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robotlearnstolove · 17 hours

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2024-04-26

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Her thoughts swirled as her consciousness spun as she followed what she knew was a precarious path. Each heartbeat pushed a new feel through her body. Each step bounced her mind somewhere new. She forced herself to keep moving away from— away from—

Distracted and aimless, she failed to notice an oncoming passerby. For a moment, her aura intersected them. The brief intrusion of someone else in her consciousness hit her hard, a blow that cut straight into her skull, stopping her dead in her tracks, reeling, nauseated. As she doubled over, another person walked through her bubble from behind as they cut closely around her.

Her head now in agony, she fell straight onto her side. Winded by the fall, she reflexively tried to inhale and exhale at the same time, resulting in a brief choke, a gasp and a fit of coughs. In the tumult, she lost whatever tenuous grip she’d had on her aura.

The air around her immediately became hot, like the air that radiated from an iron stove, and it began to move around her in a tight circle around her head. Within a second, it was a breeze and, within another, it was like wind.

It happened so fast that Teele had no opportunity to react.

Rushing air and light roared around her. She felt the crowd around her disperse. She felt the immediate fear surge within every nearby. She felt their pain as the hot air scalded their skin, as the light and sound overwhelmed their senses as they jostled, knocked and stepped over one another in panic.

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robotlearnstolove · 2 days

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2024-04-25

Leadership

Paraé’s heart felt both heavy and separate from herself, as though it was dragging behind her. In her mentor’s absence, she felt the burden of every decision she made accumulate on her shoulders. She’d wandered into the forest seeking peace. She’d left the others because she needed to find a place to heal. But she found none of it. She couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t sit still.

Every gram of her self cried out for her to let go, to flee, to abandon everyone and everything that now depended on her.

“You’re not going to leave us now,” said a familiar voice close behind her.

Paraé jumped. This was the third time she’d let her guard down. If she kept letting her dread consume her attention, she was going to end up dead very soon.

She spun around, unsurprised to find herself nose to nose with Jamelle. Her heart heaved as she looked into those sombre, serious and inescapably beautiful eyes. Like her statement, Jamelle’s expression and stance were full of confidence. It hadn’t been a command or a question or anything other than simple, honest statement of truth.

And that confidence was well-earned. Jamelle knew her better than most, perhaps better than anyone. Even when she was in the midst of her own crisis, Jamelle could tell where she was headed and how she would find her way through it.

It was too much for her. It didn’t just crack Paraé, it broke her in half, shattered her. With a definite sob, she slithered downward, first to her knees and then sat sideways on the ground.

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robotlearnstolove · 3 days

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2024-04-24

Urban Forest Trail

The sun had just started peeking over the treeline and the cool morning air already felt warmer. Efrain, having pulled his bicycle over to the side of the paved trail, stared up the trail that ran straight into the forest. He took a long drink from his water bottle. Even though he was still only a twenty or so metres from the highway, the clamour of passing cars already seemed more distant. When he was done drinking, he clipped the bottle back onto the frame, pushed himself forward with one foot and mounted.

As he got going, he stood up on his bike, shifting the weight of his body left and right, through one leg and then the other, putting as much force as he possibly could into each downward stroke of the pedals. Then, once he’d picked up a decent amount of speed, he sat back on his seat and let himself coast for a few seconds he resumed pedalling just hard enough to maintain his speed. The asphalt bike trail that ran through the urban forest was new, barely a year old and, as such, it felt as though he was gliding along. It was undeniably more pleasant that cycling on the edge of the road where he often had to contend with potholes, cracks, bumps and all the winter grit and dust that never seemed to quite get cleaned up.

He mostly kept his eyes forward, watching the black pavement as it disappeared under his wheels, seemingly moving faster and faster as it got close. Sometimes, his gaze would dart out into the dense foliage that bordered the trail, his attention momentarily capture by the movement of a small bird or rodent.

Oncoming cyclists zipped past him in blurs of brightly coloured helmets and spandex. This early in the morning, the trail was mostly inhabited by the hardcore cycling enthusiasts. He passed a decent number of joggers too. When passing a dog walker, he would slow himself down a little and give them a wide berth.

After roughly half an hour, he arrived at the other highway, pulled over and stopped for another drink of water, noting that, when he was done, the bottle was only about a quarter full. His heartbeat was elevated but not racing. He could feel it pulsing gently in his wrists, chest and neck and he gave himself a satisfactory nod of approval. Health-wise, he’d come a long way in the past three years and he was proud of that achievement.

On the spot, Efrain turned himself and his bike back toward the forest trail, his back to the noisy highway traffic once again. He felt lucky to have found this place. Even though it had taken him half his life to discover it, being able to exercise in nature had been the key for him all along. And now, at least in the snowless months, he took this particular trail almost daily and loved every minute of it.

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robotlearnstolove · 3 days

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2024-04-23

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As she stepped out into the sunlight, into the afternoon breeze and the into all the distant sounds of the city, she staggered a little. Outside, there was just so much more to sense that it hurt, much in the same way that it hurt to look directly at the sun. For the first few moments, it was so overpowering that she came very near to losing her balance entirely. A timid voice in the back of her mind tried to remind her that she had been trained to pull back when she felt overwhelmed.

Teele refused.

She stood up tall, first, pushing though the pain, then, intensifying her aura until the it no longer even registered as pain. She’d already come this far. And, deep down, she knew that, while she had blown past the breadth of her experience, she was still nowhere near her limit. She wasn’t even sure she knew how to pull herself back at this point. Her hands and legs were trembling.

She took one shaky step forward and breathed in. Then, she took another and breathed out. After the fifth, she stopped counting. By the time she reached the gate, she was no longer paying attention to her breath. She was a little less shaky. As she had with the door, she opened the gate telekinetically, marvelling at the ease with which the heavy iron bars slid aside even though she had only applied a small fraction of her strength. If she tried, it was likely she could tear apart the entire wall all the way down to its stone foundations.

Unsurprisingly, the street was as busy as it had been when she arrived. As the gate closed behind her, she turned left, heading west. Her fingers were still trembling but walking had become easier. As much as possible and with great difficulty, she avoided letting herself get too close to anyone else. Luckily, the people who spotted her halo also avoided her.

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robotlearnstolove · 5 days

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2024-04-22

The Winter Traveller

Falomi took a piece of wood from the pile and tossed it into the hearth that kept this one room of their house warm through the winter. As the log quickly caught fire, his eyes bounced around what they had come to call their winter home. First, they shot toward the stranger who sat by the fire, then back to the fire and finally exchanging a bewildered look with Ramih, who was sitting a couple of metres behind the stranger.

The house had gone quiet since the children had gone to bed. Falomi could tell that his wife’s mind was bubbling with all the same questions as his. However, neither of them seemed able to find the space to ask. Most frustrating was the fact that, there was no place they could go to discuss things privately unless they were willing to stand outside and freeze.

The biggest question, the one that neither of them seemed to be able to figure out exactly how to ask, was how a person, seemingly alone and unequipped for the cold, had managed to survive the Biboton road in the middle of winter. It seemed impossible. In the summer, the amount of travellers passing through town on their way to or from Hallium numbered in the thousands. As far as they knew, however, no one had dared even attempt the crossing during the winter when the wastewind was cold enough to kill in a matter of minutes.

Falomi also desperately wanted the stranger to repeat his name but that also seemed rude to ask at this point. He had already shared it twice now, once when he’d first met Falomi and once when he’d first met Ramih, but, both times, Falomi had been unable to understand it. The pronunciation was deep and guttural and the stranger spoke with an accent that altogether unfamiliar. Living in Biboton, he had met and spoken with people from every corner of the world and yet he had never met anyone quite like this stranger before.

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robotlearnstolove · 6 days

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2024-04-21

Two Hundred

Daisy had been up since four in the morning. When her alarm had rung, she immediately jumped out of bed without bothering to make it or even throw the blanket back over the sheets. She remembered how cold it had felt, walking to the kitchen in her underwear. She remembered how strange it had felt to be in the kitchen with her hair loose and messy all around her head. Before doing anything else, she turned the dial on her small apartment-sized oven, setting it to three hundred and fifty degrees.

It was now almost noon and, although she was now dressed, wearing an apron and had her hair tightly tied back, the little oven was still running at three fifty. The entire apartment was hot and humid. Every free surface in the kitchen and living room, every tabletop, shelf and desk, was occupied by some measure of the project. There was just one portion of the kitchen counter that was kept unobstructed. It was her working area, her rolling space. Eternally dusted with flour, it was the place where the crusts were made.

The rest of the space was effectively being used as storage. The kitchen table was the cooling station where the cherry pies went when they came out of the oven. It was an old metal table she had bought for twenty dollars at a thrift store so she felt no qualms about putting hot pies directly on in. The other surfaces — the coffee table, the desk and the bookshelves — they were being used to store the cooled pies. At this point, many of them had been put into boxes so that they could be stacked in groups of six and tied together with twine.

There were empty cherry filling cans stacked by the front door, rinsed and ready to be taken out to the communal recycling bin.

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robotlearnstolove · 8 days

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2024-04-19

Greener, Brighter

Deliberately, Della walked against the foliage that protruded from the garden, letting the leaves gently brush against her right side and run through her extended fingers. She shivered as the light cotton skirt of her dress, now damp with cold morning dew, brushed against her bare leg. Her hand got wet too but she kept moving until she arrived at the fence.

Amos caught up with her there as she was lightly blotting her hand against the fabric that covered her stomach.

“Why’d you do that?” he asked. He wore a bemused expression. “Your dress is all wet.”

“It’ll dry,” said Della. She pointed her tongue at him.

Amos reached out to take her hand but she skipped backwards with a coy smile. Her dress billowed around her in the cool morning air. She turned away from him and began briskly walking back across the garden. It was still early in the season so it was still mostly greenery with just a few flowers opening here and there. Within a week or two, there would be many more.

“Where are you going?” Amos called after her.

Wherever I want, Della’s thoughts replied.

“Over here,” replied her voice.

In the course of less than a month, the garden had gone from snowed over, through brown, dull and lifeless and had finally become green again. Della was uplifted by the return of colour, a green made greener by its absence. After living in its absence for several long, aching months, she knew it was inevitable but felt like it was impossible. Even without all of its flowers, the perennial garden was beautiful to her and she wanted to lose herself in it.

Amos was probably still following her, worried about one thing or another. He was always anxious, always fretting. Sometimes, Della fretted with him. Sometimes, they dragged each other down and held themselves at the bottom where it felt like they could be safe.

But not today. Today wasn’t a day for surviving. Earnestly, she wanted to thrive in the spring and the sunlight and she wanted him to thrive alongside her.

Della turned and looked back toward Amos and smiled. To her surprise, he smiled back. It was weak at first but it strengthened as understanding blossomed in his eyes.

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robotlearnstolove · 10 days

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2024-04-17

Fireside at Dusk

The fire in the rusted iron box crackled in the centre of the campsite, occasionally throwing a burst of sparks up into the evening sky. With the sun long gone, the sky had darkened to the point that, if one were to look upward, they would only just make out the shapes of the treetops against the dark blue. The fire, which was quickly becoming the only source of light in sight, cast its flickering orange light onto the tents, the car, the picnic table and onto the faces of the three people who sat around it.

The three friends sat around the fire in a near perfect circle, each of them sitting roughly the same distance from one another. None of them had planned or even noticed this symmetry in the same way, ten year prior, none of them had planned to still be friends and go on this camping trip together. Like most things in life, it was just the way things had ended up because things always ended up somewhere.

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robotlearnstolove · 12 days

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2024-04-15

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Teele felt her entire body surge with emotion as, once again, her aura leapt out of her. This time, it only enveloped the two of them. This time, she expanded more intensely than first time, more powerfully than she’d ever pushed herself before. She felt the temperature around them rise by at least a couple of degrees.

Her vision blurred to a white haze as a halo of cold light materialized around her head, obscuring her vision slightly. To her mother, it probably looked like a spherical cloud pulsating, swirling and writhing around Teele’s face. To Teele, it was inconsequential. At this strength, her mind was able feel every atom of matter around her. She could sense the disturbances that were sound and light. She could have counted all of the bones in either of their bodies. In this state she didn’t need any of her mundane senses.

Contemptuously, she screamed, “I’m seventeen, Mother!” the words booming out of her mouth like a thunder clap.

She hadn’t exactly meant to project the sound of her voice like that. She felt the words vibrate uncomfortably through her and could tell from the look on her mother’s face that she felt it too. Practically in unison, both of them reflexively put their hands over their ears. In her mind, Teele felt the sound of her voice reverberated deeply into the walls, ceiling and floor of the house around them over and over as the sound echoed around the house.

Enforcement or the Academy Masters or the entire Hallian guard would surely be here to arrest her any minute now. She was not in control of the situation. She barely felt in control of her own body. And yet, somehow, she didn’t care. They couldn’t kill her without risking a catastrophic collapse.

As the echoes died down, Teele lowered her hands and stood up tall. Her mother staggered backwards from her, still covering her own, almost cowering. Teele drew her aura inward, taking grim satisfaction in the terror she felt within her mother as she did.

With her ears still ringing from her aureally enhanced shout and aura held in a tight sphere around her own body, Teele descended the last steps. She walked right past her mother, all the way to the front door. She didn’t lift her hands. She didn’t slow down. The door opened just in time for her to walk through it and closed gently behind her.

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robotlearnstolove · 13 days

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2024-04-14

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“Did you?” Teele interrupted. She was surprised when she heard the demanding reverberations of her voice in the hallway and stairway. She hadn’t meant to shout but she didn’t really regret it either.

For a few seconds, her mother stared at her with a furrowed brow and narrowed eyes. “I did,” she explained confidently. “This is my house and I can go into any of your rooms if I want to. Tell me, what’s gotten into you? You come home unannounced with a ridiculous haircut and start yelling at me over nothing.”

Teele fumed. Her hands were shaking. Her jaw hurt. Why was Mother behaving as if she didn’t already know?

She struggled to keep her voice level as she choked out, “There are books missing from my bookshelf.”

“Oh,” said Mother, sounding almost disappointed. “Is that all this is about?”

“Where are they?” asked Teele, tears welling in her eyes. She was suddenly unsure whether she was about to fly into another fit of rage or crumple into a sobbing mess.

“While I was in there, I noticed you still had a lot of old children’s books on your shelf. You’re too old for them so I had Gomin bring them to the charity house in the lower West Quarter.” Mother said all of this plainly, without remorse and in a tone that made Teele feel as though she was the one who had done something wrong. “I can’t imagine that you’re this worked up over a few books. You know that we’re the ones who purchased them in the first place.”

Teele was barely holding on. Slowly, her tears fell. She wanted to rebuke everything her mother had said, pick apart her arguments, force her to acknowledge her transgression. All she managed to say, however, was, “Then why the fuck did you leave dad’s old collection of children’s stories?”

Mother laughed, “My dear, that book is an antique. You know it was printed in the Old Kingdom. It’s incredibly valuable. Besides, what do you know? You’re only thirteen.”

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robotlearnstolove · 15 days

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2024-04-12

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She’d been so caught up in herself that, for a second, she had no reaction. However, the calm didn’t last very long.

This time, the surge of emotion was instantaneous. All rationality, every gram of guilt and fear she’d been experiencing was drowned in the flood.

Too overwhelmed to speak, she took a slow step down the stairs. Then another.

“You look different. You cut your hair so short,” said Mother the tone that never failed to aggravate Teele. It was superficially jovial. It sounded both forced and false. She hated the way her mother could switch from lashing out one minute to pretending everything was fine the next.

After several more quick steps, she was almost at the bottom of the stairs and stopped on the second last step. She stared downward with an acrimonious look. There was less than a metre between their eyes but most of that distance was vertical.

“Did you go into my room when I was gone?” With some difficulty Teele managed to speak the words both slowly and clearly.

Mother didn’t stammer; she replied confidently, “Well good afternoon to you too, Tee—”

it’s not over yet→

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robotlearnstolove · 16 days

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2024-04-11

Croissants

His hands moving quickly, Aric took the croissants from the ugly, parchment-lined sheet trays and arranged them on the clean, shiny ones meant for the front display. These pans had never gone into the oven or the dish machine and so they lacked the countless dents, scratches and burned residue in the corners that the working ones had. Each time he filled a pan, he loaded it onto the rolling rack to his right.

At this point, the work was more or less automatic for him. He went through the plain ones, then the chocolate ones, then the mixed berry ones without really thinking about what he was doing. Between each pan, he glanced at the clock. This close to the end of his shift, all he could think about was the hot bath and three hour nap that waited for him when he got back to his apartment. The best part was, now that he was renting one of the suites in the same building as the bakery, it took him less than a minute to get home. It was, by far, the easiest commute of his life.

As he started transferring the almond croissants, he continued to mentally plot out the rest of his day. After his nap, he was going to meet up with his friend Carolyn for lunch at the coffee shop on Main which was actually called The Coffee Shop on Main. Mirthfully, he reminisced over the way he and his friends had made fun of this seemingly unimaginative name when they had first opened their shop. However, this mockery had quickly died down when they discovered that they were serving the absolute of the best coffee in their little town. Recently, they had expanded into serving food and had even announced their intent to start roasting their own coffee beans.

With the almond croissants done, he started on the last two pans which were ham and cheese. These were the most popular items on their menu and were often sold out within the first couple hours after they opened.

The last time Carolyn had visited, she had disbelievingly bemoaned the lack of a good coffee shop in their small prairie town. She’d lived her entire life in a big city on the West Coast so this was an amenity she’d come to expect. Aric was excited to show her all of the new and cool places that had opened around town since her last visit, three years prior. She hadn’t even seen the bakery yet as it had only been open for the past year or so.

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robotlearnstolove · 17 days

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2024-04-10

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In an instant, she drew it all back, folding her aura inward until, once again all she could feel was her own body and feelings. She still felt angry but her emotions were no longer driving her forward. She stopped and stood in the middle of the staircase, completely still. Her thoughts cleared, she reflected on her actions and contemplated her options.

She knew definitively that her parents and sisters were all insensitive and, although he’d never been formally tested, Gomin had never given any indication that he could feel the presence of other people’s auras. As for the two new servants, however, she had no idea. She’d unfolded pretty strongly and, if they were aura-sensitive, she probably would have felt them react to her intense presence over their minds.

Despite all of this, she had still overstepped as far as the rules for undergraduate Aureals were concerned. Outside of the Academy, undergraduates were allowed and even encourage to extend their auras weakly over distances of one or two metres to improve focus, perform manual tasks or help with physical training. However, her accidental push had not been weak and it had encompassed a fifty metre disc around her.

Her heart started racing. She had no idea how or even whether she would be reprimanded for this transgression. She hadn’t harmed or even attempted to harm anyone. But if Aureal Enforcement had detected her outburst, would they send and enforcer or even several to confront her? Would she be be taken to the Towers for questioning? Or would they turn her over to the Masters at the Academy?

She heard Master Ania’s voice in her head, “Every time you extend your aura, you must first have awareness of your intent.” It was a phrase she’d heard countless times. She had no idea what her intent had been. She’d carried by her anger over the things that were missing from her room. Had she been intending to restrain her mother? Surely, she hadn’t been wanting to cause her any harm.

She felt a chill run through her body. She should run away. She should go back to her room. She should go to the Towers and turn herself in. Volunteer to attend extra therapy sessions and get her emotions under control. Her hands were clammy and there was sweat on her brow.

But before she could even decide what she was going to do, “I didn’t know you were home,” came Mother’s voice from the bottom of the stairs.

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robotlearnstolove · 18 days

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2024-04-09

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Before she knew it was even happening, Teele’s mind escaped the confines of her body.

She felt her mother’s presence in the kitchen, standing upright and gesturing animatedly. She immediately sensed her mother’s intense anger but was surprised to discover an equal level of fear intermeshed with it.

There were three other conscious minds in the kitchen, close to her mother’s. One of them was familiar; she recognized Gomin’s mind, attentive and mildly annoyed. Of all the servants they’d had throughout Teele’s childhood, he was the only one who always stuck around mother scared the others away with her volatile temper.

She guessed that the other two people were servants that had been hired sometime in the last six months because she didn’t recognize them. Their minds were full of fear and doubt. They were certainly questioning their decision to work in this household.

Father wasn’t present in the house but Hakte and Jada were both in their respective rooms. And, much like Teele had been a minute prior they were both having the same struggle with keeping their minds occupied while they laid low and avoided mother’s ire.

As her aura strayed outside the confines of the house and all the way passed the stout brick wall that encircled the property, her mind touched the grass and the trees that made up their small urban orchard. She felt the elaborate decorative garden and all the flowers and vines and every leaf stalk that grew there.

Her aura continued to intensify and she felt the wind outside and the cool air currents blowing through the open windows of the house. An intense coal fire smouldered in the kitchen, throwing heat and smoke up the chimney. Hakte had a candle burning in her room. More books in the library. All of the things in her own room. The furniture. The lanterns and chandeliers. The stone and wood in the walls around her. The carpet over the wood of the stairs under her feet. Her own body. The heat in her cheeks. Her own anger, rising.

Teele’s focus was everywhere at once and she took it all in and held it. Far from overwhelmed, she was hungry for more.

And then, she caught herself, realized what she was doing and what she had done.

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robotlearnstolove · 19 days

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2024-04-08

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While her room was still indelibly hers in her mind, she realized that it no longer felt like home to her in the way that it once had. Now that she was living at the school for most of the year, her dormitory room had become the real home to her.

Several times, as she sat and stared at her pretense, her attention wandered back to the bookshelf. Eventually, she found herself staring intently at the shelves, trying desperately to figure out what was bothering her about them and no longer listening at all to the sound of her mother’s voice. Her eyes slowly went back and forth across the shelves looking at all the familiar and colourful spines, some embossed with text and some not.

But the more she looked at them, it dawned on her that it wasn’t the books themselves that were the problem. There were empty spaces between them. Spaces she was certain she had not noticed during her last intersemestral break. Her heart started pounding on the verge of panic as she realized that several books, at least fifteen or twenty of them were missing from the shelves.

And with that realization, Teele felt that all too familiar spark of emotion ignite a fire within her chest. Her fists clenched and the periphery of her vision disappeared as all of her focus went into an impromptu inventory of the room around her.

The books that were missing all seemed to be the ones she’d had as a child. As she spun on the spot, she saw that there were trinkets — small and precious decorations from her youth — missing from her bedside table and dresser. She looked inside her wardrobe and, to her horror, realized that it was only half-full. Her head throbbed. Her every muscle felt tense. A lingering thought from her earlier attempt at meditation caused her to try and take stock of what she was feeling.

More than anything else, she was angry that several of her personal possessions were missing. She was also angry that she hadn’t noticed they were missing right away. She was angry because someone — but probably her mother — had entered her room without her permission. She was angry because she was having such an outsized reaction over this entire affair. She was angry—

In an instant, all of her mental health training vanished and her emotions gripped from within. Nauseated and light-headed, she let them transport her out of the room, neglecting every precaution of she had taken on the way in. She let the door swing and bang open. She let her footsteps be heard throughout the house. She didn’t care. She walked openly and loudly down the stairs.

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robotlearnstolove · 20 days

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2024-04-07

Sunday Morning

Allen took a look at the brass-coloured clock on the mantle and then at the room around him. He let out a deep sigh of satisfaction. The entire apartment was clean and tidy and it wasn’t even noon yet. What the hell was he going to do with the rest of his day off?

He walked into the kitchen and checked the dishes in the drying rack. They were still a little damp. It would be better to let them dry completely before putting them away.

He went to his bedroom and adjusted the comforter on the bed before spending a minute smoothing out the wrinkles with his hands.

Slowly, he walked back to the living room and let himself fall into the armchair. He picked up the remote and turned on the television. After ten minutes of scrolling, he had looked at countless Netflix title cards and not a single one had enticed him. He switched his screen to the Disney app and spent another ten or so minutes having the exact same experience. He let out a deep sigh of dissatisfaction and turned off the TV.

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robotlearnstolove · 21 days

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2024-04-06

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After what felt like a boring eternity of attempted meditation, Teele stood up and softly walked around the room several times. While she paced, she kept throwing haphazard, slightly suspicious glances toward her bookshelf. Something felt off about it but she couldn’t divine what exactly it was.

Eventually, she walked right up to the bookshelf and, without thinking, pulled a volume off the shelf. It was a collection of children’s stories that had belonged to her father when he was a child in the Old Kingdom. It wasn’t particularly heavy; she carried it with one hand and sat down at her desk, setting it open in front of her.

Teele stared at the two pages of print in front of her and, without reading a single word, already knew exactly at which story she was looking. It was called Turtle and Crow Cross the River. As a child, she’d read the entire book many, many times. There had been a roughly one-year span — sometime when she was between six and eight — during which it had been the only book she read. To this day, the worn volume remained one of her favourite and most cherished possessions.

She sat for another long while. She held her entire body still. Her eyes were fixed on the page. Her ears listened to the distant, furious thunder of her mother’s voice that never seemed to come any closer and refused to die down. And still, she didn’t read a single word on the page. The book distracted and delighted her. Or, it should have because she felt neither.

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