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longed. She didn’t want to remember, and yet her dreams and her body remembered, constantly.
    The longing was physical. It was dizziness. It was a seizing in her belly. It was the need to wrap her arms around herself alone in bed when there was no one else to do it forher. She felt the longing in fingertips that yearned to stroke, to touch, to caress. The longing made her fingers restless, fiddling with the zipper of her jacket, the strings of her hoodie, fidgeting with whatever little thing happened into her hand. The longing made her teeth bite into her lower lip, leaving it chapped and almost bleeding. She knew she was being stupid. She knew her longing was pointless.
    I long for the land that is not.
    That’s the way it was. Lumikki longed for something that was not and which she could not reach. She longed for a person who did not want to be hers. Who claimed he couldn’t be hers. A person who had walked out of her life and not looked back. What sense was there in longing for something that wasn’t? Lumikki longed for intimacy and trust and sharing, even though, by now, she should have understood with painful clarity that the person she longed for did not have these things to offer her and maybe never had.
    Lumikki had just assumed so. Imagined so. Wanted it to be so.
    Blaze. That was what he had said when Lumikki asked his name.
    “Everyone calls me Blaze.”
    “Everyone?”
    “Everyone.”
    So the name issue had been settled. And Blaze did fit him better than his real name. Whatever “real” meant. That wasn’t simple or straightforward either. Blaze was equal to his name. Fiery, burning, always in motion, mercurial, shapeshifting,warming, scorching, beautiful to look at but exuding a vague sense of danger.
    “Now just don’t tell me you have a tattoo of a flame somewhere that no one gets to see,” Lumikki teased on their first date.
    “Worse.”
    “No.”
    “Yep. I have a whole bunch of fireballs.”
    Blaze stared intently at Lumikki over his coffee cup. The gaze of his ice-blue eyes was so intense that Lumikki found herself blushing even though she had no reason to. At least no other reason than that she had just started trying to guess where the fireballs might be tattooed on Blaze’s body since she couldn’t see them anywhere. His sleeveless shirt ruled out his arms. Maybe his back or belly . . .
    Without a word, Blaze started smiling.
    “What now?” Lumikki couldn’t help asking.
    “Your expression.”
    Lumikki felt the blush on her cheeks deepening. She couldn’t help it, no matter how much it irritated her.
    Blaze leaned over the table and bent his neck for her to see them. Lumikki understood instantly.
    “Gemini,” she said.
    Blaze leaned back, looking at her in amazement.
    “How did you know?”
    “It’s my favorite constellation,” Lumikki replied.
    That silenced both of them. It felt as if some strange premonition had lightly brushed by and said that right now, right here, something special was happening. And it wasn’tjust that they had both independently taken their large coffees black, that they were both wearing red canvas sneakers, or that they both happened to like the same constellation. In that moment, Lumikki sensed that Blaze might be a person who could understand her from half a word.
    The first person like that in her life.
    Lumikki had been right.
    They had breezed right past all the normal levels of getting to know each other to a deep, intense connection that left Lumikki gasping for air. She probably would have been afraid if there had been time. But there wasn’t. Everything happened so fast. Her walls all crumbled in a moment with Blaze, blasted to smithereens. Lumikki was completely naked and vulnerable before him, and everything he said or did rocketed toward Lumikki like a bullet, penetrating her instantly and exploding into fireworks of joy, warmth, and light. She had never experienced anything like it before. It was confusing, startling, and