The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Thursday, November 4th

Priya came early now. The group was four people and a lot of empty chairs, the radiator louder in November. He let the hiss fill the pauses.

She came in underslept that Thursday, and it sharpened her to a point. She told him the fun-size candy was insulting, a bribe a child would see through, and when he said he’d only meant it kindly she said kindly back at him like a word she had caught him misusing. None of it was about the candy. He was learning that a hungry Priya and a tired Priya were each their own animal, fast to find the meanest available reading and commit to it, and that neither was the woman who turned up an hour after she had eaten.

He didn’t need the cards as much now, but he kept them on his knee. The top one had gone almost white at the edge. She had started leaving her scarf on the back of the subject chair and coming back for it after.

“Same as before,” he told her. “You know the shape of it.”

She nodded. He counted slower. He added a line he hadn’t written down, about the warmth of a coin held in the palm, and her breathing evened and her hands, which usually worried at her sleeves, went still.

They had both grown into it by then. He had stopped, for the length of a session, being the boy who folded into chairs, and become someone with a low voice and steady hands and the right to use them, someone he liked better than himself and reached for every Thursday like a coat that fit. And she met him there. She lowered her eyes when he asked for her eyes. She let her wrists go heavy when he talked about heaviness. She gave him a subject so perfect it should have frightened him, the trance returned to him exactly as he had described it, on cue and to the letter, as a rehearsed thing arrives. He took the perfection for depth.

When he lifted her arm by the wrist to test for catalepsy, copying the stage videos, it stayed where he set it for three full seconds, then lowered on its own. Three exactly. He told himself that was textbook. He told the room, for the two sophomores still bothering to watch, “That’s demand characteristics, not magic.” Jonah would have liked that. Jonah had stopped coming.

Priya opened her eyes and looked past him, at the ghost on the board. “It felt deeper,” she said, quietly.

He wrote later: deepening consistent with expectation. He underlined expectation twice, and felt, doing it, like a careful man.

Thursday, November 11th

He had given her a carryover that week, the kind the books described, a small instruction meant to follow her out of the room. Tomorrow you’ll feel steady. Rested. A little proud of yourself, for no reason you’ll need to name. Harmless. The kind of thing a coach might say, or a mother.

He saw her the next afternoon outside The Perch, in the thin November light, a paper cup in both hands. She lit up when she saw him, and what disarmed him was how plainly she did it, with no theatrics in it he could have explained away. It was just a face opening, the ordinary gladness of a person glad to see another person, and he stood there and watched it happen and could not get his own face to do anything as simple.

“You seem happy,” he said.

“I am when I see you.”

It was too direct. It left him nowhere to stand. A braver boy would have heard a girl with a crush saying a true thing in the cold and answered it in kind. Daniel heard the carryover. Steady, rested, a little proud. He filed her brightness under the suggestion, because filing it there let him keep his hands clean of it, and the cup steamed between her fingers, and she waited for him to say the thing he was not going to say. After a moment she let him off and asked whether he wanted half her cinnamon roll.

Thursday, November 18th

It started with lunch.

She came in pale that Thursday, vague at the edges, and when he asked she itted she had been in the stacks since nine and forgotten to eat, like you forget a coat. Some older, attentive part of him went very still. He told himself it was concern, and it was, and it was also the other thing, and he could no longer get a blade between them.

She was being awful besides, in the specific way that meant she had not eaten: she called his reading of a story undergraduate, then a minute later put the same reading forward as her own and dared him to disagree. He had stopped taking it personally around the second week. It was what her body did when it was running on nothing, turning mean to hide the fact.

“When you leave here, you’re going to —” He started over, and this time heard his own voice drop, without his deciding to let it, into the he used for suggestions. “You’re going to eat something. Real food. Not coffee. Something with protein in it, and you’re going to sit down while you do it.”

She opened her eyes. For a second he thought she would laugh at him, and braced for it, and would have deserved it.

She didn’t laugh. Her jaw came unset and her shoulders dropped, the loosening he knew from the chair, except her eyes stayed open and on him.

“Okay,” she said.

It became a thing between them after that, the small commands, and he could not stop himself finding them. A girl who forgot to eat was a girl with a gap in her he could fill with an instruction, and an instruction was the most honest way he had of touching her without touching her.

“You look like you slept four hours,” he told her one Thursday.

“I slept five. They were quality hours.”

“Eight tonight. In a bed. Phone across the room where you can’t reach it.”

“You can’t make me.” The dare was already in it, the chin already up. “It’s not even in the literature. You’re well outside your scope of practice, Mr. De Luca.”

He should have let it go. Instead the card-voice came up under his own, low and even, the one she answered to in the chair. “You’ll be in bed by eleven, and you’ll be glad you were, because you trust me, and I happen to be right about this.”

It landed somewhere it had no business landing. He watched it land. Her eyes did the thing, the small drop, the loosening, and her mouth opened to fire back and didn’t, and for a second she looked exactly like a girl going under for a man she had already decided to go under for. Then she rolled her eyes hard enough to be audible. ”Fine. God. The tyranny of bedtimes.” But at 11:04 his phone lit with a photograph of her ceiling, captioned the subject is horizontal and furious, and inside two weeks the bruised look under her eyes was gone, and he had not laid a finger on her, had only told her body what he wished for it and watched the body obey.

The stranger weeks were the ones she turned around. She would arrive keyed up about a seminar and order him to sit, sit down, and hear her out, and somewhere in the middle of bossing him she would slide without seeming to notice into the other voice, the slow one, you’re going to read the Sedgwick before Tuesday, you’re going to stop apologizing in your emails, the cadence of a hypnotist coming out of the mouth of his subject. He could not tell whether she was running him or only playing at being run: a girl who had learned his trick and turned it back on him for sport, or one who dropped so easily that even giving orders carried her halfway down. By Tuesday he had read the Sedgwick. His emails had stopped apologizing. The proof was always in the wrong place, in what got done and never in who had done it.

The eggs were the one that undid him. She told him, unprompted, one Thursday, that she had eaten eggs, said it like homework turned in, half rolling her eyes, and he wrote nothing in the notebook, because there was no clinical word for what it did to him: the eggs, the sitting down, the small obedient fact of a person doing herself a kindness because he had asked her to. It should have horrified him. It mostly did. Underneath the mostly was the part that had wanted exactly this all along, a person he could keep, and keep well.

Thursday, December 9th

He set one chair now. The group was down to her, and the sessions had thinned to a shape the two of them kept without naming. He sat on the edge of the table. The radiator did its winter work in the corner.

He had written water on a fresh card that morning, in his own hand, underlined once. He liked water metaphors. They were the safe kind, textbook Erickson, easy to walk back from: stones in a warm bath, a hand trailing in a lake. There was nothing in water that could be mistaken for heat, for wanting, for a body.

In M-14 he read it wrong.

“Imagine sun on the back of your neck,” he said, and only as the words were leaving him did he glance down and see the card in his hand said water. He kept going, because stopping would have made a thing of it. “Warm enough to notice and no warmer. It spreads down into your shoulders, slow, and you don’t have to hold yourself up against it.“

She closed her eyes a half-breath before he reached the place for it, the small sorry again, and sank.

Afterward, in the cold of the hall, she pulled her scarf up and said, “I liked the sun one.”

“The sun one.”

“Better than the water.” She said it as she corrected a professor’s date or a mispronounced name, certain and unbothered, already moving on. “You do sun more than you think.”

The corner of her mouth flickered when she said it, there and gone before he could be sure of it, and his stomach did the small cold drop it had done in the chair the first time. Then she was only a cold girl pulling her scarf up against the hall, and he let it go.

He turned the card over in his pocket so the word lay against his thigh. He’d written water. He was nearly sure. He could see the loops of his own hand making the W. But the word had come out sun, and she had taken sun, and now she was telling him there had been others, and the three things sat next to each other in him and would not line up.

In the notebook that night he wrote: used sun imagery, subject reported positive affect. He looked at the sentence a while. He had meant to write water. He turned back a page, and another, his own entries waiting for him, careful and clinical and not quite trustworthy, and he closed the book before he could decide what they proved. His memory was the soft thing here, he told himself. Everything he had actually done in the room was sound. He was proud of the distinction for about a week.

Friday, December 17th

He decided to ask her to dinner as other people did it, and discovered he had no idea how other people did it.

The trouble was the asking. Everything he said to her in M-14 was built to be obeyed, even the parts built to sound like they weren’t, and he could not work out how to put a question to her that did not arrive already answered. He practiced on the walk over. He discarded every version. They all sounded like instructions wearing a coat.

In the end he made a hash of it, there on the steps of Alden Library with her books pulling one shoulder down. “I wondered if, only if you wanted to, and you don’t have to, obviously, but if you were free, I thought maybe we could, not as a, just dinner. If you wanted.”

Priya let him get all the way to the end of it.

“You can ask directly,” she said. “I’m allowed to say no to a sentence with a verb in it.”

He breathed. He found the verb. “Would you like to have dinner with me? I’ll cook.”

“Yes.”

It was that fast, and the speed of it unsettled him, because speed was what he distrusted most.

He had meant to suggest a restaurant, somewhere with waiters and a check he could reach for, a script other men seemed born already knowing. Then his mouth had said I’ll cook before his caution could stop it, and so on a Friday when both his roommates were out he let her up the narrow stairs of the Belden Street apartment, into the one room of his life he had not arranged to be obeyed in.

She stood inside the door and took an inventory he felt on his skin. The whiteboard leaning against the wall with its half-erased equations. His other index cards, the private ones, rubber-banded on the desk. The narrow bed, made too carefully. Physics on every surface, and under all of it the apartment’s standing smell, cumin and cold solder and whatever his roommate used to strip flux off a board. In M-14 he chose what she saw. Here she saw everything, and he stood in his own kitchen holding a wooden spoon like a man caught with the instrument of a crime he had not yet decided to commit.

“So this is where the wizard lives,” she said, and set her bag down, and that was that. She was in.

He cooked because his hands were steadier with a job, and because this was the one dish he made without arguing himself out of it first. It was his grandmother’s, more or less, as she had made it on the stove in the house off Atwells Avenue while he did his homework at her table, narrating each step in a dialect he had only ever half caught and could still smell on command. She had been dead since June, and he had not cooked it for anyone since the funeral, where the cousins ate someone else’s catered ziti while the stove in that kitchen stayed cold for the first time in his life. Her hands had gone the whole time she talked, certain and never still, and the only thing she ever taught him on purpose was that you could not hurry a thing into being good. You stood over it and paid attention until it was. Onion going down to nothing in butter, slow, no color allowed on it. Italian sausage pushed out of its casing, fennel seed cracking as the meat browned and the fat went gold. A splash of wine that hissed and was gone. Then the rice.

“Arborio,” he said, before she could ask, tipping it in dry to toast, the grains turning glassy at the edges and staying pearl at the heart. “Wrong rice for almost everything. Too much starch. But the starch is the whole point. You toast it, then you feed it hot stock one ladle at a time and you never stop stirring, and the starch comes out of it and makes its own sauce. You have to stand here and bother it the entire time or it seizes on you.”

Priya watched his hands the whole time he stirred, openly now, as she had never let herself in the bright room of the group: the wrist working, the dark hair on the back of the hand catching the steam. “You chose a rice that needs constant supervision.”

“I didn’t choose it. My grandmother chose it in nineteen-forty-something.”

“Still.” The dry voice, warming. “At home you’d be exiled for this. You don’t stir Kerala rice into a sauce. Matta.” She said the word like you press on a bruise to check that it is still there. “Red rice. Parboiled, coarse, big grains, so red my mother’s stains the wash water pink. You boil it hard and drain it and it does not go soft, ever, no matter what you do to it. That is the entire point of the rice. It has already been through the heat. It holds its shape.”

“Sounds stubborn.”

“It has survived worse than you.” She said it lightly. It did not stay light. “Ponni’s the everyday one, polished white, what you cook when you aren’t making a thing of it. Matta is what my grandmother gives you once she has decided you’re family. You don’t get the red rice on the first visit.”

He would have written that down, normally, except this one he wanted to keep somewhere the notebook could not reach.

When it was done he spooned it into a bowl for her without asking, more than she would have given herself, the sausage folded through the loose creamy rice and the last of the parmesan going soft over the top, and he set it in front of her and watched her read the maneuver in a single second.

“I see what this is,” she said.

“It’s dinner.”

“It’s a command wearing a bowl of risotto.” But she pulled the bowl in, took a forkful, ate, and her eyes did a small involuntary thing at the first taste that he would have cooked all night to cause. “For the record. I’m doing this because I want to, not because you said.“

“Noted.”

“Write it down, even. Subject ate under protest. Asserts free will.”

He almost did. The bad part, the part he turned over later that night, was that the line between because I want to and because you said had gone soft somewhere back around the eggs, and neither of them could find it now, and the food was getting eaten either way. She had a second bowl. He did not have to ask her to.

Later, Friday, December 17th

She talked while she ate, which she only did about books. About everything else she went careful and quiet, trying sentences in her head before she risked them aloud, as she rehearsed her coffee order while she stood in line. About books she had opinions the size of weather systems, delivered flat and dry in the voice that dared him to keep up. The Gothic, she said, understood the body better than the realist novel ever had, because the Gothic knew the thing realism kept trying to forget: that a house and a body are the same kind of object, both of them haunted by the question of who owns them.

He was startled by how good she was, and then ashamed of the startle, because the startle meant some part of him had filed her under subject and had not expected the subject to be cleverer than he was.

“You don’t me,” she said. Not a question. She had set her fork down. The kitchen had gone quiet under the radiator and the smell of his grandmother’s stove, years and a whole life away.

“From the group? Of course I do.”

“From before that.” She turned her water glass a quarter turn on the table. “Ilyin’s section, last spring. Back row. You came in as a guest lecture for one day. You talked about placebo effects and forgot your own example halfway through.”

He did not . He ed the lecture like you a room you have walked out of. He did not her in it.

“You said expectation was just another kind of architecture,” she said. “That you could build a person a room out of what they were told to expect, and they would walk into it on their own. I wrote it down.” She kept her eyes on the table, as if she had confessed to something.

He had no memory of saying it. It sounded like something he might say. It sounded, in her mouth, better than anything he had ever actually said, and it sat there in the warm kitchen between the two bowls he had filled and the room he had cooked her up the stairs into, and he found he could not look straight at it.

“And you talked with your hands,” she said, as if it followed, because for her it did. “The whole lecture. You’d forget to perform and they’d start going, drawing the idea in the air, and then you’d catch them and fold them away and go flat again, and I sat in the back and waited the whole hour for you to forget. I noticed your hands last spring, in that lecture hall, before you knew I existed.” She looked at him. “I want you to keep that, whatever else this turns out to be. That part was mine first.”

He looked down. His hands were on the table, where they had been the whole dinner, quietly conducting a kitchen that had not asked them to. He had not felt them start. With her, lately, he kept forgetting to put them away. He folded them into his lap, too late, and she watched him do it and said nothing.

Then his face started its old argument with itself, and she shifted in the chair and said the thing for him before he could spoil the evening reaching for it himself.

“I can say yes when I’m awake too,” she said. “Now eat. You cooked the whole thing and you haven’t touched it.”

It was meant to comfort him, and it did, and that was the worst part, because now there were two kinds of yes in the world, and he was going to spend the rest of the winter telling them apart.

—The Voice Declined

The first time Daniel touched her with any intention beyond comfort, Priya stopped him.

By then the dinners had stacked into something with a shape, January nearly gone, and he had learned how much it cost her, each time, to let him a step closer.

She did it without drama, without the flinch or the gasp or the safe word he had given her. Lantern, she had repeated, weighing it, and the word had glowed briefly in the air between them, absurd and useful. She did not say lantern now.

She put her hand over his wrist.

They were in her room in Rook House, on the narrow bed with the bad institutional mattress and the fairy lights she claimed had been left by a former roommate, though Daniel had never seen any evidence that another person had ever lived there. Her books occupied the second desk. Her sweaters occupied the second chair. The room smelled faintly of cardamom, old paper, and the citrus shampoo she used because her mother bought it in bulk and mailed it to her in padded envelopes addressed in a slanting, careful hand.

His hand was under the hem of her sweater. Not far. Just the warm side of her waist, the surprising softness there. He had discovered over the last few weeks that Priya was not made of the angles her clothes suggested. The body beneath the oversized wool and denim was slight, but it had warmth, and it answered.

That was the word he could not stop using privately: answered.

Her body answered before she did. His did too.

“Stop?” he asked immediately, already pulling back.

“No.” Her fingers tightened around his wrist. “Just wait.”

He waited.

She looked at him with a face he could not place. Priya had so many faces he had been stupid enough to miss: the seminar face, dry and unsparing; the coffee face, suspicious of any cinnamon roll that cost more than four dollars; the trance face, where everything went loose and slow and so still it tripped his pulse. This one was none of them. Her brows had gone up, her bitten lip pressed white and then released, her eyes holding his without the retreat he was used to. Embarrassed and certain at once, he decided, wanting and entirely in command of the wanting. He believed his reading completely, as he believed all of them, and on no better evidence than usual.

“You’re doing the thing,” she said.

“What thing?”

“The voice.”

His hand went still under hers.

He had not meant to. That was almost worse. If he had chosen it, he could have apologized for choosing it. Instead he had carried it here inside himself and let it leak out through his mouth, through the lowered cadence, the pauses arranged like steps descending into a room below this one.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize.”

“I know.”

“I can stop.”

“I know that too.”

Her thumb moved once over his wrist. The was light enough that he might have imagined it, except he went still at it, all of him, the held-breath stillness of a hand laid on the back of the neck. Stay.

He stayed.

Priya’s eyes lowered. Making herself look directly at him to say the next thing cost her, her jaw tight with the work of not dropping her gaze again. “Not tonight.”

The relief came first, which made no sense. Then disappointment. Then shame at the disappointment, immediate and hot.

“Of course,” he said. “Yes. Completely. We don’t have to do anything.”

“That isn’t what I said.” She looked up again, and there she was: irritated, precise, herself. “You do this.”

“Do what?”

“I say one thing, and you hear the worst possible version because that makes you the villain faster.”

He had no answer to that. It was so accurate it felt like being touched somewhere indecent.

Priya took his hand, the one she had stopped, and set it back where it had been: against her waist, under the sweater, over skin. A deliberate restoration. She inhaled when his palm settled there. He felt the breath enter her, felt her ribs widen.

“I said not tonight,” she said. “I didn’t say never.”

Daniel closed his eyes.

“Stay with me,” she said. “Don’t go away into your ethical panic room.”

“My what?”

“You heard me.”

Despite everything, he almost laughed. The laugh came out broken.

Priya’s mouth changed. Softened. “There you are.”

That did something to him worse than her obedience ever had. She had found him.

He kissed her because there was no way to answer the sentence that would not ruin it. She met him with a seriousness that frightened him a little. Priya kissed as if revising an argument: testing, withdrawing, returning with a better claim. Her hand came to the back of his neck, not pulling him down, only resting there, informing him that he was being kept.

He had imagined, before, that if he ever reached this point with her, he would need to be careful not to take. He had it backwards. Her willingness asked more of him than any taking would have, demanded a steadier version of him than arousal did.

His hand moved slowly. Waist to ribs. She watched it travel, the dark hair on the back of it stark against her skin, the hand she had watched from the back of a room since last spring finally laid open on her like a fact. Ribs to the place just below the band of her bra, where she breathed sharply and said, “Yes, that.”

It was a correction, plain and exact, and it went through him lower than any instruction had.

He followed it.

He drew the sweater up and off. In the fairy lights she was thinner than her clothes had ever itted, and the plainness of it undid him: the small breasts in a plain cotton bra, the visible ladder of her ribs, the soft unexpected give of her belly that a year of oversized wool had denied. It should have looked breakable. It looked instead like something kept back on purpose, and he had been starving for the sight of her and calling it concern. He put his mouth below her collarbone and felt her breath snag, and when he pushed the cup of the bra up and took the small stiff nipple against his tongue she made a sound like a held thing giving way, her hips rising toward him before either of them had decided they should.

He had gone past argument himself, hard against his jeans and ashamed of how fast, more ashamed of the relief when her hand found him there and pressed. Because he had read too much and feared himself with academic thoroughness, even now, even here, he began to think in of reinforcement: her pleasure paired with his touch, his touch paired with his presence, the chain assembling itself while he held her. He hated that he was doing it. Stop making a theory of her, he told himself. But the theory was how he touched. The attention was the desire. Her responses arrived as data and miracle at once: the catch in her throat when his thumb paused instead of moving on; the way she pressed her knee against his hip and then seemed embarrassed by her own insistence; the softer sound when he adjusted.

“Good?” he whispered.

She shook her head.

He froze.

“Don’t ask like you’re grading yourself,” she said, breathless now, annoyed even there, even like that. “Ask because you want to know.”

He understood the distinction so sharply he almost resented her for giving it to him.

“Do you like this?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to keep going?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to tell you what to feel?”

Her eyes opened.

The question opened the smaller room they had both been pretending not to enter.

“No,” she said.

No, and she was still there. No, and her hands were still on him. No, and the wanting had not gone anywhere; it had only sharpened. He had not known a refusal could leave so much standing.

“All right,” he said.

Her face let go at the ease of it, the braced brows unknitting, the set jaw loosening, a person who had readied herself for persuasion or disappointment and been handed neither.

He kissed her shoulder. Then her throat. Then the place where her pulse moved fast and bright under the skin, and it was there, with the actual edge of the thing in front of her, that the wanting in her seized up and turned to fear.

He felt it happen. Her whole body went from open to braced, her breath snagging high in her chest, her hands no longer pulling him in but gone still, the way a hand goes still on a ledge. She had been brave all the way up to here. Here was as far as brave reached.

“Hey,” he said. “We don’t have to.”

“I want to.” It came out thin. “I do. I just.” She pressed her forehead to his collarbone so she would not have to be looked at while she said it. “I haven’t. Ever. And I can’t make my body stop doing this.”

The whole evening reread itself: she had been walking herself toward a door she had never once been able to open.

He could have told her it was fine, and meant it, and it would not have helped, because the fear was in her body and not her mind, and her mind was not the part that needed talking to. So he did the one thing he knew how to do for a frightened body.

“Can I help you not be scared?” he said. “Just that. I won’t tell you to want anything. Only the scared part.”

He had offered her the two uses of the same voice, the one that told you what to feel and the one that only made you unafraid, and he watched her weigh the difference before she nodded against his skin.

He kept it short, and he kept it true. Breathe out slower than you breathe in. Your shoulders can come down. There is nothing here you have to do, nothing happens that you don’t allow, and you can end all of it with one word and I will be glad you said it. His voice found the low even groove without his deciding to let it, and she closed her eyes and went down as she always went down in M-14, the loosening jaw, the long breath, the good subject going under.

Except that this time the going-under he had been taking for trance since October stopped looking like a thing she was doing and started looking, for the first time, like a thing that was happening to her: the bracing left her shoulders for real, the breath stopped being managed and simply came. He could not have said whether she had talked herself into it or only stopped holding the door shut. He only saw the fear leave her, and saw, where it had been sitting all evening like a hand pressed over a mouth, the want come up under it, so fast and so plainly that she made a sound at it, startled, almost a laugh.

Her eyes opened, dark and sure. “Oh,” she said. “Okay. Now.”

After that there was no voice in it. There was only his hands, his mouth, the awkward work of two inexperienced people trying to touch without injuring the thing they wanted, and it should have been less dangerous and it was not. When she pulled him over her and reached down to guide him in, the whole argument of the evening ran out of language: her body taking his, the heat of her against him, a small hurt and then the end of hurt, his breath going ragged against her throat as he held still to keep from finishing at the mere shock of being allowed. She moved first. He followed that too. He came apart somewhere in the middle of her name.

Later, when she was shaking in his arms and laughing once into his shoulder, startled by herself, he thought: I did not make that.

Then, because he was Daniel, because guilt had a metabolism and his fed on every form of evidence, he thought: Unless this is what making looks like from the inside. Unless safe was a thing I told her she was, and everything else came up through the opening it left.

Priya lifted her head. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t do that either.”

“What?”

“Leave me alone in the room with you.”

He understood her, somehow. Or thought he did. “I’m here,” he said.

She studied him for one more second, then tucked herself against him with a sleepy, irritated trust that felt more intimate than anything they had done. “Good,” she murmured.

The word entered him like a suggestion.