My throat stiffened, and I felt a lump forming.“How much do you want me?”
His lips didn’t move.Expressing my desire would only downplay its significance.
I could hardly believe what happened next.I moved forward.It was like being sucked into him.Like he pulled me into him with a gravitational field that I could not fight.Next his arms were around me again, but this was not the sweet embrace from moments before.
His eyes sought out mine.They sparkled with smaller gray stars of their own.His chin lowered.
I closed my eyes and leaned forward, waiting, even if I didn’t know for what.Then an electric buzz filled me as his lips touched mine.At first they were so soft I didn’t know if he was kissing me, or if I only imagined it.
I parted my lips just slightly, wondering if he would move forward.I opened my eyes and saw him still looking at me, still swallowing me with his omnipotent gaze.
Aster’s hold on me tightened.His kiss grew firmer, tighter.It locked the breath in my chest.If this went any further, I might have needed to leave my body for a moment to process it.It was too much.To beautiful.After a while—seconds or minutes, I couldn’t tell—I realized I had become dizzy.
Aster let go.He glanced upward, either ashamed or afraid.
Meanwhile I looked straight forward at his face, his mouth, in a numb shock.
Aster slowly lowered his gaze to me.I suppose that inspires you?
I had forgotten the entirety of my need to write.
THE FIRST CHAPTER
The world inside of me,the place my writing came from, was chaotic and complex, a smaller prism of the world I lived in.It was populated by its own characters, its own oceans and mountains and stars.It fought its own wars and survived its own famines and cured its own diseases.It fell in love and grieved and enacted its own crimes of passion, many of which never became manifest in my own apparent life.
My world would die with me one day, in silence, without any contact with the equivalent alien races, the people that walked around me day after day.That thought had unsettled me for years.If I wanted to make contact, then no one else could initiate it—I just needed to know how to do it myself.
I could never calculate how alone I was in this.Some people assured me that my inability to address or express those deepest thoughts was a common human condition, but no one else I knew ever seemed to see it the way I did.I lived with my arms perpetually outstretched to monumental treasures just out of reach, my own unrealized self-worth—why did no one else look in the same direction if there was anything here worth finding?
I expressed myself through creative writing, but I could have gone with anything else.I still couldn’t say what made me settle on writing in particular.The black letters on a blank white page didn’t catch people’s eyes like painting or sculpture.The words read in silence would lack the vivacity of music sung aloud.But writing was direct.I could say what I meant and cling to it like a life raft in the hopes of spotting the rescue ship of my hopeful discovery one day.
Over the span of my life from a childhood surrounded by books, I had learned all the intricacies of narrative, of storytelling and poetry and wordcraft.From an academic standpoint, I lacked nothing.I had my degree, and everyone encouraged me.But the spiritual element of my writing eluded me.I felt that I hadn’t been called so much to write, as to invoke—but I couldn’t discern what I was supposed to invoke.
More and more I feared that I would never live to herald the message entrusted to my subconscious.No, I would be relegated to the sidelines as an entertainer.A court jester instead of a prophet.I had accessed the test, but I could not pass it.
Or at least, not until I met Aster.
I had won my residency here at Illumination Point.I wrote an essay about “heritage,” a simple prompt with an expensive submission fee on the heels of a half a dozen other competitions I entered at the same time.Sometimes I still wonder if I won the contest rightly, or only because of a serendipitous fluke.
Victory celebrations were foolish when the victory itself was temporary.I needed to repeat my successes if I wanted a future in this field, and I worried that I never could.Never before had my writing distinguished me.I couldn’t create something like that on demand.Maybe that essay was the only true inspiration I had ever known.
If Aster taught me anything about the technical aspect of writing during our first couple weeks, he taught me that I spent too much time thinking about it.He didn’t like thinking about writing, or art, or any of the kinds of things muses were meant to inspire.He cared more about the lighthouse or the ocean or making trips to the village nearby to spy on people and find new foods for dinner.He didn’t like artistic or decorative language but the intricacies and insinuations of everyday conversation instead.
Something changed about our relationship after that kiss.Until then, we’d kept our relationship platonic and professional.I liked it that way and wouldn’t have changed it on my own.Aster knew precision.He knew how to say things, how to recall hypothetical events in a way that would lodge into a reader’s mind forever.
We had known that we harbored strong feelings for each other.Even if things hadn’t taken an explicitly sexual bent, we wanted to know more about each other.I wanted to know more about him.Not just the facts, laid out in autobiographical drabness, but about his soul.About what he wanted to find.He had a quest, but he remained quiet about it while poking me around the edges for clues.
Likewise, I assumed that he wanted to know more about me as well.He frequently adored me.Even when he criticized me work or intent, he did so from the vantage point of someone who found me utterly fascinating.
But we were never equals.I was the artist and he was the muse, and the imbalance between us had kept our relationship on the proper course…
Until the kiss.The kiss made us equals.It declared that we could share anything with each other, that we were two people in an increasingly confusing universe and that we could both go further if we teamed up.
My energy had changed that night.Not my enthusiasm, not my will to do better.I felt like a different person after kissing Aster, like my soul had been renewed or even transplanted with something better and more powerful.
The next day I assumed at first would be like the others, unproductive but dazzling.Aster and I planned to picnic on the beach.I would have resisted before, but now I sensed that resisting Aster meant resisting my greater calling.I still had much to learn about surrender.
I started the morning alone, as usual.When I verified that Aster wasn’t waiting for me behind a corner, I wrapped myself up in a teal silk bathrobe over my nightgown and slipped on a pair of sparkly tourmaline earrings I had bought on one of our outings.
