“Dance with me, baby,” Cyrus had said as the singer returned to the stage for an encore. He stood and held out his arms for Izzy to join him, his head cocked to the side so his hair fell into his smiling face.

“I don’t dance,” she said, but she stood anyway, her limbs longer and more awkward than ever.

He put his hands on her hips, and she draped her arms around his shoulders and leaned her face into the base of his neck where she could feel his pulse beating with the rhythm of the music below them and the stars in the amphitheater above. Cyrus and Izzy swayed like that, among the pine trees, in the distant light of the city where they had vowed to someday return.

“I worship at your altar,” Cyrus whispered.

As he kissed Izzy, she felt a chill run through her like wind under the door of the desert shack on the coldest of nights. The chill was not simply from his kiss or from the singer’s voice. That bucolic summer evening in the trees above the amphitheater, in the city they both dreamed of as their sanctuary, their escape, Izzy experienced the distinct sensation that someone was watching them from the trees. But no one ever appeared and she realized it was just the darkness inside her that followed her everywhere, even to this city she loved.

Later, Izzy had seen an image on the internet of the singer taken from the stage below. It was probably a doctored image, but it intrigued Izzy just the same. The fearlessness of the woman, naked beneath her dress. An apotropaic symbol warding off death and evil, a talisman to enter another world. Sheela na gig like the stone woman, heavy and cool in Izzy’s pocket.

But that magic hadn’t protected Izzy from Cyrus’s leaving. Maybe she shouldn’t have ignored the darkness she’d felt that night in LA. Maybe it was trying to tell her something, even then. But it was too late now.

She turned her focus on Ever again. “I listen to a lot of nineties music,” she told him. “Our friend Ted turned us on to it. My friend,” she corrected herself.

“Music is life.”

“I agree. But why, do you think?” She’d asked Cyrus this once, lying on a rock, still warm from the day, looking up at the stars.

He had said, “It drowns out the sound of bombs going off in my head,” before taking her into an embrace as warm as the stone on which they lay.

“It combats oblivion,” Ever said now. “Also, it proves to me that souls exist.”

“How?”

“Because when I listen, or when I play, I can feel my soul in my body,” Ever said.

Sex does that, too, she thought.