Several days had passed, and Amber and I had not spoken about Friday night when I had pleasured her with my hand, or about Saturday night when she had pleasured me with her mouth. It was not that we were pretending those events had not happened. Instead, it seemed as if we both thought that speaking about those events would profane their meaningful significance to us both.
As usual, I spanked Amber before she went to school, and as she stood again and returned her skirt to its socially-acceptable position, she looked at me with an expression I had never before seen in her eyes.
"I want to go back to the house," she said solemnly, even as she rubbed her sore backside through the back of her skirt.
I was a bit surprised, for Amber had shown absolutely no interest in returning to her former home once she had officially moved in with me. In the interim, I had gone to the house a few times per week while she was at school, primarily to clean a little and ensure everything was in order, and I still had a hard time being in the house in which my close friends had lived.
"Are you certain about this?" I asked softly, standing before my friends' daughter and placing a hand on her shoulder. "Are you sure?"
Amber simply nodded solemnly.
"Okay," I said. "When do you want to go?"
"Now."
I thought about that for a moment, about my schedule for the day, but I knew that I could shift things around being a Wednesday. "Are you sure you won't be missing anything critical at school?"
"I'm sure."
"Okay."
Maybe twenty minutes later, Amber unlocked the front door of her former home. She hesitated a long time before she finally turned the doorknob and opened the door.
Hand-in-hand, we walked through the house together, slowly. Amber looked upon everything with an expression I could probably never truly describe with any semblance of accuracy. Clearly, she was reliving memories, but whether they were positive memories or painful memories I could not tell.
Oddly enough, as we stood in the bathroom, she stared at the bathtub, clearly remembering one or more significant events which had taken place in the waters which had once filled that space.
Instinctively, I stood behind her and wrapped my arms around her. She trembled slightly, and soon I felt a tear upon a forearm, and I gave her a gentle squeeze in response.
"I should've waited for you," she whispered, and I initially thought that she was addressing a memory she was seeing before her. But then Amber turned around in my arms and looked up into my eyes. "I wish I would've waited for you," she whispered, the tears beginning to truly stream down her cheeks.
I did not understand what she meant, but I understood the she was in distress. I held her close as she cried upon me, gently rubbing her back as her tears flowed uninhibited.
Eventually, with tears still trickling down her cheeks, she stepped back from my embrace and took my hand in hers. I followed silently as she directed the way to her old bedroom.
The bedroom was rather sparse. The curtains, a dresser, a vase, the bed, and a few posters on the walls were really the only visible signs that this had for ten years served as Amber's private sanctuary. Yet as soon as Amber and I had stepped into the small bedroom, I could feel her calm, although she squeezed my hand a little tighter.
"You've been cleaning in here," she said flatly - not accusingly, but just making a simple observation.
I nodded. "I've been coming here periodically to check the house, make sure everything is as it should be, and to do some cleaning as well. I was just here yesterday actually."
"It shows," she said. "Virtually no dust on anything."
"If I had known we would be coming here today, I would have put some flowers in the vase."
That actually caused Amber to smile a little, subtly lifting her mood, and her smile brought a smile to my face.
"Are you okay?" I asked, deeply concerned. "I haven't seen you like this since the funeral."
Amber only nodded. She placed her hand upon my chest, directly over my heart, looking at her hand as if she could see through it and my chest to see my heart beating for her.
"I'm torn," she acknowledged. "I could sell the house and one of the cars and everything in this place and we'd be fairly well set financially for quite a while. You could even cut back on your consulting work if you wanted. But I also feel like I might lose a part of myself if I sold this place."