"You mean the highly uncertain prospect of attaining vast powers?"  Oliver is ready for a change of subject too!

"Noooo... not so much the vast power thing... though of course I want to talk about that too!"

"What I really meant was that thing where you asked me how I want my heart to be won, should it be about cloth, or should it be about something else? And I've been thinking about that, while I looked at the ocean."

"I care about animals and never like to see them suffer. I care about fashion and color and lighting people up by dressing them well. I believe in mermaids and dwarves and junimos and everything weird and wonderful. I want my life to be bold and bright. I want to look upon the world with wonder and know that what I see is a gift woven out of magic and fantasy and the miracle of Yoba's blessings."

"And I want to spend time with someone who cares about those things too, or at least some of those things, and who will be goofy with me. Somebody who wants to try Gotoran meditation. Somebody who wants to try to put on Elvish jewelry and play that we're enacting an ancient rite. Somebody who wants to try to find and hatch a dino egg, and then be kind to that dino forever even if it grows up big and scary."

"And... if that person also wants to give me cloth, I'm definitely going to like that too. I'm always going to need more cloth. But I don't think it's really the main thing."

"It's not a bad start!  If you were a woman of the outside world, I'd probably warn you at this point that after going through your first three boyfriends you may find your top list of priorities shifting to 'Will not get angry with me every time I say anything suggesting he might possibly be wrong about something' and 'Is theoretically capable of not listening to loud music while I am trying to sleep' and 'Rich enough that our combined income suffices for a house with two bathrooms', and finding yourself increasingly willing to compromise about that Gotoran meditation part.  I'd also warn you that the first boy you meet who acts really enthusiastic about Gotoran meditation is probably just trying to sleep with you, and that you face a stark and awful choice between living your life inside a dreamworld he constructs and maintains to get into your pants, knowing deep down on some level that none of it is real; or alternatively accepting some boy who doesn't actually care about Gotoran meditation, even though there are boys genuinely enthusiastic about Gotoran meditation somewhere in the world, because you can't find them anymore since OKCupid sold out and nothing really replaced it and now true love is dead."

"In this situation, it's incredibly unclear what your options really are.  Cards on the table, I'd probably try Gotoran meditation once but if I didn't gain incredible powers from that I'd probably table it until I'd tested all the other means of attaining ultimate cosmic power.  I'd try Elvish jewelry if it looked cool but I'd only want to try the ancient ritual if it did something.  Raising a dino egg... man, depends on how much work it is, because I would not like to raise something like that and then abandon it."

"That's probably not perfect according to your standards!  So the question you want to ask yourself is maybe more like, do you want to hold out for the possibility of our gaining enough incredible cosmic powers that you can make your perfect man, and then also, do you want to maybe date any imperfect guys along the way?"

"Make my perfect man? Out of what, exactly? I mean, the usual way of making people results in children and I don't think that's actually going to help, and can't possibly be what you mean?"

Emily's line of thought has taken a disturbing turn and she beats a hasty retreat.

"But yeah, I think I'd be willing to date some imperfect guys along the way." She looks up through her eyelashes at Oliver as they walk north through town.

Before stopping to think at at the beach, Oliver had racked up a pretty high score in her heart's old method of accounting, and has done nothing so far to lose any of those points. She's got a new scoring system on board now and she'll have to see how he fares. He seems game to try the things she cares about, at least, and that counts for a lot with Emily.

"Good to hear because I do not like pretending to be perfect!"

"And, it really depends what level of power is available within this world, to people who are awake in it?  Maybe you can make your perfect boyfriend the same way Yoba would do it.  Or maybe, in the process of waking up a man, you can give him your own advice about what it means to be a man..."  Should he actually be saying this.  "But I wouldn't particularly advise testing that right away, you could mess somebody up worse than a dino egg."

They're passing the old Community Center now. Emily doesn't have long to lock this in.

"Hey Oliver... can we stop walking, just for a second?"

She grabs his right hand in her left, and then, as he stops to look at her, reaches for his other hand too, so that they're standing, facing each other, both pairs of hands clasped.

She looks up at him.

"Will you... kiss me? I want to see what it's like."

There's a lot of things that somebody more prudent than Oliver might say in reply to this!  But right now he's feeling kind of relieved that Emily got The Talk and doesn't want him to be perfect!

He says, "Small safe kiss or big scary kiss?"

Emily just got done wishing for big and bold and bright. Time to put her tongue where her mouth is!

"Big scary!"

He leans in and goes for it.  One hand with a nice strong grasp around her body, the other a nice strong grasp around her head, though more in a 'here is where I definitely want you' way than 'and now there is no escape'.  There'll be tongue involved, if Emily doesn't pull away in the first few moments; whether or not Oliver can get his oral appendage into her wet soft mouth, and actually feel that appropriately, may be a valuable sign about other things!

At first the kiss feels to Emily like a small, atomic event, the sort of thing that could be described by the sentence "And they kissed." And Emily feels a wash of disappointment, is that all there is, oh well.

And then she wonders, does it have to be like that? What else could she say, if she wanted this kiss to be more complicated? How could she more richly describe it? And when she pays attention, there's quite a lot to notice, actually.

She notices that Oliver's arm is around her, feels the solidity, his arm circumscribing their small shared world.
That he's cradling her head in the palm of his other hand, his fingers twining into her hair.
That his face is very close to hers,
that she can faintly smell him,
that he smells pleasantly unfamiliar,
that his lips are touching hers.

That she has no idea what to do with her lips, but it doesn't seem to matter, because he seems to know what to do.


There is so much to notice.
She could write an entire letter just about the first few seconds of it. How did she ever think a kiss could be a three-word sentence?

As far as Oliver can tell, this is a normal kiss that gets to include all the interesting wet parts without skipping over them!  Good, good.

Oliver pulls back once he's had his fun, rather encouraged about how the fun doesn't seem to have been censored.  There is always a pleasant feeling of incrementing by one the number of women you have ever kissed; it's the number of times you've won a game, the number of times that a woman has evaluated you and not found you too wanting.

Now, of course, to find out if that was the last kiss, which is also a figure of merit, but it doesn't do to get so focused on that part that you forget to savor the earlier triumph that's yours forever even if she immediately dumps you as a poor kisser.  Oliver doesn't try too hard, there, he knows what kind of kissing he likes, and either that's enough for a woman or it isn't; you don't want to form a bond where you're constantly worried about whether you're kissing correctly.

"How's kissing?" Oliver says, the better not to immediately offer any suggestion that other men could in fact be better.

"Surprising! Complicated! There is a lot going on!"

Emily looks confused, and does not seem to be getting less confused as time passes. She's holding out her arms in front of her and looking at them, turning her hands over to look at the other sides.

"That's usually a win!  Any kiss you don't walk away from immediately is a good one!"

"This is really weird. I can feel so much, and I don't know how to turn it back off. How do I turn it back off?"

"I'd say, don't!  Just keep feeling lots of things for a minute or an hour or a day until your mind sorts itself out again!  People who don't feel lots of things usually think they have it worse!"

"Okaaay..." Emily is not sure this is actually going to work, but it sounds like Oliver either doesn't understand what she's talking about or maybe just doesn't care?

Emily feels overwhelmed, every feeling at once, wildly out of control, not sure how to process any of it, and can barely form words.

It is pretty clear that Oliver is not going to rescue her from this, and she doesn't quite know how to rescue herself.

She sits down in the middle of the path.

That, combined with Emily's earlier looking at her hands like that, may actually be enough for Oliver to make a leap of sheer intuition about what Emily actually meant there!

"Oh.  Did you just notice you had a body?"

"Is that what is happening?" Emily looks like she's about to cry.

Oliver sits down beside her, feeling strangely like an imposter priest in a church ceremony.  "I do not actually know, because you have not said very much about whatever is happening to you right now, and I have never been in your exact position.  Talk to me?"

"So... the kiss started out boring, small, nondescript, and I didn't want it to be like that. I was thinking about what I would say, if I wanted to say something longer about it. And then I started... noticing. Noticing lots of things about the way you were touching me and the way it felt and there was just so much and now it won't stop and I'm so confused."

"Well, not to be too reassuring or anything, but I actually have no idea how to handle this."

"But I'd guess that the first step is that you sit quietly and let yourself experience everything and remember that people like me have always had bodies, worse and more painful bodies than yours, and we've survived.  It will be okay."

"The next step after that will be learning to focus your attention on one thing at a time, like, can you just pay attention to your right thumb more than to everything else."

Emily holds out her right hand and makes a thumbs up sign with it, and then stares intently at her thumb and wiggles it. She pokes it with the index finger of her other hand.

"Mostly I just want to scream because it's REALLY A LOT."

"Wait."

"I decided to feel more, during the kiss. Maybe I can decide to feel less again."

Emily closes her eyes and furrows her brow.

"There!" she says brightly.

That was fast!  Much easier than he was afraid that was going to be!  The sense of being present at a church ceremony completely vanishes, leaving only a small faint remnant of sadness.

"Oh, wow, that would not have worked for my kind of person.  I wonder if now I could learn to do that?"

"Try it?"