The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“I don’t know, Karsten. You know I really like you, but—”

He just stared at her, dumbfounded. “What, then?”

“—you worry me sometimes, some of the things you say. I still don’t know if I can trust you. Sometimes I feel I hardly know you.”

He, Karsten Talv, reflected on these statements. Prima facie, they seemed to indicate that this woman, the ‘Katya’, was not willing to allow him to give her what she wanted, or at least not immediately. She had even described it, earlier, as ‘messing with her mind’. She’d even once called him immature, a fantasist. An absurd accusation. He was twenty-three years old, hardly a boy any more, and he knew exactly what he was talking about.

And he certainly didn’t need one of his own creations telling him what was what, thank you very much.

What he offered was a precious gift: simplicity, clarity, and fulfilment. But he’d learned by now that no matter how good one’s intentions might be—and his towards her were amongst the best, he thought—there was always a degree of unpredictability involved in dealing with the externals. On the other hand, after enough attention and analysis, they usually ceased to surprise.

Objectively, he understood her statements to be meaningful constructs in the English language, which, although it was not his first, he spoke almost perfectly. He sought to analyse the words for his own clarity.

Examining the first statement, he gleaned that the ‘Katya’ was presenting as if she had some kind of emotional doubt or misgiving about him personally. Perhaps her hypothetical hindbrain presented this via the blunt instrument of fear. He supposed he would need to work harder to stress the objective merits of his ideas, and the irrelevance of such apparent subjectivity. Perhaps he just hadn’t been clear enough? All right, that could be dealt with.

Second, there seemed to be a question of trust, or more accurately the demonstration of trust, or more accurately still, he guessed, although this was doubly woolly territory, the perception of trust. This was something he did not wholly comprehend. Did she actually have ‘perceptions’, per se? He wasn’t sure, and had no way of really telling. Anyway, if the logical benefits of a particular course of action could be articulated clearly, what did vague notions of trust have to do with it?

Finally, it was true: the ‘Katya’ did hardly know him, and (even assuming for a moment she was independently aware) she was not at all aware of that part of him which would have been most important and insightful to know. However (reasoned Karsten Talv), such knowledge might not help at this point, and in fact would probably confuse the issue of helping the ‘Katya’ achieve her desires, especially if he had to explain that she might not even exist at all. He had found others rarely responded well to this assertion, and that it was a subject best avoided. Therefore whatever de minimis level of knowledge needed to be imparted, it would by necessity be incomplete.

Furthermore, none of this altered the key facts. Clearly the ‘Katya’ desired him strongly—or presented as if she did—and there were specific things she needed in order to achieve her potential, and he could help, and that was surely that. Did she not understand this? Perhaps he had overestimated her apparent intelligence.

The harbourside restaurant was soothingly quiet and tastefully lit. Glasses clinked and people murmured in their twos and fours and the occasional group of six. At the next table, he observed from the corner of his eye a handsome young couple of a similar age, holding hands across the white linen. The woman was a redhead. Karsten’s peripheral vision was excellent, and from the dilation of the redhead’s pupils, the way she shifted in her seat, and the obvious swell of her nipples beneath her blouse, he perceived that she was aroused. His hearing was excellent too, and while the ‘Katya’ had been speaking, with one ear he’d registered the redhead’s words of invitation to her partner, what she would do with him later, and what he would do to her.

He found it all depressingly mundane, and wished he could help the very sexy redhead to express herself better. He imagined her on her back, and then pictured her on all fours. He already knew exactly what she would feel like in bed, and he sensed hidden hungers there. Perhaps another time.

Karsten wondered yet again whether the ‘Katya’, the redhead, the other people in the restaurant, the food on his plate, the restaurant itself, and the world outside in general were actually real, in the strictly objective sense that he himself was, self-evidently and provably, real. It was an important question, and he had been grappling with it for some time.

Certainly, that which described itself as ‘Katya’, and other such apparent externalities, behaved as if they were independently real. Quite often, they even talked as if they were distinct individuals with their own free will, emotions, and whatnot. But how could one be absolutely sure? It was all so maddeningly circular. There seemed no obvious answer.

His current default position was to treat all apparent externalities as if they were genuinely real and self-determining—although he was as yet far from convinced of this—and see what happened as a result.

The ‘Katya’ really was extraordinarily beautiful; white-blonde hair, high cheekbones, vivid blue eyes, and a wide kissable mouth. She moved with the grace of a dancer. Somehow she reminded him of someone else, although he couldn’t quite think who. She had a secret tattoo of which she was both defiantly proud and slightly ashamed.

She presented as spontaneous, wilful, sensual, independent and strong; he marvelled again at the ability of his wonderful mind to conjure up such objects of desire from nothing.

He’d even taken her to the old family boathouse a few weeks ago, a place he hadn’t been in months, down by the empty windswept beach at Kakumäe. There was no longer a boat there, of course. It had been lost a few years ago; the ‘Katya’ had asked where it was, and whether he would get another one day. He just shrugged.

Karsten Talv was a very strong swimmer, of course, and the Baltic held no fear for him.

They stripped off and swam for a while. Naked, she playfully wrapped her legs around him in the water, teasing him, laughing, tempting him with what she knew he wanted, what just maybe she’d let him have, and then swimming away. He knew she’d be his then, and he knew she knew it too.

The sun was setting over the sea, and they sat drying off in the last rays, watching the sky turn from salmon to gold to orange to red, then purpling into night. He pointed out the dim glow of Helsinki in the distance. How had he ever come up with the word ‘Helsinki’, he wondered? He’d been there of course, and found that by some miracle of his boundless imagination the ‘people’ there spoke a completely different, invented language. It had taken him a whole weekend to learn to speak it fluently.

On the beach she told him of her last love, and he remembered to nod sympathetically. Now she was alone, and free, she said, and glad of it, although another part sometimes still cried out with the bitter pain of it all. But here, with him, Karsten, she felt like another person, on an unfamiliar shore, miles away from home. She felt renewed. He remembered to hug her tightly, and to kiss her gently, and to say ‘thank you, darling’.

The evening air sang with possibilities.

As the sun finally died, she pointed up at the twinkling sky. “What’s that bright star? That cluster, to the north?”

He knew, of course. He knew all the stars, because they were all in his mind, just like her, just like everything.

He told her a story.

“There once was a woman, and I know this to be true,” he said. “A woman like you, Katya.”

The woman was very beautiful, and she had her choice of lovers. She was wooed by the warm and constant Sun himself, who was always there for her. She was wooed by the soft romantic Moon with equal vigour through all his complex phases. She couldn’t choose, and instead she chose the Star.

The Star was as all stars are; bright, beautiful, cold, distant, inconstant. The woman tried to love the Star with all her heart, and perhaps she did. But he abandoned her, whether cruelly or innocently she never knew; he simply went away one day and never came back, as stars do.

She fled to the sea, and she cut herself with seashells, relishing the jagged comfort of fresh pain. But by the shoreline, she looked up and saw the sky was full of stars. That night she slept, and didn’t dream at all.

Afterwards, she still sometimes looked to the sky, and wondered where her Star was. But there were so many stars that after a while she couldn’t even remember what he looked like, and then it ceased to matter.

The ‘Katya’ was quiet for a while, and he listened to her breathing, the rise and fall of her chest.

“What do you love, Karsten?” she asked, finally.

That was easy. “Pears. Sweet, succulent pears. They’re my favourite pomaceous fruit of all. Genus Pyrus, family Rosaceae…”

The ‘Katya’ punched him in the arm. “Foolish Karsten! Be serious.”

He talked with animation then about his passion for conceptual art; how, at its best, it allowed bland everyday objects to find a natural self-expression, a different meaning, transforming mundanity into beauty, and didn’t that apply in some ways to people too? Wasn’t that what life was all about, really?

This was better, but still did not seem to be quite what she was after. Very soon she put a finger to his lips to stop him talking, and pulled him down onto the still-warm sand. He kissed her then, wondering at the illusory softness of the ‘Katya’s’ lips against his, the tenderness of her flesh, the sensual curve of her breasts, the wet warm willingness of her beneath him under the starlit dark.

She was momentarily very real indeed as she cried out in joy, quick and alive in his arms; almost as real as him.

He snapped out of the reverie, and turned his attention to the immediate here and now, the facts, the ‘Katya’s’ words. Working through the logical corollaries of her confusing collection of statements, he reasoned that there were two potential high-level solutions to this conundrum.

The first (Solution 1) would be simply to cut the Gordian knot; to drop the whole ‘Katya’ project, involving as it was, and focus his energy and attention on another external. The second (Solution 2) would be to attempt to address, and in so doing refute, the ‘Katya’s’ three objections, probably in the reverse order from that specified by the woman, on the principle that:

Knowledge of other → Trust in other = Negation of irrational fear or concern about other → Desired outcome. Q.E.D.

Although Karsten discerned that this, Solution 2, might well involve a significant investment in time and effort, he also thought, on balance, that the desired outcome could be worth it. It was all for her own good, after all. In addition, on the principle of loss aversion he was reluctant to abandon completely the investment of time and effort he had already made in the ‘Katya’ for her own benefit. He considered it a sunk cost which should be recovered if at all possible, and on this basis alone discarded Solution 1 as suboptimal.

He took a moment to reparse the logic from his own perspective. For him, neither fear nor trust were particularly relevant variables, so certain steps could be omitted, simplified, leaving:

Knowledge of other → Desired outcome. Q.E.D.

He wondered if there was some other intermediate step between knowledge and outcome that he was missing, but he couldn’t think of one; the axiom seemed complete. And axiomatically, he knew the ‘Katya’ better than she knew him (assuming for the sake of argument that she was real and therefore independently conscious and aware), and far better than she knew herself, or would admit to knowing herself (subject to the usual caveats). The latter was the frustration and the barrier. He would need to try again to explain to her what he had come to know over the last few weeks, and he rehearsed it in his head again, until he was happy with the form of words, and content that they left no room for ambiguity or misunderstanding. He would present his conclusions thus to her later:

ITEM #1: Although you (‘Katya’) present as a young woman who knows exactly what she needs and wants, you also have your own insecurities. There are a number of needs and wants which you do not articulate. These needs and wants seem repressed or denied, possibly buried beneath imprinted codes of ‘normal behaviour’.

ITEM #2: You find me (Karsten) both charming and fascinating. Irresistible, in fact (note: this is not a boast; this is normal). You have fallen in love with me. However, you will not admit this easily, because you are very beautiful and very proud. Also, you claim to have been ‘hurt’ before. You are now excited and discomforted by the balance of power in our ‘relationship’, as you like to describe it, and this presents as confusion and wariness.

ITEM #3: Yet when we have sex, which is often and enjoyable, you present as preferring me (Karsten) to take the initiative and take control of proceedings. It is clear that this signifies a deeper desire to relinquish control fully to me. Specific examples now follow.

He paused momentarily to ensure all this was logically consistent. Yes, on the assumption that the other was independently conscious, she would by definition also have a subconscious. If she was not, experience told him that she would still behave and respond as if she did, which amounted to largely the same thing.

ITEM #4: You have stated that in your early years of sexual awakening you resisted fellating men. This is pampered and lazy behaviour. Then you said it was ‘different’ with me, because you have ‘never felt this way about anyone before’. Interestingly, this particular act has recently become something of a habit, and increasingly so, in increasingly diverse locations and environments, some of which border on the exhibitionist. All this, and especially the latter, signifies a desire to express a hidden true nature.

Yes. That should do the trick. He foresaw her clear cornflower eyes widening in realisation, and then the placid acceptance of the self-evident truth of this.

ITEM #5: You asked me what I thought about ‘role play’. When I stated there was no difference between role and real, that none of this was ‘play’, and explained what that meant for you, you presented as angry and claimed that this was a discussion in the abstract, and that you were not talking about yourself (‘Katya’). However, the very same evening it became clear that this was not the case at all. And I am sure you remember what happened then. Another clear signifier.

ITEM #6: You offered to ‘play’ at being my, quote, ‘sex slave’ for the weekend. Yes, a sexy little game, you said, giggling beside me. When I queried why this suggestion was limited to the weekend, instead of the week or the month or the year, or just ongoing, you flushed and presented as angry again. You accused me (Karsten) of not taking you seriously. In fact I was taking you precisely seriously, as I shall now proceed to demonstrate.

The ‘Katya’ would be all agog by now, he thought; in thrall to his knowledge. Experience told him that the externals loved it when you knew them as they really were (if they really were). However, it was important to get the next part of the logical chain absolutely right, before he could move on to initiate the process itself.

ITEM #7: Although you present as rationalising this behaviour as ‘exploring ourselves, a game of love’, I sense this represents a desirable alternative reality for you. I can and will make this reality real, permanent, and irrevocable, because this is what you desire, a fact you will please now recognise and embrace.

ITEM #8: Thank you. You agree this therefore represents the desired outcome for you in terms of fulfilment and self-actualisation. Now, in order for this to happen, for your own good, a number of steps will need to be undertaken. These are as follows—

There. Job done. The rest was surely mere detail.

In a separate compartment of his mind, Karsten began to enumerate the various intricate stages he had already planned out for the ‘Katya’ project. He wondered if he would need to write it all down for her. There was a whole process map in his head, branching step by implacable step to an inevitable outcome—an outcome the ‘Katya’, secretly craved (and/or presented as secretly craving). He felt confident that, having heard his logic, and consequently knowing how well he understood her most deeply hidden desires, she would embrace these pre-determined stages of transformation as a necessary and desirable part of the self-improvement process, and she would present as suitably grateful.

He just needed to get past this knowledge → trust → fear business and get her to appreciate him properly.

He was confident this would be achievable. Some years ago—a lifetime really—he’d imagined that the ‘ema’ had got him a ‘kitten’. He’d looked at it, fascinated, for a long time. He couldn’t decide what to do with it at first, and wondered why he’d imagined that the self-styled ‘mother’ had delivered such a thing to him. The creature was all over the place, skipping and mewling at random, and not doing what he expected it to do at all.

He had broached the subject of what it was made of, how it worked, and how he could make its behaviour more predictable. The ‘mother’ had presented as amused.

“Karsten, it’s an animal, not a clockwork toy. It has a mind of its own. You can’t control a cat, let alone a kitten; it’s too intelligent, too independent, too wilful. It’s just like a little person. You can’t train it to be something it’s not. Just let it be, let it play, have fun. That’s what it’s for!”

He stared into the smiling face of his mother, green eyes into cornflower blue, and wondered why he had imagined she would say such disturbing things. Well, he thought, we shall see.

It took several attempts and several kittens over the years before he finally got it right.

In another compartment of his mind, Karsten reflected on the fact that the Montagny Premier Cru he’d ordered—at considerable expense, by the way—was something else that appeared woefully underappreciated by the ‘Katya’, who seemed thoroughly habituated to the finer things in life. She would appreciate such privileges far more once she had accepted his plan, he thought. In fact, he was confident that by the next time they came to this restaurant, she would have seen the light fully, and begun to express herself properly.

He decided there and then that the next time he visited this place, the completed artwork should be on a leash, just like his little kitten. It would be a fully-finished piece by then, and quite unrecognisable as the former ‘Katya’, of course, but everybody would immediately know his new creation for exactly what it was, which would be a good result for all concerned.

He was confident that his process would work, and that the former ‘Katya’ would be happy, and/or present as happy. He would have to think of a good name for it, though. Something simple, elegant, accurate, and descriptive.

He was sure the ‘Katya’ would present as liking its new name once he explained.

He slightly regretted not having greater immediate resources at his disposal, as he would have if certain things had turned out differently in this world. Real or not, the untimely disappearance of ‘ema’ and ‘papi’ had left him devastated, once he discovered his expected and overdue legacy was temporarily locked up in a so-called ‘Trust Fund’.

That word again: trust! Real or not, the world was full of such small ironies.

It had been the first and only time in his life that his world hadn’t simply delivered what he wanted on a plate, and the sense of outrageous injustice still smarted. He wasn’t yet sure if this swayed the evidence in favour of external reality, or whether his mind was simply playing a clever trick on him.

Still, his internal clock was ticking on that: two years, one hundred and thirty one days, four hours, eleven minutes and seven seconds was not very long to wait, and then he would truly be able to think big—on a grand scale, in fact—and he would be able to do what he wanted. Soon, he would be able to help many more of the externalities. He—Karsten—would be able to change many things. He spent a little time dwelling on the rich possibilities afforded by such freedom of action, and his thoughts briefly strayed to the redhead at the next table, and then beyond, to the wider canvas of the unknown future.

Very soon, he would make this world a better place.

But how time flew. He realised fully three seconds had already passed since the ‘Katya’ had spoken—almost four, now. Karsten Talv was a very quick thinker, and he’d learned a long time ago that social protocol dictated a spoken response within a given interval, for the avoidance of what he’d often heard described as ‘awkward silences’.

So thinking, he organised his face into the special smile he was learning worked best under such circumstances, the one signifying ‘empathy’.

“I understand, Katya,” he said, resisting the urge to raise both hands and add ironic rabbit-ear quotation marks. “So what would you like to know about me?”

He remembered how after they’d made love for the first time the moon had risen full over Kakumäe, and they’d wandered on the beach for a while, kicking the sand, looking for shells. He saw her feet touched the ground only lightly, and in the salt breeze and moonlight she seemed ethereal, almost weightless.

She was stooping to pick up a tiny pink coral when she saw the starfish.

It was small, no bigger than her hand; iridescent orange splashed with streaks of red. She peered at the starfish. It was trapped in a small rock pool. The starfish waved a perfect tentacle at her, and she waved back, amused.

“Look, Karsten, it’s talking to me!”

“Starfish can’t speak,” he said, automatically. “They are ancient marine invertebrates; simple things with a basic nervous system and not much else. They are barely one step up the evolutionary ladder from plants, and the prospect of conversation is remote.” The ‘Katya’ looked at him oddly at that, and he reminded himself again that ‘emotions’ were the important thing here.

“But what a pretty, fascinating creature it is,” he corrected. “Just like you, Katya.”

She squatted on her haunches to take a better look, brushing white-blonde hair away from dark eyes.

The rock pool was high on the beach, a remnant of the highest tides, and Karsten guessed the waves wouldn’t reach this far again for a month. The little starfish must have been here for a while. It must have been deposited in the shrinking rock pool by the receding high tide and then just abandoned to its simple dreams by the ebbing sea.

She wondered aloud what journeys the starfish could boast, if only it could talk for real. She wondered how it would feel, if it could feel, to be trapped here in this tiny rock pool. She had heard starfish can drift in the currents for thousands of miles, in search of the perfect home.

“Oh, Karsten, look. One of its poor little tentacles is missing. It’s only got four and a half.”

“Not a problem at all,” he said confidently. “Starfish can regenerate themselves from that central disc; cut off their limbs and they do not die. Such a loss does not hurt, because a starfish has neither pain receptors nor brain.”

“Mm hm. But now it’s trapped, in this pool, alone, far away from everything.”

He had a sudden fleeting sense of immense distance, of desolate emptiness, as of a creature lost and far from where it should be. Whose feelings are these, he wondered?

The ‘Katya’ reached into the rock pool and picked it up. It fit her hand perfectly. As she squatted, palm up and fingers splayed, it wriggled to arrange its tentacles accordingly, mimicking the shape of her hand. The starfish pulsed slightly, almost as if it was breathing.

The earth turned beneath his feet. New bright constellations were starting to appear in the east, exactly on clockwork cue. She gently carried the starfish down to the lapping silver waves. The tide was coming in, now, and she set the little creature down in the waves. The two of them watched it bob away, free, five tentacles spread like a flower.

Mister Talv does not often dwell on his youthful experiences these days, let alone the nature of reality. The past is the past, an alien place; and in any case he was a different person then, feeling his way towards his vocation. Nowadays, his skills and his work do not invite meaningful comparison with his early immature efforts any more than the drool-spattered scrawls of a teenage boy invite comparisons with Michelangelo.

Looking back, he understands, and he is richer for the understanding. But he just couldn’t make sense of it at the time. He had even been angry for a while; a whole new emotion for him.

‘Anger’ was coloured red, he’d noted with interest, and it smelled of metal. It still did.

All that time and effort and dedication and single mindedness, all with the very best of intentions, and the end result was: unaccountably, incomprehensibly, wrong.

Consider: he’d shared ‘knowledge’ that evening in the restaurant, in the pursuit of ‘trust’, and some of it had even been true.

He’d told her all about the ‘papi’ and how he’d helped get the occupation out of the Old Country; all the heroic fables of the reconstruction, a fine story. He didn’t dwell on the way former public assets always seemed motivated to repurpose themselves to the benefit of Mister Talv senior.

When the conversation touched on ‘work’ and ‘money’, he’d shrugged and explained (using terms he felt the ‘Katya’ would understand) that he was lucky, or more accurately, blessed, which he felt to be indisputable.

By way of illustration, he told the story of the travelling woods; how in the Old Country, the forests were the life blood of the land, and the trees moved in the night, always clustering around good people with good intentions, and edging away from the bad. The trees could move quickly when they needed to. A very cruel and ill-intentioned man had once woken up to find his entire forest had—so to speak—upped sticks and vanished over the bleak horizon, leaving behind only bracken and a few pine cones. His humble and well-intentioned neighbour—a friend to forests—thrived, while the cruel man was condemned to wander a wasteland of ever-receding treelines, their fruits always just out of reach.

She’d liked the story very much. He put his humble, well-intentioned face on just to reinforce the point, and imagined pear trees flocking to him, leaning their branches in his direction just as the beautiful blue-eyed ‘Katya’ leaned towards him across the table in rapt attention, her cleavage swelling fetchingly like ripe fruit.

Because formative childhoods always went down well, he’d spoken fondly of ‘ema’ and her wise and warm and funny ways, her beautiful white-blonde hair, and how she was the very beating heart of his much-loved family. He omitted to mention the many times he had quietly peered through her bedroom window to watch her endlessly striving in the service of a series of anonymous, faceless men, who may or may not have been real, he still wasn’t sure. He also did not speak of the kittens.

But how did his parents vanish together—so tragically, so suddenly—without a trace or a ripple in the calm summer water at Kakumäe? The ‘Katya’ was aghast at his loss. Why had they never even found the boat? Please, he didn’t want to talk about that. It was all still too raw. He’d showed her his very sad face and ensured his eyes were moist.

This had caused ‘Katya’ to present as smiling sympathetically, and she’d reached for his hand. She’d talked about how brave and sensitive he was, and how she’d been privileged that he’d shown her the boathouse, the precious beachfront cradle of his memories.

Excellent.

He’d learned from the ‘Katya’ that a bit of emotional hurt always went down well. In response to a particularly predictable line of questioning, he’d even made up a suitably romantic, innocent and rose-tinged story that could have come straight from the old archetypal myths. In fact, they had, although she wasn’t to know that. He’d spoken then of his own first love, his soul mate, Hämarik, who called him not Karsten, but Koit; her smile was like the sunrise, she had broken his heart, and this was why he was cautious and complex, and yes, maybe even a little wary of opening up.

“You can talk to me, Karsten,” she’d said softly, with that peculiar female mix of sympathy and hunger in her eyes, the hunger that signified the externals’ constant need to connect, to understand. “I know how you feel. Remember what we talked about on the beach; I’ve been there too. You can trust me, I promise.” That word again.

He’d held her hand tightly, and made sure to invent a few more stories implying he might not be perfect, because it was now clear to him that this was the way to communicate ‘vulnerability’, and that this helped to engender ‘trust’.

And on this basis, things had proceeded gratifyingly and according to plan, and he’d returned to his, Karsten Talv’s, apartment, with the ‘Katya’ enthusiastically in tow.

Whereupon the world had gone mad.

All that detailed analysis and planning and design: for nothing. He’d thought it all through to perfection, and his explanations were surely unambiguous. He had even drawn the ‘Katya’ a picture—several pictures, in fact!—in exquisite detail, to show exactly how the outcome of the project would be, which was surely exactly what she wanted, if she would only see. He’d explained how he would set her true desires free, and change her mind—quite literally change her mind—accordingly. He’d been so sure he’d got it right. It was the most extraordinary gift, and all would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Surely she must see? It was obvious.

So why on earth was she frowning at him like that?

And then, after all his most compelling insights and arguments and persuasive gifts, all his good intentions, when with a final flourish he’d explained what her new name would be, and what it meant, all hell had broken loose. She had actually shouted at him—well, screamed, really—and thrown wine in his face, and slapped him—twice, hard—and then just flounced out of his apartment like an ungrateful spoiled brat.

So the world outside existed after all, it seemed; and more importantly, it had failed to deliver what he wanted for a second time. It was all so horribly, counterintuitively random. This was not acceptable.

And as she—Katya, mystifyingly, indisputably real—slammed the door behind her, he’d resolved with icy determination that he must never allow such a thing to happen again.

Now, here in Tallinn, eighteen years, seventy two days, four hours and eleven minutes on, Mister Talv thinks of stars. He touches his cheek at the memory, still fresh after all this time. He can still feel the sting of her hand.