Your room is a state. It’s been two days of intense work and there is so much more to do. Orgy/trance left you with a mind’s eye full of streaks of light, points and broken glass. When you came round from the aching, roiling hours of sex you were gripped with revulsion for the physicality of it all. My house stank of sex, an entire woman converted by your womb into cum and sprayed from your cunt.

Remember when you gave me my first gay experience? I’m pretty sure that’s not what you set out to do. It was a year or so ago, now. I’ve been thinking about it today because of what I said the other day about living more with you than I ever would without you. We burst through my front door from the taxi, all three of us. You and he were giggling because you’d been winding me up the whole journey, speculating about my gag reflex, making me blush by talking about my, y’know, butthole and everything.

Everything is getting jumbled up. Your brain, your whole body has been at fever pitch for what feels like hours. Your awareness crackles across your body as another orgasm rips through you, causing your back to spasm. You’re dimly aware that aching muscles sent an arc of your cum out into space. Your belly sloshes, heavy low down, and latex-tight around what feels like a basketball in your womb. Awareness flickers to elsewhere.

You’re wearing my sunglasses when you walk through the door. “Very funny. Undress. Sit.” You waggle the glasses by applying pressure to the arms where they hook over your ears then look about the room. It’s still light but clusters of candles stand ready to be lit, and a scented candle already fills the air with jasmine. The sofa I’m gesturing to with a flat, open hand sports a new, ultra-soft blanket of artificial fur and a tray on which sit game controllers, a glass, a book, another pair of sunglasses, a deck of your cards, and a selection of baklava on a plate.

I saw the way you looked this morning as you left the house. And I don’t know the circumstances of your going, or having to go. I don’t even know if I’m allowed to see you. But the way you looked… I take a chance. I wear sunglasses. That will throw any watchers off the scent. Are you as aware of me as I am of you? You’re my downhill. I know you like me, but perhaps to you it feels that all souls are tugged in your direction?

You don’t always eat another streamer when you go live. Maybe every ten sessions? You prefer your own seat, and I think you might like having me around you to pamper you. Maybe I’ll try to contrive a way of getting a streamer to your place so you can devour them in the comfort of your own home. It would make a change to tracking them down online: difficult work I’m not really trained for.

The sensation of light fades. I am disoriented. Someone spoke, but I can’t remember the words. Solidity returns and I’m slumped against a wall in a house, feeling motion-sick. The decor is alien, three walls sloping up to a high ceiling and a fourth, transparent, giving a stunning view over no city on earth. Two children sit among a collection of soft furnishings here, looking up at the intruder with curiosity and no fear.

The keyboard is annoying. Your angry-typing is even more angry than usual. You dash off your message then switch back to the game: you’ll have to wait for the surprise, I already told you guys ^///~ Spyro flits in mid-flight, effortlessly gliding despite being easily twice his original mass. You’re not going to make the fucking jump. Again. You groan and cover your face with one hand then pretend to yourself to claw down your own face.

The sources hint at an old concept called Second Sleep. The idea is that in the winter months, when candle light was expensive, people would sleep so long they would wake in the middle of the night, but not really wake. One writer reports going walking, carrying a deep sense of peace with him utterly divorced from the stresses of the day. We stir one another awake—I don’t know who moved first.

It’s a good thing I came back when I did. You hear my key scrabble in the door and look up, simultaneously excited and guilty. The door opens and we make eye contact. A lot happens in quite a short space of time. Let’s unpick it. First, there is a palpable sense of homecoming. You can read in my face that a certain kind of haunted tension just disappears from me the moment I clap eyes on you.