. 20

Author's note:

This is, in all its seven parts and their many chapters, one very,

very

long story. If long stories bother you, I suggest you read something else.

No part of this story is written so as to stand on its own. I strongly suggest that you start with

the beginning of Part 1

and read sequentially—giving up at any point you choose, of course.

This is the last chapter of Part 2. It contains no explicit sex. It centers on a discussion some people won't like or will be uncomfortable with, but which is very important to the characters and to later developments. Decide for yourself whether to read it.

All sexual activity portrayed anywhere in this story involves only people at least eighteen years old.

This entire story is posted only on literotica.com. Any other public posting without my permission in writing is a violation of my copyright.

One afternoon, somewhat more than a month before the end of school, as Jenny and Sam and I were studying, Ellen knocked at the door. Sam opened to see who it was, and let her in. Ellen looked, well, odd. Anxious, or maybe even a little afraid. In fact, Sam said, "Ellen, what's wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost or something."

"I don't know, this may be worse. Do you believe in prophecy?"

I said, "What do you mean? Messages from God? Mere predictions? People have made lots of predictions, some of which have come true, even seemingly unlikely ones. Lots haven't too, even—or especially—ones claiming divine authority. If God exists, and if he's what the Bible says, then it seems likely that some prophecies really are real, really are prophecy. And of course some things that claim to be prophecy aren't anything of the kind, on that assumption—prophecies from other spiritual powers and prophecies based only on the prophet's wishes, or his hearer's wishes, are all through the Bible."

Jenny said, "I think people make enough predictions that some of them are bound to come true. If you look back at people claiming to have ESP and making predictions, you find that they claim to have foreknown all kinds of things. But if you look closely, most of those, what they said wasn't anything like that clear beforehand, and their bad guesses way outnumber their good ones. I think it's just luck and stretching things after the fact to fit what really happened.

"In fact, there's a really clear example. Jeane Dixon predicted that a Democrat beholden to labor would win the presidency in 1960, and be assassinated or otherwise die in office, maybe in his second term. Pretty wide open, right? And she later flatly predicted that JFK would not win in 1960. But somehow, she and everyone else trumpeted that she had predicted his assassination, as 'proof' of her psychic powers."

I put in, "For that matter, Swift's Laputian scientists said that Mars had two moons, with orbits not all that close to the actual orbits of Phobos and Deimos but not outrageously far off. That's often been viewed as a prediction which came true, but it looks a lot more like a coincidence." I was pretty sure they all knew this as well as I did.

Sam said, "I don't know, but I've never found any reason to believe in it—prophecy or psychic foreknowledge or whatever. But do you mean prophecy in general, or something more specific?"

Ellen looked at me. "Both, I guess. I was asking in general, but because of something specific. I didn't believe in it. Now I'm not so sure. My grandmother, my mother's mother, claimed that sometimes God gave her messages. Sometimes predictions, sometimes warnings about what people were thinking or doing. I thought she was crazy. But maybe she wasn't.

"Anyway, something happened to me a little while ago, just a few minutes before I came in here. I was distracted for a minute, daydreaming maybe—and I saw something, or was told something or something like that. It's a little hard even to know how to describe it that much. But now I understand something that always bothered me. You know, in the Bible, it will sometimes say something like, 'The word of the Lord to so-and-so, which he saw during the reign of some king or other.' Whatever this is, I saw, and—it's not really like I heard anything, but it was a lot like being told something. Or having been told something, maybe, remembering what I was told but not the telling."

Ellen sounded like she was going to break down into uncontrollable weeping at any time. I got up and went over to hold her, and before I got there she pushed me away. "Phil, please, keep away from me. I can't stand it." I sat back down, and she relaxed, very slightly.

"Phil, insofar as it's a message, it's basically for you. Or it's about you, anyway. In a few years, they're going to ask you to come back here, as an instructor. And you will come here, with your wife. And you've got to, terrible things will happen if you don't! You will be married, and the two of you will have had troubles of some sort, but you will have weathered them and been strengthened by them. And I didn't see anything about what that part means, it's like I was told that much and no more.

"But you, and your children, will do something important. I saw your children! Two boys and a girl, and they will be students here, themselves. Anyway, something you and your children do will save the school, and the whole island, from some kind of disaster. I don't know what. But, well, it was put something like this: What you do will save more than the island, much more, but less than the whole world. And why tell me that but not tell me anything useful, like what or when?" Her voice was still quiet, but that last question was a despairing wail.

I opened my mouth to say something, I'm not sure what, but Jenny jumped in first. "OK, but I want to know, who is this wife supposed to be?"

Ellen dropped her eyes to the floor. "That's something I didn't see," she said. And I don't know what it was about that, but I knew without any doubt at all that she was lying.

I said, "Ellen!" and she looked up at me. Looking startled and maybe a bit frightened. "Ellen, don't lie to me. I can tell that you did see that. And it's you, isn't it?"

She dropped her eyes again, At this point she definitely was crying a little. Again I automatically moved toward her to try to comfort her, and again she held out her arms to fend me off.

"Phil, please. I can't stand it." She was crying harder, enough to interfere with her talking. "You know I love you, and being married to you would be—my idea of heaven. But it's, um, if we ever get married, I want it to be because I want to and because you want to. And because Jenny and Sam and anyone else with a real claim are OK with it. Our choice. Not because someone or something says we're going to, whether we like it or not, whatever we want. I feel like someone's ordering me to do something, and yes it's what I really want to do, more than I can tell you, but ordering it without regard for me. Or you. Or Sam or Jenny."

I put in, "Ellen, listen a moment," but she ignored that.

"And I know what you want to do, all you want to do right now, is to comfort me. But if you hold me, I'm going to want you to take me over to that bed and reassure me that you really love me. Or to my bed, if for some reason Sam wouldn't let us do it here. And—and I just couldn't stand it, thinking that this is just another part of pushing me into some plan made up without regard for us."

This time I stood my ground. "Ellen, please, let me hold you. I promise, I won't try to take you to bed, or let you pull me into it, until you're sure you're ready. And I don't mean until you can't stand it any longer, I mean until you've settled things in your own mind. I promise. Whether it's days or weeks or even never. You said you'd trust me with anything. Won't you trust me with this?"

She sobbed harder. Then she stepped into my arms and put her head on my shoulder, and cried and cried. Finally she started to run down, and she said, "Phil, thank you. With you, anything, but please, please, don't ask me for more."

She stepped back from me, not rejecting me this time, but so that she could address us all better. "There's more I've got to say, there's background you need to hear about. I don't think I've ever told you anything much about my family. My grandparents were all Christians. During the Mao years, Christians were persecuted a lot, there had been persecution before but there was more under Mao, and not only Christians. My grandparents were lucky enough to be able to escape, and came to the States. They arrived with almost nothing, you understand.

"I told you, my grandmother claimed that God sometimes told her things. In fact, she said that she and her husband fled because of a vision, and that soon after that almost all of the people of their church had been imprisoned, and she thought most had died. Information about things like that wasn't easy to come by, of course.

"You need to understand, my parents aren't Christians. They didn't violently rebel or anything, they have their share of the traditional Chinese respect for parents, which they also insisted on from us. Respect for parents and grandparents. Any ancestors. They just quietly abandoned religion, all religion. They didn't complain about my grandparents trying to teach my brother and me. I'm sure my grandparents saw this as one more influence of American culture, which they viewed as immoral and materialistic through and through. Much as they appreciated its freedoms and material blessings, and they understood the connections! It really is hard to believe how bad things were in China at the end of Mao's life. I think if my brother and I had believed, my parents wouldn't have objected at all, they made no effort to turn us either way. But we didn't.

"Anyway, my grandmother. Um. This is half my life ago! I don't remember just when, I wasn't a little girl any more, but I wasn't a young woman at all, yet. But we were working together on something, housekeeping probably. And out of the blue, she said something like, I saw you last night, and it was given to me to know that you, at least, will believe. Will come to know the Lord, something like that. She said, you will be married then, and your husband will come to believe along with you. And then she said something really strange. She said, but before that, you will be given knowledge that you don't want. In spite of that, you won't believe at that time, but the word will be true.

"I asked her for more details, and she just clammed up. She said, I can only tell you what I saw and what I know. I saw what I saw and I know what I know, but I wasn't given everything. I can only say what I was shown and told.

"And if you ask me for more, that's really all I can say, too. I think I know what she meant. This comes from whoever or wherever it comes from. I didn't ask for it, I didn't control it.

"And now, does this mean that she really saw ahead to this? Is this what she was talking about? If it really is knowledge, she's right, I sure don't want it! But the bigger issue, besides what I already said, is this. If my grandmother was right about this much, is she right about all the rest? Including God's being real and telling me this because you have to do something important, and I have to provide you with the children who will help you? I'm scared to death of this!"

I said to her, "'It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.'" She stared at me. I said, "That's from the Epistle to the Hebrews. I think maybe it sums up your feelings, doesn't it?"

She didn't answer my question, not as such, anyway. "Phil, you have to let go of me now. I've got to figure out where I can stand. Everything I thought I understood has all come apart. I love you. If we can decide to get married and do it, because we want to and choose to, I'll be the happiest woman you've ever known—whatever troubles we have to weather. But that's a big if. I don't know what to do. And if we go to bed now, I mean before I figure things out at least some, I'll never have the courage to face it and try to figure it out. If that means I'm not your partner any longer, please tell me. I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it now, I love you so much and want you so much, but I'm afraid."

She seemed to be a little more in control, so I didn't push her to let me hold her again. I said, "Ellen, I have some things to say, if you think you can stand to listen. They may help you think things through. They're not magic, I'm not saying this will fix all your fears and concerns, certainly not instantly. Can you listen? Or do you need time before we can even talk at all?"

Ellen took a deep breath and held it a moment, then let it out in a long sigh. She stepped up to me and gave me a quick hug, then backed away and sat down on the edge of the bed. She said, "Sit down, Phil. I do trust you. If I can't stand what you have to say, I'll say so and you'll stop saying it. You've always been good to me.

"And before you go on, I'm sorry about pushing you away. I do trust you, and if you want to hug me at some point, go ahead. I should have known without your having to say it that you wouldn't take advantage of me, of my wanting you. I hope you'll always be my friend, no matter what."

"All right, then. What I have to say, as far as I can think now, is all directed to one point of what you said. If I understand you, it's the key to what you're afraid of, but it also rests on assumptions that you're not necessarily ready to make. So you'll still have a lot to think through.

"I don't know. Um. You said your grandparents tried to teach you, but I don't know how close you were to them or how much they tried to give you. Or even much about where they stood theologically.

"Now, my parents are atheists, Dad vehemently so, but my paternal grandparents were Christians, very strongly so. And I don't understand how this got worked out, but my parents are gone a lot, so from pretty young my grandparents probably raised me about half the time. And the thing I understand least about that is this: my grandparents, especially Granddad, did their best to give me a strong Christian upbringing. I learned early not to talk about it when my father was around, but he had to know, and he let it happen. If you knew my father, you'd know how impossible that is, but somehow he did.

"And Granddad gave me an extraordinary grounding in the Bible. I memorized whole chapters, some whole books. I can still drag most of it out, probably not quite word for word after years and after reading other translations, but I really know it. And he loved to talk about it and what it means. There are plenty of things where I think his understanding was wrong—and I know how conceited and cocksure that makes me sound—but most of them are minor, and on a couple of things he even admitted in the end that I was probably right.

"But on the main outlines of what the Bible means when you put it all together, he seems to me to have been right. And it's not because he told me what to think. He always insisted on looking up the text of what it was based on, to see whether that supported what he was telling me.

"That's all background. What it's background to is that he was a thoroughgoing Calvinist, theologically. Ultimately, God is sovereign over the whole of creation—the entire universe—including the hearts and minds of men. That was their church's position, too, very strongly, but there were a lot of people in the church who weren't really comfortable with that. They would ultimately say that God doesn't—or even that God can't!—make anyone believe or not believe. Now, there are a few verses in scripture that seem to support that, but it says the opposite over and over, at length in some cases, about as strongly as it's possible to affirm something.

Anyway, I'll tell you what Granddad would have said to that kind of thing. In general terms, anyway. We don't do God's will despite our own choices—our own wills—to the contrary. We choose things according to his will, because he has made us to be the kind of people we are, and he puts us in the circumstances he has designed for us. The potter chooses what to make out of the clay. If God has ordained that you and I get married, then everything that has happened with us, beginning long before you tripped and I took you out into the tall grass, has been part of that. Your feelings for me and mine for you, and all that goes with them, will be the reasons within the causality inside the universe. And if God has somehow shown you part of what's going to happen, it's not to make us do things against our wills, but so that we have the information we need to choose what we would want to choose—if only we knew enough.

"Now, it should be obvious enough that I'm not a Christian, and I'm sure you aren't either. In my case, I'm definitely an agnostic. I have a good understanding of what the Bible says and what that means—at least I like to think so. But it matters whether it's true, and I just don't know. There's an awful lot saying it is, actually. And, well, what you've just told me may be the most convincing thing of all, in the long run—for me.

"If God doesn't exist, it's not clear to me why we should expect any vision to mean much of anything, in terms of reality. But if God does exist, and sent this vision, then one of two things will happen. Either we will get married, finding ourselves ready and willing at the right time, or we'll run away from not only what we're supposed to do but what we want to do. That's clearly illustrated in scripture, in a lot of places. In any case, God's overarching will for the universe will go forward according to his plan."

The other girls said a little more on the subject of Ellen's vision, but nothing of importance. At least, that I could see any importance in.

During the rest of the time until school was over, we were all really pretty busy, but we continued to manage some time for sex. That is, Jenny and I did, and Sam and I. I really worked to make sure that Ellen didn't think I was pushing her away, but she was still feeling totally at sea from her vision. I was concerned that it would affect her classwork, but if it did, it wasn't visible. I went so far as to quiz some of her other friends, who actually were in her classes, and was relieved that they said she was functioning normally.

I told Ellen I'd done that, and why. I was afraid she'd be angry, and feel that I wasn't trusting her. She professed, anyway, to be touched at my concern, and I admitted that if she were in free fall I couldn't do anything about it. We hugged and, after a while, gave friendly kisses. I thought she got to the point of actually trusting me for real not to push her or hurry her. But in terms of anything serious, Ellen was still holding me at arm's length—with my full cooperation, as I had absolutely meant that promise. I just hoped she would make her mind up soon. Otherwise, the next year looked to be a lonely one.

This is the end of Part 2. The rest of the story follows life after high school, beginning with a two-week interim before college.

Revision: 5/7/2019