And then, as his palms glided up my sides, wrinkling fabric, the cloth melted away and disappeared, and then it was just flesh, and fire, and the taste of David’s lips and tongue. I felt myself burn and go faint with heat stroke, revived with the cool relief of his skin.
And if it was a dream, it was the best I’d ever had.
In the morning, we got down to the work of teaching me to be a Djinn.
I’m not what you could call spiritual, so learning how to be spiritual—in the true spirit sense of the word—was a challenge. Sure, I’d been a Warden, but calling the wind and calming storms was all about science for me. I understood it in the way a child of the atomic age would, which meant subatomic particles and chaos theory and wave motion. Hell, I’d been a weather-controlling bureaucrat, when you came right down to it. Nothing that you might call preparation for being granted power on a legendary scale.
David started me out with that night of incredible, unbelievable sex, and the next morning when I woke up it felt like it was still going on. I mean, senses locked wide open. Chakras at full power. Every touch, every taste, every random sensation echoed through me like a struck bell. It was fun at first.
Then it got to be painful.
“Turn it off,” I groaned, and hid my head under a down pillow. David’s fingers traced the bumps of my spine, dragging down the sheet in slow, cool increments. “Oh, God, please, I can’t stand it!”
He made a sound, low in his throat, and let his touch glide down over my buttocks, down the backs of my thighs. “You’ll need to learn how to shut off your senses,” he said. “Can’t walk around like this all the time, can you?”
I knotted my fists in the pillow and screamed into the mattress. Not that he was particularly trying to drive me nuts, it was just part of the overload. Everything was sexual. The sheet, sliding over the backs of my legs. His fingertips firing nerves. The smell of him, the taste of him still tingling on my lips, the sound of his breath in my ear.
“I don’t know how,” I whispered, when I’d stopped shaking. “Tell me how.”
“You have to learn how to choose what level of sensation and perception to use,” he said. “To start with, I want you to meditate and block out what’s around you.”
“Meditate?” I took my head out from under the pillow, shook dark hair back from my face, and rolled over on my side to look at him. “Excuse me, but the closest I ever got to having a spiritual awakening was dating a yoga instructor. Once.”
David propped himself up on one elbow, looking down at me. No mistaking it; he was enjoying this a little too much. And I was enjoying the bird’s-wing graceful sweep of his pecs. “You’re underestimating yourself. You’re highly spiritual, Joanne. You just don’t know it. Just clear your mind and meditate.”
Meditate. Right. I took a deep breath and tried to relax muscles I no longer actually had. Which was more than a little confusing, even in the abstract.
“Focus,” David’s voice said next to my ear, and of course, it was instantly impossible to stay anything like on track. His voice got inside me in places that nice girls don’t mention. His breath stirred warm on my skin, and there went that potential orgasm thing again, a little earthquake of sheer pleasure that completely sabotaged any chance of achieving my center.
I didn’t open my eyes, but I said, “I could focus a lot better if you were somewhere else.”
“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry. That velvet-smooth tenor sounded smug. “I’ll be quiet.”
He was. I concentrated on visualizing something calming—in my case, it was the ocean—but the whole wave-and-surf vibe fell apart when I heard him rustling pages. I sighed and opened my eyes, propped myself up on my elbows, and looked over at him.
He was lying next to me in bed, propped up, reading the newspaper.
“You’re kidding,” I said. He gave me one of those What? looks and went back to the Metro section. “I’m trying to meditate, here! Give me a break. At least help.”
“I am helping,” he said. “I’m distracting myself so I don’t distract you.”
I glared. It had absolutely no effect. He sighed, put the paper at half-staff, and looked at me gravely over newsprint. “Fine. What would you like me to do?”
“I don’t know! Something!”
“I can’t meditate for you, Joanne.”
“Well, you can… encourage me!”
He folded the New York Times and put it down on the side table. “Oh, I’d like to encourage you. I just don’t think it would help you focus. Unless…”