“Dear God in Heaven.”

Those words went spontaneously through my mind as I walked into the copy room. She was bending over a box of letter-size reams, so that her short, tight dress rode up her thighs and exposed the garters holding up her stockings. The supple curves of her ass and the contours of her legs made my heart skip several beats.

“Mr. Fredericks,” she said, straightening with a stack of paper clasped in both hands. “Put this into Tray 1 for me.” She handed me the white sheets and breezed by me toward the door, not pausing to see if I would accede to her command.

I hesitated for a moment; looking bemusedly at the stack I had been given. A prurient impulse had led me into the copy room. The new secretary had appeared in the office the day before. I had noticed her before getting any particular vibe from her. It was impossible to do otherwise. Her face and figure were unreal, astoundingly sexy in a way one only sees today in old movies starring bombshells like Monroe or Mansfield. But as an engaged man I confined myself to an appreciative peek or two, resigned to leave any flirting to the younger single men in the office. Besides, as an executive any untoward attention I gave her might trigger a sexual harassment suit.

But soon after I first noticed her, I could not escape the feeling that she was checking me out.  At first it was subtle. I would be in the conference room or by the water cooler and seem to catch her glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. I discounted these impressions. What would someone like her want with a shlep like me? Yet the looks continued, and grew more obvious. At several points in the afternoon I looked up to see her staring at me full-face. By the end of the day she had held my own gaze with her dazzling emerald eyes more than twice, favoring me each time with a wide smile that hinted at wicked thoughts.

When she paused in the hallway outside my office the next morning, filling my doorway with her exquisite frame, I was thoroughly disarmed. “Good morning,” she breathed in a voice so lush and vibrant that it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. She was holding a memo for copying, so to any casual observer she would appear to have simply stopped to exchange pleasantries with a supervisor in the midst of an office chore. But before continuing down the hall she winked with the eye turned toward my office, and pursed her delectable lips in a quick kiss.

After she was gone I sat for a few moments, mouth hanging open, doubting what had just transpired. I don’t know what I was expecting when I got up to follow her. I only sensed that when a woman that sexy makes a pass that obvious, a man had to answer, fiancé be damned.

And so I found myself in the copy room, holding a ream of creamy white 8 X 12 paper. I bent down and opened Tray 1, filling its empty hamper with the contents of my hands. As I straightened I heard a jarring “click.” She had closed and locked the copy-room door.

“What’s going on?” I asked, my bold resolve blunted by her unexpected forwardness.

“Don’t worry,” she replied. “There won’t be any hanky-panky in here. I would use the storage closet for that.” At this she winked again, more brazenly than in the hallway.

I coughed. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you?” she asked, smirking broadly. “You came in here because I’ve been eye-fucking you for two days. I think you read my meaning quite clearly.”

She was trying to fluster me, and it worked. I could feel my face blushing hot red. After a moment of disorientation, I managed to compose myself. “We haven’t been properly introduced,” I stammered, fleeing to the shelter of formalities. “I’m Jim. Jim Fredericks. And you’re…”

“I forget what bullshit name I gave on my job application,” she shot back. “Tammy or Kimmy or Becky-Fay or some such nonsense. I am the Goddess Marquesa. You may call me Goddess or Mistress.”

This answer only deepened my confusion and discomfort. In my befuddlement, I latched on to an odd detail. “You lied on your job application?”

This elicited a laugh. “I have no interest in this crappy job. I’ve come for you, Jimmy.”

I coughed again. “That’s very flattering, but…I’m engaged.”

She laughed again, louder this time. “I hope you didn’t spend much on the ring.”

More hot blood rushed to my face. “Listen…Tammy…or Goddess, or…or…” I stumbled, verbally flummoxed, “I don’t know how you’ve come to have these feelings for me, but…”

Another laugh, this one accompanied by a shake of her head, making the golden curls of her hair glint in the synthetic light of the copy room’s fluorescent bulbs. “Oh, you’ve got it so wrong, Jimmy. I haven’t ‘come for you’ like some doe-eyed schoolgirl. I’ve come for you the way I would come to pick up a new appliance or car I had purchased.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s all right. You’re not understanding won’t change how things turn out.”

“Stop talking in riddles,” I sputtered, nervousness and pique mixing in my voice.

She stepped away from the copy-room door and toward me, coming so close that I could feel the heat coming off her body and smell the enticing fragrance of her perfume and the warm breath of air passing through her luscious lips as she spoke. “All right, I’ll be as clear as I know how,” she said flatly. “I’ve come to this office to make you my slave.”

I had been seized by an eerily uncanny feeling since rising from my desk to follow her down the hall, but these words deepened my sense of being stuck in the Twilight Zone. “Why?” I blurted. It was the only response I could muster.

“My reasons are strictly need-to-know, pet, and for the moment you don’t need to know. Suffice it to say that enslaving men is what I do. I am the Goddess Marquesa, erotic hypnotist and Mistress extraordinaire.”

“You’ve hypnotized me?” I asked.

“Not yet, sweetling. That will come later. For the moment I’ve only mesmerized you with my sex appeal. I could hypnotize you now if I desired, but…I’d rather play a little game of cat and mouse with you. I won’t hypnotize you until you beg me to.”

“Why would I do that?”

She smiled. “Why did you follow me in here?”

“This is insane,” I bridled. “All right, I fell for that obvious pass you made at me. But I’m not quite as predictable as you seem to think.”

“Oh no?” she asked in a tone dripping with sarcasm. “Then how did I know to empty Tray 1 and be leaning over with my ass exposed just as you walked in the door?”

This made my face flush an even deeper red. A queasy sense of vertigo seized me. Part of me was frightened at the ease with which she had manipulated me. The other part was angry at being played for a fool. “If you think that because you have a nice ass I’m going to beg…” I began, sputtering with mixed fear and fury.

She raised a shapely finger and placed it on my lips, silencing me with effortless confidence. “Don’t waste your breath, pet,” she cooed. “I don’t think you will beg to be my slave, I know it.” The words were harsh but her tone was not…it was laced with a note of affection that bordered on sympathy. “Your desire for me is already very intense. It will continue to grow, drawing more and more of your energy. Your fantasies about me will become more frequent, more persistent. You won’t be able to block out impressions of my face, my lips, my eyes, my voice. You will lose yourself in reveries about my legs…my breasts. At odd or inappropriate times you won’t be able to refrain from contemplating what it would be like to feel my hands running over your chest…your back…your cock. Your yearning for me will expand until it eclipses every other pleasure in your life, sapping food of its taste, music of its melody, other women of their charm. At that point you won’t be able to resist my verbal commands, much less begging to be hypnotized.”

Here she paused to let her words sink in. A sheen of sweat had broken out on my brow despite the cool temperature of the copy room. “How can you know this will happen?” I finally asked.

Another wry smile creased her brilliant green eyes, lowering their lids seductively. “I know it will happen, in part, because I’ve planted the suggestion in your mind. My will is stronger than your will, and since you just let me insinuate these ideas into your imagination the seed will grow from here. But even absent my own powers of suggestion I am very confident of my prediction. I am the Goddess Marquesa…reading men like you is what I do.”

“I don’t believe you,” I stammered, “no one can…”

“Give me an envelope and a piece of paper from the shelf behind you,” she commanded, interrupting my protests and pointing to some supplies over my shoulder. Nonplussed, I obeyed, swiveling to retrieve the items and hand them to her.

“Lend me your pen.” Once again, it was a direction, not a request. I pulled my Parker from my suit jacket pocket and handed it to her. Upon receiving it she merely looked at me and tapped her foot expectantly, until I deduced her desire and turned, offering her my back as a writing table.

“This is the date on which you will break,” she declared, scrawling briefly onto the paper I had provided. When I turned to face her again she was folding the paper and placing it in the envelope. This she sealed and handed to me along with the borrowed pen.

“Read this whenever you like. Today…tomorrow…or throw it out if you prefer. Whatever you do, it won’t change the outcome. On the date written there you will beg to become my hypnotic thrall.”

This said, she winked again and blew me another kiss. Reaching up, she stroked my cheek with her lovely hand. “Sweet daydreams, pet.” As she unlocked the copy room door and exited into the hallway I stood mute, the envelope and pen clutched tightly in my shaking hand.

My heart beating wildly, my blood pressure spiking, I tried vainly to get my bearings. After a few moments I gave up trying to sort through what had just happened and stormed back to my office. She did not look up at me as I passed her cubicle, but to my own alarm I could not refrain from glancing at her legs.

Back in my office I collapsed in my chair. For several minutes I sat dazed. Finally, I resolved to try and get back to normalcy by working. But when I reached up to tap my computer keyboard I found my right hand still clutching the pen and envelope. I placed the pen back in my jacket pocket and sat contemplating the envelope. I sensed that I should throw it away…toss it out a window…burn it. Some perverse part of my mind itched to tear it open and read its contents, but I knew that that would be assenting to the reality of what had transpired in the copy room. I sat struggling with myself for a full minute, successfully resisting the urge to tear the envelope open but unable to throw it away.

Finally I wrenched open the lower right-hand drawer of my desk and tossed the envelope in on top of a stack of old handbooks and forgotten correspondence. Slamming the drawer shut, I tried to go back to work as if nothing had happened. But for the rest of the day my mind remained fixated on that drawer and the envelope it contained, as if a small voice was calling to me from inside the desk.

The letter was forgotten the next day, but only because my mind was drawn elsewhere. I had gone to my fiancé’s apartment straight from work after my encounter in the copy room, my whole body ablaze with need. “Jim,” she sighed after we had made love for the second time, “you’ve never been such a tiger. And you’ve never called me ‘Goddess’ before. I’m sorry I have to leave town for the next couple of weeks…” It was the last time I was able to perform for her.

I came to work that morning confident that the whole mess was out of my system, but my first sight of Goddess Marquesa threw me off my axis. “Good morning, Mr. Fredericks,” she cooed coyly as I passed her in the lobby. She had somehow become even sexier in the sixteen hours since I had last seen her. Despite my draining of the night before, I had to use my briefcase to cover my erection in the last yards before I reached my office door.

I tried to stay clear of her for the rest of the day, remaining barred behind the door of my office as if sheltering from the zombie apocalypse. I skipped lunch and held my pee painfully for the last two hours before the office shut down. But despite these successful efforts, my willpower was undermined in small ways. The glass walls of my office afford a clear view of the secretarial pool, and though she made no obvious effort to put herself in my line of sight, my antenna seemed exquisitely attuned to her every movement. Whenever she rose from her cubicle I sensed it, and my eyes were drawn to her like a magnet. I tried to focus on a memo that needed writing, but my mind kept drifting to the scene in the copy room. The sound of her voice. The luster of her eyes. The gap between her thighs as she leaned over, her garters stretched tight against the exquisite flesh of her legs and ass…

The next days and weeks were a surreal torment. At first I was able to remain sequestered in my office. But like a compulsive overeater on a starvation diet, my will eventually snapped. Three days after the copy room, I rose from a daydream of her and walked across the main office toward the coffee machine. She didn’t make eye contact with or even acknowledge me as I passed, but the small smile on her face signaled awareness of (though not surprise at) her triumph. I drank in the sight of her face and body, walking as slowly as I dared. When I reached the coffee machine I glanced nervously about to see if anyone had noticed my failure to bring a mug. Relieved to see no one paying attention, I paced back the way I came, shamelessly ogling her along the way.

As the days passed by my fixation became more consuming and less easily concealed. I capitulated to the impulse to see her more and more frequently, until it became obvious to everyone in the firm that I was crossing the office floor on increasingly flimsy pretexts. At night I masturbated incessantly, picturing us together in postures of ever greater carnal abandon. But no amount of self-gratification ever slaked my desire. When I arrived at the office the next day and saw her again my lust would ignite even more intensely, setting me on a new cycle of lurking and voyeurism.

I began to invent reasons to interact with her. I came to her desk with busywork and would engage her in shop prattle, straining desperately to extend the contact for as long as possible so that I could savor the play of light and shadow on her face, the nearness of her presence. She never let on any awareness of my feelings, and her coworkers became amused by the persistence of my boyish attentions in the face of her cool professionalism. I could hear giggles and see eyes rolling as I retreated from these encounters, but I could not resist coming again two, three, or four times a day.

Abashed, I began calling her into my office to take dictation. This was the cruelest torture. She would sit opposite me, legs crossed enticingly yet all business, a look of sweet compliance on her face while I stuttered out nonsense. My eyes crawled over every inch of her face and body as she ignored my ogling, letting me simmer in the boiling juices of my own obsession. These sessions became so frequent that no rationalization could possibly provide me cover, and the office staff soon dropped any pretense of shielding me from the gossip I had aroused.

Not only those at work, but all of my routines and relationships began to disintegrate. When my fiancé returned to town I avoided seeing her, pleading illness. After a week she grew suspicious, and when she finally issued an ultimatum I relented, receiving her at my apartment. I tried to recapture the intimacy we had shared before, but my body would no longer cooperate. She left in tears. It was the last time we spoke.

Shortly after that I approached Goddess Marquesa at her desk, my heart pounding with apprehension. “May I talk with you in private?” I muttered, sensible of ears pricking up in adjacent cubicles.

“I’m sorry,” she replied, smiling blandly, “I can’t leave my station right now. Perhaps later.” Muffled giggles from the right and left.

“I must speak with you…” I pleaded, audibly at the end of my rope, “…I broke up with my fiancé.” The giggles stopped, suggesting that the eavesdroppers were intent on clearly hearing what followed.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Goddess Marquesa offered, her lips pursed in a moue of mock sympathy.

I paused, hesitating. “I hoped you might be willing to come out with me some time…to dinner…,” I swallowed hard, trying to subdue the lump in my throat.

Goddess Marquesa winked, a gesture only I could see from the angle at which we spoke. “Oh, Mr. Fredericks,” she began, her tone projecting mild surprise even as her eyes telegraphed gloating satisfaction, “I’ve told you…our relationship can only take one form…what you are implying could never be…”

The irony lay on me thick as the other secretaries tried to suppress snickers of mixed pity and contempt. They thought that I had been rebuffed by a secretary trying to remain discreetly professional in the face of improper advances from a supervisor, but I understood Goddess Marquesa’s meaning clearly. I couldn’t hope to date her as one would an ordinary girlfriend. For me the only choice was between total surrender and….and….madness.

I don’t know how much longer I held out after that. The passage of time began to blur. Between three days and a week after my plea for a date, I was slumped at my desk, exhausted from lack of sleep. I felt trapped, driven to the point of despair. Suddenly a memory made goosebumps rise on my arms. I opened the lower right-hand drawer of my desk. There it was, sitting on top of the stack of manuals and old letters.

I picked it up, my hand trembling. Ripping open the flap, I pulled out the sheet of paper inside. On its face, in a neat feminine hand, was written “July 6.” I reached up for the mouse on my desk, dreading to see what the autoclock on my computer would reveal. Clicking out of my screen saver, I saw the awful numbers: 7/6/2016.

It was more than I could take. I snapped. I sat holding the paper, the ripped envelope in my lap, sobbing like a child. I heard someone enter my office and lock the door from the inside, but I didn’t have the strength to look up.

She pulled my rolling chair back from the desk and swiveled me around to face her. “It’s time,” she said.

“No….no…please…” I whimpered. I outweigh her by at least sixty pounds, but I had no will to physically resist. I could only beg.

She stepped forward, pinioning my knees between her own. Placing her hand on my shoulder, she brought her right foot up to rest on the arm of my chair, so that I was caged by her gorgeous leg. Her perfume hit me full force, amplified by the alluring scent of her pussy.

“Kiss my thigh,” she ordered.

I shook my head, wetting her stockings with flung tears. “No…I can’t…please don’t make me…”

“Kiss. My. Thigh.”

My heart stopped. My breath caught in my throat. My body convulsed as I tried to resist, but my lips were slowly drawn as if by a powerful magnet. My pleas continued even as my body rebelled. “No…please….no…n…mmmmm…”

I had never tasted anything so sweet or felt any sensation so thrilling. The world fell away. Every muscle in my body relaxed. I lost myself in the joy of desire fulfilled. It was a moment of perfect contentment like I had never experienced.

She withdrew, leaving me dazed and bereft. I looked up at her, wondering…pleading…incapable of coherent thought. She merely pointed at the ground, confident I would apprehend her meaning eventually.

I slid out of my chair and to my knees, resigned, finally, to my fate. Composing myself, I summoned the strength to express one thought. “Please,” I asked, “I have to know…why? Why me?”

She laughed at this, though her tone was gentle. “I sit on the board of trustees of a charity that runs several women’s shelters in this area. Do you know of them?”

“Yes,” I replied. “My sister was a victim of domestic violence. I’ve tried to honor her memory by supporting women’s causes.”

“Indeed,” she said. “I noticed a while back that you had been very generous in your support of our work.”

I looked up at her, blinking in confusion and to clear my eyes of tears. “I don’t understand,” I finally summoned the will to say, “why would you punish me for that?”

“Punish you?” she asked incredulously, sexily snickering with surprised laughter. “Silly boy, becoming my slave is not a punishment. I did this to reward you.”

I could not respond to this, it was too disorienting. I knelt for several moments, staring back at her blankly, my mouth hanging open in shock. Finally she broke the silence.

“If being my slave is so upsetting to you,” she began, “I will give you a choice. I will hypnotize you now according to your wishes. Tell me it is what you want and I can make you forget your desire for me. Perhaps you can get back together with your fiancé.”

I contemplated this, wondering at this turn of events. What did I want? To be free? What was freedom? I tried to imagine going back to what I had been before, when I did not desire Goddess Marquesa. Had I been free then? Wanting Goddess Marquesa had given me vitality and purpose that I had never felt. I realized in that moment that before meeting her I had been sleepwalking through the world. Only my desire for Goddess Marquesa had made me feel truly alive. My job…my friendships…my relationships…they were all much like a prison of pretense. The only escape from that drudgery was in slavery to Her.

“Please,” I said finally, “I beg You. Make me Your slave. I want to be Yours completely.”

Her smile told me that She had known what I would choose all along. “Very good,” She began, Her tone relaxed and soothing, “Listen to My voice and breathe deeply….”

The End