Discouragement was clear on her face. Alex squeezed her hand and shook his head in joking disbelief. “After all that? You got – wait a minute” – he counted on his fingers – “one, two, three, four, five kisses out of me? And the aura work isn’t even going well?”

She grinned, and pressed close to him again. “So sue me,” she murmured against his lips.

My psychic skills had always come so effortlessly that I’d thought disguising my aura would be easy too, once Seb explained it to me. It wasn’t – just seeing my aura took practice at first. It seemed so unnatural to even notice it, like being awakened by your own snores. After three days, I could finally bring my aura easily into view, but now trying to change it made me feel like I was in the second grade attempting advanced calculus. And for Seb it was all so simple – not to just see his aura, but to then sort of mentally grasp it, changing its colours with his thoughts.

“You have to be friends with it,” he said for about the dozenth time. “Be simpático.”

We were down in the exercise room again, where Seb sat straddling the weight machine. Stubble covered his firm jaw; he’d apparently taken me at my word about the shaving thing. All he needed now was a leather jacket and screaming groupies, though that would be so un-Seb-like as to be completely unreal.

I nodded, determined to get it this time. “All right. Let me try again.”

Perched cross-legged on a sofa cushion, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. My aura swam into my mind’s eye. I sat still, noticing the way it radiated out from my body: buoyant when I was happy, drawing in closely if I was upset. It was kind of medium-sized now, with a focused sense that matched my own. I watched its lavender lights drifting through the silver...and then I mentally reached out, frowning as I strove to catch hold of it.

Blue, I told it. You need to be sky-blue now.

The aura in my mind’s eye stayed calm, intent...and silver. As usual. Opening my eyes, I gazed at it glumly.

There was a creak from the weight machine as Seb got up. “Maybe we should try something different,” he said. The sofa cushion dipped as he settled next to me; as always, a pleasurable tingle went through me at the mingling of our auras. “Just feel what I’m doing, yes?”

As we sat there together, I could sense Seb’s light concentration, so different from my own grim focus. His state of mind was almost like an afterthought, or daydreaming. Gently, he nudged his aura; I felt it shiver as the colours he was imagining swept through it. Green. Then a dull grey. Green again. Silver.