After she left, Ben and I sat in silence for a long moment.
“We did it,” he said at last.
“I think we did.” I looked down at my faintly glowing forearms. Here at home, I didn’t mind pushing up my sleeves to reveal them, but I knew I’d have to be careful once I was back out in public. Ben and I had explained our absence from Silver Hollow and the continuing closure of the pet shop as having to leave town to attend a funeral of someone in his family, a funeral in Southern California, where I’d picked up a nasty bug that had kept me home for days afterward. At some point, though, I’d have to face people again. “At significant cost, but we did it.”
“Was it worth it?”
I thought about the way the phoenix’s wings had blazed pure gold after its rebirth, how the global network was stabilized and flowing properly again. How my mother and grandmother were still alive, even after all these months.
How Ben was sitting here beside me, alive despite throwing himself in front of a weapon that should have killed him.
“Yes,” I said. “It was worth it.”
That evening, we went outside to sit on the porch after dinner. The day had been uncharacteristically sunny, and some of its warmth had lingered even after the sun went down. It got that way here sometimes in late August, burning away the perpetual fog and mist so we could get a little taste of what summer was supposed to be like.
“I want you to move in with me,” I told Ben. “Not as roommates recovering from dimensional burns, but as real partners. Romantic partners.”
He turned to look at me, expression startled. “You want me to move in?”
Since I’d started this, I had to keep going, even as I wondered if I should have kept my mouth shut. I pulled in a breath and then said, “We’ve been practically living together since this started anyway. And after everything that’s happened, I can’t imagine my life without you in it. I don’t want to imagine it.”
“Sidney — ” he began, but I knew I needed to continue before I could lose my nerve.
“I know we’ll need to find a different place eventually. When my mother and grandmother get back, this house will be theirs, just as it always has been. But until then — or until we find somewhere new — I want you to be here with me.”
Joy pulsed outward from him, so intense that I hardly needed our connection to feel it. “Yes,” he said at once. “Obviously yes.” He paused, then sent me a lopsided smile. “I guess it’s a good thing I only have a month-to-month agreement for Nancy’s cottage.”
“Definitely,” I said with an answering smile. “You wouldn’t want to get on Silver Hollow’s bad side by breaking a lease.”
We both laughed — but then he reached out and took my hands and pulled me close, pressing his lips against mine. We’d kissed since we’d both survived the merge with the phoenix, but this felt different, as if we both had realized that we were about to set out on an entirely new path.
I leaned against him, a haze of warmth surrounding us as our bioelectric fields overlapped and blended. “We’re probably going to glow during sex,” I commented.
He laughed again. “That’s what you’re worried about?”
“Have you seen how our marks react when our fields synchronize? We literally illuminate each other.” I gestured at the faint glow that surrounded our clasped hands. “It’s going to be pretty obvious if anyone’s watching.”
“Then we’ll make sure no one’s watching.” He placed a gentle kiss against my cheek. “Sidney, after everything we’ve been through, a little bioluminescence during intimacy is probably the least of our concerns.”
He was right, of course. We’d merged our consciousnesses through phoenix fire, survived dimensional burns, and channeled energy that shouldn’t exist in normal reality. A little glowing during sex was hardly the strangest thing about us anymore.
“Take me to bed,” I said. “Let’s see just how much we glow.”
Ben’s eyes darkened with need, and I could feel how his electromagnetic signature throbbed with enough desire to make my breath catch.
Still, he hesitated. “Are you sure you’re healed enough?”
“The unicorn’s been treating us for five days. Everything’s not much more than a dull ache.” I rose from the porch steps and pulled him along with me. “And I need to know we’ll work together, that the changes didn’t make us incompatible somehow.”
He sent me a serious look. “Sidney, we’ll always work.”
But he didn’t say anything else and instead let me lead him inside, up the stairs to my bedroom — the place where we’d been sleeping together ever since we returned, only not in the way I now planned.
I’d thought about this moment for days, ever since the pain had subsided enough to let me consider the future. I’d been worried that the merge had changed me so fundamentally that intimacy would feel different, wrong, something this altered body of mine would no longer need.
But as Ben pulled me close, as his hands found the hem of my shirt and carefully lifted it over my head, I felt only anticipation.
And desire.
