The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

One — The Old Man and the Book

It makes sense to begin my tale two nights after Nell Brockton came home for the winter break of her sophomore year in college. Lila, my stepsister, was also home on break, excited to reunite with her best friend from high school.

Just as I’d done so many times in the past, I kept glancing out my bedroom window, hoping to catch an overhead view of Nell’s giant rack; everybody needs a hobby, I guess. I did get a few glimpses, but it was bitterly cold and Nell was always enveloped in a bulky down parka, no thrill there. She dropped by the house the next evening, hooking up with Lila for a shopping adventure, and though the parka stayed on I did get some tactile excitement in the form of a great-to-see-you-again hug. The hug itself lasted something like two seconds, but the feel of Nell’s rack touching my ribs, even with all the fabric and insulation in the way, was the kind of experience that might haunt me forever.

She was so goddamned beautiful, with a bright dimpled smile and that just-slightly overstated ass, and then the fantasy boobs from another planet. She was almost two years older than I was, a sophomore in college while I was still living at home with one semester of high school to go. And sure, I had my fantasies, and they involved smoke in her eyes and my cock lost from sight between those awe-inspiring tits, but I never believed fantasy could become reality. I could probably spend hours writing down all the factors that made a woman like Nell unattainable, and I was right; she might as well live in the clouds above me, no chance in hell that we’d ever hook up.

All up until that third night after her arrival, just fourteen hours before Blizzard, our family dog, came out of the woods barking at me like Lassie, completely changing my life.

I have to explain that our neighbors, the Brocktons, had added an addition to their house during the time that Nell was away at college. Downstairs it was a long sun room that was added on, while the upstairs additions were two bedrooms and a third bathroom. With their house now going back further from the street, it so happened that one of the bedroom’s windows, plus the new bathroom window, were almost directly across from my two east-facing bedroom windows. The bathroom window was some sort of frosted or translucent glass, and because of that privacy feature—and the fact that no one had ever occupied the upstairs rooms—they never put up curtains.

That third night after Nell returned was a snowy Friday night; the severity of the storm was the only reason I wasn’t out somewhere with Nancy Bakken, my girlfriend of five months, most likely humping in one of our cars. I sat in darkness in my bedroom instead, and as luck would have it I pretty much watched Nell prepare for a shower and groom herself, naked. Though all the details were blurred, the contours of that woman’s body were clearly enough defined to know what I was seeing, and it was a whole lot like witnessing a miracle of human design. I thought her tits, which had been Holy Grail knockers ever since her family moved next door, looked like they had continued to grow in the year and a half since she’d moved away. Huge as they were, they appeared to be true stand-out material, like they just said fuck-you to gravity and exploded out from her torso in ta-da! fashion. The look wasn’t a fake one like you might expect from implanted boobs; she just had perky tits, even at that scale. This attribute seemed to hold true even with her back hunched as she slipped on panties. When her back went the other way, arching with her arms raised to towel her hair…

Maybe I’ll never fully understand why that undid me so much. I guess it was one of those expectations things—I’d beat-off to inner visions of Nell’s boobs for years, but to find out the real things were way more more than I’d ever conjured? It wasn’t even my brain that felt so shocked; it was my dick, which wanted to jump out my window and crash through hers, and say a big hello-nice-to-meet-you.

I dreamed of Nell and her out-there monster tits in my sleep that night, and I was probably thinking about them the next afternoon, when our dog did his life-altering thing.The rest of my family was out Christmas shopping, and I was alone at home, digging out my car so I could get together with Nancy at seven. Our house is situated almost at the cul-de-sac of our dead-end street, and beyond that is a thin strip of woods and Crescent Lake. Blizzard was off by himself somewhere—we let him run free fairly routinely, as he was built for the snow and was smart enough to keep out of coyote trouble or any other mishaps.

I thought he’d seen coyotes when he came charging out of the woods barking at full volume, vocalizing non-stop like I’d never heard. He charged at me and tugged at my pants-leg so hard that the fabric tore, and then he took off for the lake. It was an obvious come-hurry display so I chased after him, and once cleared of the woods I immediately knew what he’d brought me for. Someone had fallen through the ice, God knows how, as it should have been almost impenetrable.

I trusted my senses and knowledge of the ice and didn’t flatten myself upon approach, but ran out there. And a good thing, too, because I don’t know if the old man would have made it if I’d arrived any later. I say “old man” and he was; the gnarled hands fruitlessly trying to gain purchase on the jagged ice edge told me that. I think it registered on me even then that there were no bootprints leading up to the hole, only Blizzard’s tracks coming and going, but I was too pumped up right then to give such details any thought.

Closer to the hole I did put my belly on the ice, and took hold of both hands and pulled, hard. The flesh on those bones was like parchment, and I remember there were a few seconds where I thought it realistic that I might tear the flesh right off the underlying structure or hear finger bones cracking as loud as lake ice. There were even worse things to worry about than that, though, because for several seconds or more I slid forward, enough that I was certain I’d be dragged into the frigid water and we’d both drown. Maybe Blizzard knew that because he went berserk with his barking, which somehow gave me courage. I did not let go and damn the consequences; I remember thinking that thought in that language, and I’m not quite sure how I managed it—one of those legendary adrenaline surges, presumably—but I curled my forearms like some champion weightlifter and with that action I had the guy halfway onto the ice, with no more forward slippage on my part. With a portion of his weight out of the water I managed to struggle backwards, maddeningly losing ground to slippage several times but eventually getting the whole of the guy’s body onto a solid surface.

This was no neighbor. The old man was totally unfamiliar and he was shit to look at, in his eighties at least with his bald head and thin wrinkled skin nearly as blue as the clearing sky. I guess I went into some sort of half-unconscious survivalist mode, because the next thing I knew I was back at my car, breathing heavily with a sack of iced man-bones slung over my shoulders. I considered throwing the frozen geezer onto the backseat and cranking the heat while I continued to dig the car out, but instinct told me he wouldn’t make it unless I got him out of his wet clothes.

Into the house with the old man still on my shoulders, and straight up the stairs to the bathtub, where I turned the hot water on and laid the guy on his back. I didn’t even try to unbutton his shirt with frigid fingers; I grabbed a straight razor out of the medicine cabinet and managed to cut his clothing away without drawing blood. The boots were last—they looked as old as he was and the razor was of little use there, so it took awhile. Who knows why, but as I worked at his boots I observed that the guy’s cock was pretty damned together for someone his age, though it was bluish, too, and had to be shriveled some from cold. Even in that state his cock and balls were surprisingly large—some old men are fucking hung, who knew? And though there was too much to contend with to dwell upon it, I noted that the guy’s dick and balls somehow looked younger than the rest of him.

My number one thought was that I needed to get this half-frozen stranger to the hospital, and I pulled out my cell, or tried; it wasn’t there, probably back out on the ice. So out into the hall to pick up the landline.

“N…n…no!” he chattered a protest. “No amb…b…bulance!”

I don’t normally take orders from unknown octogenarians, so I ignored him. I saw him raise his hands out of the water, fists clenching and unclenching in rapid fashion, and I took that as a good sign that he could move them at all. And then, not understanding it at the time, I think I got the first taste of what he could do, because when I pressed the “on” button to dial 911, a strange whine came from the phone, and the buttons wouldn’t depress. I thought it was my numb fingers at first, but no; for whatever reason the numbers on the handset were as frozen as our lake, and there was no dial-tone.

“G…g…give me a few m…minutes alone,” the old man said, his hands continuing to convulse.

“Mister, we need to get you to a hosp—“

And then the bathroom door slammed shut, with me out in the hallway standing stunned and oddly sleepy.

I did have the thought that doors don’t normally shut themselves, and I thought I’d never been drowsier in my life, so much so that I went to my bedroom, got under the warm covers and fell sound asleep.

While sleeping I had the strangest dream, but it was no dream because when I awakened I was in my car and the car was at the side of interstate 75, and it was night. It was midnight on the button according to the dashboard clock, and it turned out I was close to the Wolverine exit, which is almost a hundred-and-ten miles from home.

It all had the surreal quality of a dream, some parts of the narrative completely there in my memory while other parts were fuzzy, the transitions from one thing to another not always making sense. Here is how I remembered it, the sharp and the fuzzy both:

I’m with this old man, the same old man I pulled from the lake, and we’re sitting in plush chairs in what feels like a Medieval parlor room, with a fire blazing in a stone fireplace. He’s dressed in a dark gray suit like you see in old black-and-white movies, and he’s not any younger but he sure looks better in the light of a warm fire than he did when frozen like a fish in the supermarket aisle.

In a white gloved hand he holds a glass of red wine, and I see that I have one, too. He nods for me to drink and I take a tentative sip. It might be wine but it warms my insides more like hard liquor, especially the insides of my balls and cock, and I find myself gulping it down.

“That is your first gift,” the man says, “and we shall call that one the gift of my choosing.”

“Gift?” I ask, not understanding.

“You showed admirable perseverance out on the ice. You shall see that staying power and far beyond quite soon in more pleasurable exertions. You might even say you’ve become indefatigable, in one particular area.”

I understand, even if I don’t believe him. What he’s saying, in a different language than I’d ever use, is that he’s somehow blessed me with a cock that will need no refueling at the Great Gas Station of Time. But that’s not possible—testicles are not designed like automatic weaponry, just keep firing away.

“The next gift shall be the power to fulfill your greatest desire. The third shall be chosen by the book, as instructed by…” And here an almost childish laugh, the sound so strange coming from that parchment face. “Well, by the book, of course.”

The book. It’s a mystery how I could know this before even seeing it, but this is a very special—perhaps I should even say living—book that he speaks of, containing countless magical spells. I feel as though I know its shape and smell, and how the dust of distant ages coughs a great cloud from between its edge-worn pages every time the mammoth-hide covers slam shut. And is it true that the book’s pages are infinite, or is that merely one of its tricks, the number just sufficient that any living being would die of natural causes long before the entire span of its contents could be counted?

In this dream that I know was no dream, the old man is suddenly standing at my side, and he takes the glass of red liquid from my hand, full nearly to the brim even though I thought I’d swallowed most of it down. He flings the entire glass right onto the fire and it shatters violently, and in the spray where liquid touches flame, the color of fire turns green. It’s not the normal flame that is so affected: it’s as though a second fire has come to life inside the other, this magical one not governed by thermodynamics, but by the desires of my brain and body. This greenish flame does not lick as fire does; it wiggles with an intelligence, and in the wiggling contours its light coalesces into a crude but definite form, becoming curved and almost anthropomorphic, and then, gaining definition, undeniably a human figure. Seconds later, I am witnessing the nude shape of a woman with a super-abundance of curves catapulting from her chest.

It’s Nell; of this I have no doubt. And it’s not just Nell; it’s Nell just as she was the night before, making the same movements, though she’s made of wiggling green fire now, her body seemingly lit from within. The details of her naked form keep gaining clarity; it’s as though every single thing I had been blocked from seeing through that indistinct pane of glass is now being served up with complete precision.

She might as well have been designed to slay me. Her body is that of a cheerleader, taut and strong with a world-class ass, and then, as though somebody on the design team got huge tits in their brain and just couldn’t stop adding on, breasts that would look appropriate to a woman who was fifteen feet tall. She bends at the waist, boobs pulled downward with the angle of her ribcage, and though there is no fire-towel in her hands she’s drying her ankles and calves, working her way up. There’s nothing about her body that I don’t love, and want, and then, with elbows raised and both her head and torso tilted back, she ghost-towels her narrow waist, up to shoulders and arms and finally the huge breasts thrusting not only out but up.

I make an involuntary sound when I take in the exact details of Nell’s breasts, seeing for the very first time that she has perfectly round areoles the diameter of IHOP pancakes. The flesh there is slightly raised, meaning she has puffy warm-pink areoles placed dead-center in the acres of surrounding flesh, serving as launching platforms for her nipples. And her nipples… They’re wide and long and—how do they do this—they point not only out but up above the horizontal, like they want to track the rising sun or moon. I knew they’d be great, that if I ever saw the whole of these tits they’d blow me away, but these aren’t just great tits, they’re miracle tits.

Just at that moment something changes in the attitude of Nell’s neck, and the hands that had been drying her hair are clutching at it now, her jaw dropping, lovely lips parting. There is something about her expression, with her eyes not quite closed but turned inward, and it’s like thunder booming through my cock when I realize that this is no longer Nell in a casual moment of grooming her hair; this is Nell Brockton in the throes of orgasm. This is Nell in that critical instant when all systems align. This is Nell when she is aflame from within.

The old man laughs behind me, and it’s a sound with a co-conspiratorial edge. “I must say you have exquisite taste. This woman… How many glance upon her every day, and wish without real hope. Yet you can have her, if you are skilled in the art of seduction. For just as it was your liquor that birthed this vision, it is a relatively simple spell that can turn any aqueous material into an irresistible attraction potion.”

A clarity blooms in my mind as he says this. I’m being given a potion spell to make Nell Brockton desire me enough that I can see that expression on her face for real. It’s all thanks for saving this old man’s life, and I understand what went wrong for him to make my help necessary. Because of his age, decades beyond his appearance, his faculties are not always what they should be, and he can sometimes fuck-up one of the spells he’s been given by the book. Today he was spell-a-porting and got something wrong, and by sheer accident or the workings of fate, he ended up plunging onto and through the ice on the lake so close to our house. No wonder there were no bootprints, and maybe the man isn’t as brittle as he looks because it was like he’d been dropped from a crane, and it wasn’t the impact that came close to killing him, but the cold.

And his desire, almost like a duty, to reward me… I think it’s the fact that I persisted in helping him when I truly believed I could die in trying, if for only a few seconds. But something else, too, some need or desire from…

“The book shall now play its part,” the old man says.

I know it’s wrong if I ever start believing it’s his book. This is not a tome like any others—its form might appear familiar but it would not be wrong to say this book predates writing, predates humanity. I feel its immeasurable patience, its innumerable secrets not fully alive until humans developed to a point where they could participate in bringing these spells into full existence. It, and the frail magician—they share something like a symbiotic relationship, though the words fail because the book has no biology. And he—the old man never told me his name and I don’t believe I’ll ever know it—is only the most recent of hundreds or thousands to be in its thrall over the ages. Chosen, that’s how he thinks of it, and that does not sound wrong. He is no wizard, not inherently; it is the book that holds all the magic, or is the magic. The man is merely the vessel through which that magic operates.

I want to ask a hundred questions all at once, but then in the way of dreams I’m standing in front of an ancient stone slab, the book resting upon it. There is texture all over its cover, and the wear of time. The binding appears organic, like it’s made of sinew, or perhaps thousands of spider webs woven together. If I wanted to try, and fail, to describe the book’s color, I could say it is an earthy off-blue, or a tarnished false silver, or the color of a thunderclap, or the color of The Void. In ordinary terms I might describe the general scale of the thing being roughly the size of a large coffee-table book, only so much thicker, but all of that must be illusion because it pulses with vastness, in a way that has me believing that in reality this book could slam shut and crush this entire house within its pages.

I do not fear it, but there is a feeling that makes my spine buzz, and it might be awe. I wish to know this book, somehow, and so I look for writing upon its cover, some indication of a title. Nothing there, but the more I stare the more I do seem to see meaningful patterns in the hide’s organic whirls, and even deeper patterns inside those patterns, and within them…

They, or the book itself, beckons, and I find my right hand moving as if of its own accord, the fingernail of my index finger strumming the contour of the text-block edge, page after page, hundreds of pages, thousands of pages. I believe that every page is a spell, a means by which one can cheat the laws by which men must live, and a hunger blooms in me to open the book to where I choose, to rummage through its mysteries to find incantations that suit what I wish my life to be. The book, I can tell, knows this. It feels it somehow, but does not deviate from its purpose of choosing for me by controlling my hand.

My finger is still moving down the pages, and down still, somehow farther than could be possible if the book were even ten times the depth of its appearance. I begin to wonder how my arm is even reaching that far when, finally, a spot has been chosen for me, my fingernail halting and digging between two specific pages, separating them. I have the thought that I should open the book to see what’s been given; no need, as the book opens itself, slowly at first but with an emphatic thump when the front cover strikes hard stone.

I can’t read one goddam word of the utterly bizarre markings on these two facing pages. It’s not even Greek to me; it’s more like Martian, and I wouldn’t even think of it as writing if not for the context. The best way I can describe what’s on the page—if a squirrel’s paw somehow became a marking tool, and the squirrel was taped onto a yellowed sheet of parchment, and then somebody poured hot sauce all over the squirrel, you might get markings like this. Wild. Frantic. Indecipherable.

Then, like a tide washing through my brain, it’s all there, the whole of it completely understandable even though nothing on the page ever changed. Impulse control—it’s an incantation for impulse control, complete with instructions on how to work with it. I know it’s a complex spell, but just like that it’s seared into me so I can retrieve it in its entirety, even with my eyes closed. It’s as though I worked at memorizing every nuance for weeks, though I made no such effort at all.

“Such a powerful spell, one that I…” I hear the old man say. ”The book favors you.”

It favors me enough that it opens, all by itself, to another page with another spell, and just as before I see impenetrable markings that sort themselves in my brain into the promised attraction spell. I absorb it until it’s as much a part of me as a limb, impossible to forget.

“Already written,” I hear the old man say, his voice more distant than before. “All of this, you being here…”

That was the end of it, as the next thing I knew I awakened because I was cold and my neck ached. I was in the driver’s seat of my car with my head leaning against the window, and once I had the sense of things I saw that I was parked on the shoulder of the interstate, within sight of the green exit sign for the town of Wolverine. That was a hundred-plus miles from home, and how the fuck had I gotten here?

I didn’t know, but I knew my dream had been no ordinary dream; it had all happened. In my brain, both spells sat glowing like hot coals, and I could somehow sense that my cock was more vigorous, like it was Popeye’s dick and I had as much spinach as blood in my veins. I thought about rubbing one out right there to test what I already knew to be true, but that was all I needed, being questioned by a state trooper before I even had a chance to get my wits together. Feeling plenty awake to drive, I started the car and began the journey back home.

Who knows how long it had taken me, or us, to drive the car where we/I did, or if that was even how I got so far north. Did the old man cast a spell to melt the snow I hadn’t dug out with a shovel? Did he use different magic to spell-a-port my Corolla so driving wasn’t even necessary? Wolverine was, presumably, the town nearest to the house that had been in my “dream”, and I had no idea at all what had happened to get me where I was.

With only conventional means of transportation at my disposal, it was roughly two a.m. when I pulled into the driveway of my house. I knew things weren’t good when my stepmom ran out the front door, not in a nightgown but fully clothed. Her eyes were red and she greeted me with a nearly backbreaking hug and the words, “You stupid, wonderful boy!”, and more tears. Lila stepped out onto the porch with her hands on her hips, head cocked at a “What a fuck-up” angle. My father was last, and he shook his head the same way he’d done when I crunched the rear-end of my Corolla the previous year by backing into a tree.

I guess it’s good to know that people care if you’re alive and well. My entire family had gone nuts with worry at my disappearance; they hadn’t understood why there were so many melted ice puddles in various parts of the house and why a pair of old boots and sliced-up soggy clothing were lying on the bathroom floor. Their puzzlement had turned into outright panic when Blizzard led them to the hole in the ice, partially refrozen with my cell phone laying not four feet from the edge. My car was gone, which argued against my being a frozen corpse at the bottom of the lake; even so, the only reason they didn’t call the police was that Lila was so forceful in believing that I was just being a jerk.

My explanation for where I’d gone without telling anyone? The whole drive back I couldn’t think of anything better than a jacked-down version of the truth: I had saved an aged stranger from freezing to death in the lake, and after warming him in the bathtub my own near-hypothermia had caused me to black out, after which I found the stranger gone and I went out looking for him.

No one was completely satisfied with that story, especially my girlfriend. Nancy had gone bonkers, too, because I had never failed to show up for one of our dates. She called my folks and became worried sick, which turned into rage when I finally called her to let her know I was okay. I had to hold the phone away from my ear and I raised no objections when called an uncaring self-centered idiot, lacking the common sense to borrow someone else’s phone to call home.

Maybe I can be self-centered, because it occurred to me, right there at the apex of my girlfriend’s fury, that if she had any shred of an impulse towards forgiveness lurking inside, I could use my new impulse control spell to make it flare up, and once it flared I could grab hold and bend it in any direction I wanted. But not over the phone; it didn’t work that way. I needed to be much closer to her, not so much visually or even within earshot, but within a certain distance where our emotional and physical fields could mix.

In the wee hours of the morning, with everyone finally asleep, I lay awake with the knowledge that real-life magic pulsed in my core, and I thought thoughts that sometimes turned into schemes. It was unnerving, in a way, to be told that my very deepest desire was to get Nell Brockton naked and to bring her to orgasm; I mean, what about world peace or even the predictable zillion bucks? But then I remembered what I had witnessed through Nell’s bathroom window just one night before, and how she had looked in my dream/not-dream in perfect green detail, riding a climax. I thought of all the times I’d fantasized about her, all that yearning with no hope of achieving anything. Ever since she had moved in next door, I had lived with a deep longing in my heart and my loins, and I was enough of a romantic that in every one of my fantasies, there had been reciprocal desire animating Nell’s features, the unattainable woman wanting me the same way I wanted her. With that possibility now on the table, I thought I shouldn’t be surprised that bringing Nell into an enraptured sexual state would be what I wanted the most in this world.

I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to tell someone what had happened to me, and the obvious choice was my friend Rock Ross. He was an aspiring science-fiction writer and he would have no trouble providing ideas on how to use my magic once he came to believe in its reality. But could he keep it a secret? I didn’t think so, and it might drive him batshit crazy to learn that I could have a shot at getting my hands inside Nell Brockton’s bra. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that I could not share any of this with Rock or anyone else. Classic superhero conundrum—I was in possession of special abilities, and the temptation was extreme to confide to somebody that magic was a real thing. But the nature of my magic, and how I intended to use it… I would have to keep my lips sealed, and use my limited number of spells in complete secrecy.

Still unable to sleep, I did what I often did, looking at photos and videos of my favorite big-boob models. I had done this in the past without having seen what Nell’s tits actually looked like, and now I knew beyond any doubt that she was as hot or hotter than any model on the net, past or present. To my mind there were only two models, one current and the other a legend, who were anywhere near as cute as Nell, with breasts that had the kind of aesthetic beauty I’d witnessed in green flame. But no one had her dimpled smile, or that fabulous ass. It stretched credulity to believe the sexiest big-tit woman in the entire world had ended up living right next door to me; at the same time, seeing was believing, and the fact was I’d never seen a woman that I thought was more beautiful. Or that I wanted more.

“Fuck yes, I’m going to cast the attraction spell on her,” I whispered out loud.

I fantasized about that and jerked off, and damn if I didn’t get hard again less than a minute after blowing a huge load. I looked at porn and fapped again, and looked at more porn and fapped again, and it was pretty obvious that the old magician had indeed bestowed me with a magical resurrection dick.

I stopped testing the limits, and it came to me a bit later that I should fortify my understanding of another of the spells by looking up the official definition of impulse control. It was this: In psychology, the degree to which a person can control the desire for immediate gratification. Impulse-control might be the single-most important indicator of a person’s future adaptation to the circumstances of life, determining their success with friends, education, and employment.

And wouldn’t you know, there was a condition known as impulse-control disorder, with a whole class of sub-conditions where a person failed to resist a temptation that might cause harm to themselves or others. They even had a list of five behavioral stages that went with impulsivity: the impulse itself, a growing tension about it, the pleasure of acting upon it, the relief from the initial urge because one had acted, and then—no guarantee that this would emerge, but it sometimes did—feelings of guilt.

I could see why the magician had considered this spell to be such a powerful one. People had impulses all the time that either became actions or non-actions, and they needn’t be about extreme or destructive things that were mentioned as disorders, like the urge to set fires or have sex with dead people, and other twisted shit. I’d be able to cast a spell on someone that opened a window onto a private world inside their brain and body, not mind-reading but impulse reading, and I would have the ability to make them act where they would have remained cautious, to make them say yes where they would have chosen no, to make them move where they would have remained still, etc. I could also do the reverse, causing them to remain silent when they would have blurted something out, make them stay still when they would have thrown a punch, and on and on. To eat that or not eat it, to buy that or keep the wallet in their pocket. To make them make love with me, as long as there was even the slightest urge to do so.

“To open Nancy’s mouth where it would have remained closed, and have it suck me off,” I said out loud.

Because my girlfriend, really solid in so many other ways, steadfastly refused to give head. At first I’d believed it was some sort of ick-factor about swallowing semen, but I knew now that Nancy had a general kind of oral phobia; she was fine with a gentle smooch on the lips, but abhorred French kissing, too. The loss of deep tongue while kissing was tolerable, but no blow-jobs, ever?

Only now, the whole of getting her to do it was imprinted somewhere in my brain. I decided right then and there that I would give the impulse control spell its first test run on my girlfriend, searching for its limits and working out any kinks before I turned my sights on Nell. I would learn the art of it, of how to practice magic.

My phone, which had survived an afternoon and part of a night on the ice, pinged a text alert just ten or fifteen minutes later. It was from Nancy, as if my train of thought had already gotten inside her and was keeping her awake. Her message said: We need to have a serious talk. I’ll pick you up at 6 tomorrow eve.

A somewhat ominous tone in that text, enough to figure that I was in deep doo-doo. Funny, how my reaction was not to feel any apprehension at all, but to have a raging hard-on.

I replied with complete honesty: Can’t wait.