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  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you use sexually explicit images as a tool during masturbation?”

  Fortunately, I don’t blush easily, and we were far beyond that point already anyway. “Sometimes.”

  “Literature, photographs, or videos?”

  “All of the above.”

  Check. Check. Rustle. Rustle. I was getting wet. The interview couldn’t have been more clinical. The subject, however, was getting to me. Talking about sex in any form, in any fashion, under almost any circumstance, turns me on.

  “Have you ever used sexually explicit images during mutual masturbation with a partner?”

  “How many people are going to read the interview form?”

  Dark eyes met mine. “One. Me.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  Dr. Adams put down her pen and placed both hands on the desk, her fingers lightly clasped. She regarded me with a slight tilt of her head and a contemplative expression. “If at any time, for any reason, you want to withdraw from the study, you simply need to tell me. I will be administering all of the tests and collecting all of the data.”

  Well, that got me nice and hard. Administer away. The sooner the better. I nodded.

  “I’d like to start tomorrow. Can you be here at eight a.m.?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s important that you be well rested and in as relaxed a state as possible. I know that may be difficult, but I assure you, there is nothing painful associated with any part of the study.”

  “I promise to go to bed early.” I grinned.

  “And please remember the stipulation regarding abstinence.”

  How did she know that the first thing I wanted to do as soon as I was alone was jerk off?

  “Got it.” After all, she wouldn’t know. If I did it. Or if I just happened to be thinking about her when I did.

  ***

  At five minutes to eight the next morning, I knocked on the door with the small plastic nameplate that read V. Adams, PhD. She answered immediately. Today, she wore a moss green shell, hemp-colored linen trousers, and low-heeled brown boots. Her lustrous hair was still severely tamed and tied back with a scarf.

  “Good morning, Ms. Burns.”

  I laughed. “Could you call me Robbie? There’s no way I’m going to be able to get excited if you keep calling me Ms. Burns.”

  “Get excited?” she asked as we started to walk down the hallway in the direction she indicated with a raised hand.

  “Well, the only reason I can figure for the questions you asked yesterday and the stipulation that I not jerk...ah, have an orgasm any time except during the course of the study is that I’m going to need to do it here.”

  “Let’s save this conversation for later,” she replied evenly. She removed several keys from her pocket and opened an unmarked door at the end of a hallway. Inside was one large room that held a leather recliner in the center surrounded by electronic equipment on rolling carts, a bank of video monitors, and a small glassed-in booth in one corner. From what I could make out, the interior of the booth was wall-to-wall equipment. I also saw a microphone and headset resting on the counter.

  Dr. Adams checked the thermostat just inside the door and turned it up. The room was already quite warm. Not overly so, but, I realized, warm enough that someone without much in the way of clothing would be comfortable. Holy shit.

  “Today,” she said as she gestured to the recliner, “we are just going to establish baseline values.” She leaned down, opened a drawer in the bottom of the oversized chair, and withdrew two white sheets, one of which she spread out over the recliner. Turning to me, she held out the other. “Please undress completely and sit here. I have a few notes to make before we begin.”

  “I guess you’ll tell me what I need to do when the time comes, huh?”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be given specific step-by-step instructions.”

  Under other circumstances, that sounded like it could be fun. The psychologist went into the tiny booth and must have adjusted the lights, because the overheads in the main room dimmed and the booth went completely dark. I knew she was in there, but I couldn’t see her. It’s not like I didn’t know what was coming. Ha ha. I took off my clothes and got as comfortable as possible, which wasn’t very. Hell, my clit was the only thing that wasn’t twitching.

  It couldn’t have been more than five minutes before Dr. Adams came out of the booth.

  “Ready?” Her voice was soft and warm. Or maybe it was just the room.

  “All set.” I think I sounded pretty confident. Usually, I am pretty confident about most everything, particularly sex. At the moment, I was terrified I might have performance anxiety and blow the very handsome stipend she’d mentioned the day before. Besides that, I wanted to appear studly in front of her. Since she hadn’t given me the slightest reason to think she had any interest in me whatsoever other than as a study subject, I couldn’t say why.

  “Good. I’m going to be connecting you to various monitoring devices,” she said as she rolled the carts containing the electronic equipment closer to me.

  Most of what she attached I recognized—EEG pads on my forehead, EKG leads on my chest, arms, and legs, and a blood pressure cuff around my left biceps. When she motioned me to lean forward so she could run a thin flexible strap around my chest just below my breasts, I asked, “What’s that for?”

  “Respiratory rate and excursion.”

  She was so matter-of-fact about everything that I relaxed without even realizing it. Until she reached for the little alligator clamp with the thin red and blue wires trailing from the tiny jaws. We’re talking minuscule, maybe a half an inch long—too small to be a nipple clamp. I had an uneasy feeling about where that was going to go.

  “Uh...”

  “This morning,” she said conversationally as she stood beside me with the tiny clamp dangling from her fingers, “we’re going to take baseline measurements during unstimulated masturbation.”

  “Isn’t that an oxymoron?” I couldn’t take my eyes off the little tiny teeth along the edges of the little tiny clamp. “Where are you putting that?”

  “First question first.”

  I swear to God I heard a hint of laughter in her voice.

  “Unstimulated in the sense that we won’t be using any visual aids. I’d simply like you to masturbate to orgasm unassisted by anything other than...well, whatever you ordinarily use in terms of mental encouragement.”

  “So fantasizing is okay?” I was struggling not to inch my way over to the far side of the chair. Escape was impossible at this point, unless I wanted to hotfoot it buck naked through the psychology building with electrodes hanging off my body.

  “Absolutely. This,” she said, indicating the device in her hand, “is a tonometer, designed to measure turgidity in the clitoris.” She must have seen my pupils dilate. “I promise, you won’t even know it’s there.”

  “Where exactly are you attaching it?” There was no way she was closing those little tiny serrated jaws over the head of my clit. No fucking way. Not for a million bucks.

  “Just distal to the junction of the corpora with the clitoral body.”

  “Translation?” I asked through gritted teeth.

  “On the shaft at the base.”

  “Okay. Go ahead.” As I was fairly sizable, I figured that thing couldn’t hurt too much.

  “I’d let you do it,” she said evenly as she drew the sheet up to my waist and leaned over, “but it needs to be precisely positioned to pick up small variations in pressure.”

  I tried not to tense my thighs and told myself that this was just like a visit to the gynecologist’s office as she spread me open slightly with the fingers of one hand and exposed my clitoris. Oh yeah, right. I never get a hard-on in the gynecologist’s office. To my acute embarrassment, the second she touched me, I got stiff. Great. Then I felt the slightest bit of pressure in my clit, which only excited it more, and she was straightening up again and adjusting the sheet. I stole a
look at her face, but she had that same dispassionate expression she always wore. I was just another lab rat.

  “Comfortable?”

  “Oh yeah. Perfectly.” I was afraid to move in case something fell off. “There’s a problem, though.”

  One of her perfectly sculpted brows rose infinitesimally. “Oh?”

  “How am I supposed to masturbate with that little thing on my clitoris?”

  “It may fall off, depending upon how vigorous you need to be. But all data is information. Try not to pay any attention to it.”

  Right. It should be a piece of cake to jerk off while attached to a bunch of machines with a beautiful woman watching and a little probe attached to my clit. No wonder they paid a lot of money for this.

  “It would probably be helpful if you closed your eyes while I check the calibrations.” Then she turned and walked away.

  I leaned my head back and did as she said. Behind my closed lids, I could tell that the room got a little bit darker. I can’t say that I was relaxed, but part of me was enjoying this. I’d liked her touching me, even in such a distant and clinical way. Her fingertips were soft and smooth and gentle as she’d attached the electrodes, and she’d handled my clitoris like she knew what she was doing. I pictured her eyes and the honeyed timbre of her voice, and my clit twitched.

  “What are you thinking of?” her voice asked from a speaker somewhere nearby. The acoustics were good, and she sounded as if she were sitting right beside me.

  Something told me that the only way this would work was if I was honest. “You.”

  “What about me?”

  “That I liked it when you touched me.”

  “Would you touch yourself now, please.”

  “Is there a time limit?” I slid my hand under the sheet and rested my fingers on the inside of my right thigh.

  “Not at all. Take as long as you need.”

  I kept my eyes closed as I tentatively ran my index finger between my labia and up to the undersurface of my clitoris. It was nice. It’s pretty much impossible to touch an area with that many nerve endings and not feel something. Plus, my clitoris was intimately associated with my hand, and I had pretty strong conditioned responses to fondling it. Namely, I got wet after a few seconds, and if I fooled with it for much longer than that, I wouldn’t be able to stop until I came. Out of habit, I carried those first droplets of thick moisture on the tip of my finger up to the head of my clitoris and circled it. I got a little harder. Intending to squeeze the head, I inadvertently brushed the alligator clamp with my thumb and caught my breath.

  “Sorry.”

  “No problem. You’re doing fine.” There was a beat of silence where all I could hear was my own rapid breathing. Then she murmured, “I’d like you to tell me on a scale of one to ten how you would rate your current level of excitement. Ten being imminent orgasm.”

  God, she had a great voice. And a fabulous face. And she was watching me jerk off. The sudden realization that I was going to come in front of her, for her, hit me in the stomach like a sledgehammer. I soaked my hand.

  “Robbie?” Her voice caressed me. “On a scale of one to ten?”

  “Six.” Christ, how did I know? I was hard as stone and wet and every time I ran my trembling fingers over my clitoris, my hips gave a little jump. Somewhere in my increasingly addled brain I wondered what that little device clamped around my clit was measuring now. Because I certainly felt like I was going to explode. I just needed something to get me past the last bit of nerves. “Can I use two hands?”

  “Of course. Do whatever makes you feel good.”

  I slid my other hand between my legs and toyed with the swollen labia, manipulating my clitoris faster between thumb and index finger. I was starting to get that going-to-need-to-come-soon feeling. I picked up speed with my hand and moaned quietly.

  “One to ten, Robbie.”

  “Eight,” I gasped. I curled two fingers inside and rubbed my clit harder. “Oh fuck.” I hadn’t meant to say anything, but I couldn’t help it. I pushed my hand deeper, working the head of my clit frantically with my fingers. My stomach gave a warning clench. “Jesus. Nine.”

  “I know you’re close,” the soothing voice, so much like a touch, whispered from somewhere nearby, “but if you can, talk to me as you approach orgasm. Tell me what you feel.”

  I whimpered, I think. I turned my head and opened my eyes, trying to see her through the glass. I imagined her watching me, then I imagined her touching me, and the fingers stroking me rapidly to orgasm became hers. “I’m so hard now, need to come so much. Almost there...close...oh yeah. Just touch me right there...a little faster, baby. Just a little harder.” I arched my back as the tendrils of orgasm fluttered and curled along my spine. Blinking, I tried to focus on where I knew she must be, but my vision was tunneling as every cell in my body ignited. “Oh God. Ten. Oh yeah, please, ten.” I surged upright in the chair as my stomach convulsed, my hand moving so rapidly as I forced out the orgasm that the clamp flew off my pulsating clitoris. “Jesus,” I groaned, “I’m coming.”

  Somewhere in the middle of it all, the top of my head blew off. God only knows what the EEG must’ve shown. I fell back, boneless, my breasts heaving under the chest band, my heart hammering. It took me a minute, maybe more, to get my breath back. When I was finally able to open my eyes, she was standing beside me. Her face, that beautiful elegant face, was still and serene. But her eyes were liquid and hot.

  I smiled, a lazy sated smile. “I screwed up.”

  “How?” Her question was curious, her voice throaty and low. She didn’t move a muscle, but I felt her fingers on my skin.

  “You can’t use those readings for baseline values.” I was still trembling and my voice was shaky. I sucked in air and tried to calm down. “That wasn’t my normal self-induced orgasm.” I shivered as an aftershock gripped me. “Oh man, not at all.”

  “Oh?”

  I nodded, still unable to lift my head, watching her face. She was smiling now, too. “I shouldn’t have thought about you while I was doing that. It turned the ten there at the end into a hundred.”

  Something close to pleasure flickered across her face and then disappeared behind her composed, clinical expression. But she couldn’t hide the satisfaction in her voice.

  “Well, I shouldn’t worry too much about that. That’s what bell curves are for.”

  And I couldn’t wait to plot the next data point.

  PHASE TWO: VIDEO

  “Do you think we could switch our sessions to the evening? When I come this hard, I’m not much good for anything for a while, and I have classes in the morning.”

  Two days later, the words still reverberated in Van Adams’s mind, as did the memory of how Robbie had looked when she said this. She’d still had that soft, dreamy look in her eyes that she got immediately after she orgasmed. Over the previous three weeks, they’d had multiple sessions in the lab to establish baseline control values for the psychosexual imprinting study that Van was conducting in the experimental psychology department. By the time Robbie had made the request to change the meeting times, Van had come to recognize how Robbie looked throughout the various stages of arousal, at the moment of climax, and during the postorgasmic recovery stage. She knew how Robbie moved as she climbed through the levels of excitement to orgasm, the restless twitching of her limbs and progressively more frantic thrusting of her hips keeping time to the rapid movement of her hand beneath the crisp white sheet. She knew the way Robbie sounded, from the first slight hitch in her breathing to the soft moans and muttered pleas as she masturbated to orgasm.

  Of course, Van’s only interest during phase one of the study was in Robbie’s physiological responses during the phases of sexual arousal and release as indicated by heart rate, blood pressure, brain wave pattern, respiratory rate, and pressure gradients in the erectile tissue in the clitoris. These readouts were carefully tabulated and charted, means and standard deviation calculated, and time-response graphs constructed. T
he fact that as Robbie approached orgasm she always turned her head to stare into the glass observation booth where Van sat watching, or murmured soft endearments while holding Van’s eyes in the midst of her climax, or smiled up at Van as if they shared a secret while she relaxed in the aftermath of her release, had no bearing on the study and was therefore of no consequence. Besides, Van knew she was invisible inside the isolated chamber where she dispassionately observed, methodically recorded, and neutrally hypothesized.

  I know she can’t see me. Then why does it feel as if she is looking at me, for me? Why do I feel as if she’s reaching out to me as she’s coming? She’s very beautiful when she orgasms—so expressive and free, unlike anyone else—

  Van pulled herself up short, appalled by the way her concentration had wandered. Subjective observations such as these were of no clinical value. She was only interested in reproducible data. That’s what the monitors and recording devices were for. After all, sexual arousal and orgasm were merely physiologic responses that could be explained and measured like any other natural phenomenon. Of course, there was a mind-body relationship, which was why the effect of various stimuli on response rates and magnitude were of scientific and behavioral interest. That was part of the purpose of the study. How a particular individual might appear during those brief moments of neuronal discharge and vasospasm had no bearing whatsoever on her work. And therefore did not warrant her consideration.

  The alarm on her wristwatch sounded. 6:25 p.m. Robbie would arrive any minute. She was always on time. Of course, this was their first evening session, and perhaps she had been held up by something. A last-minute phone call, an engrossing dinner conversation, an afternoon interlude with a lover.

  What are you thinking? She said she was single. Plus, she knows she can’t engage in sexual activity outside the study because it might lead to orgasm. And she’s not allowed to orgasm with anyone except me. Van gasped at the misstatement. Except during the study. I meant she’s not allowed to orgasm except during the study.

  Van slipped her fingers over the inside of her wrist and felt for her radial pulse. Sixty-eight beats per minute. Elevated. And she felt a little flushed.