The Book Lover Ch. 14

Author's Note:

There is a lot that happens in this one chapter and I needed to show things that were happening simultaneously to different people quite often, so the perspective changes more often than usual. Also, I start mixing non-verbal communication in with verbal communication more frequently. I did that before just to get readers used to it, but something happens here to make it much more frequent. To make matters worse, I also wanted to have characters speaking a different language without constantly translating back and forth, but still making it obvious when a different language is being spoken. For the next two chapters I introduce another markup for when people are speaking another language. I chose to simply underline any quotes spoken in the other language but translated into English, but still following the rest of the rules for verbal communication.

I realize that mixing this in while also mixing in more non-verbal communication AND switching perspective more often will make this more difficult to follow, but I felt like all these events belonged together in one chapter. Hopefully everything will be clear enough to the reader based on the different markups.

You may also notice a small change at a certain point in the non-verbal communication.

This was on purpose, and not just a error on my part.

It was their first night in Paris. They were both getting tired, having forced themselves to stay awake the first day in order to be tired enough to sleep on Paris time. They spent most of day outside, walking in the parks, visiting the Eiffel Tower, and just wandering the streets of the city and talking a long walk along the Seine.

Tom had arranged for them to have a table in a restaurant with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Jessie seemed to enjoy the restaurant and the view. Tom was nervous because he had finally decided, after almost six months of debating, what he was going to do about Jessie's two different personas.

It had been a difficult decision, and he had changed his mind on numerous occasions, but in the end he had finally decided what he was going to do.

As they waited for dessert that first night in Paris, he extracted a wrapped package from his backpack.

"I have a present for you," he said as he handed her the gift.

"For me?" She said excitedly as she took it from him. She turned it over in her hands a few times, acting excited that he had surprised her with a gift. Soon enough she unwrapped it and opened the box and pulled out a small little leather book. She looked at it with a bit of a puzzled expression. Then she opened it and looked at the pages inside.

"It's interesting," she said rather matter of factly, "What is it?"

He was stunned for several long moments. She should recognize it, shouldn't she? According to what she described to him, she had been without the book for 14 years, and it had responded to her immediately. Why would the last 6 months be any different? Was it because she had given up the book willingly?

"Ummm," he stammered. "You don't recognize it?"

She shook her head vigorously.

"Should I?" She asked. "Did you make it yourself? I mean it clearly looks handmade."

Tom was beginning to panic now. What had he done wrong?

"No," he replied, "I didn't make it myself." He knew he sounded a little testy and wondered if Jessie noticed.

"Did you get it from Eli? It seems like something he might have picked up somewhere."

"No. It was one of your Gramps' books. I thought you might find it interesting."

"Well, it is interesting," she said, "I'll give you that. Maybe we can take it to Eli when we get back to the city and see what he thinks about it?"

"Yeah, maybe," Tom agreed. He was confused as to what had happened, but didn't want to let on in front of Jessie.

It was about that time that the dessert was served. Jessie asked Tom to put the book back in his backpack for safe keeping. Jessie began to talk about all the things she wanted to see in Paris as though she had already forgotten completely about the book he had given her. He couldn't think of almost anything else. When she asked about why he seemed so distracted, he just made up an excuse about being really tired.

"Why don't we just pay the bill and head back to the hotel?" Jessie suggested. "It's probably late enough we could go to bed now, don't you think?"

This was not what was supposed to be happening. They were supposed to be talking about the implications of him giving the book back to her. He was going to give her the engagement ring after dessert and tell her he desperately wanted to marry the real Jessie Murray, even if it was scary. Instead, he was left struggling to understand why the book no longer responded to her. Had he lost the real Jessie forever? How could he go back to the way things had been before, now that he had decided he wanted the other version of Jessie? What on earth was he going to do now?

They walked, holding hands, the half hour it took to get back to their hotel. The backpack somehow felt really heavy on his shoulder as he carried it. It was supposed to unlock the door to their new future, but now it only held a useless piece of leather and parchment.

When they got back to the hotel, Jessie asked to see the book again. She held it and flipped casually through its pages before setting it on the nightstand.

"I do love that you thought of me when you saw such an interesting book. I can't wait to find out about it when we get back."

Tom already knew a lot about the book, of course, but he couldn't share any of that information with her now.

She pulled him in for a quick kiss on the lips before heading into the bathroom to get ready for bed. She came out of the bathroom wearing her long, thick nightgown that Tom always felt like would look best on a grandma.

He got himself ready for bed, and climbed into the bed next to her. She flicked off the lights.

"I know it's not Friday," she said taking her nighty off, "but I thought maybe since we were in Paris we could make an exception?"

This was not what he wanted or expected. He had been looking forward to the sex they would undoubtedly have had after he gave her the book back; wild, passionate, extraordinary sex. Now she was droning on about sex as an exception. He knew it would be anything but exceptional.

This was one of the reasons he had decided to give the book back in the first place. He could no longer live with sex as a routine they performed every once in a while, with no passion and no energy and no desire. He'd been okay with it before her transformation, so he assumed he could live with it afterwards as well. But once he'd experienced what it could be like, it was really hard to go back to what they had before.

Her hand slid down inside his boxers, one of the few times she had taken such an initiative. Even though he was nearly depressed about how things were turning out, it did feel good to have her pretty little hand wrapped around his cock. It started to get hard.

"Why don't you take off your boxers, sweety?" She asked.

He complied and found himself quite erect even though he was kind of dreading the thought of another round of nearly lifeless sex after weeks of anticipation of what this moment was supposed to be like.

She pulled back the sheets on the bed and led him so that he was standing up next to it, fully exposed, albeit in a darkened room. She knelt next to him and he sensed her moving her head down. The asexual Jessie had never even remotely considered oral sex, so he wondered what she could possibly be doing. Was she just going down to take a closer look before she laid back for the standard missionary position?

Suddenly, she completely swallowed his entire cock in one smooth motion. She held him there and then images of all kinds of nasty and intense sexual activities began flooding his mind. And then he knew.

"You little minx," he groaned, startled with the intense pleasure she was giving him. "You knew all along!"

She pulled off of him and laughed enthusiastically.

"What is it?" She mimicked in a little girl voice, making fun of the acting job that had so utterly fooled him.

"I can't believe you did that to me."

"What are you talking about? You made me wait almost six months. Six months!! And now you're going to whine about me making you wait for a whole hour?" She laughed again, and this time he couldn't help but laugh with her.

"We are going to have a long discussion about why in the hell you waited six months to give me the book back, but right now, I'm going to fuck you until you can't move."

She pushed him down onto the bed and then straddled his chest.

"But first," she said, looking down on him with a wicked little grin and slowly moving forward until her pussy was right over his face, "you're going to make up for the six months you kept me from this. I figure I'm going to need at least one orgasm for every month you waited before you get any pleasure of your own. Does that seem fair?"

He couldn't answer her. She'd lowered herself onto his mouth. He knew exactly what he needed to do. In that moment he knew that she was guiding him to maximize her pleasure and he completely let himself go as she rode him until she was loudly vocalizing the arrival of her first of many orgasms.

"Thank you," she said to Tom as she came back down from her climax.

"For what?" He asked.

"For this," she said. "For choosing this side of me. Looking back on the last six months, I've missed this. Of course I didn't know what I was missing at the time, but I'm glad to be back."

"I'm glad you're back," he said to her.

"You still have work to do before I let you fuck me, you know," she said with a smile.

"Oh, I suffer so," he replied, grinning back up at her.

Jessie stepped out of the hotel room. She was wearing only a thin robe that left most of her legs and a fair amount of cleavage exposed. It was the same robe she'd been wearing the day Harold had paid her a visit. It was a little after midnight and she wasn't really expecting to find anyone in the hall for her short trip over to the ice machine. But just as she stepped into the hall and closed the door, the door next to their room opened and a man stepped out.

His room was directly opposite the wall that their bed was against. If he was in the room at all in the last couple of hours, he had to have heard the noises that she and Tom had been making. It was not quiet love making.

She looked over at him. He looked to her to be either Spanish or Italian, probably mid to late thirties, thin, medium height, black hair, olive skin, intense brown eyes. He was quite handsome. She watched those eyes take in the shape of her body, only barely concealed beneath the robe she was wearing.

She smiled at him and began walking down the hall toward the room that contained a vending machine and an ice machine. She could sense that he was following her, even though it was not in the direction of the elevators. She stepped into the room and began filling her bucket with ice, relatively confident that he was standing in the hall and looking at her.

When an ice cube missed the bucket and clattered across the floor, she deliberately bent over at the waist, leaning down onto the floor to pick it up. She was certain that the robe slid up enough to give him a peek of at least the curves at the bottom of her ass. As she stood back up she turned to look at him and caught him staring at her. He just smiled at her seemingly nonplussed that she had caught him staring.

"Increíble," he said, smiling at her.

He was Spanish then. She didn't speak Spanish, but was able to guess the meaning of that word. She turned back to the ice machine, discarding the stray piece of ice and picking up her bucket. When she turned back towards the hallway, he was gone.

She imagined that she should have felt uncomfortable that he had followed her and so openly ogled her. Instead she stood there, her skin flushed, her nipples hard, her pussy adding fresh lubrication to the fluids that had already been leaking out of her.

She took a deep breath and headed back to her room.

Ethan was practically ripped from his sleep.

He could hear the deep breathing of Irina lying next to him. He knew she would be sleeping peacefully. He'd given her several spectacular orgasms. It was really the only way he found himself able to enjoy sex anymore. He'd found if he could push a woman to multiple orgasms, and then look inside of her to feel her pleasure, he could usually ride the wave of her pleasure to the point of orgasming himself.

It still was nothing compared to what he'd experienced with her. Nothing had come close to comparing with that.

He knew instantly what had awoken him. It was her yet again.

Fuck!

Every time he'd decided to forget about her and move on, he would once again feel her, pulling on him as though she was trying to tear him asunder. The last time it had felt like this had been the night she had reached out to him, letting him once again feel the pleasure that could be had with someone who shared his abilities. That night had convinced him that he was going to go back to New York City and try to find her.

But it took him ten days to get there. He hated flying. He'd always hated flying. On every flight there were at least a dozen people, often many more, that were terrified of flying and were only barely keeping themselves from a full blown panic attack. Their emotions were so strong and assaulted him from many different directions. He found he simply couldn't tune them out in the close confines of an airplane. So he chose ground transportation. But public transport via train or bus wasn't much better for him, so he found himself hitching rides to get everywhere he wanted to go.

He could have bought his own car, of course, but he'd deliberately chosen a nomadic life. It was what gave him the most pleasure in life; moving from place to place, connecting with as many people as possible, learning new skills, working new jobs, meeting and getting to know people from all the different parts of the world and from many different backgrounds.

And, of course, bedding as many different women as he could. It meant that travel took him a long time to accomplish. Normally that wasn't a problem for him as the journey was what gave him joy in life, not the destination.

But when he'd left New York in the spring, he'd wanted to get as far away as possible as quickly as possible. He'd just managed to make it all the way to San Diego when she had reached out across the country to him in his sleep.

That moment had changed his mind. He knew he had to get back to her. He'd arrived the following Sunday, just as her pull on him had once again disappeared into nothing more than a whisper. The entire time he was traveling he felt her pull as something insistent and impossible to ignore, but as soon as he arrived it had died down to almost nothing, yet again.

Fuck!

It filled him with incredible frustration to be so close yet again and then have it cut off. With intense concentration he'd managed to follow the whisper that her pull had become to its source and had found it coming from the offices of a security software company. It never left that location. He knew that it wasn't actually coming from her, she couldn't be constantly living inside those offices.

And so he was stymied yet again. He waited for a few weeks, hoping her call would return to him. It never did. He could have looked her up and just found her using traditional means, but he already knew what he would find. If her pull on him had become this weak, he would find the Jessie that only barely recognized him and was engaged to be married to someone else. He knew there was little point to finding her when he could barely feel her pull on him.

So he decided it was time to put even more distance between them to see if he could make the whisper go away. He found a cargo vessel headed to Spain that was looking for extra crew and made his way across the Atlantic. Then he began wandering again, heading East across Europe. Her pull became almost unrecognizable the further East he went until he could almost forget about it.

He found himself once again able to find pleasure as a nomad, exploring new countries, new people and new cultures. His travels had taken him as far as Batumi, on the shores of the Black Sea. He'd met Irina and she had captivated him enough that he'd stayed for weeks, something he normally didn't do. Batumi had the other advantage of having casinos, which offered him access to some easy money playing poker.

He was, of course, fabulously good at poker. Being able to read opponents minds makes the game much easier. But he usually avoided being too good at poker and making too much money doing it, as it often drew unwanted attention. He also preferred finding a job to make the money he needed, as it allowed him to meet new people and learn new skills. But in a new resort town with multiple casinos, he'd indulged his desire to play some poker and make a little easy money.

Until she had once again woken him. Her pull was once again strong and insistent. He could feel it yanking him to the north and west. As he laid in bed, he exerted all of his energy to follow that pull as far as he could follow it.

Paris.

She was in Paris.

The question was, could he resist the urge to try to reach her?

"I was going to do this last night," Tom said, "until you decided to play your little game with me."

They were sitting in a little café across from their hotel having brunch. They had missed breakfast because they had slept late, and had found better things to do with their time when they did finally wake up.

"Jessie Murray," he said, kneeling in front of her and holding out the open ring box, "the real Jessie Murray, the one that excites and frightens me and that makes my life so unbelievably complete, will you marry me?"

"Yes, yes," Jessie exclaimed excitedly, leaning forward to kiss him full on the lips, then rain kisses all over his face. "God yes, it will make me the happiest woman on earth to be your wife!" She said happily.

The crowd in the cafè cheered and the waiter offered them each a complimentary glass of champagne along with his hearty congratulations. Once everything around them had settled back down, Jessie began to question him.

"I'm guessing that since you waited this long to finally make a decision, that it wasn't an easy decision for you to make?"

"No," Tom agreed. "The hardest decision I've ever made."

"What made you change your mind?" She asked him.

"What do you mean?"

"I can only assume that you decided to keep the book from me, and then changed your mind. How else do you explain taking six months to decide?"

He looked at her, then looked down at his empty plate for a long moment, then back into her eyes.

"I'm sorry to say it," he said softly, "but yes, I had pretty much decided on keeping the façade you created rather than releasing the real you."

"Why would you be sorry to say it?"

"Because who am I to decide to keep your true nature bottled up forever?"

"I told you that you could. You had every right to. I never would have known otherwise. And, like I said, you made me so happy before all of this. I would have stayed blissfully happy. You don't have to be sorry for that."

He nodded, but then sighed.

"Perhaps," he said quietly.

"So what made you change your mind?"

"Several things, actually," he replied. "What made me start to rethink it was when I couldn't actually get rid of the book in the first place."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, like I said," he explained, "I had already decided to hang on to the fake Jessie, because it felt so much safer. You told me to get rid of the book, so I did. I sent the book off to a book dealer in Moscow."