Crown Vic to a Parallel World

7

Feelings, Memories, and Bad Habits

I opened my eyes, and I was still in bed with my arm around Shawn.  He was asleep, and his breathing sounded like a series of peaceful, contented sighs.  I turned my head as far as I could without shifting my body and admired his placid, sleeping face from the edge of my peripheral vision.

‘He’s so perfect.’ I thought as I looked at the smooth, fair skin of his face and the shining black hair that pooled around his head as it rested on my arm. ‘I can’t believe he slept with me.  I can’t believe he’ll let me come near him.  Such a lovely young man.’

I loved the way Shawn felt against my body.  I loved sharing his heat and breathing the same air as him.  I inhaled a long breath through my nose.  His scent filled my head and set my mind on fire with lust.  I breathed him in again.  He smelled as good as he looked.  ‘How is it possible for a man to smell like that?’ I asked myself.

As a worker in the skilled trades, as a welder for industrial plants and construction projects, I was used to being around men.  The men I was familiar with stank.  They sweated as they labored and thought that rank farts were hysterical.  If I smelled them at all, they were more likely to smell like a gym locker at low tide than something I would be attracted to.

Shawn’s scent, on the other hand, was intoxicating.  It was all male but not pungent or rank.  His scent wasn’t a stink, it was a fragrance of man.  Smelling him like that, it was like getting to sample his masculinity.  It was arousing to the point of making my morning wood painfully hard.  It was also as close to intimacy as I could ever hope to get with someone as lovely as Shawn.

I wished that I could stay in bed with him forever, or at least until he woke on his own, but I couldn’t.  There was an urgency building inside me that I had to address, and the sooner the better.  The urgency was the jagged fingernails of my nicotine addiction clawing the inside of my skull.  I extracted my arm from under Shawn’s head and threw some clothes on so I could go outside to smoke.  As I put my pants on, I whispered to my erection. “Sorry Junior.” I said as I tucked it away into the constraining fabric and fastened my pants.

I grabbed my smokes and headed for the balcony, but I didn’t make it through the door.  I paused with my hand on the knob to look back and admire the sleeping beauty in my bed.  I wanted to burn the image into my memory, because I was certain I’d never see it again.  I shook my head at the futility of my desires and slipped through the door onto the balcony.  I lit a cigarette and closed my eyes against the too-bright sunshine of full-morning.

I let the cigarette rest in my mouth as I leaned both hands, arms locked, on the balcony railing.  The acrid odor of the cigarette chased the smell of Shawn from my nose and banished my fantasies from my imagination.  I berated myself for the fantasies. ‘Yeah,’ I thought, ‘you’ve got a hell of a chance with him.  You were always too ashamed of being gay to be gay and now you’re too broken for it to matter.  Fuck.’

I shoved those thoughts aside and allowed some different ones in.  I thought about my situation and the night before and the day that preceded it.  I reproached myself for the decisions that I’d made.

‘Did you really tell Ars he could have your tomorrows?’ I asked myself, though I already knew the answer. ‘How can you help anyone?  You can’t even help yourself.  They must be out of their minds to think you can help them.  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 smoked and berated myself until the heat of the cigarette on my lips and the ease of the draw told me the cigarette had burned almost all the way down.  It was time for a fresh one.  I plucked the butt from my mouth and used it to chain light another smoke.  I wound up to flick what was left of the first cigarette over the railing but paused to glance down to make sure I wouldn’t hit anyone with it.

The view that greeted me from below, froze my hand mid-flick.  A small group of people had gathered on the sidewalk at the edge of the hotel property.  They all looked up in my direction.  A few pointed and conferred with each other while the rest just stared.  I looked up and behind myself to see what had attracted all the attention.  There was nothing above me but sky, and nothing behind me but the blue stone wall of the hotel.

I couldn’t flick the cigarette away, so I burnt my fingers stubbing the butt out on the underside of the railing.  I waved the burn away from my fingertips and looked at the growing crowd.  They were making me nervous with their staring.  I drew on my cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke.  A noticeable murmur rippled through onlookers and several fingers pointed to the dissolving cloud.  My worry spiked at their pointing and I stepped back from the railing in an effort to reduce my visibility.

As I retreated toward the wall of the hotel, several people down below moved in the opposite direction so they could keep me in view.  Some went so far as to cross the street.  The crowd’s attention was undeniably on me.  I got scared enough to cut my second cigarette short.  I ground the butt to dust against the stone wall and hurried inside.

I entered the bedroom to find that Shawn had gotten up and was in the bathroom.  I waited for him to come out and announced my concerns when he did.  He came through the doorway rubbing sleep from his right eye with his fingers.  He noticed me waiting for him and wished me a good morning.

“There’s people outside staring at me!” I blurted and pointed toward the balcony.

Shawn cocked his head at me for just a second, like he was reasoning out why people would stare at me.  His face scrunched into a worried look of disapproval. “Oh no.”

“Oh no, WHAT?” I demanded.

“Were you smoking?” He asked like he already knew the answer.

“Yeah.” I announced and raised my defenses for another harangue on my bad habits.  That’s not what I got.  Shawn watched my face and waited for me to reason out the trouble.  An image of the staring blonds from the previous evening flashed into my head and enlightened my mind.  “Oh, shit.” I said as I realized that the people had been staring at me as I smoked, like they might watch a fire-eater at a circus.

Shawn shook his head as he saw that I’d connected the dots for myself. “We’re going to have to do something about your habit.” He explained, like it was just that easy.

I gathered from the resigned simplicity in Shawn’s voice, that he’d never been addicted to anything.  ‘Good for him.’ I thought.  I crossed the room so I could prop my ass on the bureau with my arms folded over my chest.  I glared a challenge at 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?”

Shawn crossed the room away from me and sat on the bed.  He clasped his hands together in his lap, the left was a fist with the right wrapped over it and squeezing the left.  He looked at the floor while he considered the problem, 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.  I could help with the drinking as well, 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 figured that I’d quit if it was just that easy, but I didn’t understand how it could be.  As I reasoned that out, I realized that 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.” Shawn explained. “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.”

Shawn stood off the bed, 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 gripped 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, emotionless tone that sounded like he was lecturing about an insurance policy or something.  I mentally named Shawn’s manner of speech his ‘clinical tone.’

“I started to explain yesterday,” he waved his right hand my way and pointed at my head, “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 in desperate confusion.  Nothing that Shawn had said made any sense to me and I was grasping for something that I could make heads-or-tails of.

Shawn crossed the room to where I was perched on the bureau as he answered.  He stopped just outside my personal space.  “I press my forehead to yours, put my hands around your head, then you relax and clear your mind.  When you’re calm, I establish what you might call a telepathic connection with your brain stem.  What I do isn’t actually telepathy, because I can’t read your thoughts, though I might get impressions of your mood.

“I send my perception through your body, using your nerves as conduits, 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.  There are no pharmaceuticals here.  Any treatment for any medical problem, be it illness or injury, from closing a paper cut to curing cancer, is done with magic energy.”

Shawn closed out his monologue by resting his right cheek in the cupped palm of his right hand. “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.”

I wasn’t sure I believed what Shawn had said.  To me, it sounded like smoke, mirrors, and bullshit.  I reminded myself that I was on another world where magic was apparently a thing.  I also reminded myself that I’d already experienced Shawn’s ‘magic’ as he cured my hangover the previous day.  I figured that it was possible that everything he’d said was the truth.  I also figured that I didn’t have anything to lose by letting him try.  “Fuck it.  Sure, why not?”  I shrugged my agreement at him.

Shawn 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.  Shawn 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 even though I wasn’t.

Shawn moved in, so close that I felt his heat.  My deep-breathing treated me to a nose-full of his masculine scent, the scent that I’d discovered I loved.  My desire flared and vague fantasies flitted through my mind.  I tried to ignore them and calm myself, but I couldn’t.  I’d almost decided to tell Shawn that there was no way I could be calm with him that close to me when he pressed his forehead to mine, located his hands on my head, and made the connection.

I immediately felt his presence inside my mind.  It was like walking into a dark room and realizing someone is in there without being able to see them.  He spoke inside my head.  ‘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 had just thought or if he could see the lurid scenes my imagination was conjuring.

Shawn spoke again inside my mind. ‘Please, Church, I need you calm.’

‘He obviously doesn’t know what he’s asking.’ I thought.  I tried to focus on my breathing as a way to calm down, but every breath pulled in more of Shawn’s essence.  I thought about holding my breath, but I knew my smoke-damaged lungs couldn’t hold my breath for more than a few seconds.  I also didn’t want to stop breathing him in.  I wanted to savor Shawn’s essence, to remember it, and add it to my fantasies about him.

A strange sensation in my chest distracted me from my fantasies and gave me something to focus on.  The sensation was the pins and needles feeling of a foot that has fallen asleep.  It filled the center of my chest and made me worry that I was having a heart attack.  I worried until the pins and needles started to move.

They left my chest and traveled down and up each of my arms, then moved to my stomach, then down and back up each leg, before they returned to my chest.  I suspected the pins and needles were Shawn’s energy as he explored my insides.  The idea that any part of him was inside me gave me the creeps but was kind of hot too.  I thought about that for a second until the pins and needles moved toward my head.

I panicked again that Shawn would be able to read my lusty thoughts when his energy reached my brain.  I was in the middle of panicking when the pins and needles entered my head, and something changed.  Suddenly, my body felt hot, like working-on-a-black-roof-in-August hot.  Sweat poured out of me and it got hard to breathe.  I gasped like I’d climbed ten flights of stairs.  My heart pounded like a jackhammer.  I felt like I would burst into flames, like my body would combust and explode like a firework.

I opened my eyes and saw my own face.  I stared into my own bloodshot brown eyes.  My eyes looked scared.  I was scared.  I was terrified.  I didn’t know what was happening or why I could see myself.  I tried to move, but I couldn’t.  My body wouldn’t do what I told it to do.  I felt strange, different.  I felt my hands, Shawn’s hands, on my head and my hands felt the heat of my head and the sweat of my unwashed hair.  I looked at me from outside of my body.  I looked at me from inside of his body while Shawn looked at his from inside mine.  I squeezed my eyes shut, his eyes shut.

Heat poured from my body and my consciousness boiled over like an overheated pot with a loose-fitting lid.  The fire inside reached a crescendo and blazed one last time like a flare shot into the night sky.  It winked out and everything returned to normal.  As quickly as the out-of-control sensation started, was as suddenly as it stopped.

Shawn 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 my breath wheezed in my chest.

Shawn didn’t answer me.  He turned away, toward the windows to rub his temples with his fingers.  He looked back at me curiously, with his 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 tried to figure out what the feeling was, but I couldn’t.

Shawn’s breathing steadied before mine did.  He lifted his shirt to wipe the beads of sweat from 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 Shawn 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, gasping mouth.  White-hot desire exploded inside me, and I almost surrendered to it.  A tiny part of my better judgement stopped me.

I stood up and shoved Shawn off me.  The chair that I’d been sitting on 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 was more than scared.

“I want you.” Shawn whispered from the floor. “I want you badly.”

I heard the words that he said and felt they were true.  I felt the projected desire that went with them.  I felt his lust like it was my own.  I told him I felt it. “I know you want me.”

Shawn’s eyes widened until white was visible all the way around the frozen blue 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, and I shared it with him. “I know you want me because I can feel it…your lust.  Your lust is like steam…intense and so hot.  I can also feel your fear.  It feels like rancid butter smells.”

Shawn’s wide eyes narrowed.  His lust quenched out, and his intense fear settled into worry.  My fear didn’t settle, if anything it had increased toward terror.  In spite of my fear, I realized that Shawn was still 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 on his feet, he rubbed both of his temples again, his first and second fingers made 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.”

Shawn was right.  That was my earliest memory.  The fact that he knew it was too strange to be scary.  I thought a little and found I had knowledge enough to tell 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 of ‘Shawn’ when you moved to the capital to go to medical school.”

Shawn shook his head back and forth so quickly his hair fell across his face.  He talked to me through the strands.  “Oh my!  Oh my…oh my…oh my…oh my!”  He said and sounded very much like his uncle had.  He walked away from me, the whole length of the sitting room, spun on his heels and ran back.  “Do you know what this means?”  He whispered in my face.

“HOW IN THE HELL WOULD I KNOW THAT?” I shouted and waved my arms wide in angry panic.

Shawn shrank away from me.  He was afraid of my shouting.  I felt his fear and I didn’t like that I was the cause of it.  I tried to calm myself.  I hoped that if I was calm, Shawn would be calm.  I took a few deep breaths, righted the chair that I’d knocked over, sat on it, and gave him my full attention.  My hands rested on my knees and tightened until all the knuckles were white with tension. “OK, OK, Shawn, what does it mean?”

I felt Shawn wrestle control over his emotions.  He forced calm upon himself and 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 searched my mind, but didn’t have to look far to realize that there was an entire body of knowledge next to my own that wasn’t there before.  I nodded to confirm I had what I assumed were Shawn’s memories.  “So, what do we do?”  I asked.  I was trying to stay calm, but Shawn was losing his struggle against his worry and his spiraling emotions were getting tangled with mine.  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.  As he did it, he exposed his sinewy torso from waist to collar bones.  The view caused my thoughts to shift far away from our new dilemma.

“Ummph.” Shawn grunted.  He stopped wiping and pushed his shirt down.  I felt a warm wave of lust from him, then 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 that Shawn needed me to be serious, but the madness of what was had happened, and what was happening, limited my ability to be serious.  I answered and sounded more flippant than I felt.  “I’ll try, but all bets are off if you lift that shirt again.”

“I’m sorry.” Shawn turned his back to me. “Is this better?”

I looked Shawn 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 to refer to the peach-shaped roundness that topped his impressive legs.

I felt Shawn’s frustration rise at my silly comment, so I reluctantly peeled my gaze away from his incredible body to direct it out the window.  I thought maybe I’d go out for a cigarette and that would give us both time to calm down, but I realized that I didn’t want one.  The thought of smoking held no attraction for me at all.  I took the pack and lighter from my shirt pocket and set them on the desk at the window.

“Good job on the addiction.” I complimented Shawn. “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 Shawn off me and felt bad about it.  “I’m sorry I knocked you down.”

Uncertainty replaced the happiness he’d felt at my praise.  “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.  I felt that Shawn was attracted to me, but that was beyond unbelievable.  I wanted him to tell me if what I thought that I knew was right.

Shawn paused to consider his words before he spoke.  “I’m attracted to you…and 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’d 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 remained silent 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 to reach 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 my lust for the first and only man that ever kissed me.  I stood up and stretched.  My joints popped 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 while you call your uncle.”

Shawn replied to my idea with a mundane announcement. “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 moved toward my room.

“Church!” Shawn called after me.  I turned to see what he wanted.  His emotions had shifted again.  He was ashamed of himself.  He held his left hand as a fist and squeezed it with his right while his eyes looked everywhere but at me. “I’m sorry.  This…I don’t know what happened.  I must have done something, but I don’t know what.  I was taught…I was taught that if I wasn’t careful…if I didn’t protect myself, that something like this could happen, but not to this extent.  People have been known to share emotions, but never memories.  I don’t know…I don’t know…”

“Hey, Shawn.” I called to stop his anxious chatter.  He raised his eyes to mine with worry on his face and in his heart. “We’re both alive and in one piece and I don’t want a cigarette.  You could almost call this a win.” I said to let him know that I wasn’t angry.  I had no idea how to feel about what had happened between us, but ‘anger’ didn’t enter into it.  The situation was too strange for me to be angry.

Shawn rocked his head up and down in an appreciative nod. “I’ll call my uncle.” He said again.

I nodded back to him and went to get cleaned up.