Thank you for your emails and comments. I have appreciated every single one of them. I am glad that you appreciate my efforts.
I feel that the first times are the ones that are remembered most distinctly in one's life - like the first lie, first praise, first love, first breakup, first pleasure and pain, even the first orgasm. They imprint on our mind because we are young at the time of these experiences. The fact that we face it for the first time makes us vulnerable and hence makes it memorable for more than one reason because we are never the same after that. The revelations it creates in our minds help us to grow, in more than one ways.
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The 'slavery' did little to calm us down. In fact it had opened a can of things we both were too young to handle. I was very nervous behaving around her and she was anxious of making any moves. Yet the whole episode had showed us a vision of life together we had never dreamed. It was exciting and enticing just as much as it was making both of us anxious about the future that was beckoning us. Hesitation was more due to uncertainty rather than denial. Little to say, the few weeks went very awkward.
But we did manage to spend some good time together and hug for a few instances.
I came home one day with a big smile in my heart. I was apparently very poor to disguise or hide it since she asked me about it after dinner when we were trying to settle for the night sipping on our hot drinks.
"So when are you going to tell me?" she asked me with a very subtle grin in her eyes.
"About what?" I tried to pretend.
"I don't know. That's what I would like you to tell me."
It was very hard to keep the smile in my heart and I think I must have let the cat out of the bag when I smiled in my lips.
"You obviously have something you wish to say to me, but you are taking your time as usual to tease me."
I smiled again and tried to pretend very fruitlessly to deny there was anything.
"Ok. Take your time." She shrugged her shoulders and lay down sipping her drink.
I looked at her and she looked at me, straight into my eyes. Seemed like her aim to shoot me at sight was getting better each day and her shot was getting more lethal as we got closer. I looked at her and had to get up.
"Give me a minute." I said to her with an expression of a looser. She had killed me with her feminine glance.
I walked to my room and went back to the lounge with a folder in my hand. She was still calmly looking at me walk to her. I gave her the folder and sat down.
"What's this?" she seemed confused still.
"Have a look. I got an 'A' for it. It probably is due to your help."
As she glanced through she said, "Oh it's your portfolio you said you would work on."
I just smiled at her.
As she took time to go through it, I tried studying her eyes, on how they reacted to the pages as she turned them one after the other carefully.
At a page, her lips moved and she smiled. A sigh may have escaped her breath but her eyes lit like the morning sky.
"This is beautiful. Is that me?" she showed me the page and pointed at the pictures.
I just smiled and nodded.
"You are wonderful. I cannot imagine you could change them with such subtlety. You have done well." She smiled at me.
"I haven't edited them. In fact yours are the only ones I didn't edit."
She just looked at me with question marks on her face.
"What you see is what your are."
"You mean to say, 'what you see is what I see'."
"No. What you see there is what you are. I see you the way you are, for what you are."
She looked at me for moments. She gestured me to come and sit next to her.
As I sat close to her, she glanced in my eyes deeply for a moment, and she let her eyes fill with warm wetness. I couldn't bear it and I touched her hand. At that she let them flood and I could see a tear roll down her cheek.
She was the first to speak. "You are just too wonderful for me to deal with."
"You don't know how wonderful you are. I am just a mirror."
At that she slowly moved her lips closer to mine and planted a soft kiss. As she paused, she brushed her cheek with mine and hugged me close. Her arms wanted to wrap me all over her.
"Your identity remains anonymous as I had promised." I said to her after we broke our hug.
She smiled. "What did you do with the other pictures?"
"I have deleted them." I just answered with a straight face.
"All of them? Why?"
"Too risky. I couldn't take the risk. And I thought to myself, 'Why would I need the pictures, when I have you'."
"True." She smiled. "I would love to pose for you whenever you need any pictures."
That sentence seemed like hot furnace melting the iron of my heart. I felt warmth building inside me, bubbles brewed inside my stomach, and my lungs filled with air and I gasped as though I was suffocating. Her desire to please overwhelmed me.
"I click away every moment, everyday, with my eyes." I smiled with a wickedness to lighten the mood.
"I know you do. I was just referring to the times when I am not around." she smiled back.
At the beginning of Fall, the weather had turned rough. There were thunderstorms and it had poured heavily one day. I had spent time working in the garden. One morning I woke up feeling very tired. My body ached and I felt weak. The next day I had a soar throat and then it got worse by the minute. By the end of the day, my nose was running and I felt very ill. By the time mom was home, I was in my bed, and I didn't feel well. She took my temperature and she advised me to take rest. By next morning I wasn't well. In fact far from it, I was feeling worse. Now I was coughing too. I was poorly for the whole day.
Mom called me in the afternoon from the office but I could barely talk to her. In the evening she drove me to the hospital and they diagnosed it to being flu. But along with that, I seemed to have caught a virus for the throat infection too. That had topped it all. I was given some medication to put me at ease. But that didn't help much. For the next whole week I suffered quiet terribly. During the afternoon mom used to come and visit me during her lunch break but most of the day I was asleep. I didn't eat much, because I had lost my appetite. My throat hurt like hell and I couldn't drink much. My taste buds were kinda lost. Anything I tried eating tasted awful. She managed to feed me some soup in the evenings and her caresses made me think of eating a few bites. But it was a long road for recovery.
During the worst two days, I woke up in the middle of nightmares. During the whole day, as I tried to sleep, I dreamt that I was in isolated places, like a desert or at sea, alone and my mom was being taken away from me, in front of my eyes. It seemed like she was being 'escorted' away from me. Her expressions were of helplessness, as though it wasn't in her powers to stop from being taken away from me. All I could see were her tears. She wasn't pleased to be taken away from me. But her helplessness was evident in those tears. I saw myself just standing there watching it happen, without doing anything to prevent it. After she was gone, I could feel the devastation that would hit me. I would feel overwhelmed with grief of loosing her. And usually that would wake me up. I used to wake up sweating.
If I tried to sleep again, this theme repeated several times during my sleep. Some times I would see her in an accident, and then at other times I would loose her in a big crowd. For two days I could not sleep for the fear of these nightmares. One evening when she was next to me on my bed, I told her that I couldn't sleep and that she shouldn't leave me. She reckoned I was not sleeping well from my poor diet. So she made every attempt in encouraging me to eat properly that night. I barely managed some food. She also suggested that I was imagining things because of the high fever I was running from time to time. That day she sat next to me and coaxed me to eat a bowl of soup, some vegetables and some rice. Her loving concern was evident and her plea for me to eat something couldn't keep my protests for long. I gave in to her love and affection and ate from her hand.
The nightmares stopped after about a day later. Things also started changing and I started eating more. Mom was more than loving to take care of me. She used to check up on me every few times. Every time I received a kiss and a caress, her touch was tender and I could feel its love even in the ill state that I was. It made me feel so special. Especially when she caressed my face, she ran her palm over my face and my hair, it used to melt me and short of making me hard it used to give me goose bumps. The caresses were the best part of the day for me. I could have her caress me like that all day. As I recovered I asked her not to stay too close to me in fear of further infection to her. She laughed it away and said she had had a flu jab and I wasn't to worry about it.