Charlotte
Chapter 9
Sleep longer than half an hour eluded him that night. Nothing he did could take his mind off of Charlotte, and his failure from the previous night. His mistakes, thanks to hindsight’s perfect vision, were immediately obvious: he should have admitted to her earlier that he never worked as a stage hypnotist and he shouldn’t have hypnotized her to get out of the argument and to get her to stay (they had both agreed that the lie really wasn’t that big, but as in most things in life, the cover-up was worse than the crime itself). But, he decided, those were surface-level answers. He had failed Charlotte as her Dom. He spent the last few days of the summer after Derek left ruminating on where he failed on that front.
What did it truly mean to be a Dominant to a submissive? It was certainly more than simply telling her what to do in bed. A Dominant and a submissive must have a connection between them that runs deeper than simple attraction and affection, for each is placing in the other’s hands an integral aspect of the self, an aspect fragile and tender and dear as a newborn bird: for the submissive, it is a piece of her control over herself; for the Dominant, it is his ability to shirk responsibility and his primacy in his own hierarchy of cares. Either could easily become abusive should one lose the trust of the other. There was where he erred. By trying to hypnotize Charlotte in the middle of their argument, he placed himself wholly before her, betraying their tacit agreement of him taking responsibility for her well-being. If he ever got Charlotte back into his life, he would never make that mistake again, he promised himself, for that mistake had betrayed her trust, and that spells the doom for any relationship, be it that of a Dominant and submissive or just a boyfriend and girlfriend.
While he had reached a conclusion on that question, it brought him no joy. His days passed with him simply going through the motions of being a functional human being; his nights passed with dreams to mirror The Wanderer’s: holding and kissing Charlotte, and laying his hands and head on her knee. He found little enjoyment in things he usually found joy in. He only baked now to make cookies, which he kept in a steady stream in his apartment so he could drown away sorrows in food. He stopped eating as well in general, and stopped running, and as a result, he put on some weight, which only made him hate himself more.
After a couple of weeks, he decided that he needed some outlet for his hypnotic desires now that Charlotte had let loose that dam. He signed up for one of the more popular and well-used fetish social media sites and started to look for women who were interested in trying hypnosis. He had some luck in finding women to do video sessions with, but none of them held a candle to Charlotte. For a sizable minority of them he simply struggled with getting into trance, which proved to be a dent to his confidence. Those he could hypnotize either didn’t go that deep and seemed to just be playing along more than actually involuntarily obeying as he preferred, or he simply wasn’t that attracted to them. None of them came close to hitting the sweet spot of beauty and suggestibility that Charlotte was the Platonic ideal of.
His performance in his classes deteriorated, as well. About two months into the semester, his advisor emailed him, asking to meet outside of their normal schedule. He had been expecting this eventually, and when the scheduled day came, he forced himself out of his apartment and over to the main math building. When he finally got to his advisor’s office, the door was uncharacteristically closed, and he could hear voices inside the room, although indistinguishable through the door. A few minutes passed before the door opened, and the department’s graduate director left the room. She saw him, and gave him a quick smile and nod before hurrying down the stairs back to her office.
“Come in; I have heard you outside,” his advisor called out in his German-accented cadence.
He did, and greeted the man with a simple, “Hello, Georg.” As with most professors in hard sciences, he abhorred being called “Doctor Hofbauer” and simply preferred his forename.
“Good to see you. Sit yourself.” They both sat down. “I’m sure you have noticed that your performance this year has so far been quite poor. I know that you can do it. You did very good your previous years, and you have talent. I would not have said yes to be your advisor if I thought you were not smart, oder? Has anything been recently bothering you?”
The answer, of course, was yes, but he didn’t want to answer that. He couldn’t think of anyone with whom he’d actually want to fully talk about how terrible life had become.
“I’m… OK, I guess,” he equivocated. It was the best he could come up with. When he looked up at his advisor, he could see he wasn’t convinced, but thankfully, also that he wasn’t likely to press the issue.
“Yes, well, this has not been a good year for you so far. I know something is the matter. You don’t look well, you are not doing your coursework, and when you are it is not very good. I brought this to Joanna’s attention, which is why she was in here just before you. Poor performance can make you forced to leave the program, and none of us want that. We’ve arranged for you to take a kind of sabbatical. You can take the rest of this semester off from your studies. Unfortunately, you’ll have to keep your teaching duties as we cannot get a replacement so quickly, but that is only a few hours of work per week. And maybe having just that little responsibility will keep you busy enough, yes? I will be here, if you need.”
He felt relief at this. Of course, he knew his work had been slipping and he wasn’t doing anywhere near as well as he could or should be, but even so, he hadn’t been able to get himself out of wallowing.
“Vielen Dank, Georg,” he said as he stood up. “Ich hoffe, dass ich dich nicht enttäuschen werde.” Thank you very much, Georg. I hope that I won’t disappoint you. He decided to say that in his advisor’s native tongue, hoping that it would show that he wasn’t yet fully lost.
“Es wird dir gut gehen,” Georg said in response through a smile. You will be fine.
It was a small gesture, but in leaving the building to go back home, he started to feel a little better. Walking home, he decided to start a plan for getting himself turned around. He would need to stop focusing so much on Charlotte, to begin with; she was not coming back. She proved as much when she never responded to the couple of texts he had sent, one the next day and one the following week. The problem was that she was so intricately linked with hypnosis to him now, that whenever he needed to satisfy himself or held a video session with some random woman, Charlotte flooded his mind. As such, he decided to quit hypnosis cold turkey, as difficult as the occasional release he needed would become. He would also start to get himself back into shape by having a good diet and running daily again.
And over the next month, he worked extremely hard on himself. Most, but not quite all, of the weight he had put on he had lost, and he had managed to not watch a single video of a hypnotized woman. He even tried to get back into the dating scene, and managed to have one date. It had gone miserably for him, because, try as he might, he couldn’t stop comparing her to Charlotte. She was pretty and intelligent, but she wasn’t her, and he knew midway through that it wouldn’t be fair to string her along. As the date ended, he told her that he was incredibly sorry, but just not ready yet to date again, and they parted amicably.
A few days later, he was walking across campus back home after one of his teaching assignments. He was really back into the flow of it now, and he was starting to become as popular with his current classes as he was with all of his previous ones. He was starting to actually feel happy again, both about himself and life in general. There was still a hole where Charlotte had once been that had not been filled yet, but he felt better about handling it. As he walked past the Education department’s building, a young woman pushed open the double doors to step outside. He looked up at the movement caught by the corner of his eye, and saw that the woman leaving the building was Sophie, the woman who asked the question setting him down the life path he was currently on, Charlotte’s best friend, and Charlotte’s current roommate in the dorms. He didn’t really want to talk to her right now, but he had already made eye contact—wholly by accident—and in response she waved and hurried her step to reach him.
“Hi! Um, how’ve you been?” she asked, oddly losing enthusiasm as her question went on, as if she wanted to talk to him initially but thought better of it and didn’t know how to extricate herself.
“Good evening, Sophie. I’m doing alright, you know, all things considered…” He trailed off and gave a small shrug. “How are you doing?” She would certainly know how Charlotte and him and that things had ended painfully. He knew Charlotte wouldn’t have told her every detail about their fetish, but the rest would be there, in all its unfortunate detail. He hoped she didn’t think too terribly of him.
“I’m fine, thanks.” She quickly looked around them, as if making sure no one was spying on them, and seemed to take a slight moment to steel herself for what came next. “Look, um, I’ve been kind of hoping I’d run into you sooner or later. Obviously, Charlotte told me what happened with you two. I don’t think everything, but enough to know it didn’t end well. But we need to talk. Can we just, I don’t know, go to the library and find a room? It’ll be kinda quiet and private, I guess.”
He hadn’t expected this; rather, he thought it would be more of a how-dare-break-my-best-friend’s-heart kind of thing. Her eyes almost looked worried, and he could not figure out why that may be the case.
“Yeah, OK, we can do that. It’s only a handful of blocks away.”
His nerves started to get to him after about thirty seconds of walking with neither of them saying anything, and Sophie not looking over towards him. He couldn’t take it anymore, so he simply asked, “So how has your semester going? Hopefully you’re enjoying your classes and you’re happy in the program?”
She turned to him and smiled and said, “Yeah, I am! My whole family are teachers, so I knew I always wanted to do this, and it’s been wonderful so far!” It was nice to see some vivacity return to her, mostly because it made him feel less like he was walking towards his doom. “The semester has been really great. How has yours been?”
“Um, not great, to be honest. I really hit a deep low after Charlotte, and my studies suffered, and I’m really only now pulling myself back together.” It was a little more honest than normally would have been, but, since he was talking to Charlotte’s roommate, he felt a little extra honestly was warranted.
“See? That’s how I thought…” But she cut herself off. “Um, never mind just now. We’re almost to the library.”
More confused than ever, he kept quiet the rest of the way. When they got to the library a couple minutes later, they walked through the main entrance and searched a few floors for an unoccupied room. Eventually, they found one on the fourth floor. Safely ensconced, Sophie put her things down on the table and began to pace, again as if to gather her nerve for a conversation she knew she needed to have but didn’t want to.
“OK, so, I don’t know how to say it, so I’m just going to say it: I’m really worried about Charlotte. She doesn’t seem like herself. And I don’t know what to do, but I needed to tell someone and Charlotte won’t listen to me and I’m certain you still care some amount about her.”
“Worried, how? What do you mean she hasn’t seemed like herself?”
“Well, OK, she’s… No, let me back up. Over the summer, when you two were together, I had never seen her like that before. She was so incredibly happy. You could see it in her eyes that she was so deeply in love with you, and you two seemed so perfect together. Obviously, I didn’t see anywhere near as much of her over the summer as you did, but we still talked. At the start of the summer I thought it was just stereotypical young-love exuberance, because no one can think that someone else is that amazing, but when we talked a lot more towards the end of summer when she was with her family for a week, she really did think that highly of you. I don’t know if she ever thought it, but I was completely convinced that you two were going to get married. Yeah, I know it was early, but I have never heard or seen anyone as deeply in love with someone as she was with you.”
“Yeah, thanks, Sophie.”
“Sorry, but it’s part of this. Anyway, I know you’re a good guy and so I didn’t think you’re one to string a woman along, so I was happy for her. Well, for both of you, actually. When she came storming into our room at the end of the summer sobbing, I never once thought that you could have broken up. I thought someone in her family had died. I had to practically carry her to the futon and I comforted her for about half an hour before I could even ask what was wrong.
“It was like playing Twenty Questions to figure out what happened. I ran through grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, before asking about you even entered my mind. Then when I did ask about you, I still didn’t think you had broken up, but that something had happened to you. Like I said, I didn’t get the full story, but I know you had a fight over some dumb lie you had told at the beginning, and during the fight, something happened. She wouldn’t say what it was, but you were over from that point on.” He nodded in sorrow at this recounting.
“So what was it? Did you cheat on her?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Did you hit her?”
“No! Of course not!”
“What happened?”
He sighed. “I betrayed her trust. Fatally, I think. I ended up not being the man she deserves, and it kills me every day.”
“That’s not really what I meant.”
“I know, but that’s all I want to say about that.”
She just looked at him for a few seconds before continuing on. “Fine. So for the next several days, Charlotte is miserable and doesn’t really leave the room much. She really just cried a lot and sat at her computer. I was a good roommate and brought her food and some papers from a couple classes she skipped. And then, like out of nowhere, after about a week, I come back to the room and she’s completely normal. She’s not sad, she’s ready to go back to classes, and she’s acting as if she was completely over you.
“So I ask her how she’s doing and she says she’s great, and I ask her if she wants to talk about what happened with you any more, and it was weird. She looked at me weirdly for a sec and just answered back that she’s great, like she didn’t hear what I asked. I thought that she was trying to get over you by just pushing it all out of mind and ignoring any mention of you at all. I didn’t think that was healthy, but oh well. I was happy she was coming back to herself. She left for a class a little bit later, and I started to think about it some more, and it just seemed odd. People just don’t get over someone whom they love as deeply as she loved you like that,” snapping concurrently with the last word, “and can act as if the relationship never happened in the first place. She went from one extreme to the other in the blink of an eye, and that’s not normal, especially because I know how much she loved you.”
“Are you worried about her just because she got over me really quickly?”
“No; I’m almost there. Sorry, it’s just a lot to explain. Charlotte acts like that for the next couple of weeks, and, again, while I thought it was weird, I thought she had just gotten over you and was back to her normal self. But then she starts to act differently again. It was as sudden of a change as before, but the change ended up being even bigger. Outside of the very start of the semester just after you broke up, she would never miss a class. She was incredibly studious and did every assignment, every reading, every paper. But she started to just skip classes. She started blowing off assignments. She started to just sit in front of her computer reading stuff and watching videos all day. When I asked her what she was looking at, she’d always change to something else on her computer and not answer. She became more and more withdrawn from everything. She even started going out almost every night, which also isn’t like her at all. I was worried she was getting into drugs or something, but she insisted that she would never do that, and I did believe her there. Still do, honestly.
“Then two weeks ago, she disappeared without saying anything. I woke up and she was just gone. A little after noon, I got a text from here that just said, ‘Don’t worry visiting a new friend be back soon!’ She was gone almost an entire week. I don’t know where she went or how she paid for the flight. When I tried to ask her about everything when she got back, she’d look at me weirdly like she did before, and acted like nothing had happened! It was like she was just ignoring me. And just nothing about her seems like the old Charlotte. I’m worried she’s gotten into, like, a cult or something weird like that.
“I know you still care about her. You have to, after how intense your relationship was this summer. That’s why I had to come to you. I don’t think going to, like, the police is the right thing to do, but something is up. And, not that I’m blaming you, this really all started because you two broke up. So… yeah… That’s why I needed to talk to you. I need your help figuring out what’s going on with Charlotte.”
It was a lot to take in. Almost too much. Assuming that everything she said was true, and there was no reason not to, he certainly agreed with Sophie that Charlotte was behaving differently. But none of that meant that it was anything beyond a first heartbreak, and she was handling it just as poorly as he had, albeit in different ways.
“I don’t know, Sophie. There’s likely an innocent explanation in all of this.”
“Yeah, I know, I know. But none of it feels right.” Her eyes were laced with worry as she said this. “I think she accidentally somehow got into something, and it’s wrecking her. She says that everything is great and stuff, but it’s just not her.”
He wasn’t fully convinced that there was something nefarious going on here, but maybe there would be nothing wrong with helping Sophie look into it. Either he was right, and Sophie would just need to accept that Charlotte had changed, or she was right, and they could think of a plan to help their friend.
“Look, I don’t know. I just don’t. Can I think on it for a couple of days?” She sighed and nodded in acceptance. “Obviously, I mean nothing creepy with this, but can I have your number? I’ll call or text you when I’ve made up my mind.”
“Yeah, OK,” she said, exasperated. They exchanged numbers, and since there was nothing more to really discuss, they left the library.
It was an awkward silence as they walked together towards their homes, as they were in the same general direction. She did not do much to hide her displeasure with him.
“Look, I can tell you’re disappointed in me,” he said. “I don’t know how we’d arrange it, but maybe if I saw her behaving differently, I’d be more convinced. I’m sorry, but this is all just really hard for me, especially if she’s simply just over me and exploring a new side of herself.”
“Please just think about it. Please.” She was outright pleading with him now.
“I’ll let you know in a couple of days. I promise.”
They walked in silence in their mutual direction for another couple of blocks until they approached Sophie’s dorm, when something wholly unexpected, and perhaps serendipitous, happened: Charlotte was walking in their direction, having just exited the building for whatever sojourn she had decided on for that night.
“Charlotte!” Sophie called out. “I didn’t expect to see you. Where are you going?”
“Just out tonight.” She was looking only at Sophie, and didn’t seem to have noticed him.
“Will you be back tonight?”
“Yeah, I will be. I’m just going out tonight.”
“But where?”
“Just out tonight.”
Sophie shot him a quick look, clearly saying, See? This is really fucking weird. And he had to agree with her: the evasiveness and repetition of her answers were really fucking weird. Sophie’s look caused Charlotte to finally look at him herself, as if she had only noticed now that he was there.
They made eye contact, and her eyes went wide, as if in shock. They quickly morphed into a look of vague emptiness. He gave her a small smile and said, “Hi, Charlotte. You look well. How are you?”
“I… uh… I’m…” she stammered, which he had never heard from her before. But, he noticed, as she was stammering, the look in her eyes changed again. The vague emptiness had left, and he could only describe their current look as pure terror. They were twitching ever so slightly, and a couple beads of sweat appeared just below her hairline on her forehead. “I’m… great! Thanks for asking!”
The instant she said “great” the look of terror vanished, replaced again by the quasi-emptiness. She also punctuated the word with a smile. But it wasn’t her normal, lopsided smile that he loved so much. Instead, it was symmetrical; it was the kind of smile that meant, obvious only to those who shared their asymmetry, that it was a forced smile, used in those situations when one is not actually happy but needs to pretend for propriety’s sake.
And that was it. He didn’t need a couple of days to think about what Sophie had said. Everything he had needed to convince him of the correctness of her worry was just laid out in front of him.
Charlotte walked away, and Sophie immediately tried to talk to him. He held up his hand to silently tell her, Wait just a moment until she’s a little more away. Charlotte went to the end of the block and turned. Once out of eyesite, he faced Sophie and put his hands on her shoulders.
“I have never known Charlotte to stammer like that and be that flustered like she was for a few seconds trying to answer my question. Did she ever do that this semester?”
“Um, yeah a couple times right after she started behaving differently when I’d ask her if she was doing alright or what she was looking at on her laptop. Why?”
“Because you are one hundred percent right. That was definitely not the woman I loved this summer, and definitely not your best friend.”
“Really!? What convinced you? Do you know what’s going on?”
“I have a very strong hunch about what’s going on, and I’ll explain things to you tomorrow. I want to take tonight to think about how best to tell you, because it deeply concerns both Charlotte and me. I have nothing to do on campus tomorrow. When are your classes over?”
“I only have a lecture from 9 to 10:20.”
“That works well. I’ll text you my address. Come to my apartment after your class. Don’t tell Charlotte. OK?”
“Yeah. That sounds good. I’m glad you agree with me. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
“Have a good night, Sophie.”
They parted ways, Sophie turning into her dorm building, he continuing the walk back to his apartment. He quickly took out his phone and texted her his address. The rest of the walk home was spent wrapping his mind around the conclusion he had come to, that he could see no way that it wasn’t true: Charlotte was being hypnotized, involuntarily, and didn’t want to be, but she couldn’t stop whomever it was taking over her life and changing her into a person she didn’t want to be. Knowing how incredibly susceptible to hypnosis she was, she was in danger, and he needed to save her.