Charlotte
Chapter 2
He awoke contended the next morning, and anxious and excited to see Charlotte at the final in a few hours, even though he knew that he couldn’t give any outward sign that they had anything more (even though yet unconsummated) than normal TA/student relationship. But just being able to see her, watch her, memorize her every feature would be enough. Thankfully, one of his duties during the exam was to keep an eye on the students to ensure no one cheated and got away with it. There would be more than ample opportunity to commit her everything to memory. He wondered if she would decide to be brazen today and wear something to help attract any male’s eye. As much as he’d have liked to use the few hours between waking and leaving his apartment for his class’s final for some more work, the morning proved unproductive. The prospect of seeing her, and secretly spending the entire time she was in the room taking every inch of her in, was too much. After a shower so long it turned cold because his water heater emptied, he got dressed, and walked to campus, ensuring he’d be plenty early for the test. He purposely took a route that brought him in front of Charlotte’s apartment, as she had pointed it out to him the previous night, but alas, fate had spent all its power on the previous night, and he didn’t run into her. Disappointed, but by no means despondent, he resumed a normal pace and made his way to the campus building where he was due.
He purposefully arrived half an hour early to the room, and saw that about a third of the overall class was already there. A quick scan showed Charlotte was not. The scan was not necessary, with as tuned in to her as he felt he was, he knew beforehand that she was not yet present. The professor smiled, shook his hand, and thanked him for being so responsible as to arrive so early. After chatting together for a few minutes, he turned his gaze back to the entrance, eagerly awaiting Charlotte’s arrival. He didn’t have to wait long. When she entered, she was dressed similarly to last night in a casual shirt and shorts and sandals. When she saw him, her face immediately brightened, and to his horror she started to raise her hand in a quick wave. Their eyes had been locked on each other, and a quick shake of his head made her stop momentarily, and she deftly made her haid raise into a motion to fix her hair by running her hand through it.
Relieved, he went back to scanning the room, never having his eyes off of her for more than a few seconds. His soul sung more with each time his eyes returned to hers, seeing hers locked onto his, and the beautiful, lopsided smile on her lips. After endless, class-wide nervous minutes, he and the other TA passed out the exams, and the test began.
Unsurprisingly for a classroom full of future teachers, the final came and went without incident. While the students had three hours, almost all finished in less than two. He didn’t know whether it was intentional or not, but Charlotte was one of the few who took longer. When she handed her test in with half an hour left, she clearly was sauntering up to the front of the room for his benefit to hand in her exam, and, while making her way to the door he was standing in front of, took a quick glance around, saw no one looking their way, and blew him a quick kiss, without breaking stride. She took his breath away with such a simple motion, and he hated he wouldn’t see her again for another three days. He knew he had her number, and he was certain she’d have come to his apartment within minutes if he requested her to, but was able to abstain over the following days. They dragged on, but that was worth it, as he was able to do well enough on his own exams. His last one was on Friday evening, and afterwards, walking home, he again took the slightly different path that took him in front of Charlotte’s apartment building. For whatever reason, he felt that if she should see him on the sidewalk and say hi, she would join him back to his apartment, and that this would be different than explicitly texting her, even though one was just as intentional as the other. Upon arriving home, he collapsed onto his bed, and fell asleep, dreaming of tomorrow, and cursing her Saturday afternoon final.
He spent the next morning with the same nervous energy, he thought, as Napoleon must have felt before Austerlitz, but fearing it could be his Waterloo. He could have spent the day enjoying himself leading up to that night’s meeting, but his nerves and fading self-confidence made him spend the day doing as much research on hypnosis as he could do. He would not let Charlotte, and himself, down. The hours seemed to pass as slowly as for a child on Christmas Eve, and he watched a string of hypnosis how-to videos on YouTube, covering different inductions, deepeners, and signs of a successfully induced trance. None of this was new to him, of course (he had been watching videos of women being hypnotized and reading articles explaining everything since he was twelve), but it was comforting to have the refresher. Once the clock passed 6, he found himself too worked up to sit down and concentrate, so he spent the next forty minutes walking in circles around his small apartment. At 6:40, he left to go meet Charlotte, knowing he’d end up being about fifteen minutes early, but he couldn’t tolerate one more minute in his apartment, impatiently waiting.
When he arrived for their rendezvous, it was just after a quarter to 7, and he was surprised and grateful to find Charlotte was already out in front waiting for him. She looked as beautiful as he could ever recall seeing her: her hair down, softening her features a bit; a thin-strapped sundress showing her bare shoulders and arms, with a low-enough neckline to just show the merest hint of cleavage; and flat-soled sandals, showing almost the entirety of her feet. As he reached those with his eyes, he decided to have them join her crooked smile on the list of features she had the best in the class. She wasn’t looking in his direction when he walked up, and he panicked over how to get her attention. Just saying, “Hi”? Too short and casual for such an important meeting. “Good evening, Charlotte”? No, way too formal. What about not saying anything and just tapping her shoulder? Even sillier than his last thought. He had only a couple more strides to make up his mind, and decided to just stick with the classic (and things are classics for a reason), “Hi, Charlotte. You look wonderful tonight.”
She turned, saw him, smiled, and beamed. One’s face can say any multitude of things, more often than not revealing everything one wishes to keep secret at a given moment. Hers was very clearly saying, “I have waited for this moment my whole life, and never have I been more excited. Not for my first kiss, nor getting my driver’s license, nor my senior prom, nor graduating high school, nor moving away for college and living without my parents for the first time. But seeing you, here, now, has made those seem like common occurrences, like breathing, experienced by everyone every day.” His heart could not help but melt.
“Oh! Hi!” she said breathlessly. “I’m excited you’re here. I couldn’t stand just being in my dorm room anymore talking nothings with the other people on my floor, and trying to find excuses to not party with them tonight.”
“Yeah, roommates can be like that. I actually came now for similar reasons. I hope you haven’t been waiting long?”
“Not even five minutes.”
“Oh. Good. I’d have felt bad if you’d been waiting for me for like half an hour. Um, do you want to go inside?”
“Yes! Please.” He decided to be as chivalrous as he could tonight, and opened the door for her to enter. They went inside, and he was happy to see that it was decently empty, which made sense as the school year officially ended only a few hours ago, and students were all inevitably out somewhere trying to have the best time of their lives; yet he knew, as unquestionably as he knew his own name, that none of them would have a night as great as that which he and Charlotte were about to have, together.
They got in line, although that would be a loose usage of the word as there was only one other person in it, who was already ahead of them. They stood there, waiting, in near-comfortable silence, before he could decide on what he wanted to say first. He started to ask her how her exams went, which he knew was lame, but didn’t feel fully comfortable talking about his, and, though she had not explicitly said but implied enough that he felt it a near certainty, her, fetish in public. (He still wanted to confirm that with her before he did anything beyond some basic, vanilla hypnosis; he would never be that brazen). Ideally, they would eat, make some small talk, neither letting their true feelings be known, and then go back to his apartment for the real reason both were there. The young man in front of them in the line finished ordering. They stepped forward, ordered, got their food after a few minutes’ wait, and proceeded to find a table as far from everyone as they could. The dinner itself passed quickly, with both of them eating quickly and not elaborating on the answers to each other’s small talk-questions as normal. Both avoided mentioning hypnosis until the very end of the meal.
“So… are you going to hypnotize me now?” she asked. “I don’t know how I feel about doing it in public, but if that’s what you wanted to do, I’d be OK with it.” He was amazed by how willing she was.
“No, not here. I wanted to talk to you a little beforehand. I want to know fully why you want to try this, what your expectations are, things like that. I’ll make sure I explain about hypnosis and its limitations and the like, so you don’t come out of this disappointed. So let’s go back to my apartment, and we can get started.” She smiled and nodded, and they rose to walk to his apartment. After they had gotten a few steps from the restaurant, he offered her his arm, for he thought it would be a nice touch; she slid her arm through his and gripped it firmly. She smiled up at him, and he saw the joy in her eyes. His heart rate began to quicken, and he felt a stirring a couple feet lower. They walked in a fully comfortable silence the five minutes to his place. As he unlocked the door to his apartment, he went over how he wanted this night to start out. He would start with what he said in the restaurant, getting her desires and expectations and then setting them more realistically if they were excessive, and he feared they would be. Then start with a suggestibility test, probably having her imagine she’s holding a bundle of balloons and a heavy bucket, move into an induction, and then a few deepeners. He’d hopefully have her in a deep enough trance at this point where he could get her to answer fully honestly about why she wanted to be hypnotized. Yes, all of this could just be innocent: maybe hypnosis was just a long-time interest, and her flirtiness is just that she genuinely thinks him attractive. But what he wouldn’t give for her to say, “Because it turns me on more than anything else, I thought you’d feel the same way, and I want to spend at least the night with you exploring my mind and my body.”
He lived in a furnished studio apartment, and it was a great price since it was technically off campus, even by only a block. The exact same apartment one block over would be another two hundred dollars a month, at least. As you entered, there was a small kitchen nook to your left, with a two-burner range, a sink, and just enough counter space for a cutting board and his crock pot. To the right of the entrance was the corner where the double bed was positioned. Directly next to the bed on the left was his TV on a stand, and continuing counterclockwise around the room, a two-seat couch on the wall opposite the front door, the door to his bathroom, and then a short wall between the bathroom door and his kitchen, where stood an armchair. In the middle was a small table which served both as a coffee table and his dining table during meals. He was happy that he was able to find a furnished apartment, as most were not, and if it was, with how little his stipend was, he was fairly sure he’d be sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor.
He felt a little self-conscious of it, and said to her, “I know it’s not much, but it’s just me, so I don’t have to worry about roommates and I can have as much privacy and quiet time as I like.”
“I think it’s great.” She sat down on one end of the couch where he had gestured for her to go, clasped her hands in her lap, and looked up at him with hunger in her pale eyes. He pulled the table a few feet closer to the couch and sat down on it, facing her.
“So, uh, Charlotte.” He wished the calmness he felt on the walk back here had stayed, instead of fleeing the moment she sat down. This was it. This was the moment. He had never been closer to having all of his fantasies come true, and as excited as he was for it, he was even more terrified of both of failing to actually hypnotize her and his suspicions of her actually also having a hypnosis fetish, but not feeling she could admit it to him, being wrong, and instead she simply had a non-sexual interest.
“You want to be hypnotized in person,” he stated, to begin. She nodded enthusiastically, her face blushing slightly when he said the word, “hypnotized.” He had to remind himself to not get distracted by her enthusiasm and prettiness. “Let’s start here: I know you said so when we talked on Tuesday night, but why do you want to be hypnotized so badly?”
She shifted a bit on the couch, and averted her eyes from his before answering. He thought, or more accurately hoped, that this was because she was getting ready to lie to him, or at least tell him half-truths. “Well, I’ve always wanted to be, as far back as I could remember. When I was a kid, I remember seeing the hypnotizing clown episode of Scooby-Doo and when it got to the scenes where Daphne was hypnotized, I thought it looked really cool, you know?” He did know, in fact, as that episode was coincidentally what started his hypnotic awakening. He nodded. “And ever since then, I’ve wanted to try it because I… just thought it looked really fun and like something I’d want to try.” The only time during her answer that she looked him in the eyes was after her question, waiting for his nod. He didn’t fully believe the second part of her answer, as the part about Scooby-Doo seemed too specific to be a lie, but she certainly could have been truthful. He didn’t want to press the issue, though, for fear she would close up and decide to not do this after all.
“And you’ve watched some videos online, but not anything in person?”
“Yeah. I had looked a few up on YouTube to try out, but I’m not sure they worked since I’m pretty sure I just fell asleep during them.” Yet another half-truth, he was certain of it.
“OK, last question from me. What would you like to happen when you’re under?”
She shuddered briefly; her blush extending down to her chest yet again lasted longer. “Well… I’d like to just see what you could make me do. I’d like to feel what it’s like to just be completely… out of control.”
He nodded, smiling a little. “That all sounds good, Charlotte. So now let’s get a little technical. I want you to know how this will be. Hypnosis isn’t like TV and movies. I can’t make you do something you don’t want to do. If I try to, you’d either just not do it or snap out of trance. You won’t just be some mindless drone mindlessly doing whatever you’re told.” He couldn’t be fully certain, but he thought she looked crestfallen for the briefest of moments when he said this. Please, he thought, let me not be reading too much into this. He quickly checked the time on his phone. “It’s almost 8:30 now. Would you still like to try tonight or wait until tomorrow?”
“Definitely tonight! Please?”
He loved her eagerness. “Alright. I want to start with a suggestibility exercise. While how well you do or don’t do is not a guarantee of how well or not you’d be hypnotized, it’ll give a pretty decent idea. So what I want you to do is sit up straight,” which she did, “close your eyes,” which she did again, “and place your arms straight out in front of you,” and which she did again. “Now, when I tell you to, I want you to imagine that tied around your right wrist are fifty very large balloons filled with helium, and in your left hand you are holding a very heavy bucket filled with sand.” As he was explaining this, he noticed her right wrist go limp, as if it was already being held up only by those imaginary balloons, and her left hand closed into a fist, tightly closed, as if struggling to hold onto that heavy bucket. “OK. I want you to feel those balloons pulling up on your right wrist, and that heavy bucket pulling down on your left hand, now.”
Based on what she had said to him about watching hypnotic induction videos on YouTube, he expected her to do very well here. He hadn’t expected this. It only took about three seconds for her right arm to be straight up in the air, her wrist the highest with her hand lying limply down, swaying slightly as if the balloons were caught outside on spring day with a light breeze, and her left as if it was being pulled so far that she was leaning to that side. The sight of her like this made his pants tighten. He told her that he was just going to do a suggestibility test, but she responded so impeccably that he decided to go for it and put her under right now, using a method he had seen once online. He stood up silently, and bent over her with his hands hovering inches from her wrists. With one motion, he grabbed both wrists, pulled them together and forward, and firmly called out, “Sleep!”