I'm visiting one of the friends I met in chorus. He's a baritone, and part of the college's Conservatory of Music, majoring in conducting and composition. He's also an artist. The walls of his dorm room are covered with pictures he's drawn, and bits of sheet music, as well as the usual posters dorm rooms get decorated in.

He has a single room. It's not much larger than a walk-in butler's pantry, but still, it's a single. Lucky him. He's a senior, and seniors get top priority in the room draw - that, and there are more single dorm rooms available for male students than there are for female students, which seems remarkably unfair.

I keep finding myself gravitating toward him. We can talk for hours about philosophy, about art and music.

We spend a lot of time these days talking about how impossibly harsh our choral director is - he makes us spend several hours a day in special sessions with our respective sections to work on the Bach motet we're studying (Singet dem Herrn, BWV 225, which according to my friend is one of the most difficult-to-perform pieces of Baroque-era choral music in existence) in addition to the two hours every other afternoon that we spend in chorus, and often we practice while being barked at by an irritable terrier of a director for not having memorized our music to his satisfaction. The director obviously loves music, and he possibly even loves teaching music, and we're stretching our voices and learning an astonishing amount of information from him about how to use our throats and lungs, and how to blend well together, and about the composers we study; but none of this matters, because he is a holy terror.

That's what my friend thinks, anyway.

I kind of have a crush on the director. I love the way his face lights up when he's conducting. I haven't mentioned this, though. It doesn't seem quite right to confess to being hot for teacher when we're in the middle of complaining about the teacher in question.

"I don't see why I have to have my part memorized now," my friend says. "The first concert won't be for another month and a half. And I have to finish the rough draft of my opera before the end of this semester if I'm going to stage it for my senior independent study project... Maybe I'll drop out. Chorus is only a quarter of a credit."

"Well, it is kind of easier to nail the counterpoint if you don't have to look down at the notes to remember what you have to sing."

"No, it's not. If anything, it's harder, given that we're still just learning the first movement. It's not like the second and fourth movements, those we got down pat within a week. The first movement is a beast. And unlike you, I can sight-read my music easily. Wait, why are you taking his side?"

"I'm not."

"Yes, you are."

"Don't drop out. We need you. Most of the other people in your section are first-year students. Without you, they'll be all out of tune."

The song on the Siouxsie and the Banshees CD changes from "Ornaments of Gold" to "Turn to Stone."

"And here's the thinly disguised sex song."

"No, it's about spirit channeling and magic," I argue. I've managed to learn about the existence of such things thanks to an anthropology class I signed up for: an upper-class course called, appropriately enough, Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion. Apparently, some things I read about in science fiction and fantasy books have some basis in real-world belief. No doubt I'll have a flaming argument with my parents when they see my report card and see what courses I've been taking this semester, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I was only allowed into the course, sophomore that I was, because I am in the honors program. My friend is in my class, too. We seem to be in a lot of the same classes together this semester.

"Sex."

I sigh. "She's doing a religious ritual to invoke a god. When she's singing 'ferry me down,' she's singing about the path to the underworld. She's singing about Charon's ferry."

"Flesh turning to alabaster? All that stone imagery?" He laughs. "Sex."

"Fine. Spirit channeling and sex. The Great Rite."

"I'm pretty sure it's just sex."

He reaches across me to turn off the stereo. Our hands brush. There is a pregnant pause. There have been a lot of those lately. I don't know why - well, I do, but it's nothing I've wanted to acknowledge to myself. I look away; I am afraid, somehow, of meeting his eyes.

He clears his throat. "Want to work on meditation exercises?"

Yet another thing we have in common is meditation.

That, and awkward silences.

"Yeah. We probably should. It's been a few days; we've been getting lax. Let's sit zazen for a while."

Also, we have to find a way to fill the time that doesn't involve paying attention to a growing attraction to each other that neither of us wants to confront.

We sit in traditional postures - I am jealous of his ability to sit for long periods of time in lotus, for the best I can manage is that of the student pose, my feet and legs bent under me in a modified kneeling position - and try to clear our minds while staring straight ahead. The point of zazen is that it teaches you to let your emotions and sensations wash over you like water, flowing past you, until all is gone and all you remain focused on is the still, empty point of quiet within your soul.

At least, that's the theory. We probably shouldn't have taken positions facing each other.

Several minutes of predictable awkwardness pass before we give up. I don't know who moves toward the other first, but we are drawn together like magnets, and we can't stop ourselves from touching. His fingertips brush my jaw, my throat.

"We could try meditating while doing this," he whispers raggedly. I am dubious - it seems to me that conditions are not very good for concentration - but he takes me by the hands, pressing his palms to mine. "Let's try concentrating on each other this time."

"That's not Zen, is it?"

"No, I read about it in a book on Western tantrism."

Oh, so we're going to cross the streams, then.

This is an interesting development. I'm focusing on him, on his warm flesh, on the increasing sweatiness of our hands as they press together, and it feels electric. We have become electricity, our desire arcing lightning, flaring before us. His mouth has met mine now - there is no way to stop this, might as well stop a summer thunderstorm - our lips barely touching, his tongue teases out and flicks across my lips, and I lean to crush my mouth to his, to devour him and entrap him in my arms but he holds me back, whispering about focus. I focus. I focus on him, rather than on the sudden violent passion that is threatening to overwhelm me.

Slower, then. I need to be slower. All right. I will see what slower does.

I am once more aware of him, awareness as sharp as a blade, as fine as a ribbon, a thread. I trail my fingertips along his arms, listening to him gasp with sudden pleasure, and bizarrely I feel fire under his skin, in lines along his veins, or maybe it's his nerve endings - it feels like some kind of searing pathway, if I close my eyes, I can almost see it. Entrancing. Beautiful. I've never seen anything like it. I massage the fiery path and feel it burn.

He puts his hands at the base of my spine, near the small of my back, making slow circles, pulling fire from the caldera of molten need between my legs, up into the small of my back, along my spine, and it sears my chest and chokes in my throat and threatens to pour out of my now blind eyes; I feel him on my skin, through my skin, and it's all I can do to remain in my meditative posture - as his hands rise, so does the heat. A stream of lava is within me, flowing up me.

"Ooh. Feel that? It's Kundalini," he whispers.

It seems to be like the fire I've seen in the tracings of sensation I felt in his arms, and I reach around him to place my fingertips on his spine, to see if I can call up more fire. I want to play with it. I want to see what I can do with it. My hands tingle madly. My head buzzes. I'm drunk, even though I've had nothing to drink, and I feel his drunkenness too, and I want him to get more drunk, so I reach. I reach with my hands, I reach with my mouth, my kisses, his kisses invading, my kisses invading, burning -

It explodes in a concussion of light. I can't see anything but him and me and the desire we have wound together in braids of crackling fire; we fall onto the floor clutching at each other, mouths fused, our pelvises grinding at each other. There are too many clothes in the way, so we tear them off. Hunger. Need. He's engulfing me with it. I'm trying to drown him with waves of fire as he drives into me, splitting me, and as I start to feel the beginnings of spasm take us both, I reach out with myself and drink him in, his moaning breath as he kisses me and crushes my mouth, his sudden ecstasy, and everything else he has that burns. Oh, delicious.

Stars. Burning and dancing in space. We are burning and closing in and we are mad swarming particles consuming each other and we are the explosion, the end, the beginning, light too bright to comprehend, transfixed -

And then it is done, and we lie panting on the floor, too heavy and amazed to move.

After a long, long while, he rasps, "Sex. The song is about sex."

"It's about magic."

He lifts himself on one arm and gazes down at me. I couldn't break away from his eyes even if I wanted to, at this point; and I don't want to. His eyes seem too beautiful. Why would I want to stop staring at a sharply cloudless sky? "Red-headed witch." He grins.

"You did mean that in a nice way, right?"

"Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes." He kisses me. My lips tingle; I wrap my arms around his neck and gently pull him down on top of me again.

That. Magic was what just happened. Magic. The universe spins above me, dizzying me, and I am lost in the whirl.