“What are you doing?”

“Oh,” I say, “just a reading. Seeing what the cards have to say to me.”

“Something on your mind?”

I don’t answer right away, but continue to shuffle the cards. The stirring in the bed beside me, tells me that my silence has not gone unnoticed.

“Is it about me?”

“No. It’s about me.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“Hush, you,” I say, with a little gentle poke in my voice, as I start to lay out the cards.

“Why do you arrange them like that?”

“It’s called the Celtic Cross pattern. Ten cards, each signifying a different aspect of the querent’s life.”

“Querent?”

“The person asking the question of the cards.”

“Oh. That would be you.”

“Yep.”

“This sexy gal right beside me. My little querent.”

“Quiet now,” I say, gently slapping the hand that started to reach across my belly, and then putting down the last card. Ten ancient pictures lie before me. I look them over as a whole, just skimming them up and down and back and forth, before I drag my eyes back to the very first one, where my inquiry, my journey, begins.

1. This covers her, the card that signifies the matter behind the question: Two of Swords. She sits there, blindfolded, on the shore beneath a crescent moon that illuminates the rocks lurking in the waters just beyond land’s end. Her arms are crossed over her chest, and in those hands are two swords about as long as her body, surely too big for her, but she holds them in perfect balance. She wears a simple garment, a kind of robe, and sandals. I feel myself in this picture. I can feel her wearing nothing beneath that robe, so that the cool night air and the coldness of the stone bench beneath her chill her skin. I can feel the spray from the sea behind her alighting so gently upon the nape of her neck. But she does not move. She waits, patiently, with her swords.

2. This crosses her, showing what forces may be acting upon the situation, for good or evil: The Star. She is naked, unashamedly so, as if Adam and Eve and the Fall never happened—or perhaps they did, and she simply does not care, does not believe in shame. Her left knee is planted on the ground, while her right foot rests upon the surface of a small pond, standing on the water. In both hands, she holds pitchers of water pouring out into the pond, where it ripples the waters surface, pouring out onto the ground, where it separates into five little rivulets. Five: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. Every sense, like when I was young enough, but old enough somehow to guess for the first time that sense was somehow sacred, lying in the bed at night and fumbling between my legs, with fingers that knew here was something amazing if only I could learn it more, learn it not in those spare minutes before sleep, but be like she, naked upon the earth with all the time in the world, as the stars sang down their twinkling little melodies.

3. This is beneath her, the subject’s deep past: Two of Cups. How young they are, this maiden, this man, facing each other and holding their two cups, as if going through some ritual of bonding. Two cups. Like the two cups that fell away from my chest before him that first time, his hands so virgin with the hooks of a bra, that I had to reach behind myself. And how he lost himself in them, filled his eyes with my chest, eventually reaching out hands just slightly a-tremble to cup them, and how his thumbs then gently arced across my shy little nipples, and made them stand up as the breath left my body in a sigh. That first time, those first hands and everything so new, that we felt like the world was beginning all over again. Especially when he leaned in with his mouth.

4. This is behind her, a more recent influence: Two of Wands. All these twos. Here is the adventurer, looking out from the ramparts of his castle, his safe and secure home—looking out into the world with the desire of delving right into it. Is that what I was doing? The bold venture beyond the castle, desires I did not know I had leading my up to the ramparts to look out over all the free world, the places I wanted to go, but all the time telling myself that I had to stay here at the castle, as if it was some responsibility to the nature I was supposed to have. But then I did stop looking and, in a fever I wasn’t able to control anymore, took that first step beyond the walls, left my home and went home with her for the night. When we kissed, I closed my eyes and told myself that this mouth could be any mouth, that these hands now under my shirt could be any hands, that there was nothing wrong in this. And in scant minutes, when those fingers were slowly opening me up, slowly massaging the inner recesses of my body known only to him and me—well, they could be any fingers. With my eyes closed, they did not necessarily belong to her, even though they knew me better than I had ever been known before. And that mouth left my mouth and traced its way with so warm a tongue down to my nipples, as two and now three fingers became a part of me with each thrust. And then those lips that could be any lips were there between my legs, and until I came with such a roar that my universe was filled only with sound and touch.

Lying there, the aftershocks of the orgasm still coursing through my body, down to toetips and fingertips, and I still had my eyes closed, because in my own little darkness, it could be anyone there stroking her fingertips gently across my thigh, across my belly.

But then I heard her voice say, “Open your eyes.” I did. And there she was above me, her face still wet withme, a smile playing across her lips.

“Your turn,” she said.

5. This crowns her, being something that may happen in the future: The Moon. There she floats in the sky, a crescent face, eyes closed, stern little mouth, encased in a bright, yellow glow. On either side of the card are two towers, and a path runs between them. On the ground, two wolves howl at Lady Moon in the sky, and a crayfish walks up out of the water of a pond, drawn by the light and perhaps thinking itself the first being to come up out of the depths to tread on dry land. But my eyes are drawn toward those two towers standing so starkly at opposite ends, as if meant to embody a choice.

Like when he said, “You can choose.”

Like when she said, “You can choose.”

“Choose what?”

“To be one way or the other.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

And the times I tried to explain, and how words never seemed to work, until all that was left were angry tears from eyes that wanted to see the world like they saw it, the simple choice—but eyes reflecting a soul not so concise. And if only I had known this card earlier, if only, I might have said, before it all ended in crying, I might pointed to the card and said, “My path is like this one—it goes between. It touches upon the land of both realms. And it is the only path I know.”

6. This is before her, something to occur in the near future, perhaps a person or an influence, a meeting: The Queen of Cups. She sits there in her blue-robed splendor, her throne strangely placed at the seashore so that her feet, resting upon those ocean-smooth rocks, are ever in danger of being kissed by the water, caressed and washed in gleeful obeisance. The golden cup she holds with her hands and with her eyes, is like some holy vessel holding tight its secrets from the world outside. She is a dreamy creature. But what does her placement here mean? Is she the dream of my future, the kindly love of times not yet gone by, the hazel-eyes incarnation of wisdom and judgment and oh those thighs I would want to kiss on a woman—so sure and, because so sure, as sexy as you damn well please, never a trouble on her mind that she cannot handle.

Or is she, in fact, me—what I am to become?

7. This is what she fears, all the negative emotions she has about the question asked of her life: The Tower. Like one of those in card of The Moon, but this one has risen higher, up to the very clouds, where lightning piercing the black sky has knocked off its crown and sent the two people therein tumbling down into the darkness, wet and cold. It’s the Tower of Babel, the ever-mythic overreaching, the pride of people who want to gaze upon the infinite. Do I fear falling like that, being forever robbed of the transcendent I had but a peak of? But the Tower is more than that. It is a singularity, a statement of the uniform purpose behind its construction, an entity with no other side—solitary. Of one mind. Of one love. And the thought makes me shiver because my life of love is the only one I know.

8. This represents her environment, the opinions and influences of family and friends: The High Priestess. Number two of the major arcana. She sits there at the gate of wisdom, the full moon planted in the crown on her head, the crescent moon there at her feet in the folds of her robes. She sits there, scroll in hand, the guardian of sacred mysteries.

One time I did a reading for him, and he looked her over and said, “What’s with those two columns? The ones labeled ‘B’ and ‘J’? Is she, like, the queen of blowjobs or something?”

“‘B’ stands for ‘Boaz,’” I said patiently. “The ‘J’ is ‘Jachin.’ They’re both pillars from the Temple of Solomon.”

“No blow jobs?” he said, a goofy and hopeful grin on his face, and I should have known then that not everything works out. The High Priestess, she was in the position of what he feared most. I did not mention the obvious fact that it takes both pillars to hold up this part of the temple.

9. This is what she hopes, what she desires more than anything: Two of Pentacles. The last of the twos.And there he is, or she (because it could be either), standing there with the ocean in the distance bucking and heaving, and the two ships riding that vast wetness for all it’s worth. She holds in her hand two pentacles, and given the silly outfit she’s wearing, anyone might think she were juggling them, but she’s not—you can tell by the cord wrapped around the two in a figure eight, in the symbol of infinity. She’s just holding them, one in each hand, lovingly balancing this duality, this eternity, this everything. Balancing, and so in balance. Loving, and so loved. One pentacle in each hand. Circling back and forth in this infinity: pick one point on the loop, and there you find me astride him, his hands at my breasts, as I ride this moment into one long moan that comes up from my toes until we both explode into sound as our bodies are taken over by timelessness, by waves of pleasure that tickle every nerve, him and me. Now pick another point on the loop: and there I am, kneeling at her delta until her body tightens in orgasm, in one solid moment of illimitable pleasure before every muscle lets go and slides into a divine listlessness, and there I am still, feeling her pleasure course through me, as if we are no longer two bodies but one, our hearts racing the same beat.

And this is what I want to be, like that girl near the shore, balancing her symbols so perfectly, knowing that there is no need to choose between them, no need to toss one away—for it takes both to make the infinity she holds.

10. Final outcome, the card that summarizes everything divined from the spread: Temperance. The angel who stands at the edge of a pond by which irises grow. There are mountains in the distance. The angel has one bare foot on land, tickled by the grass, and the other in the water, teased by the little eddies and the fish and the tadpoles—and so much life. The angel holds two golden cups, pouring water from one into the other and then back again as the sun rises over distant mountains in the east.

“Is it a good reading?”

I turn around. I look into a face I love. I stare into eyes that stare into mine.

“Yes,” I say. “It is.”

And I lean in, and fingers slide into hair, and mouths find each other once again, and warm breath wafts over warm skin. And I am home. I am home.