The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I wasn’t going to go to the next dance class, but Grace did some effective arm-twisting and I gave in. Two minutes after arriving together, she and the redheaded screamer hooked up and promptly disappeared, leaving me to stand by the dance hall doorway alone. Scanning the large space, I didn’t see Mira or Taylor, and breathing came a little easier.

Until I felt a light tapping on my shoulder. When I turned, Mira and her husband were standing right behind, and Mira was too happy to see me in a way that Taylor couldn’t miss. We exchanged pleasantries and I didn’t like the way Taylor looked at me after that. Yes, I’d had vague fantasies about doing it with his sex-bomb wife, but no, I was still as innocent as a six week-old kitten.

I shrugged it all off, because the last I checked the living aren’t damned for having vivid imaginations. Also, I could hardly be accused of being the only man in attendance to think wicked thoughts about Mira. The length her skirt tonight meant she didn’t even need to twirl to put on a lust-inducing upper-thigh show.

I made a point of keeping my distance, wondering whether I was in danger of becoming some sort of tool. Was Mira dressed to kill and feigning an attraction towards me, as a way to slap Taylor’s ego around? If not, and she did feel attraction and had some wicked little thoughts of her own, she’d need to take some acting lessons from Grace to learn how to conceal them.

I danced with Mira only once, and felt a disquieting rightness in the way our bodies fit together. I kept having the thought that her tits were even larger than I’d first believed they were, and that had me struggling to keep my gaze away from them. The solution was to lock my eyes with hers as we were supposed to, and I watched as her expression began to alternate subtly, between fear and fire.

“I want to talk to you sometime,” she whispered, her mouth suddenly very close to my ear.

“During the break tonight?”

“No, not here. Alone. It’s… I’m not asking you to be my therapist, but I think I could use some perspective from someone like you.”

“This is about…”

“I’ll tell you later. Should I come to your office? Do you have openings?”

I didn’t know what she was angling for, and the conspiratorial tone was eliciting a hopefulness that was far too centered in my pants. “I keep Wednesdays free, to write reports and that kind of thing. But maybe my office would be too official; we wouldn’t want any therapist/client overtones.”

“Friends.”

“Right.”

“Coffee, then. Wednesday morning at ten, at Jungle Cup? That’s close to where you work, right? I have your number if something comes up, and you have mine. But I intend to be there. I… Please come, okay?”

I agreed, and made a point of steering clear of Mira the rest of the night. I got way too excited when I danced with her, and I could feel a disapproving vibe emanating from hubby all the way across the room.

“I think you have a new frenemy,” Grace smirked when we finally danced.

“I think you need to wash your hands,” I answered.

“They smell like pussy, don’t they?”

“Yep.”

“And now yours do, too.”

“Great.”

“Maybe I should dance with Mira next, and wave my fingers under her nose. I could see if any lights flicker on in those green eyes.”

“You’re a troublemaker, you know that?”

“Not half the troublemaker you are.”

“Me? I haven’t done a thing.”

“She’s locked onto you, Michael. And that dress she’s barely wearing? There are women here who are furious with their boyfriends and husbands, because they can’t unglue their eyes from Mira’s legs and tits.”

“So she’s the troublemaker, not me. I’m harmless.”

Before I knew what was happening, Grace took my cheeks in her hands, and slid her fingers around.

“Hey!” I protested, knowing that my cheeks and hair now smelled like a certain redhead’s excitable loins.

“Consider that a reminder, dummy, that sex can get into places where it doesn’t belong.”

Wednesday morning came, and Mira and I sat at a window table for two at the small coffee shop near my office. Sunlight raked across her left shoulder and chest, her bare arms looking elegant and extremely athletic, her breasts simply not what you’d expect to be confronted with when in the company of a professional dancer.

We got through the laundry lists of our pasts before finishing our first cappuccinos. She was from upper-class Chicago roots, had moved to our fair city when she was sixteen, and was now twenty-six. Ballet training from the age of five, followed by four years of modern dance study while attending college in New York. She’d gone professional right out of college, and was one of The Movement Machine’s top performers. No children, but Taylor wanted them. She was inclined to wait into her mid or late thirties before even thinking about children, and she and Taylor sometimes argued about that.

That led to a brief and deliberately abstract exchange about how shifting life goals could introduce tensions into long-term relationships, and that became a segue for her to ask how I’d chosen psychology as my vocation. I gave her the Cliff Notes version of my life—I would turn thirty this year, born in Seattle, teen years in Boston and then back to the West Coast for schooling at Stanford. Two years of private practice at my current location, single, yada yada.

Eventually, during a very pregnant pause, Mira itted that she was afraid to begin talking about the things that were on her mind.

“Just dive straight in,” I suggested. “They’re only words.”

“Okay, here goes. I think my marriage is in trouble.”

Those particular words were like tasting liquor in my coffee, unexpected but undeniably pleasing. I took a deep breath, working to keep my expression calm while drawing out a neutral-sounding, “Okayyy…”

“I want to make things work,” she continued, “but it just doesn’t. Work, that is.”

She was staring into her coffee cup and I let my eyes roam all over the volumetric shapes of her tits. Whatever the problems were, her husband being able to get it up would not be among them.

I managed to find her eyes as I said, “Are you sure we should be talking about this? You barely know me.”

“You’re exactly the one I want perspective from. You’re used to listening to these kinds of things, right? You probably know the exact questions to ask and I… I trust you.”

I laughed a little nervously, but then slipped into the role she wanted me to play. “Do you love him?”

Her eyes darted, and she didn’t answer.

“Wow. You know how much you just said, right?”

“I know,” she replied, and her lips tightened strangely, perhaps to keep them from trembling.

Some women, though lovely, temporarily lose their sex-appeal when they’re in emotional pain. That’s a good thing, probably, and it troubled me how in Mira’s case, vulnerability looked fucking great on her.

I gathered myself like I had a conceptual fire-extinguisher at the ready, alert for the wrong kinds of words or thoughts. “It’s hard to make things work if the feeling isn’t there, Mira. It’s almost impossible.”

“It isn’t like Taylor is a bad man in any way. He’s sweet most of the time. It’s just… He’s so stuffy and ordered. I kind of hate that about him.”

“You knew he was this way when you married?”

“Yes. I don’t know what I must have been thinking.”

“Were your parents ordered like that? Stuffy, as you put it?”

“You really are a therapist, aren’t you? Straight to my parents.”

“Well?”

“Yes, they were horribly ordered, especially my father. I must have thought that Taylor was safe somehow, because he was sort of familiar. I didn’t know… I got caught up in the romance of it at the beginning, and I ired him… I still do, when it comes to his skills as a surgeon. He literally saves lives every day, but that doesn’t excite me when it comes to… He tries to excite me, and there’s no question he finds me exciting as hell. We keep trying, I guess.”

“He’s a nice-looking man. Tall, successful, respected in the community. Those qualities—”

“Are great on paper but they end up doing nothing for me somehow. I can see how I should be happy, but in practice, in private…”

“Are we talking sex?”

“Yes.”

“I shouldn’t probe, then. Just tell me what you want to tell me.”

“I don’t mind if you probe,” she said, looking at her hands on the table.

It was probably right at that moment that I recognized where we were, and what the rules might be. I stared at her hands just as she did, and moved my gaze up her arms. The woman had dynamic arms, elegant but with a lot more muscle than any ballerina I’d ever seen. It hit me that I’d never in my life felt stirrings from the shaping of a woman’s arms before, but in their way they were indicators of just how incredible her legs were, like you could study her biceps and forearms and wrists and know that her lower body couldn’t be any other way. My gaze moved on, taking in the natural girlish curls in her chestnut hair, the glimmering eyes and the striking planes of her face. My conclusion was that she was too beautiful, in a way where it wasn’t even fair. I could see that she understood that, too; a woman this great-looking could not be unaware of how her physical splendor could do things to a man, including me.

“Mira, does Taylor know we’re having coffee?”

“No. I don’t have male friends. He would never allow me to have a male friend.”

“Because he doesn’t trust you?”

“Because of my looks.”

“Ah.”

“I excite men.”

“Intentionally?”

“No, it’s just… Wait, that isn’t true. Yes. It isn’t like I have to try all that hard… I guess I flirt, sometimes rather shamelessly.”

“Just for the fun of it, or...”

“I’m not sure I know the difference half the time. It’s not like I plan it out. Men get silly over me; that comes with the territory. And sometimes I let it get a little serious.”

“How so?”

She sat straighter, and I had the thought that this might be like confession time in church. “There are several friends or associates of Taylor’s who’ve propositioned me at Christmas parties or other hospital functions, that kind of thing. I was flirting a little… Or maybe I drank too much Champagne and flirted a lot, and they… Pretty treacherous of them, isn’t it? Taylor would die if he knew some of the things his colleagues and supposed friends have said to me. I get… I guess you’d call them propositions.”

“So this isn’t just happening out of nowhere, these times when that happens. When you say you flirt a lot… Perhaps you led these men to believe—”

“I think there’s something about a certain kind of male who finds himself at the top of a respectable profession. They see someone like me and come to believe they have every right to have a go at the prettiest girl in the room, no matter what the extenuating circumstances are.”

“And you’re almost always the prettiest girl in the room.”

“More like always always. That must sound so conceited but—“

“But the truth is the truth.”

She nodded, rather than saying it. “And sometimes I… There are times…”

“Yes?”

“I might have given these colleagues of Taylor’s, and other men, good reasons to think I could be had. A look, or maybe a moment’s touch. A squeeze of the hand, or… I don’t know. There was one time, just recently, where Taylor became furious with me when we came home from a party. We’d been sitting together with some others, and Taylor said I was practically dry-humping this one guy, with the way I was showing off my legs to him.”

“Were you?”

She indicated a yes with a shrug of the shoulders. “He was a brain surgeon and I could see how smitten he was, like he needed blood pressure medication anytime I found a way to arch my feet or make my calves bulge. Just sitting there on the couch became a kind of game, like he might know all about the cerebrum and cerebellum and all that, but I could so thoroughly fuck with his brains, the one in his head and especially the one in his pants, any way I wanted.”

“Your sexual appeal as a kind of power.”

“That I must have enjoyed holding over him, yes. This same man wanted us to see his wine cellar and I went with the others, and when going back up the stairs I made a point of being right in front of him. My dress was really short and I knew the view he’d have. The look on his face when we were back in the kitchen, the longing there, like a kind of pain…”

Her head was lowered like she might be feeling shame for that behavior, but when her chin lifted there was a hint of fire in the green of her eyes, and barely contained energy at the corners of her mouth.

I was fascinated. What had I just witnessed? For only an instant, she had just thought of something or had felt something that had turned a candle flame inside her into a blowtorch.

With an almost imperceptible shake of her head, like ing to tell herself no, she said, “I think I do that sometimes, the showing off, without quite knowing how much I’m doing it. I feel men desiring me and sometimes… It’s like a switch flips, quietly enough that I might not notice the change, and I find myself misbehaving.”

“That was the whole of it, some merciless teasing with your legs?”

“No, not all. Later, with the two of us alone in a hallway, I took his hand for a couple of seconds and squeezed a finger into his palm, and wiggled it. He groaned, like if I only did that for a few more seconds he might… You know. Right there, uncontrollably.”

I noted how she’d avoided any graphic wording of this man’s potential ejaculation.

“He was never the same around me after that. Like he was afraid of me or… No, it was like he was afraid of himself around me. And with good reason, I guess. I think I could have asked him to do almost anything—end his marriage, move to Tahiti with me… He would have, and damn the consequences. I could have demanded any kind of insane shit as the price, and he would have done it.”

A wrecking ball; she was gorgeous enough to be that if she wanted. I was about to ask if she’d felt any consideration for this brain surgeon’s wife, or if he had kids. Instead: “You like that feeling of power over others?”

“Sometimes. But it’s more that I like being beautiful. I like the idea that I could actually give all of this…” And here she glanced down, indicating that fabulous body. “…to someone, if I chose to. Like I could be the perfect gift if things went exactly right.”

She had me wondering if desirable women in my past had harbored similar feelings, but with a few seconds of scanning back through the years… I had simply never known anyone this insanely desirable, even going back to high school.

“How long would you say you’ve experienced this?” I asked. “Is it just recently, or—“

“I had something of a sheltered upbringing. I was always in all-girls Catholic schools, so for the longest I didn’t even… I knew I was lovely; people told me that every day. But then suddenly, long after it should have been obvious to me, I saw how I just got to men, and boys. They’d go half-crazy around me, like I was…”

I didn’t know how to interpret the look that had come over her, but my cock was applauding it under the table, almost making me wince. “Like you were what, Mira?”

Her mouth moved around before the words came out. “Sexual nitroglycerin.”

I must have made a quizzical face.

“I heard that from a friend in my freshman year in college, that some guys on campus were calling me that. Apparently it got shortened to Nitro, although no one ever called me that to my face. It felt unfair at first, you know? I’d walk into a classroom, minding my own business, and it was other people who’d become unstable, at risk of exploding. Not literally exploding, but… You know.”

Again, the avoidance of spelling it out, that she meant students coming in their pants right then and there, or going somewhere private to jerk-off . And though my undergrad years were deep into the rear-view mirror, I could empathize with these poor college kids from Mira’s past, having had her hip pressing into mine when dancing.

She breathed out before continuing. “So I know. I know the effect I can have, and it makes me… I know how this all must sound, but… Like it would be terrible to let having so much go to waste, right? It’s like there are people hoping I’ll dress really sexy, or flaunt what I have. I don’t exactly think these things out, but sometimes the feelings just rise up, and all of a sudden I can’t help it. I do things I shouldn’t do.”

“Like twirling your skirt up so high when you dance.”

“You noticed. Professionally I’m rock solid and I do what the choreographer tells me to do, pretty much perfectly. But at those dance workshops where we met… I’m a horrible show-off, aren’t I?”

“I wouldn’t call it horrible.” I’d call it the most sensual elixir I’d ever been exposed to, that had made me so horny I’d run from it.

“Maybe this is wrong, but I get kind of turned-on when I do that. I don’t know why, and sometimes Taylor lets me have it when we get home.”

“Let’s you have it? What—”

“He starts yelling. I think he gets conflicted because his ego likes that he’s married to someone so desirable, but then he hates that I enjoy when I tease. Like it makes him feel small or something.”

“I might get that. It could be a feeling of being cuckolded.”

“I’ve never strayed. Not all the way.”

I nodded, accepting that as truth. “My specialty is psychology, and not everything needs to become concrete for emotions to rise. People can feel betrayed from a mere look, or a gesture, or a few words phrased in a way they don’t like.”

I could see that Mira understood. “There’s our problem in a nutshell, because Taylor wouldn’t be upset at all if we came home after I’d misbehaved and I did all sorts of sexy things to him. If my showing off were just some kinky way that I got all heated up, he’d be overjoyed. I fulfill my duties with him… God, just listen to me. Sex feels like a duty, and I want… You know, squealing tires and a throaty engine, and tire streaks left on the pavement.”

Language this time that was both evasive and vivid, and it was amazing that she was telling me all of this at all. Then again, maybe it wasn’t. If she had painted a target on me as the next one in line to have my cock aching for her, all to no avail… I licked my lips and asked, “Is there more?”

“I have fantasies. Taylor would be mortified if he knew about them.”

I noticed then that her hands had crept forward on the table. Our pinkies were about a quarter of an inch from touching.

I gulped, and it felt like that movement in my throat must be magnified for her to see, a giant telltale signal that my blood was stirred. “Sexual fantasies?” I asked, managing to say the words calmly.

She noticeably shivered, goosebumps rising on her arms. “I keep fantasizing about having an affair. A real one where I don’t back off at the last minute. Something where sex would be all heat, and no duty.”

I slowly leaned back and brought my hand away from hers, an instinctive withdrawal from the hot coals of all she was saying. Everything she’d been talking about was happening right at our table; there was some aspect of her that was opening like a fuck-me flower right in front of me, and I couldn’t help but want her. I wanted this woman to a degree that I didn’t think I’d ever experienced before with anyone.

It was simultaneously frightening and inspiring, my cock buzzing with energy beneath the table while mental gears turned above. I was beginning to make sense of where Mira was psychologically, and I judged that my chances might be a true fifty-fifty at ending up in bed with her. If, that is, I made that attempt, rather than running for my life in the other direction.

She really was sexual nitroglycerine, and to escape heaps of damage I knew I should say something like, “I need to be getting back to the office,” or some other retreating movement to bring a guillotine down on any fantasizing. Instead, my eyes absorbed once again how her forearms were shapely, and I recalled what her upper thighs and panties had looked like when she twirled so vigorously that it became a form of momentary strip-tease.

The words that came out of my mouth were: “Would you ever go through with something like that, Mira?”

A sigh. “I don’t know that I could ever… I flirt and I dream about it, sometimes excitedly, but…”

She trailed off, never having given a firm no. My general stiffness under the table was becoming more like a monster hard-on now.

I took a deep breath, knowing I could be just another one that she enjoyed exciting, only to twirl away. I sensed other possibilities, though. For one, I’d bet anything that she had never itted any of this to a man before; that placed me in a unique position, several steps ahead of her usual transgressive territory. And I could easily imagine how others who came to believe they might stand a chance of fucking her would lose their shit and come on too strong. Their dicks would do too much of the talking or acting out, and too much too quickly would have her bolting like a skittish deer, game over. But if I could earn her trust and draw her in, seeming to be a help even as I was dying for the experience of her just like all the others…

“I don’t ever talk like this to men,” she said. “Sharing these secrets, these intimacies. It’s refreshing, only..”

When she had said the word “refreshing”, there was a different life in her eyes, like something really had bubbled up from the depths. My cock twitched below, and I said, “Only?”

“I don’t want Taylor to know that we talked. Promise that you won’t tell anyone.”

Our little secret. “I promise, Mira.”

“I know it’s too early to say, but maybe you could be the male friend I’m not allowed to have? I really feel that I can trust you.”

I took those words about friendship and trust as definite proof that I was her next target; they were not quite true statements about real emotions. What I said, indirectly indicating that I could be willing to play this game, was: “Don’t put any faith in me that I don’t deserve. I’m not immune to…” I glanced at her breasts, and her lips, then met her eyes again. Nothing else needed to be said.

We both fell silent, for just long enough that it was as if a certain dynamic had been placed upon the table next to the salt and pepper shakers. What we might do together was just sitting there to be picked up and sprinkled around, or not.

“Grace tells me that you don’t have a girlfriend,” Mira tacked. “Why is that?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I had an eight-month relationship going with someone until late last year. She moved to Boston for work, and we decided that she wouldn’t have taken the job if we were meant to be a longer-term item.”

It was an abbreviation that left out so much that it might as well be a complete evasion. Mira could see that and she narrowed her eyes, challenging me to go on. I wasn’t going to budge, and after a few seconds she accepted that.

“Okay then, no current girlfriend. Flings?”

A definitive shake of my head. “I’ve never had a taste for them. Why enter into something that goes ‘poof’? If it’s good, you want more, and if it’s no good, what are you doing there?”

“You should have a woman in your life. I’m sure you could make someone happy.”

“Maybe you know of a lovely dancer in your company who’s been looking for a therapist her entire life?”

“You’d like a dancer, then?”

I should retreat here, but I didn’t. “Definitely.”

She smiled, adjusting her positioning in her chair a little. “Sorry. The ones in my company seem to be taken. That, or they’re gay.”

“A pity.”

“The woman for you… She’d need to be special. Lovely, too; I can see that you’d need that.”

Speaking boldly, and probably foolishly, I said, “You don’t happen to have a twin sister, touring with a different company?”

She smiled at that, more with her eyes than her mouth, then looked out the window as though curious about something outside. My hands were back on the table; I hadn’t really thought to put them back, but there they were. Her hands were on the table too, and almost like magic, or magnetism, her hand that had been so close to mine before shifted oh-so slightly, our pinkies touching.

The was so slight, yet my heart began to beat faster and my cock fully hardened at perhaps record speed. She didn’t move her hand away and neither did I, and that inaction took on the force of definite communication.

“Come watch me dance,” she said, still looking out the window, deliberately not meeting my eyes.

I took the opportunity to ire her lips, her jaw, the indentation between her collarbones and the outward swelling where her breasts began. It seemed to me that light itself might get horny as it fell upon her, caressing her form.

“I’ve seen you dance,” I said. “You move like silk wrapped around energy bars.”

She laughed, turning her head to face me straight on. It was more than our pinkies touching now, because she’d placed her hand on mine.

“I mean real dancing, art dancing. We’re performing this weekend and I’m especially happy with the choreography. It was something of a collaboration with Pierre Charnon, our guest choreographer, and it’s… It’s very dynamic, let’s go with that. Come opening night, on Friday. I think you’d be surprised by the things I can do.”

I read the subtext: I think you’d be surprised by the things my body can do. More of that showing off, probably, but sanctioned through her art form.

“Okay, I’ll be there,” I replied, taking my hand away and lightly patting hers. I didn’t know why I’d done that—was it a gesture of reassurance? A reflexive response so goofy that it was meant to turn her off, and thus save me?

“I’m not sure if Grace already has tickets,” she said. “I could get you both free ones if she doesn’t. Or two tickets for you if you’d wanted to bring someone else as a date.”

It was clear from the set of her mouth that she hoped that last option would not be true. “Going with Grace sounds like fun,” I said, already beginning to think strategically.

“Okay, I’ll call her. As for you being with Grace there, instead of a real date… Maybe, if you come to the after-performance party, I could introduce you to one or two of the other dancers.”

“I thought they were all taken.”

“I don’t check on that every week, so you never know. You need a girlfriend, and they’re all very sexy.”

“Thank you, Mira.”

Something in her expression changed and she shook her head, her gaze seeming to study the emptied insides of her coffee cup. “Sorry, forget that I just offered that. Even if they’re available, I really don’t think any of those girls would be right for you.”

I came close to asking her why not, but I understood that her reasoning was right there on the table, next to my earlier suggestion that I was not immune to the pull of her beauty. If I had a girlfriend, or even a woman who could become a girlfriend, Mira’s pathway to mercilessly flirting with me might be blocked.

She sat straighter and reached for her handbag. “We shouldn’t leave together,” she said, briefly touching my hand again. “I’ll pay for us on my way out while you just… You just sit here a couple of minutes, okay?”

It was a rather abrupt ending, and there might have been no design to it. On the other hand, did she lift up on her toes more than necessary when retrieving her jacket from the opposite wall, giving me the show of flexing her incredible calves?

I remained in my seat and watched her leave through the large storefront window. On the sidewalk, almost right in front of me, she ran into an acquaintance or friend, a much plainer woman roughly her age. As they chatted I had three thoughts.

The first was that Mira must have seen this friend parking her car, and deftly moved to be outside to avoid any chance of the two of us being seen together. The second thought was that the only reason we shouldn’t be seen together was because Mira already knew she wanted to go further with heating me up. And thirdly, with the sun defining the musculature of her legs and the volume of her tits, I thought I would move mountains or tempt the devil himself if the reward of that woman’s body was on the other side of my efforts or misdeeds.

Wishing terribly for something does not make it happen, not without follow-through and planning, and perhaps some dumb luck. I sat in my office after that conversation, gathering my thoughts by entering a few of the things she had said into my computer logs.

It was all crystal clear in some ways—she had unresolved father issues, and had unconsciously chosen a mate who kept familiar patterns in play. Her husband represented stability and social acceptability, but also emotional constriction and a controlling presence to be resisted. I could just imagine what she must be like in bed with him, supremely gorgeous yet bound by invisible ion-stealing chains.

Poor Taylor. Mira probably liked him well enough or even loved him on one level, while feeling resentment and the need to go against him on another. Hell, she might outright hate him on some even deeper level. But then, had she really given me the straight story? If I was right that she had singled me out as her next target to stir, it was possible that she’d exaggerated her lack of ion for her husband. This might be precisely how she played cat and mouse games of luring some poor sap in—“Oh, I’m so unhappy in my marriage and what a tragedy that a body this fuckable is going to waste, could you please please be my only secret male confidante and help me somehow?”

I knew to be skeptical; even so, I couldn’t help thinking of Taylor as being like a kid having the spiffiest bicycle in the neighborhood, that always seemed to get a flat tire when he wanted to go really fast. Whatever the truth of their private time, I did believe Mira when she said she had fantasies where her ions could run free. She had never said this in so many words, but I was certain that these fantasies drove her into some extremely intense masturbation sessions, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether I’d become a recent addition to these fantasies.

My professional assessment? She was in parts. Not in an extreme way; it wasn’t to the point of having distinct and split personalities, but she probably did need the insights of a therapist to help integrate her psyche. One side of her required a stable, picture-perfect life, whereas another less predictable aspect wished to rebel, and explore much of what she probably considered coarse or out of bounds.

Under normal circumstances, a woman like Mira would be a joy to work with in my practice. She was intelligent and productive, socially graceful and completely functional. She flirted too much and there were definite honey trap aspects, which made her a human being in need of an important tune-up, nothing more. I couldn’t do the work, of course, not with the way I already yearned for her. And—this was no doubt acknowledging fault-lines in my own psyche—I thought it would pain me too much to get her fixed up, only to hear later how her sex life with her husband was finally blossoming.

I sat there for perhaps two hours, weighing the possibilities. When asked point-blank, she’d said that she “doubted” she could ever go through with an actual affair. That part, the “I’m really a good girl” part, had even contemplated setting me up with one of her dancer friends. Yet almost in the next breath, she as much as said that she would be the best choice for me, revealing her wish that I remain free to be toyed with. That was the voice of the naughty Mira, which she had described as the flipping of a switch inside, where she would find herself doing things she knew she should not do. And I believed it was twice that she’d said the words, “Half of me wants to…:” and then the rest. She wasn’t even aware how succinctly that telegraphed her true situation.

Most important to me? I was almost certain that the naughty side of Mira held the keys to most of, or perhaps all of, her sexual ions.

Again, they weren’t separate personalities, but two sides holding conflicting sets of values. Because her naughty side was largely unacknowledged, it was almost like there was a war for dominance existing inside of her, a struggle by the repressed aspect for the expression of its wishes. It was the existence of this energetic and rebellious side that led her into the sexy flirty games she played, like grinding her hip against me at the dance, or touching my hand as she had at the coffee shop. She genuinely believed she could never go though with an actual affair, but if the naughty repressed side of herself ever rose up more dominantly, even for only an hour or two…

I outright brooded over these insights. Others had come before me, and they had failed. I could imagine the frustration of the men she had drawn in, having a woman like that almost fall into their laps, only to see her dance away at the last minute. Her signals would have been convincing because they were real, part of her believing that she could go all the way. It was so easy to see how the recipient of her flirtation would press too hard in response, not recognizing the depths of her conflict. They’d believe they were in a love triangle because of Taylor, not realizing that a fourth player, often invisible, lay in wait for the precise moment when she could kick the board and scatter the pieces all over the place.

Others had been unable to sweep the good girl part of Mira off the game board. The risk existed that the same would be true for me; I could become just another one of the many, getting no pay-off except extreme frustration.

From what she’d said, a brain specialist was my immediate predecessor, and he had failed rather miserably, even painfully. I was more like a behavioral specialist, and did that give me an edge? I believed in my diagnosis of the situation—I could see what made Mira tick, and I ought to be able to use those insights to my advantage.

Knowledge is not always power and it was probably foolish to steam right into her game, but fuck it—I wanted to be The One. I wanted to be the one for Mira in a way that even her husband could never be, with her good girl part sabotaging their sex life. I wanted to be the one who fucking owned her naughty side, fucking her so hard and so deep that she would never forget it, and quite possibly never get over it.

Was this a manifestation of the BDE that Grace had referred to? I had recently lived the downside of that with Joyce, but different women had different tastes. But whatever—it wasn’t what I brought to the table anatomically that would get me what I wanted; it was my professional talents, my ability to see clearly into her psyche. Those insights might be like the magic key in a fairy tale, able to unlock Mira’s naughty nature while temporarily imprisoning her good-girl side. We didn’t even need to live happily ever-after; I’d settle for her sexual self going on a rampage for even just a short while, the woman’s orgasmic earthquakes causing a few floods and knocking down trees before the entire forest floor of her ions became tranquil once again.

I wanted to dislike the way my thoughts were turning, because they represented the opposite of what I was supposed to be. She wasn’t a client; even so, all of my training dictated that I should steer clear, no matter what the different sides of Mira wanted. I couldn’t switch the fantasies off, though, and I kept imagining how I might be able to push just the right buttons, working her up and steering her in a way that no one had managed before.

I thought of that dynamic we’d come to while dancing, where we moved so well together, all because I followed while we both pretended that I was leading. Could it work that well in reverse, too? Could I lead her right into my bed by pulling her mind-strings, all while pretending to follow? Unconscious desires were my area of expertise, after all, just as dance steps were hers.

I kept hearing her voice in my head, saying that she trusted me. She might have been saying that she trusted me to do the right thing, the noble thing, but I had heard it as trusting me to cooperate with her seduction game, perhaps navigating her past the rocks of resistance where all other attempts had crashed and sunk. Most likely, with two warring impulses inside her, she had meant two entirely different things when speaking the words.

By manipulating that split inside of her, there was a way forward. I would never actually seduce her—it would be more like steering her into seducing me, extra-hard. All I needed to do was soothe the conscience of the good Mira, while throwing gasoline on naughty Mira’s drives. Nothing would be coerced, recognizably. It would appear that I was merely following her lead.

Trying to find a way to be a good guy rather than a devil, I looked up the verb “coerce” in the dictionary: To compel to an act or choice. Interesting, but now I had to flip to the verb “compel”: To cause to do or occur by overwhelming pressure. Interesting, how there was no distinction as to whether the pressure came from the outside, or was caused to boil from within.

“You’re trying to fool yourself,” I spoke out loud, slamming the dictionary shut. It was devil territory and I knew it. Going at Mira would be an outright seduction filled with dirty little tricks, with the aim of enfeebling the half of her that might say no, while poking at the wild and sexually voracious part of her.

“Maybe she really is sexual nitro,” I spoke out loud. Because just look at me, with a non-stop erection causing all sorts of questionable motives to flash in my brain.

Only what if it was creativity and determination that exploded inside of me, rather than some futile discharge in my pants? She had initiated this game, and I believed I could be the one to finally win the jackpot.

“Challenge accepted, Mira.”

And there it was. This game was on.