Mary was what everyone would call a hottie. She wouldn't be called stunning but was more than cute enough to turn heads. She had started working for my company a year ago, first as an intern and now a full-time employee. She was now 24. Intelligent and friendly, she was appreciated by all, men and women alike. What added to her charm was her somewhat childish femininity, that appearance of innocence that is so irresistible to men.
At first, I had not given her much attention. Sure, I found her nice and attractive, but knowing I didn't have a chance with a woman had that effect of protecting my feelings before they even had a chance of getting hurt.
Sharing an office with her forced me to be witness to her antics: her laugh, the way she muttered to herself when she was getting emotional, her slight embarrassment when she had to ask for something. All these little things endeared her to me. I certainly didn't come to the point of feeling love for her, but her charm was slowly winning me over. However, she already had a boyfriend and wasn't displaying any sign of being into me. This made her a prime candidate to become an object of my lust, rather than an object of my love.
I was never a lady's man. At 31, I only had a couple of sexual experiences. The most recent one, a year-long affair with a married woman, had ended when I left my previous job in a distant city. For some reason this woman, also a work colleague, had started obsessing over me to the point of taking all the risks to start a relationship with me. I was finding her attractive and pleasant to be around. Given my lack of experience with women, I was also certainly not about to let such a rare experience pass me by. She knew what she was after, and we both just enjoyed the moment every time she would visit me, usually a couple of hours at a time. The weird thing was that I had the same name as her husband: Roger. I don't know if this made cheating easier for her, but at least she didn't have to be afraid of blurting out the wrong name during sex.
Except for this brief spat, I had never been the constant object of a woman's desire. It's not that I was ugly, I believe I'm attractive. It's just that I'm not so much above average that it helps make a difference. Additionally, women tend to not be creatures as visual as men, at least as far as sexual desire is concerned. I was lacking the confidence and the social skills necessary to have even a modicum of success with these strange creatures.
All this made me, in the end, a rather regular guy. That is, until I made the rarest of discoveries.
As I was rummaging through a cardbox full of some old stuff my late grandmother had left behind, I encountered a lamp. And when I say a lamp, I mean something looking exactly like the sort of lamp that would contain a genie in Aladdin. Ready to humour the lamp, I started rubbing it, knowing too well nothing would happen. How wrong I was!
Smoke started coming out of the lamp almost immediately, until the ensuing cloud started to take the shape of a human being, the upper-half of a human being to be precise. The lower-half was just smoke linking the upper-half to the lamp. The cloud started talking to me.
"I await your orders, master."
I couldn't believe what was happening. Aghast, I must have spent some time staring stupidly and silently at the human-shaped cloud, because he continued:
"Well, what will it be? I hope you didn't wake me up from my thousand-year-old slumber just to admire my body."
"What are you?" I exclaimed.
"Isn't that obvious? I'm a genie, a one-person genie to be exact."
"A one-person genie?" I asked, still incredulous.
"It's very simple, really. I can change one person any way you like, but only one person. So, once you've made a wish concerning a person, all other wishes will only be able to target that person."
As I was remaining silent from shock, and my inability to understand how such a thing could exist, the genie took this as an invitation to expand his explanation.
"Of course, there are additional rules. After all, I wouldn't be a genie if there weren't rules to limit my otherwise extraordinary powers. First off, I can only grant one wish a week. It is available at midnight on the night between Saturday and Sunday, and the right to use it ends up exactly a week later. So, you can't accumulate wishes. Second, the person who will be the target of your wishes cannot be yourself."
Surprising myself by even considering this, I asked "And beyond that, I can wish for anything at all?".
"Well, as I said, these wishes have to concern a person. You can wish any type of change on a person, but you can't wish for money or for an object to appear. Neither does it work if you wish your target to become rich. There are also a few traditional limitations that I won't bore you with. For instance, you can't ask for someone's death, or for them to fall in love with you. Of course, none of this is contractual. If you try to be too clever with me, you might encounter other limits to my powers. Another nice thing to consider is that your wishes don't have to be expressed in a single sentence. Depending on how you express yourself, you could cram a lot of wishes into a single bigger one. What is a wish remains quite subjective, and I'll be the judge of how far you can go."
"How do I know all this is not just an extremely well elaborated prank?"
"Just make a wish about someone and see if it becomes true."
"Not so fast, if I can only make wishes about one person, I want to be damn sure I'll make the right choice."
"As you see fit, Master. Let me add that you only have forty-eight hours to make your first wish. Once this time is up, I'll be gone forever. Now I will go back to sleep, if you'd rather think in peace... Please just rub the lamp again once you're ready for your first wish."
And just like that, the genie vanished as fast as it had appeared. Still reeling from the experience, I put the lamp away and laid back in my sofa. This was just too incredible. Such a thing wasn't possible. But I had seen the genie with my own eyes. As far as I was aware of, there was no technology in existence capable of producing this type of visual effects. Maybe some sort of holographic image but there was nothing in the room I could see that would be able to produce this. In short, I was already convinced at some level this had to be some sort of mysterious, even magical, power. But I kept trying to find logical explanations to this. This just wasn't possible.
What did I have to lose now? If this was some extremely ingenious hidden camera prank, the previous interaction was already enough to make me look like an idiot. I had to make a test. This meant I had to think hard about who would be my target.
As I arrived at work the next day, I felt a lot of apprehension. After a lot of thought, I had finally decided my target would be Mary. I knew this was an impulsive choice. Obviously, as a randy single male, sex had been at the forefront of my mind when making this choice. Still, I could have picked a famous actress, searched the internet for stunning nude models and porn actresses, studying their body carefully until I found the most attractive one. But this lacked personality, this lacked the exciting factor there was in being able to possess someone you already knew, someone so close and at the same time so unattainable. I kept thinking about how she had looked like the day before, with that cute summer dress and these little stiletto heels. How I would have bent her over that desk... Amid my heightened feelings of excitation, this last part clinched the deal. Having never seen her nude or even in bikini, not even knowing that much about her, I was still willing to take the risk.
When she finally arrived, almost one hour late, I couldn't believe my eyes. This had worked. Not wanting to wish for anything crazy before I really understood what was going on, I had simply asked the genie to plant in her mind the irresistible desire of wearing a red summer dress at work the next day. The desire had to be so strong that if she did not have such a dress already, she would go and buy one before coming to work if this was what it took. And, apparently, this was what it took.
She pretexted a problem with the tracks caused her train to be late. This was known to occur frequently, so it did not raise any eyebrows. She looked really exciting in that dress, tight and ripe for the taking. I was getting a hard-on just thinking about the possibilities. Of course, a part of my mind still believed she could be part of that crazy hidden-cam conspiracy I had conjured up. But this now seemed even more far-fetched than the existence of that genie.
I started wondering how she was explaining to herself her sudden urge to wear a red dress. Maybe she thought she had wanted to take her mind off work and break the routine. Maybe she thought these summer days were making her hormones act up and making her want to feel sexy. Or maybe she wasn't thinking much about it, she had "just fancied it." What do I know, after all, about women and how they rationalize away what they can't explain about their own behaviour...
The rest of the week went by uneventfully, but I couldn't concentrate much on my work. I was constantly thinking about what my next wish, and the subsequent ones, were going to be. I was getting far too randy. I had to start wishing for something that would pay off.
That Sunday, I made my second wish. After having masturbated several times over the last few days, I had cooled down a little and decided I had to take things slow. I wanted her to believe all of this was occurring out of her own volition. She had to believe she was slowly getting weird urges, instead of bluntly making her my sex slave. I was surprised at that side of me I had never seen before, this almost sadistic desire to see her struggle against unwanted powerful urges. Where was it coming from? It was slowly becoming more about my egotistical desire to be the object of someone else's uncontrollable lust than about pure sexual release. Of course, I knew she would be into me because of my wishes rather than because of my intrinsic qualities, but this was such an animalistic desire that it didn't seem to matter. It was all occurring beyond what my rational mind could grasp and make sense of.
The wish I made was that over this next week, she would slowly start to find me attractive. I added that if she already found me attractive before the wish, she would slowly find me more and more attractive. This would lead her to look at me more often and a bit more intently.
Needless to say, it seemed to have worked. Once, as I felt her looking in my direction, I turned around just in time to see her dart her eyes down and turn her face, blushing slightly as she pretended to type away on her keyboard.