Uncle Nick was not the first to wear the watch, and nor was he even the first 'Uncle Nick', for it was Uncle Nick's own Uncle Nick who had passed the watch down to him along with some preposterous, rambling tale of its creation by some distant, Swiss ancestor. An absurd fantasy, swiftly forgotten, and yet the watch...
The watch - the impossible watch - was everything the cantankerous old fool had promised. A mechanism not only for telling time, but controlling it. Not stopping it, exactly, but slowing it so that seconds became years - as near as he had been able to measure it. Adjusting the environment immediately around him in subtle ways that made a mockery of the laws of physics. By rights his transgressions of time and nature should have sent relativistic shock waves racing through the matter he interacted with. Doors should have exploded into splinters at his touch, and flesh should have evaporated beneath his caressing fingertips, and gravity itself should have abandoned him to an ignominious fate.
Nothing explained it. Not the science, anyway. It had to be the power of a god, or perhaps that of Chronos himself, Titan and Lord of Time. Absurd... but how else to explain it?
It made people into playthings, dolls to be used and abused, though for the longest time he resisted such a base impulse, preferring instead to test the limits of the device. For a while he imagined himself a new Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, and funding as well an extravagant lifestyle for himself. He travelled the seven seas, and explored the four corners of the world, and never lacked for the love of a woman.
But after aging twenty years in the space of five, his appetite for fresh adventure diminished at last, and he returned to England to settle down and rest - for a while, anyway.
And then his brother, Dimitri, got married.
*
It was love at first sight - at least on Nick's side. Though he had bedded many beautiful young women over the years, there was an angelic innocence about Mary, a sweetness about her, that complemented her down-to-earth, girl-next-door looks. She was an attractive blonde with bright blue eyes and full, round breasts. Indeed, a more perfect example of a buxom lass was difficult to envisage.
She only had eyes for Dimitri. Though she greeted her future brother-in-law with wary warmth, Nick understood at once that there was no hope of seducing her away and claiming her for himself. Instead, as the big day approached, his heart ached to see the lovers so entwined, stealing kisses at every opportunity, laughing at private jokes, teasing each other; and increasingly his thoughts dwelled on the watch and the opportunities its trickery could offer.
Because Mary could be his, in ways he had only ever dreamed of before. So many times he had almost given in to temptation, the bodies of time-frozen women there for the taking. Nick had prided himself on his restraint. He might be an outrageous thief, but he was a gentleman! But now, with Mary... He would have forsworn all other women for her, to have her as his own adoring wife.
It was not to be. Nick wrestled mightily with his conscience, and felt sorely tested. He had almost godlike power at his command, but what he did with Mary in his feverish imaginings was devilish rather than divine. To yield to such base desires would be to cross a terrible line. Like Eve plucking an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, he would be condemned forever.
Seeing Mary in her bridal gown, radiant and terrified as she marched up the aisle, broke something in him. He knew in that moment, his soul no longer in turmoil but almost sad, that this joyful, sacred union would soon be corrupted by his own selfish need for his brother's wife.
Stopping time mid-vows, he embraced her from behind, his hands on her corseted chest, the bulge in his trousers pressing into her soft, curtained rear. "Do you take me to be your secret love," he whispered, "to offer up your warm, sweet flesh, for as long as we both live?"
Returning to his seat - the hard wood of the pew - he offered up a prayer for forgiveness, and restarted time.
"I do," she said.
*
Inevitably, Nick had touched and even moved many people while in frozen time. His initial worries about the consequences of this had developed into a careful study. While subtle touches would seem to be dismissed without a thought, a definite change in position or shift in clothing would not go unnoticed. Sometimes people would shiver and talk of ghosts, but most would reason it away: the trick of an overactive imagination; a gust of wind; a knock from a passing stranger; something...
But as soon as he did something that could not be explained - the total removal of a man's clothing, for example - the panic was total. A refined lady might scream. A brutal warrior might cower in a corner. Entertaining as this was, it was dangerous too, attracting too much attention. Nick had no wish to leave a trail of newspaper reports in his wake. Someone might put two and two together and guess the truth.
A week before Mary and Dimitri's wedding, he brought a young woman to his house. Whitney, she called herself, no doubt after the singer she resembled. He paid her for the night, and had her lie naked on his bed, blindfolded. "All I want is for you to describe everything you feel," he told her.
This was before the wedding, before he had made up his mind to claim Mary for himself. This was, he told himself, purely an experiment. Whitney's obvious boredom and ill concealed disdain gave way to an uneasy confusion as he manipulated her flesh with his hands. "Ahh!" she would gasp, massaging the breasts he had mauled. "What was that?" Or she would cry out, shielding her clit after his fingers had teased it and exposed it for him to suck curiously on. "No!" she whined, alarmed, after he lubricated her ass, but it didn't stop him using that prepared entrance. "No!" she repeated, though her arousal by this point was unmistakable.
Throughout, he held back from climaxing, but satisfied at last he removed her blindfold and let her watch him spurt his pearly seed across the dark skin of her belly and breasts.
One experiment, of course, is never enough, and Nick had paid her for the whole night. By the time morning came at last, Whitney was as exhausted as she was perplexed. Though she had hardly been touched by her weird new client, her body ached as if she'd spent the whole night fucking.
Just as people's flesh was pliable beneath his hands, so also their minds seemed open to his words. It wasn't a conscious thing - Nick had never been able to awaken someone frozen in time - but instructions whispered into ears did seem, sometimes, with some people, to have the effect of a post-hypnotic suggestion. "Make yourself come," he had whispered repeatedly in Whitney's ears, until she abandoned all inhibition and fingered herself to a climax while he watched.
From Whitney's perspective this had been an unwise and impulsive act. Something about seeing her client's cum splashing onto her breasts, maybe, had compelled her to do what she had never done in front of anyone before. Afterwards, relaxing in the aftermath of an intense orgasm, the memory of him staring hungrily at her exposed pussy as her fingers rubbed furiously at her clit made her burn with shame.
And one week later, even as she murmured, "I do," Mary felt a sudden misgiving, confused for a brief moment about what exactly she was promising to whom. But the moment passed, swept away by the exhilaration of the ceremony's climax, and she kissed her handsome, beloved husband for the very first time.
