I began painting Natasha’s house about a week later. It was a small Cape Cod with two bedrooms, and I could see why it had been chosen. Although the interior needed cosmetic attention to look bright and friendly, the outside paint was fresh and the back yard had obviously been a labor of love for the previous owner. It was deep and wide with an immaculate deck and many mature trees. Towards the back portion of the yard, a stand of young pines shielded a host of rhododendrons and azaleas that must be spectacular in the spring.
Josh took me back there and pointed up, showing me what must have been the deal-maker. A tree house, and a nice one at that. We climbed the ladder and crawled inside, and I couldn't believe how accommodating it was. One of my friends in grade school had a tree house in his back yard, but it had been little more than a particleboard box that even a seven year-old couldn't stand up in. This beauty was made of cedar logs and the ceiling was surprisingly tall. Two foam mats with sheets and pillows covered most of the floor, with just enough space left over for a makeshift shelf that held a small battery operated lamp. Josh told me that he and his mother had slept out here two nights in a row, and that it had been so cool. It was cool. At his age I would have thought I'd gone to heaven with a getaway place like this.
I painted in the late afternoons and evenings, keeping the windows open to vent the fumes. Natasha and Josh stayed away most of the time I worked, Natasha having given me a spare key to her back door. Our hands touched with the exchange of that key, and she had a certain look in her eye, a look that had me wondering. I kept looking for signals every time I saw her, any indications as to whether my suggestions had been cooking her loins or not. Testing the waters, I made some joke about sneaking into her house late one night, and watched her face. She made some counter-joke of her own, but gave nothing away. I couldn’t tell. I just couldn’t tell.
She obviously wasn’t jumping my bones, though, and I didn’t know that she ever would. Maybe the suggestions hadn’t been powerful or direct enough. Maybe they had faded away. I kept revisiting my exact instructions, wishing that I had tightened the noose more securely. Even if Natasha did think about fucking me sometimes, would see the impulses as nothing more than annoying notions, thoughts to be acknowledged but ultimately dismissed? I’d given her sex instructions, but I was the one feeling the pressure. I fucking wanted to hold that crystal in front of her eyes again, to give her a set of commands that would have me swimming in a sea of boiling Natasha juice for years and years.
But where was the crystal? The piece of furniture with the locked drawer was not among the possessions in the new house. I became concerned that her ex-husband would keep it forever, or that she might have sold it. I found a jewelry box and searched through that, but the special crystal was not there. I felt like the world’s biggest dumbfuck for ever letting it out of my sight.
I was finishing up work in the dining room rather late one night, when Natasha walked in with two opened Coronas.
"Quitting time," she sang. "I'm beginning to feel guilty, seeing you work so hard like this."
She had just put Josh to bed, and we sat out on her deck in the back, talking with crickets chirping all around. I was a mess, I suppose, with paint in my hair and sweat-stained clothes, while Natasha was barefoot in shorts, wearing an extremely tight blue T-shirt with a picture of two whales right where her boobs were. She got the joke, right?
I couldn't help sneaking peeks at the amazing fullness of her tits. Then she crossed her legs, and I was captivated by the way her calves changed their shape. I downed my beer rather quickly, wishing like hell that I could remember what we’d been talking about the night she’d gone blank, especially the words that led her to say, “I’ll show you”. If the crystal was hidden away somewhere in the house, how could I lead her into leading me to it?
Natasha asked about Cindy, and I told her that my girlfriend was going to be leaving town in just three days.
"She's quite pretty," Natasha commented.
"Yeah," I replied. "She's nice."
"Are you in love with her?"
I must have squirmed at that one, because Natasha began to laugh. We talked philosophically about love for a bit — what is it, what isn't it, can it last, that sort of thing. She told me then how she met her husband. He had been involved in a research project sponsored by the French government, studying the cardiovascular benefits of what were deemed “extreme sports”. Lester Hart, along with a small team of other doctors, gave Natasha and some of her circus compatriots a series of physical examinations as part of their research.
I could just imagine what it would be like for a doctor to have a woman like Natasha as a patient. Who would have the strength to maintain an air of professional objectivity when a woman with such a cum-inducing body was stripped partially naked on a table? The man must have blown a fuse, or maybe even his load, right there in the examination room.
"Yes, he was quite taken aback by my body," she said, as though she had been reading my thoughts. "I think Lester was looking for a certain kind of woman to marry and bear his child. I fit his parameters perfectly, and he pursued me with a vengeance.”
She spoke a little bit about what had gone wrong with her marriage, and one thing in particular stood out. She said something about how her husband was always trying to control things, to keep everything running like clockwork in their lives. It seemed that this need of his was the thing she had hated the most.
"He was so blind to my needs," she said.
“Which are…” I ventured.
Now it was her turn to squirm. "Well, we’re being quite personal in this conversation, aren’t we? But I’ll bite. I need spontaneity and excitement, more excitement than Lester would have known what to do with. I must have been drawn to death-defying stunts for a reason, and… Well, that side of my personality is still alive. I have this desire to be… I don’t know, wicked, sometimes.”
The woman was a free spirit, that much was obvious, while Lester Hart had probably wanted a more obedient woman. And yet, what about the magician, the one hypnotizing her every night? If that wasn’t controlling behavior… It was a riddle. With that crystal in his hands, wouldn’t the magician have wanted to heat up her hormones, just like me? All I could think about was turning Natasha into a full- fledged cum-slave. Why hadn’t the magician done the same?
The thread of the conversation also had me wondering what her love life was like at present. Was she playing the field out there? I didn’t think so, she had never spoken of dating. She talked some more about any number of things — Josh going into kindergarten soon, meeting with her divorce attorney — and when the conversation came back to men, I somehow worked up the courage to ask her whether she was seeing anyone.
She raised a finger and got up to check on Josh, and I wondered whether I'd crossed some sort of line. Maybe her non-hypnotic love life was her own business and I shouldn't have asked. When she returned, however, she had two more beers in her hands.
"I not sure if I'm ready to date again," she confessed, continuing the thread of our conversation. "I... really do miss... certain things. In fact, it’s almost crazy how badly I miss those things. But going out and meeting new men sounds far too complicated right now."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, the divorce proceedings, mostly, and Josh, too. I don't know how he'd take it with a new man around. I just told you how much I love being spontaneous, but I'm also the mother of a young child. I need to feel safe to some degree."
I nodded my head. I couldn't even imagine how it changed one's view of things when another life was dependant on you.
"What is it like, Brian? How does it feel to be on the dating scene these days?"
"I don't know. Okay, I guess. It's all I know." I was grateful for the intimacy of the conversation and the trust it implied, but we were talking around the subject of sex, and I couldn't stop undressing Natasha in my mind. Her shorts were very short, her massive breasts powering out the front of her T-shirt like twin flesh- missiles. It was so easy to see my hands kneading those breasts, to see my cock sliding between her muscled thighs.
"Well, who knows," she continued. "I'll date at some point, but I'll make certain that the sex is a hell of a lot more exciting than it was when I was married. Sometimes I just want to throw all caution to the winds, you know what I mean? Being married was so dulling — I often think the ideal situation would be to live independently while finding a great lover to come to me when I need him. Or even better — God, I really shouldn’t say this — sometimes I think I’ll remarry for Josh’s sake, while keeping another lover on the side. Stability and crazy passion, all in one wicked package.”
I wanted to volunteer for the job, but what if that put everything at risk? I had to get my hands on that crystal and wrap her up tight, and I’d never get my hands on the crystal if I freaked her out and made her run.
"I don't know how one judges this, but... I think I have a really strong sex-drive,” Natasha blurted. “They say that men are always thinking of sex, not women, but... It's almost always on my mind. It's been kind of... hard... being alone."
Despite my fears, I couldn’t resist a fishing expedition. "I'm sure... I'm sure that you'd find some very interested men," I offered, wondering where she would take this.
"Oh, I know. Don't think for a minute that I don't know how beautiful I am, Brian. I get reminded of it every day, with all the whistling and comments. I'm... pretty confused these days, but I've never been confused about the effect I have on men. Most of it is just a gift from my parents or even God, I suppose, but then with all of that performing and working out... Even in yoga class I can see how some of my students wonder what it would be like to go to bed with someone like me. I can do things with this body that most people couldn't even dream about, and I know I could create a scene out there in the singles' world if I wanted to. But I don't have any aspirations towards that, at least not yet. I could see having sex with someone... just the raw, animal release of energy... But going out and dating? I think I'm too confused, like I said before."
I drank my beer pretty fast at that point. My cock was ready to explode and it was an honest coin-flip whether to go over there and start massaging her thighs or not.
Natasha took a long pull at her bottle, too, and then continued. "What about you, Brian? What about your love life? You said that Cindy is leaving for college really soon."
"She leaves in just a few days."
"Are the two of you planning to continue a monogamous relationship?"
"Um, we were. We really care about each other..."
"But? I sense a 'but'."
"But four years of her away like this, without seeing someone else... She might spend summers here, but that isn't certain. We've come to the conclusion that all of that time without any other... interests... might be unrealistic."
"Have you been happy with each other as lovers?"
What a question! "Yes. It's been, uh, good."
"Just ‘good’?”
I think my eyes swept her entire body then. I knew she could do it better, and she did, too. She looked like she could do it better than anyone.
“So Brian,” she went on, “if either of you were to take on another lover, it's because you and Cindy both believe that your sexual needs will have to be met somehow while she's away."
It was a statement, not a question. I felt a bit like a caged animal right then. I wanted to pounce on her right then and there, but Josh was asleep in the house and I could sense that Natasha might be trying to find her way, in her own way, towards the same destination. She absently moved an index finger around the opening of her beer bottle and, innocent as it was, the motion was suggestive enough that it added to my already intense distress. My boner felt like it was going to rip apart the stitching of my painter's pants and I was worried that a few more words in this direction might actually have me blowing my load in my underwear.
We sat there in silence for perhaps ten or twenty seconds, although it felt like a lot longer. Then Natasha asked me, in a very soft voice, "How soon do you think you'll be done painting the house?"
"Another week, tops."
"Josh will be staying at his father's over the weekend,” she said. “Perhaps with no distractions, you can get farther than you'd think."
"I'll give it my best," I answered, my dick screaming.
I went out to dinner with Cindy and her family the night before she left. Every person at the table seemed to feel the imminent change in their own way. Mr. and Mrs. Walls cautioned their daughter against every conceivable vice that one could run into in college, while Cindy's adorable younger sister, Emma, expressed impatience for the day when she could leave home, too. Cindy herself alternated between expressions of great excitement and little glances at me that were colored with sadness.
For my part, I was all over the place. I had met Cindy's parents a couple of times before and they seemed to like me okay. I'd noted before that Cindy's mom was a very handsome woman, but it hadn't really hit me before, as it did now, how impressive her figure was. A very young-looking forty, she was a tad soft all over, but it sure did work for her in the boob department. I decided right then that I was in a very strange place sexually, because I was a guy who couldn't remove thoughts about sex and breasts and older women from his brain, a guy who wanted to explore hypno-seduction in secret and couldn’t even say good-bye to his girlfriend without wanting to check out the girlfriend’s mother’s tits.
Cindy and I made love in "our" parking spot again a couple of hours later, and it was very different than I thought it might be. I can't exactly say what I was expecting — some sort of lovemaking that was finer and much more memorable than usual, I suppose, since it was the last time for us for a long time — but instead it was very bittersweet. She gave me a blowjob that incorporated every trick that she had learned, and I reciprocated by fingering her pussy while tickling at her clitoris with my tongue, working Cindy into a climax that could have awakened the dead. As she recovered from her orgasm she cried softly and held my head in her lap for the longest time.
Cindy kind of choked up when I dropped her off at her house at two in the morning, assuring me that she would call and write often. We both knew it would be Christmas break before we would see each other again. I fondled her tits one last time, and she told me she’d be counting the days until she could feel my hands on them again. We said good-bye and good luck and I’ll miss you any number of ways, then kissed each other tenderly. I watched her walk up the sidewalk into her parent’s home, feeling as though the most innocent part of my life was being swallowed up and taken away, changing my life forever.