An Unplanned Bonding

"Are you done digging around in my head now?" I snapped, aware that I was being overly rude but couldn't help it.

She dropped her head in shame. "I told you, I'm sorry! I thought this was going to go very differently..." she finished with a sob.

I sat down on the couch in front of her.

"So, explain. Tell me what's going on, how this was supposed to work. Like... I know you are Abby, and I have no fucking clue how I know that."

She sighed. I could feel her sadness and guilt, and she was collecting herself to try to talk to me. She was tired, too. I could tell that even using my own eyes, but I wasn't about to let her get away with not explaining things to me.

"I... I don't even know where to start, Justin. That's why I was panicking earlier. There's so much to tell, and I only had a couple minutes to try to explain it..."

Using a calmer tone, I gave her a place to start. "Okay, start by explaining why I can feel you in my head. How long is this supposed to last?"

She sighed. "It's just what the Bond does. It lets us share senses, memories, emotions, and even thoughts, if I can figure out how. And... It's permanent. There's no way to break it."

I felt my blood boiling again. I could tell beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was being completely open and honest with me, so I didn't feel the need to doubt her answers. But I still felt like I'd been baited into a trap. I needed more answers.

"You said you're new to this, so how can you know so much about this Bond?" I asked.

She nodded. "I wasn't lying. I've never been Bonded until now. But my parents were, and my grandparents, on my dad's side. They've told me a lot about it, and I've picked up stuff here and there. I just don't know how to actually do any of it, there's no way to be taught."

"And that... dark magic bullshit that I saw earlier? Is that part of the deal?" I asked with venom in my voice.

"No, that's separate, it's my family's curse. Someone, way back in my family tree, made a pact with a demon. It's attached to the blood line. When we reach a specific age, 240 lunar months, the curse comes to collect our lives. The Bond prevents that magic from working, which is why I'm not dead."

She tilted her head to the side a little, and seemed to be focusing on something.

Distracted, she asked, "Look, Justin, I'm way too tired to talk about all this right now. Can you hold the rest of your questions for the morning?"

I let out a frustrated sigh, but nodded and knelt down in front of her. It wasn't until I had one of her shoes untied and was pulling it off that I realized what I was doing. I looked up to her face, confused by the fact that I'd just started doing something so intimate with a total stranger.

She clearly could read my mind, though, because she smiled and sent me a feeling of reassurance and a desire for me to continue. She was revealing to me that, in fact, it was her idea for me to remove her shoes for her.

"How are you doing that?" I had to ask.

"It's something else that the Bond can do. It took a few tries to figure out how to do it."

I was alarmed by someone having that kind of power over me. "So you have some sort of mind control on me now, or something?"

She rolled her eyes before answering, "It's a two-way link. Anything I can do, you can do right back. Don't be afraid of it, I wouldn't do anything to harm you, it would be like hurting myself. We just have to practice working together, learn when to use the Bond and when to do things ourselves."

I was being manipulated. She just openly admitted it. But, for some reason, I felt certain that she wasn't lying to me. I thought about stopping to protest, but I decided to play along.

I returned to removing her other shoe, pondering over how I felt. I was beginning to understand all the sensations I was getting from her. If I focused, I could feel the relief in her feet as I removed the other shoe, along with the softness of the blanket under her hands. All of her senses were right there for me to take in if I wanted.

Focusing harder, I could feel the extent of her condition. She felt exhausted and drained. That magic out there had already started to take her life and I had interrupted the process, leaving her barely able to stay awake. I hoped she'd be fine after some sleep. Or maybe that was her thought, not mine.

I felt a simple request enter my mind from her:Can you turn the lights off?

I was startled. She had spoken to me without saying a word, sending a direct message to me. There was no ambiguity, no chance for her words to be misheard.

It was followed with a feeling that she wanted out of her dirty, sweat-soaked clothes. I would have suggested a shower, but she might fall asleep in the process, so that should wait until the morning.

I turned off all the lights in the room and entered the little bathroom so she could change without being watched.

Alone in the bathroom, I sighed in frustration. Offering her privacy, to my chagrin, turned out to be wasted effort. While I tried to busy myself by brushing my teeth, I could feel her every movement as she stripped off her clothes and pulled on a clean tee shirt and pair of panties from her pack. She only took a moment to stuff the soiled clothes into a bag inside her backpack, then flopped onto the bed.

I realized I had stopped everything I was doing, holding still with my toothbrush in my mouth while I rudely spied on her changing her clothes. I quickly finished up and rinsed my mouth. By the time I came back out, she was asleep.

It was a particularly weird sensation. She wasn't dreaming, but she was definitely sleeping. All of her sensations that I had just started to get accustomed to were now heavily muted. I could only vaguely sense that her legs were still cold.

Crossing the room in the darkness, I went to the bed where she had slumped near the end. She hadn't even tried to reach the pillows. I folded back the sheets on one side, then picked her up and placed her properly on a pillow before covering her up.

She didn't move, and I only faintly felt her wake for a moment before drifting off again.

I was still angry, but I was aware that my anger had changed focus. At first, I had been so infuriated with her, thinking she had intentionally done this to try to control or harm me. Now, I began to see that we were both caught in the same trap. The real villain here was some long-dead asshole that was too power-hungry for his own good. He'd managed to reach down through time to fuck with all of his descendants, and I'd been pulled into it.

As I sat on the small couch, I became aware that I was also exhausted, but everything that had happened tonight had given me enough of an adrenaline rush to ignore it for the most part. Since sleep wasn't an option right now, I knew I needed this time to sit and think.

What the hell had I just gotten myself into?

This whole situation was insane, but it was real. From what I had felt from her, her understanding of her magical world felt concrete and absolute. There had been no conflict in her mind. I'd gotten small impressions about where she'd come from. There was still fear in her mind about what she had been fleeing, and while she was thinking about her sweat and aching muscles from running, I got glimpses of the home she'd fled. Worse, she was still terribly shaken up by coming within a few heartbeats of her death. I needed to know more about all of that, surely.

I'd also felt her sorrow when she revealed that she knew about Katie. It was a sense of deep shame. She already felt like she was tricking me into making a huge, life-altering decision, and now it was compounded by knowing another person was going to be affected. I don't know if she was actively trying to show her contrition or if it was simply the fact that her regret was so powerful that it leaked out.

I spent a while pondering, slowly calming from the panic of the ordeal. There was no chance that I'd try to keep this a secret from Katie. We'd made it clear early in our relationship that we would accept no secrets or lies between us. Regardless of the possible fallout, this would not be an exception.

What I really needed was more information. I tried to sense her thoughts, perhaps see some of her past and her family, the way she had done to me, but looking into her sleeping mind seemed to just make me drowsy.

After a while, I realized there wasn't much reason to stay awake, and the adrenaline had finally crashed. So I made some more attempts to search her memories, and soon I joined her.

Despite how tired I was, I couldn't stay asleep. For one, I never slept well in a strange bed. But worse, the constant stress and fear from the last few days manifested as a string of nightmares.

At one point, I felt Justin move me onto a pillow and then cover me up. I woke up a while later, twisted up in my blankets, sweating and hot. Justin was standing over me, shaking my shoulder to wake me. Though I could barely see his face, I could feel that he was startled and filled with concern for me.

"Hey, wake up. Are you okay?" he asked me frantically.

I was struggling to untangle myself and couldn't focus on anything in the dark room. "Um, bad dream, I think. Did I wake you?"

"Sort of. You were making some noises and when I sat up, I could feel that you were scared." Feelings of worry were coming through the Bond. He wasn't sure he'd done the right thing.

"Thank you," was all I was able to get out before my exhaustion did its thing and took me back under.

I fell right into a terrible dream, followed by another, and another. Being consumed by ghostly strips of cloth were a common theme. Sometimes, they even had jagged edges, like shark teeth. And I was almost always running, terrified, or hiding and cowering somewhere. I was relieved each time I woke up, hoping to end up with a better dream next time.

At one point I found myself staring at Justin's sleeping face. He was passed out on the couch, and even in the darkness, I could see that he was twitching slightly. If he was dreaming, it wasn't projecting out to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was having nightmares, too. I had another surge of guilt about our Bond, feeling like I had tricked him into making a terrible decision. I had to turn away to find sleep again.

Finally, I found something benign to dream about. I found myself standing in a bathroom.

It was vivid, and I was especially surprised to discover that I was aware that I was dreaming. I was never one to find myself lucid dreaming, but I knew of it, so I wasn't too shocked.

I watched in a daze as my dream-self reached into the shower and turned on the water. I touched the stream of cold water, waiting a moment for it to get warm, then I climbed in. I quickly scrubbed my hair with some cheap shampoo out of a tiny bottle and reached for a bar of soap.

I looked down and watched myself rub the bar of soap onto a washcloth, then begin to wash my arms... arms that were far more muscled and hairy than I was used to. Alarm bells went off in my mind, something felt so totally wrong, and I suddenly wanted out of this dream.

I couldn't wake up, though. I had to just watch and feel as I washed my face and then looked down to wash my chest. A very masculine chest. My gaze drifted down further...

I was dreaming I was a man. A man taking a shower. This was totally new, and totally bizarre.

Alarm faded as my curiosity grew. I found that I could influence the dream a bit. I could make my hands move to a certain place if I concentrated. As soon as I relaxed, the dream just continued on its own.

As I watched my dream-self start cleaning my own penis, I found myself absolutely fascinated. I'd never seen one in person, and now I suddenly had one in my hand. It was so vivid and realistic, and I was happy to see that my mind had given me a pretty big one to play with in this dream.

I urged the dream to focus there, to explore it, clean it all over. All the extra attention had an effect, too, as I gained a nice proud erection.

With glee, I couldn't help but urge the dream to make myself play with it. I seemed to instinctively know what to do with it, I just had to think about what I wanted, and suddenly I was grabbing it, rubbing it with slow strokes.

I was rewarded with the proper sensations, too. It felt very good, better than I was expecting. I was breathing heavily, feeling the sensations building up. There was some resistance, like I wanted to stop. I felt a little guilty, but I was having too much fun to care. I kept steering the dream, putting the pressure on my mind to keep going.

I didn't want to hold back and make it last. I wanted to see a guy ejaculate up close like this. To know how it felt, even if it was a dream trying to approximate it for me.

I kept pushing the dream towards that sweet release that I was craving.

Suddenly, with a wave of pleasure, I felt the eruption. I forced my vision downward so I could watch, enraptured, as I splattered the tiled wall with a stream of white fluid. The relief was wonderful, and my pleasure soared as I stroked myself through my climax.

Gasping, my eyes popped open and I sat up abruptly. I was sweating, and my body was throbbing with my own, more familiar orgasm. It was intense, and I was still clenching.

Without thinking, my hand shot down to press against my crotch while I rode it out.

This wasn't a totally new experience. I'd woken up in the middle of an orgasm before, and it usually marked the start of a wonderful day. Something was very different this time, though. I could feel a resonance of pleasure from Justin in the shower, only now the sensations were a little muted, and I could hear the sound of the shower running from where I sat on the bed.

It wasn't a dream.

Shit.

Justin was also mortified. As soon as I realized what had happened, he was aware of it, too. The Bond made it obvious. He hadn't been aware that I had been watching, and even directing, his play time in the shower.

He'd even felt my orgasm, too.

Fuck, this was going to be hard to get used to. How the hell had my parents dealt with it for so many years?

For now, we silently agreed to just pretend it hadn't happened. It was just a shared feeling. We both saw no reason to delve into the why or how. He quickly finished up his shower, and I sent him my intentions to swap with him. I stripped off my clothes and went to the bathroom carrying my backpack.

He didn't bother to turn off the water, climbing out to dry off right as I climbed in. I felt his eyes on me briefly, but also sensed his guilt at sneaking a peek at my body. We had to get used to the fact that there could be no secrets or privacy between us.

My shower was quick, and I made no attempt to hide what I was doing. I was willing to let him see just as much as I had. However, the sun was up and there was no reason why we couldn't check out now and get on the road, so Justin kept himself distracted by loading everything up into our Jeep and grabbing some granola bars and a bag of trail mix he'd kept stashed in the back.

'Our' Jeep... I'd subconsciously already made that change. The Bond wouldn't let us separate by more than a few miles, I knew. His home was now our home, so by extension, his belongings and my belongings were now 'our' belongings. I had some money put away to contribute to our future life, in the form of a bank account that only I could access, and every possession I had brought was stuffed into my backpack in the back seat now. It was all his now, too.

Once on the road, though, the silence was painful. I could sense Justin's burning need to know more while we ate our cold breakfast. I couldn't tell why he didn't just ask, or just reach in and search my memories for what he wanted. I suspected he didn't know how to do it, but I didn't know how to explain it, either. For now, I needed him to just ask his questions aloud.

"Okay, seriously Justin. Just ask. I probably can't answer everything, but I'll try, as long as it isn't too distracting while you drive."

He sighed. "This is all just so overwhelming. Especially what happened there in the shower. It's worrying that you can make me do things with just a thought."

"That's not the way it works," I quickly defended myself. "I can't turn you into a puppet or anything. It's more like... suggesting you to do something. Or urging, I guess. And you can turn around and do the same right back. I am worried that it happened the way it did, though. I thought that I was just having a good dream."

He seemed surprised. "That wasn't on purpose?"

"No! I'd never intentionally make you do something like that. The only time I did that on purpose was when I had you take my shoes off last night, and that was just to see if I could do it. I really thought I was dreaming that I was a guy taking a shower, and my curiosity sort of took over."

My face was reddening in embarrassment as I unintentionally recalled the experience.

"I'm just as new to this as you are. It isn't like I've ever been Bonded," I added, trying to explain.

"Right, right. You've mentioned that before. You said your parents were Bonded. What was that like?" he asked.

I took a quick drink from my water bottle before answering.

"In many ways, it was like growing up with a single parent. I never had the option of bypassing mom by asking dad's permission, and stuff like that."

He nodded with a hint of a smile. "You must have had an interesting childhood. Did they argue a lot or anything like that?"

"No, not at all, that was the nice part. If they ever argued, it wasn't out loud. Like, when I got in trouble, they'd go quiet and stare at each other for a bit before one of them would tell me what my punishment was."

"That honestly sounds bizarre," he said.

He sat for a moment, thinking.

"So, did they ever get any privacy from each other? Like, everything he did, she was just right there watching?"

I could tell what he really wanted to know. He was trying to be sneaky, but I knew what he was asking.

"This is really about Katie, isn't it?" I asked.

He only paused for a moment before nodding.

"I'm so sorry that I didn't know about you and Katie. You know I'm telling the truth. I wouldn't have even spoken to you if I'd known. Believe me, I'm going to do everything I can to make this work for you.

"There are ways to get privacy. My parents called them 'walls' and 'blocks.' I don't know how to do either, I just know that they are possible."

He brightened a little. "Tell me what you know, then."

"Well, I think that the 'walls' they were referring to was when one of them wanted to shut the other out to get some privacy. Like, my mom would help me make my dad's birthday present and tell me, 'Don't worry, I've Walled your father, it will be a secret.'

"And when they talked about blocks, it was more specific, and they were blocking themselves from sensing something. My dad used it once when my mom had burned her hand pretty badly. He was able to block himself from feeling her pain, but otherwise, the Bonding worked normally. At least, that's how it seemed from my point of view."

I could feel him rolling the idea over in his head. I took the time to try something new. I had already figured out, intuitively, how to Urge him to do things. I tried to package up that knowledge and give it to him.

It took a few tries, as I struggled with how I thought it should work, but then his head suddenly snapped towards me and he blinked. He'd received it, and now he understood, and he was very pleased that I'd given him the knowledge and put us on a more level playing field.

I smiled, then Urged him to keep his eyes on the road.

He chuckled as he turned his head back to focus on driving. I didn't have to push hard, he agreed with me.