I was stupid. I wrote about liking being kissed in my diary, which I had thought was stashed in a safe hiding place. The aide found it and took it to my mother. I didn't mention the circumstances of the kiss when I wrote about it, but the very fact that I had allowed my boyfriend to kiss me was enough for my parents. They made me break up with him. He was no longer "harmless enough." Neither was I. I spent my senior year grounded. My father made me do evening prayers with him every night as if I were a child again, and he made me leave the church choir because I was no longer someone to be looked up to. I didn't understand why my being seen in church wearing choir robes and singing hymns at Mass should suddenly be a shameful thing, nor did the choir director, who had no idea what was going on behind the scenes and begged my father to let me stay in the choir, because I was still the only alto, but my father was adamant.

   Actual sexual experience, due to a number of different factors, didn't happen until I was in college on a partial academic scholarship that my parents were too proud of to make me turn down (and I was glad to be several hundred miles away, on the other side of the state – by then I wanted nothing to do with my parents' rules. I think I must have been the only freshman in my dorm who didn't cry from homesickness on my first night away from home). By then I had acquired a different boyfriend, who I'd met when he sat next to me in my Rationalism and Empiricism class and struck up a conversation about Pascal's wager. And yes. By then I knew it was possible to do more with my body than just kiss.

  His mouth is warm and moist against my genitals, his tongue doing insane, almost unbelievable things to me until I fall over the edge into orgasm, screaming out in pleasure and need. He's been at this for a while tonight. Months, really; we've been groping and mouthing each other for months, while I've wrestled with the demons of my childhood religious indoctrination, banging my head against the concrete wall of my boyfriend's dorm room until he begged me to stop before I hurt myself, crying myself to sleep in his arms after every make-out session, or at least trying to cry, for what passionate joy could I have if I did not pay a price in guilt afterward?

   It has finally reached the point where I no longer care if I burn in hell for having sex before marriage. I've already been seen naked, all of me, including all the parts normally covered by underwear, and I've had all those parts touched, as deeply as fingers can reach inside; that means I'm not a virgin, by some definitions anyway, right? So, it's too late for me. And I want to, so badly. I want him, he wants me. I'm pretty sure I love him. He's told me he loves me. What more do I need? Maybe we'll marry later, maybe not, but we've been fumbling at each other for all the last semester and the beginning of this one, now, and I don't want to wait any longer than he does. The orgasms he's given me tonight haven't satisfied me, any more than they have before. They've only left me hungry for something more.

   "Now," I moan. "Tonight. Now."

   "You're sure?"

   "Yes."

   He gets up and takes a condom out of his drawer, one that came in a discreet brown paper bag from the campus health center. He struggles with it for a few seconds, but eventually manages to get it on his member – it's fairly goof-proof, really – and reaches for me. He's warming me with his fingers, caressing me, entering me, gently stretching me, making me burn again until I'm practically engulfed by my need. I don't know how he can be so patient. He's been waiting so long for me, an eternity of unfulfilled desire, all because of my wavering and fear.

   He climbs on top of me. I open my thighs for him and guide him into me with my hand.

   And instantly my world is blazing agony.

   I collapse onto the floor of his dorm room into a fetal ball. Blood is gushing out of me. It's not a period. It's not that kind of blood. There's too much of it. The pain stabs me; I clutch my abdomen, keening, trying to shove everything back, to make it stop.

   "Are you all right? Do I need to take you to the emergency room?"

   I'm pretty sure it wasn't supposed to be like this. I know I don't want to go to the hospital, though. My parents would see the bill, get scared, and ask questions, and if they find out I'm not a virgin any longer, I don't know what they'll do to me. Nothing good. At the very least I'm pretty sure they'll pull me out of college. I don't want to leave college. This is the first place I've ever really been happy and made friends. I'm picking all my own classes, and my professors and classes are all great. I'm in a medieval reenactment club and a gaming club and a classics club and a chorus. I'm enrolling in an introduction to bagpiping class. I'm going to be initiated into a sorority soon. Oh, God, I don't want to have to give all of this up.

   "No, I think this is normal," I reply, still crumpled in a fetal ball, trying not to whimper. "I've read about it in romance novels. I'll be fine. Can I have a towel?"

  In retrospect, I do know that it's not normal to have an experience right out of The Bell Jar. (Even in The Bell Jar, it wasn't normal. Since that sort of profuse bleeding was supposed to be a "once in a million occurrence," I have to wonder if maybe Plath drew on her own personal experience when she wrote about the aftermath of cherry popping. Surely that was too weird for her to have just made up. Did she also think about turkey necks the whole time, too, then, the way her self-modeled protagonist did? That must have been unfortunate). Hymens are thin outer membranes, part of the labia, rather like half-open sheer curtains at windows, not internal blood bladders that sit inside the vaginal walls, acting as gate guardians that somehow allow fingers and tongues and tampons to enter, but not penises, and should some cock manage to bypass security, they perforce self-destruct to create a fatal distraction that stops coitus from happening. All my research tells me that one's first experience of sexual intercourse is not supposed to cause near-hemorrhaging, indeed, if there has been adequate foreplay and plenty of lubrication and stretching, the hymen may not bleed at all – it may just part as it is stretched. Which was certainly the case with me. I couldn't have had a gentler, more attentive first love. And yet, there it was: I experienced awful pain upon first being entered, and I bled like a stuck pig.

   More proof that I am a freak.

   At any rate, I survived. I even somehow recovered without getting any real medical attention. I wish I could say the same thing about the relationship, but I can't.

   One reason things didn't work out was that I discovered girls soon after I discovered sex, but that was only one contributing factor. There were many, many others, foremost of which could be summed up by saying that attraction does not always coincide with compatibility. Forget the old saying. Amor, eheu, non omnia vincit.

She is so warm in my arms. We have been dancing around each other, finding excuses to sit together, so that our skin touches; to put our heads on each other's shoulders; to give each other back rubs. We hold hands, then trail our fingertips along each other's palms and forearms when we break apart...

   I've never wanted anybody so badly.

   "What if we're damned?" she asks me, her voice trembling. "What if the whole reason we're so attracted to each other is that our faith is being tempted?"

   "Do you really think God would be that cruel?"

   "No..."

   We silence our words and thoughts with kisses.

   She has a long-distance boyfriend who is in the army. Her boyfriend does not know about me, or about the fact that his girlfriend is starting to realize that she likes other women more than she likes men. She wants to come out of the closet and break up with him in person, rather than through a letter or over the telephone, and I wish I had the strength to wait for her until after the fact, but he won't be visiting her for many weeks, and we only have so much time before spring is over and with it, the school year, and we are tired, so tired of waiting. What if we never have each other? I have no more strength to hold out against this need, nor does she. It is done.

   All the desperate love poetry we've written to each other has ended here, in this dusty storage room in the attic of the art building, while our sorority sisters play volleyball on the quad outside, heedless of what is going on in here.

   I went through Rush Week for the experience, and the free food; I pledged the sorority on a whim because it had a reputation for being the straight arrow geek Hellenic organization on campus (average GPA: 3.91; during the lip synch competition last Greek Week, they lip-synched to Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" from the Messiah; good grief, half the sisters, including the woman in my arms, who was my sorority Big Sister, were members of the town medieval reenactment group, just like I was, having discovered the meetings that were held on our college campus; and they were also gamers, and they wanted to initiate me because I seemed open to learning how to play Dungeons and Dragons, and they needed a rogue to round out their adventuring party. Where were they, all my life? Oh, God, what if they find out about us and expel us? No, I can't think about this now) and a part of me wanted to belong to a group, just wanted to belong, and maybe being an only child made the idea of having a group of sisters seem somehow so exotic that how could it not be everything I ever wanted?

   And then I met her, and it was clear to the both of us, given the passing of enough time, that we wanted to be so much more to each other than just sisters.

   If her parents find out, they will disown her. If my parents find out, they will disown me. Hell. If my parents find out, it will probably destroy them.

   But now we are here, stealing kisses from each other; stealing gasps and sighs. Her skin is so soft. Her breath is so sweet. She's moaning into me as I kiss her, melting her skin against mine. Trembling, I reach for one of her breasts.

     I didn't know this ecstasy was even possible.

     Desire shakes us like thunder.

  That was in mid-April. Two weeks later came the spring formal. If you are wondering how much religious angst, self-recrimination, second-guessing, and general worrying a sedevacantist Catholic and an Apostolic Pentecostal can produce when coming out of the closet to each other and falling in love, or maybe, if we are being honest with each other, in an infatuation so overwhelming and hopeless that it seems virtually indistinguishable from love, the answer is: A lot.

   None of that was enough to stop us from succumbing to desire, of course.

   A cynical part of me even wonders if maybe the guilt and existential torment added spice. Few things, after all, are tastier than forbidden fruit. If that was the case, the hot sauce had a very limited shelf life. Before the school year was out, I had gone sort of generically Unitarian, bodering on Emersonian transcendentalism, with occasional moments of "what the hell can we even know about all this, anyway?" and a heavy dose of New Age; and my girlfriend, meanwhile, eventually converted to Wicca after she ignored her resolution to stay completely in the closet and poured her heart out to one of the townies, a motherly sort of schoolteacher who, like us, was a member of the local medieval reenactment group. A motherly schoolteacher whom she wound up seducing, many months later. It's funny how things work out, isn't it?

  She lies on her bed, naked. I was the one who undressed her. Her long, dark hair and tiny frame take my breath away. I've never seen anyone like her. I've studied the nude female form in works of art – statues, nude paintings, that sort of thing, I took an art history course this year – but nothing prepared me for her. She is radiant.

   Her formal dress, a confection made of navy blue and white striped taffeta and ruffles, lies crumpled on the floor. My long yellow vintage granny gown, with the square neckline and lace and seed pearls that made me think I was Juliet Capulet the first time I tried it on, lies on top of it in coital abandon, a single filmy cotton sleeve nudged into a wrinkly crevasse of navy satin. The dresses seem surer of themselves than we are.

   I swallow past the lump in my throat to kiss her lips. When her mouth opens and her tongue darts out to meet mine, I taste the blackberry wine we've each had a glass of.

   One of us is trembling. I don't even know which one of us it is.

   I want every inch of her. Her ears. Her dark walnut hair, which smells like flowery shampoo. Her eyes. Her cheeks. Her throat, oh, her throat, which feels like rich, smooth silk.

    I resolve to kiss her everywhere no matter how long it takes.

   Her musk blends with the vanilla scent emanating from the lit candle that sits on her dresser.

   "My lady," I whisper as I kiss her hand, one reverent kiss, then another and another until I am covering her in a flurry. When I work my way up her arm until I finally reach a small and perfectly pointed breast, she moans, and the gasp she makes when I take her nipple in my mouth lances my heart.

   The candle flickers and makes wild dancing shadows on the wall.

   She has small feet, almost dainty. I bend down on my knees to worship them before working my way up her legs. Her skin, by candlelight, is a perfect shade of ivory, aside from the areas where the shadows dance; and soft, so soft.

   Thighs like white satin.

   Lips ripe as berries, and the juice as sweet.

   A moan like a dove's cry.

  Oh, my lady. Let me fill the night with your cries. I want to hear nothing else. I want my ears to be filled with your beauty.

Then came May, and with May, spring finals, and the end of the semester. We had a private graduation celebration of our own, beautiful, wretched, passionate, ecstatic, and above all, awkward.

"You want me to what?"

   "Tie me up."

   I blink. "Okay... Um. Why?

   She looks at me shyly with one eye, dark hair in curtains around her face, while her lazy eye stares off in the distance somewhere. I always found that trait fascinating, although she says it's more a nuisance than anything else – only being able to use one eye means she has no three-dimensional vision, so her depth perception is nonexistent, and she's made clumsiness into a form of ballet.

   "I think it would be fun."

   Oh, well, in that case, why not.

   I look around the room. I don't see anything that would be very useful for this. Her bags are already packed – graduation is tomorrow, and she leaves immediately thereafter – no doubt she has scarves or a bathrobe with a tie or something I could use, but I'd have to rummage through her bags to find them, and I don't want to have to make her repack all her belongings.

   I'm wearing a pair of argyle socks that go up to my knees; maybe they'll do, although all things considered, I'd better keep them away from her face. Maybe if I tie one around each ankle, on the metal frame of the standard-issue dorm bed? It will stretch my socks out something wicked, but they'll probably shrink back after a wash or two.

   Perplexedly, I get to work. I don't see where the "fun" enters in, but maybe she knows something I don't.

   On the other hand, she is on the bed, and so am I, and that's nothing to be displeased about. I lie down next to her and take her into my arms as best I can. As always, everything about her is sweet, from her freshly shampooed hair to her skin to her breath, which tastes of peaches when I kiss her. The dining halls served peach pie as a dessert option tonight.

   Her lips are so perfectly shaped that I find myself running my finger over them, around and around, and she giggles and lunges for my finger with her teeth. I pull back.

   "Uh-uh," I murmur. "No biting. Not allowed."

   Her breath quickens.

   What on earth? All I said was, "No biting."

   "What are you thinking about?" I whisper, almost afraid to hear the answer.

   "You," she replies.

   Well. That's gratifying. I kiss her and take my time before surfacing. Her increasingly ragged breath urges me on.

   "Naked. I'm naked, too."

   That's even better, and it's what I was longing for tonight, anyway. "I think that can be arranged," I say, and strip my clothes off slowly, one article at a time, doing my best to caress myself with my blouse and jeans as I remove them. She watches me with hungry eyes. I start to remove her clothing next, although I realize when I get to her trousers and underwear, that I won't be able to completely remove them because I tied her ankles to the bed with my socks. I can only push them down as far as I can get them to go.

   Her body stretches before me in the evening half-light. Tonight is the last night I'll be able to see her before the school year starts up again in the fall, at the very earliest, and I gaze at her fixedly, trying to memorize her every curve and muscle.

   "And there are whips and chains in the room."

   Wait. Stop. What? What would I possibly do with – My mind boggles. Clearly, her imagination is a little more fertile than mine.

   "All I have is myself," I reply, and cover her mouth with mine before she has a chance to say something else that will confuse me even more. Some intuition, though, tells me to reach down between her legs. She is soaking wet, and within seconds, she shudders and cries out.

   That was all it took to make her come?

   I think for a moment, then lean onto her body, pinning her shoulder underneath mine while I bend around to bring my mouth to her ear. I don't move my hand. "Maybe you'd better tell me what you want in a little more detail," I whisper. "I'm not quite sure I caught all that."

   Her breath catches again, and she starts to buck against me.

   I don't get much sleep. I learn a great many odd and baffling things about the contents of her imagination, though.

That was my freshman year as an undergraduate, and at the end, my girlfriend went away to Vermont for the summer to share an apartment with another one of the graduating sorority sisters, while I let myself get dragged back home to my parents because I didn't know what else I could do with myself.

   We wrote letters every day – desperate letters, letters that we carefully intercepted before anybody else could see the mail. We wrote each other poetry. We sent each other little tokens of our affection: locks of hair, pretty flowers we crushed and dried and inserted into cards; poetry, more poetry. Oh, the poems we wrote. And we talked endlessly on the telephone. Every day I would take a long walk to a phone booth in the little public park that sat on the corner of a shopping district in my neighborhood, and call her collect because I didn't have an endless supply of quarters; and we would sigh hopelessly at each other, telling each other all the things we wished we were doing to each other, which, in retrospect, weren't all that extensive, but they were much desired nonetheless. Had she been there for me to hold, I would have happily died in her arms.

   When school started up again, she went to graduate school at a large state university about an hour away from me to the north, and we tried to keep things going, but what long-distance relationship can possibly survive when neither partner has any way of visiting the other? Neither of us had cars – she did not exactly come from a moneyed background, although she was by no means poor, and my parents did not believe in feeding me with a silver spoon, for all that our family had wealth. What I wanted, I had to earn, and I had yet to find a job that would pay me enough to let me afford a car of my own. Meanwhile, although she didn't talk about it much until the very end of our relationship, she was starting to see other women. My place was not secure.

   It didn't take either of us long to slide from indoctrinated chastity to bouquets of lovers, and that should surprise no one. Ever see a kid with sudden freedom and an allowance to spend let loose in a candy store after years of being forced to live on nothing but macrobiotic health food?

   We still wrote and called each other, trying to keep things alive despite the impossibility of the situation; I even took a Greyhound bus to see her a few times, a trip that took several hours each way, because the bus did not travel a direct route, but rather made a circuit through two major cities, laying over in one of them for an hour before winding back to the town my girlfriend's university was located in.

   All this cost money, and eventually, that had some terrible consequences for me, because I hadn't been as discreet as I thought I'd been.

   A clean break probably would have been wiser, but I was young, and I was foolish, and I was driven by the noisy demands of my passions rather than the clear advice of my rational mind. Also, just maybe, I was following the dictates of my inner calling, even then. My fall from grace did, after all, get me onto the path on which I sought truth; had things continued to be easy and my life sheltered, I would not have become who I am now. Perhaps I engineered my own fall without letting myself know it.

   At any rate, that was summer.

   After summer came my sophomore year, which I at least got to attend half of before losing my family name, my funds, and my right to attend classes in the white brick buildings of my college campus; and a couple of incidents stand out that, I think, shaped me significantly as well, although at the time they seemed rather minor.

   One involved something that transpired between me and a fellow member of the college concert choir. 

   I'm visiting one of the friends I met in chorus. He's a baritone, and part of the college's Conservatory of Music, majoring in conducting and composition. He's also an artist. The walls of his dorm room are covered with pictures he's drawn, and bits of sheet music, as well as the usual posters dorm rooms get decorated in.

   He has a single room. It's not much larger than a walk-in butler's pantry, but still, it's a single. Lucky him. He's a senior, and seniors get top priority in the room draw – that, and there are more single dorm rooms available for male students than there are for female students, which seems remarkably unfair.

   I keep finding myself gravitating toward him. We can talk for hours about philosophy, about art and music.

   We spend a lot of time these days talking about how impossibly harsh our choral director is – he makes us spend several hours a day in special sessions with our respective sections to work on the Bach motet we're studying (Singet dem Herrn, BWV 225, which according to my friend is one of the most difficult-to-perform pieces of Baroque-era choral music in existence) in addition to the two hours every other afternoon that we spend in chorus, and often we practice while being barked at by an irritable terrier of a director for not having memorized our music to his satisfaction. The director obviously loves music, and he possibly even loves teaching music, and we're stretching our voices and learning an astonishing amount of information from him about how to use our throats and lungs, and how to blend well together, and about the composers we study; but none of this matters, because he is a holy terror.

   That's what my friend thinks, anyway.

   I kind of have a crush on the director. I love the way his face lights up when he's conducting. I haven't mentioned this, though. It doesn't seem quite right to confess to being hot for teacher when we're in the middle of complaining about the teacher in question.

   "I don't see why I have to have my part memorized now," my friend says. "The first concert won't be for another month and a half. And I have to finish the rough draft of my opera before the end of this semester if I'm going to stage it for my senior independent study project... Maybe I'll drop out. Chorus is only a quarter of a credit."

   "Well, it is kind of easier to nail the counterpoint if you don't have to look down at the notes to remember what you have to sing."

   "No, it's not. If anything, it's harder, given that we're still just learning the first movement. It's not like the second and fourth movements, those we got down pat within a week. The first movement is a beast. And unlike you, I can sight-read my music easily. Wait, why are you taking his side?"

   "I'm not."

   "Yes, you are."

   "Don't drop out. We need you. Most of the other people in your section are first-year students. Without you, they'll be all out of tune."

   The song on the Siouxsie and the Banshees CD changes from "Ornaments of Gold" to "Turn to Stone."

   "And here's the thinly disguised sex song."

   "No, it's about spirit channeling and magic," I argue. I've managed to learn about the existence of such things thanks to an anthropology class I signed up for: an upper-class course called, appropriately enough, Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion. Apparently, some things I read about in science fiction and fantasy books have some basis in real-world belief. No doubt I'll have a flaming argument with my parents when they see my report card and see what courses I've been taking this semester, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I was only allowed into the course, sophomore that I was, because I am in the honors program. My friend is in my class, too. We seem to be in a lot of the same classes together this semester.

   "Sex."

   I sigh. "She's doing a religious ritual to invoke a god. When she's singing 'ferry me down,' she's singing about the path to the underworld. She's singing about Charon's ferry."

   "Flesh turning to alabaster? All that stone imagery?" He laughs. "Sex."

   "Fine. Spirit channeling and sex. The Great Rite."

   "I'm pretty sure it's just sex."

   He reaches across me to turn off the stereo. Our hands brush. There is a pregnant pause. There have been a lot of those lately. I don't know why – well, I do, but it's nothing I've wanted to acknowledge to myself. I look away; I am afraid, somehow, of meeting his eyes.

   He clears his throat. "Want to work on meditation exercises?"

   Yet another thing we have in common is meditation.

   That, and awkward silences.

   "Yeah. We probably should. It's been a few days; we've been getting lax. Let's sit zazen for a while."

   Also, we have to find a way to fill the time that doesn't involve paying attention to a growing attraction to each other that neither of us wants to confront.

   We sit in traditional postures – I am jealous of his ability to sit for long periods of time in lotus, for the best I can manage is that of the student pose, my feet and legs bent under me in a modified kneeling position – and try to clear our minds while staring straight ahead. The point of zazen is that it teaches you to let your emotions and sensations wash over you like water, flowing past you, until all is gone and all you remain focused on is the still, empty point of quiet within your soul.

   At least, that's the theory. We probably shouldn't have taken positions facing each other.

   Several minutes of predictable awkwardness pass before we give up. I don't know who moves toward the other first, but we are drawn together like magnets, and we can't stop ourselves from touching. His fingertips brush my jaw, my throat.

   "We could try meditating while doing this," he whispers raggedly. I am dubious – it seems to me that conditions are not very good for concentration – but he takes me by the hands, pressing his palms to mine. "Let's try concentrating on each other this time."

   "That's not Zen, is it?"

   "No, I read about it in a book on Western tantrism."

   Oh, so we're going to cross the streams, then.

   This is an interesting development. I'm focusing on him, on his warm flesh, on the increasing sweatiness of our hands as they press together, and it feels electric. We have become electricity, our desire arcing lightning, flaring before us. His mouth has met mine now – there is no way to stop this, might as well stop a summer thunderstorm – our lips barely touching, his tongue teases out and flicks across my lips, and I lean to crush my mouth to his, to devour him and entrap him in my arms but he holds me back, whispering about focus. I focus. I focus on him, rather than on the sudden violent passion that is threatening to overwhelm me.

   Slower, then. I need to be slower. All right. I will see what slower does.

   I am once more aware of him, awareness as sharp as a blade, as fine as a ribbon, a thread. I trail my fingertips along his arms, listening to him gasp with sudden pleasure, and bizarrely I feel fire under his skin, in lines along his veins, or maybe it's his nerve endings – it feels like some kind of searing pathway, if I close my eyes, I can almost see it. Entrancing. Beautiful. I've never seen anything like it. I massage the fiery path and feel it burn.

   He puts his hands at the base of my spine, near the small of my back, making slow circles, pulling fire from the caldera of molten need between my legs, up into the small of my back, along my spine, and it sears my chest and chokes in my throat and threatens to pour out of my now blind eyes; I feel him on my skin, through my skin, and it's all I can do to remain in my meditative posture – as his hands rise, so does the heat. A stream of lava is within me, flowing up me.

   "Ooh. Feel that? It's Kundalini," he whispers.

   It seems to be like the fire I've seen in the tracings of sensation I felt in his arms, and I reach around him to place my fingertips on his spine, to see if I can call up more fire. I want to play with it. I want to see what I can do with it. My hands tingle madly. My head buzzes. I'm drunk, even though I've had nothing to drink, and I feel his drunkenness too, and I want him to get more drunk, so I reach. I reach with my hands, I reach with my mouth, my kisses, his kisses invading, my kisses invading, burning –

   It explodes in a concussion of light. I can't see anything but him and me and the desire we have wound together in braids of crackling fire; we fall onto the floor clutching at each other, mouths fused, our pelvises grinding at each other. There are too many clothes in the way, so we tear them off. Hunger. Need. He's engulfing me with it. I'm trying to drown him with waves of fire as he drives into me, splitting me, and as I start to feel the beginnings of spasm take us both, I reach out with myself and drink him in, his moaning breath as he kisses me and crushes my mouth, his sudden ecstasy, and everything else he has that burns. Oh, delicious.

   Stars. Burning and dancing in space. We are burning and closing in and we are mad swarming particles consuming each other and we are the explosion, the end, the beginning, light too bright to comprehend, transfixed –

   And then it is done, and we lie panting on the floor, too heavy and amazed to move.

   After a long, long while, he rasps, "Sex. The song is about sex."

   "It's about magic."

   He lifts himself on one arm and gazes down at me. I couldn't break away from his eyes even if I wanted to, at this point; and I don't want to. His eyes seem too beautiful. Why would I want to stop staring at a sharply cloudless sky? "Red-headed witch." He grins.

   "You did mean that in a nice way, right?"

   "Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes." He kisses me. My lips tingle; I wrap my arms around his neck and gently pull him down on top of me again.

   That. Magic was what just happened. Magic. The universe spins above me, dizzying me, and I am lost in the whirl.

That was how I discovered magick. I discovered something else, arguably another form of magick, a couple of months later, shortly before the beginning of winter break; although at the time I had no idea how to contextualize it. Silly me.

  It's dark, so I flick on the lights.

   The padded walls and floor of the wrestling room have an acrid under-smell of perspiration, the result of years of bodies writhing, straining, and sweating in a struggle for victory – mastery of techniques, dominance over opponents. No matter how well or how often the room gets scrubbed and sterilized, it will always smell faintly of sweat. Above us, I can hear shouts, thumping noises, and the occasional muffled whistle tweet – the wrestling room is beneath a basketball court, and there is apparently a game going on. Probably just intramural, or we'd have heard more about it. Or maybe it's a class. I've never really paid much attention to the sports schedule.

   "Oh, good," he says, "we have the place to ourselves for a while."

   My sparring partner is built along my lines: tall and gawky. He's even taller than I am, which is saying a lot. Most people stop growing before they are old enough to enter college, but not I. I gained two inches in my freshman year alone and going by the way my clothing fits (or, more accurately, doesn't fit) I'm still gaining. I'm taller than most men; I tower over other women. But he's taller.

   He's also thin, although it's more of a lean and wiry kind of thin than a "feed me, I'm starving" kind of thin. When we fight together, we probably look like storks trying to do interpretive dance.

   The only thing the wrestling room needs to be perfect would be unbreakable mirrors along one or two of the walls. It would be much easier to practice kata if I could see my body's reflection and correct any errors before they get entrenched. Maybe one of these days someone will invent a padded, shatterproof, non-warping mirror specifically for use in martial arts training.

   We decide to warm up with some tai ch'i forms first.

   As we run through our tao lu and universal breathing, I can't help but notice that my partner is cute, in a gangly, fluid sort of way.

   He's watching me.

   "Yes?"

   "Your stance is a little off," he says. "Try copying me."

   I watch him and see how my stance is different from his, and copy his somewhat wider foot spread and more upright position. My natural tendency is to lean back a little bit more, but I can see right away how his posture works better. It feels more stable. Even better, it enables flow, something I hadn't noticed before when practicing in class because, of course, I'd been doing it wrong until now.

   We finish several rounds of tao lu, and then it's time to fight.

   This is the whole reason we decided to get into the wrestling room two hours early by signing for it in advance. We both need practice – myself more than he does. There are some people for whom physical motions like ballet, fencing, mock armored combat, and East Asian martial arts come easily and naturally, who learn the required motions quickly and retain the motions in their muscle memory. I'm not one of them. I am a slow learner. Once I have something down, I'm generally quite good at it, but it takes a lot of repetition and practice before I reach that point, and because the Tai Ch'i + Kung Fu class only meets once per week, I'm doing badly at it. The instructor has been giving me A's for effort, but I am so bad that I didn't even compete when there was a local competition with the townies that my other class members took part in. I want to change that. I hate being bad at things. It's embarrassing.

   It would be nice to earn a belt.

   Yes. It's true. I don't even have a belt. I'm that awkward at it.

   We've squared off. As usual, there is tension regarding who is going to be the attacker and who will take defense. We really should talk about this sort of thing ahead of time. Finally, I decide to take the offensive, and so I throw a punch. He blocks it easily.

   I'm not fast enough.

   I feint and come at him again. At least this time I make contact.

   "Put your breath into it like the instructor tells us to," he advises me. Jerk. He's not even breathing hard. "Like this."

   At least I'm good at blocking.

   "Good block. Can I show you how I'm punching?"

   I sigh. "I think you'll have to."

   He moves behind me until we're only about an inch separated and mirrors my horse stance. I try not to think about the overtones of this. I can feel him through the air; he radiates heat in a way I find almost bizarre, because the heat is dancing in waves. When he takes my wrists and holds them by my abdomen, his hands tingle.

   "Like this," he says, putting my hands into fists, chambering them, and going through a few rounds of punching like we do in class, only a lot slower than the instructor does it. "Breathe out. There. Breathe in. Chamber. Punch out. Exhale."

   The air is moving with my hands and breath.

   "Let's try again," he says softly against my ear.

   I'm almost disappointed; I was beginning to like the feel of his body behind mine, and his hands on mine. However, I still feel the air. I feel the flow. This is something I never felt in class. It makes me giddy. I throw another punch, harder and faster than I thought possible, and the contact is immediate and raw.

   He doubles over.

   Oops.

   "I'm sorry," I squeak. "Are you all right?"

   He laughs. "That," he says, "that was perfect." And he immediately kicks out and topples me onto the ground.

   From below, I sweep out with my own foot. Contact. He goes down and lands gratifyingly hard. It would probably hurt if the floors weren't thickly padded.

   "Gotcha."

   I'm smirking. I can't help it.

   And then he's on top of me, flattening me with his weight, and I'm flailing out with my feet and struggling to get my arms free because he has them pinned. I can lift myself, but that's about it – I can't get the kind of leverage I want. No arms. I thrash and almost manage to wriggle free, but he grinds against me with his pelvis, which keeps me from wriggling out from under him, and we freeze for what feels like an infinitely long period, staring red-faced at each other, unable to look away from each other's eyes as his body betrays his aroused state. A mewing noise escapes my lips before I can stop myself from making it.

   I can either kiss him, or I can pretend this isn't happening.

   I start to writhe, trying to free myself, and ignore the taut, stretched feeling of my own need as I pump against him, lifting him off the ground, rolling out and away. I get back into stance.

   We wait. Awkwardness thick enough to cut with a knife.

   Finally, he says, "Fighting. Back to sparring... Okay. We can do this. So. Something I've noticed. You're not very comfortable being the attacker when you fight, are you?"

   He's right. I'm not.

   "You need to come at me," he says, shaking his head. "Come on. Practice makes perfect."

   If I don't attack, he won't move; we can either crouch here, wasting time, or we can fight and train. I leap at him with a cry that is as much a form of attack as the leap itself, punching out with my leg.

   Which he catches and uses to flip me onto the ground again. "Weak offense," he says.

   I snarl and yank him down by the ankle. If the only way I fight well is when I'm flat on the floor, fine, I'll fight him down here. He falls, cursing, and I'm on top of him, grabbing him by the hair and holding him down, slamming him down as he tries to rise, and it feels good, so very, very right; I give in to the need I feel and take his mouth and we kiss, our tongues dueling, and I push him, every time he tries to rise I push him.

   Meanwhile, he's harder than ever. It's time for the sweatpants to get shoved out of the way.

   I smile down at him.

   And then we resume our battle. Just because we're having sex doesn't mean we're done fighting.

   Sweat and desire. His straining to free himself and seize control maddens me, and I yell as I force him back down by his arms and shoulders and impale myself on him. All I know now is craving, a driving hunger that has made him not just a sparring partner, nor even a lover, but prey, helpless against me. My prey.

   Several minutes of violent wrestling and another orgasm later, I collapse on him; he bucks his hips under me furiously until he too cries out, his body arching and racked until at last he groans and presses his head into the mat we've been bruising.

   "Good offense," he gasps at last. "Your follow-through is improving."

   I nod against him. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to think.

   The door starts to open.

   "Don't come in," we both yell.

That was back when I could still be easily embarrassed. I was even more embarrassed when I found out he had a bit of a reputation himself and had made it obvious that he'd been planning for some time to try me out. To the rest of the world, I was just another one of his conquests.

   Silly if you think about it – why should anyone be embarrassed about people knowing whether they'd just had sex? Sex is nothing to be ashamed of. Provided all parties consent to it, it is essentially an innocent act, no matter how or where or why it is conducted.

   I was so naïve when I was young. Fortunately, I divested myself of that naivete as soon as I had the chance to do so.

   See through my eyes.