The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Doctor Adam McCallister had no idea how long the bag had been draped over his head, but he knew it had to have been hours. It might have even been a couple of days. Time was insanely difficult to judge without external tools, and he’d been unconscious for several stretches of it, only complicating the matter further. One of those times had been to sleep, but another had been forcefully inflicted upon him against his wishes via a blow to the head when he had refused to be quiet.

The lesson had been learned all too well from that altercation. Pain served as an excellent instructor to even the most stubborn of subjects, something he knew quite well from both sides.

He’d been moved several times since the bag had been put on, because he’d been forced to stand up and sit down multiple times, and he’d heard the distinctive sound of a van door slamming, plus whatever vehicle he’d been loaded onto didn’t have the best suspension, so he knew part of the time had been spent on the road. He thought part of the time he’d been on a boat as well, as he could feel the seat shift unevenly beneath him, and the smell of the ocean had permeated even through the bag, although it felt like he was back on solid ground again, as everything had been completely stable since they took him off the boat.

Whoever had taken him, they’d done so while he was alone, which meant he had only a week or so before he would need at least one of his partners, or to imprint a new partner, before his immunity to DuoHalo would wane to dangerous levels. That thought had been dancing rampant through his insecurities since the second the bag had dropped over his head. What cruel fate would allow he, Adam McCallister, who had single-handedly saved the world from the brink of extinction, to die in the same manner as the wash of uneducated cretins who had insisted the problem would simply disappear if allowed to run unchecked. If it was to be so, he prayed that his captors would at least dispose of his body in an unmarked grave in the middle of the wastelands, and his story would simply trail off with some layer of mystery. It wasn’t as though there was a lack of desolate land nearby, or what he assumed was still nearby, although he honestly had no real concept of his location. By this point, they could have moved him a few miles or several hundred.

Adam had done his best to try and acquire tidbits of information based on sounds, sensations and smells, but, as he’d learned early on, his skills in these fields were laughably lackluster, even under optimal conditions, which these were far from. There was a distinctive odor around them, but other than it being wildly unpleasant, Adam couldn’t discern any meaning or point of origin from it.

More than anything, however, he simply wanted the handcuffs off his wrists and the bag off of his head, so he could connect with the world around him once more. This inky blackness of limbo was plaguing his morale and his very soul in the process. Answers needed to be given. This treatment was unacceptable for a man who had kept the Y-chromosome alive entirely on his own.

It was around that thought that the hood was taken off Adam McCallister’s head.

Not that it helped much.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but it seemed like he was in a fully enclosed room. Somewhere dark. There was a single source of illumination, an LED lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, but the lumen count must have been ridiculously low because the light wasn’t even strong enough to give him a full picture of his surroundings. He glanced up and realized, no, it wasn’t that the light was low, it was that it was encased on all sides but the bottom, a can forming a cone of light, shining directly down onto him and him alone.

‘So, not friendlies, then, I see,’ Adam thought to himself.

“What the hell is going on here?” Adam asked the room. He could vaguely make out shapes of other bodies moving around him, but how many and of what variety, he couldn’t discern. “I was out for a walk, minding my own business, and you’ve kidnapped me, and I demand to know why.”

“Doctor McCallister,” a woman’s confident voice said, her voice a strange blend of multiple accents. “You may as well drop the pretense. Do you think we would go to so much trouble to obtain you if we did not who you are and what you have done?”

“You know nothing about me,” he sneered. He couldn’t get a good look at her, because of how the light was, but could see that she was dressed from head to toe in a dark military style jumpsuit, black combat boots on. “If you did, you would have either killed me or put me in a lab by now. Instead I’m here, wherever the hell here even is.”

“You are in purgatory, Adam,” she laughed throatily. Her voice had a raspy quality to it, like the woman had been smoking cigarettes since a young age, or maybe had received some larynx damage at some point in her youth. “You are in limbo while we decide what to do with you.”

“Who is this we, then?”

“Ah ah ah, Doctor McCallister,” she cautioned. “I am the one asking questions for the time being. Perhaps, in time, I may be convinced to grant you some baseline of knowledge, but until that point, until I am convince that you are going to be a good little gimp, who does what he is told and only when he is told to do it, then you are unworthy of receiving even the most basic of answers to your questions.”

“I’m an American citizen,” Adam decided to try. “I have rights, you know.”

“But you are not in America, Doctor McCallister, and therefore I am not obliged to give any credence to your pleas. You have no rights, no lawyer to be phoning and no reason that I should not beat, brutalize and torture you until you are providing the answers to my questions at a reasonable and satisfactory pacing,” the woman said, as she moved around the small dark chamber.

Adam was starting to be able to see other forms leaning against the walls of it, mostly women, but one or two men, he thought. It was difficult to make out clearly, as he didn’t have his glasses on, which meant his visual acuity was in the toilet at anything more than five feet.

“We have some of the details of your story, some moments we have a rudimentary understanding of,” the woman continued. Adam used this moment to attune himself to the room a bit better. The chair he was on and handcuffed to. A table in front of him. A chair on the opposite side of the table. A metal floor beneath him. Not much to go on at all, but still it was something, a starting point on which to build the mental map of his predicament in his mind. “Others we know very little of. So I have been tasked with acquiring all of it from you, of harvesting what useful knowledge still resides in that horrible little brain of yours, and to determine whether it is more advantageous for us to allow you to remain consuming oxygen or whether you offer nothing of substance to this world you have helped destroy.”

“Since you know my name,” Adam said confidently, “then you know I am the inventor of McCallister’s Remedy, the cure for the damnable DuoHalo virus that has been slaying so many fine men and women across the planet’s surface. That alone should ensure that I have value.”

“Remedy?” the woman asked, pausing in her movements around the room, folding her hands behind her back in thought for a moment before lifting one hand up to point a finger at the ceiling. “Ah! You must mean the Quaranteam serum that you aided in the development of.”

Adam internally was livid. He’d single-handedly given them a viable treatment and management tool to keep DuoHalo from decimating society, and they hadn’t even had the common courtesy to name it after him? True, he had defected from them and fled the United States, but there was no reason for Doctor Marcos to be petulant about it all.

“Yes, we know you had a hand in establishing that tincture for the Americans, but they are in the process of distributing it worldwide now,” the woman told him, her voice condescending and amused all at once. “They are even making the formula itself public information, so that other countries can begin manufacturing it themselves. Within a matter of months, the whole world will be inoculated with this serum. And you, Doctor McCallister, you will be relegated to the level of a minor footnote in the ledger of history, if they are even so kind as to leave you in the tale at all.”

Adam frowned. The woman was playing on the one weakness he could admit to himself that he possessed—ego. But even still, the case was compelling, in that it would be a chance for him to tell his own story on his own terms. “You aren’t with the Americans or the Russians, so who are you? At the very least, I need something to call you,” he said.

“Then you may call me Elle,” the woman said.

“Like the letter L or Elle as in short for Elaine or Eleanor or—”

“Pick one,” she replied, cutting him off. He hated when people cut him off. If he had been done talking, he would have stopped talking.

“Fine,” he did his best not to spit back. “Elle then. What do you want to know?”

“Before we get started, ladies?”

A woman from either side of the room moved over to him and began adjusting his constraints. His arms had each been attached to the frame of the uncomfortable metal chair he’d been sat in for hours, and the women moved them so they were shackled together in front of him twice over, the links of the two pairs of handcuffs locked to the center of the table. At least his arms were elevated, he supposed.

But then he saw one of the two women set a box down onto the table, and he winced as she opened it. Inside was a syringe and a small bottle of blue liquid. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s one of our little house cocktails. Sodium pentothol mixed with a few other relaxants, stimulants and intoxicants of our own blend,” Elle said as she said down opposite him. He could see her face clearly for the first time now, a Caucasian woman in her late forties or early fifties, brunette, attractive without being overwhelmingly so, her nose looking as though it had been broken at least once in her lifetime. She had dark brown eyes the color of the earth he thought she would bury him beneath, once she was through with him. “It will help you be comfortable and also be... shall we say more forthcoming about your story.”

“What possible motive to do I have to lie to you?” Adam grumbled, as he felt one of the two other women bring his vein to the surface then inject him with a very strong dose of the blue substance, which he immediately felt the effects of. The liquid had entered his bloodstream like ice, but was starting to warm up quickly, as he felt his body being drained of tension, a polite and pleasant fog settling in over his brain, sapping him of his will to manipulate or bend the truth.

“To you, Doctor McCallister, there may be little difference between lying through intent and lying through omission, but I intend to make certain that all the information I want to have at my disposal is provided to me in a timely and efficient manner,” Elle said. “Now, tell me of your youth...”

My name is Adam Livingston McCallister. I was born on the Fourth of July, in the year of our Lord, 1968, and this is the story of both myself and my life’s work.

I grew up the youngest of three children. My father, Doctor Alexander McCallister, was a renowned cardiovascular surgeon in the Hamptons, and my mother, Doctor Irina Miele McCallister, was one of the leading pharmaceutical researchers for the Naxxon Group, whom I am certain you have heard of. They were acquired by Brand Pharmaceuticals in 2015.

As the youngest, and the only male child, I was often lectured about how I needed to set a better example than my sisters, Celeste and Vivian, who were allowed to run rampant and do whatever they wanted. Celeste was seven years my elder and Vivian five, so they regarded me as the baby of the family, and while I looked up to them greatly when I was younger, in retrospect I felt like they often despised me for reasons I have never understood.

My father died when I was seven under shall we say scandalous circumstances. It would be years before I would learn the entirety of the story, but when I was in college I was able to piece it all together. Apparently my father had been having an affair with a married woman named January Janty, and one night they had been traveling from the bar to their cottage they had bought in the countryside, their little love nest away from their respective families. They had both had too much to drink, and so she had decided to fellate him while he drove them to their private abode, but the car hit a slippery patch of ice on that December evening and it slid off a bridge and down into a ravine, killing both of them instantly. The coroner’s report included the grisly detail that my father’s severed penis had been discovered inside of Mrs. Janty’s mouth, a detail I did not need to be exposed to and therefore I expose you to it as well. I was once told by a therapist that by sharing trauma with others we loosen the sway it holds over us as individuals, but I have yet to find that to be true.

The scandal of the story destroyed the reputations of both my family and the Jantys, and we were shunned from the high society we had grown up within. We relocated out of the Hamptons down to New York City proper, where my mother and sisters attempted to reinvent themselves, doing their best to become upper class citizens among the crowd where the scandal hopefully would not follow.

It took its time, but eventually, word got around. The upper crust of the Manhattan elite, however, seemed much more willing to dismiss the matter, and while it caused a minor kerfuffle when it came out, the shame was gone within weeks, not months or years. In fact, to some, it made my mother more desirable, more resilient, more appealing as an ally and confidant. The relocation had done its job of insulating my mother from my father’s failings.

Still, my mother’s anger over my father’s unfaithfulness never dissipated, nor did it even fade all that much. It lingered as a stain upon her soul until her dying breath, and while I do not know what my mother’s final words are, I would not be in the least surprised to find they were one last curse upon my father’s spirit, or a prayer that she would not be reunited with him in the afterlife.

Because my mother could no longer take her wrath over my father’s infidelity out on him, she transferred that wrath onto me growing up. My sisters followed in her footsteps, so from the age of seven onward, I was repeatedly told that I was worthless scum, just as my father had been, and that I would remain forever unworthy of love of any sort. Not just me, either, but all men, my mother would proselytize, were horrific, dishonorable creatures, and the world would be better off without all of us upon the planet’s surface.

While she was able to keep from espousing these opinions too loudly in public, in private her drinking habits would consume her, and I spent many a week limping because she had belted me until I had finally blacked out from the pain, most times over a transgression as simple and minor as having left a toy out of place, or forgetting to close a window when I left a room. My sisters were of no aid, sometimes egging my mother on, sometimes accusing me of such falsehoods as to induce a beating on their behalf.

My father’s legacy lived on in their hatred of me.

My mother had no interest in remarrying, and her career in pharmaceuticals was lucrative enough that the family’s lavish lifestyle dwindled not one iota. She worked hard and kept busy, which was fine by me. The less I had to endure her misandry, the better, I decided.

As they grew older and left the house, both of my sisters came out as lesbians, something my mother seemed to embrace with great enthusiasm, as if it was one final fuck you to the patriarchal society in general, and my deceased father in specific. Their contempt for me has yet to fade, even all these years later.

By the time I was in high school, I had learned to manage my mother’s tantrums, mostly through the process of avoidance. Were I not around to anger her, there would also be no me around to inflict damage upon. This meant that I immersed myself in my studies and school recreational activities as intensely as I possibly could.

In absence I found ablative armor.

My grades were excellent, far better than either of my sisters had ever achieved, so my mother could not hold poor scholastic performance over my head as a justification for her anger. I ingratiated myself well with the other students. Oh, I wouldn’t say I cultivated much in the way of friendships, but I did everything I needed to in the quest to emancipate myself from my mother.

High school was, if anything, a holding pattern that I simply pushed myself through over time, and once I was past it, I never looked back. With my grades and extra curricular achievements, I was able to garner a scholarship to Stanford University, completely across the country, away from everyone and everything I had ever known. It would be a chance to reinvent myself, to be someone better, stronger, more interesting and more resistant to the harsh truths of the world. I would leave the East Coast, and with it, abandon the trappings that had suffocated my very sense of being, and be reborn among the freedom and lucidity of the West Coast.

Such was the plan, anyway.

Two utterly life shattering events happened in my freshman year of study at Stanford which complicated matter significantly. The first was meeting Eve Merriweather at a freshman mixer being held in the dorms. I was not doing particularly well in my attempts to find and make friends, simply because I was, I admit, socially inept.

I had survived through high school by functioning as a part of many groups without ever standing out from the herd in social regards. I had little interest in being in charge or leading groups, content to do my work and engage in conversation when someone approached me. I simply didn’t venture forth to start conversations. This had given me, I suppose, a certain level of mystique in high school, a status of curiosity, and those who liked to acquire large numbers of acquaintances would simply see me as another tally on their scoreboard, and I would find myself involved in groups of people without so much as lifting a finger on my own.

My first few days at Stanford, I had attempted to fall back into familiar patterns. My hope had been that, just like as had happened in high school, my quiet mystery would draw in some of the more prevalent alpha individuals, and I would find myself folded into existing social strata before I knew it.

This was not to be the case.

At the mixer, I was engaging in very little mixing. I had by necessity started venturing out of my comfort zone, and begun initiating conversations with individuals, mostly at random, an attempt to seed the clouds, if you will, prime the pump and form a basis for others to build upon, but as it turned out, my skills in this regard were atrophied, assuming they were even there to begin with.

I was attempting to relate an anecdote from my high school days that had often functioned as an icebreaker, and when I hit the punchline, not a single person of the several gathered around me laughed. Not even so much as a smile. I was regarded by a sea of blank, uncomprehending faces, like a herd of dogs that had just been shown a card trick.

Just then, as I was contemplating ritual disembowelment as an escape route from this incredibly uncomfortable situation, a figure behind the row of blank faces began to laugh. It was her. Eve. She then explained quickly that the word “pop” was, in other parts of the country, used in lieu of the word “soda,” and with that bit of information, the crux of the tale dawned on the others, who all started to laugh, as if beginning to come around, that crucial piece of information taking a moment to make the entire tale click inside their feeble minds.

Eve, or, rather Evangeline Merriweather was also a freshman at Stanford that year, the autumn of 1987, and for whatever reason, she took an immediate shine to me. We were both pre-med students, and both planning on going into bio-engineering, which meant that we spent a great deal of time together as we shared many classes.

Within a year, we were sharing a bed. A year after that, we were sharing an apartment. Whatever social shortcomings I might have had, Eve compensated for them and then some. She was the illuminated center of any room she inhabited, the beating heart of any party, the driving force behind the direction of nearly every conversation she was a part of. She did her best to draw me in, to make sure I wasn’t allowed to simply disappear into the background, as I had done with so much of my life up to this point. This, it would turn out, would eventually be both to her benefit and her detriment.

While we were dating, I did everything I could to keep Eve buffered from my family. She would ask from time to time, and I would dodge and skirt the issue, engage in every possible tactic I was aware of to divert the conversation onto other matters. After some time, I think she took the hint and stopped attempting to pry into what I had left behind back east.

The Merriweathers were vaguely local to the San Francisco Bay Area, hailing from Monterey, some eighty miles south from Stanford, so she made a point to introduce me to her family. She is the oldest of four girls, and her parents own and run a motel and restaurant near the shore that is quite popular with the tourists.

I always got the impression that her parents liked me, although her mother also described me as “a man with a thousand hidden motives.” That said, on our fourth or fifth meeting, I can’t recall specifics, her father pulled me aside and told me that if I wanted to marry Eve, I would, of course, have his blessing in the matter.

I hadn’t even asked for it, but apparently it was the next expected step, and once the matter had been broached by him, I started noticing how Eve had been hinting at her expectations of me to ask, and apparently the hints were not new. She had been dropping them for some time before I finally took note, and even then, it was simply because she made them more and more direct.

At this point, I should tell you that I did not consider Eve the love of my life, but that we were adequate if not good partners. We got along well enough, and we brought joy to each other, but there was, from my point of view at least, something significant missing, some spark that I had always been told would be present when one fell in love.

I tried faking the emotions, pretending that our connection was deeper than it was, and it seemed as though Eve believed in that story without hesitation or reservation. I engaged in all the sorts of behavior a boyfriend was supposed to—I brought flowers, I bought jewelry, I organized celebrations her birthday—and yet, she rarely made the effort on my behalf in kind.

Decisions were always her final say, and while my input was appreciated, it was just as often also fully disregarded. On more than one occasion, I remember saying to her, “Just once, I would like to make a decision for the both of us, the way you always do.”

Her response to me still rings in my ears even now. “Men need women like a fish needs water. To live. To survive. Women need men like a fish needs a bicycle.” I think she considered it a joke, and took no note of how unhappy with that sentiment I was. The final say in all things remained hers, as it would for decades more.

Still, all signs pointed towards marriage being the expected logical progression, so I began considering the matter when the second life shattering moment of my college career happened. Both Eve and I had been working late on a project, so when we returned home to our apartment, we were exhausted and simply wanted to climb into bed, but the answering machine next to our telephone had a blinking red light on it signifying there were messages to be listened to.

I reached down and pressed the button to play them, and a voice I had not heard in years filled the air, clearly rattled and crying. “Adam, it’s Celeste,” she said. “You need to call home as soon as you get this message.”

I glanced at the digital clock on the wall, and did the timezone conversion in my head. It was half past midnight in California, which meant it would be working towards four in the morning on the East Coast. I tried to convince Eve to let me call after we’d slept, but my partner insisted that the tone of my sister’s voice had meant whatever it was she needed to tell me could not wait, so I picked up the cordless phone from the cradle and dialed my mother’s number for the first time since I’d moved out west to escape all of that.

Celeste answered after only two rings, and it did not sound like I had woken her up. She was still crying. My mother had died. Aneurysm. She had been mid sentence at Thanksgiving dinner then seized up and dropped dead, face first into the dinner my sisters had spent hours preparing, at a meal they had never invited me to since my migration west.

It hadn’t even dawned on me that it was Thanksgiving until my sister had mentioned it. We had been so engaged in our research that while we had noticed it was much quieter than normal, neither Eve nor I had taken stock of the date.

I was needed to come home next week, Celeste told me, for the reading of the will and the funeral. Since it was technically Friday when we were speaking, the will would be read in one week’s time, and my mother would be buried the following day, which would be Saturday. Whatever else was going on in my life would have to wait, my sister told me.

I never liked how they kept using the word “home” to describe where my mother had lived. It had never been a home to me. It had always been a prison, one that I had liberated myself of. A home is a place where one feels comfortable and at ease in their surroundings.

I have never had one of these.

After hanging up the phone, I relayed all of this information to Eve, who kept repeating the same ridiculous sentiment to me over and over again. “It’s okay to cry,” she would tell me, but no tears were forthcoming, because I had lost nothing and gained only more freedom.

I think Eve was bothered by my lack of tears, but eventually she decided to stop pressing the matter. She did, however, insist that she was going to travel back east with me for my mother’s funeral, and to meet my sisters. When I told her that my sisters and I were not on good speaking terms, Eve told me that her presence was all the more important then, to ensure my mental safety and security.

I fully expected Eve and my sisters to mix like oil and water, which is to say not at all, and yet to my immense frustration, they seemed to form an immediate rapport. All of the hostilities that my sisters directed towards me, Eve wrote off as “sibling teasing,” and told me not to take everything so seriously. All the hurtful and hideous things that they said to me, Eve would constantly try convince me were meant merely in jest, and that I needed to “lighten up.”

I cannot adequately explain to you how infuriating that was to me. Much of what was to follow in the decades to come may perhaps have been born from those moments, where this woman who had plucked me from obscurity at a freshman mixer and installed me as the center of her world, where that woman chose to side with my horrible sisters instead of me.

Women, as a gender, have done nothing positive for me over the entirety of my life, and left me nothing but misery and shame in their wake.

When it came to the reading of the will, my only surprise was that there was anything at all left towards me. The will had last been updated a little over a year prior. As expected, nearly everything was bestowed upon my sisters. The house, the estate, the bank accounts, the art... what I found myself with was a trust fund to pay for the remainder of my education, through me obtaining a doctorate, and one million dollars exactly.

I realize that to most of the world, this sounds like a life changing sum, but I think it is worth pointing out that my sisters each inherited fortunes over a hundred million dollars. Let me stress that word, in case its presence passed unnoticed.

EACH.

As she had done in life, in death my mother extended me only further pain and abuse. In the will, from beyond the very grave, she repeatedly called me a disappointment of a child, and accused me of following in my father’s footsteps, being cruel and inconsiderate to the feelings of the women who had only tried to make my life a good and enjoyable one, a lie that there was no one left to dispute with. You cannot argue with the dead, for they have no ears with which to hear you.

My mother went on to say that the only good thing I had ever done in her life was to get out of it, and that she hoped the small pittance she was leaving me would encourage me to distance myself even further from my sisters, whom she insisted would go on to live lives of great import, reshaping the face of the planet for generations to come. I, on the other hand, would forever be alone, dying in an unmarked pauper’s grave, unmourned and unloved.

“Go away, Adam,” my mother’s final words to me were. “Let that be the one good thing you contribute to your sisters’ lives. Your very absence.”

I remember crying that night in the hotel room, Eve holding me tightly, assuring me that my mother hadn’t known who I truly was, and that my sisters did not feel that my leaving their lives would be a good thing to do. Interestingly enough, neither Celeste nor Vivian have ever said they wanted me to remain in contact with them, neither in public or in private. I don’t recall the last time I spoke to either of them, but it’s certainly been several years. They did vaguely keep in touch, but only at a sizable distance, and with great space in between contacts, as if it were simply a vestigial relationship they neither wanted to imbue with energy to maintain nor deal with the mental taxation of abandoning a family member, relegating me to the gutters of history.

One detail has never left me, however. At my mother’s funeral, other than the Catholic priest conducting the ceremony, I was only the only man present. My sisters each had their wives. I had Eve. All of my mother’s friends were women, and none of them, for whatever reason, had brought their husbands to the funeral.

I was surrounded by a hundred or so resentful women, all of whom thought I was responsible for their friend’s death, through stress or whatever superstitious nonsense they bought into. I could feel all of their eyes upon me, judging me, condemning me, wishing it was me inside the coffin, so there would be no need for an audience at all. They had decided I would be the lightning rod for their anger and grief, and I was offered no say in the matter.

As we sat in the airplane on the tarmac, waiting to depart New York and return to the sanctuary of California, Eve proposed to me. She said I had been through enough trauma for several lifetimes and she didn’t want me to have to go through any more of it alone. She had been with me through all of this, but she said she would have felt better if she could have introduced herself to my sisters as my wife instead of my girlfriend. She said she understood how rough a time it had been for me, and she wanted to protect me from the world, to take care of me.

I agreed, and before we had even touched down back at SFO, we had the preliminary plans of a wedding sketched out on the back of a cocktail napkin. My mother had died on Thanksgiving 1989 and before Thanksgiving of 1990, Eve and I would be wed.

It wasn’t until we were both at home, in bed, Eve asleep after some decent congratulatory sex, that it dawned on me—during the entire conversation, during the entire planning for our wedding, I hadn’t been allowed to make one decision the entire time. Oh, I had contributed to the direction of some of the things, but there hadn’t been any single element I had been allowed complete say it. Even my groomsmen were basically dictated to me.

I was a passenger in my own life.

“You could have pushed back,” Elle interrupted, again to his feverish annoyance. “You could have stood your ground and said you were making a decision and forced an argument, to put your foot down. In not doing so, you allowed her to walk all over you.”

“Ah, but you see, if I had caused an argument, it would have reached the same end result, only taken twice as long and with twice the volume,” Dr. McCallister told his captor. “So I decided upon a different route. Oh, it wasn’t as though it became an all-consuming drive from that point on, but right there, at that particular moment, lying in bed, realizing I was a hostage in my own upcoming wedding, that was where all the various threads of my life snapped into a solid cord of focus.”

“Oh yes?” Elle said, curiously. “Go on.”

“That was when my secret past time was born—finding a way to make women need men like a fish needs water, just to prove my wife wrong. I would ensure that men, even as hated and despised as we are, we would be required, a necessity for women to survive. It would be almost thirty years before I could make that happen, to ensure that women would dote on men with the same relentless care and devotion they had always come to expect, but eventually I did. I did make that happen. There is no expiration date on will. And I intended to show history exactly what a strong will was capable of.”