Chapter 3
THE MORNING
I fell asleep that night in my bed on the second floor, with the drowsy blue comforter thrown casually to the floor by my side and my arms wrapped tightly around Aster as he slept beside me for the first time.
I didn’t dream, but every now and then I half awoke and found him still next to me, breathing, human in a way that he had never been before.
My unexpected solitude cast a confused haze over me. “Aster?” I asked, wiping the sleep from my eyes and standing up naked from the bed.
Briefly I feared that everything between us last night had been a dream. I looked at the bed itself in reassurance of its reality, that we really had gone all the way, that he meant it when he told me he loved me.
“Aster?” I asked again. I pulled open the bedroom door.
At this point, I half expected that I would have to summon Aster the way I did every morning.
Maybe he reset after a point. Maybe old-world magick imposed restrictions on him neither of us could change.
The word “muse” came from the same Greek term that coined the word “music”—and like a song, maybe he needed to be started anew every day.
But then I heard the sound of the shower in the bathroom across the hall. The light gleamed through the crack under the door, and I twisted the handle to open it.
Aster’s form stood clearly visible on the other side of the textured glass of the shower door. He held the head of the shower in one hand and moved it back and forth over his body, and the view of it caused me to exhale with relief.
The figure in the shower turned when I stepped inside. Good morning, Stella, said Aster, whose voice sounded clear and unaffected over the sound of the water.
I looked at my reflection in the air. My skin looked bright, clearer than usual.
My hair lay in a tangle over my head and shoulders and automatically I picked up my brush and smoothed it from the bottom up.
“I didn’t know if you were still here. I mean, after what happened last night, I didn’t know if you’d actually stay until morning or if you planned to disappear after I fell asleep. ”
Didn’t I tell you I’d stay with you forever? Then let me say it again. I’m never going to leave you. I’ll stay with you… forever.
The water turned off with a thunk, and Aster hooked the shower head back in its place.
He slid the door open and reached for one of the powder blue towels that hung on a polished nickel rack over a furnace vent.
He mopped his face with it, his hair looking darker than usual in its soaked form.
And he looked just as beautiful as I remembered.
I’d never experienced a romantic phase before—not seriously, at least. Love seemed dangerous, reckless and inefficient, the sort of thing that could only be wished by women with no future and no better prospects.
Love meant staying home on the family farm and accepting that the boy next door was the best fate I’d ever meet.
Sure, some people could pull off the homey life, and thrive with it—but anything that meant slowing down was out of the question for me.
Ultimately, I feared that if I slowed down, time would freeze, and my chance to prove myself would never come again. I would be old. Ordinary. Irredeemably mundane.
I knew the life I’d chosen was imperfect.
My work ethic dictated that if typing for so many hours on end didn’t give me the attention I wanted, then I needed to double down and work harder.
I needed productivity. I avoided what I hated in most people: they were lazy.
They didn’t try. They might have talent or funds or connections in all the right places, but hardly anyone could sit down and write an entire book.
I could pound out a draft in a month, possibly faster if needed.
My existential fear didn’t begin until after graduation.
My solitude had reached the point where it began to bother me.
My support network felt superficial, and that any victory I won wore me out too dramatically for me to push further.
I was twenty-two and had never been kissed.
My grades didn’t matter anymore. The only people who admired my writing were classmates, immediate family, and a few scholars and professors.
I had no honest fans, and no honest reputation without them.
That explained my frustration with winning contests—even the most celebrated new books remained in tiny circles and seldom became anyone’s guilty pleasure. I had learned how to be perfect, but I still struggled with the task of being good. Aster was the solution I’d been waiting for my entire life.
When I typed up the first chapter of my book in a mad rush after our first kiss, I thought the other chapters would follow just like it. The inspiration had hit—past tense—and writing followed as a natural next step.
And I certainly did write, but nothing came out the way I expected.
Aster had shaken me on such a profound level that I no longer saw the book as a construction or organization but as an act of expression instead.
I didn’t think of an outline or a plan, and I didn’t need to.
Instead I turned over and over again to the storm that I had written about and to my strong feelings about Aster, and I let them spill out onto the page.
Is there anything I can do? Anything you want to talk over? he asked the previous day while I closed a chapter.
I’d torn my flustered hands from the keyboard and looked at him, and for a moment I didn’t know what to say. I was blushing—I’d been writing about him, more or less, and I wondered if he knew. “No.”
Good. Keep it up.
Aster changed me from the inside out. Sometimes I couldn’t write at all during our time together.
I found him too fascinating, too distracting even if he existed to help me complete this one project.
What surprised me about him over and over again was his realness, the depth of his emotions, and the fact that his feelings centered around me—and I could never imagine anything more marvelous.
Aster came to me in a body of flesh and blood, but he lacked a social security number or a residential address.
I couldn’t return home and show him off to people.
Even if he dazzled them out of their questions, which I believed he could do as easily as most people shook hands, I didn’t know what our relationship would look like if we took it further than Illumination Point.
After he left the shower, I watched as he pulled on an outfit similar to yesterday’s. I didn’t know where he got his clothes from, or rather, I had a vivid idea, but it still caused me a degree of discomfort.
What are you looking at? he asked as I watched him button his shirt up the front.
I swallowed and looked away, suddenly feeling hot. Nothing felt the same between us now. We couldn’t go back to the way things were. If he wanted something form me, anything at all, I was obligated to give it to him.
“Nothing,” I said.
He corrected me. You were certainly looking at something. Was it my choice of shirt or how I put it on? Should I have stepped into it like the pants?
I smiled and almost laughed, but suddenly I shivered as I wondered what could happen to us after my residency had ended. “I was thinking of the future,” I said.
Aster gave me a curious look. Please, promise you won’t do it again.
“But I need to,” I said. “I live in time. And I’m only going to be here for this summer, and then I’ll have to start from scratch on another project. Do you know what, Aster?”
What? He cleared a spot on the mirror’s foggy surface and combed his pale golden hair delicately with his fingers.
“I don’t have a home.”
He frowned, and the eyes of his mirror reflection met my own.
“I mean, I still live with my parents,” I said. “I graduated college three years ago and haven’t been able to land a job since then, and I’m worried that this whole thing was a mistake.”
Isn’t this book you’re writing supposed to fix that? He straightened and adjusted his collar and then took one step in my direction. Suddenly all of last night’s excitement bubbled in my head and I wondered why I had even thought to question Aster’s inspirational abilities.
“It should,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “But will it, or am I letting my hopes get in the way? I mean, we could throw together the most inspired work that’s ever existed, and it still might not be discovered in my lifetime.”
How do you define greatness?
Greatness: eminence, distinction. The word “great” came from an old English term—also “great,” but pronounced more like “gray-yat”—that referred to anything with an exceptionally large size. I swallowed. I didn’t know what answer he wanted, and I feared giving him the wrong one.
Fortunately, Aster didn’t give me an opportunity to answer. He grabbed my shoulders and pulled me toward him and pressed his lips over mine until I felt like he was breathing new life into me.
I tensed, and then I relaxed myself in his grip. I could feel his intention through his hold and tasted it on his tongue, that solid confidence that he would let nothing come between him and his mission and that I had been foolish even to doubt him.
A moment later, he pulled away from me. I disrobed, thinking that my turn to shower had come and that Aster was going to stay here the entire time. My college friends and my parents would have been scandalized if they found out. When they found out. Some day I’d take Aster to meet them all.
Aster placed a hand on my naked shoulder and waited two seconds before removing it. As I stepped to the shower to turn on the water, he reached forward and touched my hand. Not today, he said. Today you bathe in the ocean.