Double Tears
Chapter 119
“Trust is dangerous.”
—Pittacus Lore, Eight’s Origin
I DID SOMETHING VERY UNUSUAL in my morning concert Sunday. I played alone and from music. Oh, Sophie had volunteered to sit with me and listen but I turned her down. I had a feeling our musical advisors weren’t entirely happy with us after last night’s performance. Well, Vinnie was. I think Jannie was okay with it. LeBlanc and Sokolov were confused at best and disappointed at worst. Those guys wanted a note-perfect performance according to their interpretations.
I knew they both tuned into my Sunday morning concert, so I wanted to show them I was serious about my music and our lively performance at the Ren Faire wasn’t because we were tossing off the shackles of the composers. I set the music on my stand and sat at a slight angle so it didn’t block the camera from watching me. The piece was Bach’s Lute Suite in E Minor. It has six movements, most of which are different Renaissance dances. I had the notes memorized, but I paid attention to the other markings in the sheet music as I played.
I have a tendency to just drop into the music trance when I’m playing alone and let the emotion of the piece carry me along. If you are watching the music like I was this morning, you can’t space out. For me, it’s really hard to find my place in the music if I lose it. I pretty much have to stop and start over. Well, the advantage of the suite was that most of the movements were significantly less than four minutes long, so the two times I did have to stop and start over, it wasn’t like I had to play fifteen minutes of music to get to the place I goofed up.
And you know what? When I edited and uploaded the video, I could hear the difference in my playing. I needed to do this more often.
Nanette and I went out for a good run down at that church near Ossian where the running club often met. It’s one of my favorite trails. It was a little damp because the storm that affected us at Penn the day before had moved across the whole northern half of the state. We ran our first pass around the three-mile course slowly to make sure our footing was good. But then we took off on a second circuit and stretched out our legs. Most everyone else had left by the time we completed the second 5k.
“I’m so impressed with the way you’ve mastered your stride,” Nanette said. “When I first met you, I didn’t imagine you’d ever walk without a limp, let alone run distance races and win.”
“You were a lot of the reason I can do that,” I said. “Nan, I don’t tell you enough how important running with you is to me. It’s a big part of what I love about you.”
“Enough to skip Kentucky next weekend and run in Noblesville with me?” she teased.
“Um… I kind of promised…”
“I’m teasing, Jacob. That’s one of the things we’re all learning about having this group thing we have. It’s a two-edged sword. Someone is almost always available to be with you but you can’t always be available to be with everyone,” she said. I automatically took her hand as we cooled down and guided our steps through the old cemetery. “I know you agreed to do the last weekend of the season with Desi and her family, and that they decided they were getting much better business than if they packed up and went to Indy PopCon like last year. And besides, Livy and Rachel are going to run with me. They won’t be with the rest of you in Kentucky.”
“That’s really what we’re learning from all this, isn’t it? I’m still having trouble with feeling like I need to give all of myself to each of my girlfriends.”
“No, you need to give all of yourself to all of your girlfriends,” she said. “There’s a difference. When you give to all of us, you can’t slight any of us. Nor can we you.”
I stopped in front of Joseph Hennessey’s grave as I did whenever we came out to this church. I crouched down and looked more closely. I’d never really found anything about the man online. Almost like he hadn’t existed. Except there was this grave and I had his hat, picked up at a vintage clothing store I just happened into last spring. I noted that he lay next to his wife who preceded him in death a few years earlier. Her name was Diana. There was nothing about her dates or name that was remotely like either of V1’s wives. It was just a coincidence that we shared initials.
“You always stop here when we walk after a run. What is it you see here, lover?” Nanette whispered.
“Oh, it’s nothing, really,” I shrugged. “Our initials are the same. And he died the day I was born.”
“He died in 2018. I know I’m a cradle robber but I’m sure you’re more than two years old.”
“Two years ago, yesterday,” I said. “When I woke up from a coma in the hospital.”
“Oh, my. Oh, Jacob. And you told us you woke up with past life memories. His?”
“I don’t think so. It’s just an interesting coincidence.”
“Yes, it is. Do you think it has meaning?”
“I read something online once that said the possibility of a coincidence occurring at any given time is always one hundred percent. It was a coincidence that I was wheeled into the physical therapy room just when you were up for the next appointment. It was a coincidence that you ran in the park where Em and I did. It was a coincidence that you spotted me running alone. It was…”
“I get it. It was a coincidence that I fell in love with you. All from the start of that chain of you waking up on August twenty-ninth in the hospital where I worked. The coincidences are all around us but we assign significance and meaning to them after the fact.”
I kissed her. She did not pull away in the least but rather molded herself to my body and offered herself to me fully. When we broke away from the kiss, she glanced around. Everyone who had been out for morning runs had left. The church service was over. Hers was the only car parked at the road. She took my hand and led me to where the cemetery started the downward slope and was hidden from everything but a farmhouse at least half a mile away.
“You need to help stretch me out,” she said. Okay. We hadn’t really stretched after the run and usually we did. She sat on the ground and pulled off her running shorts. My eyes popped open as she parted her legs in front of me. “Stretch me, lover.”
Oh. It didn’t take long for me to have my shorts off and be hovering over her. Nanette pulled me toward her and into her. She was delicious. Her pussy sucked at my cock and coaxed me to please her. Unlike my music, I forgot about timing and key signatures and was simply lost in the emotion.
It was nearly three o’clock when I drove down Donna’s long lane. After I showered, I made sure my essay for English was finished and I had no more homework to take care of. If it weren’t for our nightly study sessions, I think all of us would be behind in school. None of our parents were complaining about us gathering at any of our homes to study as long as our grades were all good.
Donna met me on the porch with a big hug and a kiss. That hug told me all I needed to know about the state of her underwear. There was no bra under that T-shirt to obstruct the intimacy of our embrace. I restrained myself from groping her and instead took her hand as she led me around to our usual entrance. I wondered if she ever used the front entrance.
“Do you have all your schoolwork done?” I asked.
“Yes. Do you?”
“I’m set for tomorrow. All the teachers want to get tests in before Labor Day so mostly we have reviews this week.”
“It does seem strange to have nearly four weeks of school before Labor Day,” Donna laughed. “Okay, we’ve taken care of all the school stuff. That’s enough of it for today.”
“I agree. I really just want to be with you for a while. I’m so glad you invited me out this afternoon.”
“We need to get past that,” she said.
“What?”
“Do you wait for all your girlfriends to invite you? Certainly, you must initiate contact sometimes. Tell me.”
“Well, we’ve kind of evolved, I guess. A lot of the time we’re all just deciding whose house we’ll study at that night. I try to go out with Rachel on Friday nights and we often invite another of our girlfriends to join us. And sometimes, I just call up and say, ‘Do you want to get together?’ I guess we all participate.”
“Yet you’ve never called and asked if it was convenient to stop by or if you could all come out to study one evening. Maybe like a Saturday afternoon.”
“Um… I guess not. Is it okay?”
“I need to ask you seriously, Jacob. Am I a part of your pod? I want you to know I’d like to be. But I feel like you are still holding me away.”
I thought about what I’d overheard that weekend in Kentucky when John videoed us. “That’s the difference in a nutshell, John. You want to take care of me. I don’t want to be taken care of any more or less than I take care of my mates.” Donna had spoken the words to her ex-fiancé. It was the first open declaration of her intent. Then, by Wednesday we were all back in school and suddenly I felt like a high schooler and she was a teacher—even if no longer my teacher. I sighed.
“Have I really been so dense, Donna?” I led her to the porch swing and sat holding her hand. “I want you,” I whispered. “I want you to be part of our pod. I want you to be part of my life. I thought we were just taking it slowly but maybe we’ve been obstructing it without intending to. And then we get into situations where I screw up, like greeting you at the race yesterday. That was so stupid of me.”
“That’s a difficult part,” she said. “But think of it the same as with any of your other girlfriends. You wouldn’t walk up and kiss Nanette at the physical therapy clinic where she works. For that matter, you wouldn’t greet Desi that way on stage. Nor would any of us make an intimate gesture toward you in the presence of Cindy and her mother. We all have to learn what’s appropriate in what circumstances.”
“You’d think I’d know that by now.”
“There are some things you can chalk up to lack of experience,” she laughed. I snorted. “Oh, dear. You think of yourself as far more experienced because of the past life memories you woke up with. But there is a difference between head memories and body memories.”
“Yes. I’ve learned about that. My other memories didn’t include anything about music. Suddenly, I discovered this body knew a lot about the guitar. Em tells me I picked up the classical guitar when I was seven and had seven years of lessons before my accident. But I woke up not remembering one of them. Not in my head. My fingers remembered as soon as I placed them on the strings.”
“Tell me more about your memories,” she whispered. “Why do you think you have them?”
“When I woke up—you know, that was two years ago yesterday?—I felt like I’d just been reborn into a new body. The body was a wreck. I had stitches in my face, two broken arms, a broken leg, three broken ribs, and every inch of my body hurt. But I was fresh. I could scarcely remember anything about the me who was so depressed I decided it was better to walk in front of a bus than keep living,” I said.
“What a shock that must have been! Did the new you want to keep living?”
“Oh, yes. For a while, I was confused by the memories and thought I’d just live the old man’s life over again. I could correct the mistakes he made, get rich, date the girls he didn’t have the confidence to ask out as a teen.” I don’t know exactly why I was being so open with Donna. She was one of the girls I wanted as a teen. Now she was here, holding my hand as we swung on the porch. I’d shared many of my ‘recovered memories’ with my girlfriends at different times. The thing I’d avoided talking about was having been sent back from my deathbed into this body and discovering the world I lived in was not only at a different point on the timeline but had a different history. But I’d never just sat and delved into the memories and uncertainties like I was willing to do with Donna. She’d opened a part of herself to me when she said she wanted to be part of the pod. I couldn’t help but trust her with more of my story.
“What are your dreams, Jacob?” she whispered in my ear before laying her head on my shoulder.
“Well, since I found out the source of my nightmares, the dreams seem more like normal teenage dreams. Success and accolades and loving girlfriends and the terror of walking into a class for final exams not having read anything for the course and being naked,” I laughed.
“Well, that would have made our final exam interesting,” she chuckled. “I don’t mean the nightmares or what happens when you sleep at night. What is here in your heart. Taking the memories of the you who walked in front of a bus along with the thoughts and memories of what I’ve heard you describe as the old man inside you, and combining it with the two years of new you since your accident, why do you think you are here? What do you dream of becoming?”
“Oh. I see,” I said. Donna was probing with her questions even as she cuddled under my arm and placed a hand on my chest. “Um… I discovered memories of things I hadn’t done in my fourteen years of life. I wouldn’t have to worry about education much. I remembered courses I hadn’t taken, books I hadn’t read. There wasn’t much to learn in school. But that’s where I parted ways with the memories. He was a whiz at math and an engineer. I… the me who is truly just sixteen now… want to do something more creative. I don’t want to relive his life.”
“Hence your argument regarding algebra as a freshman,” Donna said.
“Not just algebra. I had to fight to not take calculus this year. Mr. Gieseke tried to trick me into the class twice.”
“It’s that new NSRE. The schools all think they should force students into the Corps’ recommended course of study.”
“It’s funny that the corps seems to only be interested in recommending courses for math and science. You’d think they had a vested interest.”
“Oh, that’s not the only thing. Several students received recommendations that they transfer to technical schools. And, to be honest, that was a relief to many of them. But it’s true that there were very few recommendations that students study more language and arts. It seemed that if a student did well in those areas, it was used as evidence that the student didn’t need any more education in that field. I’ll be interested to see what this year’s round of testing reveals when both sophomores and juniors will take the test.”
“Yeah. I want to write and play music. I feel kind of bad that I haven’t been writing any stories for you to read.”
“The story that goes with your video isn’t finished?” I swear she was pouting.
“Um… almost. I just… It’s a little embarrassing.”
“Tell me.”
“I’m afraid you’ll see yourself in the story and think I’m being gross.”
“This character you think I’ll see myself in, is she the heroine?”
“Yes, though there are other important characters.”
“I see,” she said. She lifted her face and lightly bit my earlobe. “Are you mean to the heroine? Do you—I assume you are the hero—beat her? Humiliate her? Dominate her? Treat her unkindly? Kill her?”
“No!”
“So, I assume that part you would be embarrassed about involves sex. Do you make love?” I nodded. “Do you describe the intimate details? What she looks like when you see her naked? How her lips taste? Her scent as you lower your face to her sex?” I nodded and my hips shifted a little automatically. Donna was whispering the words in my ear and they were going straight to my cock. “Do you talk about how it feels to drag your penis through her juices? The heat of her sex as it envelopes you? The sounds of her ecstasy?”
“Donna…” I was panting a little.
“I think you’ve written all those things before and given them to me to read. And yes, I saw myself in your writing. So what, my boyfriend, is so embarrassing about this time?” she asked.
“I… Well…”
“Tell me. Tell me how it began and where it ends.”
“It begins with a glance,” I said. “Relationships all seem to begin with something simple. In this instance, it is a poetry class being held in a park. We are sitting around discussing Robert Browning. You glance over at me just as I’m reading.”
She should never have looked at me if she meant I should not love her!
There are plenty … men, you call such, I suppose … she may discover
All her soul to, if she pleases, and yet leave much as she found them:
But I'm not so, and she knew it when she fixed me, glancing round them.
“And just at that moment, I know my heart has been captured. But, of course, neither the hero nor heroine can admit that and even though their paths keep crossing and their conversation gets deeper, they each deny that the other could possibly be interested. But then a very aggressive coed enters the picture. I think she’s drawn by the fact that the couple can’t seem to connect but she sees the longing in each of their eyes. She interprets that as an opportunity.”
“Ah, dear! She attempts to drive a wedge between us and claim you for herself. Such a tragic trope.”
“Mmm. Yes and no. She doesn’t merely want to claim the hero. She wants the heroine as well. On each front, she uses her seductive charm. Just at the point where she must decide on one or the other, she is so torn that she retreats from them. Both hero and heroine, crushed by her sudden withdrawal, go to seek her out. Discovering they are both in love with the ‘other woman,’ they almost come to blows. This so shocks her that she rushes to both their arms and holds them together, describing how she saw their love and wanted to become part of it, not to destroy it.” I hesitated a moment and then finished, “That’s where I am now.”
“Oh! You do like multiples, don’t you,” she smiled. Her lips trailed kisses all down my neck and I turned to capture them with my own. Donna put her arms around me and opened her mouth to my probing tongue. Our caresses deepened and I found her breast with my hand. Her own hand drifted southward and I soon felt a gentle pressure over my hardened penis.
I don’t know how long we kissed and petted. We were way past any point we had previously gone. Our T-shirts both lay on the porch and our bare chests were pressed together as we kissed. I now cupped her naked breast in my hand and explored to see what kind of touch she liked, how rough or gentle to be with her nipples. I started kissing down her throat, seeking the hard little points my fingers had found but she halted me just short on the rise of her breast. I looked up at her and she kissed me again.
“Can you spend the night?” she whispered. I thought of the call home I’d need to make, but it was worth it. I nodded. “Then in the morning, perhaps you’ll be able to finish the story.”
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
