To My Senses

Author's note: If you haven't read my previous story "Jessie" then this chapter will likely not make sense. That book connects directly to this chapter. If you haven't read it, I would recommend taking a break from To My Senses to read that one.

This chapter contains very little sexual context. If you've been reading specifically for the erotic sequences instead of the plot, this would be a chapter to avoid.

Thank you for your views and your votes, and your public and private comments. I really do appreciate it all.

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"What are you doing here?" My mind couldn't process this, and my head ached. Nothing made sense. This was impossible.

"I should ask you the same question, Gary. What are you doing here? Again?"

"Again?" The weaponlight on the Sig cast crazy shadows over Tori, and I rose heavily from the bed, flipped on the bedside light. Jessie didn't stir and I moved to kneel beside her.

Tori's voice stopped me from trying to shake her awake. "Don't bother."

"Why?"

"Because."

I stood and placed the Sig on the end table, turned my attention to the woman impossibly sitting in the chair across the room. She looked better than when I'd seen her last - no bandage or brace on her leg, no cane resting nearby, no weak, tired air of defeat hovering around her. She looked young and vibrant, my old neighbor before violence and pain and death had intruded into our lives. She was dressed in a faded denim skirt and a cut-off Terminator t-shirt that exposed her slim waist, and even with Jessie sleeping behind me, all that skin on display made me hungry for her.

"How did you get on board? How did you find me? Aren't you supposed to be in California with your mom? How are you here now?"

"How are you here, Gary? All the other lives you could be living, and you choose to remember the life that hurt the most?"

"Remember? What the fuck are you talking about?"

Her voice was gentle. "The explosion, Gary. The car bomb. You saved Jane, at the cost of your own life. Pulled her from your truck before it blew."

The room seemed too small to contain my pounding head and the ringing inside it, and all the air seemed to have been sucked out, leaving a crushed feeling in my chest. I staggered, supported myself on the bedpost.

I did remember.

I'd lived a few years with Jessie after this day. Driven to Denver with her. Nearly died there. Sienna had come back, and we'd taken care of her and her daughter. I hated to admit it, but I'd fallen in love with her. Her past had caught up in spectacular fashion, a former Marine named Morgan. He'd bombed my truck, just as I feared when I took Sienna and Jane in.

I remembered the fated feeling of walking up to a guillotine as I made the choice to rescue Jane from the Suburban...and then the piercing, burning pain of the explosion just a few feet behind me, the feeling of being hurled through the air by the shockwave.

I looked up at Tori seated in the chair at the other end of the bedroom. I ground my teeth together, forced out the impossible words I know were true. "I'm dead."

She signed. "Not yet. But you will be. Soon. You're in a coma, dreaming. Close to waking up."

"I'm gonna die?"

Tori nodded gravely, fine black hair swinging around her finely featured face. "Yeah. You've been on a ventilator for a while. You have an infection. Antibiotics aren't going to cure it, and you're not strong enough to fight it."

I sighed. Closed my eyes for a long time. I didn't expect death to come like this. I'd expected a long life, or more recently, a quick and violent end.

Tori was still watching me when I opened my eyes. "You ok?"

"Does it matter? I kinda have to be."

One side of her mouth curled upward in a smirk.

"So why are you here. You die too? Are we soulmate ghosts? Are we communicating telepathically?" It sounded stupid to say, but I said it anyway.

Tori laughed, and the sound ripped at my heart. Dammit, I'd missed that. "No dummy. I'm still in Colorado, probably. Last you know of me I am. No, I'm you."

"Me?"

"Yeah. I'm the part of you that wants to stop. Wants to rest."

I was sitting on the bleachers in Greene Park, a few blocks from my house. There was a frosted glass bottle of Chopin in my hand. "I don't know how I could've done anything different. Every FUCKING choice, I've had to make. I couldn't live with myself if I DIDN'T do everything I've already done. It's like fucking...fate or something. And I'm sick of it. I want it to stop!"

By my side, Jessie didn't even notice Tori standing at the foot of the metal seats.

Another flash and I was standing in a basement in Minneapolis looking at a bloody mattress, surrounded by restraints and the surgical instruments necessary to perform the most unnecessary, destructive, disgusting surgery humanity had held over from the dark ages. I turned to Mike and said "No."

I stared through the red dot on top of my Sig, the dot skittering over Morgan's chest, and I couldn't help but flinch as fire bloomed at the end of his Beretta.

I sat with my back to the unfinished wall of the townhouse attic, an empty bottle of Chopin by my side and the muzzle of my dad's Browning warming under my chin. My face was hot with shed tears, my nose and throat were thick with mucus, and I'd never felt so alone, so broken, so tired, so worthless. Tori stood in front of me. "Wanna fuck?"

Across the yacht bedroom, Tori gazed at me, her eyes soft and sympathetic. "You don't have to keep fighting, Gary. Fighting other people. Fighting yourself. Fighting to wake up. It's time to rest. You earned it."

"You mean die."

"You're gonna die anyway, neighbor. The choice is to die peacefully, or in pain. Asleep, or aware..." Her smile was disarming, sympathetic.

On the bed, Jessie coughed, hacked, gasped, startling the moment. I bolted over and jumped up on the bed, kneeling beside her. I could smell the blood, it soaked into the sheets, turning the green bedclothes crimson. "Jessie! You ok? Answer me, baby!" I turned her to me, and she smiled weakly, reached up to touch my cheek. "Hi, daddy. I missed you."

"Jessie! Jessie, what's wrong, talk to me!" I shook her and it didn't make any difference.

"Good to see you again. I bet you're wondering why I look like shit, huh? I did it. Finished what you started. Kept Sienna safe. I stopped Morgan, got some justice for all those people he hurt. For you." Her voice was fading, growing weaker.

I looked back at my former neighbor. "Tori, what's going on? She needs help!"

"We're gonna have kids someday. Won't that be something? I wonder...I wonder if they'll have your eyes..."

Tears blurred my vision as I looked down at Jessie. "I'm right here, Jess, I've got you. It's ok..."

She smiled, recognition in her eyes like she could see me. "I wanna dance with you," she sang in a whisper. "I see a world where people live and die...with grace. The karmic ocean - " Her voice cut off, and I stared down at her for a long moment before vaulting off the bed.

"Tori, what the FUCK is this? Am I dreaming? Is this a nightmare? Does she really need me, is she hurt? WHAT?"

Tori sniffed the air audibly. " Smell her? Smell the blood? She's nearby, dying too."

Fear and panic lurched through my heart. "You said I was close to waking up. I want to wake up. Now!"

She shook her head. "No, you don't."

I seized my former neighbor by the shoulders and shook her. "Wanna bet? I need to be with her! I need to save her."

Tori exploited some joint lock just like she would've in the real world, was suddenly free, breaking away. "You can't help her. She's gonna die. There's nothing you can do for her if you wake up, you can't save her. All you can do is die painfully after watching her die."

"Bullshit!"

"You've got a respiratory infection, Gary. You're on a fucking ventilator. You wake up, all you're gonna do is watch her die, then spend a handful of days drowning in your own lungs, and then you're gonna suffocate to death. Sound like fun?"

"I can't leave her! I won't!" I glanced back at the bed where Jessie lay, still and motionless.

"She's already dead, Gary, or will be soon. What difference does it make, sentencing yourself to that torture... When you could rest, here? When you could live the rest of your life, here?"

"What?" The pounding in my head grew more intense, and I had to hold onto the bedpost to stay upright. Between the headache and the pain in my chest, it was only muscle and will that kept me from falling to my knees.

Tori approached, smiling softly. She reached out and touched my face gently with her fingertips, and I felt my heart melt, just a little. I always had loved her. Even when I was with Jessie, I still loved Tori too. Her absence was a huge, messy hole torn into my heart that would never, ever heal so long as I lived.

"We're in a dream, you and I. Time doesn't mean anything here. Whatever you want to dream, you can. Millions of lifetimes if you want, until you...just fall asleep and fade away. Better than drowning in air, gasping for every breath, don't you think?"

I blinked and I was walking in the backdoor of my house. Grass clippings stuck to my shoes and cargo pants, and I kicked them off so I wouldn't track them all over the floor that Cady had just mopped. My son James ran up to me, holding up a toy car. "Dad, come look at the track that I built!"

"I will in a minute." I walked over and hugged Cady from behind, arms around her waist as she put a tray of ice cubes in the freezer. She shut the door and turned in my arms, and I was struck by how beautiful her face was. She'd aged, growing out of the vibrant, hot youthful look of her late teens. Now she was a beautiful woman, my wife. I hadn't realized how much I missed her. How much I'd wanted this life with her.

How incomplete my life had felt without her in it.

"Finished with the yard?" she asked.

"Yeah." Cool breeze blowing in from the warm, grass-scented backyard stirred the lace curtains over the sink, and she gave me a peck on the lips. "Good, go shower, you're all sweaty. I'll bring you some soda."

With a supreme effort of will, I pushed myself away, and the scene froze. Tori smirked at me from where she leaned against the kitchen counter. "Isn't this better than drowning? Or maybe you'd rather, uh, scratch an itch."

I was over, and inside Sienna. Her wrists were cuffed to the bed, arms outstretched, head thrown back in ecstasy, blonde hair splayed across the blue sheets. I surged forward, burying my cock deep inside her, making her scream and arch up off the bed to look pitiably at me. "Gary, PLEASE..." I straightened upright, gathered her legs together, squeezing her pussy around me even tighter, picking up my pace as I hammered her. Sweat dripped from my face onto her skin, as clean and unbroken by scars as when she'd first lifted her dress for me in my college office.

Tori crawled up on the bed and gave me a sultry smile before lowering her mouth to her girlfriend's breast, tracing pink tongue-tip around brown areola before sucking the nipple into her mouth and making the blonde cry out with pleasure.

Lifting her face from Sienna's tits, she grinned at me. "With everything that you could be dreaming, why were you remembering your pain? Why were you remembering your life?"

I was sitting on the bed in Nina's apartment, and she was bent over my lap, bare bottom stuck up in the air, schoolgirl skirt tucked into its own waistband, legs sheathed in white stockings that contrasted with her dark skin. There was a wet slurping noise as I pulled my thumb from her snatch, quit my digital stimulation of her clit. She gasped as the pleasure I was giving her ceased. "That's enough of that," I said playfully. "Time to return to your discipline."

It was so instinctual, so natural, pulling my hand back and delivering a hard slap to her naked ass, that I didn't even think about the fact that it was Nina. Nina, who'd been dead, what, five years now?

She let out a quiet whimper at each of the spanks, looking back at me with an intoxicating mixture of fear and anticipation and arousal in her dark eyes.

Dammit.

I pushed her off my lap, and she immediately knelt, fingers going for my fly, and I grabbed her wrists, stilling her. "What?" she asked.

I took a moment to look over her face, oval, model-fine features, brilliant, beautiful eyes. I'd thought I could love her once.

Fuck, I HAD loved her. I'd traded my relationship with Cady, my FUTURE with Cady to protect her. I'd risked my life, risked a future in prison to protect her. I let go of her wrists, gently took her face in my hands, smiling as I brushed the box braids she was so fond of away from her face, draping them over her shoulders. "I missed you," I whispered. "So fucking much. I'm sorry... Sorry I wasn't there for you when you needed me."

"I'm here now," she replied. "And you've got me so turned on I can't think straight. Please? More spankings? I was close..."

"Yeah, I just...I wanna look at you again. I haven't seen you in years..."

She bit her lip, smirked as I brushed a hand over her face. "I have something... Something I want to ask you, big brother."

"Yeah?"

Her eyes tilted to the floor demurely. "We've been doing this so long, and I wanna keep doing it... Do you..." Her body shuddered as she took a deep breath. "Do you wanna make this official? Boyfriend and girlfriend, instead of dom and sub, big brother and little sister?

"Yeah. Yeah, I do."

"Even though I'm Cady's friend?"

"Yeah."

"Good. Awesome! Yay!" Nina pushed me back on the bed, climbed astride me and lifted the hem of her short, plaid, costume skirt to show me her bald vulva as she ground her lips back and forth on the bulge in my jeans.

I dragged two suitcases up the garage steps into the hall, kicked the snow off my boots, and walked into the kitchen. Last time I'd been in this hall, it'd been on fire and I'd been struggling to keep Keanaaddiid from sinking his machete into my liver. I remembered the look of fury in his eyes as we fought, the look of surprise as my strength prevailed and I pushed him back and three of my bullets had found him.

Now there was sparkly red and green garland lining the doorways and the smoke in the air smelled like candle smoke and cooking food rather than burning building.

The kitchen counters were set with crockpots and trays of desserts, and a roast was wafting stomach-rumbling meat fumes from the oven. All those stupid bears decorating the kitchen and dining room wore red and white Santa hats, and my mom stood in the center of it all mixing something in the blender. "MOM!" I dropped the suitcases to the floor and ran to hug her, burying my face in her shoulder.

"Gary! You made it up! How were the roads?" I let go of her regretfully and stepped back. "A little slippery, not bad. Shit, you're...sorry, I'm just really glad to...dammit!" I was stumbling over my words and I cut myself off by hugging her again.

"Let me go, you goof, I'm cooking!"

"I missed you, that's all."

"We just saw you last week..."

Cold wind blew in from the deck door, and dad stepped in, a Santa hat on his head and a drink in his hand. "Son! You came up after all. Good to see you!"

I walked over hesitantly. It felt like my heart was breaking with every step. I remembered... Remembered the crash and my life after they'd passed, but I also remembered my life where they hadn't. I could feel the tears in my eyes as I bypassed my dad's outstretched hand and hugged him instead. "I missed you," I said, my throat thick with emotion. "I'm sorry."

He pushed me away gently. "I'd offer you a drink but I know you're abstaining because she is too. Now go help your pregnant wife carry all her shit in!" He laughed and turned back, walked out onto the deck to look out on his backyard. Christmas lights were set in all the trees, turning the dark night and the edges of the black forest a beautiful blend of festive colors.

Heart bursting with joy and profound relief, I turned mutely back and walked through the kitchen into the garage. I approached the SUV, dragged more bags out of the trunk, slammed it shut as cold wind blew thick, puffy flakes of snow around me. The passenger side door opened and a small, round figure climbed out, thickly bundled against the cold, dashed as fast as she could to the garage. I chuckled and stumbled the weight of our duffel bags forward, finally setting them down with their fellow suitcases in the hall.

I looked around for my wife. Mom noticed my confusion. "Downstairs already."

I sighed with exasperation and lugged the bags down the steps into the family room. A fire was roaring in the fireplace, and garland hung from the split-log rafters, a white-lit Christmas tree illuminating the figure by the downstairs patio door. She shrugged off her coat, pulled off her hat and scarf, and I wrapped my arms around her, burying my face in glossy black hair. "Beautiful night," Tori whispered.

"Yeah." We gazed out at the holiday-decorated backyard for a while, the Christmas trees collecting snow but still blazing like festive beacons in the night.

"We need to get upstairs, I'm famished," she said.

"Yeah," I repeated, not wanting to leave the embrace. This was everything I wanted right here. This was contentment. A week's vacation from work, Christmas with my family, hunting with my dad...

"Don't let me eat all the Angel Food candy," Tori said with a grin as she stepped away. She ran her hand over her belly. "Gotta keep my girlish figure."

We both laughed and she walked over to the pile of duffel bags, dug through until she found what she was looking for. A collapsible spreader bar in her left hand, wrist and ankle cuffs, and a ballgag in her right. "By the way," she said, her voice going low and dark and sultry, "My fucking hormones are going crazy. The restraints are for however you want to subdue me tonight when you fuck all three of my holes. Repeatedly. The gag is for whenever your cock isn't in my mouth, so I don't wake your family up with my screaming. I NEED your cum in me tonight. NEED."

"Yes, honey." I took the sex toys from her and hid them back in the bag, put my hand on her hips and kissed her. Dammit, I'd missed this. The smell and taste of her, the feel of her body against mine. It was intoxicating, it had been too long since it was just a memory.

We walked back upstairs, hand in hand.

Dinner was deer that my father had bagged in the fall, vegetables, and bread. I refused a drink since Tori couldn't have any, opening a soda as I stood at the counter and joyfully took in the holiday scene before walking over to the table. There were little carved Christmas bears with each of our initials at our place settings, and an instrumental woodwind album played "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" softly in the background.

I felt relaxed and happy, and the back of my mind buzzed with anticipation of the dirty fun my wife and I would have in the basement after everyone else had gone to bed.

I was content.

"Pass me another slice?" Tori asked at my elbow.

I reached out and stabbed a slice of roasted deer, dropped it into her plate with a slight splat. She laughed, gave me a peck on the cheek. "I love you, Gary."

She, Tori, my wife loved me. It felt like the hole in my heart was repaired. Like it'd never existed at all. Like I'd waited a lifetime to hear her say that.

Dammit.

I looked around the table at my family, at my wife - the woman I'd loved for a decade. "I love you guys," I whispered.

It took all my willpower, it broke my heart, but I stood. "This isn't real."

"Does it need to be?" Tori asked, her voice serious now.

"Yeah. I need to wake up. I need to be with Jessie."

"She's dying and you can't save her. All you can do is condemn yourself to death by slow torture."