“Every time you please yourself without my permission, you will spend a week alone. You’ll hear from me next Sunday.” It felt like one of the longest weeks of her life. Seconds ticked in her mind so slowly she found herself wanting to scream out loud. He hadn’t contacted her once. He hadn’t responded to any of her texts. She began to wonder if he was still there, still real, still paying any attention to her at all. She hated silence. It trapped her in her head where endless loops and elaborate labyrinths sprung up with every new idea about him, where he was, what he was doing, what he was thinking, how he was thinking about what he was thinking, what he read, what he listened to, what captured his eye, what delighted and amused him – all of it. She wanted to know all of it and all of him. She was obsessed. Her mind like a dog with a bone turning thoughts and ideas over and over until she had sucked the marrow of them dry. He was distracting her at every turn out of absolute nothingness. She was pinned like a butterfly on an entomologist’s corkboard. She considered ripping her wings off and returning to her Caterpillar state. Was that even possible? Going back to before he captured her wings? It infuriated and excited her in equal measure. She began to ritualise her affliction. She undressed and laid herself on her bed shrouding herself in her scarf. The icy touch of the silk began to thrill her nerves merely by its caress. Her body made no distinction between the nothingness of the scarf and her imagination. She imagined his hand touching her scarf and the scarf touching her. It was almost a spiritual transference that she conjured out of thin air. She read and re-read his texts imagining his voice, giving them more life than they deserved. She was playing a game of chicken with herself. If her body could take her over the edge where her mind lost its will to stop her hands would she give in to her body? How far would she go before she restrained herself? Her ability to imagine was getting sharper. Her ability to experience phantom arousal was acute. Why was she so easily obsessed? And why was she never obsessed about? She believed her independence prevented her from being anyone’s object of obsession. She never showed her need to anyone, and there was something about vulnerable women who drew on men’s obsessive qualities. Why was he so impervious? Why wasn’t he writhing, unable to concentrate or work. Why was he able to not make contact so effortlessly? She thought of her muse. It was Lolita’s simultaneous promise of pleasure and perfect innocence about what that pleasure could be that snared Humbert, wasn’t it? Lolita was indifferent to her own carnality. Lo was never a threat. Dolly was always immature, and Lola never truly emerged, or Humbert would have evaporated like a monster under the bed. She was already a Lola and that was somehow more threatening than enticing to all the Humberts she encountered. She wanted mind, body and soul. To the soulless Humberts, that was perfectly fine for them, but she couldn’t accept their lack of depth, their lack of consequence, their lack of meaning. She needed a soul more than she needed the physical – but those with souls aren’t willing to give them up – especially to a woman like her. The risk was too much and there were far too many other women who wouldn’t extract such a high price. Safer was the better choice for men of substance. For those men, Icarus was a cautionary tale. But she knew that heat that melted Icarus’ waxen wings was also the fire that could have held his heart aloft for eternity if he had only embraced it instead of fearing it. If an Icarus got close enough for her to melt his wings, she would have held him so safely and tightly in her light that he would never want for anything - but no one ever dared get that close. As soon as the wax warmed and began to soften, they flew away to cooler air. She had fallen asleep on afternoon and dreamt of being chased. Loving the thrill of trying to get away. She woke up to the convulsions of an orgasm that she could not completely fulfil. She tried to relive the dream. The running. The knowing it was futile. Getting away was not an option. She wanted to be caught. She felt his weight, his penetration, and then..She was the one penetrating. She was him reaching deeply inside the taut, nubile Lolita beneath her hands that was a younger, nymphic version of herself. Her hips thrusting to reach that primordial eruption of ejaculate, the spray of seed and the smell of freshly cut grass filling her senses as wave after wave of pleasure convulsed her out of the dream. The higher, brighter pitch of bliss projecting out of her into the world as a man was so different from the deeper, darker inundation of gratification she experienced as a woman. She began to notice bodies as they moved across her path. She began to see everyone as prey that she could pounce on at any moment. She began to wonder what it would be like to pull that random stranger from the street into the alley and mount him against the cold brick wall. She began to imagine wondering the streets in nothing but a shift dress, so she could be taken from behind by any man who noticed she was available for such random delights. There were so many ways she could satisfy her lusts now. She was going mad trying to control her body’s hunger. She stopped eating. If she couldn’t feed her sexual hunger because of what he demanded, then she wouldn’t feed her nutritional hunger just to prove her self-control was hers. She went for 3 days without food. She would be lean and hungry for him in more ways than he would know. All day Saturday she railed at him in her mind for his lack of decorum. Did he think he could just show up at her door tomorrow afternoon or text her to meet him without warning? She cursed his name, his blood line and his arrogance. She made pacts with herself that she would defy him completely. She even considered making arrangements with someone else tomorrow afternoon, so she wouldn’t have to lie when she said she was busy, and she could taunt him with the idea of someone else indulging all the pent-up passion which had been coiling inside her all this silent week. At 00:01 she received his text. “I’m at your door.”