The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Not until Louis got hungry for lunch did it occur to him to wonder why he was having such a good day writing. He’d jumped out of bed and almost run to his desk, words and images jostling in his mind as if desperate to make it on to the page—the words and images had flowed almost non-stop until late morning. He was exhilarated. It was a difficult chapter, told from the point of view of a soft-drink vending machine in Grand Central Station; he’d suggested it almost as a joke to his editor, but she’d latched onto it with delight. “New York people will LOVE that!” she’d said over the phone, and the next thing he knew she’d been lunching all over Manhattan with the promise of this exciting new chapter (“it illustrates how life in the greatest city in the world draws in people from all nations, all languages, all walks of life,” she had said, without even realizing how ridiculous she sounded), so now he was stuck putting it in. It had stalled him for a couple of weeks—but now he’d broken the back of the writing in a morning. It wasn’t just a first draft—it was a good first draft, which is much rarer.

Then the images of a man cursing in Uzbek because the machine had delivered Coke Zero instead of Diet Coke abruptly faded from his mind, replaced with images of a cheeseburger. What did he have in the fridge? he wondered.

Then he wondered, what just happened to me?

Dimly now he recalled parts of the night before: lurking shyly at the edges of Juliet’s party, cursing himself for letting her talk him into coming; then that gorgeous woman with the luminous eyes who seemed really fascinated by . . . him; then—a spoon? What was it about a spoon?

Suddenly he felt a stab of panic. There was something he was supposed to do—someone he was supposed to call—had he forgotten? His fingers punched a number without any thought. After two rings, he heard her voice—husky, full, almost as complicated as if she had recorded two tracks of herself. It was a voice he could imagine listening to—or had listened to . . .

“Hello?” she said again. “Is anyone there?”

“Oh! Sorry! Elle! It’s Louis—you know, from the party last night?”

“Oh, yes! Hi, Louis, I wondered if you were going to call.”

“Oh, really? Well, listen, I just had this crazy idea—I don’t go out much during the week but I am a little stir-crazy and I wondered—“

“Of course,” she said. “I’d love to have dinner. Let’s meet at 8. I know a very nice quiet place not far from my house. Let me tell you how to get there.”

Her voice went on, but he was only half-listening as surprise and pleasure washed over him. This amazing woman was willing to go out with him! With no notice, just on the spur of the moment! And beyond that, she was part of whatever had happened last night that was affecting the writing today.

Whatever that was, he wanted more of it.

He realized she’d hung up. What had she been saying? It was vague in his mind. And last night seemed vague and confusing too. There’d been a spoon. There’d been a voice coming from above him. He’d been sleepy. Then a phone call. Something about today . . . .

He found himself back at his desk. He wrote for another three hours straight before he realized he still hadn’t eaten anything.

It was a good thing she’d said 8, because his errands took longer than he had expected. It was perfectly clear that he had to bring flowers. He didn’t buy a lot of flowers, and when he did, it was usually at a little stand near his house. Today, though, he decided to go to the mall across town; they’d be more likely to have something special. Once he got there he got confused; he thought he’d known where the florist was, but there was a shoe store there instead. When he asked the two clerks where the flowers were, they found him very funny, but they set him straight, and next thing he knew he was walking to his car with the box under his arm, nervously checking his watch in fear of being late.

He wasn’t, though; he was in his seat at 10 minutes to 8. She arrived 15 minutes later, five minutes late, but that didn’t matter. Women are allowed to be late. Men are supposed to be kept waiting.

He felt a bit light-headed seeing her. “Flowers for Madame,” he said, bowing and presenting his package.

She smiled—about ten megawatts—and tucked the box by her side. “I’ll open it later,” she said. She hadn’t dressed up; she seemed perhaps to have come straight from a therapy session. But in her pencil skirt, silk blouse, and cream sandals, she was still breathtaking. In fact, he really was a little breathless in her presence, until she looked him in the eye and uttered a few soothing words.

Then she turned to the waiter and ordered food and wine for them both. Later he was a bit surprised by this, but at the time it seemed perfectly natural. She knew the place and he did not. The wine was great, too; and when it arrived she fixed him with that luminous gaze and began to ask him about himself.

What followed was almost an out-of-body experience; he was still talking when the food arrived, and he began to eat it without paying much attention. For some reason he felt at ease telling her parts of his story he usually didn’t emphasize—especially how hard it had been to write this second novel after the unexpected success of the first. The first novel had just flowed out onto the screen; this one did not. The idea had seemed great, both to him and his editor, but the day-to-day writing was slow and scary. He wasn’t sure he was someone who even should be writing books at all. Readers he met disagreed—they loved his first book; but somehow their praise didn’t make things easier. Just the reverse. He knew he wasn’t the person they seemed to admire so much. He was just a guy who’d nearly flunked out of college because he insisted on reading science-fiction and fantasy books instead of the assigned reading—a guy who’d gotten lucky with one novel but would never be able to do it again; a guy who was treated as a literary lion but who, left to himself, hung around the fringes of a crowd wishing he had the nerve to talk to pretty girls.

To girls like this one, that is. Or even just a little bit like this one. He’d never met anyone like Elle. She was the total package: beautiful, glamorous, smart, accomplished, confident. Nice, but not too nice. Whatever that meant.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Don’t you like the pasta?”

“Pasta?” He looked down at his plate. Yep, tagliatelle. It was good. “No, it’s great! I just realized I was babbling on about myself, but I’m certainly not the most interesting person at the table. What about you? Where were you born, where do you come from, how did you become a hypnotherapist, what is that like?”

She seemed surprised, even taken aback. “Men don’t usually ask me about myself,” she said, half-aloud.

“That’s because, by and large, men are idiots,” he heard himself say. He’d often thought that, but never really said it so clearly to someone else. “I sometimes think that the human race only survives because women are willing to overlook what jerks their men are.”

She threw back her head and laughed—not a chuckle but a rich, contralto guffaw that seemed to come straight from her diaphragm. “Who told you that?” she said when she calmed down. “Men aren’t supposed to know it!”

He was distracted by her laugh; she put so much of herself into it, let herself go so fully, that almost involuntarily he found himself wondering whether she might let go the same way at . . . other times.

“Hmm, what? Oh, well—there’s a character in my first book who has to take care of her brother, who’s always getting into trouble—“

“Jessica,” Elle said. “I remember.”

Wow, she really did read my book, he thought. “Anyway, I had to spend a lot of time inside her head. He hardly even noticed how much he owed her, but she was always there for him. I based the brother on my college roommate, who’s now married to a terrific gal—and I suddenly realized that she’s too good for him and that, if you look at it right, most wives are too good for their husbands.” He blushed. “I’ve never actually said that to anyone before.”

The waiter arrived to clear away.

“We’ll have dessert,” she said. When the dessert menu arrived, she handed it to Louis and said, “Pick your favorite.”

Obediently he glanced down the list. Goat’s milk flan? Raspberry crumble with salted-caramel crème fraiche? The guy who supposedly wrote his first novel would have ordered one of those. He could have picked one, to keep up the pretense that he was that young avant-garde author. “Boring as it seems,” he said, “my all-time favorite is vanilla ice cream.”

She beckoned the waiter. “We’ll have one vanilla ice cream,” she said. “And two spoons.”

When the spoons arrived she handed one to him. “Spoons are so complicated,” she remarked. He noticed again the rich hum at the lower range of her voice, like the faint soothing drone of an air conditioner on a hot night. “On one side a spoon reflects reality in a convex way, outward, broader; on the other side, the reflection is concave, throwing the image back on itself. You can switch back and forth; turn it over and over, going from one world to the other. A famous poet once said that the convex reflection ‘makes the point that the soul is a captive, treated humanely.’ Can you see what he meant?”

He was beginning to see it; the captivity, the pampering, the joy of a soul kept tethered close by another and cared for. The run to the edge for escape, the inescapable curve back—like light curving around the edge of Einstein’s universe. No escape. No thoughts of escape. No thoughts. No . . . . It seemed natural that she knew John Ashbery’s work. Ashbery was a poet he liked and by now her voice was inside him, part of him, like his own thoughts. Of course the voice knew everything he knew and more. He was inside the voice. He was the voice. There was no him. There was only the voice.

He was still studying the spoon when he ice cream arrived.

“Here you go,” she said, holding out a spoonful. “Open your mouth and close your eyes and I will give you a big surprise.”

He did both, and the flavor flooded his tongue. “Just keep your eyes closed and taste it,” the voice, or his thoughts, was saying. “A lot of feelings and memories are anchored in our favorite tastes. You can remember why you love vanilla—the times you had it as a child—and you can remember the way it tastes now and how you feel now, and what a good meal you’ve had and what a good time you’ve had and you can let that feeling flow into you so that you can get it back whenever you think about it, or when someone says ‘vanilla,’ or when you tap on your wrist with your other hand, like this.” She tapped on his wrist, and even though his eyes were closed he was aware of the feel of her perfect lacquered red nail, which was somehow tied up with the richness of her voice and the taste of the ice cream.

“Open your eyes,” she said.

He looked down. The dish was empty.

“Oh, my god,” he said, blushing. “You didn’t get any!”

Her mouth shaped itself into an enigmatic smile. “Oh, Louis,” she said. “I got all I needed. Now, excuse me, I’ve got to go to the ladies’ room and then we will get out of here. Keep an eye on the spoon while I am gone.”

He looked down. Concave. Convex. Out. In. The soul is a captive. His soul. Treated humanely. Treated. Captive. Soul.

“All right,” she said. “We can go now.”

He started. Somehow she had managed to pay for dinner without his noticing. That felt wrong. Surely he should pay for everything? She held out her jacket and he all but leapt to his feet to help her with it.

“We’ll go to my place,” she said. “Follow me in your car. And bring the flowers.”

He grabbed the package and trotted at her heels, admiring the pride in her walk, the sway of her hips, the way she put one high-heeled shoe in front of the other as if bestriding a catwalk.

“Where’s your car?” she said. He pointed. “Okay, good, now follow me. You’re wide awake, right? Look around, be alert, drive carefully. Now, off you go!”

He all but sprinted to his car. She didn’t live far away; he followed her taillights carefully into the driveway of a small but cozy-looking brick bungalow, with a curving flagstone path leading to an arched front doorway. There were two buttons by the entry. The lower one read THERAPY OFFICE—RING AND GO TO REAR DOOR. For some reason he imagined bringing his worries here and ringing the bell and then giving them up as he listened to her voice telling him to relax, to let go, to slee—

“Well, come in, silly!”

He shook himself out of the fugue and went inside.

“Now,” she said after hanging up their coats. “You mentioned flowers?”

He discovered he was holding the box. He held it out to her. “I’m not sure exactly what they are,” he said. “I asked for a nice gift bouquet.”

“Sort of an odd shape, don’t you think?” she said. He looked at it—a small, squat package, not long and thin like most florists’ boxes.

“I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Well, let’s see—“ She slipped the gift ribbon off the box and opened the lid. “Oh, what lovely stems!” she said.

Inside the box were two shiny red women’s pumps with 4-inch heels.

“What the—”

“They are JUST what I wanted!” she said. “In fact, they are just what I ordered.”

“Ordered?”

“Yes, silly—don’t you remember our conversation?”

Suddenly he did remember her voice on the phone giving instructions—very precise instructions about the store, the size, the color. The clerks would be ready for him, she’d told him.

And then he remembered—really remembered—the party the night before, the spoon, the voice, the sleep—not being able to get up from the chair . . . .

Confused and embarrassed, he looked up. She was seating in a chair, slipping the shoes on her feet.

“How do you like them?” she purred, leaning back in the chair like a queen on her throne raising and flexing one foot to display the shoe.

He had no words. Literally none. Just an inarticulate growl in the back of his throat, a deep erotic rush of submission and excitement that seemed to pick him up like a huge breaking wave on the beach and throw him down to the floor in front of her, first kneeling and then flat on the floor, kissing the shoes and the feet inside them while somewhere far above him, miles above him, came, until it was the only sound there was anywhere in the world, that incredible, deep, proudly commanding, irresistibly feminine laugh . . . .