A few minutes were spent lazily watching the bolt and sitting side by side when Lizzie got a notification from her phone. Dispelling the electricity between my palms, I peeked when she took it out to look; It was just an email from one of her subscription services that had no important information. She sighed, staring at the fifteen-percent battery. “I need to charge it…” she said, before cutting herself off mid-sentence, wide-eyed.

            Uh-oh.

            She turned so violently with her phone in her palm that she practically jammed it right into my chest. “Wait, can you- Oh, sorry!” She rubbed the area where the phone made contact—as though it would help—while I just leaned back slightly, very startled. “Can you charge it? With like… powers?”

            Any skepticism that instinctively rose to my breath to counter her possible claim died the moment when I remembered the already ridiculous things I had done thus far. It boggled me just how quick my mind went from “no way” to “fuck it”. Besides, if she was right, this would easily be the most practical use of my powers thus far. With a hum of curiosity, I grabbed her phone from her reach and studied it for a moment, staring particularly at the small slot where the charging cable entered. I tried to imagine how it would work, picturing myself replacing the charger with an index finger. Awkwardly, I placed a finger at the end of the phone, jamming it as far as the skin in my finger would contort into the outlet.

            Something in my brain clicked.

            With unexplained confidence, I pushed electricity into the finger and pushed it through my skin and into the open air between the edge of my finger and the receiving end of the outlet. I couldn’t see the path that the miniature bolt was taking after leaving my finger, but I somehow knew it found the right home. The phone’s screen brightened, and the battery indicator lit up charging. Lizzie cheered in excitement. It had worked.

            Then we both gasped.

            The percentage estimate of battery life on the screen was rising rapidly.

            In the span of five seconds, the number increased until it stopped at three digits. A number you’re not supposed to see outside of a full night’s rest of charging. When that happened, I hardly noticed my finger instinctively shutting off the power it was granting and letting the electricity just lie dormant. In my hand lay Lizzie’s now fully charged phone. She slowly took it from my now open palm and examined it. I had mildly worried that the sudden burst in electricity would cause some the phone to be hot, but she didn’t react as if that were the case. She quickly opened several apps and closed them to see if any of them affected the indicator, but it stayed locked at one-hundred percent battery. “Holy…” she said.

            “I… Wow…” I whispered.

            I wasn’t sure how I felt about this new revelation. On the one hand, I’d never need a phone charger ever again. On the other hand, I was getting more concerned with the power I was starting to display. Slowly the fears of imagining someone discovering my secret resurfaced, and especially the level of power I was starting to rise to concerned me. What would happen if I was discovered? By some random person? By my family? What if I was recorded? What if someone with a ton of power wanted my power for themselves? Would anyone be powerful enough to stop them? Would I?

            “You’re hyperventilating,” Lizzie observed, putting her phone down on the table between the beds.

            “Am I?” I said, trying to compose myself.

            “I’m exaggerating a little. How are you feeling?”

            “Overwhelmed,” I admitted. “There’s too many emotions in my brain at once right now. Excitement, nervousness, paranoia, awe, disbelief, you get the idea.”

            “How did you even know how to do that?” she asked, head tilted to the side.

            That was the other big thing that bothered me. Somehow when pushing my finger up to the phone’s outlet, the understanding of what I was supposed to do came instinctively and out of nowhere. It hadn’t been a conscious thought, I just… knew. The more and more I practiced my powers, the more it became clear that my abilities were based on instinct. I had a strange understanding of my electricity, and whenever I put it into action, I was somehow able to predict the outcome of what I needed it to do. Part of me wondered if the electricity inside my body had a mind of its own. It certainly felt like it was calling out me earlier, both in the cage and the dreams that followed. If I had to describe the way I used my powers, it would be through mental commands. I would tell it to go to my arm, and it would obey without question. Did it have the ability to resist? If it did, it didn’t seem like it ever wanted to. And those sudden realizations of what to do with my powers… were those ideas my own? I didn’t have an understanding of the inner workings of a phone, yet I almost just trusted that the electricity I sent through the phone would go to the right place. How much of that was me? “I don’t know,” I told her. “I can’t really explain it.”

            She watched my troubled expression and parted her lips. “We can take a break if you want. I don’t mean to overwhelm you, I’m just… I’m really excited about all this.”

            I looked over my girlfriend’s concerned face and once again felt undeserving of her care. She was willing to put aside all of her excitement just to make sure I was alright, and it touched me. But the thing was, her excitement was too infectious to ignore. My worries melted away yet again. The electricity in my body kept my energy up to a maximum. Like the flick of a switch, I was fired up all over again. “No, I can keep going,” I said confidently. “What’s next?”

            The rest of the night Lizzie and I spent testing out all sorts of wild theories on what I could do, with far more success than what should’ve been possible for her ideas. Not every idea worked to perfection, I couldn’t change the color of the bolts I produced from my hands, I couldn’t make my body glow, I couldn’t suspend electric bolts in the air and hold them in place without support (ruining her weird idea of writing my name with electricity in the air), and I couldn’t suck the light out of a light bulb.

            Nearly everything else was an unexpected success. While taking light away from a light bulb wasn’t possible, I found that I could absorb the battery of a phone (Lizzie offered her own) and replenish it just as fast. We then found that I could take the power from the batteries of the remote from the hotel and transfer it to the phone. We found a way to produce a ball of electricity in my palm, though we were both too scared to see what would happen should it separate from my hands. The best I could do was to pass it between my hands without throwing it. Lizzie theorized I could become a human magnet, and we had all sorts of fun sticking metals and other things to my arm, and then watching me repel them away at blinding speeds. We then tried the reverse, to see how far away I could be while still having a magnetic pull toward the object. We tested with a magnetic pen that Lizzie had brought with her, placing it further and further away from me until I could no longer get its pull. The issue was we never found a limit, as I found that if I focused on the pen in particular, I could direct a magnetic flow from across the room so that it would fly into my hand. This power proved to be our favorite for a long time, as Lizzie then started chucking the pen around the room, and I seemed to catch it in midair to zoom it into my grip. When Lizzie suggested I try pushing it somewhere instead of pulling it, I started flying the pen around the room with just the gesture of a hand. With only one thing left to test, I tried balancing the two, trying to both push and pull simultaneously, or at least push or pull in opposing directions. The result was a pen floating in midair.

            Unbelievably, after the night was over, I had discovered I had telekinesis.

            The amount of control I had was unbelievable. I was able to turn the pen around midair, click it open, and have enough stability to cleanly write on Lizzie’s journal. At first, my handwriting was messy, but with enough practice it looked similar to my normal handwriting. We then tested the ability on other magnetic items, and before long I was juggling the keys on my keychain around in the air. My gestures toward the keys were needless, as we quickly found out when Lizzie snuck around behind me and tried to throw the pen over my shoulder. I had managed to stop it in midair with just a thought. I had lost my concentration on the keys but caught them too without reaching an arm out.

            Unfortunately, the telekinesis didn’t extend to items made from non-magnetic items, as we found out trying to get a wooden chair to slide across the room. Not only that, some items like metals that were non-magnetic were immune as well (“Quarters are non-magnetic?” Lizzie had said, verifying on her phone. “I never knew!”). What did work, much to our surprise, was anything electronic. We discovered the ability by accident; We tried to get one of my car keys to hit the light switch off when I frustratedly gestured downward and the switch flicked itself off without the keys touching it. Startled, I rapidly flicked the switch on and off mentally, much to her brief but playful annoyance. She offered her phone again, and I carefully lifted it off the bed into the air. The feeling was somewhat different. For magnetic items, it felt like I was manipulating the magnetic field around them to push against some invisible force to go where I wanted. While there were some magnets in the phone, it felt more like I was taking the existing electricity flow within the phone’s circuits, and almost making them push the phone somehow. It took more concentration, albeit not enough to exhaust me mentally. I turned the phone around, so the screen faced us in midair, and I mentally tried hitting the power button on the side. The screen lit up, and Lizzie laughed in amazement. “Wait, I want to take a picture from afar, I’ll set up a timer real quick.”

            Hmm… I wonder…

            The more I experimented with my abilities, the more our roles reversed. Lizzie was becoming the audience, and I was becoming the conductor. Now I was the one coming up with ideas on the spot, and I happened to have an interesting one. When Lizzie reached toward her phone, I flew it away from her. “Hey!” she said, with a half-amused smile on her face. I didn’t look back, instead deciding to concentrate on the phone’s screen carefully. If this works…

            Lizzie’s jaw dropped when the phone seemingly swiped upward all on its own. She stammered and looked back to me, as I tried to hold in my composure and laughter. I squinted to focus on the screen, holding out a finger as if tapping on the screen from afar, and I slowly entered Lizzie’s passcode. Navigating to the camera app, I gestured over to her to join me in a picture with the goofiest grin on my face. Her bewildered expression was golden, and I snuck an early picture of it while she wasn’t looking. “How are you even doing that?” she exclaimed. “Are you, like, projecting your fingerprint onto the phone?”

            I grabbed her jittery hands and lowered her to the bed next to me, keeping a side-eye view of the phone to keep it airborne. “No, I don’t think so. I was trying to remember how a touch screen works, and something in my brain told me it was electrical in nature so I just… tried pressing mentally on the screen.”

            Her face was full of amazement. “You are so hot right now.”

            “Smile!” I smirked.

            We took several pictures from afar, finding weird angles and making weird faces the entire way. Our antics made me feel five years younger, not caring about anyone or anything, just having a blast and just generally being incredibly silly. When we took a break to look at the album we had concocted, I didn’t see any of the stress of the last two days on either of our faces. I saw two people, young, having fun, fully embracing who they were. I didn’t look at pictures of myself often but looking at my face in these made me realize that I hadn’t looked this happy in years. And one only had to look at the other person in the photos to know why. Lizzie’s face shone brighter in these photos and in the last two hours than I’d ever seen it before. I always said her smile was infectious, but this kind of joy was angelic. Her presence could cure depression. Her love would be eternal.

            I looked at the real angel, who still seemed enamored with the pictures. As I watched her eyes sparkle, as I watched her laugh, I realized just how much I loved her. I could tell Lizzie anything, and she would be there to comfort me, to love me, to cherish me. I trusted her wholeheartedly. I valued her honest opinions. I welcomed her warm embrace. And when she finally looked up and returned my loving stare, I had only one thought going through my mind.

            I’m going to marry this woman.

            It was a private thought. Even though our hands were locked, I didn’t send the thought over to her head. But I didn’t need to. Sometimes you just get so familiar with someone that you know exactly what they’re thinking. And judging from her expression, her gorgeous smile, her sparkling hazel eyes, her steady yet excited breaths, I already knew that she had somehow, someway, thought the exact same thing at the exact same time.

            I was going to marry this woman.

            And she was going to say yes.

            For a while, there was silence, just two lovebirds sharing breaths. Two sets of eyes studying each other. Her smile glistened, my dimples widened. Then unexpectedly, Lizzie broke into a laugh, breaking the trance and leaving me startled, but still in heaven. “Waitwaitwait, I just thought of a couple of other ideas for pictures.”

            The pictures resumed, and we were kids again. Then we started kissing each other while taking photos. Then we were kissing each other, and we forgot about the photos. Then we abandoned our clothes and forgot about everything.

            It wasn’t our first time by any means. But we had just taken our relationship to a new level, and we were ready to show off just how bonded we were. Never before was our embrace so magnetic. Never before was our love so magical, both figuratively and literally. Just like I had been all night, I let the strange foreign electricity in my body do the work. I couldn’t tell you what happened that night. All I know is that that night was the best night I’d ever have in my life.