Love on the Dark Side

Laura kept smiling at Evelyn, as the woman prattled on about another adorable moment in the life of her one-year-old wonder son. But she wasn’t listening; she was staring over her co-worker’s shoulder at a man she’d never seen before, walking down the corridor of cubicles into the actuarial department. She brought her ‘Kittens for Mittens’ coffee cup up to her parted lips, her glasses steaming with the hot beverage, at the sight of the man’s tight buttocks twitching beneath his pale-blue suit pants.

The older woman twisted her head around to look where Laura was looking. ‘Oh, yes, that’s, oh – what’s his name? Oh, yes, Perkin Miller.’ Evelyn was a payroll officer and, as such, knew everything about everybody at the medium-sized insurance company – and wasn’t afraid to tell it. ‘Perkin. Can you imagine?’

And she was off on another baby Ezekiel tangent. While Laura studied Perkin’s short taut physique as he turned around. His brown hair was parted to the right with ruler precision, big blue eyes peering out from behind gold-rimmed corrective lenses, his pale face lean and bony. She played with the possibilities – Laura Miller, Laura Litt-Miller, Perkin Miller-Litt (wasn’t that a beer?).

Nerds need lovin’ too, she well knew. Laura toiled in the accounting department checking expense reports and posting journal entries, but she was a girl with a very active imagination. Among other talents.

It was at lunchtime when Laura finally spotted Perkin again. He was sitting all by himself at a table for four in one corner of the company cafeteria.

She swallowed hard and moved boldly, slipping away from the accounting pack and carrying her tray over to Perkin’s table. Normally, she was a shy reserved type of girl, but she hadn’t had a date in six months, and she was hungry for more than just chocolate and American Idol. Not to mention, the batteries were getting low, again.

Laura smiled and set her tray down, as she slid into the chair. Her long dark hair was loosely braided into twin ponytails tied at the ends by red ribbons, a light dusting of blush and eye shadow and lipstick on her round girlish face. She was wearing a thin pink sweater and a long white skirt. Dressed to thrill? Not exactly, but a girl had to go with what she had.

She bit into her tuna salad sandwich and the two of them watched each other eat for an uncomfortable while. ‘So, um, you’re an actuary?’ Laura finally asked.

‘No, not quite,’ Perkin replied. He picked up his milk carton and sucked on the straw with a pair of lips fuller and redder than Laura’s. ‘I still have to complete my exams.’

‘It must be fascinating,’ she gushed, her brown eyes flashing behind their dark frames. She pouted out her own lips and sealed them around her straw, sucking up milk with a wet throaty slurp. A drop dribbled out of the corner of her mouth, and she scooped it up with her tongue and slowly brought it back home. ‘I’m in the second level of the certified general accountant programme, myself.’

‘Yes, it is,’ Laura breathed. She tore into the bread and tuna with her strong white teeth, eyes widened, nostrils flared. ‘I don’t want to be posting journal entries all my life. Not when I can tell somebody else to do it.’

‘Makes sense,’ Perkin responded. He licked his lips and swallowed, prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down above his conservative striped tie.

Laura wagged her legs under the table, face and body flushing. ‘Sooo, you ever watch the TV show Numb3rs? Last night –’

Perkin carefully wiped his hands and mouth on a serviette and got to his feet. ‘Have to go,’ he said, as he lifted his tray off the table and walked away.

A man who takes his responsibilities seriously, Laura thought dreamily, watching the man’s pert buttocks disappear into the crowd exiting the institutional eatery.

Laura’s first real awareness of her unique ESP abilities didn’t come until she was twelve years old, when she attended a pyjama party at a friend’s house. As an only child living with her parents in a roomy mansion, she’d never slept in close proximity to anyone before. But, on that night, Ashley Schweinsteiger had bedded down right next to her. And, as Laura lay awake listening to the girl’s heavy nasal breathing, a strange image had suddenly flashed across her mind: Ashley riding a unicorn.

And, as Laura concentrated, Ashley’s weird dream had unfolded in both their minds. Ashley and her unicorn jumping rainbows and waterfalls and wheeling around a golden meadow to the applause of a crowd of Nickelodeon-cast admirers, accepting a giant red showjumping ribbon from a Freddie Prinze Jr-looking centaur. Laura knew the girl was obsessed with horses. A little too obsessed, she found out, as Ashley hugged the Prinze-centaur, and then . . . things got weirder still.

It was when the dot-com bubble burst and soft-soaped her father away for a three-year term, forcing Laura and her mother to move into a cramped apartment in a government-subsidised building, that she really discovered and developed the full extent of her telepathic abilities.

She and her mother shared the same one bedroom, and Laura would lie awake at night concentrating on the woman’s sleeping mind, receiving her dreams. They were usually about the family in happier times (which made Laura cry), or about the bitchy woman who ran the perfume counter at the department store where her mother worked (which made Laura cry some more).

She determined that she could only read the sleeping mind. But she could also project herself into another person’s dream, if she concentrated hard enough.

She first accomplished this when D’arby T. Spoule, part-time artist and full-time parking-lot attendant, moved into the apartment next to theirs. Their bedrooms were separated by only a thin sheet of drywall, and Laura tapped into the man’s rich vein of vibrant colourful dreams about painting the sky, sculpting colossal figures and paddling the haughty know-nothing gallery owners and art agents who rejected D’arby’s work with rolled-up canvases and giant paintbrushes.

She’d lie in her bed and come alive in his spectacular dreams, actually entering his outrageous sleeping scenarios and participating. The two of them and other artists and artist’s models embarked on all kinds of wild wonderful adventures in the glorious pursuit of truth and beauty. Fanciful flights of unconscious imagination far removed from the depressing surroundings of apartments 10C and D.

D’arby would stare strangely at Laura and contemplatively stroke his red beard whenever they met for real in the hallway or elevator of the building. Like he recognised her as more than just the girl next door, though he didn’t know why, or how. There was more than just paint and clay splashing around in D’arby’s artful sensuous dreams.

After a couple more fruitless attempts to arouse Perkin’s interest at work, Laura resolved to use her special powers to pique the guy’s curiosity. Sure, she could’ve been using her gifts to preach peace and brotherhood into the dreams of local Jihadists, the need for cheaper bus fares and affordable housing into the dreams of local politicians. But, at twenty years of age and horny as the brass section in a Marine Corps band, the girl had other priorities.

She found out from Evelyn where Perkin lived, and then was lucky enough to snag the apartment directly below the guy. She signed a three-month lease and surreptitiously moved in a fold-out cot, a blanket and a pillow. And put her plan of subliminal seduction into play.

The first night, she clearly heard him walking around overhead (the whole Tudor-style building was as creaky as Granny Moses’s rocking chair), heard his TV playing, heard him in the bathroom and then finally heard him walk into the bedroom down the hall. Then she heard nothing. She lay down on the cot and concentrated, her arms rigid at her sides, her body trembling, teeth clenched. She’d never deliberately tried to manipulate a man’s dreams before. But she was a woman – as well as a physic – so she knew she was capable. And the call of her wild hormones easily drowned out any dissension.

Unfortunately, Perkin wasn’t the type who hit his pillow unconscious because, as she lay there a half-hour and counting, Laura picked up nothing from the guy. But everything from the woman next door. It was straight out of a video game, rated ‘P’ for Psychos. The woman armed herself like Rambo and then drove through the front of a building like the Terminator, letting loose with enough firepower to clog even the Gears of War, mowing down people like they were dandelions.

Laura watched the mayhem for a while, until it became tiresome, and then she popped out of the dream/nightmare and promptly fell asleep. In the morning, she saw the woman – a petite blonde with a sweet smile and sparkling green eyes – leaving her apartment dressed in the proud uniform of the United States Postal Service.

The second night, Laura and Perkin finally connected. She listened to him wander back and forth between the living room and the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom again, and at last into the bedroom. The floorboards creaked one final time over her head, and then all was quiet.

She clutched the blanket with her damp hands and closed her eyes and concentrated. Men and women in blue screaming and streaming out of a giant warehouse as a maniacal little blonde with a super-gun sprayed lead like water from a firehose. She shook it off, concentrated harder. And there it was. Faint. A black and white world of cubicles and computers and carpeting. Growing stronger now as she concentrated still harder, as Perkin slipped into deeper sleep.

He was seated at his desk, in his cubicle, scrolling through actuarial tables on his computer screen and leafing through mammoth binders of statistical data and claims reports, making notes, filling electronic spreadsheets. There wasn’t even a shade of grey in sight. The man was having a mathematician’s wet dream.

Well, dreaming about work wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. Laura lay patiently on the cot waiting for the dream to pick up, to take on some life, some colour, something pleasurable to start happening. That would be the perfect time for her to make her entrance, she figured, to make a connection.

But the dream didn’t pick up. The guy worked just as hard asleep as he did awake. He was in the midst of amassing the annual actuarial report for the Teacher’s Pension Fund, and he was working way beyond overtime. Laura balled up the blanket and cursed, her nose twitching like she was bewitched.

And there she was. Dished out in a skintight red dress sporting a thigh-high hemline and a plunging neckline, her long tresses flowing over her bare milky-white shoulders in inky waves, her face blushed to perfection, lashes thickened and lengthened beneath her lenses, lips lacquered a wet crimson. Her plump round breasts heaved almost right out of her designer dress, hard nipples poking almost right through the thin satin. She was backlit in a glowing amber light, her hair ruffled by a gentle backwind. And she’d dream-shopped her waist down a couple of sizes and stuck a mole on her left cheek.

She strolled into Perkin’s drab little cubicle on four-inch red spike heels and then bent forwards and placed her hands on the disappearing hem of her dress, flashing a deep warm cleavage and breathing, ‘Time for a break, Mr Miller.’

It was a stunning entrance, and it certainly stunned him. His right forefinger jumped up and down on his mouse and his left hand shook a clenched piece of paper like a white flag, as he stared at the bright bold vision of loveliness that had invaded his shabby dream.

Laura straightened up and took his hand. She lifted him out of his dull workaday (and night) existence and led him off down the hall to the elevators. Down in the elevator, his palm wet in her hand, his wide eyes pin-balling back and forth between her face and her breasts.

They left the dreary building and she danced down the moon-washed city sidewalk with him trailing after her, her bare legs flashing as she kicked up her heels, attracting the admiration of men in the shadows. She dragged him through the doors of the most exclusive restaurant in town. ‘For two tonight, Enrique,’ she said, laughing to the maitre d’.

They held hands across the fine Egyptian linen, Laura puckering flame-licked kisses over the candle at her agog companion. ‘The veal is excellent, darling,’ she murmured, the Justin Timberlake-esque waiter nodding his approval.

They dined, the Beaujolais flowing freely and expensively. Every chew and swallow was dignified and graceful, the banter witty and urbane, handsome couples at neighbouring tables eyeing them with obvious envy. They devoured desserts both rich and creamy, took dainty sips out of tiny cups of coffee even more so. Then Laura slipped her foot out of her shoe and touched Perkin’s shin with her bare toes. The ravishing woman in red had this dream by the short hairs now, and she recklessly pushed it forwards, revelling in her power and purpose.

Perkin spluttered cappuccino. She smiled, hands folded elegantly under her chin, the hunger in her stomach (she’d missed her actual dinner that night) temporarily satisfied, the hunger in her loins insatiable. She rubbed her slender foot up and down his shin, then slid it higher, past his knee, moving smoothly and silkily along his inner thigh. They both jumped when all five of her mischievous toes landed softly in his lap, directly on top of his mounting hardness.

Her eyes flamed like the candle, his glasses and flushed face reflecting the fire. She stroked the swelling length of his desire with her silken ped, as he crumpled a napkin and panted.

Laura flitted to her feet, light as feather despite the heavy meal, while Perkin slowly and awkwardly unfolded himself. She swept him out of the restaurant and on to the street, into a horse-drawn carriage idling by the kerb. They rode off into the old city, the clop of hooves sounding the cobblestones, moonlight painting the streets and buildings with a silvery sheen. She snuggled up close to Perkin, who wrapped his arm around her while she rested her head on his shoulder, her hand on his stomach.

And, when they entered the dimly lit tunnel linking the old city to the park, the top-hatted driver with the Harrison Ford visage turned around and winked at them. They melted into the darkness, and Laura tilted her head up and pressed her lips into Perkin’s. They kissed soft and warm and sensual. Then harder and hotter, Laura sliding her hand over Perkin’s erection. He shuddered, squeezing her tightly against him.

She darted her tongue in between his parted lips and entwined it around his tongue, pumping his cock through his pants. His hand slid off her shoulder and slipped under her arm, over her bulging breast. He squeezed the brimming flesh, and she moaned into his mouth.

They were halfway through the tunnel now, the light at the other end becoming brighter. She couldn’t wait; she wouldn’t wait. She broke away from his thrashing tongue and groping hand and quickly and expertly unzipped him, pulled him hard and heavy out into the open. His club throbbed in her hot little hand. She lowered her head.

She enveloped him in the humid warmth of her mouth, the musky scent of the man, the pulsating hardness of him, driving her wild with want. She took him halfway down and then pulled back. Then went down even further, the tip of his prick bumping against the back of her throat, and beyond.

She bobbed her head, her lips oiling up and down the vein-ridged length of his dong, tongue cushioning shaft, sucking long and hard and deeply. He clawed at her shimmering curtain of hair, ran his hand down the back of her dress and over her electrified skin.

Only when he was bucking with the need to explode, desperately plunging into her sucking mouth, did she finally pull her head back. She quickly straddled his thighs, raising herself up on her knees, lifting her dress and positioning her dripping sex directly over the top of his slathered erection. He gripped his throbbing pole with one hand and her waist with the other, helping lower her down on to his spear. Her moist petals caught on his hood, spread, his stake sinking into . . .

She heard floorboards creak as he scurried from his bedroom into the bathroom. She grinned and slipped a hand into her jeans, gripping a breast under her T-shirt at the same time. Maybe it was better this way – get the guy good and hooked, then reel him in.

She watched out of the corner of her eye as Perkin walked by her desk in the accounting department. A half-hour later, he came back the other way, darting a quick glance in her direction. Laura smiled to herself, tingling all over with the memory of the previous night, the anticipation of nights to come.

The third time he stopped, hesitated and then came right up to her desk. She raised her head, enjoying the look of confusion in his big blue eyes. This is it, she thought, the subliminally assisted breakthrough.

He flushed, the department becoming a vacuum as all of the girls stared at him, the latest framed photo of Evelyn’s little darling spewing mashed carrots into Daddy’s face forgotten in her hand.

He pulled a direct deposit stub out of his shirt pocket. ‘Do you know what this deduction is for? The one marked “SF”.’

She slammed the cot with her fist. Absolutely nothing was coming into Laura’s mind that would allow her to get into Perkin’s head. He hardly looked at her at work, and now he wasn’t dreaming. She couldn’t get anywhere with the guy.

She shifted her mental focus from north to east, and picked up the woman-next-door’s brainwaves loud and bloody clear. Blondie was on the rampage again, as usual. Laura hid behind a sorting machine and watched, nothing better to do, in that kind of mood herself. Why did all the men dancing to the gunner’s tune look exactly the same? Ex-husband, perhaps?

Finally, seven dull days and long dark nights after Laura’s first dream date with Perkin, she caught a flicker of unconscious imagination from upstairs. It was weak, at a brainwave frequency so low she could barely pick it up. Like he was being cautious about how he dreamt.

She shut her eyes tight and mustered all her powers of concentration. Perkin was sitting in a colourless conference room at a colourless meeting with ten or twelve other colourless people. They were listening to someone expound on the present value of future benefits payable in the Teacher’s Pension Fund. The guy stopped talking, jarring some of his audience awake, and Perkin stood up and started handing out binders as thick as insurance policies to the stony-faced crowd. He actually half-smiled at a pretty young woman wearing a skirt so short he could’ve folded it up and stuffed it into his suit-jacket pocket.

Which was when Laura entered the picture, blazing technicolour red in her low-cut dress and high heels, skin glistening brown with instant tan, chest sparkling with glitter. Binders thumped to the boardroom floor along with jaws, as she grabbed Perkin by the arm and pulled him out of the stuffy room and building.

A limousine was waiting next to the kerb, the Jason Statham-lookalike driver holding the rear door open. Laura pushed Perkin into the black leather-upholstered back of the stretch-car and then jumped in herself. She slid up next to him, untied the knot in his ever present striped tie and yanked the thing away, before falling laughing into his arms as the limousine sped from the kerb, out of the city and into the country.

They stopped in a flash; the hunky driver opened the door and handed Laura a picnic basket. She sprang out into the bright sunshine and skipped off across a rolling emerald-green meadow, Perkin in tow. They rushed through a forest of tall leafy trees, then burst out on to the loamy banks of a clear babbling brook. Whereupon Laura dropped the picnic basket and all further pretence and flung herself into Perkin’s arms, smooshing her mouth up against his.

They kissed for an eternity, Perkin coiling his arms around Laura’s vibrating body and holding her tight. She felt his heat, his passion, his hard cock pressing into her stomach, and it set her on fire. They tumbled down on to the soft cool bed of grass, devouring each other’s mouth, Laura on top of the guy, all over him.

Perkin slid his hands up under Laura’s dress and on to her bare bum cheeks. He kneaded the fleshy mounds to her delight, as she caught his tongue between her teeth and sucked on it, riffling her fingers through his hair, forever mussing up the perfect parting.

They furiously kissed and frenched and fondled one another under the glowing sun, on the banks of the gurgling stream, until, ablaze with desire, Laura arched up over the top of Perkin. She pulled her dress over her head and tossed it away into the water, baring herself to the man. He anxiously reached up and took hold of her hanging breasts, and she tilted her head back and moaned, joyously running her hands through her raven locks.

Perkin grasped and squeezed the soft supple flesh of Laura’s burning breasts. Then he crawled his quivering fingers up to her flowered nipples and rolled the rosy-red protuberances, sending twin streaks of lightning arcing through the girl’s chest, shimmering all through her body.

She collapsed over the top of him, digging her fingers into the good black earth as he gripped her breasts and licked at her nipples. He twirled his tongue all around her buzzing tips, before finally taking one into the wet hot cauldron of his mouth and sucking on it. She shivered with pleasure, as he licked and sucked and bit into her achingly hard nipples, working her electrified breasts with his hands, until she just couldn’t take it any more.

Laura scooched lower down Perkin’s body, unbuckled and unzipped his pants, then pulled them down, and his underwear. She gazed at the straining object of her desire, then looked up into his begging eyes and encircled the pulsing shaft with her fingers. He groaned and jerked. She lifted his rigid cock off his stomach and pumped it. He grunted. Then she rose up and pushed the bloated head of his prick in between her slickened pussy lips and lowered herself down, swallowing him up in her hot velvety wetness.

He grabbed on to her shuddering breasts as she undulated her bum, impaling herself on his stake over and over again. She bounced up and down on the man’s thighs, the wet smack of their charged flesh melding with the birds twittering rhapsodies and the leaves rustling contentment at the gentle caress of the wind. The brook babbled its delight and the sun beamed down on the heaving dewy lovers, nature in perfect harmony with their erotic efforts.

‘God, I’m coming, Laura!’ Perkin suddenly bleated, gripping her waist and furiously thrusting his hips up in rhythm to her movements, fucking her with abandon.

Laura dug her dirty fingernails into his chest and cried, ‘Yes, yes!’ Her body was burning out of control, her pussy gone molten.

He groaned sweet agony, and she felt his hot seed spill into her gushing sex, the two of them bucking and shaking with a fierce fiery ecstasy that went on and . . .

She heard his bed scrape against the floor above a couple more times, and then all was quiet. She closed her eyes again, and slept deeply and blissfully.

Laura wore a red dress and pair of red high heels to work the next day, her face and body done up exactly like they’d been the night before – in dreamland. Evelyn dropped little Ezekiel’s latest crayon masterpieces all over the floor, as she and the rest of the accounting gang watched the woman in red strut down the hall and into the actuarial area.

Perkin was standing next to his cubicle, talking to a colleague. She strolled up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder with a red-painted nail. He turned around.

Laura could see the fear in the guy’s eyes, all right, but she couldn’t read his wide-awake mind, which was screaming, ‘She’s out of my league. She’s a dream-girl. She’s too good for me!’