was this going to be?

No matter how many guesses she’d been given, she wouldn’t have expected that she’d open the door to one of Pete’s pub friends. She raised her eyebrows to the blonde in polite inquiry, trying the whole time to remember her name.

*

By dint of careful pacing with her drink, Kendra had contrived to go up to the bar at the same time as Pete, leaving Tim and Leo behind to shoot the shit. It would, she thought, have been much easier if the friends were still in the habit of buying rounds; she could have just offered to help carry and got some privacy with him that way, But Leo had, too often, been the one guy who never stood his round, and they had quietly dropped the practice once he was earning enough to pay for his own drinks.

Kendra had voted for a confrontation instead. She was a firm believer that saying nothing and waiting for the issue to resolve itself was a recipe for failure, if not for outright disaster. The boys weren’t as practical. It annoyed her, but it could also be manipulated to work in her favour, so she largely considered it a wash.

“I didn’t realise Emi was still on your mind so much,” she said, once they were both at the bar waiting for the staff to notice them. “Were you serious about what you said?”

He blinked several times in quick succession. “I don’t remember what I said.”

They didn’t play poker as a group, either, and the fact they’d stopped wasn’t something to lay at Leo’s feet this time. Kendra tilted her head, looking lopsidedly at him with a crooked smile until he answered it with a slightly flushed half-smile of his own. “Yeah,” he admitted at length. “I remember.”

“I don’t know why you still bother trying to lie.”

“Well in this case because I’m embarrassed.”

Kendra shrugged. “Look, I may not have the same problem, but I do recognise where it comes from,” she said. “You’re still wishing yourself back with her, right?”

“Right.” He sighed, and while he still wasn’t looking at her, she saw the tension go out of his shoulders as he accepted that she wasn’t going to give him shit for it like Tim always did.

“You shouldn’t listen to Tim about this shit,” she said. “He’s just the same kind of idiot as the rest of us. He can be wrong. He often is.” Usually, would probably have been a more accurate way to say it, but there was only so unkind Kendra ever liked being to her friends.

“Well, sure,” Pete said. “I just… ah, shit. The problem is there’s one thing he’s right about. I can’t keep doing this indefinitely.”

“Mm,” Kendra agreed. “Oh, hey,” she greeted the barmaid. “Same again, please. Thanks.” She grinned, received an answering smile that she was sure had some personal liking mixed in with the professionalism, and turned back to Pete as the barmaid moved away. “Let me ask you this,” she said. “If I date her a while, you think you can move on then?”

“If you - Kendra, I’m pretty sure she’s straight.”

“Answer the question.”

“Oh, Jesus. I don’t know. I’d have to think about it. Why are we even talking about this?”

“Think about it. You have until Trudie gets back with my drink.”

“That’s not much - why are you pushing this?”

Kendra shrugged. “I’ll call her off limits if you want. She’s hot but I don’t want to lose our friendship over it.”

“We’d still be friends,” he retorted firmly. Kendra was mostly listening to the tone of voice he said it in. He wasn’t dismissing the idea because it was impossible, she felt; he was dismissing the idea because it wouldn’t hurt their friendship, or at least he thought it wouldn’t.

And then he carried on talking. “Honestly I’d probably be happier with you dating her than most people. At least I know you’d treat her right.”

Kendra patted his hand and changed the topic.

*

“Hi,” the blonde said. “My name’s Kendra. Emi, right?”

“Uh, right.” Emi blinked in surprise. “Can I help you?”

“Oh, definitely,” Kendra told her, and took two quick steps forward over the threshold into the flat. Emi gave ground on reflex, something about the other woman’s confidence preventing her from questioning it.

She closed the door after her and followed her deeper into the flat. Kendra was standing by the sofa, looking at the paused game on the screen. Her nose had wrinkled. “Not what I expected.”

Emi’s first instinct was to apologise, but she stopped herself. She was used to questioning her first instinct. She’d been raised to be dutiful and quiet, out of the way but always present to pop up if needed or called on, by parents who believed that was how a good woman always should be.

Emi disagreed. “Well, it’s my place,” she said. “So it’s my rules.”

Kendra looked back at her and grinned wickedly. “I like your attitude,” she said. “A lot, actually.”

“Has something happened with Pete?” Emi asked, and the wicked grin turned into something else almost immediately.

“Oh,” Kendra said, “I really hope that you haven’t actually been waiting for him to sweep you off your feet. That would make this… awkward.”

Emi didn’t point out that it was already awkward from her perspective, on the basis that pointing it out would just make it even worse, and also on the much more pressing basis that “Oh, fuck, no. Why? Is that what he thinks?”

Kendra waved a hand. “No,” she said. “But I think he’s got a case of wishful thinking. It’s nice that you were concerned, though. He can’t have been too bad a boyfriend.”

“No, I guess, but not good enough. Look - Kendra, was it?” Kendra nodded, and Emi continued. “I don’t know what brought you here, I don’t know what you expect to happen. But I had a plan for my evening I was mostly happy with, it didn’t involve anyone but me, and if I’d wanted it to be interrupted and to have to spend time dealing with someone else’s drama instead I’d have got a cat by now.”

“That’s fair,” Kendra said, with a surprising cheer.

Emi waited.

After maybe ten seconds she watched the other woman relent. “Alright, alright,” she said. “You’ve got me. I’ve invaded your day, and I can’t blame you for being annoyed. And I guess from your end this all has to look cryptic, although I promise if you know what’s going on, it all makes perfect sense. You just don’t have that information. Yet.”

“So explain,” Emi told her.

Kendra took a seat on the sofa and patted the space next to her with one hand, fishing in her back pocket with the other. It didn’t look like the most natural set of movements. “Sorry,” she said. “Rusty at this apparently.”

Emi sat down as invited, more because it was her house than out of any particular urge to be polite. “This had better not take long.”

“It won’t,” Kendra said, and looked up as she pulled her phone from her back pocket. “You sound pissed off. I don’t blame you - but I’m hoping you’re not still mad at Pete.”

“Oh please tell me this isn’t some plan of his to get me back.”

“The complete opposite, as a matter of fact.” Kendra was scrolling through something on her phone, but she was holding it oddly; the screen was tilted away from Emi, sure, but it was also tilted to be at a very strange angle to Kendra. It couldn’t be easy for her to make out what was even showing on screen from that position. “Ah, here we go.”

Kendra tipped the palm of her hand toward Emi, shifting the phone so that the screen was now directed completely away from Kendra and to Emi.

The screen itself was completely white, but as Emi watched a blue dot appeared in the centre of the screen and grew. At a certain size a white dot appeared inside it in turn, and as the blue reached the edge of the screen there was a strange sound, a kind of whoosh rendered as an electronic drone, with the centre of the blue now white again except for a second blue pinprick now emerging.

A second later it was whiteness eclipsing the edge of the screen and there was a distinct, if similar, sound to herald this.

Then the curious way the brain processes what it sees kicked in, the optical illusion began to behave correctly, and instead of watching circles grow inside circles, Emi had the dizzying sensation that she was hurtling down some tunnel with alternating blue and white sections, the sounds she heard at each transition registering not just audibly but in her scalp, as if each one were a fresh breeze generated by the passage through the tunnel.

The whole thing seemed to be speeding up more and more, and for some reason Emi was starting to find herself caught up in it, the sensation of movement given by the screen feeling more real somehow than the knowledge, as she sat on a perfectly sedentary sofa, that she could not really be moving.

She felt fingertips at her hairline; Kendra reaching up with her free hand to brush a stray lock of Emi’s hair back away from her forehead, taking advantage of the opportunity to almost caress Emi’s scalp, and her skin tingled where the other woman’s fingers had passed.

She didn’t see Kendra, though. Only the tunnel, as if her vision had somehow dwindled down to just that small box being held in front of her.

“Let’s go on a journey, you and I,” Kendra said clearly into the quiet. “I’ll drive. You just settle back and follow along.”

“What?” Emi asked. Or intended to ask, anyway. What came out was more like “Ungh?” But with the momentum she was gathering as she rushed forward down the tunnel, she was whisked along too quickly to try again.

“You can hear me, then,” Kendra continued. “That’s good. I wasn’t at all sure you’d have the tools you needed for that. Don’t worry too much if this doesn’t make sense. I’m being cryptic.” She paused. “Plus by now you should be locked out of most of your thoughts. I guess that’s going to be a factor, too.”

That didn’t make any sense to Emi. She moved past it, drawn quickly down the tunnel beyond the questions it raised, and she didn’t worry too much about it.

She wondered what it might be like to be locked out of her thoughts. If her thoughts were outside the tunnel, neatly spaced along its route at different points, she supposed she would effectively be locked out. That was quite a nice picture, she thought.

“I just want you to look straight at it,” Kendra was saying. “Look straight at it. It’s perfectly natural to just stare into it. Right?”

Emi moaned inarticulately. It felt as if she’d answered properly. So she accepted that she had.

“You’re going on a journey, Emi,” Kendra said. Her voice was coming from so close to Emi’s ear, the words were hot on her skin, each syllable tingling. “And on a journey we learn things about ourselves.”

Emi was well and truly moving, she felt; she was fully on this journey, pulled along by the tunnel in Kendra’s phone. And yet she was also perfectly still; with the other woman sitting so close to her, seeing nothing but the tunnel, her whole body was frozen in a moment of deep anticipation.

“You’re going to learn more than me. You’re going to be a fucking model student, you’re going to learn so much. Do you understand?”

There was suddenly something urgent in Kendra’s voice. Urgent and hungry. Emi moaned softly in understanding.

Kendra gave a growl in response. Her lips and teeth grazed at Emi’s neck possessively, just below the ear, a quick hungry caress that promised much more to come.

Emi wondered how she should react. She wasn’t interested in women. Therefore…

But the rest of the thought was out of reach, kept away from her, locked behind some strange mental barricade. Emi’s puzzlement, an emotional reaction, was drowned out by the greater, more physical response of arousal, the one that somehow seemed connected to the tunnel.

Was the tunnel taking her toward arousal? Kendra had said there would be a journey.

“I want you good and hot for teacher,” Kendra breathed. Emi heard and absorbed this but understood it only partially. Was Kendra teacher? Should she do as Kendra wanted?

Neither question’s answer was simple, clear, and logical, and no thought that wasn’t all three would complete in Emi’s mind as she rode her way down the tunnel.

There was another nip at her neck from Kendra’s teeth, and Kendra had one thigh over Emi’s legs now, her calf hooked to draw Emi’s legs closer to her possessively. The tunnel had seemed to shift sideways as she did, with Emi’s eyes turning to follow it while the rest of her sat perfectly still; the hand that held the tunnel must have moved.

“Are you still hearing me?” Kendra purred.

“Unnnhyng.” In Emi’s head, it was a clear and distinct yes.

A hand found its way under her top, up the warmth of her soft belly, across her chest. It found a breast in a bra and peeled the bra-cup back away from the breast, then took hold of Emi by the tit, weighing her up assessingly one-handed. Emi still sat motionless, but something was sparking, right at the base of her brain, as pleasure centres were starting to light up more and more enthusiastically.

“Are you hot for teacher right now?”

“Mmrrg.” Even Emi wasn’t sure what that meant, but Kendra’s voice, more excited and breathy with every utterance, carried on just as if it had been an enthusiastic yes.

“That’s good. You’re too sexy not to be turned on all the time, Emi. Emi is a needy little ball of lust.” She left that to hang in the air for a few moments. “What are you?”

Emi opened her mouth to echo the statement back in answer, but what came out was a long, needy moan, suitable for a little ball of lust who was having one tit aggressively groped at the time.

“Let’s try that again,” Kendra said, and there was another shift in position. Emi felt weight across her thighs, a woman straddling her, pinning her down, her top abruptly drawn up until it offered no concealment for her breasts, one of them now entirely bare.

Emi’s attention was still almost entirely on the screen being held in front of her eyes.

“Repeat after me, Emi: Emi is a needy little ball of lust.”

“Emi is a needy little ball of lust,” Emi answered, and if she had retained enough of her capacity for independent thought, she might have wondered how simply being told to do something made it a process that worked successfully, and wondered what that said about her previous attempts without instruction, and overall why she found herself following instruction without hesitation or question.

“Emi is a horny little slut.”

“Emi is a horny little slut.” Her voice caught as she echoed this one, her arousal seeming to grow.

“Emi loves to have a woman’s hands and tongue all over her.”

“Emi loves to have a woman’s hands and tongue all over her,” she repeated.

The tunnel suddenly angled upward, rising over her head, and she tilted her neck back to continue to stare upwards into it; Lips and teeth found her bared throat again, followed by a tongue, a woman’s tongue. Emi loved that. She wanted it all over her, and the woman’s hands into the bargain.

“Emi loves to eat pussy.”

“Emi loves to eat pussy.”

There was a powerful, hungry growl from just beside Emi’s throat. It coincided with teeth dragging back down her skin in a way that sent shivers up and down her stationary spine.

“Emi needs a dominant girlfriend.”

“Emi needs a dominant girlfriend.”

Kendra had been right, Emi half-thought woozily. She was learning a lot about herself on this journey.

“Emi thinks Kendra is smoking hot.”

“Emi thinks Kendra is smoking hot.” Her voice kept faltering, with these later ones, as if some part of her was objecting. But whatever part of her that might have been, she was locked out of it. Couldn’t say anything. Couldn’t comment.

“Emi thinks Kendra’s tits are smoking hot.”

“Emi thinks Kendra’s tits are smoking hot.”

“Emi thinks Kendra’s ass is smoking hot.”

“Emi thinks Kendra’s ass is smoking hot.”

“Emi can’t stop thinking about Kendra’s lips.”

“Emi can’t stop thinking about Kendra’s lips.” They filled her imagination, the soft red of her lip gloss, the shape of them. Emi imagined the tunnel she was in leading toward them, and she whimpered happily.

“Stop repeating things now, Emi. Do you understand?”

“Unnnhyng.”

She heard Kendra laugh, and the tunnel shook as the woman holding it laughed. Emi’s head reeled.

“Emi, forget everything you heard since you started to see the video clip. None of it is allowed for your conscious mind to think about. Do you understand?”

“Unnnhyng.”

“Good girl.”

The phone turned off. Emi moaned, and did not know why, and smiled slowly up at the woman straddling her, trying to work out what had happened to get them into their current respective positions.