Cuddled together on the outrageously puffy and flamboyantly multi-colored cushions of her sumptuous divan, Jessica Sherwood and I were enjoying some excellent after-dinner wine. We were also enjoying each other. As always when our husbands are out of town, we had lost no time in grabbing the opportunity to be alone together. In the cozy den at the back of her huge house, and with a cheery fire blazing away in the hearth, it was almost overpoweringly warm. Warm enough for Jessica to have proposed, and for me to have ratified unanimously, a motion that we remove all our clothes immediately. We had eagerly complied with that democratic decision, our customary practice on these precious occasions, before curling up amiably together. Staring somnolently into the flames, I was in the mood to talk.
“All right, Jessica. I really need to know how you do it. You've kept me in suspense long enough.”
“How I do what?” she replied lazily, softly tracing slow circles around my navel with a languid forefinger that she had first dipped in her wine glass. It was most disconcerting.
“You know exactly what I mean. How you do that mind control trick so you get men to do whatever you want sexually.”
“Oh, that.” She was smiling, her eyes dreamily closed, her finger still tantalizingly busy. It slowly headed downward until she was gently twirling it in the hairy part of my lower abdomen. “Well, Steph, if you would rather talk . . .”
“Tease! No, you don’t have to stop what you’re doing. You can talk at the same time.”
“I suppose so,” she drawled, reluctantly. She slid her finger a little lower, lightly touching the periphery of the more sensitive parts of my anatomy down there.
Jessica. Professionally, she’s a psychologist and executive director of the women's shelter where I serve as business manager. We’re both happily married, but that doesn’t stop us from enjoying our little interludes on the side (or is that the wild side?). Jessica and her husband are notorious among their closest friends for their interest in kinky sex, though poor old Ralph seems so out of it these days that most of us have assumed he has some nasty chemical dependency problem going way out of control.
But I know better. Jessica has magical powers. She has an uncanny art of divining what people really want; up to a point, she can even control people’s actions without their awareness. She confessed this to me recently when describing her relationship with one of her internship supervisors a few years ago. The only explanation she gave was that during her childhood in the Celtic areas of west Britain she had learned some mystical stuff from Druids and whatnot, performing arcane rituals around stone circles and ancient burial mounds. She sometimes uses this mind control on her husband to get him to cooperate with her most self-indulgent fantasies, but she’s never divulged the details of how she does it. It was high time I confronted her on the need to reveal all!
“Well, Steph,” she continued, “I could try to explain it, but you’d find it awfully tedious and boring.”
“Try me. And don't stop what you're doing -- yes, a little lower.”
She gave one of her trademark coy smiles.
“All right. But you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Men love that, you know.”
“Love what?”
“Thick, soft, springy hair like that, down there.”
“Fine. Well, ‘men’ don’t get to see it. Even Michael doesn’t, most of the time.”
“Poor guy. Lucky me.”
I sipped my wine as I smiled at her.
“I know what men like even more than that, since we’re in the mood for compliments. They like that wide space between your thighs, at the top there. The wider it is, the more they like it. Especially with that -- as we’re being poetic -- luxuriant rug of furry auburn hair you have between your legs.”
“My, my. We have become a mutual admiration society, haven’t we? Turn over a minute.”
Trying not to bounce us both off the well-sprung divan, I complied, nearly suffocating myself as I buried my face in the ample pillows. Jessica started gently massaging my shoulders and back. She reached my waist, then my rear end, caressing my buttocks with both hands.
“So, you want to know all my secrets? OK. In graduate school I was researching biofeedback with a professor named Martin Fotheringay. I think he may have had a crush on me . . .”
I exploded in laughter. “Get real, Sherwood. Every heterosexual male over the age of ten has a ‘crush’ on you at first sight. The occasional woman, too, come to think of it.”
“If that’s another compliment, thank you. But there’s no need to be huffy. Where was I? Yes, Fotheringay was measuring people’s brain activity, recording tiny electrical currents and displaying these wavy lines on a computer screen. When you let people see their own brain waves, they can try to alter them so as to relax, get rid of headaches, that kind of thing, and quite a few people get pretty good at it.”
“Is that the EEG?”
“Yes, the electroencephalogram. In fact, I got pretty good at it myself. One time I was working late in the lab with Fotheringay. We were both monitoring our own tracings, each with our own computer set-up. I happened to glance over at his screen, and just for fun I tried to make my wave pattern match his. It only took a few minutes, and as soon as the two sets of squiggly lines started looking really similar, I had a sudden flash of -- well, I was going to say memory, but it wasn’t. Not one of my own memories, anyway.”
“Well? What was it?”
“Oh, nothing at all dramatic or exciting. Quite mundane, in fact. It was a vivid impression of an attractive middle-aged woman smiling up at me. Long fair hair, colorful clothes; straight from the sixties. She was telling me not to forget to pick up skim milk and multi grain bread on the way home.”
I gasped.
“Jessica, I know already I’m not going to believe a word of this. I can see where you’re headed, and no -- no, it can’t possibly be true!”
“Stephanie, you asked me to explain how I -- do certain things.” She was in stern, lecturing mode. She had withdrawn her hands from my derrière. If she had been wearing glasses, she would have been peering over the top of them. “So, I’m explaining. If you don’t want to accept what I’m telling you, fine. We’ll talk about something else. Why don’t we get dressed and go downstairs and make some coffee?”
Sitting up, she slapped my bottom briskly and looked away, petulantly. I got up on one elbow.
“Jessica, you can be utterly exasperating at times. I withdraw my comment. Go on! Go on! Tell me what happened!”
She made a show of reluctance, then relaxed and went on. She took my hand and placed it unashamedly between her thighs.
