The Job Jar
Chapter 4
4. Tension and Release
Things were tense over the next several days. We spoke only when necessary, goodnight kisses and off-to-work hugs were perfunctory. I tried to hug her in bed and she felt like she was made of doorknobs and nail-studded two-by-fours.
We finished dinner in silence one night. As she rose and reached for my plate, I grabbed her wrist.
“Jan, this is killing me. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say, don’t know what to do. Please, can’t we talk this out?”
She pulled free of my grasp, but sat back down, looking thoughtful.
“Yeah. Yes. We can’t go on like this; I guess we’ve got to get it all out on the table.”
She took a deep breath, looked at the ceiling, sighed heavily. “I’ve been thinking about it all week. Trying to so sort it out. So pardon me if I ramble. First, let me say that I love it when you hypnotize me and do all that sexy stuff.” She blushed a little. “I mean, you put so much thought and energy into our sex life, create all these scenarios… It’s very flattering that you take so much interest.”
I never thought of it that way. I just thought I was trying to get my rocks off and indulge my hypno kink.
“I mean, girls talk… and none of our friends have what we’ve got. They’re all stuck in one rut or another. I can’t even tell them how often we get it on and how it never seems to be routine. I’d either make them feel bad or they’d think I was just bragging or making it up.”
She paused.
“On the other hand, it’s a little weird sometimes. I remember being hypnotized and what we did. Like the link to your spiral thingie. Or the time you hacked my Google Calendar and it kept texting my phone with these messages that got me all hot until I jumped your bones. I knew what you were doing, but I couldn’t stop it from happening.”
“Or didn’t want to stop it,” I smiled.
“Shut up. I’m not through yet. Sometimes I feel like you have some goal or ulterior motive or something. I had pretty much figured out that sometimes the job jar hypnotizes me. I mean, there are these gaps in my memory and a lot of them seem to occur on Saturday mornings. Or some crazy thing kicks in later. But after last Saturday….”
The look on my face confirmed her suspicion.
“It’s the blue slips, isn’t it?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “I’m still pissed off that you insinuated yourself into my fantasy. It was my little thrill, doing the thing in my mind that I’d never do in real life. I should never have told you. I mean, you’re so creative, what was the big deal? Why did you have to co-opt it?”
I thought for a moment. Time to put my cards on the table.
“Because it wasn’t vanilla sex.”
She looked dumbfounded. She rose, strode to the sink, talking to the back window.
“This is about wanting to screw me standing up? The old position thing again? I thought we were past that.”
“I thought so too. But I was jealous of the guy in your fantasy. I guess it was always there in the back of my mind and I saw an opportunity for both of us to enjoy something different. And come on, you did enjoy it, at least until afterwards.”
She turned and stared hard at me, said nothing.
“And you’ve never explained why we only do it one way. Jan, I love you madly, and I love making love to you, and I love hypnotizing you and I admit that I thought I could use hypnosis to break down the missionary position wall. I just want to experience you in every way possible.”
Her eyes welled up.
“Come on,” I said gently. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Her lower lip quivered. “Just the thought of it makes me feel dirty and cheap. Slutty, but not in a good way.”
“But your fantasy…?”
“That was different. It didn’t feel the same, in my mind or when we did it. Maybe that’s why I wanted to protect it, so it wouldn’t feel dirty—wrong. I mean other than cheating on you in my head.” She smiled lamely.
“You’re forgiven,” I smiled. “But that doesn’t explain why everything else is dirty.”
She regarded me for a long moment. “Maybe you should do a little of your hypnotherapy magic on me to see if you can find out.”
“But… it’s generally a bad idea to do therapy on one’s family members—too much baggage, secrets that I shouldn’t know, that kind of thing. And look how I screwed up with your fantasy.”
“Look, you said it a long time ago—I trust you completely. Can’t you do something with some conditions, a ‘privacy clause’ or give me some way of saying ‘don’t go there’ while you’re doing your hypnotizing and analyzing?”
I had to admit, it sounded plausible.
“And besides,” she said, “look how you helped Justine with her exam nerves. She‘s family.”
Justine was our niece, the one who was delivered under hypnosis many moons ago.
“OK, peace?” I opened my arms and enveloped her as she tucked herself against my chest. I could feel her tears through my shirt.
“Let’s do it soon,” she said. “I don’t want this between us anymore.”
A couple of evenings later she was in our living room chair, looking up at me expectantly as I perched on the arm of the sofa.
“As I told you over dinner, this trance is going to be different. You already know consciously and subconsciously that this is an exploratory trance, a healing trance, a way to find out more about this issue and set it aside.”
It sounded rehearsed and it was. But so was most of the preinduction conversation. I had set up some safe words and conditions, and she had taken them as waking suggestions. I could see from her already-relaxed features that she was in the initial stages.
“Now you know how to go into deep hypnosis and all you have to do is take a deep breath, hold it for a moment, let it out slowly… close your eyes… and sleep. That’s right. Thaaat’s right.”
I could hear myself adopting the Ericksonian tone of encouragement, trusting her unconscious mind to take her where she needed to go.
“That’s right, deeper and deeper. And as you go deeper, you feel doors unlocking, sights and sounds returning, memories returning. It’s like when you were in school, you come in in the morning, not sure if you really know all the answers. But when the teacher asks, the answer comes easily, you’re there in the classroom and you know the answers. And my voice will go with you, be there with you, I am who you need me to be, and you can think of things, things that are answers.”
Her head dropped down and her breathing slowed. I left long pauses between bits of encouragement and patter. After a while, her head twitched a couple of times, a shoulder lifted, fell again. Her hands clenched slightly and I could see lines of tension on her face.
“I…. Oh, gosh,” she mumbled. “I have a question.” Her voice sounded young, a childlike version of herself.
I spoke gently. “What is it, Jan? What’s going on?”
“Can I, um, talk and be asleep at the same time?” The voice was still light, girlish. She had clearly regressed to some earlier age.
“You can be as awake as you need to be for us to talk and as deep as you need to be to remember what you need to remember and say what you want to say.”
She nodded and sighed.
“How old are you, Jan?”
“I’m ten.”
“What’s going on? What do you see?”
“My brother. He’s getting married. His friends are coming over. Going to the basement. Into the rec room for a stag party. That’s a funny name. I ask if there are going to be does, too. His friend laughs and says something I don’t understand. They have a movie projector like the kind we have in school.”
“After a while, I hear them laughing and shouting. I’m curious, so I sneak into the furnace room. I can peek into the rec room through gaps in the wall. It’s dark in the room. I can smell the beer. It looks like they hung a sheet on the wall and they’re watching movies. They’re black and white. It’s girls—women—and they’re naked or just wearing panties. They’re doing things with men, sticking things in themselves… and…”
Her face had turned bright red. “And what else, Jan?”
“Kissing a horse’s peepee.”
She paused, looking strained. “The boys are laughing. Yelling at the screen. Saying mean things about the girls.”
She drew a breath and spoke in her grown-up voice. “I want to talk about this.”
“That’s fine, you can open your eyes or keep them closed, as you wish, and you can talk easily about what happened and your reaction.”
She opened her eyes, but they were lidded and heavy. She didn’t make eye contact, but stared at nothing.
“That was the first time I saw men and women having sex. I don’t know why I didn’t remember it until just now, but I guess it affected me.”
She looked up at me, still trancey. “I mean, I knew about the mechanics of sex, but in my mind it was some kind of abstract thing that happened in soft, pink light with silk curtains and crinolines and I don’t know what.”
“And when you saw the stag films…?”
“I was shocked. And my brother and his friends were so crude. ‘Ride him, you whore! Come on, you little slut, suck on it!’ My brother’s friends were calling him ’cuntlapper.’ I wanted to warn Cindy not to marry him, that he and all his friends were sick perverts.”
“But it didn’t turn you off to sex.”
“No, but….” She paused. “That’s it! That’s it! About the only thing I didn’t see was conventional, missionary-style sex. I didn‘t want to be like those poor girls on the screen. Thinking back on it now, some of them were obviously drunk or drugged. I knew something was wrong, that they were being exploited somehow, but I didn‘t put it together until now.”
She was more animated; had pretty much come out of the trance. “But now that I know how it affected me… I still feel the same way. If I think about having sex in some other position, all I can think of is those poor, exploited girls and those men coming on their backs, on their faces…. Do guys really like to do that?
“It’s the money shot for porn, for some reason. I’ve gotta admit that I don’t understand it myself. I can’t think of anything better than having an orgasm deep inside you, preferably while you’re coming too.”
“Me too,” she said, a little sheepish. “So what do we do about these negative feelings, these associations?”
“We wipe them away.”
“Just like that? With your dual-action, foaming brain cleaner?”
I laughed. “It’s easier than you think. Your mind doesn’t want to hold onto those associations, it just needs some help letting them go and some new ones to put in their place.”
“And how do we do that?”
“First you go down, down into a deep trance, Jan.” I brought a hand down over her eyes and she obligingly closed them and slumped in her chair. I deepened the trance and gave her some words of encouragement about the ease of letting go of the past and allowing herself to enjoy lovemaking in all its permutations and variations.
“Now I’d like you to bring up one of those grainy black-and-white images in your mind, a freeze frame from one of the movies. Let it be one where the boys were shouting out or saying things that disturbed you. Tell me when you have the image and what it is.”
After a moment she said, “She’s on top. She’s riding him. Another man has his penis in her mouth.”
“OK, now bring up the photo editor in your head and delete the second man.”
“OK.”
“Now I’d like you to construct a second image in your mind. You’re on top, I’m on the bottom, and you’re having the most incredibly pleasurable experience. You’re taking your pleasure from me, and it’s a beautiful picture, in full color, You can see the pleasure on your face, you can see how much I love you and how much I love making love to you.. Tell me when you’ve got that.”
A pause. “OK.”
Now when I tell you, let that second, beautiful image wipe away the first one, replacing it, pushing the old , ugly grainy image right off the screen. Ready, Now!” I waved a hand in front of her eyes, knowing that she’d sense it from the change in light, the rustle of my clothing, the heat of my hand.
“What do you see now?”
“Us.”
“And how is it?”
“Nice.”
“Good. Now let’s wipe the other way and you’ll notice that you may not find the grainy, ugly image at all. If you do find it, it will be much smaller, fainter, harder to see.” I waved my hand again. “What do you see?”
“It’s gray and blurry.”
“Good. We’ll wipe again, making our new, loving image brighter, more colorful more vibrant. Let it destroy the old image entirely.” I waved again.
“What do you see now?”
“Us. Nice.”
We continued in this vein, breaking down a few more of her old, bad images, replacing them with vibrant pictures of us making love. I left out the horse and simply erased the facials and such.
“How are you feeling about what we’re doing here?”
“Good. I want to do some on my own now.”
I sat quietly and watched her eyes move under her lids as she did her visualizations. She twitched a couple of times, licked her lips once. Her breathing sped up, slowed down again. Finally she opened her eyes and held her arms out for a hug. With a sleepy smile she said, “Honey, take me to bed now.”
She let me undress her and I tucked her between the cool sheets as I quickly undressed and slipped in beside her. We embraced face to face as we lay on our sides. I kissed her and smoothed her hair back over her ear. She threw a leg over mine and pulled me close with her thigh. I worked myself down so I could kiss her breast. She pressed against my half-hardness until I was fully firm, then reached down and grabbed my shaft, giving a few strokes. She guided my head to her lips, sliding it back and forth, opening herself, moistening us both. She pressed on my butt and I I pulled on her thigh and slid part way into her warmth. She looked meaningfully at me as she began to rock her hips.
“I see only you,” she said.
In response, I covered her mouth with kisses and pushed deeper into her. She moaned and dug her fingernails into my butt and the rocking became a flurry of almost-desperate pumping that quickly mounted into her first orgasm.
We settled back into a slow undulation, still on our sides. She smiled softly and ran her hand over my arm, through my hair. Suddenly she hooked a leg around mine and rolled me onto my back. She sat up, pressing me deep into her. She put her hands on my chest and I half-supported her ribs while caressing her breasts, squeezing her nipples the way I knew she liked. Her eyes closed in pleasure.
She opened them again and did something extraordinary, pressing what could only have been her cervix against my head. The feeling was exquisite and I made some wordless exclamation of pleasure. She looked very pleased with herself as she rubbed it over me once, twice, four times, each time eliciting another moan from me. I needed to come very badly and I pulled her down close to me, banging her fast and hard. She pressed into me, lifting her hips for free access. Her head was down, hair tangled across my sweaty face. I came hard and she was right with me, her voice going up an octave.
We lay together sweating freely until the room began to feel cool. I pulled a sheet over us and kissed her as she nuzzled into my neck.
“That was amazing,” I said. “Where did you learn that move?”
“Cosmo,” she said simply.
I laughed so hard that I shook the bed and she started laughing too. We giggled and snickered at the incongruity of it all until we finally fell asleep.
A couple of weeks later, we were all but exhausted, somewhere between puppy love and happy idiots as we walked around holding hands, pressing up against one another. Our friends joked about it and asked if we’d gone to Marriage Encounter or fallen under the sway of some perverse sex cult. Jan was making up for lost time, rediscovering herself and me. We hadn’t done any hypnosis since “the cure,” as she called it.
That’s why I was surprised when the alarm went off Saturday morning. Not too early, but earlier than I would have liked. Jan had her let’s-get-busy face on.
“Come on, she said, arms folded, steely look firmly in place. “This place is a wreck. We’ve got lots to do.”
I grumbled, tried to take her back to bed, failed.
After breakfast she held out the job jar. “You first.”
I pulled a slip out halfheartedly and read, “JUST STAND THERE.” I looked her, puzzled, as she pulled a slip out of her jar. A blue one.
A funny expression came over her face as she read it. She stepped towards me, grabbed my belt buckle, unzipped my jeans, and pulled them down over my hips.
“Whaddya know,” she smiled as she sank to her knees. “It works when I write them, too.”