Chapter 19: Madison! (2)
"Okay, what about the baggy clothes?" asked Jack.
"The same. If you couldn't see my body, then you wouldn't lust after me, and try and get in my pants. And if you didn't have sex with me, then you wouldn't leave me. Again, I'm not saying you're that kind of guy. My fears were admittedly irrational. Even knowing my fears were irrational, I couldn't bring myself to let go of them."
"So, how did the soul bond change any of this?"
"It allows me to know unequivocally that I won't lose you. It's permanent. So you can't get rid of me even if you wanted to. It also allows me to feel you, to know what you are feeling. That helps reassure me that you are not just humoring me. You really do care."
Feel me? Know my feelings?
Remembering that something appeared in the back of his mind when the soul bond formed, focused on it and realized it was like a tunnel and the closer he focused on it, the more he could sense Madison through the tunnel. On the other side, he could feel Madison, could feel her emotions. She was swirling with emotions, but the dominant ones were relief, joy, something that felt like friendship and love, and something that was hard to identify. It wasn't lust, or hunger, but felt like both with something more besides.
This emotional connection had not been even hinted at in the Soul Bond feature description. He looked at the Soul Bond section of his interface and found that it only contained one additional bit of information not provided by the original store catalog item description. It said that a soul bonded person was likely to develop loyalty for him at a faster rate and to a greater degree than would otherwise happen without the bond. It also said that mistreating the bonded person would undo any loyalty they had just as fast as if the bond didn't exist.
Now that he knew they could sense each other's emotions and, given her previous irrational fears, he sort of understood what happened. She'd been hiding her true feelings, because she was afraid any romantic entanglement between them would be transitory and also ruin their friendship.
However, the existence of the ability to sense each other's emotions was troubling, not because of its nature, but because of the fact that it existed and wasn't included in the description. If one aspect of the soul bond wasn't included in the description, then what else might it have done to Madison? Was it really true that her fears evaporated so completely just because she could feel his emotions?