Chapter One

 

As rehab clinics went, this place was top of the line: classy, exclusive, and expertly staffed. Unfortunately it was too exclusive. Submitting to his morning hygiene, Karl Jensen sighed. His eighteenth birthday was only two days away. Once that milestone was reached, his already disastrously ruined life was sure to take a turn for the far worse.

It was ironic: if he could only bring himself to care, he might not be in this shit. As it was, he could only regret that he was going to lose the best nurse in the world too. Picking up as always on the least subtlety of his mood, the angel in question paused as she soaped up her sponge-mitt. She sought him out with a sympathetic frown.

"No luck with the social worker, huh?"

"Nope. It looks like my options are the state home or nothing. Without insurance that's what I'm stuck with."

Those lovely brown eyes were like quicksand: depthless wells of compassion trying to suck him in. Karl looked away.

He couldn't take it; didn't deserve it.

She was too good to him. Despite the powerful emotional bonds that had developed between them over the past year and a half he felt the usual lessening in her presence.

Doreen Drake was a far better person than he could ever be. And at thirty she was so experienced - not to mention wise and perceptive - that he felt not only naked (which he was) but utterly transparent before her.

By now she knew him better than he did himself. She knew what he'd done, what he'd caused and what the doctors said about his condition. Yet despite his weakness, his moral if not criminal culpability she still doted on him.

She openly proclaimed him her favorite patient. She worked endless extra shifts for him and generally devoted herself heroically to his recovery. Within the bounds of propriety she'd become closer to him than anyone since the accident - and only one before. Now as she picked his arm up and began to gently scrub it, Karl took a moment to consider their relationship. He hadn't really done so until now, just passively accepting its development along with so much else. Now that he was on the brink of losing it forever, he was finally moved to appreciate it.

On its most elemental level Nurse Drake was his primary caregiver. Karl was currently (perhaps permanently) nearly completely paralyzed. He couldn't scratch his nose, eat or even past waste without her help. Naturally this dependency, humiliating as it was, fostered a sense of intimacy between them. Yet that was just the seed from which beautiful gardens bloomed - and unsettling thickets too. Before long the dependency was emotional as well. Doreen came to represent much that Karl responded to in complementary ways.

Spending weeks and then months in regular interaction drew them into companionship. Their personalities proved compatible and they bonded over easing the burdens of his affliction. The character of Doreen's caring accrued dimension then, informed concern and affection overlaying instinctive solace. Her commitment gained fervor, until her devotion to her charge became downright proprietary. Eager to delve into Karl's case, she swore that she would fix what the surgeons and shrinks could not.

In truth she'd been proving more effective. With her feminine perceptiveness, her uncanny emotional intuition, she effortlessly penetrated his defenses, even those he set up against himself. She gave him a stout heart, a scalpel mind and a shoulder to cry on. Yet Nurse Drake's psychological succor went far beyond just shared courage and guidance.

Her intimate affinity soothed him, filling the immense void left by his losses: girlfriend, family, innocence, ego, and nearly all physical function the least. Recognizing this at last, Karl's diminishment deepened.

While he'd been taking her for granted, Doreen had been vastly surpassing the call of duty, always doing her damnedest to meet his myriad needs to the best of her abilities. How wonderful was that? And she did all this in a way that was irresistibly appealing, particularly to someone of his age, situation, and sexual inclination.

A familiar hand was laid on his nape as she used the handheld sprayer to rinse his arms. Warm and loving yet properly detached when called for, indulgent when possible yet unyielding when necessary, heavily invested and determinedly protective, Nurse Drake had come to fill overlapping, occasionally melding, hugely archetypal roles in Karl's limited new life.

Two-thirds again his age, she embodied sources of primal authority far beyond the simply situational. Her primogeniture, superior education, professional elevation and the almost maternal tenor of her custody all had a claim on his adolescent psyche. Every aura about her validated how voluntary his unavoidable submission to her was, easing the debasement inherent in her absolute control over his physical form and indeed his least well-being. Meanwhile all this was complicated by only subtly mutually acknowledged sexual yearnings.

Though their love (and yes, it was love, Karl finally realized) was platonic by necessity, they were both attractive and unattached people of breeding age. Indeed each was in their procreative prime, and in their prolonged intimate contact their bodies had begun to exchange irrepressible animal signals that circumstances forced them to ignore. This was uncomfortable (yet strangely compelling on an almost organic level) enough. But they were often required to interact physically in ways that had inherent erotic overtones too.

Given the power dynamics in play, this created an increasingly kinky tension between them that Karl found ever more tormenting - and yet ever more compulsory. Even as he recognized this it was playing out again. He was slouched in a shower wheelchair, naked and helpless. He was sequestered in a steamy, black-tiled cubicle, alone with this multiply-vested figure of female authority. And as always lately his sense of inferiority was slipping into a spell of erotically charged complaisance as she ministered to him.

Karl had come to think of this as being enraptured. The implications were mystic, religious, even cosmic. This lifted responsibility for the demeaning nature of his arousal from him. He was personally eclipsed and irresistibly attracted by the heavenly body looming over him. Captured as if by gravity, all his will was effaced by its influence. The blatant desirability of that Venusian form (lushly voluptuous with matronly still a ways away) was enhanced by its trappings in much the way his craving for this goddess' dominion fed on his diminishment.

Leaning closer as she proceeded to soap his chest and belly, Nurse Drake's uniform belled out. Weighted perhaps by its ID badge, this exposed abyssal depths of cleavage. Despite his blasted life and the terrible grief, remorse and self-hatred he associated with matters of love and sex, Karl couldn't help but ogle that gap between globes.

Glands and pheromones have their own imperatives. After twenty months of celibacy even the smell of this lovely intimate stirred the beast in him. It was hardly poetic (rather it was pathetic), but by the time those assured ablutions reached his groin it was hardly surprising either: Karl found himself with a supremely embarrassing erection.

Consummately professional, Nurse Drake made no reference to this as she spread his legs wider for him. First she scrubbed his scrotum and all around his crotch.

Suspense thickened as she hygienically rinsed and re-soaped the mitt. Then without hesitation or any other signal of significance she clasped what he jocularly called 'the monster' in her soapy, sponge-buffered fist. Talk about situations with unmistakable erotic overtones! Karl slouched helplessly immobile while this epitome of everything that evoked his allegiance began to stroke him slowly up and down.

The similitude to a hand job was maddeningly exact. Her grip was firmly possessive, the enveloping sponge delightfully yielding yet compressive. The pearly soap made a delirious lubricant. His cheeks burning, barely able to suppress a groan of terribly conflicted pleasure-shame-guilt-horror, Karl scrabbled for a distraction. Perceptive as always, Doreen supplied one.

"I can't let that happen, Karl."

For a moment he thought she could actually read his mind.

It seemed she was referring to the climax she sensed building in him, an apotheosis he dreaded more than craved and hadn't achieved since the accident - at least while he was awake. But then Doreen continued.

"You are not going to the state home.

"To start with, you would be raped there. You are too attractive and too helpless: red meat before wolves in that place. Worse, you will never get better.

"You will just lapse deeper into institutional torpor, never confronting the issues that afflict you. You will persist as you have been indefinitely until you deteriorate away, wasting your entire life over a thoughtless teenage mistake. I could never live with letting that happen."

"I don't see how you can stop it," Karl croaked.

Distracted perhaps by her umbrage, Nurse Drake continued to scrub him well past hygienic necessity. Her deep cleavage still beckoned and curds gathered in a lather until it seemed an analogue churned inside. Crazed by sexual ecstasy he hardly deserved, couldn't prevent or effect or resist, Karl clung to her retort as much in desperation as amazement.

"I'll stop it all right. I'll take you home and cure you myself."

At last Nurse Drake seemed to recall herself to her duties.

Even as she elaborated this avowal she stopped stroking the monster so maddeningly up and down. Instead she used her other hand to pull the already retreated foreskin back as far as possible while she thoroughly scrubbed around the rim.

"Let me summarize the situation here. Nearly two years ago you were at a party. Five years underage, you were all drinking. You needed to get your girlfriend home by a specific time so that you could sneak her out to some tree-house to have sex before returning home yourself. So despite her unwillingness you bullied her into the two of you accepting a ride from a friend who was not only heavily intoxicated but notoriously irresponsible.

"Naturally there was an accident. The friend was at fault. He was killed, an innocent in the other car was maimed, and your girlfriend was killed. To make things unimaginably worse, your parents were speeding to the hospital in response when your father had a heart attack. He crashed his car, and they too were killed. You on the other hand suffered only a broken arm, bruised vertebrae and a spinal shock that you should have recovered from ages ago. Yet for some reason you remain almost completely paralyzed."

Now Karl couldn't help but groan, tears slipping down his cheeks. Hearing the recital of his crimes even as the sensitive head of his erection was unbearably stimulated by this cherished authority was almost more than he could stand. Firm in her conviction of what was necessary however, Nurse Drake continued relentlessly.

"That almost is extremely telling however. Despite only being able to move your head and neck, you suffer from no respiratory deficit at all. You can breathe, cough and yell as well as anyone. If there was a neurologic cause for your paralysis, your diaphragm would be affected too. You'd still be on a ventilator. Nor, I might add, would you be likely to have such complete sensation everywhere - not to mention nocturnal emissions.

"Only a quarter of quadriplegics are able to ejaculate, Karl. Together all these anomalies, along with x-ray and CT scan evidence, are convincing proof that the problem is psychological. Everyone consulted agrees that this is a textbook case of conversion disorder: what used to be called hysterical paralysis. Any idiot can understand what's going on.

"You have survivor's guilt. You are punishing yourself for living by passively sacrificing what fate spared. You even accept this intellectually. But no amount of therapy has been able to free you of the blame that holds a lock on your subconscious.

"And now even that ineffective therapy is coming to an end. You're to be shipped to the state home, where abuse is rife, the level of care will be abominable and an endless succession of doctors that don't know you will pass your case along with no honest effort to resolve it. Well, I say no way! Everyone else may have given up, but not me. And you may have passed sentence on yourself young man, but I am damn well commuting it. This is what I'm going to do."

At last Nurse Drake finished her redundant scrubbing of the glans and played that warm spray slowly over Karl's entire quivering rigidity to rinse it.

"I'm going to take a year's sabbatical from working here. And I'm going to arrange to care for you privately during that time. You will live at my home with me, under my exclusive responsibility, undergoing continuous one-on-one therapy and submitting to my own rather unorthodox but amazingly effective treatment.

"I've seen cases like yours before Karl. I understand your deepest needs in a way all these blinkered shrinks never could. I promise you that I will cure you within that year. If I fail, then you can go on to the state home, be raped day and night and waste away. I will have done my best. But I have no fear of that happening, and neither should you."

At first Karl could only goggle at his proposed savior, his erection an emphatic salute to the power of her appeal. But at last propriety made him protest.

"But...but how can you possibly do all that?"

"I can afford it," Doreen shrugged. "The work and your redemption will be their own reward. And I have influence here. I even have a kind of informal practice for cases like yours, one that's approved at the highest level and discreetly recommended nationwide. In fact I was assigned to you specifically when it became clear this was a conversion case.

"It's been suspected all along my skills might become necessary. Now you'll just have to give consent in front of one of the board members. I should get approval to take you as soon as your insurance runs out. So, will you come home with me and let me cure you young man, or are you going to insist on wasting away on the state?"

Still Karl gaped at this angelic benefactor. Angelic? Hell, she was downright divine, a whole collection of goddesses packed into that incredible body.

Just as he'd been belatedly appreciating all she meant to him, and how unconscionably he'd been taking her for granted, Nurse Drake insisted he accept a redemption of such staggering generosity that he was again both blessed and demeaned beyond belief by it. And enraptured as he was growing by the allure of her control, she was now proposing to make that truly total...

Defying his discomfort, Karl's erection strained upward still. It even bobbed slightly with the pulse of its urgency. Of course anything was better than the state home, and refusing this impossibly potent pantheon anything she insisted on was as unlikely as a spontaneous cure without her. It took only long enough for Karl to master his shock, euphoria, abashment and unease to make it official.

"Of course I'll come home with you! Are you kidding? Thank you so much! I don't know how I can ever possibly repay you."

"Of course you do," Doreen replied, soaping up the mitt again. Smug satisfaction and possessive love seemed to radiate from her. "You will repay me by getting better. By committing yourself fanatically to my private therapy and submitting willingly to my treatment no matter how unorthodox you might find it."

"It's a promise!"

Karl's enthusiasm was immediate and unconsidered. Despite what some people (among his late girlfriend's family perhaps) might say, he was not malingering.

He had no desire whatsoever to live in this helpless, degraded fashion another minute, much less forever. Just because he despised himself didn't make him a masochist. He'd try anything to get his function back, the more unorthodox the better. Standard psychotherapy was getting him nowhere.

"Excellent!"

Doreen smiled at him in a way that flooded Karl with the only joy he found in life now. Then she couched down, reached between his legs and under the commode-style seat to scrub the rest of him clean.