Hypnothe-Rapist: Starr Scores Ch. 03

To every gentleman in need of female companionship and affection...your dream doctor. Literally.

*The Hypnothe-Rapist*

STARR SCORES III: "Return Of The 'Jed' Guy"

***

April 30th, 10:27 a.m.

"Hi babe! How's she lookin'?" Angela casually asked Paula, the "she" in question being the daily docket of patients.

"Pretty good, Starr," Paula answered. "Full schedule; you've got one every two hours today. 'S see, you've got...a new visitor, Mr. Ray Reynolds in three minutes, he just got here, and then...oh, here's a name I haven't seen in a while: Jed Parsons. His third session, 12:30 today. First two were a year and a half ago."

Angela paused for a minute. Paula heard the sound of the keystrokes as Angela looked him up in her laptop's database.

"Oh yeah, oh yeah. I remember him now," Angela said, having brought up his digital dossier. "September 12th and October 3rd, both year before last." Jed Michael Parsons, 29, relationship difficulties, she read to herself. Hm, she thought briefly.

"Well all righty then, Miss Paula, be a doll and send in Mr. Reynolds, s'il vous plaît."

***

April 30th, 12:23 p.m.

"Is everything all right, Mr. Parsons?" asked Paula.

Jed Michael Parsons was very anxious. He was pacing counter-clockwise around the waiting room in a pattern which was basically a cross between a circle and a square. He was breathing shakily, fidgeting and rubbing his eyes with his left hand. He did a couple more rounds before Paula asked him this question.

He looked up. "Is it 12:30 yet, Paula?"

Paula consulted her computer's built-in clock. "You still have about six minutes to go," she said, in response to which Jed uneasily sighed. He was particularly very much in a hurry to talk to the doctor today.

Paula could see how antsy he was. She said, "You know, Mr. Parsons, sir, it may not be my place to make suggestions, but when I feel anxious or wound-up, I find that it helps to make myself take a really big, deep breath, and hold it as long as I can, and then let it out nice and slow."

Jed tried. It lasted about six seconds.

"Well...if the appointment in front of me's done before 12:30, can I go right back?" he asked.

"Just please give me a moment to let her know that you're here and ready to see her, and once she confirms she's ready, yes." He nodded, trying to distract himself from the things on his mind by cracking his knuckles, shaking out his body, blinking repeatedly, anything he could think of. All right, man, come on, he told himself. It's only six more minutes...even less now. Still, it felt like forever. He tried watching the TV, but a program with a bunch of cute British people drinking a lot of tea somehow didn't help ease his anxiety. He looked at the selection of magazines. Life, GQ, Maxim, Sports Illustrated, Men's Health, Highlights, Esquire...Jed did a double take. Highlights?? The reading material wasn't inspiring a great deal of confidence either.

Finally, three more interminable minutes later, a very refreshed and content Mr. Ray Reynolds emerged from down the hall and stopped by Paula's window.

"Oh, hi, Mr. Reynolds!" she smiled. "Did things go well?"

"Wow! Oh man, I gotta tell you," he said. "I don't know what she did in there when I fell asleep, but she's a genius!"

"Oh, good!" said Paula. "Did you want to set up another appointment?"

Come on, come ON, Jed thought impatiently. They proceeded to do so, and Mr. Reynolds departed. Jed reapproached Paula as she pressed the intercom button.

"Mr. Parsons is here," she said. "And it's pretty urgent; he would like to come see you immediately."

"By all means! Jed Parsons, come on down!" Angela agreed dynamically through the phone, just like a TV hostess. As soon as she said the words, Paula pointed her thumb behind her in verification and he started down the hall. He got to her office and went in.

Angela today had on a plaid set of cotton pajamas and a pair of slippers a friend crocheted just for her, and her hair was back in a large faded blue hair bow. The hair bow made her look a little like Belle from Beauty And The Beast dressed in Angela Starr's pajamas. She started to get up from her chair to greet him. "Hi—" she said, but Jed simply threw up a quick wave of the palm, went straight to the sofa without a moment's hesitation, quickly kicked off his shoes and collapsed on it on his back. He covered his face, rubbing his forehead in anguish.

Ohhh, dear, thought Angela with concern. It clearly did not take a doctorate to see that something was deeply bothering him. She normally waited until the Starr Treatment* was underway to do this, but right now she picked up the "Session in progress, please do not disturb" slate and slid it into its wedge in the door, shut it and locked it. She sat back down, rolled the chair over towards him, close enough to rub his shoulder. When he uncovered his face, she smiled at him. "Dr. Angie's in," she encouraged. "Lay it on me."

Jed slowly sat up. At about the same speed, Angela rolled backwards to her desk, slipped on the glasses, picked up the pad and pen, crossed the right leg over, and listened.

The year and a half before, when Jed had made his first two visits to see her, he had been involved with a woman named Viv. They'd been going together for a few months and were starting to get pretty serious, but while Viv wanted to be 100% exclusive—and Jed thought he did as well—he nonetheless felt these urges he couldn't understand. He wasn't a half bad-looking guy, and tended to get smiles and winks and small flirtations from other girls. Though he knew it wasn't advisable, he didn't have sufficient self-control to disallow himself to return the flirtations, which understandably sat not too well with Viv. She said she wanted him to stop flirting, or she wouldn't see him anymore. So on September 12th, he came to see Angela for the first time.

He ended up only paying half price for the first appointment, because he was just a little too uncomfortable to undergo the actual hypnosis just yet. He said he needed to see a therapist, but the hypno-part was just...a little on the "weird" side for him, which was fine with Angela, as she never tried to steer patients in ways they didn't wish to go. So after their interview, the two of them just continued talking. Angela gave him some advice, that his problem was mind over matter, he needed to resist and control the urges to reciprocate other women's advances. And he tried. He really did. He really wanted to succeed at this...but, unfortunately he just did not try hard enough.

Things were almost starting to look up for them when out of the blue, in the midst of those three weeks, he kissed another woman. When Viv found out, she stuck to her word, and they broke up, resulting in appointment number two for Jed. When he dropped in to see Angela the second time, he told her he sincerely wished he'd tried the hypnosis the first time, as maybe things would have been different. He felt so terrible and angry at himself for succumbing to these unwelcome temptations of other women which assaulted him like dive bombers, he declared he would try anything at this point to gain more self-control, and so as was her way, Angela coddled him away from his negative feelings about himself, back towards a point at which to start over, and under the hypnosis he indeed went. So Angela probed him, strengthened his will through his subconscious, and having verified that he was in fact now completely single and unattached (and clean), proceeded to magnificently bestow upon him the secret Starr Treatment*. And poof, post-session two, Jed Michael Parsons did not have such difficulty resisting other women anymore. The Starr was a magician.

Over the next year and a half, he started taking matters into his own hands. He decided he needed to straighten up, and focused on his personal flaws and improving himself. He gathered the courage to write a letter to Viv sincerely apologizing for his actions, and for the way things turned out. He said that although his contrition was very genuine, he understood that an apology did not make up for kissing another woman, and that he didn't at all expect her to give him another chance, that he just wanted her to be able to move on and find happiness for herself wherever it might be. He didn't hear back from her, but that was okay with him. Once he let several months pass to analyze where he was at this point in his life, he started dating again.

Beginning around last year's Christmas, over a year after he and Viv had split up, he met a girl a year or so younger than he was, named Rhonda. She was beautiful, smart, gifted, sexy, everything he thought he wanted. In this new state of self-restraint and willpower, Jed felt confident and happy in this new relationship. He found himself now wanting to be exclusive with her. He was seeing a real future in this. And then, on April 24th, before his eyes...he saw Rhonda, with another man.

The emotions were indescribable. The immediate feelings he experienced were, in this order, hurt, heartache, betrayal, anger at Rhonda, and then a realization...anger at himself. The tables had turned, he realized. The proverbial shoe was on the other proverbial foot. So this... he'd thought, ...must have been like how Viv felt. Once he learned how painful it was to be on the other end, he decided that maybe he'd take a little break from dating for the moment. And a little break from listening to The Beach Boys. Then two days later, he remembered Angela.

He could see why she was named Angela. He remembered how comfortable and solaced he'd felt with her. He remembered her cozy office, her sofa bed, her munificent voice, the nurturing way she smiled, her affectionate manner, her benevolent green eyes, the way she made him feel that everything was going to be okay...and he dug up her business card and called the clinic and booked an appointment as soon as was possible. April 30th, at 12:30 p.m.

And here he sat once again, spilling out all the details of his past week to her.

"Why does it have to be this way?" he asked. "I'm with someone who really seems to like me, but I hurt her, so I'm not with her anymore, then I learn how to not hurt anybody, and I meet someone I really like, and she hurts me. Why?" he lamented.

Angela understood. "Unfortunately, no one has an answer for that one," she commiserated, "Not even brilliant hypnotherapists." She worked up just as much of a little humor-induced smile on her face as she felt was appropriate, then returned to being serious. "People have been trying to figure out that kind of thing for eons."

"Well, so, anyway," he said, "I-...I, uh..." He stopped, his voice unsteady.

Angela leaned a few degrees forward towards him. "Yes?"

He thought he had something else he wanted to say right then, but it was overtaken by an impulse from deep down inside him. He dropped his face in his hand again, and she heard a faint, unidentifiable sound come from him, followed by a sound she recognized. A sniffle. The sort of sniffle that lets you know exactly is coming next.

The sniffle made her heart crack. She put down the pad and the pen, came over and sat down next to him on the sofa and hugged him. "All right...all right...'s okay..." she consoled. She let him rest his head on her shoulder. "You want me to stay here on the sofa with you, Jed? We can talk together, both of us here side by side, if you want."

After a minute he raised his head. He looked over at her, looked down at her hands in her lap and trustingly placed his hand on hers. She clasped it and interlocked their fingers. He blew out a sigh. "I just wish I could go back and do this all over again," he said.

Angela didn't say anything for a moment. She looked down and thought about the two of them holding hands the way they were. She often had this little dilemma with herself, as right now she felt it coming on again. She usually got two distinctly separate rewards from healing the men who came to see her. One was the grand satisfaction in knowing that she was unaffectedly changing these gentlemen's lives for the better. It was who she was inside. It was her whole identity. A healer, in the truest sense of the word.

But then there was the other side of the coin—i.e., where the dilemma came into play. Angela knew there was nothing wrong in loving what she did for a living, and she saw nothing morally wrong on the surface in indulging herself and her own desires, but a small part of her couldn't help but wonder at whose, if anyone's, expense. She adored men, passionately, but on two very different levels: fostering them, protecting them, healing their emotional wounds...and the side of her which came out once the hypnosis actually went into effect. Her hungry, lusty, animalistic side. In a way that always remained something of a mystery to her, a real desire to befriend such a man, take care of him and serve as his emotional bandage soon translated into a very real desire to soak up his manliness, slip him under her magic spell, (figuratively) sink her teeth into his masculine body, and hopefully sooner than later perform the deed which, well, constituted the essence of the Starr Treatment*.

At the same time, while all forms of her devotion were purer than falling snow, still, something inside made her question herself: was she taking advantage of her patients? Most of the time she took pride in being able to supply them with pleasure and happiness on multiple levels, but in such a case as this, with a man who was showing his true emotions like Jed, idiomatically mothering him, giving him succor and mental security, she pondered over whether or not putting him under and essentially having her way with him, to state it bluntly, placed her affection and integrity under the category of dubious. A man like Jed, obviously pained, shedding his tears and pouring his heart and soul out to her, it seemed underhanded of her to send him into Slumberland and turn him into one of her erotic cream-filled lollipops.

That was the way it seemed. At least, until he'd touched her hands...with his...

There was something about the hands and arms, especially...something that lit her up inside. Something that spoke only to her sexual voracity. Something that triggered that tingly sensuality in her, which when awoken, wanted ferociously to emerge and take over. Something that made her feel her juices start flowing. Something that rendered the fact that he was very emotional less significant. Something that said, NO, you're not taking advantage. You're healing him. Now let's put him under and REALLY heal him...

Suddenly, it didn't seem so devious anymore. But she would never put a patient to sleep just to immediately turn him from her patient into her playmate. First and foremost came the conversation with the subconscious and putting it to work inside to help cure him. The former made the latter possible. She would never be able to bring herself to hypnotize a client, Starr Treat-him right away and not actually fix his issue. She would hate herself. She'd never be able to forgive herself for that.

After a minute or two of silence, she said, "Well, Jed, we may not be able to go back in time, and we may not be able to make those fidelity violations just disappear, but what we can do is give your memory something of a...a re-sorting, you might call it. We'll try to arrange things so that you won't forget these unfortunate incidents, nor hold them in any lower regard. Instead, we're going to attempt to refresh the positive, so that with the positive at the forefront as well, you won't be so sad and depressed by only the negative." She stood up. "Now be a dear and don't go anywhere, I'll be right back." She kissed his hand, slipped into the washroom and returned three seconds later with a box of tissues. "Here we go," she comforted him, as she removed a couple of tissues from it and dried his face from the trails of his tears.

Putting them down, she stood again, held out her hands, took his as he gave them to her and helped him up off the sofa. "All right..." she said, sentimentally snuggling him with her voice, "Now let's give you a nice nap, what do you say, and Doctor Angie's gonna make everything better again."

She picked up his shoes and placed them over by the filing cabinet. She unfolded the sofa into its bed form and asked Jed if he wanted anything. "P.j.s? Music?" Pajamas, okay, but no music, please, said Jed. Whichever genre or content, he thought music would just make him more wound-up. He changed, grabbed an armful of pillows and flung them on the bed, slipped under the sheets, put on the sleep mask and tried to find a comfortable position. He still felt a little too agitated to feel like sleeping, but so extraordinarily gifted Angela had trained herself to be, she could lull Juan Valdez into a tranquil snooze.

Angela unplugged the phone, plugged the stethoscope into her ears, dropped the kneeling pillow in place, slid open the drawer in her desk containing the hand lotion, gave her hands a thin coating, flipped off the light, shuffled back to the bed and lowered herself to the knees.

She began by cradling him by the upper arms. "Okay, Jed, you're going to be all right...I know you're nervous right now, but before long you'll be drifting off to Heaven. Just listen to me. Listen to Angie. Your guardian angel. Let your mind immerse itself in the serenity of my protection, and let your body calm itself and sink into the mattress. Now give Doctor Angie your hand..."

She exhaled on her palm, slipped it under his wrist to begin monitoring his pulse and put the stethoscope on him.

"Good...very good. Time to breathe. Go ahead, inhale, nose...one...two...three...four...five...six...seven...eight...aaaaaand, exhale, mouth...one...two...three...four...five...six...seven...eight." She paused. "Excellent. Again. Inhale, nose..."

She repeated the familiar pattern with him over and over again, each time leaning just an inch closer to him and lowering her voice a notch. She knew riding down Jed's pulse and heartbeat would take a slightly disproportionate amount of time in comparison to most other patients, which was perfectly fine by her. The only issue in play regarding the time fluctuation of varied cases was putting them under and treating them in enough time to keep their sessions under the max two-and-a-half-hour mark, and not keep the next patient waiting past his appointment time.

When he was regularly breathing at her preferred rate without her instruction, aware she going to have to toss in a little extra pinch. So she whispered to him, "That's it, Jed. Just sink...you're fine...now we're going to go to the Happy Place, Jed. You remember the Happy Place? You remember? Floating with the clouds above the mythical green and gold fields, all your cares magically vanished away? Take yourself there again. Let me fly you there on my gossamer wings."

Angela put down the stethoscope, rested her head on his chest, started caressing him with her fingertips and didn't sing but just rhythmically whispered, with her own slight lyrics adjustment—

"Lullaby, and good night, in the sky stars are bright/May the moon's silver beams bring you super-sweet dreams/Close your eyes now and rest, 'cause you're safe in my nest/Close your eyes now and rest, Dr. Angie's the best..."

Slowing down the tempo towards the end, she finished the song, and shrank her whisper even softer. "Ten..." began the countdown. Once he'd descended far enough, she counted down and lowered him the rest of the way down.