I’m lying on my back in the darkness. Although I can’t see anyone, I feel the presence of a woman behind me, observing my condition. I hear footsteps approaching, the sound of heels echoing on a hard floor. I lift my head and see a flickering shape in the distance, coming closer. I can’t tell what it is at first, but begin to recognize the shape as two shapes, moving together — Mira’s legs, sheathed in thigh-high white stockings that somehow shimmer with moving light. I feel my cock growing hard, and she’s suddenly standing above me, legs locked straight with her heels planted beside my waist. I stare up at her strangely glowing nylons, and feel my cock growing so hard that it’s filled with an almost unbearable pressure. I think it’s just the beauty of Mira’s perfectly sculpted legs getting to me, but I begin to distinguish individual images playing upon them, and it becomes apparent that dozens of movies exist upon or within the white of her stockings. I recognize scenes from when we met and danced together, the very first time I ate her pussy in a rocking chair, the sex with Lucinda and others. I see myself hypnotizing Mira, and hypnotizing other women, fucking Rosita and Coral yet always coming back to taste Mira's physical wonders again. Even our sex from earlier in the night is there, as though every moment of my recent sexual history has been visually stored within the fabric of Mira’ stockings, forever playing there.

“How are you able to do that?” I ask, fascinated by the dizzying display.

“It isn’t her,” the unknown and unseen woman answers from somewhere nearby. “It’s me, inside of you."

"Who are you?" I ask, the woman's voice familiar and haunting.

"Just watch,” is all she says.

I think she means watch the movies playing on the twin screens of Mira’s shapely legs, but Mira begins to twist at the waist, hips slowly gyrating, hands cupping her firm breasts. It's a supremely seductive sensual dance above me, Mira moving as only she can move. She bends at the waist and takes hold of my hard cock with her hands, and still swaying, repeats what the unseen woman said: “Just watch.”

“Do it!” I hear the unseen woman urge. “Unlock him; give him a glimpse!”

Mira begins to twist the flesh of my dick, one way at the top, in the reverse direction at the base. It feels incredible, the most intense hand-job ever, but my eyes widen with curiosity when I see a seam beginning to appear right at the middle of my penis. It’s like she’s twisted it into two independent halves, and the top half suddenly disengages from the base, still a part of my dick, but with a new independent movement.

She pumps the top part of my cock vigorously with her hand, and I hear a hissing sound, like steam escaping. Something flutters out from my cock, something dark and alive, and I hear it flying around the room.

“It lives!” the unknown woman asserts, and I have the sense that whatever it is has landed upon her shoulder like a favored pet.

“What just happened?” I ask Mira.

She smiles down at me, confident, calm. “You can’t fight it,” she says. “You wouldn’t even want to, because we have this!”

With that, she twists the top part of my cock hard to the left, the bottom part to the right. A new alignment is achieved and suddenly the top of my dick rockets further erect, impossibly erect, as though it was always held back from achieving its full length. The sensations within my cock multiply with the expansion, and I’m looking up in amazement, the gleaming head of my dick towering at least two feet from the rest of my body. I groan as Mira strokes the entirety of my new length, squeezing me between her hands and forearms.

“Look at what you can do!” Mira says, and I know then that my penis has always had this capability. Every penis has the potential to grow like this, every vagina the possibility of growing deeper to accept it.

“Now we can really make love,” Mira breathes, bending her glowing movie-screen legs and slipping the head of my impossibly long dick inside of her. With scenes of our past playing to either side of our physical contact, it’s like my dick is inserting itself into carnal history. I feel myself going in, and going in more, and more and more, inch after inch after inch, until Mira has absorbed every bit of my titanic meat. “I can feel you… touching me here!” she exclaims, placing her hands over her heart. She gasps and the images playing upon her white stockings speed up, flickering so fast that I can’t look away from them. I feel my psyche pulled in, gripped like my cock is gripped inside. I see familiar people I don’t even know stroking Mira’s legs, stroking my cock and my mind, stroking me even as I’m inside of Mira’s beating heart…

It all comes together and I see behind the veil.

I awakened from the dream gasping, and felt Mira — the real Mira — holding my throbbing cock in her warm hands.

“You were dreaming,” she said, nuzzling her cheek against the side of my neck. “Your heart is beating a million miles an hour! What were you dreaming?”

“I was dreaming about you,” I whispered, breathless.

“I already know that,” she teased, giving my hardness a firm squeeze. “What else?”

We lay there in the dark hotel room, me with my mind racing and my cock inflated by the crazy dream. Mira held me tight, the scent of our earlier sex everywhere. Images from the dream flashed behind my eyes and I tried to recall what I had seen at the end — some hidden thing glimpsed, some illusion unveiled…

Gone. Not everything, though, and I tried to convey what I could recall.

“I was lying on the floor, with you standing over top of me,” I began to describe. “There was some mysterious woman nearby, watching, somehow a part of things even though I never saw her. You had white stockings on, like now, but your legs glowed like they were movie screens. You were helping me to discover things… that I didn’t know I could do.”

“Was I dancing for you?” she asked.

“It started as a dance, yes. But it became so much more.”

“I love to dance for you,” she whispered. “I dream about it, about dressing for you, and stripping for you, and watching you throb for me. You don’t know what it felt like for me, at your bachelor party. It was intoxicating, performing like that with nothing held back, mixing my dance training with seduction and sex. I can move and flow and embody the most challenging choreography, and I used to think that that was enough. It was enough. But that night, seducing you in front of your friends… I felt like a goddess. I felt like my body could do anything and everything.”

There in the near-darkness, pressed together, Mira told me of the weeks after the bachelor party. She resolved to stay away from me, having had her fun, and her revenge. She had determined that the bachelor party ambush would be the final taste of me, the send-off that gave her needy pussy just one more dip into my pecker’s pool. She returned home and tried dating, which, as she had already told me, didn’t really work. Frustrated, horny, she found herself replaying the film of the bachelor party over and over, masturbating to it and fantasizing about how she might dance for me the next time. If there was a next time.

She drove up to the city in early August, just for a weekend, just to see where I lived and perhaps get a glimpse of my wife. Only she stayed, sitting inside her car in the dark, night after night, staring at my house. She didn’t want to barge in and tear the fabric of my life apart, and she could never fully accept that she was stalking me. Still, she went so far as to look for a hidden key on my front and back porches, fully intending to slink inside sometime when I was at home, and Coral was away. The pressure kept growing inside, and she followed me, followed my movements everywhere, masturbating and plotting.

She applied for a leave of absence from the dance company, and began to follow Coral, too, studying the woman that I slept with every night. She didn’t have a plan, exactly, and fumed at my “Little Miss Bigtits” from afar. She began to film herself in her hotel room, dressed in various seductive outfits, masturbating to fantasies of how she would intercept me, and eventually steal me away from my wife. The idea eventually surfaced that she would seduce Bill Littlefield, and use him to get inside my world. The thought of treating someone that way was abhorrent, and she kept trying to fight the urges. She had his number, and his email. And then the phone call from Coral, the miracle call out of the blue, my wife almost begging Mira to model for her. Just like that, she was in.

I listened to Mira’s story with a strange kind of retro-fear gripping my heart. She had been hovering right at the periphery of my life for much of the summer, and could so easily have stepped closer, ruining everything. I didn’t know whether to be terrified of Mira’s obsession and all that might have happened, or to thank her for managing to remain at a safe distance for so long.

“And now?” I asked, not sure if I should. “Where are we now?”

“I’m not going away, Michael. I… can’t. And even if you pretend otherwise sometimes, I know you don’t want me to. Even your dreams are telling you that.”

“But what will you do? I thought you’d quit the dance company outright, but you can go back?”

“They don’t want to lose me. I have some time to make up my mind.”

“How much time?”

She didn’t answer directly. “I’ve always been a performer by nature. Dance used to give my life meaning. But now I want something more. Something… different.”

She spoke again of the way she had felt when dancing at my bachelor party. The experience had gotten to her in ways she hadn’t expected, stirring something she wasn’t sure she understood.

“The way you were looking at me, the way everybody was looking at me, all there in the palm of my hands, mesmerized by my body… That’s the word for it — mesmerized. I felt so powerful, so desired, so… worshipped. And so unspeakably hot, like I could make people do anything, I was so hot.”

The word “mesmerized” seemed to hang in the air, fluttering, perhaps, like the dark something that had haunted my most recent dream.

“Have you ever thought of that?” Mira whispered.

“Thought of… how unspeakably hot you are?”

“No. I know you know how hot I am. Have you ever thought of using your technique to make someone feel a certain way?”

My heart skipped a beat. “You know I have — we tried to save your marriage like that. It didn’t work.”

She nuzzled closer, her mouth next to my ear. “Remember when we first met?” she whispered.

“I remember, vividly.”

“We danced together, and I think I never really recovered.”

“But I dance horribly,” I said automatically, my heartbeat rising. Where was she going?

“With your feet, yes. You were awful. But you have other ways to lead, and you can follow, too, by letting me guide you a little. You remember that, how I helped you to move better?”

Leading. Following. She almost sounded like me.

“Sometimes a woman can help a man to do more than he imagines possible. She can unlock gifts he never even knew he had.”

For some reason a shiver went all the way down my spine, causing my legs to twitch. Her words sounded like the image from my dream, where she somehow freed my cock to grow as it had never grown before. It also sounded like the last year and a half of my life, because I never would have acquired and perfected the immersion technique without lusting for Mira as I had.

“Your voice, for example,” she continued. “I think you don’t know its power.”

I said nothing, knowing that all this time, it was she who’d underestimated what my voice could do, and had done. Had something changed?

“I’ve always melted into your voice,” Mira continued. “Almost from the first minute. Why do you think I called you all those times, and almost begged for phone sex? Your voice resonates… so deeply. All those months without you, all those tortuous weeks… I kept needing, and wanting. I wanted you, your voice and your cock, living inside of me. I had to… follow…”

Her entire body shivered against me. I shivered back, hearing my hypnotic instructions being unconsciously repeated.

“You weren’t able to make me love Taylor,” she went on. “A little fire got lit, but it fizzled out. That was an impossible task, though; it really says nothing about what you can do, or could do. You have a gift, Michael. A power, even. You could use it. You should use it.”

“Mira… What do you want? A few days ago I thought you were blackmailing me into… you know, being here. Now…”

“You don’t even realize how persuasive you could be, do you? I know you’ve gone into this healing direction at the hospital — it’s very noble, and you might become a truly great man in your field. But there are other ways you could use you talents in private. You know there are.”

“I feel lost,” I protested, concerned that Mira was nearly found.

Nearly found — why did that thought make my heart race so fast? Could she actually suspect what I'd secretly done to her?

“Don’t pretend with me," she scoffed. "I know what you did for Lucinda. She told me about it, how you hypnotized her so her orgasms are more intense. That was months and months ago, Michael, and she swears the effects have never worn off. She and Grace probably have some of the best sex in the world. She says… She claims that her orgasms can be so plentiful that she can’t move for hours.”

“I’m happy for her. For Grace, too.”

“Don’t be so modest! You could mold people, accentuating their wishes, giving them… Well. Just use your imagination. You were made for more than helping people at the end of their lives. You know you were.”

“What is it that I was made for, then? What is it you want me to do? Give you better orgasms?”

“My orgasms are already all I can handle; I just need you to have them with me! That’s what I’m taking about. You could bend people, mold them to get what we both need!”

“And what we need is…”

“Each other, you fool!”

“You want me to hypnotize Coral, and manipulate her. That’s where you’re going.”

“She’s practically begging for it, can’t you see? She’s drawing sexually charged hypno-fantasies — she even tried to work some lame hypnotic mojo on me to get me into her bed, and yours. It was silly — she couldn’t actually do anything — but I saw how much it excited her, the idea of combining hypnotism with sex. You could do it to her, I know you could.”

“Do what to her?”

“She’s left several messages on my cell, you know. She says she needs to draw me again, and photograph me.”

“So what’s the problem? When Coral says ‘draw you’, that probably means we all engage in sex again. You understand that.”

“Oh yes, sex on her terms! Doling you out at her convenience, for her aims! No one makes me a beggar in their carnal soup kitchen!”

“Mira… It isn’t like that.”

“It is unless you hypnotize your Little Miss Bigtits into begging me for sex!”

“That’s ridiculous. I can’t…”

“Better yet, hypnotize her into needing to leave you.”

“Whoa!”

“She already wants more than just you! Did you see her in bed? She was ravenous for me; you were just a tool to stuff her cunt while her tongue was parked between my legs. She’s moving on from you and you don’t even see it!”

“That’s not true.”

“And I want nothing but you! It isn’t fair!”

Her grip on my cock was vise-like. With all that pressure, she also began to move it, sliding my outer flesh up and down.

“I’m not unreasonable; you saw how I arranged a treat for you with Lucinda. Your piece of Coral is gorgeous, I’ll grant her that. I’d allow you to nibble on her every once in awhile, if you really wanted that. But you might not really need her, because she isn’t as hot inside as I am, and she’ll never be able to fuck like I can. I know it; I’ve seen it. All you’d have to do… to make our dreams come true… is bend her into hurrying up and moving on…”

“You can’t be serious,” I choked out. The rubbing of my cock was becoming an outright handjob. Mira’s arm pumped even more vigorously, making her tits shake.

“Don’t judge what I’m saying. Just feel… what I can do for you.”

“Mira… I don’t even know what to say. I take my marriage seriously.”

Her pumping hand turned to stroking, the rest of her pressing into me like our bodies might meld. “Yes, I can see that you do.” Her tongue sought out mine, and we locked lips, tongues joining. Our arms wrapped around each other and she brought my hard cock between her hot thighs. “I can feel how much you hate this,” she teased. “Poor Michael, forced into fucking someone like me… all night long.”

We rolled one way together, then back again until I lay on top of her. I disengaged my lips and stared down at her, panting. She brought both hands to her right breast, squeezing it to raise a hard nipple to my lips.

I kissed her breasts. I couldn’t not kiss them.

Mira rolled us back over, and shifted her body into a sitting position. She raised her legs high into the air, displaying them.

"You dreamed about my legs in these very stockings," she stated. She bent her knees, and wrapped the soles of her feet around my cock. "Did I fuck you with my nylons in your dreams?" she asked, sliding the sleek fabric up and down my length.

"No," I confessed.

"Maybe the dream Michael didn't imagine I could do this," she whispered, pooling saliva in her mouth.

Cross-legged with her feet continuing to rub, she bent at the waist, bringing her mouth down to the head of my cock. I gasped as her feet rubbed harder, faster, her tongue flicking at the sensitive underside of my helmet.

I thought I would come in an instant, but she read me perfectly, easing off just when I was reaching a critical point. And like that, sucking on the head of my cock while giving the shaft a nylon-job, she fired me up and eased me back, again and again, until my arms were thrashing, my head flipping from side to side.

"Beg me to come!" she urged, and I didn't hesitate.

"Let me come! Please!"

"No one can fuck you like Mira can — no one! Repeat it!"

"No one can fuck me like Mira can!"

"Say it like you mean it!"

"I do mean it!"

"You'll leave your piece of Coral for this! Repeat it!"

"I… I…"

I don't know if I would have said it. She didn't make me, bending more so that she took my entire cock inside her mouth. With several fervent pressurized swallows she had me bellowing, and seeding her deep inside.

No one could fuck me like Mira could — I knew it and she knew it. And though I might not wish it to be so, no one's pussy tasted as sweet, and I later had my fill, and made her beg me to come.

Leading and following. We had it down; we'd always had it down.

Just… where did we go from here?

I left the hotel with reddish light just beginning to color and brighten the eastern sky. There were no pedestrians on the sidewalks, other than a bearded homeless man pushing a cart filled with aluminum cans. He stared at me, silently scowling. His judging gaze unnerved me just a little, because I felt uneasy inside. Maybe it was spending an entire night like this in the bed of another lover — hardly acceptable behavior, even if Coral and I were living light-years outside of the normal married rules. Also, the strange dream and some of the things Mira had said were reverberating inside, poking at my guts.

I could dissect the dream's symbolic meaning to some degree. I hadn’t spent an entire night with Mira since very early in our relationship, and being with her for so long felt… complicated, and must have stirred up many half-submerged feelings. She had been the catalyst that opened the door to every underhanded hypnotic deed I’d committed — what a perfect symbol, the entirety of my sexual manipulations playing upon her legs, which I could never get enough of. My expanded dream-cock, unlocked and unleashed by Mira's manipulations, was like the expanded powers I could bring to the bed through hypnotic techniques.

Those symbols felt pretty clear and understood, but what about the fluttering thing that had escaped from my cock, and who was the unseen woman? An unknown woman usually represented the anima, the feminine part of the masculine psyche – what was meant, though, when she had urged Mira to give me a glimpse? A glimpse of what?

I had glimpsed something, but I couldn’t remember what. It was like Mira and I had been fucking each other’s hearts, and some kind of self-knowledge had opened, just for an instant. Was it about me? About me and Mira together?

I barely knew Mira in so many ways, yet it felt so fucking right to be there beside her. I kept thinking of her as intrinsically untrustworthy, partly because she had carried on a torrid affair with me behind her husband’s back, partly because she was a surprise attack always waiting to happen. But what kind of twisted logic was that, when I’d hypnotized her into cheating on Taylor, affixing her brain-stem onto my cock? I’d barely gotten to know the real Mira, the unaffected Mira, because that Mira might have clung to her wedding vows, or fallen only temporarily, giving me the littlest taste of her sexual talents before yanking them away.

“I’m the untrustworthy one,” I confessed to the sidewalk under my feet. The sidewalk didn’t care, of course. Even so, I stopped walking, and stared at the complex texture of the pale cement, feeling… something. I wasn’t sure what; it was almost as though I’d exposed a lie that I didn’t know I was telling. Something about Mira, or Mira and me. Something about…

I couldn’t figure out what. Whatever the feeling had been, it was gone. I resumed walking, and tried to keep my mind unfocused, the way I often did when trying to recall details from a dream that were tickling the back of my brain. No dice; nothing came.

At home, Scarlet bolted past me without waiting for her leash, squatting and peeing a stream into the yard. Her wild eyes met mine, gradually softening to express relief.

“I know, I know,” I apologized. “Good dog and very bad human.”

I felt awful for her distress, but Scarlet’s behavior told me everything I needed to know — Coral had never emerged from her studio the entire time I was away. I was off the hook, not even needing to make excuses. This time.

I walked the dog around the neighborhood, picking up croissants and a Sunday paper. Back at home, I lightly rapped on Coral’s studio door. She didn’t answer and I heard no sounds, much as I expected. I tried the handle, and found it locked.

No need for concern. Coral’s art drives were just as turbocharged as her sex drive — in fact, were completely intertwined with her sex drive — and selective secrecy appeared to be an integral part of her studio endeavors. She had probably spent the entire night manipulating two-dimensional female anatomy, perhaps sharing my obsession with Mira’s stocking-clad legs. She drew or painted them, her pussy dripping; I ran my tongue up their length to a dripping pussy. We both had our creative explorations to pursue.

Alone in the kitchen, I was in a pensive mood over coffee, my cock dully aching from the night’s sexcapades. I would be in Mira’s hotel room again; I knew that. Mira’s hotel was located midway between home and the hospital, which she must have known, but she could be located out by the airport and the effect would be the same — she was back in my world in a big way, and I’d end up between her thighs again and again, end of story.

At the same time, I’d been serious about my marriage having meaning for me. The hypnotic suggestions percolating inside of Coral had turned her into a volatile and sometimes overly focused version of herself, but my hypnotic interventions had only released what she tended to tamp down. I’d never dictated the details of her direction, so being as she was now must be what her psyche truly wanted. She was still the woman I’d fallen for, only with her sense of restraint somewhat… obliterated.

“Kind of like me,” I whispered, my immersion transgressions heavy in the air. The only difference was that my loss of restraint had come naturally, or perhaps cosmologically, with one of my Gemini twins perfectly willing to throw conventional actions and conventional morality into the cosmic trashcan.

Mira’s voice from earlier in the morning surfaced inside: I know you’ve gone into this healing direction at the hospital — it’s very noble, and you might become a truly great man in your field. It was a noble calling, the work I was pioneering at the hospital. Was that the entire point — that the brighter my star shined out in public, the darker my shadow needed to be in private?

I could say yes, and feel soothingly helpless, like I was simply a victim of cosmic inevitabilities. But the world would not judge my actions in that way, nor on that scale. I might be fine with manipulating the minds of beautiful women, but the eyes of the law, should the law ever judge me, would consider me a psychic criminal. Grace’s warning from months ago came back to me, distinct and still prescient: You have to conquer your inner demons, Michael. You have to or you’ll lose everything. The fact was, I couldn’t conquer my demons. I’d tried and had failed miserably. They had followed me to a new city, and had inserted themselves in the heart of my marriage. In a way, I could say that they were thriving inside my wife’s mind and body, and inside of a growing number of other women I’d touched. I couldn’t defeat them and I couldn’t escape them — I didn’t even want to, not really. At the same time, I knew that Grace had been right. There would be a reckoning some day, because I would make a mistake, drawing attention where I didn’t want it drawn. It had to happen, and I needed to be prepared.

And so I had begun to devise a third option, a way to have my human cake and eat it too. I’d already been planting the seeds of this option, moving my human pawns while never quite admitting to myself, even internally, even privately, what I was doing. That morning in my kitchen, with the refrigerator humming and morning birds twittering outside, I finally did so, going so far as to whisper the still-sketchy plan out loud:

“I’m setting Anya up to take the blame if any of this begins to unravel.”

There. That was it, wasn’t it? I would help her to find an apartment, a love nest, and I’d give her Judith as a playtoy. If Anya manipulated Judith through hypnosis, even just once, she would become a scapegoat, should I ever need one. Hypnotic sex was completely addictive — I knew that from personal experience, and seeing how the need kept blooming in Coral and others. Anya wouldn’t stand a chance against the temptation any more than I had. She didn’t stand a chance because I’d give her no chance. Judith was already prepared to serve as her ideal love slave, and if that somehow failed I would intervene, using the technique to brush aside any ethical resistances or other hesitations that stood in the way. She would hypnotize a woman for sex, and one time would lead to multiple times, until Anya became a habitual and secretive practitioner of hypno-sex, like me.

The entire plan was every bit as ignoble as my hospital practice might be noble, I could see that. I could also see that everybody connected in this spider’s web of immersion misdeeds had their own less than ideal agendas — I wasn’t the only one. Coral wanted the technique used to seduce however many victims over time, and I’d never bent her mind in that direction — the impulse and its corresponding moral failings had come from her. Mira wanted me to use the technique to manipulate Coral; Grace had wanted me to use the technique to manipulate Lucinda; Lucinda had wanted the technique to experience better orgasms; Judith had wanted to be used by the technique to be a more perfect fuck-slave…

It almost seemed as though everybody who got near the technique began to imagine some nefarious way to use it. Anya hadn’t, but it might be more accurate to say that I’d given her no time to come to the underhanded dealings herself. For all I knew, she would have begun to masturbate to fantasies of hypnotizing lovers into her steamy orchid-y den, eventually crossing the line all by herself. If that were true, I wasn’t the instrument of her downfall — I’d only saved her a little time.

I knew I was rationalizing the inexcusable; even so, I began to feel better. Why?

“Because she’ll never know,” I whispered, feeling my mouth turn up into a grin. That was the beauty of it, wasn’t it? The immersion suggestions were effectively invisible to those afflicted by them — Mira was living proof of that. She knew that I could affect others, and I'd begun to fear that she was inching closer to the truth about her own condition. But she seemed incapable of taking that next step, and grasping how her own behavior had been altered more than a year ago. Even Lucinda, fully aware that I'd played with her sexual system, didn’t know how deep my influence went, not unless Grace informed her. The same with Coral — she had never once given any hint of suspecting that her current attitudes had been born on our wedding night. Was it completely impossible for a victim of the technique to realize their victimhood? It certainly appeared that way.

It would be the same with Anya. Her eventual misuse of the technique would be her own, because she would never suspect that I’d pulled her strings. More importantly, she’d never be able to testify to that effect if called upon to do so. Even if she came to suspect somehow, I would deny it and she could do nothing to prove anything.

Untraceable. What I could do, unless caught in the very act while doing it, was untraceable.

With that, I decided that it must bother me less to admit my manipulating nature than it did to make attempts to repress it, because I felt very contented, and pleased with myself. I leafed through the newspaper classifieds, circling apartments that Anya might want to view that afternoon. After that I found an online real estate venue where I could take a virtual tour of several upscale apartments and condos, bookmarking those I thought Anya might respond to.

It was after eight when I heard Coral’s door open upstairs, followed by the sound of the shower. I had coffee and a plate of food ready for her when she ambled in with wet hair, totally naked.

“I’m sorry I left you all alone last night,” she apologized, sipping coffee. “I got into a groove and couldn’t make myself stop.”

Couldn’t make herself dress either, which was becoming a pattern. My eyes gravitated to her breasts as always, which were partially resting on the edge of the table. “Did you ever sleep?” I asked.

“I conked out on the studio sofa sometime after four or five. I wanted to keep going, keep working… I just couldn’t.”

“The drawings must be going gangbusters.”

“I switched to paint on canvas last night. Now all that naked flesh is glowing in living color! It’s another breakthrough, Michael. What’s going on in the studio… I almost can’t believe it.”

“Can I take a peek?”

“No, not yet. Sorry. I feel sort of protective of this work. It’s all so new, so vibrant. The paintings need time to completely gel before anyone sees them.”

I tried to appear nonplussed. I really was curious, especially since I might be in these paintings.

“I’ll probably be in the studio all day,” she stated, picking at her croissant. “Now that I’ve switched to paint, I can’t make myself stop. It’s like a creative rebirth. I need to get as much done as I can before I’m busy teaching again.”

“We also have a party to plan for,” I reminded her.

“True. You make an invitation list and I will, too. Invite everybody you can think of. We’ll email everyone, and have the whole thing catered. No big deal.”

I agreed, and she picked up her plate and coffee mug to take them to the sink. I could see that her mind was already back in her studio.

“Anya is coming up on the train today to look for an apartment,” I interjected. “Do you want to meet her, or help in the apartment search?”

That got Coral’s attention. She eased back into her chair, and met my eyes. “You’re going to help her today?”

I nodded.

“And she’s a real beauty.”

Another nod.

“By all means, bring her over. I’ll paint until then, but once she’s here… Who knows?”

“No funny business, like we agreed.”

“Meaning I shouldn’t tie her to our bedposts and teach her to love my new thick dildo.”

“That might be a bit much, yes.”

“Is it funny business if I just ask her to model for a few drawings or photos?”

“You mean dress her up as a lusty-busty porn nurse? Yes!”

“Shoot. Bring her anyway. I want to meet this Anya.”

“She’ll probably expect you to be wearing something.”

Coral glanced down, saw her big uncovered tits and looked surprised. “I’m naked!” she exclaimed, and laughed. “I guess I have gone rather informal of late.” She hefted both breasts in her hands, lightly smiling as she jiggled them. She didn’t look away from them, and I had the sense that my wife had become somewhat obsessed with the form and volume of her own tits, having painted them to whatever extent through the night. “Don’t worry, Michael,” she whispered, her eyes never leaving her breasts. “Just bring Anya over here later on. I’ll be nice. And I promise to be wearing… something. Something really special.”

I gave her a look, and she broke into a wide smile.

“I’m just kidding!”

I tried to smile back.

“You’re so damn cute when you’re terrified,” she said, plucking my cheek. “I’ll be good, I swear. So good that she’ll fall to the floor with her legs spread wide, begging, pleading…”

“Coral…”

She laughed, and grabbed her breasts in her hands, wobbling them playfully at my face.

“Worry wart!” she chided. And with that she sauntered out the room, and back upstairs.

"What kind of monsters have I created?" I asked the refrigerator. "And what kind of fool would continue creating them?"

My kind, apparently.