Chapter 4

It was late when Aunt Isa came out of her room. She looked at me for a while and then she said,

"I don't know what to do about you. I find it hard to deal with the fact that you are a mature man in a young boy's body"

"Unless I know what your difficulties are, then I cannot make any suggestions," I told her. "You would have to be more explicit."

"Because I care for you I have hugged you and kissed you and you have hugged me back. I thought this was an aunty and young boy sharing affection, but now I wonder what is going on in your head when I am doing so. And that is just the start of my problems," she told me.

"Right, I will try and deal with that as it is a very specific problem," I told her.

"From the outset of our relationship, the mature man part of me has seen you as a very desirable and beautiful woman and I have had to come to terms with that.

If I had been in my own body, I would certainly have made a play for you. But I am in a body which shares its gene pool with your body and so any relationship between us would still be incestuous. This would be particularly difficult for you and I have no intention of going down that road. But let me say this, if you had been living with the real Peter, then like me he would not have sought to have sexual relationships with you, but from experience, I bet you would have been part of his sexual fantasies."

"But he was my nephew." She said, "He would not have entertained sexual thoughts about me for I am so much older than he is," she declared.

I smiled and said to her,

"So are many pop stars and film stars and other fantasy figures he might have but that would not stop a horny teenager in the first throes of sexual awareness from fantasising about them."

"You are just guessing about that," she told me. "You can't know for certain that Peter would have felt that way."

"You forget that I am in Peter's body with Peter's memories. He did not see much of you as a child and so he does not have the conditioning that might have prevented him from looking on you as a sexual object. It is the closeness and dependency that stops a son from seeing his mother and other close older relations as sex objects." I say older, because I know from personal experience that this does not apply to cousins."

"I take it that means you had a crush on one of your cousins," she said, with a slight smile on her face for the first time since she left her bedroom.

"More like madly in love," I sad. "We had always been good friends, but when puberty hit this changed rapidly to first love. She worried that we were to closely related for that kind of relationship and her mother encouraged her to distance herself from me."

"I'm sorry," she said. "At that age things like that can seem to be an absolute tragedy"

"Yes they can, and sometimes they are and can affect your whole life afterwards," I told her, trying to prise open a bit of her past. "But fortunately for me this was not the case. Other loves followed, but sadly none led to marriage. To add emphasis to what I am saying and speculating about, perhaps I should tell you at this stage that I am or was a university graduate and I have a first class honours degree in psychology. I did not take this any further because I always wanted to be a soldier. My idea was to work in intelligence and I did for a bit, but when I passed my SAS course it meant I got a few very specialist missions because of it."

"Does this help you come to terms with the situation you find yourself in now?" she asked.

"Yes it does," I said, "But we are getting off the subject rather, for this should be about you and how you are going to cope with our situation."

"I find talking about your background helps with that," She replied. "I already feel a bit better because I know from what you have said that you will not be ogling me."

"No I won't I told her, but let me say the older person in this young body loves having a beautiful aunt like you around to hug." I said. "I am not going to embarrass you by trying to make any sexual contact because part of the reason I am here, I think, is to be a loving nephew who may open your eyes to the possibilities of new discoveries and relationships in the wider world."

"I have all the possibilities I need," she said with a touch of anger, "My life is quite full, thank you!"

"Aunt Isa," I said, deliberately speaking as Peter. "Since I have been living with you have never had a friend to this house. You gave never dated or shown any interest in a man, or a woman for that matter," I added. "You have never spoken of any close friends and you also told me you had reasons for not wanting to get to close to my family. The adult in me tells me that this is not normal and that you are a very lonely person."

"Now, you are trying to psychoanalyse me," she said; this time very angrily.

"Aunt Isa, I have no need to psychoanalyse you. But I am not going to say any more on that subject unless you want me to," I said. "Just let me say at this point that I am here partly because of you."

"That is just not possible," she said and it was obvious her anger was rising.

"My being here in a young boy's body is just not possible, so how can it not be possible that I am here in part, because of you?" I asked her.

It was obvious that she had no answer to this and she was silent for some time then she spoke again,

"How do you know you are here partly because of me?" She asked.

"I am not going to answer that," I told her, "Because I think you already know."

She was silent for another period of time, I think partly because she did not want to admit the topic of my most recent experiences. But eventually she resumed our conversation.

"Is this to do with your other experiences?" she queried at long last.

"Yes it is," I replied. "But before I speak about them you need to be sure that you want to hear what I have to say; because should you choose to go down this road it is likely to change your life dramatically."

"I thought about this up in my bedroom," she told me, "And I don't know what is worse, knowing or not knowing?

"If you are truly happy with your existence as it is then you can always go for the status quo. But I think since you have been taking care of Peter you are beginning to realise that there are great life experiences that you have missed out on. I don't know for sure because my experience with these mystic powers have not made it clear, but I have the feeling that this is a short window of opportunity that you and I have been given to make things better for you. I can also tell you that I have no earthly idea why it should be so. It certainly does not happen to many people. I am an exception rather than the rule and I think you may be too. Your choice!" I told her.

Again there was another long pause and she struggled with what she wanted to do, eventually she asked,

"Do you know anything about my future if I take the road you are proposing?"

"Yes I do, and there are some painful things you may have to face up to but the promise I have been given is that you will be much happier if you do." I told her.

I looked at my watch and I realised that we had been at this for some considerable time and it was now after midnight.

"Since after dinner I feel you have been put through a welter of emotions. Do you want to continue with our discussion now, or do you want to sleep on it. Sometimes a time of reflection can be valuable and sometimes it can just be and evasion because you don't want to face up to things. You will know better than me the state of your mind." I said.

"I am tired," She replied. "But having slept for a bit earlier on, I don't think I would be able to go to sleep now. Let us take a break and I will make us a drink and a snack and then we can continue if you are up to it?" She said.

I agreed and Aunt Isa went off to the kitchen to prepare what was after all a very late supper. When she returned we ate in silence for a while then she said,

"It is very nerve racking talking to you, because of your mystical experiences I don't know how much you know about me."

"Why don't you assume two things?" I asked her. "First you could assume that I know the worst and second that there is nothing you could tell me that would make me think badly of you. If you do that then I can tell you now there is nothing that would shock me even if I did not know it before. I have seen and encountered my share of horrors in my role as a soldier, especially as one who was involved on secret missions."

"I suspect that you know that I was abused by my father."

"If you were," I told her, "that is not your fault. You were the victim and I know you did nothing to contribute to his abuse of you. It is hard for victims to realise and accept that when someone they love abuses them. In these situations, no matter how much you hate what the other person is doing sometimes your body will betray you and you will experience an orgasm. Instead of this telling you something about the delights of sex, however, it will make you feel even guiltier because if all this is no fault of yours, then you feel you should never ever feel any pleasure from it. That is a factor in common for a great many girls who experience this kind of abuse."

When I said this, the dam burst, and she began to pour out the pain of the experiences that she had bottled up inside herself for so many years.