The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I am a slave, damn it! I have always been a slave, I will always be one, and there’s not a single thing I can do about!

I wanted to scream the words at the door that had just closed on my girlfriend, my ex-girlfriend if I wasn’t much mistaken, as she walked away in disgust. I wanted to, but didn’t dare because I was so ashamed of my feelings and needs.

I thought everything had been going all right. I thought she had accepted me and my little oddities. I thought that I could kiss her from her lips and all the way down to her boots and make her just as happy and excited and fulfilled as I had felt. Until she told me I was a pervert, and left .

No, she hadn’t told me, she had asked me. “What kind of a pervert are you?”

I can answer you now.

I am a slave pervert. I am someone who serves women pervert. I am a teasee, ticklee pervert.

I am the kind of pervert who wants to be tied up in bed and tormented by skillful fingers, to be lead around on a black leather leash, to be chained somewhere until you come back for me, who can’t see a pair of handcuffs on a criminal’s wrists or a dog being walked without being jealous, knowing you’ll never do it to me because I am such a degraded freak of a pervert.

I am the kind of pervert who turn around to look at women’s sexy, long, glossy, shiny, smooth, full, luxurious hair, falling, sliding, dangling. I am a pervert who likes to kiss such hair, brush it and play with it and beg her to drape it across my naked, quivering body.

I am the kind of pervert who loves to see your hair set up in a ponytail with a big satin scrunchie. Yes, the dreaded fashion accessory that women so love to ridicule. So what. I get turned on by it in your hair, on your wrist, casually worn when you don’t need it, on my raging, hungry manhood, pulling and teasing, if that’s ever going to come true, because that’s just disturbingly silly and you wouldn’t want anything to do with that.

I am the kind of pervert who just can’t look away when a woman wears big, jangling, glittering hoop earrings. They are flashy, golden, silvery circles of pure seductive, assertive beauty in my eyes, horribly loud and tacky bling in yours.

I am the kind of pervert who loves it when you wear silky satin ball gowns that brush the floor as you walk past my kneeling form, evening light playing on the heavy folds and your draped curves, and velvet gloves on your hands. I want to see you in tight leather skirts that show off your body and make me suffer whenever I cannot touch or kiss. I want to buy and polish and put high heeled shoes and leather boots on your feet before you put them on my neck to keep me down.

I am the kind of pervert who is terrified of, but also loves to be brought low, humiliated. I want to be ridiculed when you talk to your friends, to be your servant when you have them over for a drink, to be satisfied with only hearing your laughter and teasing words as I make sure you all have everything you need, wearing only a bow tie and briefs. I want to be exposed to others, to have pictures taken and shared. I want to be blindfolded, not knowing who’s there, who’s touching.

I am the kind of pervert who desperately needs denial, to be refused, to have all my orgasms controlled by you, to be unable to come on my own, no matter how much I touch myself, and I don’t care that you slammed the door on me, I still want to be kept in denial, because I am sick and tired of masturbating whenever I want. It doesn’t do anything for me anymore, it doesn’t give the highs I need.

So, I understand that you leave, because who would ever want to be with a disgusting pervert like me? If you only knew how I disgust myself. If people only knew how revolted I feel sometimes, looking in the mirror.

She left, and with her went all the other good things as well. Going to see movies together, to cafes, or just going for walks through the city, talking, laughing feeling elated, feeling free, feeling in love. Disagreeing about politics, and about art. About music, lying in each other’s arms on the couch while my stereo filled my apartment with guitar feedback and I tried to convince her that Jimmy Page was better than Eric Clapton. With no luck.

Layla. You got me on my knees, Layla.

What I did know, or at least should have known, was to be careful of what I wished for. I didn’t think of that just then, because I was to preoccupied with first being a pathetic, needy slave and then to spell out gloom and doom for myself.

I did that instead of, say, enjoy the fact that I was a fairly young, fairly smart, fairly handsome, fairly successful, fairly well-off man with a fairly interesting job, fairly nice friends, a fairly chic apartment in a fairly good neighborhood.

Did I want to throw away all that just to get my kinky kicks? Of course not. But I didn’t know what was going on in the astral spheres that surrounded us, or whatever the hippies call the supernatural.

Did I even believe in magic and wishes coming true until that evening? That was a question I, as an engineer and skeptic, could answer a firm ‘no’ to. But what good does all the skepticism in the world do when you just can’t have an orgasm?

When my girlfriend left and I was still kneeling on the floor, I felt angry, sad, distressed, maltreated, abandoned. And humiliated. Very humiliated.

That’s one of the strange things about male sexuality. Mess with it, and it’s going to provoke a violent emotional reaction. Anger and sulking being two of the top three. The last one on the podium, as well as on the top spot, is to crank up the horniness to eleven and beyond.

Soon I was done feeling sorry for myself. Instead I was starting to imagine how sexy it was to be rejected. In my imagination there were, of course, other women around to witness, point and laugh. Soon they would all reject me as I crawled from foot to foot, begging for their acceptance. Soon, the real world, my right hand had pulled down my shorts and boxers and was busy doing what men’s hands tend to do at such times.

The fantasy was all very nice, but before I could come, my knees began to hurt. There was a hardwood floor in my living room, in front of the chair where my ex-girlfriend had sat before she got the hell out. I rose and got the hell into my bedroom, hobbling with my shorts around my ankles, falling back onto my favorite piece of furniture for some well-earned self-gratification. A four-poster bed, whose posts had never been used for the single reason I had bought that particular bed frame.

Lying there on the soft, comfortable mattress, I got down to business. She might call me a pervert, and I would show her just how true that was. In my head, in my filthy mind, she would be the star of the next fifteen minutes, protagonist of a final goodbye to a three month relationship that had just gotten to looking good until my kink ruined it.

I started out using just my fingers, trying to emulate the way only a woman can touch you. Soft, thorough, teasing, considerate, like her kissing you at that slow, lingering pace she enjoys so much.

Maybe it was the careful start that fooled me into believing everything was as it should be?

I soon got intensely hard, my huge and thick member shaking with desire, quivering barely half an inch above my lower belly, the fine fluid starting to form on the glistening head, wanting her body, needing her warmth. On her bedside table, the bedside table that she had used when she visited me rather, lay one of her tops. Satin, blue. I grabbed it with my free hand and put it to my nose. It smelled like her, like that seductive perfume that she wore, the one that made her smile and laugh when I said it made me horny.

I went on breathing through it, imaging she was there with me, smothering me while taking a firmer grip around my manhood. One final go at bliss before it was all over.

The whole setting was so erotic I should have exploded right there and then. But I didn’t. Instead I went on stimulating myself, went on breathing in her scent, went on feeling like I was almost, almost coming, like it was just around the corner, that I had only one more hill to climb before I reached Everest and could look out at the world below me in all its glory.

Soon I got desperate. I wasn’t coming! No matter how I tried, what I fantasized about, I wasn’t coming. Something like this had happened once or twice before, though never when I was this needy, and I knew just what to do. I sat up on the edge of the bed and began moving my wrist like I was dying for a milkshake. I had fifteen years of experience, I thought to myself. There was no way my manhood could resist this beating.

But it did. After a few minutes I was short of breath and my arm hurt. I began to flag. My efforts, that is, not the monster between my thighs.

I took a short rest, tried again. Same result. This was the point when I could have started to analyze the situation, investigating why nothing happened when I was way beyond anything I had ever felt before. However, since I was way beyond anything I had ever felt before, there was no way I was going to get cool and analytical about anything.

I needed a release, or I would die.

I jumped up and ran around the apartment, searching, looking for something that could help me stimulate myself. Some of her clothes were here in my place, she would have to ask for them at some point, nice but conventional. Wouldn’t help me like her sexy dress would have, the one with the bare back that she kept at her flat. Her leather boots? Same thing. Her one scrunchie that wasn’t just a thin elastic but some fuzzy, green thing? She had been wearing it when she left.

How about Internet porn? I had watched a lot of videos where bossy ladies were being really, really mean to handsome men with large members. Yeah, that would do it. Internet porn always worked.

I opened my laptop, located my secret folder, then opened the movie where that Asian chick was playing with the big hunk she had tied to a table. He had to choose between holding his breath and get jerked off, or choking down huge gulps of air and have his mast wobble on its own. I loved it because it was so obvious that both actors were enjoying what they were doing. The woman was giggling and pretending she felt sorry for him, while the men kept begging her to stroke faster and harder. There was no Viagra involved here, no fluffer waiting off-camera. This was real need all right.

The man came after 17:34 of torture. His violent orgasm was spent in vain because he began breathing as soon as the first drop of warm semen hit his belly. The woman shook her head, clicked her tongue, and watched the futile movements of her captive, hands off. Sexy as hell. But not sexy enough tonight.

I didn’t come after 17:34 of torture. As the film faded to black, I had to let go of myself, exhausted, unable to punish myself anymore.

Was this it? Was this where I had to give up? Would I have to go to bed with this raging hard-on under me? Would I be able to sleep or just toss and turn until Monday morning came along?

Those were the kind of questions where ‘no’ was the only viable answer. No, I couldn’t stop now. I wasn’t able to think of anything but my need. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, couldn’t even count to ten to save my life, I was sure.

I had one last chance. It was down in my storage area in the building’s basement, in a box. The equipment that I had hidden there since I started bringing this girl home. But that didn’t matter now, she would never come back to me. It was down there, waiting for me. The sexiest thing I had ever bought off an online sex shop. The only thing I had ever bought off an online sex shop.

I needed my equipment. It had never failed me before. It was the only thing that could save me now.

Even the thought of going down there to find it made me insanely horny, and insanely horny men tend to do insanely horny and even more insanely stupid things. I took off my flannel shirt and got my black satin one out of my wardrobe. It was smooth and delicious against my skin. I pulled my shorts off, let the edge of the shirt brush against the tip of my manhood. That felt so good, so good. What if it had been a woman’s dress? Oh why couldn’t it be a woman’s dress?

I threw my boxers away and pulled my shorts back up. They were loose and roomy, rubbing against my manhood in a completely different way than the underpants did, tickling and tugging me whenever I took a step. And there were a lot of steps down to the basement. I put my keys in my pocket, slipped a pair of flip-flops on my feet and closed the apartment door behind me.

The hallway outside was empty, stairs leading up and down, doors to the two other apartments on this floor. The walls were bare, impersonal. In my state I felt vulnerable, exposed. That was good.

I looked down. In my pants there was a huge bulge that couldn’t even try to masquerade as a pistol or a banana or anything like that. If I met someone, everything would be over and the dangerous sex maniac would be collected by a police car. On the upside, I would finally get to try on a pair of handcuffs for real.

I started down the steps. There were three flights of them down to the entrance door, and at normal speed I would have done it in less than a minute. Even the inconvenience of the rubbing manhood wouldn’t have slowed me down much.

But I was so damn horny I couldn’t bring myself to hurry. I wanted someone to show up, to see me, gasp in shock, scold me, detest me. As I walked, I kept tapping my rod, making it swing, making my mind fill up with a mighty noise.

I didn’t understand! I should have been creaming my shorts by now, semen dripping down on the hard stone steps. But I didn’t. Instead I was just going on getting higher and higher. Look at me, I was insane! I was putting my future at jeopardy just to get even more excited.

I descended one flight, two flights, then started on the last flight. I could see the entrance door, thick and wide and fitted with heavy locks. I took a step, looked at the door, took another step, kept looking at it. My eyes grew misty, my breath quickened. I imagined, I imagined, I imagined... And then it happened.

Key in the door, key turned, handle down, door opening in one trained, smooth motion. Suddenly two black women stood on the landing. One was wearing a flowery summer dress, the other a white skirt and pink top. That last one also wore a pair of hoop earrings that looked like they had been bought from Jack’s Store of Fantasy Favorites.

I’m Jack, by the way.

They had been out shopping, both of them carrying bags with fancy names printed on the sides. Perhaps they had teased their men until they had handed over their credit cards? The idea that they had paid for it themselves didn’t even occur to me.

They looked up at me, and the one on the flowery dress said, “Hi, Jack!” She lived on the second floor, and we were on nodding terms. I hadn’t told her I found her body close to worthy of worship, but the way the dress clung to her I bet she already knew that most mean was of that opinion—.

“Hi!” I said and the three of us exchanged smiles as we passed each other by.

No reaction from either. They had been in a hurry, were already halfway inside the door upstairs, and hadn’t looked to closely at me. Besides, I had had time enough, barely, to put my hands in my pockets, my right one pushing the flagpole against my belly. Not a perfect cover-up, but it had worked.

The door upstairs slammed shut and my hand began slapping my manhood around like Mike Tyson was loose and angry in my shorts. Again, if everything had been normal, I would have come, right here, right now. Remembering the two women and their clothes and their eyes and their smiles, their perfumes still lingering in the air.

No could do. I went on, down yet another flight of stairs, into the bowels of the earth, leaving behind the evening light coming through the windows, the mailboxes, and the bulletin board filled with notices from the building operators.

The basement was cold despite the summer outside, dark even after I had turned on the light switch, the occasional bulb unable to bring even a semblance of cheer to the labyrinth of large chicken wire cages that was each tenant’s storage area. Made me feel even more vulnerable, more exposed. Harder.

I was getting closer to my thing now, my equipment.

Down a corridor, then turning left, then facing right, and I could insert my key into a padlock and open a wire door. Just the sight of the padlock made my manhood respond. Crazy. What if I got a woman to come down here and lock me inside? Even crazier.

My little cage was filled with old textbooks, VHS movies and CDs, as well as some cardboard boxes with all the stuff that had been in my dorm. I hadn’t bothered to unpack them since I got my degree, my first job, and this apartment, a few years ago.

Deep inside one of those boxes, beneath a few old notebooks, lay a very anonymous plastic bag. I lifted the bag up like it held the holy grail. To me, it did. Contained within, to be shielded from mortal eyes forever, was the sexiest item I had ever held in my hands since I dated a girl who always wore tight leather skirts.

There was leather here, too. Thick leather, black leather, studded leather, sewn with a coarse thread. And metal. Shiny steel rings. Clasps.

I put the collar around my neck, so tight I couldn’t get all five fingers between my skin and the shiny leather. It was an inch wide and had one ring in the front and one in the back. The latter one was empty, waiting for that one girlfriend who would bring her own leash and take possession of me. My permanent lover, owner, wife.

Just feeling the leather against me was enough to bring me halfway to an orgasm. Or so I believed. I had to stop and catch my breath before I went on.

The front ring had a strap running through it. On each end of the strap there was a leather wrist cuff. I buckled one on to each wrist and took another moment to breathe before I could think again.

I had tied myself up. I had restrained my own movements. I couldn’t reach my toes, couldn’t raise my hands above my head. Sometimes I wished the buckles would refuse to open, make me dependent on some unknown woman to set me free. Which she wouldn’t do until she decided it was time, until I had behaved and done her bidding. Until she had had her fun.

Now, finally, I was ready to finish off this crazy erection. Good thing, too, standing here in my storage area looking like the less daring brother of the gimp from Pulp Fiction. If anyone came down into the basement right now...

The leather strap passing through the ring in front wasn’t very long, but it was long enough. I could move my left hand up to my throat to give my right hand more leeway, and then bend my head down to add another few inches. That would allow me just enough space to inflict a kind of awkward handjob on myself, the awkwardness being part of what made the exercise so intensely erotic.

This had all been true last time I tried it.

Not now.

The strap was simply too short. No matter how close my left wrist cuff was pressed to the front ring on my collar, no matter that I almost broke my neck bending it, my fingertips just couldn’t reach the target that yearned to be hit.

After a few minutes of frustration and of leaving deep, red marks on my throat and wrists, I straightened up and eyed my body with a pair of deeply suspicious eyes.

All right, I had hit thirty and wasn’t exercising as much as I should. Perhaps I even ate too much bacon at times. I could admit to all that. But at the same time, I didn’t lose several inches of reach in three months. No way, no how.

Had to be my back, then. My spine would become less flexible in time, and I was sitting hunched over my computer a lot at work.

I cursed myself for a few seconds, but then my primal urges started to assert themselves. All right, I couldn’t jerk off with the equipment on, but I still needed to do relieve myself. What if I took it off, brought it upstairs, and wore just the manacles while I smelled my ex-girlfriend’s top and watched the video? Sounded like a plan.

It was, until I found I could not get the wrist cuffs off.

That was strange. Very strange.

The buckle mechanism was the same on both collar and wrist cuffs. Simple, standard. Two metal pins went into one of a row of pairs of metal-rimmed holes set into the leather. You lifted the end of the leather, the pins slipped out, you were free. Simple as that.

Except I couldn’t tear the end of the leather from neither collar nor wrist cuffs. They were stuck like they were sewn there.

I tried, then I tried again, then one more time.

That’s when I should have begun to suspect foul play and magic. I didn’t. I was still a skeptic, still convinced that there had to be some sort of natural explanation for this. Perhaps the conditions down here in the basement had released some sort of glue like substance from the leather which now prevented me from breaking free. Far-fetched, but not as far-fetched as ‘a wizard did it.’

The next step should have been to be practical and sensible about it all. Fling that warm winter coat which lay spread across a cardboard box getting moldy, over my upper body, find a way to get hold of my keys, manage to get back up into my apartment. I had knives there and nothing else to do for the rest of the evening that fixing my own, stupid mistakes.

The problem was between my legs. The problem made sure that no matter what I decided to do, it would not be anything practical nor sensible.

I decided on the worst option. I did find the winter coat, but I didn’t pick it up. It was warm and soft, but I didn’t pick it up.

For a few moments I was lost in my wonderful predicament, humping the coat, feeling as humiliated as I had ever been before, starting to fantasize about how I could make things even worse for myself. I was even close to enjoying being unable to relieve the pressure if only I wasn’t so damn needy. In fact, I believe I would have stayed there until someone did come down here and explanations would have to be offered.

That didn’t happen.

There was a pull on my collar. Not a yank, only a highly insistent pull.

My mind raced through all the possible rational explanations.

The collar had gotten stuck in something, the wire or a rope. But there wasn’t anything behind me for it to stick in.

A leather clad dominatrix had sneaked up on me to claim me as her own, special pet and bring me back to her dungeon for an all nighter of intense, kinky play. Fat chance.

It was just my imagination, my skeptical side decided. There was no pull.

Then there was a pull that refused to be rationalized away, and as its strength slowly increased I got scared.

I didn’t believe in magic, didn’t believe in Gods or any kid of new age crap. But I also didn’t like it when it was night and the lights went out and I was all alone in the forest or the city or my apartment.

Civilized man is only one supernatural experience away from having five thousand years of cultural foundation pulled out from beneath his feet.

There was no-one there. No-one!

I didn’t cry out for help, but I did edge myself towards the chicken wire and bury my fingers in it in a desperate attempt to stay put, even though the tug was far from being that strong, yet.

There I stood for a minute, holding on to the wire lattice with my manacled hands while someone or something tugged at me. I wanted to cry, because I just couldn’t explain what was going on. A crazy rapist and serial murderer I could relate to, but not this.

The tugging wasn’t steady. It felt like it must do when a lady was getting tired of her little dog smelling that lamppost, yet was too soft hearted to drag it away. Tug tug, tugtugtug.

Please stop, please make it only a delusion brought on by the stress of my girlfriend leaving me, please make it only a dream, make me wake up in my bed with a boner and let me finish it off and get some good hours of sleep before Monday morning and work and all that.

Boner. That was the worst part of it all. My member just refused to give up. All through my fears and broken philosophies came stabs of primal, animal desire.

You’re collared, leashed, a dog, a captive, a slave. Right here, right now, all your dreams are coming true. Let go, Jack. Submit to Her who holds the leash. Let go of the chicken wire and let Her lead you to where She wants you to go.

My mind said, “No!”

My need, my steaming hot need said, “Yes!”

Magic leash, magic dominatrix, magic bondage sex. Let go, Jack.

My rational side screamed at my mind to stop fucking around, but that part of me had just suffered a killing blow.

Jack let go.

I went sideways out of my cage. The tugging force was at the back of my neck, while my preferred way of moving was face first. We reached a sort of compromise. I had to twist my head a lot, but I didn’t stub my toes or walk smack into a wall.

Tug, tug went my invisible leash, and I was led down a corridor, past other cages. They all looked alike, full of useless trash, and soon I had no idea where I was. The pull didn’t force me to move, but it was severe enough to surprise me and make me stumble. There was no rhythm behind it but that of someone’s urgency.

I managed to get one hand back towards the ring at my neck, but my fingers couldn’t find any sign of an invisible leash. The ring rose and fell with the tugs, though. Magic. Scary. And, damn you, my hungry man-meat, incredibly sexy.

The air was cold and stale, smelling of the collected possessions of hundreds of tenants. Someone had to be sweeping the floor at least once a year, because it was only a little messy. Far off, yet reverberating through the basement, was the sound of the huge central heating system hidden somewhere behind a locked door.

After some meandering through the bunker, I was led towards a door I couldn’t remember having seen before. There was nothing strange about it, just the same kind of heavy, metal door found in nuclear shelters all over the Western World. I got wary just the same. As far as I knew, all the doors leading up to the entrances of the building were on the other side of the labyrinth. Then again, the thing about labyrinths is that they will confuse your sense of direction.

Where did it lead? To the invisible dominatrix’ secret dungeon? I could only hope so. Part of me did. The thinking part.

I grabbed hold of the handle and forced the protesting door open. The leash was impatient when I wasn’t moving, tugging at me like She had just caught the big one and wanted to make sure the hooks got properly lodged in my mouth.

“Yes, yes!” I wanted to say. “I am coming! I don’t know who you are or why I am following and how come I am breaking every rule laid out on the ‘Don’t Be An Idiot’ poster, but I am coming!”

On the other side was a set of stairs. This was another place at which my super-ego ought to have asserted itself, slammed the door shut, and waited with my collar knocking my head against the cold metal until the janitor came to rescue me.

First of all, the steps led down. Way down. Below where the light from the closest bulb dared venture. Down beyond some other light source far in the distance. This was no sub-basement, this was the fire escape for that secret level you see in movies. You know, where the heroes enter a certain combination on the dial of a phone booth and it turns into an elevator and they keep going down, down.

Secondly, the steps and walls were roughly hewed stone. Could have been blasted out with TNT, but that’s not the feeling I got. I got the feeling the steps would be taking me down into an undisturbed Egyptian pyramid, or an ancient, Sumerian burial chamber, or the crypt of an early, heretical Christian Church.

It had no business playing the foundation for a sixties’ high rise building whatsoever.

As far as I knew this city hadn’t been founded until after the steam engine had been invented. No ancient civilization had been thriving here until they were defeated by the Romans and buried beneath the soil.

Yet the stairs were here and they went on and on. The tugging was real and it urged me down into the abyss.

The steps were all wrong. Maybe they were too tall, maybe they were shaped or angled the wrong way, but there was no way I could walk down in any kind of normal fashion. As normal a fashion as one can accomplish, being led on a leash and carrying a big stick that always got in the way. I had to think about what I was doing at each step since the invisible dominatrix did her best to pull me off balance and I didn’t have hands for clinging on to the walls.

I reached the strange-looking after a few minutes of this modern performance art. It was no light bulb, which I hadn’t expected, but it was neither an old-fashioned kind of oil lamp or even a flaming torch.

It was a flower, a large flower with red petals surrounding a yellow center that glowed in the dark like a lava lamp frozen in time. It grew straight out of a little crack in the wall, water trickling past it from above.

I knew flowers shouldn’t glow, that just didn’t happen. I also knew that the thing about plants was that they needed an external light source to survive, and the thing about dark, secret holes beneath basements is that they’re often not the brightest of places.

I wanted to reach out and touch the flower, but due to my own stupidity I couldn’t.

I wanted to stay and examine it more closely, but for some reason I was convinced to go down.

I wanted to find out what made the door up above, the one that was my only connection to sanity, suddenly bang shut, but I didn’t dare find out if I would be able to open it again.

I was getting scared, but the tugging on the leash just kept on being positive and enthusiastic. If only the thing at the end turned out to be something good. Or just something at all. What if I was dragged on forever? What if I ended up chained to a rock miles below ground to die of starvation, never seeing a living soul?

The invisible leash goaded me on, and eventually I could see something down there that wasn’t just stone steps. At an even later eventually the something was revealed as a door, and when ‘eventually’ had turned into ‘in the end’ the door showed itself as some sort of ancient, wooden door equipped with large, cast-iron hinges and a keyhole made for a key the size of a monkey wrench.

A sign was carved into the stone wall above the low door, between two more of the mystical flowery lights. It showed what seemed to be a very thin oval enclosed in a tight-fitting rectangle.

Yet, it meant more than that. Due to some small deviations from perfect geometry, the image was full of meaning. The thin oval was a little rounder and thicker at the base, perhaps? It was an erect manhood, I was sure. The rectangle seemed to be slightly bent to imprison and embed the oval. It was the sign of men being held in captivity by their lust. I just knew.

The door had a handle, and my collar was shaking like wild to get me to open it and step inside. I agreed, though not with the same zeal. This was it, there would be no more wanderings and stairs.

I pulled at the door, feeling a strange mix of apprehension and desire to get it over with, and stepped inside.

“Oh, hi! There you are!”