Chapter 14

Chris and I spent the day doing what we had planned. We walked a little in the morning while it was cold, spent the early afternoon on the lake and then the late afternoon and evening with his parents playing in their climate controlled back yard and grilling and eating a very nice dinner of large mouth bass and roast corn on the cob. We kept very close the entire day, with a lot of touching and snuggling and tender kisses.

I swam in emotion the whole day. My own principally, but Chris' too and everyone else's. His parent's, the household staff's. The people in the other houses around the lake. The people in Wakefield and Reading and Stoneham. The people in Boston and Augusta. Pretty much all the people in New England were strong enough to feel individually. Further than that and it was just a sea of emotion, which thankfully managed to cancel itself out as a blanket of emotional white noise.

At first it was an on or off proposition, a little like what I'd gone through as a toddler when the gifts began manifesting themselves. By the time we were eating our grilled bass I'd managed to teach myself to filter out the strong ones, but somehow the background emotional noise was completely unaffected by those filters. Fortunately the 'noise' level was low enough that I could more or less tune it out despite not being able to shield myself from it.

Unless I decided to turn it all off, and then boom! All quiet, all the time. But no more living inside Chris' love when I did. It was an agonizing choice, but there were times during the day when I just couldn't think through the surge of it and had to turn it off.

Once the dinner was done and the evening's small talk and other social niceties out of the way, Chris' parents excused themselves for the night, off to bed. Chris and I had already been sitting together on the rustic hand-built love seat, but now we flowed together into a very close embrace which encompassed a very serious case of lip lock as well. With some time to adjust, and no concern over witnesses, the embrace was soon enhanced with some exploratory groping.

Chris had good hands. While I didn't have a lot to compare them to, I was willing, right then and there, to declare them world class hands. Based on the irregular breathing sounds coming from him, Chris must've been thinking similarly about my hands, I hoped.

We had engaged in a little groping the summer before, and while both of us had been wearing far less clothing. It hadn't been like this for me before though. The times before had been detached, almost clinical by comparison. Too much of me holding life at arms length.

With one of my nipples pleasantly wrapped within a stroking, twirling thumb and index finger, I raised my lips up, flicking my tongue out to just touch the sensitive skin inside an ear, and felt him shiver and his grip on me tighten slightly. My nipple managed to feel like it was simultaneously made of high grade steel and nothing but raw nerve endings at the same time. I let out a ragged breath and Chris shivered again.

"You were right," I whispered as my hand stroked up the length of his erection, trapped, painfully I assumed, in his cargo pants. "I was an emotional vampire. Or at least an emotional voyeur."

I stroked back down him, feeling the echo of it in the singing tautness of his muscles. "But not anymore. You have brought me out of myself and into the emotion of life. You made me human again."

I pulled my lips away from his ear then and leaned back, just a little, enough to see his face and his eyes gone wide at my words.

"Now that you've managed to make me human again, its time you took me up to your room and made me a woman, don't you think?"

The eyes went wider for a moment and then crinkled at the edges as he grinned down at me.

He had lifted me up already, but this time it was in his arms. His room was on the ground floor so there was no dramatic carrying me up a sweeping staircase. I was dressed in a polo shirt and Capri pants. Chris was wearing a t-shirt and cargo pants. It was not destined to be the cover of a romance novel by any means.

But it got done, and he did a good job of it. He made me a woman, several times, and he did a very good job of that too. A very good job.