A Presence Felt - Part 1 - Sex Stories

A Presence Felt - Part 1

Adrian's smile faded into a frown of concern when he got a closer look at Stella's face. The young woman rose from a chair in the front waiting area, forcing her own smile as she approached him. "Hi, Adrian," she said. Even her voice was lackluster.

It was late afternoon, and Stella was his last client of the day. While she sat down on the small couch in Adrian's private office, he closed the door. It was an action he performed out of habit since the building was otherwise empty. He rented an office that had been converted from an old dwelling, and what used to be the living room now served as a waiting area, while the former master bedroom was where he saw clients.

After settling into his chair, Adrian regarded Stella for a moment. When she didn't speak, he said, "You look—"

"I look like shit, I know," she interrupted with a dry laugh.

Adrian raised an eyebrow. "I was about to say tired. What's going on, Stella?" He'd been her therapist for almost six months, and now, in the spring of 1989, he thought she was making great progress. It was the death of Stella's grandmother the previous fall that had caused her to seek Adrian's help. Over the course of their sessions, he learned how Stella had adored her grandmother, whom she considered her only real family. Her relationship with her parents was strained, and she'd revealed that without her grandmother, she felt all alone in the world, utterly adrift.

Still, with Adrian's encouragement, she'd taken several ...

... positive steps. Using the meager inheritance her grandmother had left her, Stella purchased a small house earlier in the year. She'd initially seemed thrilled to have her own place. "I never dreamed I'd be able to buy a house!" she'd told Adrian, her smile lighting up her entire face. "Being single and working as a secretary made me think I'd be renting a one-bedroom apartment for the rest of my life."

Over the past couple of months, Stella had busied herself with fixing up the old house. Adrian was still working with her to process past trauma she'd experienced in her relationship with her parents, and she remained estranged from them. They'd been none too happy when Stella's grandmother left her everything, little as it was. Stella also struggled with forming romantic relationships, having developed a pattern of sabotaging them before anyone got close enough to possibly hurt her. A common defense mechanism, Adrian knew, albeit a destructive one.

As Stella now leaned back against the couch, she was careful to keep her legs pressed tightly together. She wore a long-sleeved blouse and a modest gray skirt. Adrian could tell by the way her hazel eyes narrowed that she was about to present him with a challenging question. Stella was just twenty-eight, fifteen years his junior, but he had to admit she kept him on his toes. It was one of the reasons he looked forward to their sessions.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" she asked him.

Adrian tried not to grimace, for he was never ...