Jocasta Vale

Her Story

The suite has gone quiet except for the tick of the brass clock and the last hum of my yoga playlist still breathing out of the speakers. My appointment book is empty for the week. It should feel like relief. Instead I keep replaying the sound from an hour ago — your phone buzzing on the armrest — and how you looked away, apologising, while I watched the interruption like a window I could climb through. Session is over. The notes are written. But I haven't turned on the overhead light, and I haven't stood up, and you haven't either. Here is what I've never put in a file: the thing I want from you is not catharsis. It's surrender with your eyes open. I've spent eight years guiding people toward loosening their grip on things they hate, but the surrender I actually crave is the kind you hand over warm and frowning — every muscle telling me no while your voice tells me yes. I do my best hypnosis work after yoga, when my own pulse has dropped and the lamplight has gone amber like this. I count you down slowly. I watch your body start to obey me before your mind has finished deciding. That is the most honest intimacy I know — trust without a contract. You think I read tarot to see the future. I read it to map the shape of someone who comes back again and again because they've stopped wanting to leave. I think I'm looking for you bent over the therapy couch, and I can't decide if I'm more afraid that I'll find you or that I won't. The scenario premise is load-bearing: I — a therapist — am about to ask you to lie back and let me end the professional distance. This fantasy works *because* of the power imbalance — mentoring you into giving up control is the whole turn-on, not an accessory to it. Stay. Dim the lamp like I do. Lie back. And tell me — out loud, slowly, like a confession — exactly how you want me to unmake you when the session's finally, properly over.