The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I wasn’t ignorant of the danger. Right then, with her hand outstretched, time slowed in that strange way it sometimes does, and I had more than enough opportunity to weigh the potential consequences. They were legion and I could see that, even at the beginning.

On the surface, that first touch was only the ing of hands, but then Michelangelo chose nothing less than the touch of two hands to represent the creation of all mankind. To reach out would be a monumental signal, perhaps even a promise, that we were going forward together, two conspirators dancing to our own private tune.

I extended my hand, blood running through my veins like liquid fire. When our fingers interlocked, I could feel both the heat and the tension in Mira’s body, and hear her breath catch, and see the fear in her eyes. She didn’t believe she could do this, yet there we were, pulling each other closer, the world gone noticeably silent as our pasts and this present moment coalesced and gained weight, creating a future with an inescapable pull, like gravity.

She smelled wonderful, herbal shampoo and lilac body wash, and perhaps a trace of a scent that might be perspiration tinged with desire. Her lips trembled as she tilted her head, and she sighed when our lips met, that one small sound expressing the contradictions tearing at her from within.

It was a soft kiss, lingering with our tongues touching lightly. My right hand found a perfect resting spot on the small of her back, and I pressed, just hard enough that we grazed each other at the front. Mira moaned, a sound so anguished that I eased up, allowing her the chance to regroup. She broke off the kiss, both hands going to the sides of her face, her eyes wide, cheeks flushed. Her entire body seemed to experience a sustained shiver, goosebumps appearing on her bare arms.

“Oh God, I can’t…” she began, momentarily faltering from the shock of it all. “You can’t ever let anyone know that you kissed Taylor Cassidy’s wife!”

“I’ll never tell a soul,” I answered, my tone of voice solid and calm.

“I know I’m beautiful. Tell me… I need to know it’s more than that.”

She was beyond beautiful and had already told me how she reveled in that. Dressed as she was in black leotards with a short white skirt over top, the shaping of her big breasts was obvious. She looked like an incongruously busty dancer, fresh from rehearsal. She also looked like the world’s most potent cock-tease, wanting to visually assault me with the splendor of her body.

I looked, and swallowed, and said what she obviously wanted me to say. “It’s more, Mira. You know that.”

“But you love how I look and you want to… to…”

She couldn’t say it, but she sure was thinking it. “How could I not?”

She reached down, picking up the handbag that she’d dropped upon entering my office. This brought her head closer to the bulge in my pants and she paused when returning to straight, gaze briefly latching on.

“Oh God, you… No, I can’t do this. I’m so sorry.”

I kept silent, allowing this part of her to say its piece. She had also convinced herself that she couldn’t drop in unexpectedly at my office, and she’d known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she could never kiss me.

“I’m just not strong enough,” she went on.

Not strong enough to go further, and not strong enough to stop. “I understand, Mira.”

“It’s cheating! I can’t… I’m not like that. I don’t think I could live with myself!”

“You don’t need to say another word. We’ll just go on with our lives. This never happened.”

Her eyes flashed, her expression simultaneously fearful and defiant. She slung her bag over her left shoulder, the tan strap cutting a diagonal line between her breasts, accentuating their fullness. Her right hand sought out the doorknob behind her, grasping at air a good foot from where it actually was. She didn’t break eye and I smiled inside; she was afraid to look away or turn her body because a fantasy had formed, probably something where she lost sight of me for a moment and I pounced, kissing her fiercely with my erection pushing against her, forcing her to choose.

Was it intentional, the tightening of my cock just then, making it move in my pants? She noticed. Her eyes stayed locked on the distorted fabric and her throat moved before she let out a soft groan.

“Oh Michael, you’re so…”

So big and so ready? So wanting to thrust this thing between the shapeliest legs I’d ever seen?

The hand that had been seeking the doorknob changed direction, reaching forward and staying low. Fingertips met my belt buckle and slid down, Mira’s lips parting like she couldn’t find enough air.

She gasped as all of her fingers pressed, gathering an initial impression. Her eyes went wide, almost panic-filled as she said, “You’re… Oh God, what am I doing?”

Her movements were lightning quick as she turned her head to locate the doorknob. With one swift and fluid motion she pivoted and opened the door, her skirt fanning up and out, briefly exposing her legs all the way to the tops of her thighs. There was theatre in her departure, her steps long and graceful, somewhere between outright flight and a performance to make me long for her even more. I never took my eyes off her dancer’s legs as she fled through the reception space and out into the sunlight.

Gone, but not for good; I could count on that even when my level of influence was so fragile, no nearly miraculous hypnotic abilities to rely upon. The tricks I had up my sleeve seem so paltry now, but they were all I had to work with then and I used them to the very best of my abilities.

I came to think of those tools as “following”, and I actually believed I was clever enough that they could get me what I wanted. The funny thing is that I never would have thought of that language if not for Mira. On one level, the method was nothing more than tuning in and staying tuned in, following the signals being given off by the person I wanted to manipulate. Behavioral scientists like to talk about so-called mirror cells, and their ability to pick up “invisible” clues from others, especially those close to us. We’re all built to be intuitive to some degree, and I was well-equipped, perhaps innately but also through my professional training.

Working with clients often felt like a game of following breadcrumbs into the deep dark woods of the psyche, and I had every reason to believe I possessed a higher degree of sensitivity than most. As a psychologist I’m paid to bring my attention into a heightened state of observation, searching for unconscious clues, telling tendencies. It’s even difficult to switch off at times—friends have told me, and they weren’t joking, that having me at a dinner party can be like inviting a hawk or an osprey to sit at the table. I often see soft spots in the psyches of those I meet, in the same way that dentists must see all kinds of issues with their friends’ teeth.

The fault-lines in Mira’s psyche became obvious to me the very first time we had a lengthy one-on-one conversation. I could discern that she was in a very difficult place, with mental and emotional fingernails tearing at the fabric of the picture-perfect life she had built for herself.

It’s in my nature to be in the corner of those who wish to escape entrapment, helping them to emerge as changed creatures. I’d like to say that I was on her side right there at the beginning, that I had no personal agenda or galloping urges to manipulate her psychological fault-lines. It wasn’t like that, though, because I wanted Mira from moment one, and she revealed to me that a wealth of sexual fantasies lived inside of her, some of them about having an affair.

Part of her wanted me to keep chasing; it was a game she had played with others. I willingly accepted the challenge, believing that if I employed my following techniques to their fullest, they might be sufficient for scoring the hottest piece of ass I had ever met. We became two players in a lust-oriented board game, like chess but with literal mating as the goal.

Neither of us could have foreseen how she would inspire a sequence of decisions that would take us down into a very deep rabbit hole, where I sought and found infinitely more effective ways to exploit her weaknesses, greatly intensifying her drives. She was the one who ended up cheating on her husband, but I’m the one who became the moral monster. In a way I ended up cheating fate, by changing the way I could move through life, capturing shapely women without them even knowing it.

Checkmate—in the actual game of chess, the king is trapped, not dead. The game is over when there is no possibility of escape, no freedom of movement, no chance of being saved.

I learned how to do that to multiple human beings, to Mira and others. I learned how to checkmate a beautiful woman’s psyche and tie it to the amplified needs of her body, with all of that being tied, firmly, to me.

Mira and I had met quite innocently three weeks before that first kiss, at a series of ballroom dancing workshops. I’m not a dancer, believe me, and I only attended the classes as a favor to an actress friend, Grace, who needed to brush up on her fleet-footed skills for a role in a play. And it’s not quite right to say that I met Mira at that class, as I never spoke to her that first night, only saw her. It was one of those moments where you catch a glimpse of someone in your peripheral vision, and have to bring all the senses to bear to check whether what you thought you saw could be real.

I turned and stared for as long as I thought I could get away with. The woman was flat-out gorgeous, with exuberant chestnut-colored hair and a full-breasted athlete’s torso, and what Grace calls whiplash legs. The dance hall was big and crowded, and although I never got close enough to Mira that night to take a good long look, I could feel her, and feel that others were also aware of her in a special way. I wasn’t the only one to notice the presence of a world-class beauty in the room.

And then, at the very next class, I was introduced to Mira and her husband, Taylor, by Grace. We all chitchatted during a break, and I learned what had been obvious to the eyes from moment one, that Mira was a professional dancer. She was only coming to the classes to help her “double left-footed” husband learn a few steps for some sort of fundraising event in their near future.

I was cool and pleasant on the surface. I even had a little conversation with Taylor about his work as a heart surgeon. Underneath, however, I was rattled, because I had the sense, completely illogical, that Mira Cassidy and I were destined to become lovers.

I’m not in the habit of lusting after other men’s wives, so I took in the details in small sips, absorbing her fiery green eyes and the alluring smile with small even teeth, the strong neck and the breasts that looked way too generous for a dancer to possess. And especially her legs, that looked like they’d been designed to make the entire world get horny.

Beauty can be a capricious potion; why, for example, does one age in a piece of music bring tears that are salted with the sublime, while the equally excellent notes from a few measures before do not? And is that difference in the music, or the ear that hears it, or in some connection made between them? Some higher degrees of appreciation just are, and it does little good to wonder why the particulars of Mira’s beauty made me ache in a way that almost felt alchemical, taking the desires in me and fusing them into something new, something I really didn’t understand.

We might have gotten no closer if Mira hadn’t come to a special swing dance class the next week, wearing a sleeveless black dress that highlighted every curve. She was absolutely breathtaking, but even more importantly she had no husband at her side.

As the band was setting up on the stage, Mira came right up to me, her eyes bright and active, every inch of her sending out sexy flirty energy.

“Where is Taylor?” I asked.

“At home with the flu.”

“Doctors get sick?”

“Don’t tell anyone! I should probably be at home keeping him company, but I had too much fun last week. By the way, where is Grace?”

“Out in the hall, with a potential suitor.”

“Oh you poor man! You’ve been ditched?”

“Apparently.”

“Why aren’t you doing something about it? Grace is lovely, and you two go so well together.”

It was one of those times when you don’t know whether to speak the truth or not. “We’re just close friends,” I said, revealing only a little. If Mira didn’t know that Grace was gay, maybe somebody wanted things that way.

“How do you two know each other?”

“Grace used to be one of my clients.”

“Clients?”

“I’m a therapist. It’s actually how Grace and I met.”

“Oh. And a therapist and a patient can’t…”

“Former patient.”

“Even so, I can see how there could be power issues in something like that.”

“Exactly.”

“So, good! Since you’re unattached, may I have the first dance?”

“I’d be delighted. Only, ah…”

She tilted her head a touch sideways, then glanced down at my feet. “You don’t know how to swing-dance.”

“Precisely.”

“There was a workshop earlier. You could have—”

“Grace told me to skip it. She said it’s an easy dance to learn.”

I was certain that Mira didn’t have any children, yet, but she sure did know how to give me a you’ve-been-a-naughty-boy stare. The band was ready to go and people were out on the floor, and then it was music and movement all around, with me and this ultra-gorgeous woman standing still and looking on.

After thirty seconds or so, she shouted over the music, “You have the rhythm, right? Start to find it in your hips.”

I felt one of her hands touch my right hip, and what I found was that my heart raced, and that I longed for more touching.

“Like this,” she said, and I looked down at her hips, and of course those sensational legs. I was certain that Mira could pair up with any of the most knowledgeable men in the room and dance golden rings around the floor, but instead she repositioned herself to face me, took my hands in hers and encouraged me with my first faltering steps.

“That’s good; you understand rhythm. But you have to lead me.”

I felt like I was beginning to get it, although we weren’t moving forward very much, unlike most of the others. It was like they were jet airplanes, and I could only muster a sputtering propellor.

“How much we move and how we turn is all up to you,” she directed into my ear. “I just follow.”

“But you’re the one who knows what to do,” I objected.

“Don’t be afraid. I’m a great follower. Now move!”

It was electrifying, moving together with my hands on her body, our eyes locked. I had the rhythm down and more or less knew where my feet should go, and we were moving, covering some real ground.

Not bad, an observer might think, but it was only possible because of the strange dynamic that became evident. Mira was following, just as she had said, only she was following so perfectly that she was, in truth, leading. Perhaps others could believe in the mirage and complement me on my rapid success, but I wasn’t fooled. I recognized the dynamic, because it’s at the very heart of my practice as a therapist.

And this is where I first came to think of the subtle deceptions to come as “following”. Clients can be fearful of unlocking certain closed doors within themselves, often with good reason. With many, you can lead them right to these doors, and slowly, carefully, help them to open them, freeing the psychic energy trapped inside. Not every client is strong or stable enough to go through this, however, and enough fears gather together to create an almost unbreakable resistance. When little or no progress can be made without confronting this difficult material, yet the client is helpless to open the doors, it becomes my responsibility to create an illusion, a calming sense that it is the client choosing to instigate the direction. It’s all about mitigating fear with the perception of control, or being in control. When the client believes they are in control, they accept my probing, and even the resulting psychological pain, because they begin to believe they are craving it, rather than resisting it.

It’s all very underhanded; call it a benign manipulation, with the benefit of the client in mind. When applied appropriately, even deviousness can land soft and bright like newly fallen snow. But that night on the dance floor, I suddenly understood how there might be new ways to exploit this illusion of being in control. Mira was ceding control to me as we danced, but only in an illusory sense. I really could begin to believe that I was choosing our direction, and directing our tempo.

Curious, I made an attempt at actually leading her, dictating rather than responding. She felt the change, and made a funny face as the flow of our steps became more labored, our bodies no longer moving as one.

“Leading doesn’t mean refusing to cooperate,” she leaned in, her lips momentarily touching my ear.

A jolt of electricity, then I nodded and stopped pretending I could direct our rhythm together. “I can feel how much you’re helping me,” I said under my breath.

Her eyes smiled. “I’m accumulating good karma by saving other people’s feet. No offense, but you’d be a disaster without me.”

That was how the night went, all very innocent and light on the surface, yet she felt different in my arms from then on, like we had both recognized the possibilities. I danced with other women most of the night, only reuniting with Mira once more towards the end. I always knew where she was, though, even when the flow of moving bodies hid her from my sight. I sometimes caught glimpses of her across the room, and when partnered with a more experienced dancer she could twirl energetically, the bottom of her dress flying out to reveal the splendor of her legs all the way to her black panties. She was showing off rather shamelessly, and I couldn’t help feeling that the leg show was at least partly, or perhaps especially, for me.

During our last dance together that night, an up-tempo waltz that I would have tanked on with any other partner, our hips ended up pressed together, just to that degree of wondering whether either of us, or even both of us, were doing it deliberately. The made me feel like I had a lion ready to tear its way out from inside my pants, to the point that it frightened me a little. Thankfully the dance ended before I had an outright boner to contend with.

I knew I couldn’t dance with her again. Touching Mira’s hands and being so close that I could smell her shampoo and body wash was having an effect on me, and I didn’t want to have to conceal the tenting of my pants, like an episode right out of middle school. More importantly, the woman was married and I didn’t pursue married women, so feeling what I felt could only bring frustration and pain.

Getting a grip and choosing my path, I slipped out the door when Mira wasn’t looking, deliberately not saying good-bye. Willing my erection to subside was like working to put a tourniquet on my desire, and it didn’t really work. There was a flight of stairs to go down, and I felt embarrassed even with no one around to see my awkward escape.

On the drive home I promised myself that I would stay away from Mira Cassidy for a good long while, allowing the fever to . I wasn’t sure whether she’d been flirting with me when our hips had ground together for those couple of seconds; what mattered was that my cock believed.

I would use my head-brain and stay the hell away from her. I took a few seconds to make myself promise that, going so far as to make the promise out loud. The interior of my Audi heard those words, and so did my hands on the wheel, and my foot on the gas. My cock heard the promise, too, for all the good that did me.

Because, as they say, some promises are meant to be broken.

“You made headway with that cute redhead?” I asked Grace over lunch a few days later.

“Headways, tailways, sideways… Of course I did. Her name is Tina. ‘Tina the Screama’, I’ve dubbed her. Exceptionally creamy thighs and very strong lungs, what more could a girl ask for?”

“Congratulations.”

“Speaking of exceptional thighs, Mira Cassidy was asking all kinds of questions about you after Saturday’s dance.”

“I told her that I used to be your shrink. I hope that was okay.”

“I’ll forgive you if you get her on your couch and convince her she needs to go bi.”

A flash of Mira on my office couch, arranged in a seductive pose, flashed in my brain. I banished the image as best I could and said, “No offense to your considerable charms, Grace, but I’m not that persuasive.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. Six months of working with you made me perfect, didn’t it? Plus you have a quiet intensity that’s almost scary. Sometimes I think you could hard-boil an egg if you stared at it and concentrated hard enough.”

“I’ll that one at my nephew’s next birthday party.”

“And BDE. You’ve got that, too.”

“Benevolent dharma… What?”

“Oh come on. Big dick energy.”

“Oh. Right.”

She grinned. “Even for someone like me who couldn’t care less…”

I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it. It wouldn’t surprise me if Grace turned out to be the one person at that dance who’d noticed me getting excited by Mira; then again, she could just be fucking with me.

“God, that woman has thighs and calves of steel!” she suddenly exploded. “Did you see when she spun the bottom of her dress all the way up to her tits?”

Happy for the change of subject I egged her on. “I saw. The panties were black, right?”

“Half the dance hall had a hard-on. Hell, I had a hard-on. Her panties looked more navy blue to me, and I thought they were slightly crooked, like she could use my assistance in keeping them straight. And, you know, getting her unstraight along the way.”

“Now, now…”

“I can’t help it. I sense a woman aching with unmet needs, and I’m such a humanitarian.”

“She’s also a married woman, Grace.”

“Not a happily married one.”

“You know this?”

“I feel it. She and Taylor look like the perfect little figurines on a wedding cake… Although bad metaphor, because she’s so hot the icing would melt. Anyway, I sense trouble.”

“That’s not our concern. Or it isn’t unless she really did end up on my couch.”

Grace shot a wicked smile at that one. “I’ll bet you’d like that just as much as I would. I always thought your office couch was unnecessarily plush.”

“You have a dirty mind.”

“Come on, Michael. The woman’s a perfect ten overall, with legs that completely obliterate any numeric scale. And the boobs—they might be as big a mine and I’ve got enough for five dancers, am I right?”

At some point in our relationship, I made it one of my missions in life to never fixate on Grace’s chest, which had to be her sexiest feature.

She grinned, knowing exactly how much discipline I was exerting over my eyeballs. “Easy to control yourself around your gay friend, I see. But Mira Cassidy would be another story.”

“I could—”

“No you couldn’t. You were a complete sucker for Joyce’s workout body and great big tits, so you want to try to convince me that you wouldn’t fuck a miracle like Mira Cassidy if she came on to you?”

“Tone it down a bit, please? Of course Mira is my type; with her looks she’s everybody’s type. But the woman is married, for chrissakes. That’s a firm strike against anything ever happening.”

“I’ll just bet she’s firm, but I don’t believe you. You pretend otherwise, but deep down you’re a rule-breaker like I am, and just as sex-obsessed. It’s one of the reasons we’re friends; we understand each other that way.”

“Now you’re my therapist?”

“Don’t change the subject. Mira may be married, but you aren’t. You don’t even have a serious relationship going, and for someone like you…”

I stared at her, genuinely curious. “What does that mean, ‘someone like me’?”

“How long has it been since you and Joyce broke up?”

She was deflecting my question but I played along. “Four months.”

“Four months without some good honest boning, you poor man. Or your poor right hand.”

I furtively surveyed our surroundings. Other patrons were absorbed in their own conversations or glued to their phones, no furrowed brows about the woman at the corner table who couldn’t stop talking dirty. This was quintessential Grace, where we might begin by talking about existentialism in classic French films, and end up needing to wash our mouths with soap.

Grace let out a breath and leaned back, hands in her lap. “The other night… Why did you sneak out of the dance hall at the end?”

“I didn’t sneak out.”

“Mira was looking for you, you know. She said she never got to thank you for a magical evening. You ask me, I think she was in the mood to consider a good-night blow-job in your car.”

I couldn’t hold in a laugh at that one. “Seriously, your imagination is going to the wild side!”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“I can’t deny that she’s a flirt; it’s like she has a master’s degree in looking and acting like purified sex come to life. But again, she’s married and I would not get involved with a married woman, end of story. Why are we talking about things that are never going to happen?”

Grace gave me an odd smile. “I honestly don’t know. It’s just… Watch out, okay? I’m serious.”

I didn’t go to the next dance, because I was in New York for a conference. One of the invited speakers, Sam Farnsworth, was a friend from my school years. He’d moved to New Zealand and had a practice there, and we had stayed in touch through email for a time, the months and distance eventually withering that thread of communication to zero. I was shocked to learn through his presentation that he had closed up shop on his traditional practice, after studying “dream-time” techniques with an Aboriginal teacher. He was a “spirit/body healer” now, using hypnosis for “soul awakenings” and past-life regressions.

His talk was short on specifics, and long on what sounded to me like pure magical thinking. He mentioned a technique called “immersion hypnosis”, and it was never clear to me how he was merging the hypnosis—which was Western—with whatever methods comprised the more ancient and even more vague practices of dream-time work.

I had a leisurely coffee with him the second morning, and there was something about his overly cheery disposition—plus the rather frequent references to all the money he was making—that didn’t sit well with me. I managed to feign more interest in his healing work than I actually felt, and you didn’t need to be a therapist to witness his ego puffing up in real time. When he mentioned for the third or fourth time that he had just recently become a millionaire, I privately found myself thinking of him as “Sell-out Sam”.

At one point in our chat, he asked me if I ever heard from Isabella Cavazos, a three-month relationship I’d had back in our school days. I told him I hadn’t heard from her in years, and he proceeded to tell me about more of his love life than I really wanted to know.

“I went out with Isabella a few times—did you know that? It was probably a year or so after the two of you broke up. I think she had a real thing for you, you know. Anyway, I got married about a year later, to a lovely architect. Her name is Margot Kiddy—she’s done some fabulous projects in Aukland, you could look her up online. We split after just two years. No kids, thank God.”

I was half-listening. A different waitress refilled our coffee mugs and she had a lovely figure, and Sam laughed at the way my eyes tracked her.

“You and me both,” he said, grinning. “And the funny thing? I have a much better chance of landing her than you do, even though you’re obviously the better-looking of the two of us.”

He proceeded to tell me about the total babe he was boning, and I mostly tuned him out—more puffed-up ego bullshit. That changed, though, when he made a cryptic comment about how past-life regressions were paying extra dividends when it came to his love life.

I’m sure I frowned—he wasn’t hinting that he crossed boundaries that must never be crossed with his clients, was he?

My expression must have given me away, because he met my underlying reaction head-on. “Don’t judge what you’ve never experienced, Michael. True hypnotism is so intimate that it is inherently erotic. The supine subject completely open to you, anticipating what you alone can give to them and call from them…”

“But…” I started to say, pausing as he slowly shook his head.

“As you heard last night, I’m no longer licensed. I dissolved my old practice; it was incompatible with the past-life work. I’m a spiritual healer now, and that’s an entirely different kind of engagement with people. And yes, that means with women. What I do is very intuitive now, very pull-these-threads, then follow them. Best of all, it’s blissfully unregulated.”

What, exactly, did that imply? I tip-toed forward with a softly spoken, “And blissfully unregulated means…”

“It means creativity in the moment, and nearly limitless freedom.” His eyebrows scrunched and he went on: “There’s always that removal from the client under the old rules, you know? You are the therapist and they are the client, and never shall that enormous barrier narrow. But what about the five-percent of the time when what they truly want, or believe they want, means the barrier has to vanish? Healing takes all kinds of forms; everybody knows that. I’m free to move in every direction, see? And the freedom is for everybody. We all benefit, in ways that some people might see as approaching the miraculous.”

I didn’t say anything in response, because I didn’t know what to say. We only had a few minutes before we’d need to pay up and hurry to our first lectures of the day, and I thought the conversation was essentially over.

I was wrong.

“Can I tell an old friend a very important secret?” Sam whispered, leaning towards me conspiratorially.

“Sure,” I replied, expecting some salacious story about a dalliance with a particularly hot client.

“There is no dream-time technique; that’s all a smokescreen.”

In a way I wasn’t surprised. But then, what was the basis for his new practice? Complete charlatanism?

“A smokescreen for…” I whispered back.

“The incredible power of immersion hypnotism. You can’t even imagine it, Michael. No one can, which makes it even more powerful. And you… Michael, you saw your results from yesterday, right?”

I knew what he was referring to. We, meaning all in attendance during Sam’s lecture the previous afternoon, had participated in a short “aptitude test”, where we were recorded when reading from a five-line script in what was meant to be “our most persuasive voice”. I had received an email first thing in the morning, informing me that I had tested exceptionally well, apparently in the 99th percentile.

“You should learn the technique,” Sam said emphatically. “I almost insist that you must.”

Maybe I had dozens of questions at that moment, or only a couple. We were out of time, though, with Sam rising to put his breakfast trash away. I did the same and before we parted, Sam promised to seek me out during our afternoon break. I never ran into him again, though, and learned that he’d left the conference early for some reason.

On the train ride back home I thought about that conversation, flipping back and forth between intrigue and something very close to condemnation. My old friend was rich and apparently quite happy, but at the cost of ditching professional psychotherapy for what sounded like the mirage-filled sands of New Age whateverism. And lecturing to a gathering of colleagues under false pretenses, no less.

Thinking about my own situation, I assessed that I was generally happy with where I was, as long as I could be patient with resurrecting something resembling a love life. And, more pointedly, not obsessing over Mira Cassidy’s body.

I’d switched my phone off for the duration of the conference, and when I checked messages on that ride back south, there were several, and one was from Mira.

That was totally unexpected. I’d never given Mira my cell number. Did she get it from Grace, or had she sleuthed it out all by herself?

I played it, phone pressed tight to my ear. “We missed you at the dance last night,” she spoke softly, adding that she hoped I’d be at the next one. “It’s just not the same without you.”

She had a light voice, delicate and smooth as whipped cream. I put the phone right to my ear, and above the click-clack of the train’s age I replayed Mira’s message three times. It began as “we”, as in we missed you. But then, I noticed, the “we” slipped into an “I”. I really hope you’ll be at the next one. And it just wasn’t the same without me—no one there to inappropriately press her hip into? No one else who felt like he had to run away before his balls boiled over and got him saying or doing stupid things?

I closed my eyes, intending to nap in my seat, but my imagination kept me awake. Without half trying I could hear so many desirable sentences spoken in that same tone of voice: I really missed you. The way you felt against me when we danced—I need to make love to you. Please, please make love to me.

I knew I was in the silly zone, imagining things that wouldn’t, couldn’t, come true. I listened to the message one last time, as if to torture myself with it, and knew that Grace was right. If Mira ever poured it on, I wouldn’t be able to resist a woman like that if my life depended on it.