Melati’s feet turned on the glassy tiles. Her hands held delicate poses as her arms drew upward and wheeled behind her. Her bare shoulder rolled forward and drew back, moved by the resonant drums; her fingers flicked with the tinkling bells in the air. Her eyes were peacefully shut as the rhythms pulled her muscles around the room. She loved the gentle burn in her shoulders and neck, as her joints were asked for their full range of motion by the gamelan. Her sternum popped gently with a deep, chest-filling breath, her nostrils drinking in the incense and dust and late afternoon sweat of the onlookers.

Tall, pale, pudgy and sweaty, the warang asing grinned like sick dogs at her and the musicians. Some of them nodded along, their Western minds struggling to find the pattern of the gamelan. Melati easily blocked them out and flowed with the many channels of the musical river carrying her along now. Her soft soles slapped lightly upon the tile as she hopped between steps. Her spine writhed, deliciously loose and powerful, like a naga: she grinned, imagining an enormous naga carving through the earth for a new riverbed to the tune of the gamelan. And when she saw this vision in her head, she too grew.

It felt like an itch in her bones and muscles as they thickened and lengthened, but a good itch, the way her toned calves ached after climbing the temple steps. She hummed quietly to herself, working out the stress of her shivering ribs while her organs swelled and nudged against each other. She planted her bare foot upon the smooth white tiles: rather than fitting neatly within one, now her sole covered three, ten, twenty-five of them. Just when the itch was about to drive her mad, it subsided and her whole body sighed, relieved. During the process she was careful to step and turn only in one small area, as her body felt it, not to lash out and fling the way her soul wanted her to.

Because when she opened her eyes again, the gamelan, her friends and fans, and all the gawking tourists were tiny figures encircling her feet. Those who knew her remained close; the warang asing reflexively stepped back, glancing at the locals for cues as to whether they should flee. Melati’s eyes went dreamy again as she swayed in place, countering the rock of her shoulders against the roll of her hips. The balls of her feet remained planted on the cool tile, drinking in the influx of heat from her muscles, while her calves tensed and relaxed and her heels rose and fell slightly. At her dimensions, somewhere under fifteen meters, the little people stood taller than her ankles and that was about it. She rocked her legs rhythmically, to the plonking, relentless beat of the gamelan, cycling in place to show the newcomers she meant no harm. When their tiny shapes stopped looking for the exit and rejoined the crowd ringing her feet, then it was time for her to dance again.

Anyone could perform this dance. Her friends were as good or better at it than she was, and she accepted this. She brought her modern interpretation to the bedhaya and srimpi that not everyone she knew was entirely approving of, and that was fine too. The one thing she could do that no one else in Jogjakarta could was grow into the raksasa wanita. From these dimensions, her movements took on new significance. When she raised her leg, turned, and stepped down again, it became a gesture of limitless power, the way her quads raised her mighty limb and how it broke through the air as she spun. The crowd witnessed how her huge calves bunched, stood out in rough-hewn angles, then melded into long, sweet curves from her heel once more.

And as this was a rehearsal day, she was not dressed in her traditional performance garb. Today she only wore a simple cotton slip that would have been fine for walking around Jalan Gading Sari II with her friends, looking for cute guys or a bowl of bakso. Though the sheath dress grew with her, the most disrespectful among the warang asing would peek (or leer) upward and realize that Melati didn’t care to wear anything underneath. Again, she placed this beneath her concern, letting small people do what they would, and gave herself over to the dance.

Now she was clear of the bamboo hut that held the gamelan (musicians), playing gamelan (genre of music) on their gamelan (instruments). She was clear of the warung, where surly young men in jeans ate egg rolls on their scooters, flanked by flapping vinyl banners proclaiming resto names and menus. Few of the tall, slender trees in thriving, deep green leaves came up to her thighs. Everything, everything was below and underneath her as she stretched her legs into the humid atmosphere, flinging her arms in wide, dramatic circles. This was what she loved, opening herself up to the world that remained enormous and beautiful no matter how large she became. The sun beat upon her, challenging her to endure its bold rays, but her long arms and bare shoulders and smiling face only drank it in, the burning now familiar and beloved to her as a fond childhood experience.

It was from childhood that she gained her love of dance. Her mother, professor of Javanese literature at Universitas Indonesia, hoped for more for her daughter than to shake her hindquarters in time to the flickering Western images on their TV. It was her father who saw the potential for little Melati to tap into her culture. His interests centered on the slightly supernatural shadow-puppet show, wayang kulit, through which he related the traditional stories of the creation of the world and the formation of his people. Scraping some rupiah together, he got her started in ronggeng, the beloved and decidedly low-class traditional dance, where she made friends with the other dancers. Yet in time, they elevated to the courtly bedhaya and began to divide as her friends preserved the traditional form and Melati could not resist introducing the complex melodies of Janelle Monae and the irresistible beats of Nicki Minaj and Doja Cat. “She has a firm grasp of the fundamentals,” her father explained to her disapproving mother, “but I know as well as anyone there’s nothing wrong with adjusting one’s technique to modern audiences.” Though her mother strove for the preservation of their culture, there was little she could say to this, since her father was on the street, trying to appeal to the fickle tastes of sight-seeing, children-toting French and Germans or luring the Australians revelers who regarded Southeast Asia the way American college students treated Tijuana.

All these thoughts swam like soto ayam (chicken noodle soup) through her enlarged skull, threatening to throw her off balance. Their influence was weak at best: Melati simply trained her hearing upon the small shack by her feet, picking out the bells and drums over the dull drone of Jogjakarta streets, and reliving that joy she cherished since her childhood.

She rarely knew how long her performances lasted. Sometimes the tourists were kept for an hour while the giantess writhed in the air above them; other times, Melati returned to her normal size within ten minutes, generating much grumbling and few tips from the foreigners. It really wasn’t up to her. It was a combination of many elements: the feeling of the gamelan, the weather that wrapped itself around her, the good and evil spirits that visited and plagued her during the performance, anything at all.

Today she lasted quite a while, giving the audience all they could hope for and more. They watched her huge feet rise and slap against the pristine, glassy tiles. They ooh’ed and ahh’ed as her long limbs swooped through the soupy air with great whooshing noises. It was difficult for them to stare up at the raksasa wanita without violating her privacy, but they watched the immense creature twist and roll in the sky, writhing in an ecstasy they could only catch second-hand. Whatever was going on in that great skull of hers, they couldn’t begin to perceive. They only knew the sensuous allure of her toned, colossal limbs and the frisson of panic as her great feet slapped the ground not far enough from where they stood. The women exulted in her expressions of joy as the glorious woman lost herself in the dance; the men daydreamed of scaling her inner thighs or clinging to those bouncing, swinging breasts. At the end of it, there was enough money in the woven basket to take a break for a couple weeks, but Melati would be right back at it the next day, always seeking that perfect note, that graceful stroke of arms, waiting for the spirit of her nation to carry her away again in the unconventional marriage of her father’s and mother’s values.

The warang asing jabbered at her in their tongues, tripping over their pronunciation of “cantik” and “bukan main.” They took selfies with her—at her normal size, to their dismay—and they drifted off to the internet cafes and restos and villas until the next installment in their Eat, Pray, Love fulfillment voyage.

All except one: a bald man wearing circular glasses and a tight black T-shirt, only a little taller than herself. He was of milky complexion and muscular build, with a tight smile that somehow felt merely pragmatic. Melati recognized him from the performance: he was not among the skittish tourists. He stood boldly before her feet, staring up at her and not up her dress. Her toes, longer than his forearms, flexed and mashed against the tile; her broad soles lifted, casting him in shadow, and crashed to the floor again, and he’d stood in place, whether out of stupidity or implicit trust in the performer. It was the latter, she learned, as she got to know Otto.

“I wish I could say something more interesting than ‘you dance very well’,” he said. Due to her abundant experience with foreigners, she pegged his accent as likely German, though he spoke English to her. She thanked him politely and started to turn away.

“I was compelled, truly,” he continued. “The fact of your size is, of course, magnificent, but there is something in your movements that…” He smirked, nudging his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Please pardon my forward speech, I don’t know how to say this any other way. I saw great potential in your performance.”

Melati smiled blankly at him, giving him nothing. Perhaps he didn’t know how insulting this sounded; perhaps he did and didn’t care, like a German, or else it was a translational error as they engaged in the lingua franca that was not their own. She decided to give him a little more time, if not any form of response.

“Please, have you had any lunch? Allow me to treat you.” To this she consented, and she learned all about the choreographer from Stuttgart, taking a break (yet never really taking a break) from his discipline to immerse himself in the Indonesian dream. Over nasi goreng and ikan bakar she suffered his story: his father conducted an orchestra and his mother was a ballet dancer. Rigid discipline was part of his DNA, and within these constraints he explored people’s capacity for expression and conversation through motion. While there was plenty of material and precedent to work with, the nascent Otto knew there was something else, something mystical and significant in the periphery of his art. “Make no mistake, I love my heritage and deeply respect its disciplines. Many times, I have felt no greater pride than to manifest the strictures of my predecessors.” Though his face was as flat as a sheer cliff wall, Melati sensed a kindred wryness to his words. Tradition was important and beautiful, but she recognized the germination of greater, radical ideas within this man’s chest, vines of revolution that sought to expand or burst its container.

Otto fastidiously scooped the long, transparent bones from his fish and stacked them on the edge of his plate. “I do not wish to flatter myself by saying I see something of this restlessness inside you as well. Your dance is neither mere sloppiness nor simple rebellion. There is something deeper inside you longing to be expressed. Yes, Western-influenced perhaps, but it is the kernel of that foreign influence embedded in the rich, volcanic Indonesian soil which I wish to see flourish.” He looked up at her, reached for her hand, withdrew his grasp. “A beautiful young woman such as yourself, you need space to grow and develop, and please overlook the pun. What I saw today was a little more than miraculous, I think. It was revolutionary. The final component of a gigantic, finely formed woman…”

Melati sucked in her breath, politely looking away from the ranting man. His vision was accurate, in picking out her impatience with rising to fulfill her traditional dance structure, and going no further. The way his glasses glittered as she spoke of her “powerful thighs,” her “caramel-colored arms,” she did not care for. She was uninterested in the attention and priorities of foreign penises, all she wanted to do was dance, explore the boundaries of that dance, and break through those boundaries, over and over. Still, whatever else was going on in that cannonball-shaped German skull, Otto seemed to understand and appreciate something important in her chosen mode of expression. And when he asked his question, the inevitable question she foresaw as her big toe slid across the tile before his miniature Oxfords, she simply said “yes.”

In a gymnasium, the fortuitous nexus between their two cultures, Otto slowly circled his protegee as she went through the movements. “Back straight,” he advised, gripping his elbows. “Hold your back upright and lift your chin, here, like this.”

Melati found the position uncomfortable. It cramped her muscles in places she wasn’t used to using, or forced them to hold a position she wasn’t accustomed to. Any time she felt a twinge or a pull along her spine, she rolled her shoulders and sent a wave of motion down her back and into her hips. This relieved it immediately, but it also earned Otto’s disapproval. “You looked like you were about to fall over. Are you sure you’re feeling well? Is the heat getting to you?”

The question galled her, as she was born in this climate and savored it like the flap of the magpie goose’s wings or the little tree frog’s resonant croak. It was the German who always mopped his shiny, round head with his kerchief or stood beneath the gust of the AC unit. She enjoyed swaying and stepping further from the AC, compelling him to either holler instruction at her or else step out of his comfort zone.

“Don’t writhe so much, fraulein. Your spine twists this way and that, it’s no good.” He sighed, nudging his glasses back up. “Please, just for me, just this once. Here, observe. Left, dip, rise; right, dip, rise. And then left again, sweep your leg clockwise, right again, sweep your leg counter-clock— …no, the other one. Left leg, left sweep; right leg, right sweep.” Sweating in his uniform of black T-shirt and breezy traveler’s pants, he held his arms spread, tilted his chin up, and demonstrated the step.

Melati detested the movement. She felt that Germans danced as though they were balancing a tray of glasses in one hand and trying to see something over the heads of the crowd. This was not her way, even in her blended style. The vision of the squirming, restless naga was what pleased her and to which she aspired. The roll of her neck as her head scanned the heavens and swept the ground was her regal gesture, surveying all her countryside and the heavens above. The idea of her giantess-self positioning herself at right angles to the ground, ducking and swooping while balancing upright, created an ungainly, offensive image. It would be like one of the skyscrapers downtown suddenly coming to live and twisting like a screwdriver into the ground, attempting to demonstrate something beautiful. She wondered if there was something in German history to be learned by the way Otto held his head steady, his gaze fixed in one direction no matter what his limbs did, while he danced.

Yet his choreography was not without beauty, especially when he performed it. She enjoyed watching him perform the moves from his homeland. The way he held his arms aloft, how his strong legs lifted and bounced his upper body no matter what position he took, he almost looked as though he were floating in the water or hovering in the air. She saw the conviction in his movements, the way his face shifted from frustration at trying to control the snake-girl to confidence, even peacefulness, as his muscles pulled him through his gestures. She admired the controlled posture of his arms, angled like the crystalline structure of sugar, and the musculature of his legs, carrying him smoothly from one step to another. It really wasn’t so different, the way their legs bent and knotted to support their bodies, moving them forward and through their turns. Some part of her wanted to glimpse his strong legs, out of curiosity, to see the muscles bunched and pumping under his pale skin.

“You see?” he barked, snapping Melati out of her daydream. “This is the proper form. I’m not asking you to make a career of it, but … how do we say … One must learn the rules before one breaks them.” Stiffening, he bowed slightly and dumped his open palms toward her. But she did not feel like performing for him just now.

It was not often the young giantess, at any size, condescended to speak to those around her, but now she did. If she didn’t speak, she would have to break something or set something on fire, whether a neighbor’s house or the self-satisfied choreographer wiping his temples on his shoulders. “I think there is something you’re missing, in my style of dance, the way I was taught.”

Raising his eyebrows, Otto very nearly smiled as he asked her to elaborate.

“It is a feeling in our dance. You have it too, sometimes. I can see it in your eyes as you perform. But it is not the same as our spirit.” Her bottom lip pouted as she considered how much she should reveal to this outsider. If she was going to work with him, if she was going to hang around for much longer, then there was something intrinsic to her that he needed to understand. “We call it rasa. It’s … this feeling.” Melati knew the words would run out, so she let her body take over. Her arms reared as her torso twisted, shoving her ribs this way while her hips did something else. The way he danced, with simple moves that mirrored themselves, was completely incompatible with the expression of her soul in her movements. “It’s open, you open yourself to it,” she murmured. “You don’t memorize a pattern and perform that pattern. Do you see?”

She felt the German’s eyes upon her, studying her, straining to understand rather than to critique. With gamelan in her head, she lunged this way and melted in that direction. Her hips thrust to the Western off-beat, while the naga churned her in a slow circle upon the floor. She lifted her arm, twisted her hand, and her smiling face followed its track, then retreated and reversed. In that sense, her moves were not entirely unlike the patterns Otto relied upon in his execution, maybe. “I’ve given a hundred performances,” she said, alluding to a much larger number, “and I don’t think I’ve ever moved the same way twice. It’s just how you feel, how the musicians are behaving that night, what you ate and what you talked about with your mother, dancing while the birds swarm before the mosquitos arrive, followed by the bats until the stars fill the sky.” It was difficult for her to put it into words, but not hard at all to contrast it to the rigid positions he wanted her to memorize and stumble through in correct order.

Otto’s nostrils hissed. He never raised his voice with the Jogja woman, and he never swore. He never so much as stood and trembled with barely suppressed rage. At his worst, he gusted two lungs of air through his pinched nostrils and waited a couple seconds before speaking. “Slowly, I’m beginning to understand, perhaps. And yet as different as our dances appear, perhaps they are not so unalike, yes?” He listed the aspects that she herself had noticed, how his disciplined choreography brought out a shining light from within him, at its embodiment and mastery, not unlike the vision of the huge, beautiful naga that she tried to emulate, bringing out the raksasa wanita at last. It was a different path, generating the light within as opposed to following the light’s call, but the destination was the same.

They spoke much longer, shifting from defending their heritage to seeking out the points in common. She moved her fluid arms, he cast waves from his shoulder to his wrist. Her legs bent and turned, bending with the elusive frequency that flowed all around her, and his steps and stomps created a personal resonance to fill his body. Melati aped him briefly, showing him how silly it looked to hold her spine so stiff, until she turned and stepped backward and bobbed forward and found herself in a position befitting Indonesia’s historic ruling class. Bordering on offensive, Otto gesticulated a loose, random dance styling he thought looked like her bedhaya style, when suddenly his shoulders rolled in a counter-rhythm to his swinging fists, punctuated by his Germanic stomps. He stared at his limbs, not recognizing them for a moment. “That felt really good,” he said quietly.

“It looked really good,” Melati said, and it did. He tried to replicate it and failed, but her quick eyes soaked the sequence in readily and they practiced it together. When it would ever come in handy, who could know, but it was a fun move to have in their collection. She noted, without wanting to make him feel self-conscious, that he had come dangerously close to smiling.

Melati practiced a little while longer, earnestly wanting to understand some of what Otto was trying to get across. “I think we have found some moves that aren’t entirely conflicting,” she said. “How about this: I will practice and perform some of your steps that we find compatible, but you must leave me room to pursue my spirituality.”

His jaw fell open at her words. “My dear, the last thing I would ever want to do is crush your spirit.” He stepped close, reached out for her cheek, then withdrew his hand.

Melati was surprised to feel her heart leap in anticipation of that touch.

How ironic, then, that the conflict seemed to reduce and dissipate only when they actually danced together. The clash of their minds and wills was one form of dance, each performer reading each other and strategizing their approach, but when their bodies moved together it changed entirely. Otto wasn’t as tall as the other foreigners, but he still had several centimeters on Melati, and with his strong, carved torso and disciplined confidence, she felt almost sheltered by his presence hovering so close. Hot as the day was, she could feel the healthy energy radiating from his chest against her shoulder blades. “Yes, now, lift … and lift …” The barking commands from across the gymnasium melted into a warm vibration just behind her ear. She unconsciously turned her head so her ear could drink in that delicious purr, feel it tingle down her neck and into her shoulder. She lifted her arm, as he did his, grateful to hide her raised gooseflesh from his sight. And if she could perform her sequence of moves just right, with the German man as her shadow, then he had no correction or guidance to offer and she could catch the gentle grunt from his nose, the gasp in his throat after holding his breath during a complex maneuver.

Annoying as his stilted ideas could be, they were still bonded in their love of dance and their appetite for something more than what existed. Though she didn’t always agree with his strictures, she adored that he had earned them and held them. It was clear how much he revered dance, the concept of breaking one’s body to the fulfillment of an ideal. At moments she could see him as an embodiment of their pursuit, a manifestation of dance in physical form. They chased the same dream, their torsos shifting to the side as if reaching for that future, their legs swishing in the sprint to pursue that vision. When his knee brushed between her legs, his developed thigh rubbing through her sarong against her softer inner thigh, she blocked out his hasty apology as it marred the fleeting image of both his thighs wrapped around her hips, the question in her soul of what it might be like to be crushed under his weight, in bed. He apologized diligently at each inadvertent contact, even those that weren’t entirely accidental on her part.

Despite, Melati knew he was interested, just not like this, not until the raksasa wanita manifested.

Many days could go by before she enlarged herself. She could do this at any time, but there was no need. It was more important to learn the steps, to mitigate the foreigner’s flood of ideas and find a compromise with her own passion. Every once in a while, however, she could see the naga swimming through the land, its crown glinting with no shadow, churning up the volcanic loam and plowing the trees aside as it arrived. She inhaled, deeper and deeper and deeper, filling her expanding lungs. Her shoulders ached to stretch, her calves knotted and relaxed, and the ground felt so much more fragile than before. Finally, the giantess spun and pranced and tiptoed through the oversized structure for Otto’s eyes only.

The German man looked so small and alone, in the middle of the gymnasium floor. He never ran to the side, always stayed where he had been, a rigid little toy struggling to look up her considerable length while she danced. Melati felt his gaze burning against her skin, a warm spot running along her shin and up her thigh, and she would turn. The warmth ran over her toes, up the bridge of her foot, focused on her ankle that bent and flexed to support her incredible weight. He admired her thick, sturdy bones, but he savored her dense, potent muscles. Her huge calf shifted above his head, her long toes flexed right in front of his face, her bones of her ankle ground beside his hips. How badly she wanted to poke her big toe right into his soft guts! How easy it would have been, when she raised her thigh, to simply let her foot settle one meter to the side, coming to rest upon his little body.

Yes, at least as much as she wanted to feel all that low-fat German beef piled atop her, she also wanted to feel this hardened, stubborn German tourist squirming against her sole. Perhaps his stern head could poke between her big and second toes, reddening as her foot unleashed more of her mass upon him. Or maybe she would cover him entirely, her heel shattering his thin ankles, his scrutinizing expression buried in the ball of her foot. Of course she would never do that, it was a personal rule that she never use her gift as a weapon against lesser people (and she was surrounded by lessers).

But Otto drank her in with his eyes. He never stepped out of her way as she danced unless he had been standing in the spot where her foot should land next. Their contact at same size had been pragmatic, to guide an arm in a direction or to remind her to straighten her spine. He was much more affectionate and forward with the raksasa wanita, however. His soft palm upon her ankle, less to guide her posture and more to sense the incredible tendons at work beneath her skin. All the encouraging pats upon her dinner plate-sized toenail or the stroke along her instep, twitching beneath his feathery touch. The playful boot to her large, callused heel, smug in the knowledge that such a gesture could mean nothing to the giantess. One time, and only once, he had ventured to crawl upon the bridge of her foot. It appeared to be an idle gesture after “let’s take a break” and he discussed the rest of the afternoon’s sequence of moves. But she knew these moves, and he knew she knew them, and his description was circular and lofty, taking up too much time to describe.

He relied on her mercy at these times. The little German man expected her patience as he lounged upon her foot, waving his arms in the air and repeating himself. Melati had to stand in place, hang her head to perceive him down there, and listen to his rambling in mostly fluent English while he soaked in the experience of their contact.

He was also more complimentary during these times. “So majestic,” he called her. “The fact that you haven’t torn down these walls and stampeded up the jalan to the government office or any embassy of your choice is a testament to the grandness of your character.”

“I have no desire to do these things,” she said simply. “I only want to dance.”

“But a magnificent young woman such as yourself, you could do anything. You could carve away the beaches or shore them up for more real estate. You could punish the reckless drives on the jalan with the tip of your finger. Imagine that!”

She didn’t wish to and declined to reply.

He leaned back, resting upon her girthy tarsals. “And if you stayed this way too long, your appetite would surely be a force to be reckoned with. Have you ever eaten in this state, say, a cow? Even a person?”

“Your questions sound like those of the schoolchildren I left behind a long time ago.”

“Not that long ago, I think,” he chortled, stroking her instep. “But I take your point. Yet it seems to me an incredible injustice, to you, that you must hold yourself back from your abundant potential as a raksasa wanita. Your consideration for others is commendable, this is obvious, and yet part of me would love to see you …”

He faltered, which was more surprising to her than if he’d cursed or vomited abruptly.

“What is it you would love to see, Herr Lehrer?”

He slid off her foot and walked some paces away from her statuesque pose. “Pardon me, I forget myself. Two more minutes and we begin again.” He turned and walked away, simultaneously growing smaller as he walked and larger as she called off the spell and reduced to normal size. She watched him drink some water, his canteen shaking in his hand.

That was a week and some days ago. Melati recalled that moment, in reflection, as today’s events took a different, new course.

“Again.”

Melati turned, raised her elbow, let it follow an invisible track that carried her aloft and back down again. She whipped her head the other way, wearing a mask of surprise, before stretching her legs out to carry her body across the floor. Even she knew she hadn’t paid attention to her left foot, which would guide the right. Otto clapped sharply, once.

“Again.”

She drew a deep breath. The clap stung her ears. It tensed her back and neck. It shook her out of the fluid warmth she created for herself when she danced. This was Otto’s way, she knew. He said it was preferable to the Zen master’s rap on the skull with a board, to shake the student out of their incorrect path. Was it, though? Melati could dodge a stick, but when he clapped those thick, strong hands, it rang throughout the gymnasium.

Melati took the position once more, elbows back, palms up as though she were pressed against a window. One shoulder dipped down, one rose to sweep her elbow in the arc that would turn her S-shaped spine into another arc, reaching behind herself. From that pose her right leg shot out at an angle, and it seemed as though she would topple backward until her left leg reached further, defying gravity to pull her forward. This time she focused on her ankles, what they were doing, where they twisted in their own continuum before her heels reached the ground.

His clap rang out. “Again!”

“What did I do wrong this time?”

He was an impassive stone statue, roughly chiseled, standing by the fold-out table with the water cooler. “Technically, nothing, but as you stepped forward you left your heart behind. Bring your heart with you, don’t just haul your carcass across the floor.”

This was too much, even from him. She’d practiced this sequence a dozen times, at least, and he always found something new to complain about. The only thing he couldn’t complain about was something out of his jurisdiction, and so she lapsed into her own dance, one of the trance-dances when she was a poor villager selling her body (as a dancer) for rupiah from fastuous tourists. Losing herself to the cozy familiarity of her strengths, she found it easier to block out Otto’s disapproval. He shouted, she knew, and stamped his leather shoes upon the floor. Her mind was full of the neighborhood gamelan: old men with cigarettes dangling limply from bottom lips, unbuttoned shirts and shaved heads, hunched in the bamboo hut and hammering out the tunes they could perform in their sleep. Walking away from the German choreographer’s lessons would be a defeat of herself, but retreating for the moment to nostalgia was a slim act of rebellion, one she could indulge in occasionally.

Immediately, the naga squirmed within, writhing and stretching and shedding its light throughout her limbs. Melati gasped ecstatically, unable to drink enough air to feed her expanding limbs. She flung back her arms to greet the sky with her breastbone; her quads and calves shivered as they pulsed with the energy of life, hauling her developing trunk toward the ceiling. And soon there was nothing the petulant little German could do but stare in awe at her magnificent form, radiant with height and mass, radiant with the fact of herself.

Hiding the smirk of her full lips, the giantess tossed dozens of kilos of hair over her shoulder. She thrust her shoulders and elbows back, spreading her long fingers to emulate her hands pressed against a vast invisible surface. The vertebrae of her spine toppled like a tower, spilling to the side as her left shoulder dipped and the right rose, round and robust, to swing her powerful elbow like a comet through the atmosphere and contort her upper body clockwise, against her motionless hips. When she flung her right leg ahead, her sole gripped the smooth surface of the gymnasium floor; her left leg shot out with the unstoppable force of a locomotive, and her toes likewise seized the floor and hauled her immense body forward.

The tiny German was transfixed. She knew her execution had been flawless this time, and even supernaturally rendered as her massive dimensions changed the contour of the floor, the resistance of the air, the balance of the tonnage of her meat and bones and fluids. There was nothing he could complain about now, and she knew it, and she knew he knew it. When she completed the sequence, Melati took her resting position, fists on hips, head tilted demurely, and extended one potent, toned leg toward the diminutive figure by the water cooler.

He was frozen where he stood. His eyes drank her in, unabashed, flickering up from the bridge of her foot, to the sheen of her shin, to the muscles of her thigh, twitching with impatience. All aboard, little man, she thought. Move it or lose it.

As if in his own trance, the tiny man moved toward her posed foot. He shucked his shoes, tossed them aside, and bent to climb upon the bridge of her foot on all fours. The ivory milkiness of his spindly arms stood out against her skin; she could feel his hot little palms flat against her foot, gripping, sliding, reaching for another grip.

Melati drew a long, deep breath. She knew that this gesture was breaking a barrier, but not the gesture of his ascent upon her limb: she reached out to invite him, that was the breach. He had wanted her, she had seen his own muscular legs twitch restlessly while she moved. She had felt his hot glance run over her massive limbs as she grew. If she daydreamed about his weight upon her body, in bed, then he waited breathlessly for the uncommon moments she erupted into a young goddess, holding him in her private audience.

She could have kicked him away and laughed off the incident. She could have apologized and brushed him gently to the floor. Melati did neither of these and nothing like it: she held herself steady, static, giving him a chance. Giving him the opportunity they both had waited for.

Once his little arms wrapped around her ankle, she withdrew her foot and resumed a standing position. No: she bent her limbs into the modified plié he taught her. This stance was a waiting position between dance sequences, a graceful hold that accented what had just been done and hinted at what was to come. Now, however, it was a pause in time, a place for her to wait while the little man tested his physical prowess.

His fingers dug into the smooth skin of her lower leg, and his shirt brushed over her shin as he clawed his way upward. It was impressive to watch him grip the limb so much larger than himself. Her leg tickled as he inched himself upward, slowly but surely. In another minute he accessed her knee and allowed himself to dangle there, hugging the round joint.

Otto looked up at her. Without changing her expression, Melati winked at him. His tiny face rumpled in a pleased grin; his tiny jaws parted to suck in the humid air.

Then his tiny hands reached for various spots along her thigh. The tickle up her shin transformed into something much more ticklish, something like plush bolts of velvet at the clothing store, or the drizzle of molten caramel over rice cakes at the wheeled cart that crawled down any jalan at any time of day. She stared at the tiny, audacious man, now embracing her thigh. At her size, he was about as large as her hand, or a little longer: the tiny body wrapped around the front of her thigh was not unlike her own hand resting upon her leg, as she might do while sitting in a chair and chatting with friends. Except it wasn’t her hand, it was an impatient, demanding little man from another country. It was a small man splayed across her thigh like a splash of paint. It was a small animal crawling up her limb, staring at her with intense, beady eyes, creeping closer to the hem of her skirt.

An animal would not have known or cared what lay hidden within her skirt. Otto was not an animal… or he was, now, but a knowing animal who crawled up her firm leg with intent. When his tiny, digging fingers had pulled him up enough, the bald knob of his head disappeared under her skirt. Then so did his shoulders, and then his rib cage. The tiny, clawing fingers now dug at her inner thigh, hidden from her view, and the slight weight of the miniature man’s body twisted only gently upon the surface of her thigh’s skin, drawing inward toward her other leg.

Melati wondered what she was doing, letting this little transgressor creep into her personal region. But even as she wondered, she let it happen. Part of her wondered, and the crushed velvet, caramel-drenched part of her wanted to see what would happen next.

She knew she was large. She saw the way the warang asing unfailingly backed away when she grew up, as though she’d turned into a gorilla or a tiger suddenly. She remembered the times she’d blown up indoors, ruining her parents’ home and earning a scolding from the government officials. The way undeveloped ground gave beneath her soles was too familiar; the moment of vertigo as she suddenly looked across her neighborhood from a frightening height was also familiar. There was no question in Melati’s mind that she was a gigantic woman, when the dance moved her and the naga took her. There was no question of it.

Never had she felt so large as when the tiny body clutched the soft skin of her inner thigh, tugging at it with his inconsiderable weight, and reached in with one minuscule hand to embed within the tissues that had been off-limits to everyone else in her life. The mad German, only the size of a doll, clutched the most intimate area of her leg and thrust his hand, then his arm into her interior tissues, stroking frictionlessly across steadily moistening folds of hot, pink flesh … and she let him.

More, she wanted it. The giantess held perfectly still, like the Statue of Liberty or the Colossus of Rhodes, with her thighs slightly apart for the tiny white man squirming between them. Now her massive lungs gulped gallons of air, but not to feed her expanding body. Now she sighed and shivered, as the inoffensively small limb reached inside her, stroking, searching for something. Did he know what he was looking for/ Did he have a plan/ Or was he simply groping for the sake of going somewhere unimaginable and unheard-of?

Never had Melati felt so large. Never had she felt so immense as when that tiny groping hand entered her. When her muscles contracted sensitively, his arm slipped out again without resistance. That’s how small he was, how large she was.

Now there was nothing else for her to do but dance. She melted out of the plié and assumed her position, without the sharp clap and the barking “again.” She drew her arms back and thrust out her breasts, straining against her simple sheath dress with the spaghetti straps. Simple, tasteless, but she loved it, and not just because it was one of the few garments that grew with her in these episodes. Her left shoulder slumped, her right shoulder rose, and now she noticed how her thighs rubbed together in anticipation of the wrenching twist of her upper body. She noticed, because now she had a small, squirming man trapped between her soft inner thighs.

Once again he slid his scrawny arm up inside her—scrawny! Melati had admired the iron discipline of Otto’s body, when they were mostly the same size. Even his pinky finger was well-developed and potent. To think of his entire arm as scrawny, now, was difficult to settle in her mind. Yet her dancer’s thighs clenched him in place, and his whole arm was thinner and slightly shorter than her own index finger.

Her sharp elbow raised before her, perfectly tracing an arc through the gymnasium air, rising almost to the girders of the ceiling before she drew it back and turned her torso to follow it. She drew a breath and her breasts rose toward the ceiling; she drew a breath, in no way cooling the rising heat between her thighs as the muscular little being writhed defiantly in her grip.

Her right leg swung forward, swimming through the thick air, and her toes splayed in anticipation of gripping the floor, now finer and smoother at these proportions. This caused her powerful right thigh to clamp down on the audacious little man clinging to her left inner thigh. She could feel his strong shoulders, shrugging against the compression. She could feel his spine, writhing out of the way, seeking a more comfortable position between her colossal legs; there was none, but he sought it regardless. And even as her calf bunched to extend her foot, and even as her toes gripped the floor, the little man never extracted his invasive arm from Melati’s vulva. Her tissues caressed the thin limb, running over it without friction, her juices trickling down his armpit and soaking his shirt around his ribs.

She nearly swooned at this point. So clear was the image in her mind, of the tiny man’s struggle between her cushioning legs, how deep his arm was inside her and how near that stony, comical little face was from her labia. She held her pose just a second longer than she should have, cradling the solid mass between her thighs, flexing her thighs to test his stoutness and endurance, but also to hug him very intimately. She embraced him with her thighs, hugged him tightly on both sides, the muscles of one thigh mashing him into the fat and flesh of the other. And something deeper inside her twitched as well, a brief, pleasurable spasm that ran up from her knees, around his arm, and into her womb.

Reluctantly she swung her left leg forward, breaking the embrace but completing the posture. Her massive sole patted the ground with a loud clap, and the little figure was released from the grip of her thighs. Now he clung to her leg, almost hanging off it (and surely her trickling juices could not improve his grip), but at least she pulled the sequence off flawlessly. Whatever else, he could not complain about this.

The tiny man adjusted his grip. One little arm slipped off, releasing as though shocked by electricity, but swiftly slapped back into place, tiny fingers scrabbling for something to latch onto. They found her pubic hair, and his tiny fist wrapped up in it. Miniature thighs tensed and clenched her inner thigh, pushing his body upward until, she suspected, that wry little face buried itself into her tissues.

“You’re in luck, you know. This is happening at the best time,” Otto told her. He grinned and rubbed his hands together. These little gestures were the most life Melati had seen in her instructor outside of dance. He was almost boyish, but for the way his strong legs filled his trousers and the salt-and-pepper hairs that combed over his rippling forearms. Still, the way his eyes caught the light through the plane window revealed to her for the first time some other color in his irises than flint gray. She also never knew he had a gold-capped incisor, because apparently nothing in the last several weeks had given him reason to smile this broadly. Melati felt a little naive, having taken the expat at face value, not having enough curiosity to try to see beyond how he chose to present himself. She interpreted this as a lack of curiosity on her part, rather than as Otto being intentionally deceptive and withholding his true self.

Her eyes slid off his grinning cheekbones and out the window. She had never been on a passenger jet before, only a few puddle-jumpers and long, dilapidated boats that heaved to one side, when her family had call to visit Bali or Lombok a few years ago. This, however, was almost entirely unlike anything she’d experienced before. The VIP bus up to Surabaya, she’d done that, yes, but she hadn’t been in Juanda International Airport before. It looked like a glimpse of futuristic life, a movie on TV, or what she pictured the rest of the world took for granted. Even though it was an important part of her island, the airport smelled wrong: the heady fumes of jet fuel, the sting of formaldehyde preserving Western clothing for sale in every other shop, and a great preponderance of cleaning fluid like she’d never seen before in her own town. The airport was less a hub connecting Jogjakarta to the world and more an invasion, the colonial outpost of a rapacious mentality of consumption and conversion.

But Otto had insisted on performing in Berlin. He’d made some calls and rattled off a stream of names—“My good friend Karlheinz at Neustart Kultur has been eager to hear from me,” he’d told her, eyes glinting again, “and we can reserve a space for a week at Katapult.”—that he clearly expected to mean something to her. She was happy to see him so happy, but as he got happier she realized that she would be lifted away from her community, buoyed only on his happiness.

Her mother was pleased to see that the girl would get some exposure to the larger world, “the better to hone your appreciation for your own people and heritage.” Not so her father, who wondered aloud whether this was really necessary. He had followed her dancing closely, peeking with one rheumy eye through a dirty window to see the tussle between rasa, German traditionalism, and the influence of hip-hop. As far as he was concerned, Melati was only getting closer to performing with him, father and daughter, for evenings of gamelan, wayang kulit, and bedhaya like no one had seen in a long time. “Just come back to me in one piece,” he urged, cupping her jaw in his wrinkled hands, before hiding himself in his room for a full day until she left.

Otto’s hand clapped to her knee, snapping her out of her reverie. He grinned at her as though expecting her to mirror his excitement, then fumbled with his chest pocket. “Here, you’ll need this for takeoff and landing.” He handed her half a stick of foil-wrapped gum, something that smelled like bananas over the jet exhaust in the cold cabin air.

“Why does it have to be so cold in here?” she asked him. Rather than explain, he half-rose and flagged down a stewardess to ask for a blanket. Embarrassed at the attention and the hassle, Melati tried to swat him back down into his seat, but the German got his way and soon the top half of her was bundled in something more like a shawl than a blanket. He even shut off the direct stream of air shooting at her head, something she had dismissed as an artifact of the plane. This was easy to do: after transitioning from the familiar setting of Surabaya to the glassy, glossy, futuristic interior of the airport, walking aboard this immense plane was tantamount to surrendering herself to the god of technology and the religion of other nations’ culture. She wondered whether she would see her family again, and if she did, whether it would truly be herself who returned from Germany.

When she woke up—she did not recall falling asleep, only Otto rubbing the gooseflesh on her arms—they had touched down at Berlin Brandenberg Airport. If she had been impressed by the international hub in Surabaya, it was nothing to the awe she experienced in this location. Everything was so spacious, everything was at right angles, all the materials were golden wood doing things she’d never seen before, facing off with large, hollow rectangles of concrete or something like it. She saw a large, gold-plated sports car mounted on a glowing dais, then a black car and another one deep-green, all on their little altars. Was the airport so large they needed to race around in it? Apparently not, since there was also a train that drove straight into the building. Just when she was about to pass out from the strange concepts, a familiar sight brought her back down to earth: Otto bought her a cup of coffee at Starbucks, which wasn’t good but it was comforting.

In a taxi they raced out through a brown, crinkly landscape, surprisingly plain after the opulent cathedral of the airport. “Raced” was an understatement: more like they flew too low to the ground up BAB 113 toward Berlin. Melati buried her face in Otto’s shoulder, waiting for a wheel to spin off the car or a cow to stumble in their way, which would surely be the end of all of them. He only chuckled at her, wrapping his strong, warm arms around her shoulders. Her folded hands, under her chin, rested upon his pectoral muscle, through which she could hear his heart beating lazily, uneventfully. That he could take this ungodly speed so naturally, that he thought nothing of those exciting angles and innovative concepts of lighting in the airport … these told Melati even more about the wry, knotted little man who had intruded on her life with his angular dance style and sense of rightness.

Still, she did take comfort in crushing that hard little body between her thighs. That was a pleasant thought, and she let her mind’s eye fly back a week, returning to the sight of his strong little arms, shimmering with her juices, struggling to part her huge, thick labia. The determination with which he widened her vulva, no matter how he slipped and fumbled in her lubrication, really touched and excited her. The little man wanted inside, and she wanted to feel him, give him a good, hard squeeze with her femininity and teach him a lesson.

Soon, the taxi dumped them off at their hotel, and it was Otto’s show abruptly. He jabbered away in his tongue, had someone else grab their bags (of which Melati had only needed one, yet Otto insisted she bring a second for souvenirs), and then they piled into their room, smelling of soap and linen and missing the mosquito spray, but neither did it have any mosquitos, so Melati would learn to adjust. Even more, now, Otto was more Otto and less her dance instructor, as if his own Germanic rasa had been recharged by the environment. He chucked her under the chin, slapped her buttock, and offered her a steady stream of fruit juices, chocolates, snack crackers, time alone in the shower, time with him in the shower, or anything else she could want. “Rest up,” he insisted, “and expect the jet lag to disable you for half a day.” Whatever that meant. In the end, she did let him know that it was okay for him to step out and meet his contacts, while she curled up under a pile of brocaded quilts and tried to block out the stern jabber of the TV set.

She woke up while it was dark out, whether morning or night she couldn’t tell. Otto was not with her, though his folded clothes on the chair across from the bed told her that he’d been here. The TV was off and there was yet another bottle of fruit soda on the nightstand. At least it tasted like real fruit, for which she was grateful. The Western goods she’d had in Jogja all tasted like chemicals, so maybe they hadn’t come from Germany.

Apparently she’d passed out again and Otto, barely able to contain his excitement, had really strained himself by letting her sleep in until 4 p.m. This must be what he meant by jet lag.

They toured the facility at Katapult, which looked both spacious and professional, and like something where children would practice. “This is where we’re dancing tomorrow?”

“Tonight,” he said. “You lost a full day. We have four hours to run through the routine, if we were going to. Rather, I think would be easier on you to give you leave to perform however you’re most comfortable. Exercise your own rasa.” He rubbed her shoulder and stepped away to talk to a tall, lean man in a shirt and pants that hung on him like curtains. Melati was fascinated by his look and could only respond with “yes” and “no” when he wanted to learn about her performance. Otto assured him, “It will be all her tonight. Tomorrow, I will step in and interfere and make her miserable, but tonight I think we should learn more about the girl, as she chooses to teach us.” He winked at her then, which surprised her so much she let out a yelp.

They went out to dinner before the show. He assured her that it was not a fancy repast, but the bone meal soup was much richer than what she was used to. The bread was excellent, however, so much so it almost made her cry. She tried a sip of red wine and found she liked it; he shoved a small shot glass of transparent liquid over to her, but the way he and his friends leered in anticipation told her she’d better not try it. Melati didn’t understand why they all needed to point out how late she’d slept today. If Otto could explain the concept of jet lag to her, surely they could all grasp it as well.

It never occurred to her to be self-conscious about her clothes, but during a quiet moment she looked around the restaurant at how people dressed in Berlin. It was a lot like how the warang asing dressed in Jogja, but more so: more layers, heavier fabrics, longer sleeves and pants, and less color than they displayed back home. She liked her sarong well enough, but she wondered whether it stood out so very badly; she planned to ask Otto tomorrow to take her shopping for jeans, at least.

Melati had felt rushed when Otto asked her a few times whether she was done with her meal, yet everyone else apparently agreed to leave the restaurant at once and show up at the studio before 7 p.m., the time they’d tossed around over her head. Though she didn’t know Otto’s friends very well, their voices were surprisingly stern as they reminded her that they had to be there at 7 p.m. to be ready for the show by 8 p.m. “I’m not a child,” she insisted, understanding their words through Otto’s translation, but if anything their tone tightened toward her. She tried to remember and pronounce their surnames, which was tricky for her as the sounds and patterns eluded her, yet they perpetually reminded her to address them by their given names. Melati couldn’t help but wonder if this trip was a tremendous mistake. Several times she looked to her instructor for advice or support, but he was always turned toward someone else, speaking faster than she’d ever seen him do before.

Katapult stood among a block of stern, identical buildings in light yellow, light orange, and shades of gray. It was difficult for her to imagine people living in these, unlike the open-front homes in her neighborhood, where families lounged in their exposure to their environment. There was one red car parked on the side of the road, practically glowing with individuality in a line of off-white, silver, gray, and black cars as far as she could see. Otto’s friends crowded around him as they walked up the sidewalk and let themselves into the building. She appreciated Karlheinz holding the door open for her, even if he no longer made eye contact with her. Otto introduced Melati to the director of the studio, who clasped her hands together, gave a short bow, and said “namaste.” Melati supposed this was just her personal style.

“Why did we have to rush here,” she asked Otto, when they had a moment alone.

“You were taking your time with your meal,” he said. There was no special tone in his voice, but it sounded like he was assuming she knew something she didn’t.

“I thought you said we had to be here at 7 p.m.”

“Yes, and so we had to hurry to get here by 7 p.m.”

Melati didn’t even know how to frame her question. When something started at 7 p.m., you showed up after that. There was a divide forming between her and her dance instructor, and she didn’t know why.

They examined the room where the performance would take place; already, people who looked like they were dressed for the restaurant were showing up, regarding Melati and her clothes with strange grins. “Should I be wearing something different for the show?” she asked Otto.

“Nein, you’re beautiful, liebchen. Just as you are, that is how you should dress and how you should dance tonight.”

She looked up at the ceiling. “I think I shouldn’t invite the naga tonight.”

He looked up as well, raising his eyebrows. “Perhaps not. Tomorrow’s performance shall be outdoors. I should have thought of this.” He laughed and shrugged, rubbed her shoulder with one strong palm. That gesture, at least, was comforting. “Pardon my forgetting. Sometimes it just doesn’t seem quite real to me, I’m still adjusting.”

The show, unfortunately, did not go so well. Without summoning the naga, it seemed there was little point to her dance, and if there was little point to it, then she need not adhere strictly to bedhaya style. But when she spread her legs, slapped her soles on the floor, and began twerking to the music, the audience did not seem pleased at all. Women conferred with men and Karlheinz guided Otto behind the crowd for a quick discussion. It’s not like it was easy to dance to this musical selection, anyway. Melati hadn’t been consulted, and the house DJ was playing selections of K-pop and Bollywood, which didn’t make sense to her at all. There was no rasa here, with the foreign music and the unhappy people ringing the room. The only remotely familiar thing to this environment were the glossy stone floors, thankfully. She tried to control her breathing and lapsed into the stiff, angular procession of steps that Otto had hammered into her the past few weeks, hoping these would please the attendees. Instead, she caught Otto’s expression in the back of the room. He wasn’t smiling and his eyes no longer glittered. If anything, it looked like he had something important to say to her, but now was not the time.

After an agonizing hour, the show had concluded and the jarring music was stilled. Whatever the attendees were expecting, it was clear they hadn’t received it, as they collected their coats in silence and found other things to look at, in this large, white, spartan room. When they had to walk by Melati, they either wished her goodnight in their own tongue or, weirdly, told her “namaste” like the director. One person slipped an “ooga-booga” at her but turned and left before she could react.

Germans be damned, she needed Otto now. She slipped through two rows of metal folding chairs and grabbed his arm, pulling him away from the red-faced Karlheinz. “What is the meaning of this?” Otto hissed at her, after frantically apologizing to his friend.

“I want to go back to the hotel,” she said. “I feel sick.”

“You should feel sick! What happened in that performance? I couldn’t recognize anything you were doing, except for that ungodly thing with your posterior. I should have forbidden you from those moves. I thought you had more sense than that.”

Melati frowned darkly. “What was that music? We’ve never practiced to anything like that before, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

“You couldn’t use your, your, your rasa to pull you through that Asian musical selection? How different could it be, really?” He chortled, briefly.

She felt like she’d been slapped. Words wouldn’t come to her throat anymore. She turned away and stalked off to where she thought remembered the exits were. Her instructor rushed up from behind, grabbed her arm, and at her glance released it as though it burned him. “What has gotten into you? It’s like you’ve forgotten everything we’ve been working on for all these weeks. Worse, it’s like you’ve forgotten who you are.”

“Why, because I didn’t put on my amusing little show for your gawking friends, staring at the funny little brown girl?”

He took a step back. “Oh, that’s not it at all. They're not like that at all.”

“The music? Namaste? Making me dress up unlike everyone else in the city? This whole night was a disaster, and I don’t think I want to dance here again.”

“We’ve booked three more days! You can’t back out now.” Now, finally, his face melted from the uncharacteristic amusement Berlin brought out in him and stiffened into the scrutinizing, judgmental expression that had followed her around the gymnasium.

“You can’t make me, Otto.” She smiled darkly at him. “You really can’t make me. You know what I mean. I won’t do anything I don’t want to, and no one in this bizarre city can make me.” The idea of kicking in all those glass and concrete buildings was suddenly very appealing.

He nudged up his tiny glasses and sucked a long breath in through his nostrils. “I’ll get us a cab.” He waved off his friend without a second glance and offered Melati his elbow, and they made their way out to the street.

Lights glowed on their faces in bursts as they rode back to the hotel. “I won’t do that again, Otto. That was humiliating. It’s like I was supposed to act like I usually am, but everyone treated me like … I don’t know how to describe it.”

He raised his palm. “Okay, tell me what you need from me.”

She was momentarily overwhelmed by everything that came to mind. “Don’t rush me when I’m eating. If you need me somewhere before 7 p.m., don’t tell me to be there at 7 p.m.”

His eyes blinked behind the little lenses, and slowly he nodded. “When someone gives you their first name, you have to use it.”

“But … they’re older than me.”

He shrugged. “You have to. It’s polite. And when you need something, liebchen, I need you to tell me what that is.”

“You know me well enough by now.”

“Melati, please.” He pinched her chin and turned her toward me. “That’s not how we work here. I need you to tell me, clearly.”

“I’ll try to remember.” She pouted and watched the boxy, washed out buildings sailing past the window. “And we need to talk about the music. What the hell was that.”

She felt his warm palm clasp her thigh, and she rested her hand upon his.