The Magic Rain

Chapter Twenty: A New Merging

We lay in bed after making love for the second time that night. I couldn’t decide whether the lovemaking or the blissful cuddling afterward was better, then I decided that they were both as good, just different. And together, they were far more than the sum of the parts. I was the luckiest girl in the world and smart enough to know it.

But as we lay there, I was aware of a feeling, an emotion that was… "leaking" from Debbie and Linda and reaching the rest of us, even if unintentionally. I realized that we were now so close that though we didn’t constantly read each other’s thoughts the way that Jo-Bri could, we were… "aware" of each other’s feelings and occasionally thoughts on a constant basis. It was as if someone were constantly touching our skin so that we were aware they were there even without having to look at them or tune them in.

"They’re lonely," I said, knowing that Jo-Bri would know what I was talking about.

He nodded.

Debbie had always been the odd person out; even though we did everything we could to include her. I knew too that she had occasionally during the past few weeks made love as the third person in a threesome with both Mike and Maria and Scott and Linda, but I also knew that as satisfying as making love with the others was, there was a… "Need" to be able to give and receive love to and from one specific person. And once the choice was made as to which person that person was going to be, that person became your soul mate.

Jo-Bri had spoken to us, both verbally and mentally, about love. To outsiders it would have seemed scandalous, I’m sure, and I know it would have seemed downright perverted to me five minutes before I had met Jo-Bri.

I had once asked Jo-Bri what the difference was between lust and love and he had smiled. At first I thought he was being patronizing but then he explained that he was smiling because the fact that I asked the question indicated my own advancement not just as a wizard but also as a person.

"Love is the recognition of God in yourself and others," he said, repeating something he’s said to all of us before. And as he spoke to me I could feel him reaching out to the others so that we could all "hear" what he was saying on this topic. Jo-Bri believed that love was the key to everything.

Then he said something that made me blush and laugh in surprise.

"You can fuck a person," he said, "but you can only love God."

I felt the others react the same way I just did.

"That’s an interesting bumper sticker," I said and now he laughed too. Damn, I loved making this wizard laugh.

"Is it okay to just fuck?" I heard Mike ask and I smiled, thinking it was typical for a guy to ask that kind of question.

"Is it okay to just look at your favorite meal in the whole world but never actually eat it?" Jo-Bri asked in return. "Of course it is," he answered his own question, "but the real question is: is it satisfying?"

"Fucking is physical," Jo-Bri said. "Lovemaking is the use of a physical act to express your recognition of your partner’s divinity and, even more importantly, to partake in their divinity and to have them partake in yours."

My mind was reeling over that one. The implications were staggering, but somehow acceptable. I now had experience in real lovemaking and I would be more than happy to say that both Jo-Bri and the act of making love with him was definitely, one hundred percent divine.

"Once you’ve eaten your favorite meal," Jo-Bri went on, "just looking at it will never again be enough. Once you’ve really made love – really made love – fucking will never be enough. Eventually, and I know you won’t believe this right now, Mike, fucking won’t just be unsatisfying, it will be repugnant. No, not just repugnant, it will be impossible."

I felt a surge of panic from Mike.

"Fucking will be impossible?" he said, and we all laughed and sent him comforting, albeit amused thoughts.

"Fucking someone is only possible by making that person less than God," Jo-Bri said. "In some ways it’s only possible by making that person less than human."

"Ouch," Mike thought to us, chastised even though Jo-Bri had not meant to chastise him.

"Can you see the God in me?" Jo-Bri asked.

"Yeah," Mike said without hesitation, "but I don’t want to fuck you."

We all laughed again, Jo-Bri physically, and I touched his beautiful face.

"Do you see the God in Mel?"

Mike hesitated. Jo-Bri laughed.

"It’s okay to admit that you’d like to make love to her," he said.

"Then yes, I see the God in her," Mike said and I felt the genuine, truly divine love he sent to me and to the others, "And Linda and Debbie," he added, and then paused. "And Scott."

"Then tell me," Jo-Bri said. "Would you ‘just’ fuck them? Treat them with less respect than you have for them now? Less love?

There was a long pause, and then Mike responded, "No. I don’t think I could."

"Why?" Jo-Bri asked.

"Because," Mike answered, trying to find the right way to explain what he was feeling, although we all already knew what he was feeling – love, for all of us, even if it was a love that he, as a male, was having trouble verbalizing. "Because that love would always color the way I treated them, including during sex. Because I already feel more intimate with them without sex than I ever did with any girl I ever had sex with before I met you, Jo-Bri, so why would I want anything less than that?"

Mike paused and I could feel the love we all were feeding back to him, especially from the girls.

"I would never want less than I have with Linda," he said, and I smiled as broadly as I ever had, and had to wipe a tear from my eyes.

I had my head on Jo-Bri’s chest at this point but I could feel him nodding and then laughing lovingly.

"Okay," he said, "that’s our sex-ed class for tonight." Then I suddenly felt him turn serious.

"I want all of you to remember this," he said, "Because the way we look at people is going to determine our fate, our happiness, our lives. We will only ever be loved as much as we are willing to love others. If we give out less than true, divine love, anything we get back in return will be less than that because we’ll never accept into our lives anything greater than what we’re willing to give into the lives of others. You get what you give."

This I understood, especially having experienced the love of Jo-Bri and of the group.

"But this applies not just to our love lives," Jo-Bri added, and I could feel the intensity in his voice as it reverberated against my face through his chest, and the responsiveness of the others in my mind.

"Never will this be more important than when we deal with our enemies," he added. "Loving your friends is easy," he said. "Loving your enemies, especially when you may have to destroy those enemies… that is the true test. And if we do have to destroy Hodon and his wizards, I want all of you to feel two things – love for them, and regret that we did not love them enough." He paused. "Because if we had loved them enough, we would have found a way to avoid fighting them."

I felt the somberness of the group, which only added to my own. Then I felt something else – Jo-Bri sending Debbie and Maria an invitation to come to our house – and to our room. The others felt it too, and I knew that Jo-Bri meant them to feel it. I raised my head and stared at Jo-Bri. He responded by stroking my hair and smiling so lovingly that it almost abated the nervousness I felt.

The girls arrived a half hour later. In the meantime Jo-Bri spoke more to me of love and sex and the ways in which they had to mesh, of how no sex could be wrong if it was an expression of true love.

I was prepared, of course, at least partially, by the experience in the shower, when the group had mentally and spiritually joined us in our lovemaking. But I was troubled by the thought of the two girls joining us physically, even though I wasn’t even sure it was even going to happen. Maybe it would simply be a matter of comforting them.

When the girls did arrive, what followed was as natural and mind-blowing as anything I could ever have imagined. It was love, it was sex, it was everything except fucking, and from that day on, the mere word "fucking" became a dirty one for me, and Jo-Bri had been right – it was not anything I would ever want to do or even be capable of doing again.

More than just a way of comforting and loving these two beautiful, wonderful, loving girls, it became a way of bonding the group even more closely, especially as Mike and Linda joined us not just mentally, but by making love with each other simultaneously with Jo-Bri and I making love with Debbie and Maria, all of us joined mentally and emotionally.

And through it all I was vaguely aware of my parents, not connected directly to us, but somehow aware of what we were doing and tacitly supporting us. And I found myself loving my mother and father even more as a result of this union with Jo-Bri and the others.

It was the most wonderful night of my young life. And beneath all the bliss and love and passion and beauty, was the sad knowledge that it was also preparation for the battle to come.

At the end of it all, we lay there in each other’s arms, both physically and mentally, and thought of Scott.