By the time Mara’s last client of the day started to shake, her own hands might as well have belonged to someone else.
She watched, sitting in the low chair near the padded table, as Lina’s breath hitched and unfurled. The woman’s bare feet flexed against the soft sheet, toes curling, jaw trembling just a little. Nothing overt, nothing pornographic—just the quiet storm she’d come to recognize in people when something finally loosened in their body.
“Stay with it,” Mara said softly. “Feel where it wants to go.”
Lina nodded, eyes closed. A slow, startled sound slipped from her throat—half laugh, half sob. Her fingers spread and then clutched at the blanket beneath her. Mara watched the ripple pass through her legs, the tension in her hips releasing one stubborn knot at a time.
Her role here was simple. Witness. Guide. Guardrail.
“Where is it now?” Mara asked.
“In… my chest.” Lina’s voice was thick. “But it’s like… it’s dropping. Lower.”
Mara’s pen hovered over the open notebook in her lap. She could feel the familiarity of this moment—the arc she’d seen hundreds of times. Fascia surrendering what it had held. Nerves giving up their white-knuckle grip. Pleasure being allowed in without being treated like an intruder.
Her own body might as well have been furniture.
“Let your breath follow it,” Mara murmured. “You don’t have to chase it. Just watch.”
Lina inhaled. Her spine arched slightly. A flush crept up her throat, filling the pale skin at her collarbone. She pressed her lips together as if she were embarrassed by how good it felt.
There. That tiny attempt to stifle. That was the hinge, always.
“You’re safe,” Mara added, quiet. “No one is taking this from you.”
The woman’s breath came out in a shudder. Her thighs pressed together. Not because Mara had touched her—she hadn’t laid a hand on her all session—but because the body sometimes remembered how to react without permission.
Pleasure and fear had been paired for too long. The work was untying the knot.
It was almost beautiful, watching someone reach the edge of something they’d been denied. Mara knew the markers by now. The small trembling in the fingertips. The eyes moving beneath lids. The way the neck lengthened, as if the body were offering itself to gravity.
Lina’s next exhale turned into a choked groan as the sensation finally tipped, cresting through her like a wave she’d spent years pretending didn’t exist. Not an orgasm, not exactly. Something gentler, more diffuse. A full-body sigh given shape.
Tears slid from the corners of her eyes.
“I’m…” Lina swallowed. “Oh God. I… I feel… light. I feel…”
“Don’t rush to name it,” Mara said. “Just breathe.”
She sat very still, watching Lina come down, watching the aftershocks soften. The room smelled faintly of sandalwood and the citrus cleanser she insisted on using between clients. Afternoon light leaked through the half-closed blinds in pale stripes, touching the small altar of stones and dried lavender on the shelf.
Inside Mara, nothing moved.
Her own chest rose and fell in measured, professional air. Her palms, resting on her knees, registered the texture of her skirt. Her feet were planted, solid, on the ground. Everything was correct. Measured. Appropriate.
It was like watching someone else feel through a sheet of glass.
When Lina sat up, eyes still wet, she smiled in that stunned way people do when they realize their body can still respond.
“I didn’t think…” she began, then wiped at her face. “I thought I was broken.”
“You’re not broken,” Mara replied automatically. The sentence slid out on well-used rails.
“But I…” Lina searched for words. “I haven’t felt that since before—” She stopped, the memory tightening her face. They’d spent weeks untying it. The ex-boyfriend who withheld affection until she “earned it,” the endless criticism, the humiliation when she tried to initiate intimacy. “It’s like my body was just… gone.”
Mara nodded. “It shut down to protect you. Today it realized it doesn’t have to do that forever.”
Lina looked at her as if she’d just been handed a new life.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “I don’t know how you… do this. Help people like that.”
Mara forced a small smile. “It’s your work. I’m just here to hold the space.”
She said it because it was true. And also because if she admitted that she didn’t know how she did it either—not anymore—the structure of this room might crack.
Lina fumbled for the glass of water on the side table. Her hand shook a little as she drank.
“Do you…” she hesitated, flushing. “Do you ever… I mean, with all this… doesn’t it… get to you? In your own body?”
There it was. The question under dozens of others. The curiosity people rarely voiced. Does this do something to you?
“It’s different when I’m working,” Mara said lightly. “Boundaries shift the experience. It’s not about me in here.”
That was the script. Clean, ethical, safe.
Lina nodded, accepting the answer she’d been given. She slid off the table, feet finding the floor, eyes still wide and a little dazed. The air seemed softer around her, lighter.
Mara felt nothing but a faint, familiar envy.
They scheduled the next session. Money changed hands. Gratitude lingered in the doorway like incense after Lina left. When the door clicked shut, the silence folded in on itself.
She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and looked at her hands.
They were steady again.
Of course they were. They were always steady during.
It was only later, when there was no one to witness, that the tremor started.
She wiped down the table, changed the sheet, straightened the small altar she always pretended was just decoration. Her office was minimalist by design—soft grays, warm wood, one large plant in the corner thriving in filtered light.
The only hint of chaos was the stack of journals on her desk, their edges softened by heavy use. Her handwriting lurked inside them like another person’s voice.
She didn’t open them now.
On her schedule, one name remained for the day. A new client, referred by someone she didn’t know. The intake form had been unusually blank. Under “chief concern,” just three words:
Can’t feel anything.
She checked the clock. Fifteen minutes.
Plenty of time to reset.
She went into the tiny bathroom, splashed cold water on her face, and stared at herself in the mirror. Dark hair pulled into a low knot, a few strands escaping near her temples. Lip balm, no lipstick. Neutral blouse; no jewelry except the thin silver ring on her index finger.
She looked like a therapist from a brochure. Calm. Trustworthy. A little tired, but in the polished way.
Her eyes, though. There it was. That peculiar flatness.
She pressed her fingertips into the hollow just below her throat, feeling the faint pulse beating there. The gesture was almost unconscious now, a check-in she never quite completed.
Nothing. No warmth spreading to her chest. No low hum of arousal at the memory of Lina’s release. No residual tenderness. Just… data. Another successful session.
Nine months, she thought, and watched the words form in her mind as clearly as if she’d written them on the mirror.
Nine months of brilliant results. Nine months of absolute absence.
She remembered the last time her own body had responded without calculation. Before the breakup. Before the conference. Before the night in the hotel bathroom when she’d locked the door and realized she couldn’t make herself come even with her own hand, even with porn playing on mute on her phone, even with every technique she’d taught clients.
Her ex had said it was stress. Her supervisor had said it was normal for clinicians to go through dry spells. Her doctor had asked if she’d tried “spicing things up.”
She had smiled, nodded, and lied.
Her body had quietly stayed gone.
A knock sounded at the office door—three precise raps, not tentative, not impatient. Just… exact.
Mara blinked, realized she’d been staring at her own throat, and quickly dried her face. She smoothed her blouse, checked that the soft music was still playing in the background, and stepped into the main room.
On the other side of the frosted glass, a blurred silhouette waited. Tall. Still.
For a second, her stomach did something strange—an odd, formless drop. She told herself it was just curiosity about the new client.
She opened the door.
The woman standing there looked nothing like the vague shape had suggested. Shorter than the shadow implied, hair clipped in a jagged bob, eyes darting quickly over Mara’s shoulder into the room.
“Mara Elowen?” she asked.
“Yes. Come in.”
“Sorry I’m early,” the woman said, slipping inside. “Traffic was… not as bad as I thought.” Her gaze flicked across the books, the plant, the altar, cataloguing everything with a streetwise speed. She wore a leather jacket despite the mild weather, hands shoved into the pockets like she was ready to bolt at any moment. “I’m Eva.”
“Eva,” Mara repeated, closing the door softly. “Nice to meet you. You can put your things on the chair there, if you’d like.”
Eva nodded, but didn’t sit. She stood in the middle of the room, weighing the space the way a boxer might weigh a ring. There was something coiled in her posture—energy that felt both defensive and restless.
Mara gestured to the armchair opposite her own. “When you’re ready.”
Eva finally sat, perching on the edge rather than sinking back. Her jaw was set. Mara picked up her notebook and pen, but didn’t open them yet.
“You wrote,” Mara began, “that you can’t feel anything. Can you tell me a little more about what that means for you?”
Eva gave her a sideways look, as if checking whether Mara was mocking her. When she saw only patience, she exhaled sharply.
“Sex,” she said bluntly. “I don’t feel… anything. With anyone. Not for years. I figured something was wrong with me, but the tests all came back fine.”
“Medical tests?” Mara asked.
“Yeah. Hormones, bloodwork. The doctor said it was ‘probably psychological.’ Which is his way of saying, ‘Not my problem.’” Her mouth twisted. “Then a friend said you helped her. Said you… helped her get her body back.” She said the last words like she didn’t quite believe in them.
Mara nodded slowly. “Your friend—Lina?”
A flicker of surprise crossed Eva’s face. “You can say that?”
“I’m not telling you anything she hasn’t told you herself,” Mara replied. “And I’m not saying anything about her sessions. Just putting faces to the network.”
“Right.” Eva studied her. “She said you… do some kind of… weird thing. Where people… feel stuff. Again.”
“There’s no weird thing,” Mara said, a hint of amusement warming her voice. “I work with breath, attention, and the nervous system. The body often knows how to move toward pleasure when it’s given permission.”
“And you don’t touch people.”
“Not in any way that crosses your boundaries,” Mara answered. “Sometimes we use light touch, with consent. Sometimes none. It depends on the person.”
Eva’s lip curled as if at an old joke. “Boundaries. Yeah.”
Mara made a quick mental note. The word had a history for this woman.
“Tell me about the last time you remember feeling… anything,” Mara said. “Doesn’t have to be sexual. Could be a shiver, a twinge, an impulse to lean in.”
Eva stared at the floor for a long moment. The clock ticked quietly on the wall.
Then she said, very flatly, “I remember feeling disgusted.”
“At yourself?” Mara asked gently.
“At him.” Her eyes sharpened. “But that’s not what you’re asking, is it?”
“I’m asking about your experience,” Mara said. “Whatever it was.”
Eva’s shoulders dropped a fraction. She pulled one hand out of her jacket pocket and tapped a scar on the back of it. “It was a while ago. Anyway, after that, it’s like my body just… opted out. Guys try, girls try, I try. Nothing.”
There was no embarrassment, just frustration. And underneath that—something else. Fear disguised as disdain.
“On a scale from one to ten,” Mara asked, “how much do you want to feel something again?”
Eva hesitated. “I wouldn’t be here if it was a one.”
“Is it a ten?” Mara prompted.
Eva’s gaze met hers, unexpectedly direct. “It’s an eleven,” she said quietly. “But I’m not here to cry and talk about my mother for six months. Either you can do your thing or you can’t.”
A flicker of defensiveness sparked in Mara’s chest. Not because of the words, but because of how strangely familiar they felt. The impatience. The refusal to linger in story when what hurt was the absence in the body.
She had said something similar to her own therapist months ago. That hadn’t helped either.
“I can’t promise anything,” Mara said. “But we can try something today. Just to see how your body responds. No touching. Just breath, noticing, and some guided focus. Does that feel manageable?”
She waited for the hesitation she usually got. The nervous laughter. The “I guess.”
Instead, Eva shrugged. “If you’re not touching me, what’s the worst that can happen?”
You feel nothing, Mara thought. And I fail you. And the last thing tethering me to the idea that I’m good at this snaps.
Out loud, she said, “Okay. We’ll go slow. If at any point you want to stop, you say so. Even if it’s just because you’re bored.”
Eva smirked. “You don’t seem boring.”
“Let’s find out,” Mara replied.
They shifted the chairs, adjusted the lighting just slightly. Mara had Eva sit on the edge of the padded table, feet flat on the floor. She sat across from her, not too close, hands visible on her own thighs.
“Close your eyes, if that feels okay,” Mara said. “You’re not being watched. You’re being accompanied.”
Eva snorted softly, but closed her eyes.
“Notice the places where your body touches the table,” Mara continued. “The weight in your legs. The way your clothes feel on your skin. You don’t have to like any of it. Just… notice.”
She guided Eva through the familiar sequence. Awareness of breath, without forcing it. A scan from crown to toes, naming sensations. Tight. Numb. Heavy. Fine.
“How does your chest feel?” Mara asked after a while.
“Like it’s not mine,” Eva said.
“Where do you feel most… present?”
A pause. “My jaw. It’s clenched.”
“Can you give your jaw permission to be exactly as clenched as it wants, for just a moment?”
Another pause. Then a tiny crack in Eva’s voice: “That feels… wrong.”
“Because you were told not to clench?” Mara asked.
“Because if I let it clench, I’ll probably scream. And that seems… unproductive for a first date.”
Mara almost smiled. “Screaming is not off the table in this room,” she said. “But let’s start smaller. Notice your jaw. And your teeth. And the way your tongue rests.”
She watched the small shifts in Eva’s face as she spoke. The tightening and easing around the eyes. The twitch at the corners of her mouth. She was good at reading these things. At following the thread of tension back to its source.
Normally, by now, she’d sense something. A ripple of heat, a thread of electric awareness in the room. The subtle, almost inaudible change in the quality of breath when someone’s body remembered it could feel.
Today, the air felt oddly… flat. Like a radio between stations.
She pushed the thought aside, stayed with the script.
“Now,” she said softly, “bring your attention to your pelvis. You don’t have to feel anything there. You’re just letting your mind visit the area, like walking past a door you don’t have to open.”
Eva’s shoulders tensed.
“Just notice the door,” Mara said. “Notice the doorknob. Notice the color of the door. You don’t have to go in.”
“How do you do that?” Eva murmured, eyes still closed.
“Do what?”
“Make it sound like less than it is.” Her throat worked. “It’s not a door. It’s a vault.”
Mara’s pen lay forgotten on the table beside her. She leaned forward just a little.
“What if today is just about standing near the vault without forcing it open?” she suggested.
Eva breathed out slowly. For a moment, her body softened. Mara watched carefully, waiting for the shift, the tiny tilting toward feeling. A pulse. A flicker of warmth.
Nothing.
“Do you feel anything in your pelvis?” she asked gently.
“Just… a big, blank… no,” Eva said after a moment. “Like that part of me is asleep with the phone off.”
Mara’s own pelvis might as well have been made of stone. She was too aware of the absence now, as if the word had conjured it.
“All right,” she said, keeping her voice even. “Stay with the rest of your body, then. If the vault says not today, we listen.”
They spent the rest of the session exploring safer ground. Ankles. Hands. The sensations in the scalp when you pay attention to it for the first time in weeks. Eva responded there, at least. Little flashes of curiosity, surprise at a tingling in her fingertips.
But when Mara gently nudged the focus back to the center of the body, to the hips, to the soft flesh between ribs and thighs, there was nothing. No resistance. No panic. Just… absence.
Like someone had erased that part from the map.
When the timer chimed softly to mark the end of the hour, they both flinched.
“How are you feeling?” Mara asked.
“Frustrated,” Eva said. “But not… worse, I guess.” She opened her eyes, pinning Mara there with a weary glare. “You didn’t do anything.”
Mara swallowed. “What did you need me to do?”
“Something,” Eva said. “Anything. People talk about you like you’re some kind of… witch, or something. Like you breathe near them and their bodies go off like fire alarms.”
Mara’s cheeks warmed. “People exaggerate.”
“Do they?” Eva asked quietly. “Because I just sat here letting you talk me into paying attention to my toes, and my vault is still welded shut.”
A dozen defensive explanations lined up in her mind. That it was just the first session. That sometimes numbness took time to thaw. That doing “nothing” was often the most important part.
None of them felt right in her mouth.
“I’m sorry you didn’t feel more,” she said instead. “We can explore other approaches next time, if you’re willing.”
Eva watched her for a long moment, then nodded once. “I’ll come back,” she said. “But if this doesn’t work, I’m done trying. With all of it.”
Her tone made it clear she meant more than therapy.
“We’ll take it one step at a time,” Mara replied.
Eva slipped her jacket back on, paid, and left with the same measured stride she’d entered with. When the door closed behind her, the room felt heavier.
Mara sat in the sudden quiet, listening to the hum of the air conditioner and the faint traffic outside. Her pen lay where she’d left it, waiting to record insights that never came.
She picked it up and wrote on the blank page:
Client reports numbness.
Body responds to peripheral focus.
Central absence persists.
Then, after a pause, underlined alone on the next line:
So does mine.
Her hand shook as she underlined it. Just once. A small tremor. Barely there, but undeniable.
She dropped the pen as if it had bitten her.
By the time she locked up and stepped out into the street, dusk had begun leaning over the city. The neon sign from the bar across the road flickered to life, buzzing faintly. Somewhere above, a siren wailed, then faded.
Her apartment was a fifteen-minute walk away, but she barely registered the route. Her feet carried her on autopilot past the laundromat with the flickering fluorescents, the dim storefront with tarot readings advertised in curling gold script, the alley that always smelled like old fryer oil and wet concrete.
Her body moved. Her mind floated somewhere two steps behind.
Client reports numbness. So does mine.
In the elevator up to her floor, she leaned back against the cool mirrored wall and let her head rest there. The fluorescent light above hummed, casting her skin in hospital pallor.
She pressed her palm against her lower belly, over the band of her jeans. The gesture was casual enough that if anyone had been there, it could’ve been dismissed as adjusting her clothes.
She pressed harder. Waiting.
Nothing rose. No answering warmth. No heaviness. No pull.
Just her hand on her own body, as impactful as placing it on a stranger’s shoulder in a crowd.
In her apartment, she kicked off her shoes, dropped her bag on the counter, and went through the motions. Kettle on. Tea bag in mug. Laptop opened to an inbox full of newsletters and conference invitations she couldn’t bring herself to read.
Steam fogged the window above the sink. Through it, the city blurred, turning the lit windows across the narrow gap into smears of pale gold.
She turned off the light and stood in the dim, just breathing.
Normally, on days like this, she’d distract herself. A book. A podcast. Something that made the inside of her head loud enough to drown out the silence of her body.
Tonight, the silence seemed louder.
She carried the mug to the couch, but didn’t sit. Just stood there, hands wrapped around the ceramic, watching the dark TV screen reflect a faint, ghostly version of herself.
“Can’t feel anything,” she murmured, echoing Eva without meaning to.
As if to contradict her, her hands began to shake again. Not violently. Just enough for the tea to ripple against the rim.
She set the mug down before she spilled it and stared at her fingers.
“What is wrong with you?” she asked them quietly.
They didn’t answer.
At some point, she wound up in bed. She wasn’t sure when. The night became a series of small, disjointed actions—brushing her teeth, pulling on a soft shirt, sliding between cool sheets. The kind of things a person does because they remember they’re supposed to.
Her body lay on the mattress like something placed there rather than inviting the space.
She turned off the light.
Darkness slipped over the room, thick and complete. The city’s glow barely made it through her curtains. For a while, she just listened to the sounds of the building—pipes ticking, a distant television, someone’s laughter two floors down.
Sleep didn’t come.
Her thoughts looped: Lina’s flushed face, Eva’s flat stare, the way the air had stubbornly refused to change during the last session. Her own hand pressed to her lower belly in the elevator, waiting for a response that never came.
She rolled onto her side, pulled a pillow against her chest, and tucked her knees up. Her hands shook again, fingertips tingling as if she’d held them under too-cold water.
Breathe, she told herself. The way she told her clients. In. Out. Notice the rise and fall. Stay with it.
Her temples throbbed.
At some point, the shaking slowed. Her muscles loosened, not into pleasure, not into release, but into the heavy, reluctant surrender of exhaustion.
The boundary between thinking and dreaming thinned.
She became aware, dimly at first, of another sensation. The peculiar feeling of being watched.
It wasn’t the panicky, paranoia-tinged dread of imagining someone at her window. It was subtler. Like the almost-physical awareness of eyes on the back of your neck at a conference when someone recognizes you.
In the dream, she was still in her bed. That much she knew. The sheets beneath her palms felt exactly the same. The weight of the blanket over her legs. The distant hum of the city.
But the darkness had changed.
It felt… occupied.
Her breath slowed, deepened. Not because she was calmer, but because the air had thickened, each inhale dragging slightly as if passing through invisible fingers.
She tried to move and found that every motion was dream-heavy, her limbs wrapped in velvet.
Someone was in the room.
She didn’t hear footsteps. No shifting of floorboards. Just the quiet certainty that the space near the foot of her bed was no longer empty.
Her mind scrambled for reasons. An intruder. A memory. A stress hallucination.
The fear she expected didn’t come. Instead, there was a strange, low thrum in her chest. Not arousal. Not exactly. More like the body’s animal alertness when a predator and a lover are still undecided categories.
Her eyes adjusted—dream-vision, not real sight—and she saw him.
A shape first. Tall. Lean. Standing in the thick dark as if it were water he’d waded into long ago. The edges of him were indistinct, as if the shadows preferred him and clung a little too tightly.
He didn’t move. Didn’t speak.
Just looked at her.
She couldn’t see his face, not clearly. The absence of detail made it worse. Her mind filled in possibilities—sharp cheekbones, a mouth half-amused, eyes that had seen too much. None of them could be confirmed. All of them felt right.
“Who are you?” she tried to say, but the words came out voiceless, trapped behind her teeth.
The air around her mouth cooled, as if something had leaned closer to listen.
Her hands, resting uselessly on the sheet, stopped shaking.
The sensation of being watched sank deeper, sliding under her skin. Not invasive. Not yet. Just… precise. As if whoever stood there was cataloguing her the way she catalogued clients. Breath. Pulse. Tiny shifts in muscle and tone.
He tilted his head slightly, the way someone might when examining a painting. She had the dizzy, unmoored thought that she was the one on display now. Her body. Her absence.
For the first time in months, she felt undeniably aware of every inch of herself. Not burning. Not aching. Just… present.
The stranger in the dark seemed to notice the change. It was in the way his stance altered by a degree, a fraction of tension releasing. An almost-sigh in the air.
His hand moved, slow and deliberate, from his side. He didn’t reach for her. Didn’t close the distance.
He simply lifted his palm, letting the dream’s darkness highlight the gesture.
The invitation—if that’s what it was—hung between them, weightless and heavy at once.
Mara’s body, so stubbornly absent for so long, hummed with a faint, startled awareness.
It felt, disorientingly, like being very, very close to tasting something after a long famine—without yet knowing whether it would feed her or starve her further.
The last thing she saw before the dream folded in on itself was the outline of his fingers curling slightly, as if he were holding back from touching the air between them.
As if he were hungry.
As if he were waitin
