The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Memories Make Us

Chapter 5

I was all packed and ready to go. I’d been accepted to a better university than the local college, and I would have been stupid to say no. Dani came into my room. “Need a hand with that box?”

“Sure,” I said, and I let her do most of the lifting.

“You know...I’m going to miss you, Jack. Like...a lot.”

I laughed. “Oh, you’ll find someone else to satisfy you while I’m gone.”

“But that’s the thing...I don’t think I want that. I...I just want you.”

“Oh, don’t make me blush,” I joked, not picking up on the urgency in her voice.

“I’m serious, Jack. Stop walking for a second and look at me.” I did, and that’s when I saw the pain in her expression. “When we started fucking years ago, it was just sex, just getting me off. But then we started dating...you know, I know I was the one who suggested it,” (as far as she remembered), “but I think...Jack, I think I’m in love with you. Like...truly, madly, deeply.”

“In love enough to still quote Savage Garden?” I joked. This time, the joke was to try and deflect a little. The subject wasn’t one I wanted to breach.

“Shut up. Be serious for one fucking second. I’m in love with you, and I hope you feel the same. I want to spend my life with you, grow old with you, have your children. All of it, one day.”

Woah. Red alert. I mean, I loved my sister, but not like that. The only things I felt beyond brotherly love were horniness and an attraction to her face. The dating was just for variety. I didn’t want a long-term commitment; it was time to back out gracefully. “But...you told me you didn’t want that when we started dating, remember?” Gotcha.

“I know, but that was before. Things have changed.” Uh-oh.

“But remember you said it again just yesterday?”

“Yeah, well...I lied. Look, I can tell you’re just trying to back out, so I’ll save you the trouble. I’ll say no for you.” She had a tear in one eye, which she brushed away with her shoulder. “No. There, I said it.”

I felt terrible. Like I said, I do love her, and I didn’t want to hurt her. But how could I fix this? “No, it’s not that, it’s just...um...remember...uh...remember when...” My mind was blank. I saw no way out.

“Stop asking me if I remember stuff! Stop living in the past! I want a future with you, or at least a present. If you don’t want that, just grow up and say it!“

“I...I...” No way out, like a black hole. “I...don’t want that.”

“Yeah, I got that,” she said, then turned her head to hide what I assumed were more tears.

“Dani...I love you. I do. I never meant to hurt you, I just...don’t love you in that way.”

“So you’ll fuck me, and take me out to a romantic dinner twice a week, but you can’t promise to do that in the future? You can’t promise to be there when I need you? Because that’s all love is, Jack. Being there for someone no matter what. If you can’t do that, then maybe we shouldn’t keep up everything else, either.”

“Are you saying...no more dates, or no more sex?”

“None of it. Nothing. No more leading me on. No more.”

“...okay,” I said, defeated. “If that’s what you want...”

“That’s not what I want, but I can’t make you want something else. I can’t change who you are.” She dumped my box in the trunk of my car, then walked away coldly without another word. What had I done?

Dani and I didn’t speak for two months. Mom and Dad kept telling me she’ll come around, that she’s just hurt, but that it’ll work itself out. After that, we were on terse terms: Q&As were fine, or a simple “’kay” or “nope”, but any attempt at deeper conversation was cut short. My relationship with my sister was permanently broken. I often mulled over what had happened, and that’s when I adopted my motto. Our Memories Make Us. By having my sister remember wanting to date me and fuck me, that had evolved naturally until she was truly in love with me. By having my parents remember being okay with their kids’ semi-public sex, they’d reasoned on their own that they should be afforded the same freedoms. Every decision we make, every inkling we get, all comes from our experiences. Alter those experiences, and we alter ourselves at the core. So I swore to myself I would never use the ability again. I was extremely careful never to ask anyone if they remembered something. Instead of saying, “do you remember when this happened?", I’d say, “hey, didn’t this happen?” Instead of asking, “do you remember the professor saying that,” I’d ask, “the professor said that, right?” I got into the habit of never using the word “remember”, and panicking if I ever did. Life would be normal from now on, I demanded of myself.

Until sophomore year, when I met Heather. Heather lived in the dorm across from me, and like me, she had one roommate. My roommate and I got along well enough, but never spoke much, whereas Heather and her roommate Dawn were, like, totally BFFs. Those are Dawn’s words, by the way; even Heather makes fun of her Valley Girl dialect. They’d been roommates since the beginning of freshman year, and one year is apparently long enough to know each other’s deepest, darkest, like, secrets—Dawn’s words again.

Heather was adorable. That is the perfect word for her: sexy while being demure, hot and gorgeous while still being cute. Great personality and sense of humor, though occasionally dorky. Adorable. And after being friends with her for a couple of months, I wanted her. Thing is, I didn’t know how to approach a girl with a proposition; my whole life, asking someone out was always done with one of those occasional uses of my ability. You know, “remember when you asked me out? Well, I’m free now.” That kind of thing. If you haven’t been judging me yet, you don’t get to start now.

So after a bit of psyching myself up, I decided to bite the bullet and ask her out, without “reminding” her of anything. Millions of people did this every day, so how hard could it be, right? And yet as I approached her dorm and knocked on her door, I was fairly certain vomit was making its way up my esophagus. I swallowed it down as the door opened, and Dawn answered.

“Oh, like, hey, Jack. What’s up?” She smiled kindly, but I could tell she was busy.

“Is Heather here? I need to ask her something.” Swallow again; keep the vomit down.

“Uh, yeah, sure.” She turned into the room. “Heather, Jack wants to like, talk to you or something.”

Heather came to the door, and Dawn resumed whatever it was she had been doing. “Hey, Jack,” she said, smiling without the distraction her roommate had. “What’s up?”

“Um...can we, uh...talk out in the hall? In...uh...private?”

Heather looked concerned, but she closed the door behind her. “Yeah, sure...what’s up? Is everything okay? You don’t look good...”

“No, I’m fine,” I said, trying to fake a grin. I don’t know how it looked, but it felt obviously fake. “I just...uh...wanted to know if...uh...” And then, it happened. I panicked, and without meaning to, the words came out. “I wanted to know if you remember asking me out the other day?” Damn it.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, suddenly blushing. “Of course I do.”

“Well, no, but...” I had never erased an implanted memory before, and I didn’t want to experiment on Heather. I had to just continue from there and try not to screw up anymore. “Um...well, I want to know if you wanted to go out?” Technically, I had just asked her out the same way I would have otherwise. She just...thought she’d done it first.

“Oh! Uh, look, Jack, I’m sorry, but I...when you didn’t answer, I sort of asked someone else out.” She looked a little confused—I assume she was trying to figure out the timeline of asking him out and “asking me out”—but was satisfied with her own answer.

“Oh...” I said. And then...well, I’m not proud of what happened next. There are days when I’m ashamed of it. But partly out of force of habit, and partly out of desire, it happened. “But remember you said the offer was open if I ever wanted to say yes? I thought that meant you would go out with me as a...well, a first priority kind of thing.”

“I...I mean, yeah, that’s...that’s what I said...” Yes, it’s as clear to me as it is to you that she didn’t want to go out with me. But...well, I’m telling you what happened, not what should have happened. “You’re right. I’ll cancel my date with Ricky. It was supposed to be Friday at 8:00, so we can have our date then instead.” She smiled warmly, but uneasily.

Part of me wanted to just say, “it’s a date,” give her a kiss on the cheek, and head back to my dorm. But then flashes of Dani came to mind: her crying, her heartbroken face, her urgent desire to be loved in a way I could never love her. All things I had caused by messing with her head. And here was Heather, a girl I truly cared about, making a date with me when she really wanted to be with someone else. I didn’t want her to end up like Dani. So what I actually said was, “You know what? Nah, it’s okay. I don’t want to ruin your date with Ricky. Go out with him, and if you ever want to later, my offer’s still on the table.”

Heather breathed a sigh of relief. I don’t know if she’d realized how I switched the story, said exactly the things I’d “reminded” her she’d said, but either way, she got out of the date with me, and that’s what she needed. “Thanks, Jack. Look, don’t be too upset; maybe the date with Ricky will be terrible and I’ll come running back to you like a damsel in distress.” She laughed, and I just chuckled nervously. “Oh, come on, don’t make things weird between us. No matter what, we’re still friends, right?”

“Yeah...always.”

“Then come here,” she said, and hugged me comfortingly. “And even if Ricky is my knight in shining armor—I have no idea why I keep using all these fairy tale metaphors—you’ll find someone else and life will go on.”

“Yeah...thanks.”

“Anyway, I should get back to studying. See you at dinner?”

“Just like always.”

“Just like always,” she said, smiling, and headed back into her room.

There’s something to be said for having great friends, but there’s also something to be said for despising rejection. While I knew about rejection intellectually, and had seen others get rejected, I had never felt it myself. The pain was much stronger than I thought it would be. But I did truly care for Heather, so I was happy when she told everyone how much fun she’d had on her date with Ricky, and later when they’d become a couple. Sincerely happy, but also genuinely hurt. No wonder so many poets through the ages have written about unrequited love: it’s a cesspool of emotional contradictions.