The Library

Worn Once

The only rule was to wear it once. She had been counting on that.

Paul finishes too fast, and he has been apologising for it for eleven years.

So at night he becomes someone else. Sonia: the anonymous voice that forty seven thousand locked, longing men write to for permission. Sonia says out loud every single thing Paul has never dared to want. Sonia is patient. Sonia is untouchable. Sonia is not real.

Then his own wife starts writing to her.

Vera has no idea she is confessing her marriage to the man asleep beside her. She only knows that this stranger understands her in a way her husband never has, and that when she does what Sonia tells her, when she takes the key and simply keeps it, everything between them gets better. Paul should end it. He swears every night that he will end it. Every night he answers her instead.

He is the architect of his own undoing, and he has never been happier, or slept worse.

Then a package arrives from a boutique that does not advertise, the kind that somehow finds you instead. Inside is a dress, and a card with one line written on it. Wear it once.

He knows he should send it back unopened. He knows it exactly the way he has known every other thing he could not resist: one moment too late.

Some doors only open one way. By the time Paul understands what walking through this one costs him, the price has already been paid.

Full length literary novel · chastity, secret identity, transformation · adults only

The Hypnotist's Mistress

He wrote the script. She learned to improvise.

Mark has wanted one thing for as long as he has been married, and he has never once said it out loud. He wants his wife to own him.

Emily is sweet, ordinary, and completely trusting. That last part is the problem.

So Mark stops asking and starts writing. A suggestion here, a phrase there, laid down night after night under the surface of a woman who has no idea it is happening. He tells himself he is only unlocking something already in her. He is careful. He is patient.

It works. That is the problem.

Because the woman who comes up out of that trance is not the fantasy he wrote. She is colder than he imagined and far quicker than he planned for, and she has started to notice the seams. She knows something has been done to her. She has not yet decided what she intends to do about it, and every day she takes to decide is another day Mark spends learning that a person you have rewritten does not stay in the shape you chose.

He wanted a Mistress. He is going to get one. He simply does not get to decide what she is like.

23,000 words · hypnosis, trust, betrayal, a power shift that does not shift back · adults only