Hello. Sam Stefanik here. Welcome to the seventh installment of 'Crown Vic to a Parallel World.' This is a big chapter, probably one of the most important thus far. I...I don't think I'm gonna oversell it. I appreciate you reading and hope you're enjoying the story. Drop me a line if you like. I'd love to hear from you.
You know the drill, if you're younger than 18 or find these kinds of stories offensive, please close up now and have a great day! If you are of legal age and are interested, by all means keep going. I'll be glad to have you along for the journey. Please donate to Nifty. This is a great resource for great stories and a useful outlet to authors like me and readers like you.
7
Feelings, Memories, and a Hot Shower
I opened my eyes. I was in bed with my arm around a sleeping Shawn. He felt even better in the morning, when I was cold-sober, than the previous night when all sensation had to battle through the whiskey. Despite my desire to stay in bed with my arm around him, another desire became more urgent. Specifically, the fingernails of my nicotine addiction clawing the inside of my skull. I extracted my arm from under his head, threw some clothes on, and slipped through the door in the outside wall to the balcony. I lit a cigarette and closed my eyes against the too-bright sunshine.
I let the cigarette rest in my mouth as I leaned both hands, arms locked, on the balcony railing. I thought about the night before and the day that preceded it. Did you really tell Ars he could have your tomorrows?' I reproached myself. How can you help anyone? You can't even help yourself. They must be out of their minds. You're gonna fuck this all up, like you fuck everything up, and everyone will die including that sweet, scared boy in your bed.' I thought as my head swam with worry and self-loathing.
The heat of the cigarette ember under the end of my nose told me it was time for a fresh one. I plucked the butt from my lips and used it to chain light another smoke. I wound up to flick what was left of the first one over the railing, but paused to glance down to make sure I wouldn't hit anyone. Down below, a small group of people had gathered on the sidewalk at the edge of the hotel property. They were looking up in my direction. A few pointed and conferred with each other. I looked up to see what was attracting all the attention. There was nothing above me but sky.
I burnt my fingers stubbing the butt out on the underside of the railing and blew what was left of it away. I looked back at the growing crowd, drew on my cigarette, and exhaled a plume of smoke. A noticeable murmur rippled through onlookers and several fingers pointed to the dissolving cloud. I stepped away from the railing and moved back as far as I could until I was stopped by the wall of the hotel. Several people down below moved back in the opposite direction, even crossing the street so they could keep me in view. I finished my cigarette quickly, ground the butt to dust against the stone wall, and retreated inside.
Shawn was coming out of the bathroom. He stopped in the doorway to rub some sleep from his right eye with his fingers. He yawned and wished me a good morning. "There's people outside staring at me!" I blurted, pointing toward the balcony.
His hands rose to both sides of his face to squeeze his expression. "Oh no."
"Oh no, what?"
"Were you smoking?"
"Yeah." An image of the staring blonds from the previous evening flashed in my head and enlightened my mind. "Oh shit."
"We're going to have to do something about your habit." He said simply, like it was just that easy.
I gathered from the way he spoke, that he'd never been addicted to anything. Good for him.' I thought. I half leaned and half sat on the bureau with my arms folded over my chest. "Shawn, I've been smoking since I was fifteen. I have a two-pack-a-day habit. What do you think you can just do' about that?"
He crossed the room and sat on the bed, hunched over, his hands clasped and his elbows in his lap. He looked at the floor while I waited, then raised his head with an idea. "Would you let me take it from you? The addiction I mean. I told you I'm a physician. I can remove the addiction with no pain or side effects. It would be like pulling a weed from a flower garden. I could help with the drinking to, but not as much. What do you think?"
My life experience told me that things that sound too good to be true, usually are. I'd quit if it was just that easy, but I didn't understand how it could be. Beyond the implied insanity of `removing an addiction,' there seemed to be a problem with the premise of what he said he could do. "But you said no one smokes here. How do you know how to deal with a nicotine addiction that no one has?"
"I know how to deal with physical addiction. What you're addicted to, doesn't really matter. Smoking doesn't seem to alter your state of mind. Your body needs nicotine, you deliver what it needs with a cigarette, and the addiction is temporarily sated. That's the purest definition of a physical addiction. Think of it as a more severe form of the relationship many people have with coffee." He stood up, walked to the far side of the room, and did an about-face. He hugged his body with his left arm, the forearm crossed his middle and the hand held his right side. His right elbow rested on his left wrist and he used his right hand and forearm to gesture as he explained what he meant. He used a dry, lecturing tone that I would come to refer to as his `clinical voice.'
"I started to explain yesterday when I took care of your headache. I'm a Third-Class Empath with a double-B power rating. That means I'm a physical empath with higher-than-average power. I can connect my consciousness to your body through the autonomic section of your brain. Once we're connected, I can send my power along your nerves to examine you from the inside-out. I can add to or subtract energy from your natural functions to correct sickness, heal wounds, destroy tumors, remove physical addictions, all kinds of things. As I said, smoking is a physical addiction. Alcoholism is different. There's a psychological component to drinking that I can't do anything about."
"Connect?" I asked, trying to grasp for something that I could make sense of.
He crossed the room to where I was standing as he answered. He stopped just outside my personal space. "I press my forehead to yours, wrap my hands around your head, my fingers almost meeting at the back of your skull and my thumbs on your temples, you relax and clear your mind. When you're calm, I establish the connection. I can't read your thoughts, though I might get impressions of your mood. I find what's wrong, fix it if I can, and back out the way I went in. You will be aware of my presence, and some find that uncomfortable, but it's how any doctor on this world would examine and treat you. We have no drugs, any treatment from closing a paper cut to curing cancer, is done with magic energy. If you're ready to quit, and you trust me even a little, I can have that addiction out of you before you need to satisfy it again."
It sounded like smoke, mirrors, and bullshit, but I didn't have anything to lose. "Fuck it. Sure, why not?" I shrugged.
He took me to the sitting room where he sat me in one of the small, white desk chairs near the window. "Try to clear your mind. Slow your thoughts to a stop and breathe through your nose. Long, slow, deep breaths. Calm your mind and relax your body. When you're ready, close your eyes."
I tried to do as he instructed, but it wasn't easy. He was still dressed in his clinging black night-clothes. The revelation of the previous night, the fact that I found him `attractive,' was a gross understatement. The close-up view of his smooth, muscly legs and ridged torso set my fantasies spinning. I shut my eyes to block the view and tried not to think about anything. "Ready." I said.
He moved in, so close that I felt his heat. My deep-breathing treated me to a nose-full of his masculine scent. Desire flared in my mind. He pressed his forehead to mine, located his hands on my head, and made the connection. I felt his presence, almost like walking into a dark room and realizing someone is in there without being able to see them. He spoke in my mind. `Try to calm down. You seem nervous.'
I thought, `you're talking to me inside my head when I'm fantasizing about what I'd do to you if I didn't live inside this bloated, broken, corpse of a body, and you want me to be calm.' Then I panicked because I didn't know if he could hear what I just thought or if he could see the scenes my imagination was conjuring.
`Please, Church, I need you calm.' He said inside my mind.
He obviously didn't know what he was asking. I tried to focus on my breathing, but every breath pulled in more of his essence. I wanted to breathe it in and savor it, remember it to add to my fantasies about him. Pins and needles in my chest distracted me from his scent and gave me something else to think about. They moved down and up each arm, then down to my stomach, down and back up each leg, and came back to my chest. I guessed that was his energy exploring my insides. It gave me the creeps but was kind of hot to. The pins and needles climbed up my neck into my head.
As they got there, something changed. My body felt hot, like adjusting-the-burner-on-a-steam-boiler-in-August hot. Sweat poured out of me. It got hard to breathe. I gasped like I'd climbed ten flights of stairs. My heart pounded like a jackhammer. I opened my eyes and saw my own face. I felt my hands, his hands, on my head and I looked at me from inside him while I looked at him from inside me. I squeezed my eyes shut. My body was on fire.
As quickly as it started, was as suddenly as it stopped. He pulled away from me with a backward stumble. He was sweating and panting as hard as I was. "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?" I shouted as I struggled to breathe.
He turned away from me to rub his temples with his fingers. He looked back at me curiously, head cocked a little to one side. He stared at me while I stared at him. I felt strange, like there was something inside me that wasn't there before. I was trying to figure out what the feeling was but couldn't.
Shawn's breathing steadied before mine did. He lifted his shirt to wipe his forehead. I got a tantalizing glimpse of his flat stomach, shiny with sweat. He pushed the shirt down and went back to staring at me.
With no warning he lunged at me. He jumped into my lap and wrapped his arms and legs around me. He kissed me violently, forcing his tongue into my open mouth. I felt white-hot desire and almost surrendered to it. A tiny part of my better judgement stopped me. I stood up and shoved him off me. The chair fell over backwards. Shawn landed on his back at my feet. He was red-faced, freshly sweaty, and gasping for breath. We stared at each other some more. "What's going on?" I whispered because I couldn't shout. I felt like I was on the wrong side of the mirror and getting scared.
"I want you." He whispered from the floor.
"I know."
His eyes widened until white was visible all the way around the iris. "How do you know?"
Fear and anxiety shook me and blended with the lust to make a weird emotional cocktail. A tiny kernel of understanding crept into my mind. "I know you want me because I can feel it...your lust. I can also feel your fear. It feels like rancid butter smells."
His wide eyes narrowed; the intense fear settled into worry. His did anyway; I was still terrified. I realized he was laying on the floor. I offered my hand to pull him up. He refused it with a shake of his head and scrambled up on his own. When he was back on his feet, he rubbed both of his temples again, his first and second fingers making little circles on the sides of his head. He spoke without looking up. "When you were four, Billy Collins, the boy from down the street, took your sidewalk chalk. You head-butted him and knocked him down to get it back."
He was right. That was my earliest memory. The fact that he knew it was too strange to be scary. I thought a little and told another story. "You're real first name is Chordus. Your father picked it, but you hate it because it means second,' like you're the second son and not as important as the first son.' Your uncle gave you your nickname when you moved to the capital to go to medical school."
"Oh my. Oh my...oh my...oh my...oh my." He said, shaking his head back and forth and sounding very much like his uncle. He walked away, the whole length of the sitting room, spun on his heels and ran back. "Do you know what this means?" He hissed in my face.
"HOW THE HELL WOULD I KNOW THAT?" I shouted and waved my arms wide in angry panic.
He shrank away from me, and I felt his fear. I took a few deep breaths, righted the chair I'd knocked over, sat on it, and gave him my full attention. My hands were white-knuckled on my knees. "OK, what does it mean?"
His clinical voice returned as he explained. "We must have connected too deeply, formed some kind of link...a sympathetic link that lets us sense each other's emotions. I also think I have your memories, maybe all of them. I assume you have mine."
I nodded to confirm I had what I assumed were his memories. "So, what do we do?" I asked. I was trying to stay calm, but his spiraling emotions were getting tangled with mine, and calm was pretty damn far away.
Shawn held his eyes low. He was obviously thinking. A bead of sweat ran from his thick hair, down his forehead, and got stuck in his right eyebrow. He lifted his shirt with both hands to wipe his face and the top of his head. He exposed his sinewy torso from waist to collar bones. My thoughts shifted far away from our new dilemma.
"Ummph." He grunted. He stopped wiping and pushed his shirt down. I felt a warm wave of lust from him. I felt him battle the feeling, he shut his eyes and forced the desire down, tried to turn it off. "Church, would you think about something else please?"
I wanted to be serious, I knew he needed me to be serious, but the madness of what was happening limited my ability to be serious. I answered, sounding more flippant than I felt. "I'll try, but all bets are off if you lift that shirt again."
"I'm sorry." He turned his back to me. "Is this better?"
I looked him up and down. It was better, but not in the way he meant. "You're gonna point that at me and expect me to calm down?" I said, referring to the peach-shaped roundness that topped his impressive legs.
I felt his frustration and reluctantly peeled my gaze away to direct it out the window. I had an impulse to go out for a cigarette, but I didn't want one. The thought of smoking held no attraction at all. I took the pack and lighter from my pocket and set them on the desk at the window. "Good job on the addiction. For the first time in a very long time, I don't want a cigarette."
"I'm glad." He said and I felt that he genuinely was. It was a nice feeling. His happiness felt like springtime.
My mind wandered over the last minutes. I remembered shoving him off me and felt bad about it. "I'm sorry I knocked you down."
Uncertainty replaced the happiness he felt. "Don't be. I should probably thank you."
"Why did you kiss me?" I asked. In my mind, I felt that I knew the answer, but it was beyond unbelievable. I wanted Shawn to tell me if what I thought I knew was right.
He paused, and seemed to consider his words before he spoke. "I'm attracted to youÉand I could feel how much you wanted me. It felt right to kiss you."
What he said matched what I'd felt from him, but it was crazy, except it wasn't. I felt Shawn's lust for me as clearly as if it was my own for him and it scared me. I didn't know what to say and didn't say anything for what felt like a very long time. Shawn seemed to sense my discomfort and broke the silence. "I'm going to call my uncle." He said, grabbing for the practical over the insane. "He'll know what to do or will know someone that knows what to do."
I decided to follow his example and shoved aside my swirling thoughts and lust for the first and only man that ever kissed me. I stood up and stretched, my joints popping with morning stiffness. "I guess I could stay here and panic, or I could get cleaned up." I said and hoped my voice didn't sound as shaky to him as it did to me. "I'll get cleaned up."
"I ordered some clothes for you last night. After I talk to uncle, I'll call down and have them sent up. I'll put them on the bureau."
"Perfect." I said and retreated to my room to strip for a shower. I found a soft, white robe in the bureau and hung it on the bathroom door in case my shower finished before my clothes arrived.
I went into the stall, closed the glass door behind me, and fiddled with the controls until they started to make sense. I turned the water on, as hot as I could stand it, and blasting from as many heads as I could figure out how to operate. Shawn's emotions continued to swirl and tumble like dark clouds in an angry sky. I tried not to think. I tried not to feel, but I couldn't help it. His emotions and scenes from his past flashed in and out of my head like images in a mixed-up slide show.
Everything I saw, I saw from his perspective and felt about it the way he felt at the time. Some of it was innocuous; sitting in lectures, eating meals, exercising. He liked to run or wall climb to relieve stress. The rest of it was more significant; being berated by his father and later soothed by his mother, his uncle praising his early successes in medical school, him meeting the man that would become the object of his desire, a fair-complected blond named Roeb Brevis. I wondered if he was seeing my life. I hoped, for his sake, he'd be spared that forty-year train wreck.
The glass of the stall fogged up. It made me feel like I was inside a cloud. I tried to get on with my shower, but the new feelings kept distracting me. Shawn left his bedroom to pace the sitting room. I don't know how I knew that, but somehow, I could feel his position in space as it changed in relationship to mine. He stopped pacing near the hall door to the suite. I felt some small relief and approval from him. I assumed the clothes he'd ordered for me showed up and he liked them.
He moved back through the sitting room, into my room, and paced my room. Apprehension, worry, fear, and sadness alternated through him as he paced. Sadness seemed to win. He came closer. I heard the bathroom door open and close. He was very near. He tapped on the glass of the stall.
I smeared a hole in the fog and looked into a pair of shiny eyes in a long face with a deep frown. "You're a sad, lonely man." He said to the glass. His voice shook as he spoke.
I nodded.
"And no one knows you, the real you. No one knows how your parents didn't love you, no one knows you blame yourself for their deaths, no one knows you're attracted to men, no one knows how meaningless your life is to you." I nodded again. Shawn was telling me things about myself that I'd always kept locked deep inside myself. He knew them, all my secrets and all of my shame.
"I'm lonely to, and I'm sad and I'm scared and I don't want to die and I don't want the world to end and I don't know what happened this morning and if I can fix it or what will happen if I can't, butÉbut out of all that, I know this one thing. I know that I want you." He chewed his ripe bottom lip. Anticipation and worry fought for dominance inside him. "Will you let me in? Will you make love to me? Please, Church. I know you're afraid, and you hate your body, and you think you're no good, and you think you don't deserve to be happy. I also know, you want this as badly as I do."
I reached for the watch that I'd taken off and was disappointed it wasn't there. I gripped my wrist when I couldn't stretch the watchband. I was so scared of what he wanted, of what I wanted. I made the only objection I could come up with. "But I've never...with a man...I don't...I don't know how."
Shawn pressed his palms against the glass on either side of the smeared hole in the steam. "I know you haven't. I'll teach you. We'll stop if you say stop."
Desire, both mine and his, defeated my fear. I reached for the door with a trembling hand and pulled it open. Shawn appeared in the open doorway. He peeled his shirt off and tossed it aside. He stepped out of his shorts and tossed them. He stood, naked and proud. He had a lot to be proud of. "Beautiful." I breathed.
He grinned a bashful grin and came toward me. I backed away until I ran out of room and my body flattened against the glass of the stall. Shawn closed the door and turned off all the gushing shower heads except one in the center that pointed straight down. He also did something that cleared the fog from the glass so fast it was like flipping a switch.
The stage set, he moved under the flow of the single shower head to tantalize me. He rinsed himself provocatively under the water, turned to show off every angle and curve, and ran his hands over his smooth, flawless skin. His ice-blue eyes narrowed to sensuous slits. I was torn between raw hunger and the crushing shame I felt for my soft, fat, winter-white, patchy body-hair turning grey, ugliness.
I covered my face with my hands and wished I could disappear. "What's wrong?" He asked.
"You're perfect and I'm...I'm disgusting." I groaned to my palms.
He pulled my hands from my face and made me meet his eyes with mine. "You're not disgusting. I don't think you're disgusting. Can't you feel how much I want you? Even if you couldn't...I have proof." He lowered his eyes and I followed his gaze down with my own. I paused when my eyes fell on his hard, throbbing manhood.
"Can't argue with that." I said without thinking.
He laughed, a musical, reckless laugh, like the ringing of tuned bells. He took my face in his soft hands and brought it down to his. "Stop worrying and kiss me."
I kissed his salty sweet mouth and abandoned myself to him.
Later, much later, we sat pressed together on the couch in matching white robes. I couldn't take my eyes off his face. I replayed our shower over and over in my mind and savored every instant. I could barely convince myself it happened except for the images imprinted on my memory. I never thought I'd have sex again, let alone shower-sex on a parallel world with a young guy that could have been a model. He'd been so careful and so patient with me, and every time I wanted to give into my shame, he gave me something else to focus my attention on.
He seemed to know exactly what to do to make the experience as much as it could be for the both of us. He did things, things that were obviously designed to leverage my physical strength, while watching out for my lack of flexibility. He was careful about my limited wind but aggressive enough to make me think he was aware of my high threshold for pain. He showed me pleasures I didn't believe were possible.
Our tryst also helped me understand the bathroom better. The room was a movie set, a porn movie set, and Shawn and I were the stars...well, Shawn was. The huge clear shower stall, the black wall that eliminated glare and the mirrored wall to reflect the action back to the actors...the perfect setting for a porn shoot.
Shawn broke the afterglow quiet and interrupted my musings with a gentle reproach. "Stop trying to convince yourself it happened."
"How do you know that's what I'm doing?"
"You haven't taken your eyes off me since we finished drying each other off. It's like you think I'll disappear if you look away. I feel your disbelief, it's thick as honey but bitter instead of sweet. It really happened...and, it will happen again." He said through a smirk.
His statement sent an electric thrill through my body. I was beside myself with joy that this incredibly attractive man would have sex with me, but I still didn't get it and that worried me. "Why?" I asked.
"You gave me your jacket." He said and let the statement hang in the air like that was all the answer the question required.
I rubbed my neck. "Your culture has a weird way of repaying favors." I said and hoped my sarcasm would prompt a more complete response from him.
"Don't be a silly ass." He gently scolded. "Don't you see? I like you and I'm attracted to you."
I still didn't get it. "Is it pity? If it's pity, just say so."
He shook his head like he had the night before, hard enough to send his hair falling over his face. He brushed the hair away and leaned harder against me. "I like who you are. You're brave and you're kind and you're physically attractive."
I stared at him. I think he sensed that I didn't believe what he said. "It's really simple," he explained, "you're big and brave and manly, like when you stood up to those guys on the street, but you're also thoughtful and kind, like when you saw I was cold and insisted I take your jacket. That meant so much to me in that moment. You were drunk and had just rescued me, but you were focused on me enough to see that I was cold and you gave me your kindness. You may have acted tough when you did it, but I could tell you really cared about what I'd just been through and how I felt. Then you trusted me with your car and with your life. I couldn't believe it when you just agreed to let me drive your car to wherever I wanted to go. I couldn't believe the trust."
I thought about the trust he'd shown me the night before. I hadn't thought about that as being the reciprocation of the trust I'd shown him. I still didn't. "I think you're reading too much into it." I said when he paused for a breath. He, like his uncle, seemed to be making an awful lot out of a string of arguably poor decisions on my part, made when I had way too much whiskey in me.
"I don't think so." He argued. "No, I don't think so at all. Besides, I think you're physically attractive as well."
"You keep saying that, but..." I started to argue but he talked over me.
"I understand why you think otherwise, because of your weight, but that's something you can change. I'm not talking about what you see as your flaws. No...you've got this big broad back and those big broad shoulders and those big strong arms...so sexy. To be completely honest, I'd already decided, when I came to your room last night, I already half decided to see if you'd have sex with me this morning. Then, when what happenedÉhappened, and I could feel how badly you wanted me, I decided not to wait any longer. I hope you didn't mind."
I hope you didn't mind.' I mentally mocked. Nope, sure didn't.' I looked at his face and saw that he seemed to be waiting for an answer. "Uh, no. I can't say I `minded' at all."
He smirked a self-indulgent smile at me. "You surprised me. I thought that was your first time with a man. You're either a natural, or you've done that before."
"That was my first time. I felt like something was guiding me. I wonder if we shared more than just our memories. Maybe things we know how to do, things that are...I don't want to say automatic, but things we do without thinking much about, maybe we swapped them to."
"Like what?" He asked.
I tried to think about something I knew, that he couldn't have learned just by being on Earth. I hit on something job related. "Say you want to start a Murphy welding machine on a cold morning. The first thing you do is?"
He answered without a moment's thought. "Turn the ignition on and press the button for the glow plugs." He clamped his mouth shut in shock at what he'd said. "I don't even know what that means."
"I'm sure you don't, but it's something I would do without thinking about it."
His mood shifted, from surprised fascination to serious. "What do we do now?"
"What do we do now?" I parroted and thought. "I guess we do what we already planned to do, we save the world."