-Me
Confessions
I've never told anyone this. In fact, I've always done my best to keep it forever locked inside of me. . . . Before my bond with my husband was formed, I simply never spoke of this to anyone, revealing it to no one, denying it to myself. After our bond was formed, my telepathic powers developed more and I was able to psionically lock this memory away, deep inside my mind where no one would stumble across it. I have worked so hard to keep it from my love, and in doing so I have ignored it and allowed it to fester within my mind.
But now he is helping Dr McCoy with an experiment and is in a deep coma-- entirely safe, the good doctor keeps assuring me. The point is, for the second time in our three year marriage, my mind is completely separated from his. I've been given the opportunity to resurrect a very powerful, but dead, memory. And no one will know; but perhaps I will be able to resolve the conflict inside of me.
Any observer would probably think that this memory must be of some evil sin, something horrific that I have hidden in fear. They would only be half right. It wasn't evil, though perhaps it was and continues to be a sin. And yes, a desperate fear is what causes me to hide this thing. Though not something that would seem particularly important to anyone else, it is something that would cause my husband more emotional pain than I would care to give even my enemy. It would disrupt the team greatly, friendships would be lost and trust would be shattered. Maybe years ago I could have revealed this, and sought redemption in confessing to my love, but it is too late now. I'm married. I have a three year old daughter. I have too much I don't want to risk.
I had -- am having?-- an affair.
True, this affair didn't occur during my marriage, but it did occur during the time I dated and was engaged to my future husband. The emotional repercussions are evident even today and perhaps that fact allows this affair to continue unresolved. But I have worked very hard to make sure everyone has remained oblivious to this, and so has Jonothon, but we have both been careless and in truth, only luck has kept our secret just that. For anyone to ever know what I did would paint me a hypocrite-- double standard, a very selfish portrait indeed. I have only my good-little-girl reputation to keep anyone from seriously considering Summer Emily Espanosa guilty of adultery.
No, my affair was never sexual, Angelo is the only man I have ever been with, or ever care to be with. But emotional adultery is adultery none the less, or at least I think so. For I love another besides my husband, I can't explain it and I could never hope to justify it. But, God help me, I love Jonothon Evan Starsmore with all of my heart. The same heart that beats simply to hear Angelo whisper my name. How a soul can love two people so deeply, I will never know. No one can understand me, except Jonothon, who carries the same double love in his marriage to Paige.
I suppose it would be cliche to say it just started out as a friendship. But that ~is~ how it started. Jono and I would just hang out, play video games and pull sophomoric stunts. Even though we were friends, I didn't know him. I didn't know what he thought about things, or what he had experienced in his life, or how he even saw the world. I suppose he wasn't a friend, just a glorified acquaintance. I don't think I even realized how attracted to him I was. I can vividly remember when I fist realized I liked him.
It was after Ange and Jono had gotten back from LA, but before Angelo proposed. Emma and Sean had taken the entire lot of us to New York for some reason our teachers never revealed to us. We had driven four hours there, waited in a diner for three more, and then traveled home. One of the oddest experiences of my life, and one day I hope to find out just why we went. As it was, I spent eight hours in a hummer with my best friends and my boyfriend. I had a lot of time to think.
Jubilee had been complaining a mile a minute; wedged between Mondo and the door, I didn't blame her. But somehow, she managed to drift to sleep; who knows maybe Emma had a hand in that. But we were all uncomfortable, smashed in the vehicle like sardines. We had been in the hummer for two hours and a silence had fallen on us as conversations dwindled.
Angelo sat beside me, asleep with his face pressed against the window. His skin was sagging a little. Sometimes when I pull back to get perspective I realize how revolting that should have been. I had wondered if I was cruel for thinking that of my boyfriend. I decided it wasn't cruel, just human, even if that's something I wasn't.
But while I sat in the hummer, I began to think about our relationship, where it was going. At that point, we had been dating for a little over a year and a half, and I didn't seem much chance for me to ever meet anyone else. I was with Generation X for life. At that point, I knew I would marry him one day, and I knew I truly loved him. But I had to wonder if there was someone I might love more; someone who might make me happier. Was I simply not finding this person because I never looked? Because I had so greatly limited myself?
As I thought those things, Jonothon turned around suddenly to look at me. At first, I had thought he was just glancing at something that had caught his attention. But he didn't turn around, his eyes remained fixed on my own. My mental process halted suddenly. Had he eavesdropped on my thoughts? Surely not. Surely... My heartbeat quickened and I realized it was not because I thought Jonothon knew what I was thinking about Angelo and might tell, but simply because he looked my direction. And if he heard my thoughts then he knows that it was his glance that started my excitement.
A grin spread across my face. I tried my best to hide it. Where had my mind gone? Jonothon? That was the moment I realized that I did indeed like him. I looked into his eyes, those eyes said so much; I suppose they had to in order to say everything his mouth couldn't.
My first thought was of Angelo. What would that do to him if I broke up with him and started a relationship with Jonothon? What would that do to me? for I knew I truly loved Angelo. And Paige. Even then, before they married, before they had even begun to date, I knew she loved Jonothon. I didn't want to hurt her, she was a close friend. Jono turned back around in his seat. I wanted to talk to him, to see what it was that caused him to turn around, but for some reason I didn't want to know.
Nothing further happened after that for some time, and I had been left to my thoughts. It was a while later that I decided to ask Jonothon what happened in Los Angeles with Angelo. I had asked him in the Biosphere during a training session. He had been hiding from Sean's attacks when I had come clambering by, making enough noise that he was afraid I would accidentally reveal his location. He had grabbed me and pulled me into hiding with him. I was so unsettled by the fact that his hand was resting on my waist, like it had every right to be there that I just kind of spurted out what was on my mind, asking him about Angelo. He hadn't answered me there, but later that day he promised he would tell me. That night, I snuck to his room to talk with him.
I was so afraid to be caught. I knew it wasn't a big deal, Jonothon and I were supposed to just be friends, I had every right in the world to visit him in his room. But I knew that wasn't it. I knew that I was attracted to Jonothon. And that attraction made me feel guilty and fearful that Angelo would find out and suspect. Many people have probably listened to my account of what happened that night. Angelo has heard it, Jubilee, probably a million others. But what they know is a lie.
The story is true, up to a point. I had snuck in Jonothon's room to talk to him about Los Angeles. The first lie is a small one. In reality we both sat on the bed together; I sat with my knees to my chest on top of his pillows, he sat in the middle of the bed, Indian style, turned to face me. The only reason I ever told the story any differently was to keep anyone from placing Jonothon and myself together in their mind, for if they saw us together in a mental picture, they might more easily see us together in reality. And we had talked about Los Angeles. Jonothon was reluctant to share with me and I was demanding answers.
I have always described the following moment like this:
The room, as it had been all night, was silent. With vocal speech, you can hear a pause or the hesitance in someone's voice. You can hear the soft noises they make: working their jaw, swallowing, taking a breath. But here, where the conversation takes place entirely in one's mind, no such noises can be heard. Instead there is a presence in my mind, almost like a "white noise". It felt uneasy...maybe restless. It is something not entirely explainable, I think, it was really Jono's essence. I've known Chamber for a year and a half, and I don't think I ever knew him so well as I did in that moment.
It sounds mystical or something, it's just that I don't have the right words to explain it. It was like our minds were touching, and while neither of us was privy to the others thoughts, there was a feeling of closeness. And loneliness, if that makes any sense.
("What is this?") I asked.
("Me.")
I would have asked more, but he returned to our former subject.
So then my lie is one of omission. For I didn't let him return to the subject at hand. When he revealed to me that the lonely presence I felt was himself, I could not simply allow him to leave it at that. His loneliness was so great and his eyes seemed to be asking something of me. At that moment, I reached my hand out to him slowly. I was not afraid. I knew what happened when Paige had startled him with a kiss, I didn't want to startle him in any way, but I was not afraid. His eyes followed my hand, and trembling with something not-fear as I placed my hand on his cheek.
There was an incredible heat on my palm, I was even able to detect movement in that heat: the swirling psionic energy that encompassed his chest and face. My fingertips though, encountered his living flesh. Smooth, warm. I had never touched his face before. The moment my hand rest upon his face, his eyes shut and his hand was on my own, holding it to his face. Then, in one motion, he pulled me to him, I sat in his lap with my head resting on his shoulder.
It was as if I was seeing Jonothon for the first time. He was a man and I was only a little girl. Perhaps an age difference of five years really isn't so much, but it had felt like decades to me. He felt more mature to me in every way. His movements and mannerisms were that of someone with more experience than his twenty-one years could have possibly seen. I was also frightened to think that the power to destroy an entire fleet of enemies was contained in this man and swirling next to me. There was danger in Jonothon, it scared me, but I also found security in it. There was a distinct alienness to him, he felt very foreign to me. His mind was so complex and so much more developed than my own. He was a skilled telepath and psion and I was embarrassed with my own meager telepathic abilities as I reached out to him on the astral plane.
A great communication went between us, he explained to me all that happened in Los Angeles, all that he knew anyway. He shared a great many other things with me, and I with him. All the concerns I had about Angelo and our future. It was Jonothon that helped me understand that I did love Angelo and wanted to spend a life with him, and I in turn encouraged his feelings for Paige, knowing and understanding his love for her. But at the same time we came to realize that we loved each other as well. We didn't know if it were possible for someone to have two loves. But for us, that's how things were looking.
Perhaps it was very selfish of us to try and have it both ways, to have each other and to have Angelo and Paige still. But we knew that is how things would happen for us. For neither of us wanted to give up the love we had found in Angelo and Paige, respectively, but neither did we want to give up the newfound love we had found in each other. We knew that it was a love destined to remain platonic, no matter how badly we might want it to be otherwise. I would never kiss him or have sexual relations with him, or any other outward sign of love with Jonothon, yet I loved him still.
We pulled from our telepathic embrace almost five hours later.
It was soon after that Angelo came to Jonothon's room looking for me, I was sick with worry that he would suspect, that he would somehow discern what happened.
Jonothon had shoved a CD in my hands and let me pretend I had borrowed it, providing a somewhat weak explanation of my presence in his room. I tried to slip out the door and to my room, leaving Angelo and Jono to talk, but a gray arm snaked around my waist, securing me at Angelo's side.
He seemed to bristle toward Jonothon. He led me down the hall, then down the stairs.
"So....wassup?" I asked, fearing the worst from him.
"On a crazy whim, Jubilee decided she wanted to go swimming; care to join her?"
I breathed a mental sigh of relief. Swimming. Ok, I can handle swimming.
I heard myself babbling on about swimming, relief filled me that I could hide behind that topic and not have to explain a thing. We parted after a few additional words and a brief kiss. I hurried to the dorm to change clothes.
Alone in my room I breathed a sigh of relief, but on inhaling I found myself to smell faintly of Jonothon. My heart twisted. I stripped off my clothing and froze them solid, then pulled on a swimsuit. Outside, I threw my frozen shorts and shirt against the sidewalk where they shattered happily into a million pieces.
"What in the world are you doing, Popsicle?" Jubilee had asked. I hadn't realized she was near.
"I don't know," I had said more to myself than to her.
And that was how it began, in earnest, anyway. So when Jonothon later came with me to Kentucky, it wasn't such a surprise for me, though of course I acted as if it were. S'funny, I was so angry with Angelo and so angry he suspected I was having an affair with Jonothon. I was angry because it was half-true, Jonothon became some sort of emotional rock for me. That's probably another story, of what really happened in Kentucky, but I daren't think on it now, I can feel Angelo waking. . .
