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I drop my hands for that. Partly in outrage.

Partly because on this charge, at least, I’m innocent.

“Oh Christ, this isn’t some sexy villain in a Star Wars movie, Phone.”

“Are you sure about that? There’s a thin line between love and hate.”

“Yeah, but that line gets a lot fatter when someone throws a bus at you.”

The face she’s using—Princess Peach, probably in honor of my Nintendo Switch becoming sentient, too—wrinkles into a scolding sort of confusion. “When you first told me that you said it was a car.”

“Well, I don’t recall everything perfectly.”

“Like when he murdered his friend?”

Silence, then. From her, I think, because she didn’t mean to go down this path. And from me because I’m remembering exactly what she’s talking about. Or rather, I’m half remembering it. It always comes through splintered and weird, for some reason. The lighthouse, the silt-covered stone floors, all the steps.

Someone said, Make it shine, and I put my hand on the great, dead lamp.

The beam cut a path through the fog, so intense you could see a strip of ocean.

My friend had gone; I should have been afraid but I wasn’t. Or maybe I was, because then I was screaming and running and there was blood all down my front. I saw Halsten behind my eyes, as he was in 1985. Hair white blond and spiked, wearing a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves and some metal band on the front.

He had someone’s arm in his hands.

Sometimes I wonder if it was mine.

I usually stop thinking about it when I wonder if it was mine. And that goes double here, because it only makes it feel stranger that I’m so easily separating this Halsten from the one before. In fact it almost seems like …

“Marley, are you okay?” Phone asks.

And suddenly I can shake that weird feeling off.

I have a hold of myself again. I will be practical, I vow to myself.

“I’m fine. I’m just thinking about how terrified I am of him. And how not okay it would be even if I somehow managed to want to kiss him. Which I don’t. So give it a rest. I would neither fuck a psychopath, nor go anywhere near anyone who isn’t in full control of their own mind. Now, I’ve gotta get back out there. He’s probably putting socks on his hands,” I say as I exit the bathroom. But when I return to where I left him, in front of the closet, I find he isn’t doing anything of the kind. He has put on the sweatpants I’ve picked out, all neat and tidy, no problems at all.

Only the sweatpants are so small on him that they look more like leggings. Really tight leggings that only make it just past his knees. “These are a lot more snug than I am used to,” he says. “I am not sure they preserve my modesty in the way that you would like.”

Then he gestures to the modesty he’s not preserving.

And of course I just have to glance down. Like I’m going to see something innocent and normal, instead of the banana he’s apparently smuggling. If bananas were somehow the size of a giant’s forearm. “I might be able to fix it with magic,” I say—mainly because I can feel that practicality and decency and self-preservation I vowed to think about a second ago already slipping. It calls for desperate measures. “Or I could go get you some better clothes.”

I even start to do the latter.

I grab my keys, my jacket.

But he stops me with one big arm across the door, like a meaty parking lot barrier. “No, do not leave without me. There are untold dangers beyond these doors, and I must be by your side should they come to pass. You are a great sorceress, but even a great sorceress cannot see all threats,” he says.

As if he’s just determined to make me lose even more of my senses.

But I think I have an antidote: my good old trusty cynicism.

“Listen, nobody ever wants to protect anyone else that much.”

“They would if they could see you. It would be as it is for me: my most pressing need, after a simple longing to bathe in the light of your face, and the sweetness of your scent. To serve you in all ways, all the days of my life. Despite whatever modern mores might have to say about it.”

“I think they mostly say I can’t fathom how this guy is serious.”