I’m going to do a bit of fast-forwarding here, to get us to a handful of critical events. Just to paint a picture of that autumn, I used the crystal to bring some extra money my way, and moved into my own apartment a few weeks after starting college. I didn’t rob banks or anything — there were semi-legitimate ways to get more money or cut down expenses, and an influential young man like myself could work the system in certain cases, catching an uncanny number of breaks from the female half of the species, all without creating a trail of misbehavior that might come back to haunt me some day.

I liked my first semester of college, especially since I had a real looker for an English professor. Her name was Nancy Knopski. She was twenty-seven, a petite adjunct professor with a great head of wavy chestnut hair and absolutely majestic breasts, the kind of tits that could charge any classroom with an atmosphere of total focus and breathless expectancy. She was a good teacher, too; in fact, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write this account worth a shit without her instruction in sentence structure, paragraph development, and her personal favorite, alliteration. Anyway, shortly after walking into her private office one afternoon, crystal in-hand, I had Miss Knopski kneeling on her knees while I knavishly kneaded her nicely-nippled knockers. Okay, that sentence was over the top, but she would have loved it, just as I loved her massive rack. “A++” tits, but I only graded her blowjob as a “B-”. Her oral presentation had a promising beginning and precise punctuation, but it lacked depth and she rushed the ending. The problems stemmed from the ratio between her smallish mouth and my cock’s dimensions, but hey — no grading curve or they’ll never learn.

You probably hear my cocky tone and think that I was going nuts all over the place, showing the crystal around so I could sample dozens of student bodies. Wrong. As with the money, my cautious nature came to the fore, and I approached my situation with an eye to the future. I put two thousand dollars into a massive old safe at auction, just to ensure that my world didn’t come crashing down from some crackhead breaking into my apartment. For most of that fall, the crystal remained in the safe unless I had a specific reason to bring it out, and a carefully considered plan to go along with the reason. The crystal was a once-in-many-lifetimes gem, and things were going too well for me to do a bunch of stupid shit and blow everything.

Even when I couldn’t resist temptation, like with Miss Knopski, I was super-careful. I decided in her case to make her forget the whole thing, although I added instructions that she develop a (seemingly) natural, gradually intensifying attraction for me, and also feel a compulsion to ponder and practice ways of developing her cock-sucking skills. I didn’t know whether I’d ever get the chance to give her a make-up test, but that was okay. I could live just knowing that the best-looking teacher in my life was on a slow simmer while thinking about chewing my bone.

I didn’t need to stir up too much trouble elsewhere when I kept having such great sex with Natasha. I couldn’t know how much of it came from her own talents versus the commands I’d put into her, but I began to wonder whether Natasha Hart might be modern female equivalent of a Leonardo da Vinci of hot sex — she was a master inventor, a sexual artist never lacking in new approaches, outfits, positions, and ways to get the whole thing started. I sometimes felt like a kid in a candy store, except that the candy store was great-looking and mobile and could appear out of nowhere at any moment, showering me with the treat of cock-wrenching sex with little or no warning.

She never asked me to baby-sit again. I did spend a little bit of time at her house, but we didn’t do that often because it was almost unbearable to be around each other with Josh there. He and I continued to get on well, so well that I wondered about it at times. He was always animated with me, perhaps in need of a male presence in the house, or perhaps sensing that I could see him for what he was in a way that others couldn’t. I found myself staring at him sometimes, trying to pick out his father’s features from those that came from Natasha. Sometimes… I don’t know. It was nothing I could pinpoint, but every now and then, Josh sort of spooked me. As I’ve said, he was a really beautiful kid, and it seemed to me that he was unusually smart for his age. He could be sort of intense, too, and I kept getting the feeling that he projected some sort of father-issue stuff onto me. It made me uneasy.

I guess I had enough nurturing instincts to know that it couldn’t be good for him to see how horny Natasha and I were all of the time. Natasha made it a fast rule that we would not have sex with Josh there, even if he was asleep in bed. It was probably a good rule, and she struggled with it just as I did. Just being near Natasha never failed to whip me into a lather, largely because she seemed to be venting sex steam through her pores any time we were within ten paces of each other. The instructions I’d given her were potent indeed, and I didn’t have to read her diary to know that she plunged herself into wicked-hot masturbation sessions after I’d leave her house those evenings.

One night it got the better of her, and she started to stroke my dick through my pants while Josh was there in the room. I’m fairly certain she would have fucked me right in front of her son if I hadn’t found the strength to get up and leave. Maybe it was another one of those command snafus, the order for her to keep our sexual relationship a secret clashing against the order for her to love me and desperately want to fuck me. Anyway, just to keep the kid from witnessing his mom’s mouth doing something funny to Brian’s big thingie, I mostly stayed away when she had Josh.

Another element from that fall came in the form of the dreams. I can’t pinpoint the moment they first appeared, but I kept having these recurring… well, I guess it’s right to call them nightmares, although they weren’t nightmares as most people would think of the term. It’s difficult to describe them, because there were few images involved, and no story to follow. It was more a strange feeling that I’d wake up with, a feeling that I’d been detached from myself in some indefinable way. I said something to my mother about it one time and she told me that I was probably having flying dreams, or might even be astral traveling. It didn’t feel like flying or traveling, though. It felt like being severed in half and somehow remaining alive. They didn’t exactly haunt me, but I came to dread those fucking dreams.

And I wasn’t completely stupid. I took the dreams seriously, and even thought of them as a possible warning. One thing that Natasha had told me about her magician lover had bugged me since I first heard it, and that was the man’s sudden disappearance. Perhaps she was right, that he had hightailed it once he learned that she was pregnant, but why leave the crystal behind? He wouldn’t, which meant to me that he must be dead.

The dreams had me wondering, though. Could Anton be approaching, making some kind of reappearance in an attempt to retrieve his precious magical gem? Or what if it was more far-fetched than that? Having been touched by the crystal’s powers, could the magician’s consciousness — even his consciousness from beyond the grave — be touching my own in some mysterious way? Is that what was happening in my sleep?

I remember concocting a whole drama in my imagination, of the magician passing out on railroad tracks and being cut in two by the wheels of a train. The truth was probably nothing of he sort, but these morbid musings reminded me that I really had no idea what the crystal actually was or where it came from. Was it a magical object in itself, or had it been given power by the magician? Was it an actual mineral, or something… other? Sometimes I wanted to have a gemologist examine the thing, just to learn its composition, but no fucking way. And so I just had to stay in the dark, wondering.

And what about Cindy? Where was she in all of this? I haven’t mentioned her for a while, and she did end up playing a critical role in the way things turned out. Gone but not entirely forgotten, we settled into a routine where we talked almost every weekend on the phone. Our conversations began fine, but became more labored over time, sometimes punctuated by long, awkward silences. I could reveal very little about the things that were of true importance to me, and I think she began to sense it. Deceiving her from thousands of miles away was easy enough, and I was even quite fond of her, still. I won’t insult you by claiming that I loved her, because it’s so obvious that my actions showed differently, but I did miss her, and it wasn’t all about missing the sex. Not love — probably not even close — but at least it was something back then.

And now to the critical events I mentioned, which all transpired around the end of that first semester of college. Sometime around then, I got a letter from Cindy that included several snapshots of her on a beach with school friends. They were sunset photos, the figures mostly underexposed because of the brightness of the sky. I had this moment of disorientation in a group photo where I couldn’t find Cindy while also being struck by the awesome bodies of two of her friends. I held the picture up to the light, and only then did I recognize that the one of the slim and stacked girls was Cindy.

Fuck! I shuffled through the other pictures, and sure enough, she was losing weight and gaining muscle in every place save her chest. She had mentioned on the phone that she’d traded in her glasses for contacts, but had neglected to tell me that she was dutifully sculpting away her unwanted pounds. Maybe she worked out with this other hot babe in the photos, a redhead with a physique to die for. Hadn’t Cindy told me that her dorm mate was a redhead, and a competitive swimmer? The roommate looked tight as a drum, with knockers that could displace a substantial amount of pool water. I got hard as hell looking at those photos of my girlfriend and her sexy roommate, and considered booking an immediate flight out west to get a double helping of crystal-gazing nookie.

But then I read the letter. It wasn’t a have-a-nice-life letter — Cindy was too clever a writer for a blunt instrument like that. She spoke about the excitement of meeting new people, the openness and trust between friends, the sense of academic and personal discovery she was experiencing at her university. And contrasting with all of this sweetness and light — the gulf that seemed to be growing between us when we talked. The strange, evasive silences on my end. The sense that we were growing in different ways, or at different rates.

She was trying to be patient with me, she said, trying to give me opportunities to open up to her again, but I didn’t take advantage of those opportunities. She wasn’t sure who I was anymore. She wasn’t sure how it would be when she came back over Christmas break. Maybe it would be better if we didn’t see each other while she was back at her parents’ place. Maybe we needed a time-out, a chance to get perspective on where we were, or weren’t. Maybe we needed to question whether we still saw ourselves as a couple.

My hands were shaking as I put the letter down. A fucking time-out, give me a break. We hadn’t seen each other for three months, and she thought we needed a fucking time-out. She was giving up on me. She had already given up on me. And she had met someone else. This fact, while never alluded to, almost seemed to scream out from her letter. I looked through the snapshots again, scrutinizing the men in the group photos. Three guys, all blonde and tanned, showed up repeatedly. I couldn’t know which of them had gone to bed with my girl, but somebody had. I knew it.

Okay, here we go again. Yes, I know how ugly my emotions were, I’m not blind. If you’re thinking that I had no justification for feeling jealousy or rage… well, you’re right, I concede that. The photos were a bit of a dig — their message was less “Look at my friends and check out how great your girlfriend is looking”, than “Take a good look at what you’re losing.” Still, Cindy was being honest and relatively tactful with me, while I had been a power-obsessed, secretive shit since even before she left. She was a sweet, smart girl, and I was a lying cheating manipulator. She owned the moral high ground, and I owned… the crystal.

Which meant checkmate and game to Brian. I mean, what did you expect? Sometimes you just end up with more pieces on the board, and you have to take care of business. Besides, I never did have much respect for pawns.