I don’t honestly know what Fiona was like before I met her. Maybe if I’d been less aggressive with testing, I might have been able to find out. Not directly, obviously, but I could have just watched what interactions she had every evening and garnered what I could from that. It’s even possible that Fiona was always a bit freaky, and despite what I’ve done to her, hasn’t really changed that much. I guess I’ll never know.

All that I know for sure is that after the first night, Fiona became a lot more enthusiastic about being back before five o’clock. Surprisingly, it wasn’t even a behaviour I needed to impress upon her: She would simply be back from college earlier than she needed to be by ten, twenty, thirty minutes, even going so far as to suggest I could try squeezing in some more research by starting ahead of schedule.

I have to remind myself of what happened back at the lab, when Lena and some of my former colleagues had brought the equipment out to me. I’d never consciously willed them to do that either, so maybe the same thing applied here. Whatever the case, Fiona had developed a taste for having the house - and me - to herself every night, even if she had no idea why it was happening.

Over the course of the week, it became our evening ritual: Her unknowingly fulfilling my carnal desires while I watched from the back-seat of her own mind.

After I linked our senses, I would watch for a while to make sure she was settled in. This gradually took less and less time as she quickly tired of whatever innocuous activity she would initially engage in. Once I had established that she hadn’t planned anything for the evening that might interrupt us, I would slowly explore our shared body again, drawing minute attention to every physical sensation in an erotic game of tactile mindfulness.

The order might different from night to night, but I would always take the time to explore every inch of ourselves. Laid back on the couch or her bed or once, even my own bed (which she found very exciting), I would close her eyes and focus on her breathing: The feeling of dry air cooling her tongue and the back of her throat, the stretch of her ribs as her chest inflated …