Terrell and Diramina

"Is this you saying you're moving in?"

I smile proudly. "This is me and an array of processed foods."

I sink to the floor and start laying out the goods. His face is lit up from the moment I pull out the first item, a box of Cheez-its, to the last item at the bottom of the bag; a see-through lacy red pair of underwear. His face is priceless, and I revel in it.

"Dinner and entertainment," I say serenely.

And then he's shoving Dr. Peppers and Kraft mac and cheese boxes to the side to kiss me thoroughly, throwing himself over me with a rustle of snack packs around us.

"You," he breathes, into his favorite dip in my shoulder, "are a woman sublime."

I croon out a giggle and a breathy thank you as he starts toying at my shirt. The crew-neck thermal he first threw at me all that time ago.

"Did you see the Fun Dip?"

"Did I see... shut up, D'Mina," he chuckles, gripping the waistband of my raggedy sweatpants and pulling them down off of me without much of a fight from the worn out elastic.

Fingers trailing across my thighs, and the rough gray carpet under my ass. He sees me squirming and grabs a pillow, tossing me from side to side to shove it under my hips.

I can't pique at him any further because he's dragging his flattened tongue over the center of my spread legs. Dipping in and back out to lap at the jiggling skin of my inner thighs, closing softly and gradually around his head.

"First thing I wanted to eat," Terrell remarks. "Certified organic and all. Natural sugars."

I snort, but he doesn't say a word after that. Driving his tongue at a hard right into the wall of my pussy to an absurdly responsive spot only he knows how to find - I've tried. It pushes me over for the first time out of quite a few, judging by the look on his face, and when I'm able to draw air again he comfortably nestles two fingers inside of me and starts pumping while he seals his lips over my clitoris.

I can feel the friction of the rug at my back, barely hear the heavy sigh and shift of Frank and Hade lounging on their beds.

He's merciless; I imagine what it'd be like for him to slowly drive me insane with his tongue, instead of the slippery, blazing descent he always sends me down, and reconcile that there's plenty of time to find out. For now, I'm scrabbling at inky, shaggy fistfuls of hair with one hand, holding his tight in the other as I climax again.

He snatches it from me to start lashing at his pants, and I listen to the sloppy sound of him gathering some of my juices to slicken himself with.

He climbs up over me and I hear a package of something crumble under his knees. I giggle, and he grunts, a smile teasing the corners of his mouth.

"Turn over?" he suggests, nudging at my leg. We move as one to the position he favors, with me splayed frog-legged and his legs almost under me.

He sets into me and I settle in for the storm of movement he's going to build up to, my forearms and fingers as latched to the ground as I can get them.

Terrell lifts my hips and plunges into me again, sure and steady. "That's it, baby," I groan, the end of my words guttural. "All yours. You fuck it so good."

"Mmm," he says.

"What are you gonna do with your pussy when you're ready? It'll take every drop if you want it to. I'll feed it to myself when it starts dripping out. You can feed me."

"Mmfuck, D," he says.

My head lolls on my neck and I gasp for a moment instead of continuing. "Shi- shit, baby, I wanna come all over your dick. Can you feel me rippling around you? How does it feel?"

He hunches over further, and I dip my back so that the squelching hole is angled up and easier for him to see. He just starts thrusting faster, bringing a hand down to the floor beside my waist, and I sink my face into my arm with the pressure and the pleasure.

"Mm. You might just pull out and cum on my ass. I love it when you do it and rub it in. Makes me... m..."

The final few slaps are thunderous, driven. The point I want him at always, desperate and greedy. He quivers against my back, thumb pressing down into the arch and his other shaking hand pressing deep into the swell of my stomach so he can feel himself jamming inside of me.

I come then, and he just gasps into my ear, pinning my shoulders down with the weight of his body so that I struggle against the concentrated sensations.

He slides off of me and I start to sit up, but he flips me over and spreads my legs wide, his chin nestled into the pillow of my right leg.

He starts kneading at my stomach, and I understand after a moment what he's after, bearing down so that milky fluid starts running out of me.

Terrell scoops it up and fingers are offering his spent cum to my lips in the next moment, smearing it over my clit and thighs when it stops dribbling.

He sighs.

"I sh- I should bring Mountain Dew and cheese puffs next time," I comment to a hearty murmur against my thigh.

...

"So are you jumping, or just... what's it called when you fade in and out? Casting?"

Terrell's got his glasses on, squinting at some sort of manual, and I'm very distracted. I'm warm and full, and happy, with the snacks cleaned off of the ground and stocked away in the cabinets. The underwear are in his pocket.

"I... I know that jumping, through the lines, means you can take other people with you. I don't know what this thing for matchcasting is called. I'd ask my family but then they'd know what I'm trying to do."

"You haven't told them yet?"

His eyebrows crease towards each other, and I try to cover my ass. "Well, my grandma knows I'm trying to find a solution. She's probably waiting for me to call and ask her to show me. But um..."

"But you don't want to learn how to do it safely?"

I pause "Zorro" onscreen and rub my forehead. "I don't want to learn anything at all. Magic... there's no 'just a little bit' with it. I barely want to figure this out."

Terrell stares at the threads of the couch, seemingly counting them, and lays his instruction book in his lap.

"I don't like it. I don't like it either. But I know if it's the reason we're here now... there's something okay about it."

He grabs my hand and holds it to his chest, and that sets off a rushing in my ears. A small smile starts on his face.

"Are you being bashful right now?"

"Nah. No." He draws my hand up to his lips and kisses my palm, and when I tuck my chin to the side, absolutely flustered, he begins to chuckle.

"Are you romantic, Diramina? I should've known. How bout..." he lays my hand in my own lap and leans forward to start laying kisses on my face. "How about you try going now? While I tell you how much I love you."

"I love you."

He jerks back at once, eyes crinkled and gleeful. "I know. Now try."

I grumble breathily at him, my heart pounding, and push forward towards his lips. He pushes me back by my shoulders.

"Stop, you'll distract me. I'm telling you how gorgeous you are."

A kiss on my forehead.

"How much I looked forward to you coming back home to me, even in the beginning."

A kiss on my cheek.

"How much I..." his breath sighs out into still air. "Whatever future you imagine for yourself, I wanna be there with you."

His face is stern, and the words aren't frivolous. Whatever. And wherever? My eyes well with tears and Terrell pulls me close to him, the heel of his palm pressing between my shoulders.

"Try now?"

"I don't wanna leave now," I say thickly.

"Well, I want you out. Shit was embarrassing to say," he mutters.

I giggle into his shoulder and he pulls back, holding me at arm's length.

"Go. Git. Bye," he directs.

I nod, and immediately break out into a sweat, using all my effort to reach little tendrils of myself out towards... Grandma's house, I guess? I'd been picking home when I tried before but Grandma's makes more sense, in case I create a bad rift or something. And also, the magic there might feel me trying to get in and help me through. Maybe. I think that's how it works.

I can feel my lines straining like muscles. I hope this is just the equivalent of lifting three pound weights at the gym; I don't want any more magic than I need.

Terrell's still in front of me, though he's not touching me anymore. I reach out to touch his hand and he immediately grabs mine, thumb running over the scratches and scrapes left from bending aluminum sheet metal and wire hangers into headpieces this week.

I start cussing until my frustration gives way to sheer joy, my body starting to haze clear at the edges. Terrell presses his smile to mine, and even though I'm sad to feel his lips fade, I eagerly push forward to my grandmother's dining room. I hear murmurs in transit, eager to be heard, and so overwhelming in their enthusiasm that I recoil from them.

After a final rush of wind, more voices. Thankfully they're human, but one is chasing angrily after the other more sonorant one, buzzing around my ears and distracting me from landing. I accidentally skip over the dining room.

I feel the floor under my feet before I see Sia standing adamantly over my slightly frustrated grandmother. I know this means hell may break loose, and I start trying to backtrack immediately but my heart beats wrong, once, in my chest. I stop immediately, and feel rushing around my legs. Magic gathers around me, patting little consoling puffs of wind against my chest to correct the irregular beat of my racing heart and eventually covering me head to toe. I'm in the room, standing behind the couch opposite the duo, and terrified.

But they don't seem to see me. The buzzing magic settles like a blanket around me, and warily, with no option to move or flee, I tune in to the hostile conversation.

"-execute me like the desecrate creature I am? Why won't you do it now?" Sia's eyes are empty, hopeless. "We're all suffering with my continued existence, I'm too pathetic to do it myself. You can just take the life from my body like a toy from a fucking kid, Ma..." Her voice breaks here. "Please, just do it."

"By keeping you alive... by pulling you, like a tapeworm, out of that boy... I helped create a universe that you never touched. And I planned to end your life then. I probably should have. Unlike the woman you were, though, I'd never harm a child. I often wonder now if it'd have been better to strip you of your power and let you grow unaltered, so that I could execute you when it was just to do so. Probably would've been easier for us."

My grandmother's voice is slow, plodding; effortlessly antagonistic. With a James Earl Jones touch of wonder and resonance carrying more than one lifetime of seen things. She flicks a hand between the two of them, letting it flop back into her lap.

"But here we are, Mina. Sia. Daughter. Both of us now with memories of the things you did and the people you did them to. Both of us with memories of love between a mother and child. How does it all fit?"

Sia's eyes are slitted against the light, tufts of hair curling vagrantly at her temples and looking like goat's horns. She backs away from my grandmother with trodding steps, bending at the waist like a woman beyond her years to sit down creakily beside her.

"I'm a ghost of that woman. I don't... the first time I remembered something, felt the past through the lines, I was walking down the road back to the house and I thought to my..." her voice breaks here. My grandmother stares stonily into space, a strand of magic rolling around and between the fingers of both hands. It occurs to me that they might be keeping her grounded.

"I thought to myself," Sia begins again, "that this was the future I'd been fighting for, children walking along sun-striped roads without fear of being dragged off to death-spiral labor conditions in fae villages. Without even their names, like..."

She swallows her words, and my grandmother gazes off into the errant winds of her home as Sia recovers her voice. "But I never got that future, no matter how many cities I leveled, no matter how many people I recruited or sacrificed, I... I wanted peace like that, but I left seas of victims behind and never even came close."

My grandmother just nods, vacantly. I wonder if the sobriety pains her, being anchored to one realm for so long instead of floating between them with her wispy friends.

I don't even notice when she starts speaking, and start catching her words a few moments in, her voice low and almost aged. "I can't be sure you're only a rebirth of the terror I knew. Daughter." Sia curls into my grandmother's side, and is welcomed by an arm that tucks around her like a hen's wing. "I've combed through your lines, my lines, the lines of your alternate's being, so many times that it all seems dull and shapeless to me now. The only way I know how to keep what we've repaired safe is to send you to the place I set aside for you. I claim few responsibilities in this world, but you are among one of them."

Sia's silent. "Amhara wouldn't go."

My grandmother looks down. "She's important?"

Sia nods.

"Have you asked her?"

"I'd never," Sia sighs, burrowing her head further into my grandmother's side. But the seemingly older woman rises, tsking, winds rolling off of her fingers like ribbons from a high table. I can see them now more than ever, translucent little buffets of air shaped like the perfect dollops of toothpaste in Colgate commercials, rolling around over the floor and everywhere else besides.

"Fool," my grandmother announces, reclaiming her perpetual giggle from the air and stepping up onto a bundle of magic. "Won't be a moment." She disappears into a razor-thin line in the middle of the room and Sia lets herself slump into the fetal position.

I'm suddenly aware of my own presence in the room, and the magic starts playing around me again. I want to shake it off, but I don't know if I want Sia to know I'm here. How long do I have to stay like this? Is the magic hiding me?

The floor creaks under my weight, even though I swear I didn't flex a single finger. Sia lifts her head and I breathe in, ready to calm her when the magic falls off and reveals me, and she flips out.

The line opens back up. Or rather, it never closed. I can't tell; my grandmother has been traveling like this for so long that she slips in and out of them like she's leaving and entering rooms of her house.

Sia shoots all the way up when Amhara stumbles through behind my grandmother, a little damp and filling the room with something musky and sweet.

"Ma, what the hell?"

"I said I'd be back," my grandmother says simply, her voice far away. She rolls her shoulders and yawns. "Tell one of the ribbon-y airs when you're done talking, the buffets take forever to relay a message."

Suddenly I'm in Starbucks, and it's raining outside.

"Feelings really do make everything so much more complicated than they need to be," my grandmother sighs.

She lays a steadying hand on my shoulder before the dizziness washes over me, and removes it when I'm steady.

"If you're going to travel dimensions, you need to either accept a few lessons from me or get better at it. You're very loud, and you always look a mess whenever you come through. I shudder to imagine what you'd look like coming through a line."

No one's looking at us like we just stepped into line out of midair. There's a man with a service dog and a lady behind him who looks like she wants to pet it in front of us. I really hope she doesn't try.

"I didn't make a sound," I protest, and she chuckles.

"Not for ears, no. If Sia was still Mina she would've had you hemmed up before you even got halfway into the room."

"So she's officially not Mina anymore? And why didn't you?"

She scoffs, and the woman in front of us shuffles. "I'm not an amateur. And... I couldn't tell you for sure, D'Mina. I don't want anyone to tell me either, even though they've been trying for weeks now."

Her cardigan billows once, the magic swirling huffily around her ankles.

I order a caramel macchiato, mandatory because of the weather, and my grandmother gets a giant oatmeal cookie frappuccino with a scoop of matcha... She swipes something that's definitely not a card and we disappear again. This time we're on a hill, gray with winter grass and rolling on in all directions.

I splay my legs a bit and breathe in deeply, her eyes watching me while she slips her straw from the paper. "Better," she comments.

"Do you think Amhara's gonna say yes?"

My grandmother shrugs. "Probably not. It's a lot to ask. Would you?"

My voice catches in my throat on a "Hey!" and my grandmother cackles, the hills catching her laugh and rolling it out for miles.

The wind is getting to me, and I think of warm arms and a gruff voice at my neck.

"Would you, D'Mina?"

I cradle the question and my drink close to my chest.

"I... it's different, isn't it? I could get better at jumping. I just have to control it better so I don't hear the voices so much, and I can travel. So it's different."

My grandmother's smile doesn't exactly freeze so much as invert, souring into almost a grimace.

"Do you know what they're saying?"

I shake my head, alarm pooling in the pit of my stomach and amplifying the chill around me, diluted with confusion but most certainly poisoned by fear.

I shake my head again, more vehemently, but less certain. "I thought it was the magic talking, I could almost make it out, but I couldn't really... I shouldn't listen, right?"

She glides forward in a catlike stalk, and that does nothing to assuage my panic.

"You shouldn't be hearing anything," she corrects, rolling her sleeves up, "and I have no idea what listening to all of that could do. Here, let me see."

I let her reach for the pulse in my wrist, wondering why she just didn't cast a line. At the grazing of her fingertips against my skin, my heart thuds once, then twice. It's jumping, palpitating, and somehow reaching towards her. Something in me bulges, balloons like a frog's throat, and she flies back.

I stand there, listening to the gradually amplifying beat of my heart, and watch my grandmother hit the ground.

* * *