The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Owen hung his head. “I just, uh, don’t think I have it in me this-morning.”

Even with a regular application of bedside hand-cream, Janet’s palm couldn’t help but begin to chafe Owen’s little cock, bouncing around flaccid as it was.

She looked up from the foot of the bed, suddenly feeling guilty that she hadn’t even been trying to mask her boredom. “Are you sure, honey?” She checked the bedside clock to make sure she wasn’t running too close to her weekday morning departure. “I could take off my shirt, or try using my mou—”

“—It’s okay.” Owen shamefully lifted his ass from the sheets and pulled his boxers up over his vulnerable bits. Ten minutes deep into shameful headspace, he knew there was no way he was getting it up right now. His wife’s futile attempt at a blowjob—an activity he knew she hated anyway—sounded like adding insult to injury. “I’m...sorry,” he tried to fill the silence. “It’s not you, I swear. It’s—I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

The two had married young, and through their ten years of state-sanctioned nuptials, Janet had rarely been the one to initiate anything sexual. But, Owen knew, it had been at least a month since they’d last had sex. Double that since they’d last had anything that could rightfully be called good sex. Janet was waking up frustrated, these days—frustrated enough to try baiting her husband into encounters before work with attempted handjobs. And this wasn’t the first time he’d let her down.

“It’s okay,” was her curt response. “I’ll wash up, then. Could you make the bed while I shower?”

She was out of the room before Owen could reply. He looked down at the little lump in his boxer shorts and huffed.

Things were a little easier, day to day, after Janet had left for her nine-to-five. At least then Owen didn’t have to worry about the immediacy of letting someone down. He could much easier deal with the prospect of disappointing someone in the future—even the near future! This aspect of his personality was best expressed in his leaving dishes in the sink, laundry on the floor, more often than a thirty-two year old man reasonably should.

His wife was a neat freak in every sense of the word: she was excessively neat in her personal life (organizationally, financially, fashionably) and would freak, somewhat justifiably, around those who weren’t. Within the confines of her career as Marketing Director of a mid-sized textbook publisher, this manifested in a few passive-aggressive email reminders when the members of her team didn’t submit documents as colour-coded, put-together as she wanted them. At home, though, tensions were sometimes a little higher.

Owen, it was true, wouldn’t have made the bed that morning had he not been told to. Nor was he likely to remember that he’d left an empty coffee mug on the nightstand, or the last of his cereal in a bowl on the table when he’d gone to boot up World of Warcraft. It was never his intention to “disrespect the living space”, Janet’s frequent choice of words. It’s just that he was “forgetful” and “sorry”, his usual retorts.

It hadn’t always been like this.

When Owen was still employed—still had some semblance of his mojo—he wasn’t this much of a limp rag. Sure, Janet always took the lead for the pair in social situations—and, Owen would admit if pressed, at home—but that was just the dynamic of their relationship. Janet knew what she wanted, and Owen admired that in her. He was happy to take the back seat, to some extent, and follow her lead. Some would call it “bossy”, but Owen knew in his heart that he needed a compass like his wife to get him through life. He trusted her leadership enough to appreciate her prompts, and loved her more than enough to forgive the strident tone those prompts were packaged in.

And when he’d still been pulling in a decent wage as a software developer, their dynamic seemed made-to-be! Working from home, he could spend as long as he wanted laying in bed with the laptop, casually grinding Runescape through lunch-hour, making a general mess of the kitchen until five o’clock, when he’d punch out and use his wife’s half-hour commute to tidy up the place and get something going for dinner. Things were never perfect—his efforts to get the place prim and proper for his wife’s return were rarely up to her standard—but no relationship was ever perfect. Janet loved Owen enough to recognize her own shortcomings. She was more aware than anyone that her standards for what was considered “respecting the living space” were a shade too high. Her complaints, through these good times, were more often good-natured ribbings than they were the words of a mother scolding her child. Owen needed the reminders, she knew, and he always tried to remember.

But since the layoff, things had been different—and significantly so. It wasn’t Owen’s fault that his employer was embezzling funds, under investigation by the FBI, and thus Janet didn’t blame him for losing his job however long ago that was. But she couldn’t help but hold him responsible—even subconsciously—for giving up the way he did. What began as laying in bed, looking for work, soon turned into Janet’s coming upon him at 5:30PM in the same clothes she’d left him, no sign that he’d done anything but nurse his League of Legends addiction and, judging by the quickly-depleting bedside hand-cream, indulge himself in other, less savoury, ways.

Janet was growing disgusted by her partner, and Owen could feel it in the way she looked at him, spoke to him upon returning home from work. It didn’t help that he simultaneously seemed to have lost any semblance of sexual interest in her. Days had lengthened into weeks, weeks into a month before Janet was forced to interject, direct him one weekend to “make love to me now”, and even then he couldn’t bring her three quarters of the way to orgasm. Those sessions, short and awkward, were petering out now. Janet didn’t know what she was doing wrong, or what was wrong with her husband, but this was the fourth time he couldn’t even get hard for her.

Her frustration vented in unexpected ways. She was dressing more provocatively in her morning preparations for work. She told herself that it was a desperate attempt to claw Owen’s attention away from the computer screen, but she knew deep down that it was moreso a subtle show put on for the men at work. The men she respected, and who got her off when she angled the shower-head just right.

She spent a half-hour crying in the bathroom stall, the day she caught herself flirting with her boss like some horny teenager. How had it come to this, and so quickly? How could she be the type of woman to even conceive of cheating on her husband, a man who had supported her every attempt, failure, and success these last ten years? Were the better days behind her, and was it only a matter of time before she cracked? She’d broken into another fit of sobs at the thought.

Algorithms, in their current incarnation, are a new and frightening prospect for a general public who only understands them at face-value. If you “like” an image of a hamburger on one platform, then it seems like magic (or something far more sinister) when you’re blasted with advertisements for BBQ sauce upon logging into another one. It is difficult to know which algorithm heard Janet’s quiet weeping in the bathroom stall, that day, and impossible to determine how, exactly, a platform knew that it was due to a marriage slowly unwinding. But assuredly, someone or something knew, and believed it held the solution.

The rarely dishevelled woman used her smartphone’s camera as a makeshift mirror, touching up and wiping clean her dripped-down mascara. Just as she was reapplying her lipstick—the final touch on a visage which commanded respect—a notification appeared right above her mouth: “EQUINE ENHANCEMENTS! RECLAIM YOUR VIRILITY! SAME DAY DELIVERY! ORDER NOW!”

The phrasing gave Janet pause. At first she thought it was disgust with the adjectives—equine...virile—but that knee-jerk reaction gave way to...reluctant fascination. She swiped it left, thumb now hovering over the bright red “Delete”. She bit her lip—looked through the cracks of the stall to see if anyone would see what she was about to do, and then felt silly for doing so. Cancel. “Order now”.