Chapter 28: Wreckage on the Sand
We lay there for perhaps fifteen minutes just watching the sunset as I carefully and gently stroked Kaitlyn’s body. It was pleasant for both of us, but she needed soothing as well.
When I felt her tension finally leak out and she started to get into the caresses, I spoke, “Kaitlyn, look into my eyes.” She raised herself up, forearms on my chest, and did as I asked. “I’m sorry for making you mad. I’m not trying to be annoying. I just want to show you this, rather than tell you. Will you please trust me? I’ve told you that I love you and that I won’t hurt you. I would not keep a secret from you in order to hurt you, but I will keep a secret from you if it means I can surprise you in delight with the revelation later!”
She continued to stare into my eyes, then quirked her mouth, and with a note of decision said, “Okay, Santa, please spank me. I’ve been bad, and I deserve it.”
“I’m not into BDSM either,” I said.
“I’m glad to hear it, but… Well, there’s spanking, and then there’s spanking. I want to be spanked, Santa,” she giggled.
So, I reached around with both hands and paddled her buttocks like a bongo, one hand per, in a rapid staccato. Pattapattapat! Not hard, just noisy, the little smacks amplified by the sandstone.
She laughed in delight. “Thank you. Am I forgiven?”
“Only if I am,” I replied seriously.
“You are, and we are,” she resolved.
We kissed to make up. And then we kissed some more. And then it got really gropey.
I was hard again by then, and so, still slick with my seed, Kaitlyn reached back, grabbed my cock, aimed it, and speared herself down on me, hard. Then we continued just as we had been 15 minutes ago, me intent on duplicating it, her intent on finding out if I could. It turned out that I could.
As we lay in each others’ arms again, she said, “That was wonderful again, Davie, but I wouldn’t say we were better, merely excellent again.”
I heard the question within the statement and answered that rather than the implied criticism. “Oh, we’ll need some practice and to develop certain skills before we set new records. We’re plateaued at the moment, but we’re going to break through that very soon.”
“I’d call you arrogant, Davie, but you’ve delivered so much more than I thought even possible, so I think I have to say, ‘prove it.’”
“You know, I think we only need one more round to break through, Kaitlyn.”
She looked sad at that. “I’m wrecked, Davie. I’m not tired, but I simply cannot go again tonight, or I’ll start crying, and not in a good way.”
She was still astride me, so I sat up using only my core muscles until I was face to face with her. I then splayed my feet out and around in a way that put me into a kneeling position, then I curled my toes under and pushed myself up into a stand, taking her with me. I confess to pulling a fair bit of Earth power to pull this feat off. Kaitlyn bit her lip in wonderment.
I then carried her down the hillock and lay her in the wash a short distance away. I then spoke to her, “Kaitlyn, please get into a trance. This is your guru speaking to you now, not your lover.”
She looked a little disappointed at tonight’s romance being over, but she did as I asked. She’d gotten it down to under 20 seconds! She was going to be as fast as me soon.
“Kaitlyn, I want you to feel your own body. Feel its life presence. Delve its every feature, its every subsystem, its every intricate process. Go to the cellular level, then delve each cell in the same level of detail as your whole body. This is the same thing we did with the canyon system last week, but inside your own body instead.”
I just waited.
“I feel it, my guru! I know myself! I see everything!” she cried.
“Yes. Now see the parts that are wrong. Your body knows what it is supposed to do, how it is supposed to work, and you are your body, so you know this, too. Find the parts that aren’t working correctly.”
“Oh, wow, there are several. But, um, my puss is shot. That’s the biggest problem right now,” Kaitlyn complained.
“So fix it,” I directed.
“Fix it?”
“Yes. Your body knows what ‘correct’ looks like, so as a mage, you now know, too. Dive in and correct it.”
A brief time later, I heard, “Oh! Oh wow! That’s it! It’s all better!”
I looked inside her, and she was right, she’d healed herself. I said as much: “That’s your first healing. Mine wasn’t so momentous: I’d gotten a splinter.” She laughed, even giggled a bit, almost punch drunk. “It was a big splinter,” I explained. She giggled more.
“Now find the next biggest problem, and fix that. Tell me about each one.”
“My abs are sore from all of the contractions,” she said, a bit embarrassed. After a second, she sighed “Aaaahh!” in relief.
She sat up, then said accusingly, “I’ve got a bunch of scrapes and scratches all over my back and hips where some butthead pounded me into the sandstone several times recently.”
“I just can’t summon enough pathos to feel sorry about that,” I said with a smile.
She healed the scrapes and scratches, then said, “And there’s more of that on my knees and the tops of my feet.”
“Those are definitely all your fault,” I pointed out.
She stuck her tongue out at me but fixed them, too. Then she looked at me and said, “Let me do your scrapes!” reaching out toward me with one hand.
“No, stop!” I nearly shouted, throwing out my hands in warding, almost batting hers out of the way.
She looked startled, then a bit hurt.
“I’m sorry, my shishya, but healing others is a whole different level of skill. With your own body, you are using internal knowledge to fix yourself. You create a feedback cycle that inherently guides your workings toward a correct outcome. You pretty much cannot fail to fix yourself once you set your mind to the task, any more than an asteroid can fail to fall into a star once it’s been captured.
“To heal another, you have to learn how their body is put together and how it functions, which will differ in some ways from yours. Then you have to do your work from outside the feedback mechanism you rely on for self-healing. You won’t need quite as much knowledge as a GP to get started in that sort of work, but you will need to pick up a lot of human biology — mostly anatomy — before you can safely try healing someone else.
“Even this scrape on my knee is trickier to fix than you might guess. Your instinct is going to be to apply your own body’s knowledge to the problem, which will apply a five foot two solution to a six-one problem! You’ll probably pull it tight as a drumhead and make it a Kaitlyn-colored shade of Irish-Mexican besides!”
This image made her grin tremulously.
“I can then heal it again as long as you don’t damage me so much I can’t think straight or pass out, but now imagine trying to heal a non-mage who can’t fix your inadvertent errors!”
Her mouth went into a startled O, and her hand rose to her mouth. In a chastened tone, she said, “Yeah, yeah, I see now. Okay, I’ll keep my hands off.”
“Until you’re trained anyway, yes, good. Let’s return to you. What else is wrong with your body?”
“My throat’s pretty sore, too. All that yelling…” she started.
“And screaming, and shouting, and moaning, and pleading to G…” I needled.
“Hush!” she snapped but couldn’t hold back an embarrassed grin as she turned her attention inward. “Mmmmm…better,” she said, her voice noticeably less raspy.
“Anything else?” I prompted.
After some time, she said, “Oh, wow, there’s a bunch of little stuff all over the inside of my body…and there are several more on the outside!”
“Stop! Point to one on your outside.” She did, and was startled to see that she’d pointed to a mole on her forearm. “Well, yes, technically that’s a growth that could turn into a melanoma,” I said. “It looks fine right now, but you could make it disappear, and then the minuscule problem would go away, but keep in mind that your own body’s sense of wrongness ranked this and the rest of what you’re now finding as less of a health problem than a sore throat. And that problem in turn would have cleared itself up shortly. That’s how minor this other stuff is right now.
“I expect the rest to be various little odd growths: lesions, scars, cysts, polyps, and such, and they’re all going to be mostly harmless. You can leave them alone, or you can clean them out selectively — even wholesale — but I’d recommend that you ignore them until you’ve learned to heal serious injuries in others. It’s fine to be selfish when it comes to your own good health, but going after this small stuff… Well, let’s just say that elective and cosmetic self-surgery isn’t a great use of your time.”
She thought about that, and decided, “You know, it might even be outright immoral to go after this little stuff.”
“That’s a bit strong. I’m just saying that if the time comes that you need to save someone else’s life and you can’t because you’ve spent that time clearing up your own skin, you’re going to feel pretty awful about your failure to help. You’ll have plenty of time to address these small things once you’ve got the important lessons down,” I finished.
My shishya thought for a bit, then asked, “You found the same kind of stuff in your own body, didn’t you, Davie? What did you do with them?”
“I can be anal at times, so I squished each of them in turn once I knew what they were. I made it part of my process of learning the biology I needed to heal others. You may notice that my skin is exceptionally clear,” I said in a faux supercilious tone, nose turned up comically.
She chortled, “Oh yes, perfect velvety milk chocolate.” Then, afraid that she’d just made fun of my skin, she continued, “No, seriously, it’s very, very nice. Your skin glows, Davie. Your shade is just perfect. I love looking at your skin. All of it.”
“And I love looking at every inch of your skin, too, Kaitlyn, even the moles,” I assured her. “Don’t go doing cosmetic surgery on yourself just to please me. You’re gorgeous already.” It was too dark by now to see if she blushed, but she looked down for a bit, then back up into my eyes with a smile.
I let that percolate for a while. “So, let’s get back to important matters,” I said. “You are now a healer, Kaitlyn. A healer! That’s huge. This is your most significant skill so far; maybe ever.” I let that sink in, then went on. “For our immediate purposes here, it gives you three huge bonuses.
“First, you now have conscious birth control! You can tell whether you’re fertile using only high school level biology knowledge. With a little effort, you can see whether one of my little swimmers is coming close to your egg and bat him away. And if fertilization has occurred, you can cause a spontaneous abortion, a perfectly natural occurrence in the female body; most fertilizations don’t become pregnancies. The only difference between you and other women in that regard is that you now get to consciously choose which way it goes. Give it a try now.”
She took on a look of concentration, then after a second said happily, “Not fertile! I didn’t think I was, since I’m a week from my period, so my last ovulation was more like two weeks ago, putting me safely past any chance of fertilization this cycle.” She paused for a bit, then wondered, “But if I were fertile, couldn’t I just clear out the sperm instead?”
“You could, but there’s zillions of the little buggers, so it’s an annoying chore to go after them at the cellular level. You can try sweeping them out en masse, but if you miss one…” I trailed off, the implication clear. “It’s why I lay the responsibility for birth control on you. It goes against political correctness to say there’s anything other than equal responsibility for procreation between the partners, but it’s a biological fact that it’s an asymmetric arrangement. I could go after my own little swimmers and corral them, but it’s much simpler to focus on the one egg.
“As for me messing with your eggs, I absolutely will not do that under any circumstances without your express permission! I don’t know what it’d be called to go messing around in another woman’s reproductive system without her consent, but if it isn’t illegal now, it’s only because no one’s thought it through yet. Bottom line, it’s your body, your choice.”
She nodded sharply in agreement, lips compressed. “Damn straight.”
“If I want my sperm corralled, I do it the old fashioned way: with a condom!”
“Sensible,” she said.
“Ain’t I just,” I agreed. “Bonus number two,” I went on, “you must have already noticed: I have practically infinite sexual stamina and regeneration. I can go as long as you can stand it. You now have that ability, too: if you want to heal yourself during sex, you can, and then you can keep going, too, until one or both of us collapses from exhaustion!”
She got an odd thoughtful look on her face, which turned into a concerned look. “We could literally kill ourselves with sex, couldn’t we? I mean push ourselves to the point of total physical collapse.”
“Yup,” I confirmed. “Therefore, as a regulatory mechanism, I suggest that we agree to only heal ourselves after we’re sated on sex and wish to stop anyway. It’s probably why sex starts hurting in the first place. Evolution fails if all of its subjects suicide with pleasure before reproducing.”
“Yeah, well reasoned, my guru,” she grinned.
“I doubt I’m the first to have thunk that thought before, but we two might be the only ones on the planet at the moment who could actually commit suicide that way; I’ve never heard of it happening outside of silly stories. I could write a paper on the new medical phenomenon,” I offered. I spread my hands apart in the old newspaper editor headline pose then declaimed, “On the ultimate physical limits of human sexual intercourse and its effects on mortality.” Then I turned to her with a cheeky grin and said, “Wanna co-author?”
“Y’know, I think I’ll give that academic opportunity a pass,” she demurred with an eye roll.
“Oh well, it’s a fortune and a Nobel in medicine for me alone, then,” I joked.
“Yeah, you go on and enjoy being the famous Dr. von Deathdong,” she teased.
“Moving swiftly along,” I said, a bit louder than necessary, “bonus number three: you now have vaginal tightness control. I don’t mean that you can clench your vaginal wall’s muscles, I mean you can tighten and loosen those very walls to anything within your normal biological limits.”
She just looked stunned for several seconds. “You’re telling me I can be a virgin again?”
“Yes,” I confirmed, “and without that unfortunate hymen business this time around, if that’s how you want it.”
“I want! Oh, Davie, I want!”