His arms slid around me and I shivered because no one ever put their arms around me and held me close like he was doing. Like I really meant something to him and he never wanted to stop touching me. Like he couldn’t believe he was so lucky to get to hold me and I was the biggest prize he ever could have won in his whole life.

He backed off with the kiss and we just kind of breathed into each other while he gave me time to settle into the feel of his body, arms warm and strong, close but not holding tight. It was hard for me to make myself stay put. I never let anybody touch me. Too personal. Too much risk involved.

So it took maybe ten minutes of just hugging and being close to really let myself go fluid like I do when I meditate. It was the hardest kind of meditation I’ve ever done because there was another person in it with me. I felt like I was made of all exposed edges, and I kept craving my walls and personal space back.

But I wanted this, too, and had started to think it was possible, if I never let anyone touch me, I might never be able to. That it would get easier and easier to keep everyone at arm’s length and harder and harder to let anyone in. I think we get a window for intimacy. And it can close. I’d be Jada forever, and if Jada had sex, it would be a one-night stand, and the color of the rainbow I’d never get to know was love.

Eventually, I slid my arms around his neck and, with enormous discomfort, rested my head against his shoulder, absorbing the sensation of leaning into a man. This was my Dancer. The boy who’d found me as a child, racing down the street, exploding out of freeze-frame with blood-spattered head to toe and guts in my hair, and liked me instantly. And while I’d talked a million miles a minute, spitting “dudes” and “fecks,” he’d stared at me as if I was some exotic creature from another planet, and the most stunning, brilliant thing he’d ever seen.

I melded our bodies together, my chest to his rib cage, my pelvis to his thighs, focusing only on his strength, refusing to think about that great, deceitful inner muscle of his.

It felt good. Safe harbor. Port in a storm. Something in me relaxed, a part of me that maybe never even once relaxed in my whole life.

So, this was why people hugged. Why intimacy was desired.

It was like stopping at a gas station and fueling yourself up.

It was as if time stood still when you hugged, and something was made from someone else’s arms around you, which hugging yourself could never replicate. I wasn’t alone in life anymore. Someone was by my side, standing ground with me, ready to move forward and face things together. It was the most bizarre, uplifting sensation I’d ever known.

Then we were kissing deep and hot and hungry, that kiss he’d promised me, the sexy nineteen-year-old one, and my hands were in his hair and I started to feel dreamy and sex-obsessed and like someone that had grown up normal and gone to school like other kids, maybe even attended a high school dance, and I was slow dancing with a boy for the first time. But he was a man.

And I was definitely a woman. I could feel the hardness of him pressed against me and I wanted to touch him and taste him and feel him inside me. And I wanted to tear myself from his arms and race out the door without ever looking back. Me, who wasn’t afraid of anything, stared down any foe, fought any war, killed without hesitation, now quailed, waging a battle I’d avoided all my life: intimacy.

“Mega,” he groaned, “you’re killing me, kissing me like this. You want to get out of here?”

I drew back and looked at him. My lips were swollen and sensitive and wanted to keep kissing. I felt warm and bubbly inside, languorous but humming with energy that wanted to go somewhere. This was such a big deal to me. I’d always promised myself it would be epic. I’d always thought it would be with a superhero, like myself. I was pretty sure Mac thought I’d already done it. Or worried that I had anyway. But it wasn’t as if I’d ever gotten to stay in one place long, and although there had been humans Silverside, I had trust issues and one goal on my mind: get back home.

Ryodan was the first man I’d ever kissed.

I was good at everything I did. I’d watched a lot of porn movies and thought a great deal about sex. I had a brilliant imagination. And hunger—I had a megaton of that. I knew when I finally did have sex, I was going to be epic.

But this was the one thing I’d kept. The single big decision about the way I wanted to live my life that was entirely mine.

Virginity was a door you only got to bang once.

I didn’t know how to take off my armor. I’d worn it too long. I didn’t know how to live like other people. I was a Tin Man with no oil.

“You said you had some things to tell me and something you wanted to show me?” I evaded.

He took my retreat with his customary resilience. His grin was instant, the disappointment in his eyes hastily concealed. “Mac hears the song inverted, Mega. It’s totally different the way she hears it! And I have a video you’ve got to see. You’re never going to bloody believe it.”

Then he was sitting at his desk, the moment had passed, but I knew it would come again.

Then he was playing a song for me and it was the most incredible music I’ve ever heard.

I don’t know how long we sat there, listening to music I couldn’t wrap my Mega brain around, but I had a sudden thought that buoyed me: when we figured out the Song of Making, considering it was supposed to heal things, maybe it would heal Dancer’s heart. If it could heal holes in the fabric of the world, why not a simple human muscle? Stranger things had happened. I was surprised at how uncharacteristically pessimistic I’d been about his condition. But it’d been so unexpected and I’d recently suffered a traumatic loss. Combined, they’d sublimated my usual optimism and determination to rewire the world the way I wanted it to be.