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The moment the portal shut behind us, Morrison gently pulled my arm to turn me around toward him. He put one hand behind my head and pulled me in for a kiss. As he pulled back from the kiss he said, “You handled that brilliantly. Like a pro, even.”
“There is one thing that has me a little concerned. Well, two, maybe. About the whole university thing,” I said.
“Yes?” He looked surprised. “What are your concerns?”
“Well, the first concern is that I have no idea what it is that you would like me to teach. I mean, there are some subjects that I know a lot about, but my knowledge is hampered somewhat by the fact that some of what I know is useless and irrelevant in this reality. In fact, some of what I know is factually wrong here. So, creating any kind of course will have to take that into consideration.”
Morrison nodded. “I had thought of that as well. That’s why I planned for you to teach graduate level courses where the students already have some experience or at least book knowledge about dimensional variations. That said, you have some core knowledge that is useful and completely valid across our dimensions. The conversation you had with Sandy is a perfect example of that. Your basic knowledge of the overarching magical framework, the metaphysics, is excellent. It is precisely that sort of advanced knowledge that holds true across the divides. The fact that you were able to make it so concise and approachable for Sandy shows that you also have the capacity to give some engaging one off lectures as well, like you proposed today.”
I took a deep breath and fought back the urge to respond to what felt like an undeserved compliment. Instead I addressed the other issue. “The other concern is that I do not have any actual graduate degrees in this world or any other, so I’m wondering how that will fit with both whatever requirements your accrediting body has and whatever internal politics your academy has going on.”
“The accrediting issue is not a problem. You will be teaching as a subject matter expert under the supervision of a full professor. Possibly Miri. That happens all the time and isn’t more than an ordinary bureaucratic hoop. It’s not even one of the flaming hoops. You will be fine.
“As for the internal academic politics, I think that you will just need to get to know the rest of the faculty and staff and you will find your footing within the ecosystem quickly.” He pulled me in for another hug. When he pulled back again he continued, “There’s going to be a committee meeting to officially assign you classes to teach and/or lectures to give. The committee certainly has the ability to say that they don’t think that you should teach, but I’m quite certain that they will see what an asset you will be to the teaching community here. I’ve seen inside your head just how much you love to teach, and we already have a witness saying that you are very good at it. They will surely ask you where you learned what you know and what kind of teaching experience you have. But you have excellent answers for both of those questions that will put their minds at ease.”
I breathed a giant sigh. “Okay.” I looked around the room and wondered if I should go sit down.
“Let’s head into my study, shall we?” Morrison said as he pointed the way down the hall.
We passed through the arched doorway between the living room and the hallway. A short way down the hall on the right side was a dark wooden door with sigils inlaid in what looked like shiny silver with a shiny brass doorknob. Morrison stopped at that door and opened it. He gestured me inward as he held the door for me. I walked in and then stepped to the side.
This room looked like something out of a librarian’s fever dream. There were multiple floors going up with bookshelves, and staircases that went from one level to the next, but none too close to any of the others such that you would have to walk past at least one shelf of books before getting to the stairs to reach the next floor. There was enough floor space at the bottom for a sturdy antique wooden desk, a modern office chair, and two relatively comfortable chairs on one side of the room and a three person couch and two stuffed armchairs with standing lamps atop a rug on the other side of the room.
As Morrison walked in, he pointed at one of the chairs by the desk and said, “Get comfy. I’ll be right back.” He took a little hop and then flew up two levels, landed directly between two rows of books going back beyond where the walls were on the ground level. He disappeared into the stacks and came with a leather bound book in his hand. He reached the banister at the edge of the library floor and hopped over it, floating down to a graceful landing a few feet away from me.
“You are going to love this book. The content is ancient but the ink and paper is only a few decades old. It’s mine. Part of my training was hand copying this work to match the original we have in the university archives. I sewed the pages and bound the book, as well.” He set it down in front of me, open to a particular page with both text and diagrams on it. At first I kind of squinted at the page trying to figure out what I was looking at, and then I recognized the shape of a word. With that, the rest of the page came clear to me as my brain registered that I was reading Hebrew written in Solitreo.
This looked slightly more like Rashi script than the 19th and early 20th century examples of Solitreo I’d read before. It didn’t surprise me, then, that there were a few Arabic words as well as some in Spanish mixed with the otherwise Hebrew text. It was a hint that this was a very old text, possibly written by someone in the Iberian Peninsula during the Moorish period. The image on one side of the page included both sacred geometry and Hebrew letters, this time written in the common block script.
“I see that this doesn’t look familiar to you. Have you heard of Abu Daoud, also known as rav Yousef de Cordova.” He could tell that I had not. “Jews and Muslims both claim this work. There are,” he made air quotes, “‘original’ copies of this book in both Hebrew and Arabic writing. Each has the same words in Spanish. The Arabic version always uses Arabic for the words that are in Arabic in the Hebrew edition, but will use Hebrew for certain other words. My theory is that this famous teacher is not one person, but two friends who studied and wrote a work together. My theory is not popular, however. The first volume of this work has been published in many languages. This volume is always studied in the original – or at least in one of the originals – because it is believed that is the only way to fully grasp the necessary teachings.”
Morrison was holding his chin with his left hand while his eyes looked from me to the book and back. “This book is completely new to you, isn’t it? I’m going to guess that it doesn’t exist in your world, because you are the sort of person who would know about this book if it did exist there.
“I expected an enthusiastic fanboy squee followed by congratulations on how well baby sorcerer Morrison did on these diagrams. Those figures are hard. I had to practice before I tried to do them on this paper with the special pen!” He looked up at me with big brown puppy dog eyes and feigned sadness. “I’ll have to content myself with the fact that you did geek out about the language stuff.” He smiled.
I wanted to kiss him. I figured that this probably wasn’t the moment, though. I was supposed to be looking at something. He leaned over and kissed my cheek affectionately then laughed.
“This is gorgeous work,” I said, still drinking in the pages with my eyes. “So, this is the spell that you used to open up my mind?”
“Yes. It’s a useful one, but if you turn to look at the pages before it, you’ll find a long treatise on the ethics of when to use it, including references to biblical and talmudic sources on each point of discussion. If I had the Arabic version of the book, there would be sources from the hadith instead of the talmud.”
I interrupted him there, “Avoiding the obvious question about what is forbidden ‘mechashef’ witchcraft, I’m supposing.”
“Yes, of course. That whole problem area is covered in the first section of the first volume. By the time you have diagrams for spellwork in front of you, it’s assumed that the magical aspect of this work is permitted. The author states that the preface to each spell is like rav Eliezar’s 3000 halachot about planting cucumbers in Sanhedrin 68.” He returned his attention to the book. “And then if you look at the next page,” he turned the page over for me to see, “is the spell to break the connection if it doesn’t naturally dissipate or if you wish to break it immediately without waiting.”
He watched me as I read the page and took in the figures on it. There were instructions for three ways to break the spell. The person who led the initiation of the original spell could break the spell. Alternately, the original caster and the target could do the severance together. Finally, a group of three or more people who were neither the originator nor the target of the spell could break it. So the target of the spell couldn’t tear down the connection on their own. At least not with this information. They would have to go find three other people who were willing to help them. I could see how that could be easily abused, but I could also understand why someone would create the spell that way if they expected it to be used in times of war or extreme conflict.
I looked up from the book, having read the parts that I needed to know. My eyes met Morrison’s and he said, “Oh. Wow! I expected you to need more time to study it. Well, cool. You ready to do a walkthrough?”
In comic books and movies, people read a spell book and just do the spell even if it’s a coven working with 13 people saying and doing different things. In real life, if a ritual involves more than one person and you don’t do it often enough to already know all the beats, you have to rehearse. This is where you discover who knows their right from their left, and who has an internal compass that reminds them where magnetic North is. I didn’t have to worry about the fact that I had no clue what the cardinal directions were inside Morrison’s House because there was a piece of art on one wall that said in large, beautiful, multicolored Hebrew letters, “Mizrach”, East.
We both stepped away from the desk and pushed the chairs tight into the desk. That made enough floor space on this side of the room for two people to make a small ritual circle and do a working.
“So, do you know the handshapes for the Hebrew letters? I didn’t see them pop up in your mental images while you were looking at the diagrams,” Morrison asked.
“No. There are handshapes for the letters? I’ve heard of handshapes for signaling trope symbols while reading, but never of handshapes for the letters other than modern Hebrew sign language.”
“Well, I can give you the handshapes for right now, but they won’t stay in your long term memory. You’re going to have to learn them and practice them the proper way to be able to use most of the workings in this book.” Morrison projected images and feelings into my mind. Within a few seconds I had access to the images and muscle memory for each of the handshapes as if this knowledge was already my own. I stood up a little straighter and smiled at the sensation of suddenly having a skill I didn’t really have, even if it was only going to last me a short while.
“That’s cool.”
Morrison smiled, “Yeah, I knew you’d like that. I got more where that came from.”
“Oh. My. God! Morrison. You are incorrigible!” I laughed. I liked the flirtation, but I also wanted to focus. At this point I wasn’t even thinking so much about the point of the spell itself as much as I was excited to be learning several completely new things. “Let’s do this and then we can flirt, and make a whole new connection we won’t want to sever.”
Morrison nodded seriously and said, “You are right.”
Now that I had the handshapes in my short term memory, Morrison and I talked through the steps for the spell ritual itself. Then we walked through the whole thing, talking about what we were going to say at each point rather than actually saying the words. I did the handshapes at the places and times I was supposed to for practice, but Morrison did not. After we’d gone over the whole thing, and I was sure that I could do it smoothly once we got started, Morrison nodded and said, “OK. Let’s start.”
He did a hand gesture and some tea light candles came from a shelf somewhere and arranged themselves on the floor around us. Morrison walked the perimeter of the circle around us, and then stepped into his place inside the circle. The circle was just big enough for the two of us with our arms outstretched. The edge of the circle, now glowing with a soft white light, was just millimeters from the feet of the chairs pushed into the desk. Morrison said the words to open the circle and declare it sacred space, and the candles lit on their own. Together we said the words, did the handshapes and gestures, and focused our attention on the singular intent of severing the connection into my mind that Morrison had created back in Memphis on the day that we met. When the final words of the spell were recited, Morrison finished our ritual with a song of thanksgiving and then words to close the circle. All at once, the flames in the candles blew out and the light that marked the edge of the circle disappeared. Morrison did another hand gesture and the candles floated away to some other location in the room.
Morrison looked at me and waited in the silence for a moment. “Well, it seems to have worked. The tooth is no longer loose. I can poke at where that connection was, but nothing happens.”
We stepped toward the side of the room with the couch and armchairs and sat together on the couch. Morrison took my hand and looked deep into my eyes. I looked back into his eyes and wished that I could dive into the ocean behind them.
There was a knock at the door. Morrison gave me a quick kiss on the top of my head as he stood up to get the door. As he opened the door he was saying, “Thank you, Shaun.”
Shaun walked in with a tray. There were two tall glasses of water, a pot of tea, two tea cups with saucers, and two piles of something that looked like butter cookies. Shaun stepped on a symbol on the rug in front of the couch and then stepped away. A moment later there was a coffee table in front of the couch on which he could place the contents of the tray. As he put the two sets of butter cookies on the table, he was careful to place one on Morrison’s plate and one on mine.
Pointing at the cookies on Morrison’s plate, Shaun said, “These are Dawn’tsan cookies and probably not safe for Uriel to eat. However, these are lovely Danish cookies from a tin I’m planning to use to store a brand new button collection.” Then looking directly at me he said, “The sooner you finish all the cookies, the sooner I will be able to start collecting buttons.”
“Are you going to help me finish those cookies?” I asked.
“Don’t worry, I’ve put a good dent in the supply already.” He smiled and winked as he put the empty tray under his arm and walked out of the room.
Morrison sat back down next to me. Instead of reaching for the tea or the cookies, he reached for me. A moment later I was half lying on the couch with him as we were passionately kissing and caressing each other.
“Mm! I didn’t expect this,” Morrison said as he pulled away to sit up and recompose himself. “Not being able to feel that open connection is leaving me feeling way more physically needy.” He paused, “No, greedy.” He leaned in, wrapped his arms around me and playfully said, “Om nom nom!” as he pretended to bite my neck. I laughed and played at pushing him away.
“My goodness, Morrison. You are such a goofball. I never would have guessed that from all those comics.” I stole another kiss from his lips, then reached for the tea pot and poured each of us a cup.
“Drink the water, first, my love. You’ll be glad you did.” Morrison pointed at the glass of water near me.
I picked up the glass and began to drink. As soon as the first drop of water hit my throat I suddenly realized that I was parched. I finished the whole glass in one go, then put the glass down and looked at Morrison in surprise.
“That was unexpected!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah, Abu Daoud’s spells will always leave you thirsty. Even just studying his work, you need to drink water every hour or you will make yourself sick. You need to study that first volume, then you’ll understand more about the why of it.” He picked up his own glass of water and drank it down.
Morrison put his hand on my knee while he picked up a cookie and dipped it in his tea. He looked back at me and smiled as he put the cookie in his mouth. When he’d swallowed the cookie he explained, “Once upon a time I would have never dipped a cookie into my tea, thinking that it was so gauche! Then I raised a Sandy who taught me that warm tea makes cookies better. Now I follow the wisdom of my great teacher and dip the cookie in the tea before partaking.” The proud smile on his face as he said that told a whole story about how much he loved raising Sandy and how much she means to him. But then his face shifted again to something a little sadder. “I’m feeling a little annoyed with myself right now because I’m feeling bereft without that connection to your mind. You are right here. I am touching you. But you feel far away.”
I took another sip of my tea and then put the cup down on its saucer. I leaned in to him and thought, **At least we still have lovers’ telepathy.**
Morrison sat bolt upright and looked at me. “What did you just say?”
**Lover’s telepathy. We still have some connection. Just not that thick pipe with a data diode.** Morrison still looked confused, so I said out loud, “Didn’t you have some telepathy with your other lovers?”
“Not like that. That’s a clear, strong signal. Normally, without a ritual to boost it, it’s just a feeling or like something that might be real or might be your imagination.”
**Yeah, that’s how lover’s telepathy has usually been for me in my original world. But with some work I’ve been able to have some pretty strong signals with a couple of partners. Never this clear, but I’m learning to expect all magic to work more dramatically in this reality.** I returned to projecting my thoughts just to reinforce that the connection we had was real.
**Yes, but I don’t feel your thoughts when I poke at the spot where I could find them before. So it still feels like there’s a glass wall between us. It’s not so bad when I’m touching you, though.** He looked down at his hand still on my knee.
I returned to regular speech. “Put your attention on your heart.” I put my hand on his heart, and he put both his hands over top of my hand. “There’s a chord that runs from there right to my heart.” I took his hands and moved them to my heart. I concentrated on boosting the strength of that connection. I imagined that the chord was a thick, flexible connection of light between us. Our breath and heartbeats were aligning as we sat there together.
“But what about when you cross the dimensional barrier? Will our connection stay as strong?” He asked.
I held his left hand in my left hand and then grabbed his wrist so that he would grab mine. Then I asked out loud, “Do you wish for this telepathic connection to be strong and open across dimensional divides so that we can feel each other’s presence always, and so that we can speak to each other, share chosen memories, or communicate the experience of our senses to each other?”
He squeezed my arm and said, “Yes, I do.”
“And so do I,” I agreed. Then with my right hand I brought my thumb together with my index and middle fingers as if I were holding a pen or a paintbrush between my fingers with the tip pointed down past my thumbnail and I drew an infinity symbol that burned bright blue in the air above our clasped left arms. The chord between our hearts shined brightly for a moment, and appeared to be held up by the unification of our arms together. I pulled my hand towards his hand, letting go of his wrist, passing my palm past his palm, and then holding the chord between our hearts in my hand. He watched carefully and copied me so that now we were both holding the chord in our left hands as it thickened and strengthened. I projected into Morrison’s mind what it was I was doing, pulling energy from the air around me and pushing it into this connection between us. Immediately I could tell that he was doing the same. When it felt to me that it was sturdy enough, I let my hand fall away and just sat there turned a bit sideways on the couch to see him better.
“Mmm, could you stand up for a moment?” I asked out loud.
We stood up together. I faced him and pressed my chest into his so that our hearts were together as we embraced. We held that position for a good long while, just feeling each other’s bodies and being. Then I sat back down.
Morrison stayed standing for a few seconds longer than I did. He looked down at me and then kind of up at nothing. Then he looked down at me again and asked, “Where is that spell from?”.
“It’s from here, right now,” I said.
“It’s not written?” He asked.
“No. We just did it,” I answered.
“Is that how you do most of your workings?”
“Pretty much.”
“Oh… well, then. That’s a thing I want to hear more about later. And also, we have to write that down before you forget it.”
“The last bit was just a hug. It wasn’t really part of the spell.”
Morrison laughed and shook his head as he sat down on the couch next me.
There was silence in the room aside from the crunch, crunch of butter cookies between my teeth. Morrison stared at me with maudlin eyes. I put my hand on his shoulder and asked, “Are you ok?”
“Yeah. I’m better than OK. I can feel you like you are inside of my head and like I’m inside your head. But I don’t see all the details of your private thoughts, and I don’t feel like you are prying into mine. It’s like we share a whole new, private space that didn’t exist a minute ago.”
“The space that’s inside our minds, but not able to access anything that isn’t intentionally brought there is what I think of as a ‘visitors room’. It’s based on the mental space where I imagine phone conversations happen. The other person may be far away, but we sit together in a mental space where they bring some of their world, I bring some of mine, and we can be together while we talk, despite the distance. In this case, however, instead of connecting over a phone line we’re connected through the thread of our relationship.
“That connection existed before we did the working, it just wasn’t as solid. We have threads that connect us with everyone we meet. It’s like connections between neurons in the brain. Some of those threads fall away quickly because there was just one fleeting moment of connection. Some of those threads just get bigger and more solid because the relationship is continual and important. Parents can hear their own kids’ voices in a chaotic room full of children because their connection is very strong. The thread connecting us would have gotten more robust over weeks or months. Or it might have been strengthened by some other catalyst. We just gave it some extra juice with the application of intention and will. Love is strong enough to cross vast distances of time and space, so I’m pretty sure that love is strong enough to cross dimensions.”
We fell together in an embrace again, kissing and touching each other all over. His hands moved towards the waist of my pants, and I put my hand on his to stop him. It felt awkward to stop him like that, but it was going to feel even more awkward if I didn’t. I sat up and tugged him along with me, “We should talk first.”
Morrison took a deep breath and said, “Oh.”
“Yeah. I haven’t had sex at all with anyone since I started transition. I’ve obviously never had sex with a body like this. I’m a little, um, unsure of what I like or want or anything.”
“I understand that. Makes perfect sense.”
“Thing is, I really like just moving through the world in a body that is 100% male. But also, I never imagined having sex with a man with a body like this. I’ve always been bisexual, so it’s not about gender preference. It’s just that when it comes to penetrative sex, I like my original plumbing, and I very much do not like the back door approach. It’s painful, uncomfortable, and it is not a thing I want to try again.”
“That’s fair. Would you prefer to just use hands and mouths with your current configuration? Or would you prefer to shapeshift so that you can have sex in a way that you are more used to?” He asked.
I sat for a little while staring up into one corner of the room and then up in another corner. Then I said, “I don’t honestly know right this minute, except to say that I want to experiment and see what works.”
“That seems completely sensible.” He pulled me into his arms again. “Just communicate as we go along.” **With words or without,** he added through our telepathic connection.
I playfully projected a mental image of me climbing on top of a naked woman version of him. He grinned a mischievous grin and shape-changed. She was still hot, but now she was curvy and soft. Her dark curls framed his face. It was still his face, but a bit rounder with the sharp edges sanded down. I pounced on her and kissed her soft neck. I wanted to peel her clothes off, but I sat myself back up and said, “Oy. No, I can’t do that to you. I know what it’s like to be in a body that doesn’t feel right to me. It wouldn’t be very good sex if you were in a body that doesn’t feel right to you.”
“Oh, honey!” She said, and giggled. “I know that you know that gender fluidity and magic go hand in hand. Magic is a kind of flexibility within set boundary points. You don’t have to be gender noncomforming to do magic, but it sure helps!” Morrison shapeshifted back to his usual form and continued in a more serious tone, “I would feel uncomfortable moving through the world as a woman full time, for sure. I can think of one temporary exception to that, but I’ll save that for another time.” I saw a flash of an image in my mind, but it disappeared before I could process it. “That said, I enjoy embodying femininity in certain contexts and for special purposes. Being with you is the perfect context to enjoy it.” He pulled me in and kissed my neck as I had just kissed hers a moment before.
From there, the most awkward moments had passed, and we just tangled ourselves together in a variety of intimate ways until we were both completely exhausted and happy, our skin tingling and our hearts full. Then we cuddled up on the couch and I fell asleep with my head on Morrison’s bare chest.
I woke up in my own bed to the sound of the alarm at 7am. I swear I could smell the scent of Morrison’s skin on my sheets. I reached out through my mind and heart and thought, **Good morning!**
I could almost feel Morrison kissing my lips, even though he wasn’t around. **Good morning! Your spell worked. Don’t forget to write it down. I’ll try to write what I remember you doing in a notebook here, and you can make corrections when you come home to me. And, Uri?**
**Yes?**
**I love you.**
**I love you, too, Stephen.**
And with that I was ready to face the day ahead. As I climbed out of bed I sang, “Modeh ani lefanecha…” and it seemed as though Morrison was there singing it with me.