The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

1.

In the back of the police van, the argument’s starting again.

“Damn it, this makes me look like a turtle!”

Sharon is small, and the flakvest isn’t, and when Leeward looks at her, she waves her forearms slowly and ducks her neck down, snapping her mouth open and closed. It cracks him up, but he still shakes his head.

“You’re our pet shrink,” he says. “We aren’t going to lose you because some idiot who doesn’t even want to shoot you gets you with a stray.”

She subsides onto the bench, making a reptilian hiss but accepting it. She wonders what she’d do if Leeward said, “No, you’re right. Leave the armor here. We’ll just get someone else if you get capped.”

As he talks with the others in the van, she reflects that she’ll be left here, herself, more likely than not. This is a relatively low-risk vice raid on a kinky brothel, not some fortified meth lab, and she’s there to deal with the women they bring out.

But. But. Leeward’s heard the tape, and many of the others have, and everyone knows anyway that this brothel is one of the new ones. It’s one of the places where it’s as kinky as you want it, as painful as you’ll pay for, because the girls don’t say No.

They can’t say No.

Someone has carefully mindfucked them out of remembering what No even means. It’s getting to be very popular.

The van slows and they’re already in their gear, the conversation dying down. Suddenly no one is looking at her.

Sharon has worked hard to be one of the guys, but at times like this she knows they’re seeing her in the old way, as someone vulnerable. Her ex-husband Stu had seen her that way, and even the mild risks she took in this job had bothered Stu too much.

She sees herself as more cute than pretty, and knows she has a look that gets cuter the more she tries to toughen it. She’s worked past that with them. They’ve seen her do the job, as Stu never had, and they trust her. She pulls more than her weight, even given that she doesn’t weigh much.

But the guys are reverting now, wanting to protect her. What’s waiting at the brothel isn’t physical violence—she’s shown them she can handle that. This is different, a new violence that bends the mind while leaving the body unmarked and profitable. Not everyone here really gets that, yet, even though it’s why they have a psychologist on the team.

They’re seeing a whole new danger. Some of them may already have visualized Sharon herself under mind control: stripped and staring, ready to fuck on command.

For a couple of them it may be a fantasy, and she can sense the guilt there. She empathizes: she recalls a guy from training she thought of playing with, if she’d ever subdued him with one of the processes they were learning about. Sharon had been able to look him in the eye without trouble. Only afterward had she wondered what he might have dreamed about doing to her once he’d made her obedient.

Sharon thinks of trying to explain it. It’s not like the nefarious white slavers can flash-hypnotize her into turning tricks in one fell swoop if she goes around the wrong corner in this place.

The women these people take are conditioned for a long time after they’re abducted. Sometimes it takes so long, and they fight so hard, that they’re killed. Or they’re sold, often brain-damaged, to another sort of pimp, who’ll make another sort of profit, from people who don’t care what they fuck as long as it’s warm and doesn’t fight back.

She thinks about the tape. What the caller said checked out, so they’re moving on it as though it were true. She tells herself she’s going over the details of the layout and the security that the woman’s voice whispered, but the precision, the detail itself, sucks her in.

The detail made them suspect a trap at first, but now all she can do is sigh at the effort. The woman who found a phone, and enough willpower to call, had waited and learning those details. Maybe she’d had chances to call before, but forced herself to hold off until she could make it count. She must have known that waiting meant risking they’d brainwash her out of remembering. But she’d used the mind and guts her owners thought they’d taken from her.

Sharon recalls how the call ended.

“Have to go. They make it hurt to think and . . . it really . . . hurts . . .

“They’d see I’ve misbehaved. They’ll ask me why.

“I’ll want to . . . they’ll sell everyone, they’ll—all of us—

“Please. Just come. Come now.”

Hearing that dialtone again, Sharon decides, again, that she’s not going to wait out in the van.

2.

The lights are flashing too brightly and the music hammering too loudly. For an absurd moment the police stand unnoticed at the edge of the room. Though it’s high up in a tall building, the ceiling is high, too, and there’s a lot of volume to take in.

Dancers are on platforms around the room. They’re easier to reach than if they were in cages, and this place has other ways than cages to make a captive. The dancers are better lit than the women working the floor, but Sharon tries not to look at their faces yet.

They writhe. The strobes fondle them roughly, and they are never in shadow. There are no poles on the lighted dancing stages. They balance perfectly anyway, like well-oiled, shining machines.

Nude in heels, they dance in phase with the strobes, in synch with the music. The music owns them, their pelvic thrusts and shudders follow that pulse, as the whole room fucks them standing up.

Sharon blinks and tells herself the strobes are not subliminal projectors. Leeward’s cadre aren’t pausing awestruck at the spectacle—just making sure of the room.

They move.

Patrons and girls notice them and start to stampede, but Sharon can’t take her eyes off the dancers. They’re too lost in the beat, in what the lights are doing to their minds, to know there’s a raid.

For an awful moment Sharon wonders if the owners have fried their minds so hard that they can only be trained to do simple things like this and can’t stop until they’re told.

But someone kills the sound system and the compelling throb is gone. Sharon realizes it was staring to get into her head, but the dancers are already collapsing. One slumps down onto her platform and another topples from hers, hitting the floor with a thud and cry that get lost in the noise.

One of them jerks to a halt, suddenly graceless in a squat with her arms up. The lights come up and some of the strobes stop.

Sharon ignores everything and watches that dancer. She looks confused, and Sharon’s glad: there’s still a mind left in there to wonder. They haven’t reduced her to a one-trick robot.

But she sways again and holds herself, gazing away crosseyed before she can focus. Some of the other dancers are becoming aware. One sinks to her knees, playing with her nipples and shaking, giving herself to it and forgetting the rest.

When Sharon’s dancer looks up, her eyes are clear, and horrified. She looks around at the shattered orgy. Only Sharon is looking steadily at her but she doesn’t see Sharon. She’s still blinking as she kicks her heels off and leaps from the platform to the bar, then to the floor between two thrashing knots of police.

She runs.

Sharon follows.

Sharon wonders what, or who, the dancer’s so desperate to find. She doesn’t waste her breath calling out. Two officers try to stop the dancer but she pulls loose and they let her go, since a naked girl is probably neither a mind controller nor hired muscle.

Sharon shucks the flakvest and runs. As it thumps behind her she wonders if that’s the last stupid thing she’ll ever do. Ahead, the woman rounds a turn.

It’s a suite, where the noise from the party room gives way to a distant sound of traffic, coming through open windows from the street far below.

The woman is sprinting for the balcony.

Sharon has no idea how she reaches her, but she does, and now they’re tangled on the hard floor at the threshold of the balcony. It’s too quick to feel the bruises. The woman is taller than Sharon and stronger, but more than that, she’s almost insane. She doesn’t try fighting Sharon, just hooks her fingers on the edge of the door and pulls, and Sharon can’t keep hold and still find purchase to stay put.

The woman is going to drag them both to the railing.

For a second Sharon wishes she were bigger. Or—that the woman would elbow her gut or go for her eyes. Give her any excuse to let go.

Sharon doesn’t let go. More than possibly falling ten storeys, what truly scares her is the dancer’s sheer need to throw herself down, how it vibrates through her body.

Sharon’s losing. The woman needs to die more than Sharon can hold her back. Sharon remembers training: When it’s them or you—pick you.

They’re at the railing.

She wants to scream. She wants to think Leeward will tell her there was nothing else she could have done—

“Please.” The syllable drips with pain.

Startled, Sharon almost lets go. The dancer is still pulling hard.

“Please. Let. Me. Go.”

It’s her. From the tape, the one who called.

If Sharon hangs on, the woman will pull them both over. In a minute, less than that, they’ll be dead on the pavement.

But Sharon will not let go of this woman, for anything in the world.

She feels the tight flesh against her, smells cheap perfume and sweat and powerful arousal. She thinks of Leeward and her friends, of the last moments this woman is having. Dying is not the worst thing.

This woman fought mind control to free everyone else and now . . .

She gasps out the only thing she can think of. “You—don’t—deserve—this!”

She closes her eyes and hangs on as the stronger woman starts to pull them onto the top rail.

Then they fall back, not lightly, to the balcony’s stone. The woman shakes once and goes limp. She’s sobbing but not even that can move her much. Sharon holds her, trying to be gentle, still too happy the woman believed her to comprehend that she won’t be street pizza, either.

When Leeward gets there, he brings the blanket she asks for, and keeps everyone else away.

3.

“I must obey!” The captive writhes in the restraints.

She tries to nod at what the headphones are telling her. But they’ve been droning to her for hours already, and it’s as if they made her body as limp as her mind. By now she can only loll her head.

Her surrender is clear anyway. Each time she hears the voices she seems to be having sex with her bonds. Even in repose, her body is curved and tensed for sex, and sometimes she moves slightly as though someone has stroked her. The sweat gleams on her like oil under the lights, and on her shaved crotch and her inner thighs her dew shines too.

The table that the woman—the patient—is bound to is in a glassed-off room. Sharon stands with the rest of them outside the glass, watching. They’re in the dark, lit only by screens and small desklamps.

The patient’s name is Jill. Sharon is here because it was Jill who resisted the control and called them, who almost threw herself off the balcony. She’s wishing she hadn’t come.

Putting a name to the woman in there makes it worse. Intellectually Sharon knows Jill is being deprogrammed, her mind freed, but she still feels like a voyeur. She’s seen this before, and it’s been painful enough to watch someone squirm and climax and scream her submission, still mostly a slave.

But this woman is real. She’s—Jill. She has a name, whether she remembers that or not.

Someone catches Sharon’s eye. Not a therapist—one of the social workers, she recalls. Valerie something. She saw Valerie once with one of the women after a session, in a crowded hallway. They faced the wall together, hugging, as Valerie conjured privacy, not making the woman walk and wait for it.

Valerie nods to her once before stepping out of the room. Sharon feels a little better. Valerie’s eyes, too, are full of knowing how wrong this is.

A couple of the people out here have headsets that let them monitor what she’s hearing, but Sharon’s already heard it, or something like it, and doesn’t need to listen again. Someone else in another area, behind the glass on the other side of Jill, controls those messages. It’s probably a recording.

They’re teaching Jill to think for herself again, not to obey headphone voices—which has to start by using the conditioned obedience that’s in her now. It feels dirty, and it is, but it works. So does using other slavers’ confiscated equipment.

Sharon watches Jill jerk on the slavers’ table and thrust her hips up, hissing with need. They don’t even need dildos with the women from this raid—most of them respond helplessly to triggers now.

It suddenly occurs to her that everyone else here is clothed, but Jill isn’t. She has no secrets, especially when she comes. Now, she subsides to the table, sighing, starting to plead.

“I’m sorry I disobeyed!” Only now does she look ashamed. “Please. Please, help me obey.”

A bluish light bathes her face and upper body. She melts against the table, suddenly limp in the restraints. The anguish leaves her face, and she almost smiles. They’ve inserted that trigger among her compulsions, so they can put her to sleep. It’s easier than sedating her with a needle, and it works instantly.

Someone must have decided Jill needed a break from responding to the stimulation. Or that they needed a break from watching her do it.

Sharon hugs herself. Jill’s conditioning still has her so eager to please that she accepted the new trigger immediately. The woman that hated and fought control is still inside her, but there’s still a lot there that her brainwashers installed. Most of the time they had controlled Jill’s mind, and she liked it. It’s as if she fought while she needed to, but she senses that surrender won’t hurt anyone now.

Sharon doesn’t blame her for that. But she hates that Jill has to endure it before she’s free.

Then Leeward is next to her with two cups of coffee, and she takes the one he offers. They glance at each other in the dark: they’ve worked cases where someone drugged someone else that way.

“You don’t have to be here,” he murmurs.

She just shrugs.

“You’re not doing therapy, and you’ve already done the tactical workups.” He has a point: this isn’t her part of the job. There’s plenty to learn, but she doesn’t have to learn it now, watching Jill under the lights. Someone else will prepare Jill to testify, and give their own testimony about her and about what’s been done to her.

“How are the forensics going?”

“Beside the point now.” It’s hard to tell what he feels about that. “None of them will have to testify in court—they’re just giving depositions. There won’t be any trials for this. The bastards we caught running that place all rolled on their bosses and pleaded out.”

“Good.” Sharon would have liked to see some of the slavers explaining this shit to a jury. But she’s glad Jill and the others will be spared facing that jury too, to talk about being playthings.

“She’s not your patient,” he says.

“I know.” She looks at the others, whose patient Jill is. They tolerate Sharon here—she stays out of the way, and some of them have heard about the balcony. Right now she notices that most of them aren’t even looking into the glassed-in chamber, where the nude girl is sprawled in her bonds. Naked women who beg to obey are as routine in here as in the brothel.

She looks past them, watching Jill’s face. It’s still peaceful, though she knows the programming still taints Jill’s dreams and tries to see if there’s REM under the eyelids.

But right now it’s OK. Jill’s brow is smooth and her body is relaxed, her breasts rising and falling slowly. Sleeping, just as the blue light told her to, until the headphones tell her to wake and listen again.

Leeward presses Sharon’s shoulder as he leaves.

She nods but doesn’t look away from Jill. Let her sleep! Just a few more minutes!

She leaves, too, knowing they won’t—they can’t, if they’re going to give Jill her mind back. But she wants to remember Jill at rest, when the other images come back to her.

4.

The graveyard shift. Sharon stays away from the open-all-night task force spaces and works in her office. She’d be working with the squad, but Leeward’s breaking in a new ride-along shrink, to expand the cadre, and they don’t need her.

It’s been weeks since the raid. She’s worked some calls, but nothing on that scale. She knows she needs sleep, but the apartment’s too empty. The clutter there since Stu stopped being around to sigh and straighten it out just makes it emptier.

It scares Sharon that she isn’t really missing Stu. She wants to, and now she reaches back for the early memories, when they still connected, when they could share problems. Usually that’s too unpleasant, but she’s too tired now and too heartsick with this case to remember why she’s avoided it.

She stays here and helps process the women, doing paperwork to free up the therapists. She feels guilty about leaving. Casey’s still screaming herself out of nightmares now that the conditioning that made her like it is gone. The one who can’t remember her name still hasn’t been identified. Her accent might be Canadian, and Ottawa’s looking, but when she goes to sleep tonight, if she can, she still won’t know who she is.

Sharon brings up the meager file on her. As she looks at the screen, into the hopeful eyes, she realizes she’s using the woman to escape her own inner whine. She turns away, unable to look the woman in the eye.

“Doctor?”

Sharon looks up. Jill’s athletic figure shadows the doorway.

They’ve talked a few times in the past weeks. Sharon can see her without thinking of her in the glass room, or dancing with a vacant stare. Running . . .

“We appreciate how hard you’re trying.”

Sharon realizes she’s punchy enough now to start crying at something like that. The women from the brothel have bonded, and this collective kudo means a lot. She just nods.

“I think I may get more sleep than you, Doctor. You need to take care of yourself.”

Sharon marvels at her poise. She gestures at the computer, the files.

“Do you want to go get something to eat?” Jill seems tense as she asks.

Sharon doesn’t know where this could go. She can’t afford to be anyone’s friend—cases end, friendships don’t. Jill seems concerned about her, though, and that’s good. Jill will never forget she spent months as an object, but helping others can do a lot to convince her it wasn’t her weakness.

Jill sees her hesitate. “Thing is, we get this stipend. And since you’re feeding us, too, there isn’t a lot to spend it on. So it’s my treat, OK?” She grins, but there’s something very serious there.

“Since you saved my life and all, I can spring for someplace nice. You know, with tablecloths.”

Sharon looks up. She doesn’t even know Jill had found out who’d kept her on the balcony, but she sees Jill isn’t the kind who’d leave that untouched.

“Tablecloths sound nice.” She sees Jill relax a little. “Where did—?”

“I was going to ask you.” Jill smiles lopsidedly. “I didn’t, ah, get out much.”

Sharon grins and stands. “There’s an all-night Thai place near here.”

Jill nods. “Thai. Thai is good.”

Thai turns out to be very good. They talk about everything but the raid. Jill tells her how the women are faring, and Sharon likes her more, seeing her advocate for them. One isn’t really ready to get out on her own but too diffident to say so, and she’s quietly terrified as the therapists nudge her out. Sharon agrees to talk to them.

Jill evades a question about her family that Sharon didn’t even realize she’d asked. But Jill seems to hear herself do it and, taking a drink, looks Sharon in the eye. “Thing is, they don’t really believe in mind control, my folks. There’s not a lot of it back there among the real people.

“I forgot them for a while. I mean really—forgot them. Part of the programming. Then I started to remember.” She drinks again.

Sharon saw the summaries. Jill’s brainwashers made her watch them condition other women, but instead of breaking or dulling her empathy, that intensified it. It kept pulling her out of trance. She’d visualized her family, people she knew, who would never tolerate this.

“I idealized them. It worked.” Jill looks away. “When I needed it.”

It kept Jill going, hanging on to free thought long enough to look, plan, risk a phone, wait—to save the others. Sharon is glad, once again, she didn’t let this woman die.

But that job is done. Jill’s in a completely different place. Now there’s just herself—and she’s a writeoff. She’s not suicidal, but Sharon wonders what will happen in a year, in five years.

They leave the Thai place after Jill pays and leaves a generous tip. The silences lengthen as Sharon drives up to the guarded motel where they’re putting up the women who aren’t inpatients. Jill keeps going on tangents, trying to keep up the conversation. Her idea to go somewhere else for dessert or drinks sounds rushed, and she knows it.

“Sorry, I—this place—”

“It’s OK,” Sharon says. “I’ve dealt with some witnesses, even jurors we’ve kept here. It’s tacky beyond belief.”

“No.” Jill looks guilty. “No. Look, this is palatial compared to—before. It’s . . .” She stares forward and Sharon realizes how much worse an empty room is for Jill than for her.

Sharon thinks about not playing favorites. But she remembers Jill naked above the street, begging her to let go. The wind on the balcony blows everything else from her.

She decides Jill will not have to beg to keep the evening going, to stave off a night in that room.

“If you don’t mind clutter, I have a couch that’s pretty comfortable.” She’s looking out the windshield.

Next to her Jill becomes still, and now she’s worried what else that might have sounded like.

She hears Jill breathe. Trying to say No, and can’t.

“Please. If I have to go home I’ll need the company.” As she tries to make it into a favor Jill can do her, she hears herself meaning it.

Jill sucks air. “Thanks.” She opens the door. “I’ll get my stuff.”

Finally Sharon can make herself turn and nod cheerfully, and she watches Jill run to the room.

Sharon heads to the motel office, wondering how the duty officer will react. But the woman seems preoccupied, and just accepts that Sharon’s responsible for Jill. It doesn’t seem like much of a job. None of the other rescuees has tried to venture out, even though they’re free to, and no other predators have stalked them here.

Suddenly Sharon worries they’re getting complacent. Newly-recovered victims are notoriously popular targets, since they’re pre-softened for new owners’ brainwashing. She says nothing. She doesn’t want to jolt the woman into objecting to Jill having a night out, and she has faith in the rest of it.

She heads back out quickly, so Jill won’t find an empty car.

5.

“Wow,” Jill says as the lights come on. Sharon sees her flat with a newcomer’s eye and cringes at the mess, but Jill is only seeing the personal space, the owned things. Bookshelves and pictures, newspapers, CDs. Enough sheer volume of things to clutter a floor.

Jill has her bag slung over her shoulder. It’s a plastic duffel from a dollar store with basic toiletries and underwear and shirts and jeans, and it’s her stuff just because it’s what was dealt out to her when the women were settled in the motel. The stipend would cover such things, but only a few of the women have had both the time and the spirit to make shopping expeditions. She doesn’t know why Jill has never gone, but she’s thinking Jill probably stayed with the ones too scared to leave.

Sharon chaperoned one of those trips. She spent most of it staying in the minivan with Carrie, who’d made it to the mall but couldn’t make herself get out and enter the crowd. She’d thought Carrie had been abducted from a place like this and feared it, but it turned out that Carrie just couldn’t face so many people at once who’d never been slaves.

Sharon thinks Jill might make a good co-chaperone for the next one. That might let her buy things without feeling selfish.

“Sorry about the chaos.”

“Oh, don’t worry.” Jill is smiling and looking at the books. “In my old room back ho—in my old room you couldn’t see the floor, half the time.”

“I thought about having a service come in,” Sharon says. “But I’m really territorial.”

“So was my brother,” Jill says lightly, and looks at the shelf of carved animals. Sharon hears the past tense and wonders if Jill lost him before. It feels odd to hope so. Jill and the rest of her family may be dead to each other, but only Jill went to that funeral.

“Sharon?”

She starts. Jill is looking at her with big worried eyes. “Sorry.”

“You really do need to crash,” Jill says, almost in awe, and Sharon realizes how tired she is.

Sharon feels bad now. Jill needs company, and Sharon is likely to fall over in mid-chat.

“I’m OK. Let me get the pillows and so forth before I forget.” She heads for the closet and asks Jill if she wants some coffee.

Jill meets her on the way back and takes the pillows and the afghan. “I’m fine,” she smiles ruefully. “But I won’t make you stay up.” She looks around. “It’s enough to be in an actual person’s place. I mean it.”

Sharon smiles back, and then shows Jill where the kitchen and bathroom are, both of which she’s kept relatively clean. They split up to change, and Sharon feels odd being naked for a moment when there’s someone else around, even if it’s another woman in another room. She starts to walk out when she’s suddenly conscious that her T-shirt’s brushing high up on her thighs, but she decides not to pull on sweatpants.

Jill’s dressed likewise, although she has shorts on under the tee. She declines coffee again—goes badly with toothpaste—and they sit and chat for a while. Sharon assures her that for now she can set her own hours at work, so she doesn’t need to get up early.

“Oh-dark-thirty,” she calls it, and it feels comfortable to half-mock Stu’s old military-speak. Jill grins, without saying why it’s familiar.

But she fades for a moment and when she snaps fully aware again, she sees Jill looking at her with sympathy and she has no idea anymore what they were talking about.

“Go to bed already.” Jill sounds like she’s OK, not needing company.

Sharon reels for a moment. As her head clears, she considers how blank she was. She nearly blurts out Is this what mind control feels like? but keeps it in.

There’s a short, almost luxurious moment of horror as it occurs to her that maybe she is controlled. She’s never dealt with one, but some controllers convert their victims into serial recruiters, programmed to drug or hypnotize new victims. Some keep doing it even when their masters are in jail. They can’t help themselves.

But Jill doesn’t order Sharon to follow her out or make a phone call in a monotone voice. Sharon shakes it off and stands up.

“Thank you,” Jill calls shyly after her, when she’s already headed for her room. Sharon turns and smiles and then she’s in her own bed. It’s odd with someone else here, and she lies awake for a while. She’s feeling less sleepy now that her head’s on the pillow, but before she can think about heading back out, she sees the light under the bedroom door go out. Jill’s crashing, too.

Sharon lies there, thinking, listening, only now wondering what Leeward will say when he learns she had one of the women sacked out on her sofa instead of bedded down with the others.

Something makes her get up, without turning on the light. Again, she thinks vaguely about posthypnotic suggestions, but she just eases the door open and pads back down the hall to the living room.

Jill is an upright shadow in the moonlight, not lying down. Sharon has another moment of fear. If Jill has become someone’s robot again, she’s younger and taller and stronger than Sharon is.

But the shadow is half-slumped and just turns a little as Sharon comes near. Sharon turns on a small lamp.

In the unthreateningly dim light Jill’s eyes are wide, but not with hypnosis. Her guard is down and her demons are already courting her. She opens her mouth, to try a joke or even just apologize, but can’t manage anything anymore. Sharon wants to turn away to spare Jill even an audience of one.

Instead she keeps walking and leans down to take Jill by the hand. She doesn’t smile but she nods, and Jill gets up even while shaking her head. In the bedroom Sharon eases her onto the bed. She thinks of leaning down to hold Jill for a moment, but holds back. Like an undertow this has all taken her quietly out of her depth, and all she knows anymore is that she has charge of someone special, who needs to be cared for more gently than she’s ever done.

She watches Jill curl a little and close her eyes and possibly whisper something. She reaches down slowly and squeezes the other woman’s shoulder, and pulls the comforter over her. Then she goes back around to slip in on the other side of the bed, making sure there’s plenty of comforter for both of them before sliding until they’re lightly back to back.

“Good night,” she whispers, and Jill manages to echo it.

It’s familiar but strange to lie there with another person, but Sharon’s fatigue and the long warmth of Jill against her send her to sleep.

6.

Sharon wakes from a calm dream of Stu. The body in her arms that woke her is as real as it is soft and smooth and un-Stulike. They’ve turned in their sleep to face each other and Jill holds her, eyes still closed. Sharon is suddenly very aware of breasts against hers, how silken Jill’s skin is.

Moonlight leaking past the drapes lets her watch Jill’s lips move and curl into a smile. The girl is dreaming, and it doesn’t seem to be a nightmare—or, worse, a wetdream—about the brothel or the brainwashing pens before it. Sharon holds her even more delicately now.

“Ssstayyyy,” Jill whispers, her breath cool on Sharon’s face. Sharon feels like an eavesdropper and atones by stroking Jill’s back. Jill smiles and makes a soft sound, and nods slowly against the pillow. “Nnnn. S’meee . . .” She smiles again, appeasingly, wanting whoever she’s dreaming to believe her.

“Mmmmommm . . .”

Jill’s dreaming her homecoming. Sharon goes very still. Jill’s only spoken to her family by phone but Sharon knows how they reacted. She wonders if Jill’s subconscious is kind enough to conjure a friendlier might-have-been. She wonders, too, if Jill has dreamed this before, or if sleeping next to someone softened Jill into hoping.

She watches Jill open her mouth but slowly close it again, inhaling quickly. There was no mercy in this dream. Morbidly she tries to imagine how much worse than reality this rejection was.

It’s too much. Jill’s too close. Sharon moves forward, into her, and tightens her arms around the other woman. She kisses her cheek, tasting tears, and puts her lips to the top of Jill’s ear.

“Yes,” she whispers. “It’s you, love. My Jill. Safe home.” She’s afraid of saying something wrong.

But Jill presses close to her, her own strong young arms holding Sharon. Her breath strokes Sharon’s shoulder through the cotton of the tee.

“Mmm mmm Mom.” Jill tenses in a noiseless sob. Sharon’s own eyes burn and she holds Jill tighter. Lips purse against her skin above the T-shirt’s collar and Jill moves against her, as if Jill is small and Sharon is large enough to have borne her and held her before.

Sharon is too wonderstruck to cry. She strokes Jill’s back, feeling the tensed muscles relax, as the breath against her slows and softens. Just before sinking at last, Jill turns in her arms, boneless and smiling, and then they’re spooning.

Smelling Jill’s hair, aware of the supple length of her, Sharon feels Jill’s thighs against her own. She can’t tell where tenderness becomes arousal, but she’s glad the other woman is sleeping. She remembers wishing they’d let Jill stay asleep in the chamber, and leaving while she could still kid herself that they would.

Now, instead of being on display in restraints, Jill is curled against her. Sharon keeps her warm and can guard her sleep. She reaches around and finds Jill’s hand and takes it. The girl grips her without waking.

In the precious quiet, it hits her. They’re lying as they did on that balcony, Sharon wrapping her from behind. But they’re warm this time, and Jill is relaxed and knows she’s not alone.

Sharon remembers hanging on, and how there was something even greater than her fear. Something more awful if Jill died after all that, than in Sharon herself dying. She would have clung to Jill like a starfish, even if Jill had dragged them over.

Listening to Jill breathe, Sharon trembles to know that she would do it again.

“You are to die for.” She kisses Jill behind her ear. Jill doesn’t move. Sharon feels Jill’s heartbeat and slow, rhythmic breathing hypnotizing her. She melts into her and lets it happen.

She wakes to Jill’s face before her own, silvered and lovely in the near dark. Jill’s eyes are open and there’s another dizzy moment of wondering what she’s welcomed into her home, her bed. Jill is svelte and hot against her, and a lot of Sharon is lost, wanting to let Jill do with her whatever Jill wants to. Sharon is too sleepy, and turned on, to worry that a woman is making her feel that way.

If Jill is under someone’s control, and about to seduce and hypnotize her for them, she won’t resist.

It bites her coldly inside. The friendly brave girl she’s learned to cherish would hate herself for betraying Sharon. Maybe that’s enough to let Sharon fight.

Jill smiles. The tempting nightmare passes. “I woke you.”

Sharon shakes her head, smiling back. “It’s all right. Are you OK?”

Jill nods slowly as her smile deepens. Her eyes shine and she wipes one of them quickly. “I know what you did. When I was dreaming.”

“I’m sorry.” Sharon moves her arm and strokes Jill’s. “I didn’t know what your mother called you.”

Jill shakes her head quickly and then leans down to put her cheek against Sharon’s. “No. No. In the dream it was just what I needed. Being held. I knew someone was. Someone.”

She’s holding Sharon to reassure her, but it’s she who starts to cry. Sharon curls readily against her. There’s nothing she can say, but she holds Jill and kisses her, and they lie entwined as the younger woman slowly relaxes. When they’ve been quiet for a while and she turns her face to Sharon’s, Sharon kisses her forehead and looks at her.

Jill moves, and her lips are against Sharon’s.

She pulls back a little, eyes wide and so artless and hopeful that Sharon hurts with it.

Sharon leans forward and kisses Jill on the mouth. Tasting her first woman, she feels only joy.

7.

They’re panting when they part. Their tongues’ dance charmed them out of remembering to breathe. Sharon looks at Jill in awe and feels herself getting wet again. There’s no morning and no world beyond this safe nest under the comforter, and she’s free. She leans in and loses herself in Jill once more. Jill is touching her now and Sharon moves against her.

Feather touches at her waistband and then smooth fingertips are slipping down to her cleft, feeling her with delicate eagerness. Jill hums happily under Sharon’s jaw, as if she’s thrilled with what her fingers read in the braille between Sharon’s thighs.

“But . . .” Sharon’s whisper seems loud. Jill’s lips on her throat suck gently, maddeningly. Sharon opens her legs and feels her pussy grow slick to the other woman’s touch.

“B-but . . .” It’s pointless now. She’s past any resisting, and she wants to lie there and let Jill caress her and be her soft, soft vampire.

Yet Jill stops. Sharon realizes how tenderly she’s held. Jill knows what it’s like to be played with, and she won’t make Sharon her toy. It’s unbearable, and Sharon has just enough strength to raise her head and kiss Jill. Jill’s head follows hers back down to the pillow, and she waits for a moment.

“Please,” she whispers. “Let me. It’s all I can give you.”

Sharon winces.

Jill’s eyes are moist again. “You don’t have to do anything. Just lie back. I want to do this. For the first time I want it.”

Sharon looks at her. She realizes she’s been falling in love with Jill all evening, maybe before, but right now it’s more than that. She wouldn’t let Jill be a beggar, before, when Jill needed more than four strange walls to watch the night. She won’t let Jill be a whore now.

“I w—” She swallows. “I want it too.”

She takes Jill’s hand, which rests on her belly, and pulls it down again. She tightens her thighs over it and stares up at Jill. The hand isn’t moving but already Sharon knows how nice it will feel.

“Yes.” She smiles up and nods against the pillow. Jill nods back, and her hand moves, and . . .

“Yesssss . . .”

Sharon tries, hard, to keep eye contact, to stay with Jill. But Jill’s touch is taking her to another place. Her eyes roll up and she can’t remember how to speak anymore.

Jill’s smile is by her eyes, now, and it kisses her between them before she feels breath, and lips, and tongue on her ear. As if a current flowed from there to her pussy she bucks weakly under Jill and cries out. Jill’s arm is around her now but Jill’s clever fingers and wise lips are relentless.

Sharon doesn’t know she’s pleading until Jill kisses her quiet, then touches her exactly—there.

The orgasm hits her over and over, faster than waves, more like gusts of wind. The pleasure strobes through her mind. Sharon forgets who she is.

But she remembers Jill, who holds her and keeps the gusts from blowing her away.

Jill lets her float in the afterglow until she’s ready and then brings her down gently, playing Sharon’s pussy with deft tenderness. The pleasure doesn’t stop, it just softens, fading to a background heaven that lets Sharon think again.

They’re holding each other tightly. Jill’s hand is still between her thighs, resting there as Jill rests against her. Sharon kisses her and loses herself in it. It’s like a still pool after the rapids.

She looks into Jill’s eyes.

“I love you.”

Both of them gape for a moment. Then Sharon kisses her again, and finds the will to pull Jill’s hand from her cleft. Jill is still wide-eyed but she’s smiling. It’s a fragile thing and for a moment Sharon is terribly afraid for her, but it removes any doubt she had.

She says it again. “I love you.” She smells herself on Jill’s hand and almost kisses it too, but she realizes what she wants. Slowly, she rolls over and Jill falls back, rolling under her, letting Sharon take control.

Seeing the stronger woman suddenly passive and uncertain raises something predatory in Sharon. Sharon feels it inside her and mercilessly strikes it down. Nothing will hurt Jill.

Arms on either side of Jill, Sharon looms over her, and lowers herself to kiss Jill’s belly through the T-shirt. It’s rucked up to her ribs by now, and as Sharon kisses lower still, she finds skin and lingers on it. Jill’s neck tastes different. Suddenly she wants to taste every inch of Jill, but she remembers what she wants.

“Sharon?”

Jill feels her kissing lower.

“Are you sure—?”

Sharon rears up slowly, grinning at her. “I want it too.” Then she bends down again, and slides Jill’s shorts down. She sees Jill’s pussy in the dimness and her head spins—can she smell it already?—and she almost yields and bends down to it.

But the shorts are still tight around Jill’s thighs. She doesn’t want to have Jill that way—not bound. She slides them down without looking away from the full, shaved shape of Jill’s pussy. Jill works her legs to help the shorts down and kicks them free. Sharon nuzzles the thigh that slides past her head.

Even better. Now that Jill’s legs are free, she can—

She does, breathing in the sharp new scent and making tiny kitten-licks. She wants to press in and suck and lick and let the flavor make her drunken, but Jill is making sounds and moving, and she still feels that fierce tenderness.

I want it too.

And she wants it for Jill, now. She kisses the skin around the flower, licks some more, trying to keep her mind from going all hot and wet and dark, so she can do this right. Reaching up to cup Jill’s ass, she can feel the girl weaken, losing herself in what Sharon’s mouth is doing to her, though she manages to keep stroking Sharon’s hair.

Sharon doesn’t really know what she’s doing but she lets Jill guide her, finding the spots that make Jill make the sounds that tell Sharon it’s right.

Far above, Jill is starting to babble nonsense in a little-girl voice. Her hands are random and feathery on Sharon’s head.

Sharon has found the places, and soon she’s following Jill’s pussy as it thrashes. For an instant, she wonders if it’s smart to have her head between the thighs of a woman as strong as Jill, lost in the throes of climax.

She puts her lips to Jill’s clitoris. She sucks lightly, precisely—so.

8.

Leeward can tell.

Sharon isn’t sure why he checked the signouts, but he has. It makes her worry for a moment about whether the other therapists know, too. But they don’t seem to focus on the women unless they’re actually in a session, and it might not even occur to them.

He lets her make her cautious case to them, for the patient Jill told her about who doesn’t think she’s ready for release. Maybe he can tell how she’s keeping Jill out of it, and wonders which of them Sharon’s protecting.

When the conversation stops and the therapists go back to work, she hasn’t made any enemies, but she doesn’t know if she made progress, either. She wants to. She wants to be able to tell Jill how Jill had made a difference for that woman.

Being honest with herself, she knows she wants to please Jill, too. And not just in bed.

So maybe she did hypnotize me last night. The thought is a little scary, mostly amusing, and tempting enough to make her feel guilty.

Now I’m helplessly programmed to advocate for her friends. She wants to laugh. But the idea of lighting up Jill’s eyes with good news does make her warm, and a little wet too.

Leeward is looking at her and for a second she thinks he’s read it in her face. He ends up near her, and when there’s no one else to hear, he looks down at her.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” It isn’t criticism. This is Leeward—he can be nuanced, but he usually doesn’t bother. He asks in order to know.

“No,” she says without even thinking, looking him in the eye.

He nods. “That usually works best.” He winks and strides out, never having mentioned Jill at all.

Sharon shivers, to realize that someone like that trusts her that far. It feels like a blessing.

It’s time to leave here too.

She’s been daydreaming about another dinner out, this time closer to actual dinnertime, and more time just being with Jill. Now she agonizes about the note she left, with Jill still asleep in the daybreak—too cold, she thinks, too matter-of-fact. She wanted to say “love,” let Jill see it in writing, but it felt lessened. She wanted to wake Jill and say it aloud, and risk falling back into bed with her.

She starts to worry about how Jill felt to see a note telling her to make herself at home. Warm, maybe, but not hot. Neither one of them has called the other, but that could be . . .

Sharon stops thinking about it until she’s back in her building, heading out of the elevator. There’s an almost self-indulgent vision of finding the apartment door torn open, no sign of Jill but the expended sleepdart her abductors might leave—but the door’s intact.

When she opens it, there’s music. She blushes: Jill’s found one of her Duran Duran CDs, and has also found the magic volume level that keeps the neighbors from knowing about Sharon’s thing for them. It’s just loud enough that she gets through the front hall to the living room unheard.

For a second, she wonders if she’s entered the wrong flat after all. The place is unrecognizable. The books and papers and printouts are all stacked, and at first glance they’re even tentatively organized. Even the sorting piles are neat. There’s so much more floor now, and without even having to turn her head, Sharon sees three different objects she’s lost over the last few months.

A glance shows her that the kitchenette hasn’t been spared, either. This is almost like moving.

“No! No! No—tor—ious! . . .”

Jill has her back to the doorway, and Sharon steals this chance just to look at her. She’s barefoot and ponytailed, in another T-shirt. Her lissome legs curve down from gym shorts one charming size too small. She’s dusting with one hand, and she has the other out and up beside her as she rises up and down with the beat. In quarter-profile, Sharon can see her mouthing the words.

She knows Duran Duran lyrics.

Jill bops stylishly down along the shelf system she’s been unearthing, and it would be funny if she weren’t so . . . fucking . . . gorgeous.

She freezes, and spins around. Sharon wants to slap herself for being a voyeur. Jill can probably feel a gaze on her body by now, and she does not need to feel preyed on, hunted, coveted.

Especially not here, where she should feel safest.

Jill’s still frozen but her eyes sweep the room before lighting on Sharon again. They widen, and she shakes her head without seeming to know it. She’s still afraid.

Sharon gets it.

Jill’s been enjoying her own trance today, swimming in afterglow, nesting, learning about her new lover and repaying hospitality by tidying up. Trying on the life of someone who’s never been a brainwashed slave. Who also cares about her. Touching Sharon, by caring for what’s hers.

Now she’s awakened to how much she’s just done to Sharon’s territory. Wondering if the mess was a filing system Sharon will spend months reassembling. If “make yourself at home” was just . . .

Now she’s feeling like a one-night stand, less safe after sunrise than a vampire.

Her body tenses to bolt. It’s beautiful, but not the stung heart within it. Not the hole she’ll leave—

“Notorious” still plays, insulating them. But Sharon knows whichever of them speaks, whatever she says, this will die. Jill will leave. They’ll kiss and smile, and Jill still won’t ever be back . . .

Before it can happen, Sharon moves. She’s across the now-open floor before she really knows she’s flown. She stares up at Jill, willing her silent, hoping for some hypnosis of her own.

Then she’s holding the taller girl, and it’s astonishment that silences Jill. Jill is still taut, but like a wild animal in shock she trusts Sharon against her, for a second. On the CD, a girl gasps.

Sharon puts her lips to Jill’s neck, kissing its coolness, wanting to stop and hold her and dream in the scent of her skin.

But the inward doubt’s pulling Jill from her. She leans up, on tiptoe, lips finding the fine down along Jill’s jaw, seeking Jill’s ear and the words she needs.

Sharon will not let go of this woman, for anything in the world.

Holding tighter, she whispers the only thing she can think of. “Honey . . .

“I’m home.”