Ohhh, dear
, thought Angela with concern. It clearly did not take a doctorate to see that something was deeply bothering him. She normally waited until the Starr Treatment* was underway to do this, but right now she picked up the "Session in progress, please do not disturb" slate and slid it into its wedge in the door, shut it and locked it. She sat back down, rolled the chair over towards him, close enough to rub his shoulder. When he uncovered his face, she smiled at him. "Dr. Angie's in," she encouraged. "Lay it on me."
Jed slowly sat up. At about the same speed, Angela rolled backwards to her desk, slipped on the glasses, picked up the pad and pen, crossed the right leg over, and listened.
The year and a half before, when Jed had made his first two visits to see her, he had been involved with a woman named Viv. They'd been going together for a few months and were starting to get pretty serious, but while Viv wanted to be 100% exclusive—and Jed thought he did as well—he nonetheless felt these urges he couldn't understand. He wasn't a half bad-looking guy, and tended to get smiles and winks and small flirtations from other girls. Though he knew it wasn't advisable, he didn't have sufficient self-control to disallow himself to return the flirtations, which understandably sat not too well with Viv. She said she wanted him to stop flirting, or she wouldn't see him anymore. So on September 12th, he came to see Angela for the first time.
He ended up only paying half price for the first appointment, because he was just a
little
too uncomfortable to undergo the actual hypnosis just yet. He said he needed to see a therapist, but the hypno-part was just...a little on the "weird" side for him, which was fine with Angela, as she never tried to steer patients in ways they didn't wish to go. So after their interview, the two of them just continued talking. Angela gave him some advice, that his problem was mind over matter, he needed to resist and control the urges to reciprocate other women's advances. And he tried. He really did. He
really
wanted to succeed at this...but, unfortunately he just did not try hard enough.
Things were almost starting to look up for them when out of the blue, in the midst of those three weeks, he kissed another woman. When Viv found out, she stuck to her word, and they broke up, resulting in appointment number two for Jed. When he dropped in to see Angela the second time, he told her he sincerely wished he'd tried the hypnosis the first time, as maybe things would have been different. He felt so terrible and angry at himself for succumbing to these unwelcome temptations of other women which assaulted him like dive bombers, he declared he would try anything at this point to gain more self-control, and so as was her way, Angela coddled him away from his negative feelings about himself, back towards a point at which to start over, and under the hypnosis he indeed went. So Angela probed him, strengthened his will through his subconscious, and having verified that he was in fact now completely single and unattached (and clean), proceeded to magnificently bestow upon him the secret Starr Treatment*. And poof, post-session two, Jed Michael Parsons did not have such difficulty resisting other women anymore. The Starr was a magician.
Over the next year and a half, he started taking matters into his own hands. He decided he needed to straighten up, and focused on his personal flaws and improving himself. He gathered the courage to write a letter to Viv sincerely apologizing for his actions, and for the way things turned out. He said that although his contrition was very genuine, he understood that an apology did not make up for kissing another woman, and that he didn't at all expect her to give him another chance, that he just wanted her to be able to move on and find happiness for herself wherever it might be. He didn't hear back from her, but that was okay with him. Once he let several months pass to analyze where he was at this point in his life, he started dating again.
Beginning around last year's Christmas, over a year after he and Viv had split up, he met a girl a year or so younger than he was, named Rhonda. She was beautiful, smart, gifted, sexy, everything he thought he wanted. In this new state of self-restraint and willpower, Jed felt confident and happy in this new relationship. He found
him
self now wanting to be exclusive with
her
. He was seeing a real future in this. And then, on April 24th, before his eyes...he saw Rhonda, with another man.
The emotions were indescribable. The immediate feelings he experienced were, in this order, hurt, heartache, betrayal, anger at Rhonda, and then a realization...anger at himself. The tables had turned, he realized. The proverbial shoe was on the other proverbial foot.
So this
... he'd thought, ...
must have been like how Viv felt
. Once he learned how painful it was to be on the other end, he decided that maybe he'd take a little break from dating for the moment. And a little break from listening to The Beach Boys. Then two days later, he remembered Angela.
He could see why she was named Angela. He remembered how comfortable and solaced he'd felt with her. He remembered her cozy office, her sofa bed, her munificent voice, the nurturing way she smiled, her affectionate manner, her benevolent green eyes, the way she made him feel that everything was going to be okay...and he dug up her business card and called the clinic and booked an appointment as soon as was possible. April 30th, at 12:30 p.m.
And here he sat once again, spilling out all the details of his past week to her.
"Why does it have to be this way?" he asked. "I'm with someone who really seems to like me, but I hurt her, so I'm not with her anymore, then I learn how to not hurt anybody, and I meet someone
I
really like, and she hurts
me
. Why?" he lamented.
Angela understood. "Unfortunately, no one has an answer for that one," she commiserated, "Not even brilliant hypnotherapists." She worked up just as much of a little humor-induced smile on her face as she felt was appropriate, then returned to being serious. "People have been trying to figure out that kind of thing for eons."
"Well, so, anyway," he said, "I-...I, uh..." He stopped, his voice unsteady.
Angela leaned a few degrees forward towards him. "Yes?"
He thought he had something else he wanted to say right then, but it was overtaken by an impulse from deep down inside him. He dropped his face in his hand again, and she heard a faint, unidentifiable sound come from him, followed by a sound she recognized. A sniffle. The sort of sniffle that lets you know exactly is coming next.
The sniffle made her heart crack. She put down the pad and the pen, came over and sat down next to him on the sofa and hugged him. "All right...all right...'s okay..." she consoled. She let him rest his head on her shoulder. "You want me to stay here on the sofa with you, Jed? We can talk together, both of us here side by side, if you want."
After a minute he raised his head. He looked over at her, looked down at her hands in her lap and trustingly placed his hand on hers. She clasped it and interlocked their fingers. He blew out a sigh. "I just wish I could go back and do this all over again," he said.
Angela didn't say anything for a moment. She looked down and thought about the two of them holding hands the way they were. She often had this little dilemma with herself, as right now she felt it coming on again. She usually got two distinctly separate rewards from healing the men who came to see her. One was the grand satisfaction in knowing that she was unaffectedly changing these gentlemen's lives for the better. It was who she was inside. It was her whole identity. A healer, in the truest sense of the word.
But then there was the other side of the coin—i.e., where the dilemma came into play. Angela knew there was nothing wrong in loving what she did for a living, and she saw nothing morally wrong on the surface in indulging herself and her own desires, but a small part of her couldn't help but wonder at whose, if anyone's, expense. She adored men, passionately, but on two very different levels: fostering them, protecting them, healing their emotional wounds...and the side of her which came out once the hypnosis actually went into effect. Her hungry, lusty, animalistic side. In a way that always remained something of a mystery to her, a real desire to befriend such a man, take care of him and serve as his emotional bandage soon translated into a
very
real desire to soak up his manliness, slip him under her magic spell, (figuratively) sink her teeth into his masculine body, and hopefully sooner than later perform the deed which, well, constituted the essence of the Starr Treatment*.
At the same time, while all forms of her devotion were purer than falling snow, still, something inside made her question herself: was she taking advantage of her patients? Most of the time she took pride in being able to supply them with pleasure and happiness on multiple levels, but in such a case as this, with a man who was showing his true emotions like Jed, idiomatically mothering him, giving him succor and mental security, she pondered over whether or not putting him under and essentially having her way with him, to state it bluntly, placed her affection and integrity under the category of dubious. A man like Jed, obviously pained, shedding his tears and pouring his heart and soul out to her, it seemed underhanded of her to send him into Slumberland and turn him into one of her erotic cream-filled lollipops.
That was the way it
seemed
