I Want You #2
"No." Oliver pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum. "You don't. For the first second, there was no difference."
The shadow lowered its hand. Marin did not approach. That choice steadied him more than comfort would have.
"What did it copy?" she asked.
"The pressure. Placement. Timing."
"Temperature?"
"Not until afterward."
"Texture?"
Oliver closed his eyes briefly. "No skin. I supplied that." He hated the sentence.
Marin absorbed it. "Your body recognized a pattern."
"Enthusiastically."
"Oliver."
"I know."
Humor had failed to make the sensation smaller. He let it fail. The shadow darkened. Cold gathered across his chest without touching the skin. Oliver opened his eyes.
"Bhodi."
The name changed nothing visible. He had avoided using it aloud during most manifestations. Names invited categories. Categories invited assumptions. Seraphine had taught him that long before anyone explained why. Tonight he wanted the thing to know he was addressing it.
"Was that deliberate?"
The shadow did not answer. Marin's eyes tracked the wall rather than him.
Oliver felt the cold shift. The temperature did not change.
The sense of distance did. Something moved through his mouth.
Salt. He tasted the sea from an hour earlier, sharp against split skin.
Then coffee, bitter and over-roasted. Orange peel.
Smoke from the Riptide hearth. The medicinal sweetness Marin used on dressings.
Each sensation arrived cleanly, without object or source, as if his body had become a cabinet someone else was opening one drawer at a time.
Oliver gripped the desk.
"What?" Marin asked.
"Taste."
"What tastes?"
"Mine."
The coffee vanished. In its place came the physical thrill of a locked door giving beneath a pick.
No image accompanied it, only the feeling.
Interest tightening behind his ribs. The small private pleasure of mechanism surrendering to comprehension.
Then the sensation of standing at a ship's rail with a coast ahead he had never seen.
Then the quiet irritation of another person holding Marin's attention for longer than Oliver considered necessary. He almost laughed from shock.
"Jealousy."
Marin's brows drew together. "You're jealous now?"
"No. It is showing me the sensation."
The feeling changed. Storm wind. Cold rain.
The dangerous bright joy of jumping from the cutter into black water because thirty-nine strangers needed a line and the sea had finally offered him something unreasonable enough to enjoy.
Then pleasure changed register. Marin's mouth against his.
Rope across his skin. Her fingers tightening in his hair.
The memory was not visual. His body reacted as though memory and present had become briefly adjacent. Oliver shoved away from the desk.
"Enough."
Everything stopped. The shadow remained. Marin's breathing had changed.
"Did it stop because you said enough?"
"I don't know."
"Do not give it credit yet."
"I wasn't."
"You were about to."
He looked at her.
"Occupational hazard."
"Yours or mine?"
"Both."
The exchange should have lightened something. It did not. Oliver stared at the shadow.
"You want sensation."
Cold returned to the center of his chest. There was no pressure this time, only focused attention. He tried again.
"You want curiosity." The shadow's head lifted.
"You want pleasure." The shadow gave him no visible change.
"Jealousy?" The shape loosened at the edges.
Marin said, "Don't build a vocabulary out of six reactions."
"I know."
"Say that like you mean it."
"I know."
Better. Oliver breathed through the residual heat in his body.
The violation was not that Bhodi had made him feel pleasure from nothing.
It had used a familiar route. His nerves had answered before his ethics entered the room.
Recognition could be borrowed. Permission could not.
He did not say that aloud. The distance Marin kept already told him she understood.
The shadow moved again. This time it did not imitate touch.
It changed posture. Oliver recognized the first shape from the ridge.
Himself standing straighter, both hands apparently uninjured.
Then the form shortened into the younger barefoot version.
Then tall again, shoulders carrying the suggestion of a mantle.
Masks. Possible-looking selves. The same visual vocabulary.
One by one they disappeared. The remaining shape was his.
Current. Wet hair. Open shirt. Bad hand.
Healing ribs. It pointed at him. Oliver's skin tightened.
"Subtle," he murmured.
The shadow pointed again. Then it touched its own chest. Oliver felt a word. No sound reached his ears. Language arrived as if his own mind had produced it without his consent.
Awake. His hand closed around the desk edge.
Marin saw his face change. "What?"
"Wait."
The shadow touched its chest again. Intact. A third gesture carried the next word. Continue.
Oliver's pulse accelerated. The words were too clean.
That frightened him more than the earlier sensations.
Bhodi had communicated through appetite, pressure, imitation, impossible possibility.
Language meant either it had learned a new method or Oliver had become better at translating an old one.
Neither option improved the evening. The shadow opened its hand.
Sensation flooded him again, but this time without the intimate mimicry.
Cold rain. Warm bread. A blade balanced correctly.
Marin laughing when she had tried not to.
The first sight of a harbor after weeks at sea.
Pain. Desire. Fear. The satisfaction of solving a problem.
The bitterness of being refused. The relief of being forgiven.
The strange tenderness of finding an orange on a desk and later learning someone had remembered it during the worst minute of her life. Oliver's throat closed.
"Stop."
The flood ceased. He looked at Marin. She had gone pale.