My heartbeat did a few sprints when Coral asked Anya to stay with us for one or two nights, just until she had the bedroom to her new apartment put together. I sensed wet nurse dreams blooming like orchids inside my wife’s damp loins, and still had no intention of allowing her to get it on with an important co-worker. The thing was, I couldn’t be sure whom I mistrusted the most in such a situation — Anya, Coral or myself.

Anya put my fears to rest by declining the invitation, asking to be taken to a car rental office. Coral made no motions of accompanying us for the drive, and I thought I knew why — impulses she believed to be her own were digging at the back of her brain, telling her that she needed a carnal celebration of the sale of her painting. At the front door, saying good-byes, Coral invited Anya to our upcoming party, and she assured us that she would remain in town to attend.

Thinking ahead, I fetched Coral’s camera and took a few flash photos of my sexy wife and co-worker together on the front porch. They stood side by side with bright white smiles, their arms around each other’s lower backs. I wondered whether any snapshots in history had contained two women so lovely, with minds so compromised. I also wondered whether Judith would masturbate over the photos when I emailed them to her, putting Anya’s face and body directly in her cross-hairs.

In the car, Anya and I rode in silence for several blocks. I could imagine how much she had to process from the afternoon and evening, and was content to let her stew in her juices. Once we reached a major artery, she leaned against the car door to face me, asking: “Has anyone ever placed you in the immersion state?”

My first reaction was a rush of adrenaline that tightened my grip on the steering wheel. No way was I going to let Anya — or even my hypnotic influence bubbling inside of her — go that far. But the question might be more innocent than first assumed, and I wanted to know why she’d asked.

“It was required for my training,” I replied cautiously. “It will be required of all the participants in this training program, because anyone administering the technique needs first-hand experience. We were clear about that in the interviews, weren’t we?”

“Very clear. Only… I was just wondering…”

“If I know the other side of the experience?”

“I suppose so. It dawned on me tonight just how much trust is involved. I thought I knew that when you guided me into the state after my interview, but seeing your wife like that, so incredibly open and… vulnerable…”

“Did that disturb you?”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody so defenseless in my entire life. It was… shocking.”

“Because you realized how open you must have been when I hypnotized you.”

“No, it wasn’t that,” she answered quickly, unaware that the truth had passed right under her nose. In therapy, it's sometimes said that no one can see the back of their own head, but Anya's blind-spot was so wide that it was like she didn’t even realize that she had a back to her head.

“I’m glad it’s something else, Anya, because it almost sounds like you wonder whether I can be entrusted with such a suggestible mind.”

“Oh God, I didn’t mean to suggest that! I trust you completely; you must know that. I was talking about something else. Something… kind of hard to explain.”

I understood. What she had experienced, as I had smelled without half trying, was a flood of sexual excitement. Any troubling echoes from seeing Coral hypnotized would come from Anya’s conscience, which must be alive and peering several steps ahead, crying out for her to not-go where she was being led. If she feared anything, it was the alien intensity of the sexual fantasies driving her mind as surely as I was driving this car. I had to grin at that thought — it was a good analogy, especially if I included the fact that I would cut the lines to her brakes as many times as needed.

“I suppose it’s not so different from what I’ve been doing for years,” she rationalized out loud. “All of my patients are in a vulnerable position, having to place their trust in me and others to do what’s best for them.”

“The same principles in a different form,” I played along. “It’s hard to imagine anyone more helpless than an elderly patient entering the final pages of their life’s journey. And for me, having been a therapist, an open and vulnerable psyche is hardly a new experience. The difficulties are the same; the need for compassion and empathy is the same. It’s just that through the technique, I have a more precise tool to address the needs of others.”

“You must have so much faith in yourself,” Anya whispered. “That’s really admirable.”

I didn’t say whether I did or didn’t, and a silence gathered that seemed to end the conversation. I had learned that Anya was still struggling with questions of personal and professional morality, which was to be expected, even if it was pointless. Morality would lose out to the lure of Judith’s assassin cunt, but perhaps I would need to give her extra nudges, helping her to fall off the cliff of her hesitation and even her religion, into a world of compromised values and deceptive practices like my own.

“You’re an excellent teacher,” Anya broke the silence as we pulled into to the Enterprise lot. “I just wanted to say that. If tonight really was a preview, I think I’ll learn more quickly than I’d expected.”

I thanked her for the compliment, and had to agree. There is no faster way to learn than through imitation, unless it’s having an expert voice taking up residence inside of one’s mind and body. I thought of alchemy, of the quest to turn a coarse substance like lead into something finer, meaning gold. Anya was like gold already — golden hair, golden disposition, admirably caring and sincere. Was I performing the reverse, turning something fine into something coarser? I didn’t think so. Anya remained beautiful in all ways; I was merely making her… needy, and true to herself. And since I’d leave no fingerprints, I might as well up her need by a factor of… well, a lot.

She’d learn, all right. I planned on teaching Anya every trick in the book, giving her, though she would never know the extent of it, the honor of being my apprentice.

The lights were off when I pulled up in front of my home — an unmistakable signal for my cock to expand, which it did. I opened the front door and saw the hallway floor lined to either side with regularly spaced votive candles, as though I had stepped onto a romantic airport runway leading straight to my wife, naked but for neon pink thigh-high boots and the equally pink cantilevered bra whose twin profiles had dazzled my eyes all day.

“I think we need to celebrate,” Coral breathed, crooking an index finger to make me come.

How I loved to hear my instructions pouring from the lips of a beautiful woman. “What are we celebrating?” I asked, extending my arms sideways and taxiing into the flickering light, the aroma of vanilla and wax giving way to Coral-scented pussy.

“I could say it’s about the sale of my first figure painting, but the plain truth is… I don’t know if I’ve ever been this horny in my entire life. I think your co-worker makes me hot. I think I like it when you hypnotize me, too. I’m going to need to be hypnotized a lot more often, don’t you agree?”

We were inches from each other now, her harnessed breasts and oversized nipples straining for me just as my cock strained in the opposite direction.

“The immersion technique isn’t a sex toy,” I lied through my teeth.

Coral’s fine lips smiled crookedly, her eyes cunning. She stepped forward, pressing her tits hard against my abdomen. I could feel the stiff swollen nipples surrounded by all that softer flesh, the torpedoes finally striking their target. She stared up into my eyes as she slowly bent her knees, keeping the knocker-pressure intact, straight down to my aching balls.

“It is now,” she said, unzipping my pants. “And I know how to get what I want. You're going to do exactly as I say. You know that.”

We never made it to our bed, a couch, or even a rug. Coral attacked my dick with her tits, and came just from having them manhandled. Afterwards she rubbed my semen all over their expanse like it was skin lotion, rubbed longingly with little gasps that told me she wasn’t through. I brought my head between her spread legs and bathed my mouth and chin in her nectar, taking little breaks to tell her how I was going to hypnotize her cunt the next time, turning it into an insatiable immersion-sucking monster. The words alone made her buck and scream, so much so that I finished her off with a single flick of my tongue-tip on her swollen clitoris. Her thighs convulsed and she literally squirted in my face. I liked that — I liked that a lot, and wondered whether, with enough immersion sessions, I could get a woman to do that on command.

Lying curled together on the hardwood floor, it hit me how much I wanted something exactly like this with every woman I desired. It was probably the reason I’d begun to long for Rosita tonight, because that was where I’d first begun to get things right. I had several pussies in the oven, but many of them were only half-baked, half-transformed. With Rosita the wildness had slipped out, turning her pussy into a built-in poltergeist for a time, incessantly haunting her mind and body from within. Since meeting Coral I’d been like Anya, with my conscience quietly raising objections, trying to keep me from using my abilities to their fullest.

“I’ve held back too many times,” I said out loud.

“No holding back,” Coral whispered, unaware of the path she was endorsing.

“No more holding back,” I agreed, squeezing her boobs tight.

We showered together, lathered desirous bodies mixing with steam to fog the bathroom mirrors. While toweling of, I pushed another hypnotic on-button in my wife by asking: “Why were you so willing to show your paintings to a near-stranger, whereas I’m not allowed to see them?”

“That’s complicated,” she answered without hesitation, brushing out her wet hair. “But I was being truthful when I joked about therapists in the studio. I’m in such a groove, and didn’t want my paintings to be, you know…”

“Analyzed? I don’t ever analyze your art like that.”

“You analyze everything in life like that — it's the therapist's burden. Sometimes I think that nothing escapes your eyes.”

“That can’t be true. You’ve surprised me a number of times.”

“Like my T-shirt today,” she giggled. “You should have seen your face. You thought Anya might reach out and squeeze to see if the letters were lying.”

We could talk about Coral’s tits and Anya’s tits and inevitably end up on the floor again, but I had an agenda. “I want to see your new paintings, Coral,” I went right at her, completely confident in the seeds I’d planted. “It’s your choice, of course, but…”

“I have a proposition,” she interrupted.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” I replied, already knowing her terms.

“You want to see my paintings, and after meeting Anya, I want to see a great set of boobs.”

“Look down below your collarbones.”

“Not mine — Rose Bloom’s tits. I want to photograph us mauling them.”

“I thought I already agreed to that. We agreed together that we’d…”

“No, no, I want them now! You have to make it happen if I show you the paintings.”

“But…”

“I need them, Michael!”

“But how? We have a party to plan for. I have to work, and begin training Anya. You can wait.”

“I can’t!”

“How could you need something so badly that…”

“I’ve already worked out the logistics,” she interrupted, totally ignoring the question. “We’ll fly to wherever she’s performing after work tomorrow, fuck her tits all night and be back by lunch. It’s just one morning off for you.”

“That’s insane.”

“That’s the price of admission to my studio.”

“You’re going to be relentless with this, aren’t you?”

“You bet I am. It’s non-negotiable. Just say ‘yes’, dammit!”

“Okay, okay, you win.”

“Let’s go online and book our flight right now. I’m so excited!”

And so was I. I loved this, steering my wife exactly where I wanted her to want to go. I could get used to a marriage like this. Maybe I already was.

It’s impossible to adequately describe Coral’s new paintings in words. They were alchemy, too, in that she had taken inert pigments and resins and had given a part of her heat to them, transforming those materials into something that reached right in through the eyes, grabbing firm and stirring.

The painting that Anya had purchased might as well be a depiction of her own past above, her future below. It was composed of two tightly cropped scenes, each independent of the other with the paint breaking apart where they met in the middle, the forms above bending and dissolving into an abstracted horizontal band that reformed to create a new image below.

The top part of the painting showed one of my former female patients, a woman of eighty-seven lying on her back, reaching up with a thin arm to grasp the offered hand of a hospice nurse, bending over her quite close. Their intimacy and the quality of giving on the nurse’s part was striking, filled with emotion while somehow avoiding any cloying sentimentality. A male doctor — me, although I was in shadow, thus unrecognizable — could be seen behind this fragile embrace, serving, perhaps, as a witness to the power of human compassion and connection.

Below, with all three figures in hauntingly similar poses, the patient’s role had been assumed by Judith, reaching up to squeeze the dangling tits of the fantasy nurse offering herself with hungry eyes, driven to achieve an entirely different form of connection. The breasts were Coral’s, and had been captured in paint so convincingly that they almost seemed to jiggle. Again, in the background, a partially obscured male figure watched, this time lusting and perhaps even directing the palpable carnal need of these two vital women.

The painting hit me hard and made me hard, the grit of the “real” scene above somehow amplifying the sexual vibrancy captured below. It wasn’t merely goodness versus depravity; rather, a longing for relationship and connection depicted in entirely different disguises, with entirely different energy.

There were three more paintings in similar stages of completion, with different configurations on this theme. I saw patients I recognized, and equally recognizable — to me, since I knew it intimately — female anatomy. Judith’s pleading eyes predominated, as did Mira’s legs and Coral’s breasts. They weren't always in the right place — sometimes Judith possessed legs so shapely that they could only belong to Mira, that sort of thing — but these transfers were always completely convincing, and obviously chosen for maximum visual stimulation. Above were diligent, dedicated real-life nurses offering their compassion; below, dream nurses offering their bodies, just crackling with sexual vitality.

An average viewer could either delight in the art or jack-off to the closely cropped porn elements, but for me it all went so much deeper. There in strokes and stains of energetic color, Coral had managed to intuit and depict the two natures that Grace insisted lived inside of my soul, the sacred and profane urges living side by side within me. As I said, it was like viewing Anya's past and future, the distorted war I’d created inside of her psyche. It was also like peering in at every contradictory impulse I’d tried to navigate since… When, meeting Mira? Learning to administer the immersion technique?

Coral sat on a stool, in nothing but the T-shirt that said R-E-A-L. I could feel her eyes, studying me as I absorbed the paintings.

“You’re hard again,” she observed, nodding at my erection.

“It’s your paintings,” I responded. “They’re so…”

“No analysis, not another word,” Coral insisted, rising and coming to me, and guiding my right hand between her thighs. I was hard, but she was molten. “Unless they’re hypnotic words, to keep me together until we’re with Rose Bloom. I’m… dripping… just thinking about tomorrow night. I’m not kidding, Michael. I don’t even know how I’ll make it until then.”

I did speak hypnotic words to my wife in her studio late that night. They were simple words, really, just repeating over and over how much she craved sex, and craved being hypnotized. The two things would not always happen at the same time, but they were inseparable, like the tops and bottoms of her paintings. Coral craved sex and being hypnotized, and through the hypnotism she would achieve orgasms of steadily increasing intensity. She would retain awareness that it was through the hypnosis that these earth-shattering orgasms were possible, thus she would continue to crave being hypnotized, and crave even more sex, all like an inescapable loop.

If only I could have begun Mira on this path, I thought, and lured Grace into needing my hypnotic touch when I had the chance. If only I had said these same words to Coral on our wedding night, instead of deluding myself that I could rein in the version of me she had depicted in the lower portions of her canvases, the male figure watching and controlling. Without even consciously knowing it, she was painting my ethical struggle — which, truth be told, was not much of a struggle any more. The two competing aspects still existed inside, yes, but the balance of power had shifted. The profane bottom was in charge now, while the dignified top simply paid the bills.

Still a partnership, still with their individual roles to play. Just not wasting any more time with the top believing that it really was on top.

Events at the hospital seemed to fly by the next day. The moment he arrived, Bill Littlefield told everybody that he had a new girlfriend, a Czech woman he’d met online. We had a little fun upon learning that he only knew what she looked like through low-resolution snapshots — he claimed that she was lovely, but had yet to meet her in person. He took our ribbing in stride, even played along by wondering out loud if he might have just assumed that he needed to convert her measurements from centimeters to inches. He’d know soon enough and so would we, as he planned to bring her to our party on Saturday night.

Anya accompanied me on my rounds the entire day, quietly observing and learning. She was dressed like a real nurse, not one of Coral’s fantasy versions, but for several of our male patients the effect was the same. She radiated beauty and innate kindness into every room we worked, hovering close to listen to and observe the methods I'd devised to thwart the grip of debilitating pain. She leaned so close to me sometimes that our bodies touched, shoulder grazing shoulder, large firm breast slightly grazing my forearm. I began to wonder whether she sought out these barely-there moments of physical contact, her body already ahead of her mind.

We ate lunch together at a small café, and I could gauge the speed of Anya’s learning by the questions she asked. At one point she spoke to her avocado salad in the smooth even tones of the technique, trying to find the proper inflections, the guiding cadence. She was very very good at this, so good that I wondered whether some people were naturals, their voice and manner almost perfectly suited to garner trust. And, I had to remember, Anya was highly motivated — I’d seen to that.

We continued our rounds until five, and I almost turned her down when she insisted on being placed in the immersion state before leaving. I had intended to hurry home and change, but I called Coral instead, instructing her to pick me up outside the hospital. If I’d learned anything recently, it was to never pass up an opportunity to further hypnotize a beautiful woman.

In my office with the door securely locked, Anya quickly succumbed to my voice, slipping into the very helplessness that had both frightened and thrilled her to witness in my wife. I went straight to the fundamentals, checking the progress of my earlier suggestions. Yes, she was playing with herself more frequently and more freely, and yes, the events of the previous day had provided ample images to fuel her masturbatory fever. The pornographic nurse-play in Coral’s paintings had penetrated deep inside Anya’s pussy, while the image of Coral lying on my couch, mind blank with her harnessed tits sticking into the air, had helped to elicit orgasms so forceful that someone had begun pounding on the wall of her hotel room, yelling at her to get a hotel.

That was funny; hell, every bosom-expanding breath Anya took was a delight for my senses. She liked women and trusted Michael, and Michael spent ten minutes creating something like the self-feeding lust-loop that had worked so well for Coral the night before. Anya wanted to be hypnotized because that would hasten her ability to hypnotize others, and she needed to hypnotize others because illicit hypnotic sex would give her orgasms of ever-increasing intensity. I didn’t give her the option of knowing any of this — quite the reverse, spending additional time to make certain that she would never suspect me of playing foul with her mind.

“Michael is a compassionate and honorable man, Anya. He would never misuse the immersion technique, though you will.”

“Honor… able…”

“Why did you touch Michael today while standing close to him?”

“I… ached.”

“Ached sexually?”

“Yesss…”

“Do you desire Michael sexually?”

“Yes… N…no…”

“You aren’t sure?”

“I want… what he has.”

“The ability to open a woman’s psyche to suggestion?”

“Yes! Oh God… So many… possibilities…”

You thoroughly transformed cunt-monster, I thought, my dick completely hard. She had touched me because part of her — probably connected to some superstitious nonsense — believed my talent might literally rub off on her.

“It’s good to think ahead about all you could do if you master the immersion technique, Anya. It's good to feel desires climbing on top of other desires.”

“Uh… Oh yesss…”

“Every time you see Michael work with a patient, you will fantasize about using the technique for heightened sexual experiences. You will hear every inflection, every change in pace or tone in Michael’s voice, retaining them in your mind to become proficient with the technique for your aching pussy. Do you understand?”

“Yes!”

“Whom do you admire and trust? Who has abilities that you covet?”

“Michael!”

“Why do you wish to learn so fast?”

“My pussy… needs it!”

“Masturbate like crazy tonight while practicing with your voice. The better you get, the harder you come.”

“Yes… Oh God, yes…”

“Learning quickly equals getting off with unbelievable intensity, do you understand?”

“Yes!”

"You want your pussy to gush into your lovers' waiting mouths, do you understand?"

"Yes! Yes!"

I felt proud of my student’s comprehension skills, figuring that she’d become an expert with the technique in record time. At the same time, I didn’t want things to be too easy for her, so I messed with her a little by strengthening the impulse I’d observed in her in the car, to confess her desires to misuse the technique. Only in private, I directed; in fact, the impulse to blurt out her hypnotic sexual fantasies would only seize her when we had lunch together, alone.

"You trust Michael so much that you want to tell him all about your sexual fantasies, Anya. You want him to know how you plan to misuse the immersion technique for sex. You need to tell him."

"Uh…"

"Only you can't tell him — to do so would ruin everything, and cheat you out of all your goals."

"Uh!"

"That's right, Anya. The needs conflict. You have to, but you can't. Need and denial, and more need, and more denial."

"Oh… ohhh…"

"Send the friction of those conflicting needs to your aching pussy. When you come, you'll put all of that energy into your orgasms, making them even hotter."

"Oh my God!"

"So intense, Anya. Wet squirting searing orgasms."

She began to whimper, hands rushing under her skirt. I had to work at her for longer than I'd planned, just to get her together with the possibility of composure when she came out of the state. She was to expect wet panties at the end of our sessions, but would not believe that Michael noticed; or if he did, he would not think or say anything about it, because Michael always did the right thing.

Anya thanked me profusely when she was “herself” again, for allowing her to begin learning the technique early. She excused herself for a few minutes — wash-up, I assumed. When she returned, I saw a wilder glint in the blue of her eyes than ever before, but she was able to accompany me as I gave a brief progress report to the rest of the team, appearing, I was certain, completely normal.

We rode in the elevator together on the way out, and I asked about the progress on her apartment.

"I'm having the work done," she admitted. "I have… other things to take care of. I've been exercising like crazy, and I need to practice everything I learned today. I might be up half the night, exercising and… practicing."

I'd just bet she would.

She stood with me outside as I waited for Coral. The car pulled up a few minutes later, my wife’s tits half-spilling out of a pale blue tank top this day, her eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. Anya leaned in through the open window to say hi, and I had to imagine that Coral’s eyes went straight to appreciating the beautiful authentic nurse with her uniform so utterly and properly filled out.

Putting my things in the back seat, a moment passed where the lenses of Coral’s shades were completely filled with the double image of Anya’s body, framed by the car window. Perhaps I should have taken that as an omen, but I didn’t. I climbed in the passenger door and Coral sped out onto the street, running a stop sign. Another omen, or just my hypnotized wife driven to go go go?

We drove with the windows down, the hot summer air blowing Coral’s hair into the same kind of wildness I could sense emanating from beneath her skirt. On the interstate to the airport, she reached over and placed her hand on my crotch, rubbing me vigorously until I was completely hard and aching. She deftly unzipped me and pulled my dick out, pumping me before suddenly stopping, and returning to driving normally.

“You’re deliberately torturing me!” I accused.

“Now you know how I’ve felt all day!” she shouted back over the wind. “You don’t know how painful it’s been, glancing at the clock all day, just itching for our flight.”

“I can imagine,” I said, and I could. She'd been stewing, while I'd stewed Anya. Her day had passed with excruciating slowness, and mine had flown by.

“I can’t wait I can’t wait I can’t wait… Coral softly droned.

“You sound kind of driven,” I commented. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you so driven.”

“I sure hope your thing is ready to pose for the camera all night long,” she didn’t really answer. “I don’t plan on sleeping a wink tonight.”

Get it up for Rosita Bello with my dripping driven wife as sexual sidekick? No problem whatsoever.

“Rose Bloom, here we and you come!” I answered back, and laughed.