A stalker has a talent, which he uses on his favourite glamour model

The mailman always came before his alarm went off. On the first Tuesday of every month, the sound of the package hitting the floor would infallibly cause his eyes to fly open, his body to jerk with the adrenaline rush of getting to see her again. He would get out of bed, put on his robe and go downstairs, his heart pounding in case the thud that had awoken him was that of something other than what he was expecting. He would allow himself half a smile at the familiar sight of the large brown envelope, then pick it up and put it on the coffee table in the living room. Invariably, his alarm clock would then go off, making him jump, and he would have to go back upstairs to silence it.

He flattered himself that he ruled himself with a rod of iron. As such he would not go back downstairs after silencing the alarm, but would get dressed, start up his computer and begin the day’s work. When he’d left the north-east, he’d struck an agreement with his employer: the day’s work would be emailed to him in the morning, he would finish it before noon, and as long as it checked out, he would keep his job and the paychecks would be forwarded to his new address. He had moved to Texas because of her.

Lunch, as always, was a hot dog from a street vendor, a different one every day, lest they should recognise him and attempt to strike up conversation. Today’s was better than average, worth the five miles he’d had to drive. He picked up some groceries, again from a store he’d never before visited, and returned home. Passing the door, he felt the pull of the package on his coffee table. He’d seen the preview last month, she would definitely be in it. He forced himself to wait. He would need the talent, either tonight or tomorrow night, and practice was in order.

He changed back into his robe and sat on his dining-room table in the lotus position. He reached out, searching for viable targets. The time of day meant he would probably have to look fairly far afield. Australia was normally a good hunting ground, but today there was one closer at hand, a businessman who had just returned to California and was therefore suffering quite badly from jet-lag. The man’s sleep was fitful; he was unaccustomed to sleeping during the day, so whenever he was close to progressing beyond REM sleep, either the wind would shift the drapes and cast bright sunlight onto his face, or a car would backfire, or something else would bring him, kicking and screaming back to consciousness. In short, the businessman was a perfect target, so much so that the predator nearly passed him over as too unchallenging. Nearly.

The businessman’s dreams were by and large uninteresting, a rehash of the previous day’s negotiations, which had been weighing on his mind quite heavily. The predator let his mind finish the business of preserving his sanity, then began to exert control. The dream shifted, became a dream of lying in bed, fitfully trying to sleep after an uncomfortable red-eye flight. Now he awoke (in the dream), and in the confusion, his body moved, sleepwalking around the room in the pattern the predator was accustomed to impose. Having satisfied himself, as he did whenever he practiced, that he had a sufficient level of control over the body’s voluntary mechanisms, he moved on to the involuntary responses. He increased the businessman’s tolerance for high temperatures, decreased his sensitivity to noise, teased his glands into releasing a touch more melanin, and, most importantly, went through the familiar motions of inducing arousal. The businessman would wake up with an erection, but not for a few hours yet.

Time had marched on, and by the time he let the businessman’s mind go and re-opened his eyes, it was five p.m. He let himself feel satisfaction, for his control was developing appropriately, and got dinner started. Once it was over, and he had dried and put away the last spoon, he allowed his mind to anticipate what he was about to do. He was about to open the package.

Having gently sliced open the brown paper with a scalpel, taking care not to damage the contents, he slid the magazine out and contemplated it. She was on the cover this time, and quite rightly so in his opinion. His eyes drank in every familiar curve, her voluptuous body eliciting the learned reaction, thrilling him beyond measure, making him feel more in the perhaps three seconds that his eyes spent wandering than he had in all the prior hours of that day. She was, to him, the epitome of beauty, though he was better placed than most to know that the only reason he thought so was the Pavlovian conditioning he’d put himself through by masturbating so often to her image. Unable to control himself any longer he flipped straight to the page where her photoset began, touching himself with abandon as he gloried in her image. In the illogical clarity that comes just before orgasm, when a man feels as though he can prolong the moment forever, he remembered not to soil the pages and aimed away from the magazine, caring neither about his furniture nor about the carpet as he shot his load.

Once he’d recovered, he took up his kit and set to work. The staples were carefully extracted, the front cover sliced away from the back with ruler and scalpel, and the pages of her photoset were extracted from the rest and placed individually in protective plastic pockets. All having been safely filed away, he remembered to clean the carpet.

It was seven thirty. He knew he wouldn’t be sleeping all night, so he went to get some rest.

The special outside stimulus struck his open mind three hours later, and his eyes flew open. She was going to bed. Quickly and methodically he prepared himself, getting ready for the moment when she would be vulnerable to him. He felt the avenue into her mind open up, and slipped inside. As always, he waited and watched before acting.

She was dreaming of childhood, of the loving attentions of kind parents, of picnics in the park. It was idyllic, and he almost felt remorse in shattering it. He concentrated, and the dream shifted, became a dream of lying in bed, glad to have a chance to relax after a gruelling afternoon under the photographer’s hot lights, holding pose after pose and trying to look sexy when she felt anything but. He felt all these memories through the dream, and looked forward to seeing the photoset. Another burst of concentration, and his avatar in her mind distanced itself from her own thoughts, and appeared in the dream of her bedroom. He knew that outside the dream she was wearing a very sensible nightgown, but here it was too hot for sleepwear, so she was naked. Her breasts, big even by the standards of the specialist publications in which she appeared, were bared in their all-natural glory, outthrust even more than normal by the foetal position in which she was lying. He lay down behind her in the spoon position, caressing her soft flank. She stirred, both in the dream and in reality, but did not wake in either realm. Spurred on by her receptiveness he slipped another arm under her, then moved his hands up to stroke her glorious boobs, marvelling, as he always did at how little of them he was able to conceal. He kissed her softly along the line of her jaw, and out in the real world she purred. To her, he was a recurring and welcome erotic dream, able to remind her to take pleasure in her nakedness even when the job made her feel at her most cheap and used. To him, she was a sex object, his treatment of her the arguments of all the strident Moms made flesh. He felt her half-conscious realisation that she was having her favourite dream, and for once didn’t stop himself from grinning. He moved his hands away from her breasts and began to explore. Her skin was flawless, probably more so here, where everything seemed to be in soft focus, than in real life. He continued to kiss at random, worshipping his love-doll reverently, ecstatically allowing her long black hair to fall caressingly over his face before burying his face in her neck, inhaling her scent noisily. This was the point at which his self-control could take a hike, this was his special time. She pushed back at him, pressing her ass receptively into his erection. His fingers stroked her lips, and she took them into her mouth, sucking on them greedily, making a point of demonstrating every technique she knew. He wished he could see her eyes from where he was, and without either of them moving, it was so. In her dark eyes he read desire, and the knowledge that he was teasing her and loving it.

He melted away from behind her and made the scene shift. Now she was on her back, her knees bent and flat to the bed in a classic pose. Reverently he brought his face down between her thighs, slathered wet kisses onto her nether lips and fought down the urge to bury his tongue as far inside her as it would go. “Not yet!” his control shrieked, “not yet.” He felt her arousal grow and used his awareness to modulate his technique, teasing her clit for a quick spike in the graph, then bringing his tongue into play to bring on the slow, satisfying climb to orgasm. He held her on the edge, revelling in the feeling of her soft thighs clamped around his head, before finally allowing her release. As always, he felt the pull of her mind trying to shape the dream, and as always, he allowed it. The scene shifted once more and they were under the covers, lying face to face on their sides. He felt the warmth of her body, saw the pleasure in her eyes as they embraced and the sensation was bittersweet; he knew what was coming. She kissed him, willingly engaging in a duel of tongues, and before it was quite over, she drifted down into the depths of NREM sleep, and his control was lost. As his eyes opened he imagined he could still feel her lips on his, but he knew it was a wish, not a sensation.