“Do you think these shorts are too short?”

I stared at her smooth bare thighs, and how I could nearly see the curve of an ass-cheek easing out from the cotton. Suppressing the urge to lick my lips, I answered, “Confucius say: ‘No shorts can be to short, as no dong can be too long.’”

Coral lifted an eyebrow. “You know what I mean. I’m looking for an honest opinion, not the workings of an early-morning dirty mind.”

It was probably tragic, that what she sought was so far beyond what I could deliver. As she stood at the kitchen counter pouring a cup of coffee, it occurred to me that there were three reasons why I didn’t kneel on the floor and bow before my wife’s shapely legs every day of my life. Two reasons were up above, stretching a red halter-top to the edge of its intended design limits. The last reason involved the memories of Mira’s legs, recently experienced and never fully absent.

I’d received a DVD from “The Guys” the day I returned to work, with a card that read: “As brothers in witnessing a true miracle, we are sworn to silence. This footage must never fall into the hands of your wife. We’ll certainly enjoy our copies!”

I had an idea of what it might be, and I was right. Someone had set up a camera to film the shadow play of Mira fucking with me behind the white screen, all of which I’d previously needed to picture in my mind. It was incendiary, seeing her legs and torso turned into shapes that toyed with my two-dimensional penis. It was all there — the blowjob, the “haircut”… And that body, that absolutely magnificent body, always angled just right, and stretching just right, and fucking just right to create cock-stiffening shapes, giving the audience — which now meant me — the show of a lifetime.

In the privacy of my third floor home office, I played the disc through to the end the first time, my mouth hanging open and my cock ready to burst. I beat off to Mira’s games the second viewing, hitting the pause button countless times to marvel at Mira’s 2-D physique. Every time I looked at that DVD, I had this horrible/wonderful feeling, quite strong, that it — this very moment — had all been arranged. She knew about the filming. She might even have insisted on the events behind the curtain being filmed. And Mira knew my cock would spurt when watching it, just as it had spurted in fluid tones of grey on that white screen.

I kept masturbating to the films I received from Rosita as well. It felt a little bit like a holiday every time I checked my private e-mail account and found a few sexy words and an even sexier link, taking me straight to Rosita’s monster rack. Her newest video went more hardcore than anything she had done before, including the presence of another big bust model giving it to her with a plastic dildo. They were both great-looking women, but it was stunning, the differences in their expressions. The other model was largely faking it — underneath her moans of pleasure, she seemed largely disinterested, as though this was just another girl-on-girl encounter, a job that paid the bills. She moved as though unaware of the camera’s presence, whereas Rosita engaged it with her eyes, right into my cock through the filter of the lens. I knew with every gesture, every moan and cry of pleasure that the phallus squeezed between Rosita’s boobs or lips or slippery pussy was my cock. She faked nothing, and came with guttural force, surprising the other model. The video ended with a close-up of Rosita’s face, mouthing the words “I fucking love you” right into my throbbing dick. She was still my long-distance huge-titted sex instrument, playing the exact hypnotic tunes I’d written for her all those months ago.

“Michael? Hello? Too short?” Coral stretched one leg forward a bit, arching a bare foot.

God fucking damn my wife was a hot dish from head to toe. There wasn’t even a hint of seduction in her lips, or her eyes, yet it was as though the air around her was beginning to shimmer with cock-hardening supercharged particles. And here I was, hard already from thinking about the Mira tape and Rosita’s latest present. “Just right,” I answered, my pulse quickening. “It’s supposed to be a scorcher today.”

And though Coral looked even hotter than the weather, there were still more reasons for my cock to swell under the kitchen table. Those white shorts were brand new. The revealing fire engine-red top, too. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that my lovely wife was dressing rather adventurously these days.

I tried hard to keep the search for signs from being the focus of my life in the days and weeks after our wedding, but the truth was that I had become quietly obsessed with studying Coral’s behavior. I was hyper-aware of every little gesture or action, hearing the words, “I wish I could be more adventurous” in her relaxed voice, replaying in my mind. It was nearly driving me crazy, seeking the first irrefutable signal that the immersion suggestions had taken hold, altering or intensifying her natural tendencies.

This morning, for instance. The shorts were definitely too short, unless she intended to turn dicks hard all day long. The halter-top, too — not only had she lost the breast-obscuring vests or little jackets, but she was going in the opposite direction, flaunting her bosom while baring her tiny, taut waist. I could choose to believe that Coral had become unnaturally exhibitionistic, but there might be other reasons for my wife showing so much flesh. The mercury was going to soar into the nineties by mid-afternoon, for one. Plus she had the summer off, and no longer needed to perform in front of dozens of students. Couldn’t it be that what I had already observed — her warring wishes to show off her sexy curves while simultaneously concealing them — stemmed from the need to appear “professional”, especially with so many eighteen and nineteen year old males in her art classes?

So the teenie-weenie shorts might have meaning, or they might not. If I probed further and thought of our bed as a Petri dish, the results so far were not particularly encouraging. I had nothing to complain about — my wife was stunning, and frisky, and there were very few times when fucking that the walls of our bedroom did not reverberate with her passionate cries of deliverance. As with her looks, our sex together was way up there on any conceivable scale. She still didn’t swallow my cum, though. And she didn’t ambush me the second I walked in the door after a long hard day, her fine legs shimmering in form-enhancing nylons, her big breasts surging out of a playful babydoll. And though the warm weather had pushed her into trading in a big T-shirt for a tight tank top as sleepwear, a man could wish for more, especially when every inch of his wife had been designed by the gods for maximum lingerie effect.

As I’ve admitted before, I’m a greedy bastard. And as has been evident since the very beginning of this narrative, I feel a unique cock-straining thrill whenever the object of my affections is helpless against the tides of manipulated unconscious desires.

It wasn’t that I can’t get enough of hypnotizing people — I placed an average of eleven men and women in the immersion state every day of the week at work. With so much practice on so many types of people, I was quickly becoming something of a master of the immersion arts, if there is such a thing. All of our data showed that my patients were succumbing to the immersion technique more quickly, and more deeply, the effects of the suggestions showing up as bright splotches of activity on brain scans. We could claim no miracle cures for cancer, but we could claim a forty percent reduction in the use of morphine for late stage cancer patients. And the healing rate for varying sports injuries was significantly faster when Dr. Chui and I combined our talents, combining the immersion suggestions with acupuncture and other non-Western forms of bodywork.

By every measure we had set to determine success, the program was exceeding our expectations. I was a hypnotic healer. A pioneer. I had every reason to be thanking my lucky stars for every right thing in my life, including my loving and beautiful wife.

Why then, did I keep asking this question: Why the fuck hadn’t I made every effort to turn my vulnerable hypnotized bride into a quivering cum-slurping lingerie-addicted fuck bunny when I had the chance?

I didn’t really want to think that thought, not with the driving controlling pushing energy with which I thought it. I struggled against thinking it. I even pretended, silently, that I wasn’t thinking it, even when I was.

Every fucking day I thought that thought. And every fucking day I watched, and waited, studying Coral’s every move. Hoping to interpret correctly. Hoping to see what I wanted to see.

The weeks before our wedding had been rather chaotic, but we established something of a summer rhythm by early July. We walked Scarlet together most mornings, before I left for the hospital at seven-thirty. Coral worked in her studio at home, drawing and painting. I rarely visited her studio unless invited — it was her private creative space, much as my upstairs office served as my own sheltered island within our home. We slept and ate and did all number of things together, but we didn’t cling, and gave each other some room to breathe in solitude when the need was there.

As advertised, Coral had begun to draw nude models as preparation for the class she would have to teach in the fall. I modeled nude in her studio a few evenings, fulfilling the promise I’d made the first time I visited her apartment. It was fascinating to see how Coral transcribed my anatomy into charcoal, remaining true to the observed information while adding an indefinable “something” that made me look a little bit like a bird of prey. She had talent, definitely. Insight, too, whether she knew it or not.

“I’m going to start hiring professional models to draw,” she informed me in bed one night, as a way of telling me that my modeling duties were over. “Don’t be surprised sometime if you find a semi-clothed stranger in the house when you come home.”

“Are we talking about nubile hardbody types, or something a little less… you know…”

“People come in all shapes and sizes, Michael,” she replied, in a voice she might use to explain the alphabet to a child. “They’ll probably vary.”

“Male or female models?” I asked, not deterred.

“Does it matter?”

“It might.”

“Wait a minute. Don’t tell me that yours is the only penis I’m allowed to draw. You know perfectly well that I’ll be working with both sexes at school.”

“This is our home, not the university. And frankly, I’d rather be shocked to see a nude girl’s tits hanging out of her robe in my kitchen, not some kid’s thing.”

“Sexist.”

“There’s also the question of which penis is your Muse. I don’t believe an artist can have more than one Muse.

“Now you’re an egotist!” she laughed, reaching under the covers to grasp my dick. “Why would you assume that this little thing would be my Muse?” I felt a fingertip begin to stroke, followed by a second finger.

“Little?” I demanded. “It’s growing by the second and you can feel it. You’re the one who’s little. Squirt.”

“Squirt?” Coral fumed, her eyes widening in blue defiance. ”No woman with these can be called a squirt!” she shot back, yanking her tank top over her head to brandish her full breasts just inches from my eyes. I saw a hand reach for the bottle of lotion we kept on the bedside table, just before Coral’s tits pressed in, molding themselves to my face. “Nobody calls me a squirt!” she shouted, grasping my dick hard with two greased hands.

“Youch!” I cried into her tits. It was the good kind of "youch" though. The kind where your meat is being forced into the probability of a rapid uncontrollable orgasm.

“I’ll fucking squirt you, you big cock smart-ass!” she urged, vigorously working the shaft with one hand so that the tip of my cock banged into the bottom of her left tit over and over. “Come for me, you sexist hard meat fucker! Come for me! Come! Come! Fucking come on my tits!”

I groaned, and shuddered, just before my cock let loose ropy gobs that painted the undersides of her boobs.

“Fucking squirt,” she faux-fumed. “Look at this mess and tell me who’s the squirt in this family.”

This sounded like the beginnings of a real bedroom fight. It was time to give as good as I got, and I did, until my squirt of a wife was squirting, too.

“I know you wish I’d keep going,” Coral whispered one Sunday night, as we cuddled after sex.

“If you went any longer, I’d have to struggle to keep up,” I panted. “Your timing is exquisite.”

“That’s not what I meant. You want… I can’t…”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“You’re so sweet in that you don’t complain, but I know you want me to finish you in my mouth. I really suck at giving blowjobs.”

I was tempted to laugh at her unintended pun, but didn’t want to spoil whatever had put her in this mood. She wanted to talk about this, or explore it. So did I.

“We have great sex regardless,” I offered, starting with the positive.

“I know that. It’s almost perfect.”

“So let’s work on making it perfectly perfect. We’re so close to being there.”

“I’d like to. I really would. But my mouth is so small, and you’re… It’s a proportion issue. A physical size issue.”

“Not a psychological one?”

“No. Definitely. I want to. I really do. It’s just that I’m so petite, which unfortunately includes my mouth.”

“Then just focus on what fits. Your tongue and lips are amazing, Coral. I know you can bring me off by just concentrating on the tip. You’ve come so close so many times. If you’d just let me stay there a few seconds longer…”

She wrinkled her nose as she nodded her head affirmatively, probably without knowing she had. Only a physical issue, my ass.

We made love again, and she worked my cock dutifully with her tongue. She was sooooo sexy, but something seemed to go stiff in the way she looked and moved when it came to sucking my dick. She kept at it though, and she was going to succeed.

I didn’t want it, though. Not like this. Not like sucking my cock was some sort of school assignment that she prayed she could pass. Taking her chin in my hands, I lifted her head up, and guided her into a doggie position where I could ream her pussy from behind while reaching around to knead her big bouncing breasts.

It wasn’t a plan, but I couldn’t help imagining a different look in Coral’s eyes as she sucked my cock. A lost, desperate look. The look of a woman dying of cum-thirst, with my towering phallus as the fountain of life. No duty, no doubt. No hope. Only rampaging thought-wiping immersion-controlled immediate need.

I pinched Coral’s nipples hard, pulled at them and smashed her boobs against one another as I jackhammered her tight pussy from behind, smacking her ass with my abdomen at high speed. She groaned, gasping repeatedly as though astonished, and screamed in a kind of pre-orgasmic fury. I grasped her tits tighter, squeezing and jiggling them forcefully. I felt Coral pussy clench me in a viselike grip, vibrating like crazy just before her entire body spasmed. She’d always been a screamer, but this time it was enough to make my ears ring. The dog, always calm or disinterested when we had sex, ran out of the room as Coral went all vocal and trembly, shuddering the cum right out of me.

She flopped onto her belly after the sex, head to the side with her mouth gaping open and her lungs seeming to gasp for breath. She looked almost broken, and in shock.

“Was it too rough?” I asked, my heart pounding. My every muscle shook, and I feared that I’d gone too far.

She didn’t answer, or couldn’t. Minutes later, with her upper body still heaving, she asked: “Good God, what got into you? Is this what I can look forward to whenever I try to suck you off just right?”

No, I thought. This is what you can look forward to when I imagine turning you into a rabid cum-slurper through my ever-growing hypnotic expertise.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have…” I began.

“My tits still feel like they’re shaking!”

“I won’t…”

“We really need to talk about something,” she said, turning over to face me.

I tensed up. Obviously, these were words I did not like to hear.

Breathing raggedly, Coral fixed me with her bright blue eyes. “I want to come with you to work some mornings.”

“What?” It was easily the last thing I thought she would say.

“I want to sketch the patients you work with. With their permission, of course.”

I tried to read her expression, and the universe it might belong to. “Where on earth did this idea come from? We were just talking about rough sex. I thought… I don’t understand.”

“Your patients are perfectly still when they’re hypnotized, aren’t they?”

“Yes, but…”

“Making them ideal models. And I’d be completely unobtrusive, just standing in a corner of the room. I wouldn’t make a sound.”

This conversation felt so surreal to me that it might as well be the product of a random-play button the dog had pushed. “Coral… The people I work with are injured or sick, or dying. The worst of them have breathing tubes sticking up their noses. It can be a moving experience, working with people so obviously in need of my help, but it isn’t often pretty.”

“It’s real, and that’s what I want. I’m getting my hand back from working with posed models in the studio, but I want to balance that with something that’s truly from life. The people I’m drawing are all young and healthy and vital, so I’m already working with pretty. I want the flip side, too. I want… grit. I want reality.”

“I think I see what you’re getting at. But having you watching everything would be too… too…”

“Too what?

I couldn’t come up with anything that it would be too much of, other than generally weird.

“So you’re the one who would feel uncomfortable, not anyone else,” she concluded.

“I never said that.”

“It’s your program, Michael, and you’re the only one with the ability to hypnotize your patients.”

“So far. We’re working on that.”

“Okayyy…” she drew out, absorbing this. “But for now, if the patients didn’t object, and your co-workers were okay with it… Seems to me that you have no valid reasons to keep me from giving it a try.”

“Let me think about it.”

“There are times in life when you just give in and trust your wife, Michael.”

“I said I’d think about it.”

“Suck on this while you think,” she said, hefting a breast with her hands and aiming it at my mouth. “My tits still feel like they’re vibrating, like when you get off of a boat and continue to feel the rocking.”

“You want… more?”

“Didn’t you ever consider that I might feel extremely grateful when you trust me? When you say ‘yes’ when I want you to? Give me the okay to draw your patients and I’ll give you these.”

“You’re blatantly manipulating me with your body,” I protested.

One hand left her breast to tease my dick. “Don’t even pretend to be that stupid. We both know I had you under my thumb the second I removed my vest the first time.”

“That’s… evil,” I managed to say, just before her nipple, already growing long and plump again, pushed past my lips.

“That’s doing what’s your best friend insisted — repeatedly — needed to be done. Without Grace around, somebody has to keep you in line. Now fuck me hard again! Don’t hold anything back, understand? I want you hard, harder, hardest!”

I couldn’t understand how Coral could even walk after that night, but she accompanied me to work the very next day, and stayed to the end. She stood at a distance behind me as I worked with my patients, quietly observing and sketching. With Dr. Chui’s assistance, I treated four cancer patients in the morning, and half a dozen hospice patients in the afternoon. Nobody objected to Coral’s presence — if anything, the male patients, regardless of their age or physical condition, seemed to succumb to the technique more easily with a beautiful woman in the room, a point that Dr. Chui discussed with me at the end of the day.

“Whose idea was it, inviting your wife to observe the treatments?”

“Hers. It came out of nowhere last night, and she wouldn’t let me say no. She was going to draw our patients today and that was that.”

“It might be a good thing. Did you notice how quickly Henderson fell into the immersion state? He usually throws up one roadblock after another, even after the acupuncture.”

“You think it was Coral being there?”

“I do. She… you know, pleased him, just by being there. It disarmed him, or charmed him, and made things easier for everybody.”

“It was the same with a couple of the others.”

“The other men.”

“Right.”

“So… where should we go with this? We can’t ignore it.”

I didn’t have to read his mind. Our statistical data already showed that we had a thirty percent disparity in successful outcomes between men and women, whether it was in treating pain for injuries or the late stages of cancer. Was it that women were more susceptible to the immersion treatment by nature? Or could it be that the treatment was more effective when administered to a female patient by an attractive man, with the reverse possibility being equally true?

To this point, I was the only one qualified to use the immersion technique, which placed severe limitations on the number of patients we could treat on a given day. It was an unacceptable limit on the pace of our research, but solving the problem raised sensitive questions. We had recently begun to interview several nurses for training in administering the immersion therapy, already creating something of a split on our team as to the qualifications that should be sought. Should I teach the technique to registered nurses or the hospice care workers themselves, or only to licensed psychologists, who would work in tandem with the other professionals, as I did? Should we seek out a therapist already skilled with the immersion technique? The differences between hospice care and palliative care came up frequently, as some believed we needed to include more of a “whole person” approach to what we were attempting, which included our patients’ religious beliefs and other personal factors.

“We can specify that we’re seeking a woman,” David stated. “It wouldn’t be considered sexual discrimination in a controlled experiment of this nature.”

“Already not a problem, since we’ve set the goal of having two men and two women to administer the immersion technique.”

“Giving us two women to hire. But we couldn’t publicly state that we insist on good-looks among our candidates. Assuming that your wife’s attractiveness was part of what went on today.”

It could be something other than the way she looked. It could be having an artist in the room, regardless of sex or looks. It could be the perfume she wore, or her shampoo, or having a stranger in the room donned in an orange sundress. Only I didn’t believe any of that. “You’re feeling something in your bones, aren’t you?” I asked my colleague.

“Aren’t you?”

I pursed my lips, and nodded my head affirmatively.

“What if it’s… Your wife obviously has certain… attributes.”

It’s completely unscientific, but sometimes you just know, or feel, the outcome of weeks’ worth of experiments in advance. It might be some particular aspect of Coral’s looks — her small size, or reddish hair, or blue eyes, or puffy-cheeked smile. Or her big tits, which she wasn’t exactly hiding these days. The experiments needed to be pursued, the scientific model followed, but I already knew the outcome — I could simply feel it in my bones.

“Coral says she wants to do this sporadically, balancing her work in the studio with these other drawings for awhile,” I explained. “We’ll have more occasions to see if this is a pattern.”

“You know it will be. It’s a variable that needs to be studied.”

”I know. We’ll try to get an attractive woman in the group on a permanent basis.”

“With…” David said, his hands cupped. He didn’t bring the hands up to his chest, either because he was polite or because he already knew it was so obvious to me.

“I’ll tell Bill about this, and we can discuss where to go with it, or whether to go with it. If we’re serious about looking for a hospice nurse who’s… you know… then we’ll need to get the whole team on board.”

“Can you imagine putting something like that in a help-wanted ad?” David smiled, a little shyly. “’Female end-of-life specialist wanted for breakthrough research program. Must have five years experience in hospice care, and a great rack.’ We would be so…”

“Totally fucked?”

‘Fucked. Definitely.”

“Judith thinks you’re really cute,” Coral said in bed the next night.

I was reading a book on Eastern meditation practices, and how Buddhist monks could control their heart rates and other physical rhythms when in a deep trancelike state. “That’s nice.”

“She wasn’t naked when she came into the kitchen, was she?”

“No,” I answered, remembering. Judith was a new model Coral had hired. She had padded into the kitchen for some hot tea in the evening, wearing white bikini panties and a pink tank top. The new model was definitely young, with thick blonde hair, outstanding long legs and an even more stand out ass. She and I chatted a bit about the hot weather, and my eyes kept roaming, because… Well, because.

“You hypnotize people for a living, don’t you?” she asked out of nowhere.

“I do. Sort of.” Coral must have said something to this girl about my work.

“And it’s like you’re hypnotizing parts of their bodies?”

A light laugh. “Not exactly. It’s more… Well, in a way you’re right. The mind and body are tied together more than we realize. My technique connects them more firmly, into one suggestible unit. I guess you could say that I hypnotize them both.”

“That’s so… so…”

“What?”

Her eyes danced furtively, eventually settling on her feet. “Can you only help people with pain? Or can you make people… you know, do things?”

"Do things?"

"Or experience things. Like… intense things."

“I, um…” Had the energy in the whole room changed, or was it only me? “Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” she avoided. “But answer my question. Can you bend people’s minds and make them do things, like in the movies?”

I didn’t know which film representations she was referring to. I could ask; instead, my eyes joined hers in looking at her bare feet, rising to traverse the long smooth legs, settling on the white of the panties. She had a good tan, and the whole look could be summed up with the single word “fresh”. It was like having a model from a beach calendar leaning her fine ass against my kitchen counter. “Yes,” I replied, feeling thrillingly incautious. “It isn’t the point of the work I do, but I’ve seen over time that the suggestions can be quite powerful. If I put my mind to it, I could probably make some people do some things.”

"Or feel things, intensely."

"Or feel things," I concurred. "With great intensity."

The largely naked girl made a strange breathy laugh, and shifted her weight on her long shapely legs.

“What?” I asked. “Why did you want to know?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Her eyes left her feet, and met mine through a cascade of blonde locks. “Some people might find that sexy, is all.”

We stared at each other in silence for a few seconds. Long seconds, where I felt blood rushing to my cock.

“Really sexy,” she added, brushing the hair away from her face.

I don’t know what I would have done after that, if anything. Judith said she’d better get back into the studio, taking her tea with her. And now, for whatever reasons, my wife was telling me that her model thought I was cute.

“You didn’t just pick Judith from an art class modeling list, did you?” I asked Coral.

“How did you know that?”

“Her shoulders, and her… rear. The shoulders, especially, were so nicely developed that I thought she might be a swimmer, like you.”

“You’ve impressed me, Michael. Judith began modeling for our art classes near the end of the school year, but I’ve really gotten to know her from the pool. She’s young — eighteen, I think. Killer body, huh?”

“She looks like a Baywatch or Valley girl.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Not one thing. I’m just a little surprised that you got someone that pretty to model. I thought you wanted gritty.”

“I want variety, or even extremes. And there’s no reason for me to discriminate against beauty, is there?”

I thought about our own quest to find a nurse or therapist based largely on good looks and an inspiring bosom. “I guess that makes sense. Sometimes situations come down to a matter of physicality, whether we want it that way or not.”

“I have a question for you now, and you have to answer. Who do you think is hotter? Judith or Lucinda?”

“Huh?”

“Or Grace? Grace or Lucinda or Judith? Which one would be more exciting in bed?”

The question came out of nowhere, and felt like an earthquake to boot. I closed my book and carefully placed it on the bedside table. “What kind of question is this?”

“A simple one. Who’s hotter? If you could only fuck one of them, and had to fuck one of them, which one would you pick?”

“I… don’t know.” I did know. Grace, obviously, for three reasons. One, I’d barely met Judith. Two, I’d already fucked Lucinda. And three, getting my cock inside of Grace implied a shitload of wicked hypnosis.

“You do know. You’re just afraid to say it, aren’t you?”

“I’m deeply afraid, yes.” Had Lucinda said something of a scorched earth nature to Coral out in Las Vegas?

“Why? Why are you afraid?”

“Because this is the kind of question any sane man knows to avoid, that’s why. It’s a trap.”

“No trap.”

Thank God. “Then what?”

“I know it’s a difficult choice. Lucinda has those dancing legs to die for, and she’s in incredible shape. Judith, too — she’s so young, and just a perfect peach. But I think Grace might be the real catch in the end. That would be my choice.”

“Why Grace?”

“It’s the look in her eye. Overall her body is almost as exciting, but it’s those eyes, always watching, and lusting… They’re like heat-seeking missiles. You should have seen the way she kept looking at me when we danced before the wedding.”

“I’m beginning to think I came close to having you abducted on that girl’s night out.”

“Oh, Grace loves you too much for that to have happened without your permission. But her eyes… Lucinda is always staring at Grace with that same kind of focus. It’s like an appreciation that borders on obsession. And Grace was staring at me like that sometimes.”

“At your boobs, you mean. She’s shown plenty of signs of being obsessed with your boobs.”

“So? They’re exceptional and they’re a part of me. A big part.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be obsessed over. I thought you even worked to avoid that.”

“Perhaps I was over-reacting back then. Or maybe having you obsess over me has changed my feelings.”

“That sounds… positive.”

“Or maybe I’m developing a new relationship with my body, right under your nose.”

“Now that’s hot.”

“Answer my question!” Coral demanded, pulling the front of her tank top aside so her right boob swelled out. “I’ll tickle your privates with this if you do. Grace or Lucinda or Judith?”

“Lucinda and Judith might tie each other in a physical way. But it’s Grace for… other reasons. So Grace. I’d choose to fuck Grace. Happy?”

“I knew it!”

“And?”

“I could have seduced that woman so easily, you know that? She took one look at my chest and she was worse than you, instantly dreaming of tits in her face."

"She admitted that to me. I have no doubt you're right."

"So what are these 'other reasons' that make Grace your choice? Tell Coral your secrets.”

“Mouth… shutting. Michael no speak no more.”

“Fuck that,” she scoffed, shoving her index finger in my mouth, encouraging me to suck on it. “This is where I loosen your tongue by banging what’s rising under the sheets. You have your own heat-seeking missile down there, I see.”

“So twue,” I expressed around her finger.

“And I have so much heat these days that I can hardly believe it,” she breathed, pulling the covers away as she got on all fours.

The rhythms went like that for the next couple of weeks. Coral accompanied me to work every other day or so, sketching my patients when they were immobilized in the immersion state. The days she stayed at home, she locked herself away in her studio, working with hired models. She only showed me a few of her immersion drawings, exquisitely sensitive portraits of ailing men and women lying in their beds, the muscles of their faces relaxed in the pronounced way the technique made possible. In Coral’s drawings, my patients’ openness visibly triumphed over their physical distress. I could only hope that what she had captured was true.

One unassailable fact was that most nights, Coral behaved as though almost possessed by the need for sex. It was so easy to get hard over her, and she used that to ride me relentlessly. I got handjobs, and tit-jobs, and one night she shocked me by coating my dick with thick lotion and attacking it with her toes and ankles, giving me a foot-job that had me spurting like a fountain. I didn’t know if my wife had subtle immersion suggestions creating fresh pathways between her tits and pussy and brain, or whether this represented a more natural evolution in our marriage. I decided at some point that it didn’t really matter, because I could choose to replay my voice infiltrating Coral’s trusting psyche on our wedding night, imagining how it struck the match that kept catching fire in our bed.

Which kept getting me hard for her, and wanting to fuck her as energetically as she wanted to be fucked.

Still no cum-sucking blowjobs, though. A hole in my fantasies, and evidence that Coral was merely Coral, without the imprint of the “I want to be more adventurous” immersion suggestions bolstering her unconscious wishes? I didn’t fucking know, and as I’ve said, it really didn’t matter. I could believe, and it was good enough.

Not going so good was the quest to find a suitably attractive female therapist or hospice nurse to train in the immersion technique. I was beginning to wonder if we’d have to hire my wife or a woman like her to simply stand next to us as we did our rounds, looking beautiful and sexy as we worked. On the days that Coral sketched during the immersion sessions, certain male patients continued to benefit from her presence, easing into their bodies to receive the suggestions at a much deeper level.

The effect was so striking, the potency of the technique so obviously enhanced, that I decided to divulge the nature of our observations with all the members of the search committee, which included three women. The entire committee now knew about the unusual qualifications we sought in at least one of the four trainees, and agreed to move forward on those grounds. Our program existed to learn what worked, and to respond to our observations about what worked. It wasn’t where we had intended to go at the beginning, but it was possible that something as unlikely as physical beauty could be a tool in pain management. We couldn’t really know the facts unless we expanded the model, and collected the data.

I left work early one blistering hot Friday afternoon near the end of July, to review a small stack of resumes and cover letters over the weekend. I found a note from Coral on the kitchen table, informing me that she planned to work in the studio until eight or so in the evening, and that I might want to order some carry out for dinner. After showering the workday away, I put on shorts and a polo shirt, and seated myself barefoot at the kitchen table with a tall glass of iced tea beside my laptop. We had received several applications via e-mail, and I intended to go through them before calling it a day.

I nearly dropped my tea onto the keyboard when I opened my e-mail program. There were two new messages, one from Carlotta, my former secretary, and one from Mira Hall.

Mira had never e-mailed since I called the whole thing off. I stared at her name on the computer screen, my heart pounding and my cock getting hard at lightning speed. She had a new account, which began as theselegsR4U. I tried to calm myself — she had obviously created this account for the purpose of contacting me and me alone, unless the ambush at my bachelor party had launched her into an entirely new career. Similarly, an e-mail to my private account was not a firebomb, like a phone call to the house that might be answered by Coral. This was a sexual invasion, yes, because any contact with Mira felt like a sexual invasion. Any contact with Mira always would.

I moved to click on the message, but my hand trembled so much that I withdrew it, and just kept staring at the screen. Changing my mind, I opened the e-mail from Carlotta, forestalling the invasion as I tried to calm myself. It was good news — Carlotta had found a palliative care nurse whom she considered to be an ideal candidate for my program at the hospital. I’d gone outside of hospital channels with our search going so poorly, asking Carlotta to use the contacts she’d developed to find an attractive candidate, stressing the word "attractive". It came as no surprise that she might have succeeded where others were failing.

There was more to read, but I closed Carlotta’s message, and highlighted Mira’s. I could simply delete it, and go on as though it never existed. I couldn't do that, though. Unsure of myself, I stood, and paced, my hands continuing to shake. A glass of wine, I thought, opening a bottle of cold Sauvignon Blanc. One glass, to fortify my nerves. One glass, to help me resist the urge to come all over my computer, if this was the kind of short sex film that Mira had gifted me with all those times in the past.

It could be something else. It could be Mira pleading with me in words, or gloating over what she had accomplished at my bachelor party. It could be a new website, advertising her availability for cum-shave gatherings.

I downed my glass of wine in three quick gulps, and poured another.

It could be the film I already had, of our shadowy sex dance, with Mira's shape manipulating my towering cock on a white screen. It could be a threat to show the film to Coral. It could be a video of Mira simply speaking to me, talking face to face through the computer, saying whatever she couldn’t resist saying.

I was so fucking scared, but I was also insanely hard. I couldn’t help being insanely hard, and I hadn’t even clicked the message open yet.

“I’d like a glass of that, too,” a female voice broke through the indecision.

I jumped, because it wasn’t Coral’s voice. It was Judith, standing at the entryway to the kitchen. She walked towards me, her footsteps surprisingly loud. I followed every step in a state of brain-freeze, absorbing the visual details one bit at a time. Her blonde hair was pulled back, her open, unlined face expertly made up with lipstick and eye shadow. A black stretch-lace corset, pushing up and compressing her young firm tits. Black thong panties, matching gartered stockings and the heels that sounded like little thunderclaps on the tile floor.

“I’ll get my own glass,” she stated, perhaps because I hadn’t moved a muscle, other than my eyes.

I watched her stretch her arm high into the cabinet where we kept our wineglasses. Her arms were long and lovely, the tops of her breasts so smooth. And then, down below, one calf flexing as she stretched, and that gorgeous rounded ass, uncovered.

“You didn’t expect me to be here?” Judith asked, pouring a full glass of wine. “You seem so intensely shy all of a sudden.”

What I didn’t expect was right there in front of me, accentuating every one of Judith’s curves. This teenager, who had looked like she belonged on a beach at sunset the last time I’d seen her, could have stepped out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog today. Coral was drawing her models in lingerie now?

“I see you like my new look,” she commented, and when I looked up to meet her eyes I found her head tilted down, her gaze fixed on the erection obscenely stretching the crotch of my shorts. I’d been incredibly hard before she’d entered the room, and she was doing nothing to change that.

“I, um, I…” I faltered.

“Coral left while you were showering,” Judith informed me, shifting her feet until she stood squarely in front of me, so close that I could smell her hair, and look down into the cups of her corset, seeing her breasts bulge out. “She needed some art supplies. We’re all alone, Michael. Just you and me and that huge bulge in your shorts.”

The wineglass felt heavy in my hand. “Judith…” I began.

She sipped her wine while the fingers of her free hand met my abdomen, dropping until they felt the definition of my straining cock. “We have at least forty minutes,” she whispered, her hand conforming tighter to my shape. “Oh God, you’re so hard,” she said, right before leaning in to tongue my neck.

“Judith! We can’t! “I’m…”

“Married, I know that. That’s why I’ll do you like this.”

She must have placed her wineglass on the counter behind me, because both hands were free to work my zipper when she sank to her knees. Before I could pull away, she had the tip of her hot wet tongue on the tip of my hot pulsing cock.

“Judith, no!” I shouted, taking her head in my hands and spinning free.

She remained on her knees, showing no signs of contrition, or surrender. From across the room she addressed me, her eyes glowing. “Then hypnotize me,” she said as I worked to stuff my cock back in my pants.

“What?”

She stood, and faced me over the kitchen table, her weight resting on her knuckles, shoulders forward. She was breathing heavily, her nipples visibly hard in the corset. “Hypnotize me or the blowjob, one or the other. Or both. Let’s do both!”

“Are you crazy?”

“No, I’m dazzling, and I always get my way.” She twisted her waist and hips as she said this, a hand gliding along the rise of her ass for emphasis. She knew what her best feature was, and she wanted to hook me with it. “Make your choice, Michael. Make it right now.”

“I choose neither!”

“Then I tell Coral you attacked me and made me give you a blowjob.”

“That’s…” I began.

“I’m too young to drink wine, too. And I’ve got your pre-cum on my cheek already. I can put on a good act, and Coral will believe me, I know she will. Everybody will, and I’ll press charges.”

‘That’s… blackmail!”

“I don’t care. And it’s me giving you something nice, or me under your spell, so how is that blackmail? What’s your problem, anyway?”

The problem, or problems, seemed to be everywhere all of a sudden. I had my computer right there on the table, with an unknown message from Mira, and the video of the bachelor party, and at least half a dozen downloaded videos of Rosita mouthing my name whenever she came. A close investigation of my life and personal and professional history was out of the question.

“Make your choice before you run out of time.”

I felt something rear up inside of me. Something that could not be resisted. I didn't like being manipulated in this fashion, and something was poised to lash back. “Let’s go upstairs,” I said, keeping my voice even.

“For?"

“Your turn to choose.”

“You can hypnotize me in half an hour? Really?”

“Really.” I had become so proficient at the method that it would be plenty of time.

She began to head for the stairs, and I followed. At the foot of the staircase, Judith turned her head, and smiled. “Raincheck on the blowjob? You’ll want one. I’m great at it.”

I followed a few steps behind, watching her fine legs climb in the stockings and heels, and especially watching that gorgeous ass move. “That’s then,” I said, the tip of my cock sliding out of my underwear. It felt like I was so hard that my dick had grown an extra inch, at least. “Right now I’m going to hypnotize the living shit out of you, if that’s what you want.”

“Oh God, that’s so hot!” she exploded, the smell of her heat following her up the stairs.