The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“How’s that feel?”

“Like someone’s massaging my brain,” the waitress said.

June held the woman’s hand in both of hers, rubbing the palm with her thumbs in slow, circular motions. The woman was staring at a point somewhere on the table with an absent grin. Her apron was crooked.

“You should sit down,” June read her name tag, “Haley.”

“Not supposed to sit with customers,” she mumbled.

June pressed the soft spot at the base of the thumb, rolling the muscle, and at the base of the pinky with her other hand. The waitress staggered and leaned against the table.

“Whoa.” She blinked once, slowly.

“You really should sit. Just for a sec. Otherwise you might fall.”

“Mmkay,” she said, then just stood there, swaying like a soft breeze would blow her over. Her uniform, which had been crisp and pressed at the beginning of her shift, looked frayed around the edges; the white dress shirt was tucked in, but not so tightly anymore; the black apron that hugged her hips was cocked to the side, probably from taking the little notepad out and stuffing it back in with her right hand. Her sandy hair was done up smartly, but strands had come loose and hung down around her ears and bare neck.

The overall effect was of a tired and frayed young woman who had probably looked very attractive six hours before, but who now just looked like she needed a nap. At that moment, the waitress whose nametag read Haley looked asleep on her feet.

June tugged on her hand, drawing her towards the seat of the booth. The motion sent a ripple through her body like she was made of rubber: past her elbow and shoulder, up her neck and down her back, and down her other arm. Her head nodded like a bobblehead doll, as if the muscles in her neck couldn’t correct the motion on their own. The little notepad slipped through her fingers and dropped to the table.

The dinner rush was over, and the sound in the restaurant had dropped to a dim drone of muffled voices. The section they were in was almost empty. The booth was far in the back, where June had requested it, and the only other customers were a young couple four tables away, grinning and leaning against each other with the glow of the in-love. Their drinks were full, and so they noticed the hand-job their waitress seemed to be getting not at all.

Keeping the pressure on with one thumb, June put a hand on the woman’s shoulder and guided her down, turning her until she dropped into the booth. Haley didn’t even seem to notice that she’d been maneuvered into a sitting position. She stared at the ketchup dully.

“That’s better.” The voice was kind but her face was serious, the face of a surgeon regarding a patient. She pressed at the base of each finger, rubbing in little circles, then traveled up each digit, taking her time, all the way to the tips. When she got to the end she would squeeze the tip of the finger before continuing to the next one. Always, she returned to the soft spot in the middle of the hand.

“See, with the right combination of pressure points, you can reach almost anyplace in the body. This is going to relax the muscles in your back.” She turned the woman’s hand over, pressing on the spot between the thumb and forefinger; with her other hand, she rubbed the woman’s wrist.

“Thass amazing,” Haley slurred. Her eyes were barely open—it looked more like she’d gone to sleep and forgotten to close them. A sprig of dirty blonde hair hung down over her forehead.

“That’s nothing. This next one is the real magic. Are you ready?”

“Uh huh.”

“You’re about to feel a strange sensation in the back of your neck. It’ll be a pleasant sort of numbness. You may want to lay your head back.” June searched the slack hand with her own, the fingers curling as she worked, until her thumbs settled in two soft spots, then she applied pressure and held it.

Haley’s head dropped against the back of the booth with a gentle thump. Her eyes closed.

“That’s why I had you sit down first,” June smiled. She leaned in until her lips were inches from the woman’s ear, and her voice dropped a notch. “Those other things are really only to test whether that last one will work or not, but I’m told they feel nice all on their own.”

The waitress didn’t respond. Her shoulders had slumped—her entire body had slumped—and every breath she let out was a long, slow sigh, slower each time, until the rise and fall of her chest beneath the uniform was only a hint of motion. Her other hand lay on the seat beside her, slack.

“That thing you just felt in the back of your neck—that soft, pleasant numbness—is going to spread, down your arms and back, over your chest, through your legs, all the way down through the soles of your feet. Everywhere, soft and numb, and fading.”

June kept the pressure on the point with one hand and placed her other hand on the back of Haley’s neck: thumb on one side, fingers on the other. The fingers searched a moment, feeling below the hair line, then began to massage, making the same little circles as they had on the woman’s palm. The girl’s head rocked back and forth gently as her neck was kneaded.

“It will keep fading until soon, you won’t even feel the seat under your legs, or the cushion on your back, or the floor under your feet. Don’t worry, that’s normal. As everywhere fades—as you fade—the only things that will remain are your hand, and your neck, and my voice. Your body isn’t there anymore. It melted away.”

June’s head was tilted to the side, studying the woman’s face as she spoke. Her voice was low and confident, her lips nearly touching Haley’s ear. Her hair was dark, a deep auburn, so dark that she looked like a brunette unless the light hit it in just the right way. Her eyes were blue and sharp, and they never left the waitress’s face; they were as steady as the voice, which was as steady as the hand that massaged its skillful rhythm into the woman’s neck, and the other that pressed the invisible pressure point somewhere in the woman’s limp hand.

When it was easy, it was very easy.

When it happened, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world, and June had felt it through the woman’s hand before she even sat down. It was a loosening, a slackening in the body that happened when the mind gave up a little of its control to something else, because it recognized that that other thing was controlling it better. A twisted little quirk of evolution.

Sometimes it took a long time, sometimes it never happened. Sometimes—like a few minutes earlier, with the waitress whose name tag read Haley—it happened right away.

After less than sixty seconds, the probability of the girl coming out of it on her own was very small, even if she’d recognized a need to.

June spoke in soft undertones, saying whatever came into her head, and Haley absorbed the words, seeming to be asleep except that, now and then, her lips mouthed the word yes in response. They had a quirky shape to them, her lips; it was endearing in a way that made June smile. After a few minutes she stopped talking and just looked at the girl. There was a faint map of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and a small beauty mark just behind one ear. It was tiny, almost invisible.

I may be the only person in the world who’s looked at you close enough to notice that. That’s kind of funny to think.

“Hey!” A voice startled her out of it. It didn’t faze the girl.

A tall, skinny man with a shock of curly black hair and oversized glasses was walking towards them.

Fuck.

He grinned and waved.

Not now, Ringo. I had her.

“Wazaaaaaa.” He dropped into the seat across from them and took a sip from her drink. “Hey, why’s our waitress unconscious?”

“She isn’t.” June regarded the girl while her hands worked. “She can still hear us. Can’t you, Haley?”

“Yesh.”

“She’s there, she’s just in a New York state of mind.”

He waved a hand in front of the her face.

“See, I thought that was a line from a Billy Joel song about longing for one’s home, but apparently it means totally unaware of one’s surroundings.“

“She’s aware.” Kinda. “Where’s Rose?”

“Christmas sale next door. She went nuts. I barely got out of the way in time.” He eyed them. “What are you doing under the table there?”

“Giving her a hand massage.” Kinda.

He looked under the table, saw Haley’s hand resting in June’s lap.

“That is so hot. Do me next.”

“No.”

“Do Rose when she shows up?”

“No.”

“Stop being so stingy with the hotness, June!“ He finished her margarita. “Can she get us more drinks now?”

“In a minute. We were having a nice conversation about her boyfriend before you showed up.” The hands worked their slow magic. “Her boyfriend is a bad, bad man. Turns out he owns half the city. Even owns the building I live in.”

“Your landlord.”

“Slumlord. He lets poor young ladies go months without fixing their pipes, he does.”

“Your landlord won’t fix your pipes, so you’re giving his girlfriend a hand-job?”

“We’re just havin some girl talk is all.”

“Seriously, that is so hot. But you should wake her up before you get her fired.”

“Hrred?” Haley’s lips parted just enough for the sound to slip through. They were pink and delicate. Her eyes didn’t open, but her eyebrows knitted like they were trying to. Her head flopped to the side, away from June.

“Shh.” June pressed her thumb into the woman’s palm.

Haley sighed and stilled. Her face smoothed and relaxed, and June tilted her head back to a resting position with the hand that massaged her neck.

“We don’t want her to wake up being scared for her job. We want her to feel awesome.” She leaned in and whispered a few more hushed phrases. The girl’s eyes blinked once, twice, then opened. She spent a long moment staring at the ketchup, seemed to remember where she was, sat up, looked around, and saw Ringo.

“Hi.” She blushed and turned to June. “Wow.”

“Neat, huh?”

“Wow.”

“Your other customers are probably looking for you. When you’re done, three margaritas, por favor.” She smiled and placed Haley’s hand back in her own lap. Haley had forgotten to.

“Oh! Right! Be right back.” She disappeared into the restaurant, then ran back, blushed again, snatched the forgotten notepad from the table, and disappeared again.

Ringo watched her go.

“Hand massage, eh?”

“Yup.”

“She looked like she was in a coma.”

“It was a good coma.”

“Are you one of those people who can like, make someone’s ass twitch just by touching their elbow?”

“I don’t usually aim for the ass. There aren’t a whole lot of nerves back there.”

“That is so cool. Make my ass twitch!” He held his hand out.

“Fine.” She took it.

“Hey, that’s nice.” He closed his eyes and grinned. “That’s ow. Ow. OW.“ His arm recoiled like he’d been burned, knocking over the condiments and jarring the booth. He cradled it against his stomach. “That felt like someone was stabbing my scrotum with a broken bottle.”

“Woops. I missed.”

“Scrotum stabbing is not hot, June.”

“Uh huh.”

She tuned him out and watched as Haley checked on the other customers.

The young waitress was glowing. The blush had gone, but there was still color high on her cheeks, like the beginning of a sunburn. She was smiling too widely as she talked to the couple—not a fake service-culture smile, but a genuine one, the kind that radiates, and the couple smiled back, caught up in the infectiousness of it. Her hair was even more mussed than before, but the look on her face said she didn’t care.

I did that.

She came back, a tray of three margaritas balanced like an extension of her arm. Her stride was less formal, more natural than it had been before; her hips swung like a woman’s will when she’s not keeping herself straight and stiff for customers. The black dress slacks clung to the curves of her legs.

Her eyes met June’s as she put the drinks down, then flicked away, then back.

“Can I get you guys anything else?”

“We’re good, thanks.”

There was a pause, an almost imperceptible beat. She seemed on the verge of saying something.

June looked at something else until she went away.

“So, two things.” Ringo took the lime from the edge of the glass and dropped it on a plate. “Three things. One, your editor has started calling me because you don’t have a cell phone and you never answer your home phone. And every time he does he’s an asshole about it because he hates delivery people. It’s no fun.”

“I have an answering machine.”

“Is its name Ringo?”

“George.” Her eyes followed the waitress as she left their section, and hers weren’t the only ones: in the section opposite theirs, two heads turned as Haley passed, drawn by something they probably couldn’t put words to. It was the glow. Haley flicked her hair to the side, the white dress shirt hugging her arms and back and shoulder blades in a way they somehow hadn’t before, and was gone around the corner.

“Two, there’s some problem with your source from that story last month, the one about corruption in pharmaceutical companies. Apparently everyone involved swears they never spoke to you, and they’re all willing to take lie detector tests.”

They’ll all pass, too.

“So?”

“He wants to know the name of your source.”

“Too bad. That’s why it’s called an anonymous source.” Plus, she doesn’t even remember meeting me.

“Whatever, not my fight, just passing the message. Three, there’s a problem with your story this month because there isn’t one.”

“I don’t have anything to write about.”

“Write about me! The plight of the common man. Write a big expose about the people who are getting the shaft and losing jobs because the newspaper business is dying. That’s big news. It should be big news. It’s a fuckload of people, me included, and you too.”

“Funny thing: if you write a story about newspapers, newspapers tend not to print them.”

The turning of heads in the next section let her know that Haley was near. It was like watching seagulls to see where the land was.

“I think I’m gonna take off.” June pulled some bills out of her wallet and tossed them on the table. “Tell Rose I said hi.”

“Aw. What’s up?”

“I’m gonna go find a story.”

“All right.” He didn’t look up. “Junebug?”

“Yeah?”

“Be good.”

Haley was standing at the hostess station chatting with another waitress. June passed without meeting her eyes. She didn’t need to look up—she felt, as if with a sixth sense, that the girl was watching her.

When June was gone and the door had closed, Haley blinked.

She stopped talking mid-sentence and followed June out, leaving the other woman gaping at the air, bemused, still making a half-nodding motion with her head, which she had been doing to make it look like she was listening.

In the vestibule between the inner and outer doors of the restaurant, Haley was staring at the wall with an expression somewhere between confusion and boredom.

June stood in front of her, touching her here and there with light taps—on the shoulder, hip, elbow—the place and order seemed random, but the cadence was constant. Haley seemed unaware of this activity. Her lips were moving with dreamlike slowness, as if she were sounding out words.

“When you left, I suddenly had this idea that you had left your scarf behind,” she mumbled, “and I needed to bring it to you. But when I got here... there was no scarf.” Her hand was held out halfway, as if holding the imaginary garment.

“It’s ok.” Tap, hip. Tap, chin.

“I’m not sure there... was a scarf.” Her expression slid away from confusion, more towards boredom, each time June touched her. As it did her voice got quieter, trailing off into whispers.

Tap, collar bone.

“Shh.”

The whispers faded into nothing. Her eyes were a bright green, an almost shocking shade of it, but the light behind them had dimmed.

June thought about how, for some people, beauty is a cultivated thing: they maintain it, consciously, with smiles and confidence and well-learned body language, perfected though their entire lives. Those people, when they got the look at Haley now had—blank, still—lost some of their beauty. But Haley was the opposite.

Her shirt was rumpled and the top button had come undone, exposing her neck; creases were forming on her tight slacks where her legs bent; her shoulders were slumped and her face was slack, not smiling coyly or doing anything else particularly attractive—yet still, somehow charming.

That’s the real thing, June thought—the kind of beauty that remains even when a person has forgotten themselves. She was taken aback because she so rarely saw it, and she felt herself being drawn in the way the customers in the restaurant had been.

Careful. She’s a source.

June sidled up to her, stepping into Haley’s personal space with the kind of carelessness one would only use around a lover or a mannequin.

At the moment, Haley was dangerously close to being both.

June took her hand (which was still halfway out in the air, holding the imaginary scarf) and her thumb found its place in the palm. Her other hand snaked around Haley’s side, under her arm, up between her shoulder blades, and came to rest on her neck, the fingers finding their position on each side, just below the hair line. They looked not unlike dancers.

Haley sucked in a tiny breath as the hand settled on her neck, but otherwise didn’t react.

Then June’s fingers did their trick, applying pressure to their carefully chosen points, and she whispered something. It was too low to be heard even over the low murmur of the restaurant through the walls, but it might have been let go. The effect on the girl was instant: the air sighed out of her, her chin dropped forward against June’s shoulder, and her eyes fell shut as if releasing a great weight. She almost slithered to the floor, but June moved fast to keep that from happening: she moved her hand—the one that was applying pressure to the girl’s palm—around to Haley’s lower back, taking Haley’s hand with her. Then she pulled them together at the waist, pivoting Haley’s hips against her own: also a dancer’s move. The little notebook, tucked somewhere in the pocket of the girl’s apron, dug into June’s right thigh.

June looked over the helpless girl, at her face. It was peaceful and unaware of what was happening to her.

Seal the deal already.

She hesitated.

You need a story. She’s the girlfriend of the slumlord that owns half the city. She can get you all kinds of dirt once you work on her a bit. It’s a good story, a story people will be interested in. It affects them. It affects half the city and the rest will buy that day’s paper out of pure rubbernecking.

Sunday, front page, and it’ll sell out.

Haley began to slide down the wall. Her cheek pressed against June’s shoulder as she slipped, making her lips pucker like a child asleep on the floor, and her shirt started to come out of her pants where June was trying to hold on. It was like trying to prop up a drunken snake.

“Shit.”

June put her right leg between the girl’s legs and braced her knee against the wall, forming a makeshift seat. Haley slid down bonelessly until she was sitting on it. She straddled June’s knee like one sits on a bicycle seat. The heat from between her legs was a warm, soft weight.

There were long eyelashes laying on the girl’s lightly freckled cheeks—no makeup, they were just naturally long—and for some reason, as June looked at them, she felt a protective twinge that was normally reserved for kittens. They highlighted the defenselessness of the girl’s face.

Shit.

She couldn’t do it. It was the eyelashes.

She released the pressure on Haley’s hand and neck and patted her cheek.

“Hey.”

The girl’s eyes fluttered. They blinked and darted around, streaks of bright confused green. She looked like she was having trouble holding her head up.

“Look,” June said, “Do you want to go get a drink or something?”

“Ok,” she mumbled. She looked down at herself. “Am I... sitting on your knee?”

“Kinda.”