The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The Adjusters II: The Greek Fiasco

Back in Town (2)

Daniel was walking fast, knowing he was forcing the shorter Cindy to almost run to keep up. It was not that he did not care, but he was seething from the encounter with Jenn and Biff and his cronies and he needed to work off his frustration. And besides, he told himself, no one forced her to follow him.

When he realized how unfair he was being, considering how Cindy had jumped in to defend him back at the diner, he slowed down. He still walked with his fists clenched, however. The side of his face stung where one of Biff’s companions had kicked him, his lower lip swelling up. The bleeding had stopped, but the coppery taste in his mouth was still with him, and he felt like it would never leave him. He was hurt, and the hurt went deeper than his face or his ribs.

Biff’s face flashed in his mind, a laughing Biff, a sneering Biff. The image made him clench his fists harder, hurting his bruised knuckles. At least he managed to break the bully’s nose, he was pretty sure of that. But then Biff’s brutish face was replaced by Jenn’s, and the surge of emotion he had been repressing surfaced.

He thought he could handle seeing Jenn again, thought he could talk to her, get her side of the story, figure out what happened. But he had failed miserably. He had an excuse, granted, or at least he tried to argue to himself that he had. After all, she had acted... he did not even know how to characterize it. Strangely did not even begin to describe it. It was so much out of character. The way she dressed, for one—she always hated to show her legs in public, and yet she was out in that dress, just like in that feed from the Student Center that Radhu had shown him the previous night. And then there was the way she referred to herself in the third person, which had creeped him out something fierce. And there was what she had said, how she had gone to that other guy and flirted with him, completely ignoring him. And yet—and yet—it was still Jenn. The way she moved, the way she talked, even how she talked, and the words she chose.

He knew everyone was indulging him with his wild theory that somehow Biff had done something to Jenn to make her go with him, exerting some sort of control. Certainly, Radhu had made it clear that it was highly unlikely. And Daniel had to acknowledge that much of it came from that weird dream he had had back at the beginning of the year. With that in mind, he tried to recall how Jenn had sounded. He remembered how she had talked to him earlier; he remembered her face, her eyes, her body movements, the way she talked, the way she seemed to think. Her eyes had been clear, her movements assured, and there were no hand-eye coordination problems. Her speech had been articulated, her sentences well formed. He had been studying drugs and other mind-altering techniques with Cindy for the past month, and one commonality among the techniques was that they all affected something that was visible and fairly difficult to camouflage. The conclusion seemed to be either that Jenn was indeed acting of her own volition, or whatever was affecting her was something new or secret. He refused to believe that she was being coerced into acting the way she was. He had looked in her eyes, and she could not have been able to hide that from him. Her eyes had been the way they always were, had looked at him the way they always had, those large grey eyes that he had fallen in love with so long ago.

There was no sense to any of it. No sense at all. He did not know what to do.

He turned left when he reached the small road leading to parking lot next to his place, the one serving the two apartment buildings on either side of that service road. His own apartment (the one he and Jenn used to call home, a lifetime ago) was the top floor of a two-story house at the far end of the parking lot. Cindy followed him without saying a word. She followed him as he unlocked the door and stepped inside. She followed him as he made his way to the living room. She sat on the couch, still not saying a word.

Daniel was too keyed up to even contemplate sitting down. He paced nervously, his fists clenching and unclenching, the desire to scream and hit something becoming more and more difficult to resist. The anger that he felt at the diner was rising again, shifting to rage, a rage that had been bubbling inside him for weeks now, a rage he had repressed, a rage with nowhere to go, with no outlet, no sense, no reason.

“What the hell is going on, Cin?” He did not want to shout, but he had little control. “What the hell was that?”

Cindy looked at him with narrowed eyes. She seemed worried about him. “It’s just Biff being Biff, Dan. He’s an asshole, you know that. I know that. Heck, everyone knows that. Don’t let him get to you.”

“Not him! Him I can deal with! But her? What was she doing? What was she thinking? What the hell is going on, Cin?”

Cindy hesitated, looked about to say something, but Daniel never gave her a chance to answer him. He stormed out of the room, and headed to the bedroom, slamming the door against the inside wall on his way in.

Cindy followed him, concern etched all over her face. And pity. She felt sorry for him. That incensed Daniel even more. His rage needed to be vented, something that had always been difficult for him, partly because he so rarely got angry. But now his teeth were hurting from clenching, and his hands were closed into tight fists.

“Fuck,” he growled. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” he shouted, louder and louder each time, feeling the eruption but unable to control it. “FUCK!” he screamed before punching the wall next to the bed, his already hurt knuckles pouncing through the sheetrock and missing a supporting beam by a lucky few inches. Cindy screamed in surprise.

“Dan! Please! Calm down! Please!”

“Fuck! Why is this happening to me? Can you tell me that, Cin? Why—the—fuck—is—this—happening—to—me?” He was screaming without restraint now, punctuating every word by an overhead smash of his fist against the wall. A small rational part of him felt a stab of guilt about subjecting Cindy to such a scene, but then again she was the one to follow him and she did not have to be there and he was in no condition right now to care about other people’s feelings. He was breathing hard, the throbbing in his hand dampening his ire somewhat.

Cindy looked at him with wide eyes, keeping calm but clearly unsure what her next move was. She then looked at the hole he had just punched in the wall, before her eyes circled the room and fastened on the dresser. Her eyes widened even more, in surprise this time, and after a short pause, she bolted for the dresser. Daniel jumped when she moved, still on a short trigger, then turned in place a few times, his energy level way too high, frustration having replaced rage but still needing to be released.

He was just deciding to leave the bedroom and head outside when Cindy looped something around his neck from behind and he jumped once more as a weight thumped against his chest. “Cin! What the fuck are you —?” He looked down and saw the bronze medallion that he had brought back from the NADA party the previous semester hanging from his neck on its leather string.

He turned to look at her, his hand pulling on the string as he did so. “Cin! This is no time for—”

He never had the opportunity to finish his sentence, as he felt hard hungry lips close upon his, and a tongue invade his mouth, and Cindy’s small body press against his. He wanted to pull back, push her away, ask her what she was doing, but her passion just made whatever remaining repressed emotions he had accumulated boil over. Her mouth felt perfect on his, and her hands on his back underneath his shirt felt as if they had been created to be right there. His own arms wrapped themselves around Cindy’s small frame as if they had a mind of their own, and soon he was pulling the vivacious blonde against him, crushing her against his chest, his groin, while his hands immediately went down to her ass. Cindy moaned in his mouth, and her tongue become more feverish. Daniel was losing whatever will he might have had to fight her off; he could feel the rush of lust swamping him over, demanding escape, release, freedom.

She pulled out of the kiss, breathing hard. She looked up and must have seen the fire in his eyes because she grinned, her crotch rubbing against his in a private filthy dance.

“Take me, Dan,” she said, her voice low, vibrant, promising. “Take me hard and make me scream like the little slut I am.” She pushed him on the bed, and before he could stop her she straddled him and pressed her ass hard against his groin before she leaned over to deliver another scorching kiss.

The sudden movement had jerked Daniel out of his ardor and he was about to push Cindy off and protest when she grabbed his hands and put them on her ass. He felt the firmness of the buttocks underneath the thin skirt she was wearing, and he immediately had to fight the desire to run his hands underneath the material and palm the skin that he imagined warm and satiny. His hands clenched, and he groaned into her mouth. His emotions, already thrown completely out of whack from his outburst earlier, threatened to erupt again. He was trying hard to resist, not sure he really wanted to. The pent-up frustration inside him was still clamoring to get out. Clamoring loudly. “Cin...” he managed to grunt through her kiss, “this is a bad idea—”

She lifted her head and looked him in the eye.

“Dan, you’re wearing my medallion. Remember it? That means that right now, I’m your little fuck slave. Your little fuck toy. Your little fuck thing. You can do anything you want to me. Anything. Just tell me, and I’ll do it. Or better, just take it. Take whatever you want from me. You want me to struggle a bit, give you something to fight against, let you work off that anger that’s eating you up?” One of her hands slipped between their bodies, and she rubbed the cock that was straining his pants. “Want me to play the little tease that doesn’t put out, and that you get to punish with that fat cock?” Her hand slipped into his pants, having unbuttoned them without him noticing, and she grasped his cock, making him gasp in response. Her voice dropped down to a throaty rumble. “You can be rough with me if you want. I know guys like that, especially when they’re all worked up like you are. I won’t mind, I promise...”

“Cin! Come on! Jenn—”

“Jenn? Jenn’s off somewhere fucking those two losers from the diner within an inch of their life. Perfect little Jenn probably has a cock in her mouth and a cock in her cunt right now, grunting like a stuck pig while she’s being plowed hard, with Biff cheering on and telling them to fuck the slut harder, that it’s no good unless she’s screaming her pretty little head off. ‘Fuck her up boys, she likes it hard and fast!’ And they do, and her big tits are bouncing as she rocks from one cock to the other, and her slut dress is bunched up around her waist—”

Daniel’s lust was quickly shifting to anger and back again, the two emotions fighting it out for supremacy. He did not even know who he was angry at—Cindy for saying all that she was saying—Jenn for how she was hurting him—Biff for being a fucking asshole—the world for being fucked up beyond repair—himself for not knowing how to handle any of it.

Cindy did not let up. She looked straight at him and pressed on, as if she was trying to rekindle his earlier rage.

“Maybe I should go and put on a brunette’s wig and some of her clothes from her closet so I can be your Jenn for the night. Would you like that? A docile little Jenn ready to do whatever your twisted mind wants, no matter how dirty or filthy or sick it may be? You get to have some revenge sex, Dan—a good hard hatefuck!” She was stroking his cock now, which was threatening to burst from the stimulation. “Wanna fuck her ass, Dan? Wanna ream her ass with your big cock, Dan? You can. Just shove it in there and fuck it—it’s tight, tighter than anything you’ve ever had, and you can fuck it as hard as you want, punish her for being such a selfish cunt, make her regret it all, regret you—shove your cock into her ass hard and make it bleed, Dan. Fuck your slutty girlfriend in the ass like the shameless whore she is—”

If she wanted to enrage him, it worked. With a roar he flipped her on the bed and stood over her, his cock standing straight out, hard, angry, demanding. Cindy grinned, and spread her legs. Her short skirt had ridden up, exposing a thin pair of lace panties. She pulled them aside and ran her fingers up and down her slit while Daniel discarded his pants in one swift move. An instant later he was back on top of her, and she welcomed him with a deep kiss while he pushed his cock inside her in one long thrust that found her pussy soaking wet.

“Oh God!” moaned Cindy, wrapping her legs about his waist and hooking her ankles together behind him, pulling him tight against her. “Fuck me, Dan, fuck me hard!” She punctuated her urging by plastering her mouth against his and giving him another scorching kiss, and Daniel, lost in a haze of lust and anger, pushed his hips hard against the small body below him, relishing the heat enveloping his cock. She was hot and wet and her pussy sucked him deep inside her almost against his will. He responded to her kiss, and she moaned beneath him, her hands grabbing his head and locking him in place.

He fucked her, there was no other word for it. It was raw, untamed, primitive. He thrust into her repeatedly, savagely, furiously, his cock driving in and out of her with wet slurps and damp slaps, and Cindy seemed to bask in it all, holding her beautiful legs apart and giving him as free an access as possible. In the course of their coupling, he had pulled her shirt over her chest, and was now mauling her breasts and finally bit on her hard nipples when she came, a loud orgasm that had her blonde locks swinging left and right as she thrashed on the bed.

He could not control it, any of it. His cock was the engine, his anger the fuel. Through the fog in his mind, he was seeing Jenn, he was seeing Biff, he was hearing them and smelling them and they were kissing and laughing and fucking and Jenn was begging him to take her hard, to fuck her like the cheating bitch she was, and it hurt and it burned and it made his vision turn red and he was thrusting madly now, ramming in and out of the cunt splayed out before him, smashing into it with all his might.

“Fuck yes!” cried Cindy, clawing his back, building up to another orgasm. “Fuck me! Fuck me hard! Fuck me as hard as you can! I’m yours! All yours! Body and soul! Anything you want! Anything! I’m yours! Fuck me! Fuck me hard! Fuck me like the cunt I am! I’m just a hole for you, a hole to plow, a hole to ravage, a hole to—”

“Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!” Daniel, still thrusting madly, his cock spearing into her over and over again, put a hand over her mouth to stop her tirade. Cindy turned her head and quickly sucked three of his fingers into her mouth and performed a perfect mimicry of a fantastically sloppy blow job, gagging herself on his hand in time with his thrusts, her eyes closed, a look of bliss on her sweaty face. Her lips were distended over his hand, as if she was trying to swallow it whole every time his fingers went in. Her body stiffened, she groaned, and kept sucking all the way to another shattering orgasm that ripped through her body and clenched her pussy so hard over his cock that he cried out.

It was too much—too much. Daniel closed his eyes, anger and self-loathing feeding on each other while his cock was on a path of its own conquering and laying waste and exploding in a series of blasts that drove the air from his lungs and finally he collapsed, drenched in sweat, on top of the beautiful blonde girl shivering through the last remnants of her own release.

He was crying by the time Cindy wrapped her arms around him and soothed him as he lay empty, drained, wrung out.

Twenty minutes later, Cindy was resting, on her back, her eyes closed, while Daniel, raised on one elbow, ran a finger lightly over the areola around one of her nipples. He was much calmer now, the abscess of his anger punctured and flushed. Cindy looked like she was sleeping, her breathing slow and regular. Darkness shrouded them. On the bed next to him, the bronze medallion lay silent. He picked it up, examined it, but it refused to yield answers.

When he looked back at Cindy, her eyes were open and were gazing at him. “Dan, we need to talk,” she said softly. She sounded serious.

“I guess so. Look, I’m sorry about before... I mean, just now. I didn’t mean to...”

She reached up with a hand to caress the side of his face. “Don’t be sorry. It was wonderful. You were wonderful. It was exactly what I needed.” She grinned. “I came so hard I’m still all tingly. I needed it, bad. And you needed it too. Maybe even more than I did.”

“Still, I shouldn’t have treated you the way I did. You deserved, I don’t know—”

“Quit it. I got exactly what I deserved: a good, hard fuck from someone I care about deeply. So thank you. And I should point that I’m the one who was egging you on.”

“So you were trying to infuriate me on purpose, then?”

“Of course. Worked like a charm, too. Sex and anger. Eros and Thanatos. Twisted in a Gordian knot that only a good fuck can cut through. I guess I should apologize for putting you through that, but I’m afraid I’m just too happy with the outcome to try to make it sound sincere. And you do seem much more relaxed now...” She reached up to brush her lips on his cheek.

Daniel remained silent for a while, looking at her. He shook his head.

“Cindy, what’s going on? Last night, you were crying in my arms, telling me this stuff about high school and about this guy and how you had this barrier that kept you from... well, from sex, and you were begging me to make the first step and force you, but tonight you jumped me and—”

“You must think I’m crazy,” she said, looking sad.

“Crazy is a bit strong, so let’s just say I’m worried. I’ve sort of had my fill of people behaving strangely for no reason.”

“Well, in my case, there is a reason...”

He looked at her, not understanding, and then he frowned. He reached beside him to pick up the bronze medallion. “This thing?”

She nodded.

“I don’t understand,” he added, after a pause during which they both looked at the medallion he was dangling from his fingers above Cindy’s chest.

“I don’t I understand either. But what I told you last night was the truth. I’ve got a block about sex, and we could stay up all night doing the armchair psychology thing to try and explain it. When you wear this medallion, it lets me behave like the block isn’t there.”

“How...?”

Cindy looked at him, her expression undecipherable. It seemed a mix of sadness, apprehension, and excitement. He waited, his intuition telling him that this was an important moment. He palmed the medallion and went back to brushing his fingers over Cindy’s chest. He focused on her skin and on the steady rise and fall of her breasts, round and soft and topped with nipples that seemed to long to stiffen at his request.

“It’s sort of a long story,” she said after a long moment.

“I bet it is.”

“But you need to hear it. And you’re not going to like it.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

She sighed, and seemed to come to a decision. While she had been hesitant until then, her voice was now firm. “It happened last year. I went to this party thrown by a friend—she finally convinced me to get my nose out of my books, and there was this group of boys there laughing it up and playing a Family Guy drinking game, and I hung out with them and they invited me to go sailing with them the next day, and I had this essay that I needed to write but I was feeling uninspired and I decided to take them up on their offer and go with them the next day. I had a blast—I had brought this tiny bikini that I don’t get enough chances to wear, and I was sort of hoping that it might inspire one of the guys so that he would put a move on me and—” and she looked almost shameful at that point, “you know, start flirting with me and maybe push me through that block thing. But no, everyone behaved as well as college boys can behave. There were a couple of other girls there too, all beautiful. And then I must have fallen asleep because the last thing I remember was lying on the deck of the sailboat, in the sun.

“When I woke up I was lying on a bed with an IV drip in my arm and a killer headache. There was a man sitting by the bed, dressed like a lab technician, and he was running some sort of checklist, muttering to himself. When he saw that I was awake, he talked to me for a bit—no idea what he said, I was pretty out of it—then he said something that I don’t remember and I blacked out again. Next thing I knew, I was standing outside the Delta Iota Kappa fraternity house.”

“The Delta Iota Kappa frat house.” It was a statement, not a question. Daniel’s heartbeat started sounding loud in his ears. He tried to remain calm. “What did the lab guy look like?”

“Nothing special. Oldish. Maybe forty? White, short brown hair, I think brown eyes. He had a shirt and tie underneath the lab coat. He was a pretty big man, too. Had a bit of the mad scientist in him.”

“Did you get his name?”

“No. Later on, the guys would just call him ‘the doctor’.”

“So you’re standing outside the frat, then what? Let me guess. You had a new shiny bracelet on your wrist.”

Cindy’s smile was thin. She had heard the bitterness in his voice.

“Yes. And it barely registered, at first. It’s like I knew what it was, a trinket that the fraternity offered to girls it chose as recipients of their charity money and all that jazz, you know the story, but I would forget it was there when I wasn’t looking at it directly. But then weird stuff started happening.”

“Weird stuff?”

“I started to lose chunks of time, a couple of hours, here and there. At first, I knew exactly what had happened during those times—I was reading, or studying, or sometimes just daydreaming—but it was a bit like very vivid dream recollections But after a few weeks, those recollections would become less clear and other images started coming to the surface.”

“Images?”

“Yeah, images. Fuzzy at first, but then they were like conflicting memories for the same time period. But they were becoming more definite, and one day, it all became clear.”

“What did?”

“What was happening to me. This guy—a fraternity boy—came up to me after class, and whispered something in my ear. No recollection what. But I was hit by this urge to please him, to do anything he wanted me to do. I can’t explain it. I was hot, as hot as I had never been before, and I knew—just knew—that if I could please him he could satisfy that craving I had to... to just feel him inside me. It was completely irrational—subrational might be an even better word—and it was strong. And I followed the guy when he told me to follow him, and he brought me to a restroom and there he took me. We had sex in a bathroom stall, and it was amazing. No block, no nothing, just like magic. He left me there to clean up after he had come all over my face, and eventually the craving I had faded away and I came back to my senses. There was this lingering memory, like a buzz in the background, that I had found a quiet spot to read after my class, and that I had come to the restroom to freshen up, but I knew that wasn’t true. It was like my mind was trying to come up with a plausible story to cover up what I had just done. It was fascinating and frightening at the same time. But I remembered what had really happened. And it happened again, later that day, and the next day, and the next, other frat boys coming to me and whispering something in my ear and then have their way with me, and I remembered everything.”

Daniel was silent, absorbing everything. For a fleeting moment, he wondered whether she was making this up. It was too perfect. This was along the lines of the scenarios he had bounced around with Radhu. Was she feeding him exactly the information she knew he wanted, the information that he was hoping for, in an attempt to... In an attempt to do what exactly? he asked himself. Throw me off the track? Confuse me? Distract me? He took a deep breath. He was becoming paranoid.

“Dan, you okay?”

“Yes. Sorry. Just thinking. Please, go on.”

“Well, there’s not that much more to tell. Whenever a frat boy came up to me and said whatever it was that they said—my trigger sentence, I guess it must have been—I did what they asked, which usually involved... well... lets just say that most of them were not shy in using some of my assets.”

“If you were aware of what was happening, why didn’t you say something?”

“I’m not sure I would have been able to prevent them. I was aware, but I wasn’t in control, not at first. And even if I could have stopped them...” She paused, unsure how to continue.

Daniel shook his head, understanding dawning on him all at once. “You didn’t want to. This was your chance, wasn’t it? Your chance to work through the block you were telling me about last night? You got to have sex.”

Cindy nodded, and closed her eyes. He could see tears forming underneath her eyelids. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. After a few deep breaths, she found her voice. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I’m not proud of it, but I was desperate, and all in all, they did not treat us too badly. The sex was great. I had... I had missed it.”

“Us? Right, of course. The bracelets. All those girls. All those girls with a DIK bracelet. They are... some sort of sex slaves?”

“That’s maybe a bit strong, but yes, the boys use them for sex. Although some of them just want to talk, and don’t really touch you.”

“So Marjorie... Serena... and Kyra...”

Cindy nodded. “As far as I can tell, I’m the only one who remembers anything after they use me. Everyone else seems to just fill in the blanks with bland memories, like I did at first.” Cindy looked at Daniel carefully, then continued more softly, almost hesitantly. “Are you upset?”

He took a moment to think about it, then shook his head. “No, I’m not. I guess I should be. And maybe I will be later on. But I’m too exhausted to feel anything right now. Why are you telling me this now?”

Cindy shrugged. “Guilt, I guess. I mean, when Jenn left, what was the point? It’d just rile you up, make you suffer, knowing that she was out there not in control of her actions. There was nothing you could have done anyways. But now... well now she’s back, and I just couldn’t keep it to myself. I’m sorry I kept all of this from you.”

Daniel did not respond, and decided to avoid the topic completely. He would have to figure out later exactly how he felt about Cindy’s behavior. But now, he had other things on his mind. “So what about Jenn, then?” he asked her.

Cindy looked at Daniel uncertainly. “I actually don’t know what happened to Jenn. From what I heard, the doctor that did the work on the girls sort of disappeared after Christmas, and the frat has not added any new girl to their... their...”

“Their harem.”

“Their harem, yes. The guys seemed pretty surprised when they learned about Jenn, and I remember that in the short time I was around there was be ample publicity within the frat whenever some new girls would join the... harem. So I don’t actually know what happened to Jenn. But she is wearing a charms bracelet, and if I were to guess, I’d say that—”

“That Biff somewhat got his hands on whatever the doctor used and did the job himself.”

“Or got someone else to do it for him, yes. Without going through the frat.”

“But wait. Jenn’s different, right? I mean, take you, or Serena, you’re normal. Except I guess when you’re being... used. The rest of the time, you’re still you. Jenn doesn’t seem to be like that. Otherwise she wouldn’t follow Biff around like she seems to do.”

“I know. And that freaks me out. I don’t know what Biff’s done to her. Also, so you know, I’m not part of the frat’s harem anymore.”

“Why? How? That’s why you don’t have your bracelet anymore, right? What happened?”

“I quit, you might say. The thing is, whatever hold they had on me was already fading. I haven’t really tested it yet—I don’t know what would actually happen were one of the guys to say my trigger, but I don’t think I’d have the irresistible urge to throw myself at him. Probably I’d feel an attraction for the guy, a rush of lust. But it would not be irresistible. I was really doing it more for fun than because I had to. But after what happened to Jenn, what Biff did, and how you reacted, well, it stopped being fun. I don’t want you hurt, Dan.”

He squeezed her hand when she said that, and that support seemed to have been the right thing for him to do because her eyes watered again. Emotions were running high. He did not trust himself to continue talking about Jenn. He needed to think on it, to sleep on it. He switched the subject.

“So what’s with this medallion?” He dangled the medallion before her eyes again.

“I don’t know. Remember that party last semester, where they had them? The doctor put us under, all of us that were hired as serving girls, and he must have done something to us while we were knocked out because, well, basically, what the guy at the party said—whenever someone wears our medallion, we’re compelled to obey them. It was a little bit like when the frat boys used our trigger sentence. For me, again, it mostly took away my blockage. Which is why... which is why I put it on you at the party. So I could let you know how I felt about you. Same as tonight...”

“So the medallion still has an effect on you?”

Cindy’s smile was tentative. “Clearly. I wasn’t sure it would work. But it still does. And it does make me suggestible. I’d be careful when you wear it with me. You could really get me to do all sort of filthy things with that...”

The way she said it made it quite clear that she would not mind it one bit if he did. Daniel decided not to pursue that particular thread of discussion at that particular moment.

“Cin, what did they do to you? How did they... I don’t know what to call it... program you?”

“I don’t know that either. Complete blank. And it’s been bugging me. Why do you think I was so eager to help you with your senior year project? I’m not stupid, you know. I want to know what they did to me. So I enjoyed it when the guys used me; sue me—I like sex. But I want to make sure they haven’t screwed up anything else inside my head. I’ve managed to narrow it down some. I’m pretty sure it was a combo of drugs and neuro-cortical stimulation, based on what was around the lab when they took us there to prep us for the NADA party. But no drugs we looked at over the last month comes close to having the effects I experienced. And as we saw, neurological stimulation can do lots, but again, nothing close to what I experienced. So I’m stuck.”

“If we figure out what was done to you, then we can figure out a way to undo it. And get Jenn back.”

“That crossed my mind.”

“We’ve got to find that doctor. Anything else you picked up on him?”

“He wasn’t a local, I’m pretty sure of that. And I don’t think he works at the University. He seemed pretty keen on remaining low key.” She frowned all of a sudden. “I rarely saw him at the frat house, but I do remember that one time around Christmas where I overheard him talking to someone—maybe Nils, the vice-president or something—and he was saying something about Serena and an experiment he was running. He seemed very excited about it, saying that he would have to be careful and keep an eye on her. But then, as I said, is seems no one’s seen him since winter break. At least according to Jackson.”

“Jackson. Of course. He knew. He knew all of this. And he didn’t do shit!”

“Jackson’s okay. Go easy on him. He’s just a kid. And he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. I think he wants to do the right thing—he doesn’t really partake, if you know what I mean. And he’s really head over heels for Kyra. He’s been trying to help, you know that.”

“Kyra. Of course, she also has a bracelet. Does he—did he use it to make her fall in love with him?”

“I don’t think it works that way. I do think she’s really into him. For real.”

After nearly two minutes of complete silence, with Daniel still mindlessly running his fingers around one of her nipples, she spoke up again, almost whispering. “What’s gonna happen now?”

“We need to find that doctor. And his lab. Can you give me a description of everything you saw, as much as you remember? I’ll see if I can get Radhu to figure out where it’s likely to be on campus. My money’s on the Delta Iota Kappa frat house itself. But I know the psych department has neurological stimulation equipment. If it’s at the frat house, we should get Jackson to do some footwork for us. And then we have to figure out what they did to you. You said you believe it’s a combo of drugs and some sort of programming. And you said you had an IV drip when you woke up the first time. So maybe some of it still in your system. We should get an analysis of your blood done, see if anything’s askew.”

“I’ve done that already, but nothing came up.”

“But you didn’t have Radhu’s overly neurotic eyes overseeing everything. Maybe they missed something.” Daniel paused. “Finally, we need to get Jenn back so we can undo what was done once we figure out how to do that. It’s time to quit reacting, and start acting.”

Cindy took a moment before responding. “A nice thought. But I really meant, what’s gonna happen to us, now?”

Daniel looked at her. “I don’t know. What you told me just now... what you’ve done... it’s a huge help. Thank you. But I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. I don’t think I can do much more than take everything day to day for now. Can you deal with that?”

“I can try. But you have to do me a huge favor first.”

“Depends what.”

“Could you put on the medallion one more time?”

And Daniel had to shake his head at the extent of the mischief emanating from the smile she gave him.