Like I say, this could have been a tragedy of lethal proportions. That it wasn’t was probably sheer luck. Cas didn’t implode, break like a tea cup dropped on cement, or vanish altogether. Instead, he – how do I put this? – transmuted. He became one with the universe, or at least with a very small particle of it. He began to talk about things like the interstices between molecular aggregates and the impermanence of white rice. Nikki, who didn’t usually have experiences of the psychic variety, suddenly saw his aura – a yellowish, reddish, taupe-ish kind of glow that wavered and jiggled like a star going through a series of novas (novae?) around his head. She was just trying to process what the hell that thing was when Cas said, “That’s interesting.”
He was staring at a spot directly above the bridge of her nose which created the illusion that he was seeing right through her and into her very soul. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted him to do that. “What?”
He pointed. “You’ve got a sort of bright white blotch floating in the center of your forehead. Say something.”
“Like what?”
“Something profound or silly or significant or at least true that you wouldn’t ordinarily say out loud.”
“You’re making me very uncomfortable right now.”
“Aha!” he exclaimed. “The blotch took on a shape.”
“It did?”
“A rectangle of some kind, and there’s energy moving along the boundaries of it.”
“There is?” She ran to a mirror in the hall and looked for herself. “I don’t see anything.”
“Of course you don’t,” he said. “It exists on a different plane of…existence. It wouldn’t show up in a mirror.”
“What does it mean?” she asked intently.
“I don’t know. Something, I suppose. Say something else.”
It popped out before she could stop it. “I think I’m in love with you and I don’t know why. I don’t think I should be. I feel it but it doesn’t feel…right.”
He nodded as if he’d fully expected her to say just that. “I’m too weird.”
“Well…. Yes.”
“I know. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Couldn’t you try to be more…normal?”
“I could. I have. It doesn’t work. Besides, weird as it is, I kind of like me this way. I hate me when I’m normal. It doesn’t feel…normal.”
“That’s too bad,” she said, genuinely disappointed.
“Yes and no. There are perks.”
“Like what?”
He stood and held out his hands. She stood and took them. He put his arms around her and kissed her for a while. When he finally stopped, she said, breathless, “That was nice. There was nothing weird about that.”
He let go of her and sat on the floor, chin in hands. “Yes. I can do that, alright.”
She felt bereft, even betrayed. First he was there – and how he was there – and then, poof! He was gone. She knelt down next to him. “Don’t you like me?”
“Of course I like you.”
“Then why did you stop?”
“Didn’t you want me to?”
“Not particularly, no. I said it was nice.”
“But you were just being polite, weren’t you?”
“No. It was nice.”
“Oh.” Her reaction seemed to confuse him. It certainly wasn’t the reaction he was used to. Girls often liked the way he kissed. They just never liked the fact that it was him doing the kissing. Now that one did, he wasn’t sure what to do next.
Fortunately (or not, depending on how you feel about the way this relationship is progressing), the grass took over and moved things along before anybody could do anything they might regret in the morning – or worse, not be able to remember. A few disconnected synapses fired and Nikki was suddenly on a different track.
“You saw shapes on my forehead?”
“Like…light shapes. I don’t mean they weren’t, like, dark, I mean they were light like the shapes light would make if light could make shapes. Which it can’t. Can it?”
“What?”
“Make shapes.”
“What?”
“Light.”
“Oh. Light. Make shapes.” She thought about this for a while. “I don’t know. Is that what you saw on my forehead?”
“What?”
“Shapes. Light. Shapes of light.”
“When?”
“Before.”
“Oh. That. Yes. It’s gone now.”
“Oh.”
“It was pretty. It was like the shape of your thoughts, like whatever you were thinking had its own shape. There was a triangle, a star–-“
“You didn’t tell me about those.”
“I didn’t? It was the star that made me kiss you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I got from it. ‘Kiss her,’ it said. So I did.”
“Wow.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was…nice.”
“Oh. Good. Do you want me to do it again?”
“You could. I wouldn’t mind.”
From this point on there are only two things we know for certain. The first is that they went to bed together because there was nowhere else for the conversation to go. The second is that they woke up in separate rooms. What happened in between is a story they could never agree on. In the morning, they discovered that despite the night before, they were as shy and awkward with each other as they had been before the grass. It was Nikki’s idea to treat him to breakfast at the WGS – it was time for the protection of other people to kick in.
