The first wispy light of dawn transformed the gray-black shadows in the guest bedroom into a blushing pink landscape. The blond man-woman flung back the quilt groaning as she-he clutched at his-her skull. The dilated pupils focused upon everything and yet saw nothing in the room.
A flood gate had been opened!
Memories: hundreds followed hundreds more in a frenzied, jumbled outpouring. Not just scenes and faces and words spoken, not just holidays and Christmas mornings remembered, but feelings, emotions unexpressed, fears and hopes...
"Too many!" Groaned Jeff as he clutched his head in a vice-like grip. "Too... painful!"
He gasped, his borrowed heart accelerating until it threatened to tear itself apart.
Lacy Trueman? Lacy Trueman? It was Lacy Trueman's life, every bittersweet morsel of it, that had erupted, lanced into Jeff's consciousness and shredded his dreams. Her overbearing, and all too near, mother and successful sisters. Her younger sisters! Successful in the only coin her mother understood: husband and children, and in tat order! But not Lacy! And at 37, her biological clock ticked so loud it had threatened to drown out everything else.
It wasn't lacy Trueman's consciousness that had found its voice but rather something even more overwhelming, the accumulated total of all her experiences over the last 34 years not leaking and mingling with the fragile aggregate that had been transferred from the male Jeff Parker. His fundamental essence was becoming tainted, shot through with Lacy Trueman's memories.