“Okay, so. Meditation would probably be a good way to start.”
I rolled my eyes but quickly shut them before Jesse saw the gesture. I breathed deeply, making sure to relax and let my lungs fill all the way. I yawned and let myself do it instead of covering my mouth with my hand like I normally would. I figured that even if Jesse was watching—which he probably wasn’t, all things considered—he wouldn’t care. At least it showed I was relaxing, I supposed.
I tried to focus on my breathing. One, two, three, four, five. Hold, two, three, four, five six. No, wait, five. Okay, breathing out—two, three, four five. Okay, so I’m feeling calmer, I guess. Wait, I’m supposed to be focusing on this. In two, three, four, five, six. Maybe I should count to six instead? Oh, wait, counting.
I sighed. Maybe meditation isn’t for me.
“I think I’ve got the hang of this,” I said, after another couple minutes of trying to focus on my breathing, although I was mostly focusing on my thoughts that I should have been focusing on my breathing, but I didn’t want to sit here. I could work on this myself.
“Jess?” I opened one eye and found he’d already moved out of my field of vision. “Okay, maybe that worked a bit better for me than I’d thought.” I looked around; he wasn’t in the room at all.
Ninja.
“Jesse?” I called out, starting to get up.
“Shut up and sit back down,” Jesse said, walking back into the room, looking at the buttons on the video camera in his hands.
“You want to film me?”
He nodded. “I want you to be able to see what you look like when you’re doing that—so you have some sort of a visual cue for your powers and how they’re outwardly expressed.”
Again, I had to hand it to him. He was good at coming up with this bullshit. “Okay, cool. That works for me.”
“Good, now…” He pressed a button; I heard a ping! and saw the little green light at the front of the camera turn on. He pressed it again, and the light turned off, with a couple more beeps from the camera.
“Okay, so I’m gonna turn it on, and I want you to hold out your hand…” He paused. After a second, he raised an eyebrow and held up his hand.
I mumbled an apology and held out my hand to match his. It felt strange for our roles to be flipped. He was very much in control of this situation, and while he’d always been a little forceful—especially before the anger management courses—I’d never seen him so much in his element before.
“When I turn it on, I want you to make your power go from zero to one hundred, slowly and smoothly as you can, okay?”
“Wait—slowly? You don’t want it to flare?”
“No. You really shouldn’t flare it unless you need to. That’s the first thing you want to do. If we want to grow your control, it’s logical to get you to fight your natural urges, right?”
I shrugged and nodded. It seemed a little counterintuitive to me, like it was trying to take what I could do and dumb it down, but he had already proven he knew better than I did. After three hours of focusing on pooling my energy in my shoulder wound, the doctor said he must have looked at it wrong initially, since there was no possible way there had been that much improvement in the damage. I could move it freely and only felt pain when I tried to lift something heavy.
I heard the little ping again and waved my hand around, trying to make a few small arcs of lightning flicker around my fingers. I wasn’t sure why we needed to show the hand, but I did what Jesse asked me to do.
I squinted and inhaled—a shallow breath, then I remembered to breathe down to the diaphragm. Damn, that’s a useful trick. Not only could I breathe a lot deeper than I’d realized, but the energy also steadily grew from a few arcs of lightning to what looked like a blue chain-link fence around my hands.
Okay, more.
I let it expand until there were no visible gaps between the arcs but not to the point where it turned opaque. It was still sticking fairly close to my hand, too.
“Hold on, I gotta back up a bit.” Jesse took a couple steps back and refocused the camera. “Okay, go.”
I could feel the energy now, though it was little more than a tickle. It wasn’t a huge deal; I could only really feel it because I was concentrating on the sensation. When I looked down, it had gotten a lot brighter than I’d intended. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to control it for much longer.
I grinned and looked up. “Hey, Jesse, watch this.”