Jos shakes her head.
‘I mean, is it weird,’ he says, ‘with the press and everything?’
She scratches at the fabric of his jeans with her nails. His breathing speeds up.
‘You get used to it,’ she says. ‘Mom always says, our family is still private. Anything that happens behind closed doors is just between us.’
‘Cool,’ he says. He smiles. ‘I don’t wanna be on the evening news is all.’
And she finds that so adorable that she leans in and kisses him.
They’ve done this before, but it’s still so new. And they’ve never done it before somewhere with a door, and a bed. She’s been afraid that she’d hurt someone again; sometimes she can’t stop thinking of that boy she put in hospital, the way the hairs on his arms crisped and how he held his ears like the sound was too loud. She’s talked about all this with Ryan. He understands like no boy she’s ever met before. They’ve talked about how they’ll take their time and won’t let it get out of control.
The inside of his mouth is so warm and so wet and his tongue is so slippery. He moans, and she can feel the thing starting to build up in her, but she’s OK, she’s done her breathing exercises, she knows she can control it. Her hands are on his back, and down past his belt, and his hands are tentative at first but then more confident, grazing the side of her breast, then his thumb on her neck and at her throat. She has a fizzing, popping feeling across her collar and a heavy ache between her legs.
He pulls away for a moment. Frightened, excited.
‘I can feel it,’ he says. ‘Show it to me?’
She smiles, breathless. ‘Show me yours.’
They’re both laughing, then. She unbuttons her shirt, first button, second button, third. Down to just where the edge of her bra starts to be visible. He’s smiling. He pulls off his sweater. Unbuttons the undershirt beneath it. One, two, three buttons.
He runs the tips of his fingers along her collarbone, where her skein is thrumming slightly under her skin, excited and ready. And she lifts her hand, touches his face.
He’s smiling. ‘Go on.’
She feels from the point of his collar along the bone. She cannot feel it at first. But then, there it is, faint but glittering. There’s his skein, too.
They had met in the mall, that part was perfectly true. Jocelyn has learned enough from being raised in a politician’s house to know that you never lie outright if you can avoid it. They’d met in the mall, because that’s where they’d decided to meet. And they’d decided it in a private chatroom online, both of them looking for people like them. Weird people. People in whom the thing hadn’t taken right, one way or the other.
Jocelyn had looked at the horrible UrbanDox site some stranger had emailed her, all about how this thing is the start of a holy war between men and women. UrbanDox had one blog post where he talked about sites for ‘deviants and abnormals’. Jocelyn had thought, That’s me. That’s where I should go. Afterwards, she was amazed she hadn’t thought of it before.
Ryan, from what they can tell, is even more rare than Jocelyn. He has a chromosomal irregularity; his parents have known about it since he was a few weeks old. Not all the boys like this grow skeins. Some of them died when their skeins tried to come in. Some of them have skeins that don’t work. In any case, they keep it to themselves; there have been boys who’ve been murdered for showing their skein in other, harder parts of the world.
On some of those websites for deviants and abnormals, people are wondering what would happen if you got the women to try to wake the power up in men, if you taught them the techniques that are already being used in the training camps to strengthen the power in weaker women. Some of them are saying, Maybe more of us would have it if they tried. But most men aren’t trying any more, if they ever did. They don’t want to be associated with this. With weirdness. With chromosomal irregularity.
‘Can you … do it?’
‘Can you?’ he says.
This is one of her good days. The power in her is even and measured. She can dole it out by the teaspoon. She sends a tiny portion into the side of him, not more than a jab in the ribs with an elbow. He makes a little sound. A noise of deliciousness. She smiles at him.
‘Now you.’
He takes her hand in his. He strokes the middle of her palm. And then he does it. He’s not as controlled as she is, and his power is much weaker, but there it is. Jittering, the power growing and waning even over the three or four seconds he sustains it. But there.
She sighs, with the feeling of it. The power is very real. The feeling of it delineates the lines of the body very clearly. There is already so much porn of it. The single dependable human desire is very adaptable; what there is, in humans, is sexy. This, now, is what there is.
Ryan watches her face as he sends his power into her hand, his eyes eager. She makes a little gasp. He likes it.
When his power is spent – and he doesn’t have much, he never has had – he lies back on her bed. She lies next to him.
‘Now?’ she says. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Now.’
And she touches his earlobe with the tip of one finger. Brings the crackle to him, until he is writhing and laughing and begging her to stop and begging her to carry on.
Jos quite likes girls. She quite likes boys who are a bit like girls. And Ryan was only a bus ride away; it was lucky. She messaged him privately. They met at the mall. They liked each other. They met two or three more times. Talked about it. Held hands. Made out. And she brought him back home. She thinks, I have a boyfriend. She looks at his skein; it’s not pronounced at all, not like hers. She knows what some of the girls from NorthStar camp would say, but she finds it sexy. She places her lips to his collarbone and feels the vibration beneath the skin. She kisses her way along it. He is like her, but unlike her. She sticks her tongue between her teeth and licks him where he tastes like battery.
Downstairs, Margot is on to much-needed support for vulnerable seniors. She’s using almost all of her attention to remember her lines. But a little part of her brain is still whirring over that question Alan asked her. Does she want it? Is she hungry for it? Why does she want it? She thinks of Jos and how she’d be able to help her if she had more power and influence. She thinks of the state and how she’d be able to change things for the better. But, as her fingers grip the cardboard podium and the charge begins to build across her collarbone almost involuntarily while she speaks, the real reason is that she can’t stop thinking of the look she’d see on Daniel’s face if she got it. She wants it because she wants to knock him down.
Roxy