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.