(From the Vampire Story Collection and with permission because it was relevant to thought)

“You want to try getting into my head while I’m doing this, or should I just keep asking whatever random questions hit my brain?” Imogen asked as she got Rik settled on the stool upstairs next to her easel, on top of her painter’s trap to catch the cut hairs.

With the French doors closed, leading out onto a shallow balcony that faced the West, the sunlight streaming in was filtered by a clear film on the glass, as well as the black voile curtains, giving the space enough lighting to qualify as just above a few oil lamps. With the bedside table lamp giving off a warm glow under the shade and the ceiling fan affixed to the flat section of the ceiling, above the three-quarter slight tilt of the walls, moving the air around while the wall unit cooled it, the attic actually felt like the haven it was meant to be in the first place.

“Why not both,” he suggested. “Now that you are aware of the fact that I can get into your mind, it’s much more difficult for me to do so. You distracting me with questions just adds to the challenge,” he added with an unbothered shrug, though the slight smirk was a dead giveaway that he was enjoying the idea of turning it into a game.

“What’s it like for you?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest and kicking out her hip with her chin on her hand, the scissors from her grooming kit dangling from her fingers. “When you’re trying to get in someone else’s head. Is it more of a sensation or a visualization technique or what?”

“A bit of a combination,” he said as she moved around to his back to start removing the intermittent hair ties keeping the braid together, and checking for damage. “You know the feeling you get when there’s static electricity in the air, but not enough to lift your hair?” he asked and she made a noise of assent. “As far as sensation, when I’m connected to another person’s mind, it gives me the same kind of charge. If I connect with them in another way at the same time, the charge gets stronger and can linger in both of us after that part of the connection is broken.”

“Connect another way how?” she asked absently to keep him talking while she was working.

“Say I’m in your mind, even if I’m just listening to your surface thoughts without interacting with anything, and I touch you, skin to skin,” he said, reaching back to idly touch her leg over her pajama pants. “Wherever our skin met, it would send out little shocks. Depending on the intent behind the touch, it could either hurt or feel pleasurable.”

“That is a double-edged sword if I have ever heard one,” she said as she tried not to picture what that would feel like in a certain setting and failed as he chuckled a bit. “Must come in handy for combat, though,” she said, quickly changing tracks to keep it from derailing her.

*****

Iona was chuckling to herself as she read through the pages, shaking her head as she remembered the long hair and grizzled beard she'd found his vampire character with when she started trying to visualize him before getting to work writing the scenes, wondering if he'd gone through the standard pandemic wave of the Fuck Grooming Movement.

"You know, when I wrote this, I thought I was just writing it that way because I don't mind grooming my guys," she said with a chuckle. "Like, 90% of my friends were guys, and every last one of them thought I could cut hair because I was female. Thankfully, I found out quickly that I was actually decent at it. But, what got me was the fact that reading it, it flips back and forth between our perspectives and I realized you enjoyed the sensation of me using the method of using my fingers to figure out the snarl point so I knew where to cut to prevent it when I did it again."

She felt his laughter at being called out followed by a sigh and a shrug, which made her chuckle.

"I'll have to remember that," she noted and smiled as she continued reading.

*****

“What about visualizations?” she asked as she moved back behind him, turning on some lofi jazzy and hip-hop beats to help her focus, seeing the shape and color of what she was working with rather than the individual hairs. “I get not closing your eyes to do it, but is there a scene or something that plays in your head?”

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “The more complex the mind, the more tactics I have to employ, so visualizations can come into play. Yours for example, every time I try to connect, I can feel the charge, but it’s muted. I can isolate where your mind is, but I can’t get a hold of it. Since it’s your mind, I have to obey the laws you have established for how I can interact with your thoughts. As it stands, all I’ve been getting are brief flashes of memories but, even then, it’s not even enough to identify the scene. You think extremely rapidly, especially for a human.”

“ADHD,” she said with a chuckle. “I try to keep them in order, at least, but I get easily distracted. Add that to having toxic, controlling parenting at home as a kid and you have a rapid-fire mental escape artist as an adult.”

“Would you consider me lacking if I asked for a hint?” he asked.

“Of course, not,” she said. “Asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness. As for the hint, hmm,” she said, reaching out to touch his bare shoulder. She could feel a little more tingle than she would expect from just making physical contact with someone, but it wasn’t like a shock of any kind. Deciding, since it was going to take a while for her to finish the haircut, she’d give him a little hint and see what he did with it. “Find Rosie,” she said simply. “If you can find Rosie in any way, shape or form, you will be able to enter my mind to find a hero’s welcome waiting for you. Answer the question, what happened to Rosie in such a way as to solve the riddle, and I will be yours for eternity.”

“Do you mean that?” he asked, sitting up straighter and turning to face her. “If I solve your riddle, you’ll stay with me for eternity?”

“Mhmm,” she said easily. “Because, if you can do that, you’ll identify everything that stands in the way of that being our reality.” When his brow furrowed and he opened his mouth to inhale, about to ask a question, she cupped his cheek, leaned in, and kissed him. “Find Rosie,” she repeated.

*****

Iona paused as the section resonated, causing her chest to thump and her thoughts to take note of it. She felt his question and wondered if she had inadvertently given herself instructions back in November when she wrote the scene. Rosie was a character that represented the spirit of a woman that served to be Iona's first love in the story, she'd gone missing in the tragic and over the top WTF of her backstory. Her name was Rosaline Espinoza and she had been a kind, gentle soul, who had taken her in when she needed a home. But that person wasn't represented in her world because there was no real-world inspiration behind it. The character wasn't based on anyone she knew in the physical world. Lining up the kind of person Rosie was, it clicked and she realized she'd basically warned herself that he was going to have to face Rosie in the form of her real-world counterpart, which if she was right, she instantly understood why he needed time to process. It also told her he wouldn't be able to hear her as clearly as she could hear him until he figured that out. Rosie's spiritual fragment belonged to the woman he was with. Seeing that, she saw the dilemma as the characters' relationship filled into her thoughts. They had been happy for a short time before Iona's character figured out that she needed to work on herself because Rosie was the kind of woman who deserved better than she could give her. They'd stayed friends, but Rosie had ended up dying in a vampire attack because dramatic backstory reasons. Letting her reality shift just enough to picture a world where she'd met Rosie's counterpart and lived that life instead of imagining, she could have seen Rosie being her go-to friend for when she needed someone to tell her she was a moron in the gentlest way possible while simultaneously boosting her confidence.

"Fuuuuuuuuuuck," she said as guilt swirled in her gut and she instantly felt like the villain.

She felt his questioning again and sighed.

"I honestly don't know how to help you, dude," she said, shaking her head. "All I can advise at this point is to be open and honest. All else fails, blame me and I'll hold still while she unleashes because right now, I feel like I deserve it. Maybe, afterward, we can go get a drink and she can actually get to know me instead of my spirit because I'm not sure which fragment latched onto her. It could have been any of them, including the one that would become the image of the person my sibling wanted me to be. Since my sibling is the kind of person that thinks your worth is measured by the number of followers you have on your Instagram and she wanted me to be her Mini-Me, I apologize to both of you."

When she felt him start to pull away after a few moments of silence she understood with a nod, sent a little bit of love, and let him go. Berating herself for being all kinds of selfish and nasty for latching onto him the way she did, no matter how many times they'd both let go and ended up coming back together again as they took turns seeking comfort, she hated the fact that she hadn't woken up sooner. If she'd just been faster at bouncing back, had her shit together before the pandemic hit, and saved up enough to have already skipped town, she could have saved all three of them a lot of heartaches. Oh, she was going to feel that guilt for a long time coming, no matter the outcome.

When she'd talked to John Boy, told him that she'd felt like she'd been unfaithful to him because she'd connected with the spirit of a man and fallen in love with it, he told her to go for it and sadly cheered her on. But they had been talking about divorce for years before the revelations started. For him, it would be sudden and out of the blue from Real Rosie's perspective. Iona felt for her, she really did. From the perspective of someone who had done it, it was a bittersweet thing, loving a spirit and not being able to touch them. And spirits as strong as theirs left an imprint behind that lingered long after. She just hoped bad blood could be avoided for all involved. In her book, if a spirit wasn't family, they were at least a friend because she'd always prefer to make new friends instead of enemies.

She needed to stop dwelling on it, especially since she wasn't sure when the conversation would translate for him. Needing to distract herself from doing what she'd just decided not to do, she turned her attention back to her sketchbook and paused. If she started to draw, it would send out a call to any gods in the area that were up for keeping her company for a bit. If she started to write, she would draw in Aphrodite or the Twins who were busy with their own projects. With a deep breath, she realized the sudden silence in her head as his spirit didn't leave a void so much as put her on hold. She was alone in her head, but she didn't feel lonely. It was odd. Usually the buzz of thoughts, both positive and negative were constantly warring for airspace. It was like him holding the line open gave her enough peace of mind to think clearly and she was grateful for it as relief washed through her. Deciding to take advantage of the gift, she put the audience on hold and started writing out a list of projects she was determined to complete before she was too old and was knocking on Hades's door. As her pen touched the paper, she briefly remembered a flash of a scene of their characters sitting in the backyard, back to back to use each other's shoulder as a rest as they looked up at the sky and brainstormed ways to fill their time in the isolation, from renovations to experiments, ways they could make the house located in the middle of a pecan farm a tourist attraction for the weirdos that were a part of her favored community. She knew the stories she wrote were more centered on her tastes and was excited to learn what his tastes were, but the clearer picture had gone a long way to increasing her patience. After all, she had a long way to go to get to Elysium and she was happy just knowing he was listening.