If a couple is having regular intimacy and sex, it provides a certain lubricant, a willingness to give a little, to forgive, to worry about doing non-...exual things to please your partner. After all, how can you be angry or irritated for long with the person who joins with you in that most life affirming act of shared pleasure, sex?My philosophizing was suddenly interrupted by a woman's voice."Mark McDonald, is that you?" came the lilting soprano voice.I looked up, only to see an old family. His parent's, the household staff's. The people in the other houses around the lake. The people in Wakefield and Reading and Stoneham. The people in Boston and Augusta. Pretty much all the people in New England were strong enough to feel individually. Further than that and it was just a sea of emotion, which thankfully managed to cancel itself out as a blanket of emotional white noise.At first it was an on or off proposition, a little like what I'd gone through as a toddler when the gifts began. We’d signed up for a couple of matchmaking internet sites and gotten a few replies, but never had acted on them. Last week, we’d gotten a reply from a man that wanted to make me his slave. We’d read it and she made me reply to him. I wasn’t sure that I could go through with any of it, but she made me tell him about my fantasies and then she sent him some of the stories I’d written. When he wrote back again, he told me that I was to meet him at a motel in a nearby city on Saturday. I knew that I. You can tell me whatever you need to. Don't worry about it." OK," Paige said. "Thank you." She paused again to collect her thoughts. "I just don't know what happened. We stopped talking. I stopped wanting to come home. Stephen spent more time at the office. I just felt so lonely." Well, Paige, that's pretty much what Stephen said to me about how he feels. He feels lonely. He wants to be close to you, but he feels like you're pushing him away. Is there any truth to that?" Probably lately. In the.