The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Prom Night — Chapter 2

I could see the rage on Mr. C’s face when I woke up and realized that the effects of the pendant were wearing off quickly. This was the fastest I’d ever seen them wear off, but they usually lasted a bit longer each time, so I wouldn’t need to renew my commands this often in the future—or at least that’s how it had been with Hunter. Looking forward to a morning of fucking the two of them, I smiled brazenly at Mr. C and reached around the back of my neck for my pendant.

I couldn’t find it! Where the hell had it gone? Once I was sure it wasn’t there, I started patting down the bedsheets around me in desperation, convinced it must be here somewhere, yet knowing with a growing sense of doom that it wasn’t. Looking at Mr. C’s increasingly darkening face, I felt panic rising up. “Oh…fuck!”, I yelled.

“You disgusting, despicable fucking pervert! I am gonna kill you!”, he bellowed, lunging towards me. “They won’t be able to identify you with fucking dental records!”

My initial panic had escalated to stark terror now, and I froze at the pure malice in Mr. C’s voice. I was jarred out of it, however, when his fist caught me on the chin. Instinctively backing away as Mr. C climbed over Hunter and tried to grab me, I stumbled over the bed frame, feeling his hands sliding across my skin without finding anything to hold on to.

I knew I had to get out of there—fast!—and gave the room a brief glance as I continued backing out of the room, looking for any clothes I could grab. It only took a split second for me to realize that I’d left my tux downstairs. With Hunter starting to get up, and getting in his dad’s way, I managed to get downstairs well ahead of Mr. C, hearing him yell something incoherent as I started grabbing my things wildly. I tried to cover myself up well enough that I wouldn’t be running naked down the streets, but I was all too aware that that might be preferable to sticking around for even a few seconds longer. In the end, I ran outside with my boxer-briefs hanging underneath my ass on one side, my tux pants around my knees and falling, the rest of the tux draped over my shoulder, and my feet only half in my shoes, with the socks stuffed haphazardly into them, preventing me from putting them on properly.

Realizing that I wasn’t going to get anywhere like that, I slammed the door shut behind me to slow Mr. C down, looking wildly around to see if there was anyone in sight. It looked like it must be early afternoon by now, but luckily, there was nobody all that close. A couple of people in the distance looked around, trying to locate the noise of the door slamming so hard, but I at least managed to get my pants up and buttoned. Shucking my shoes and socks, I picked them up and ran barefoot down the sidewalk, the odd stone here and there hurting my feet, though I was running on too much adrenaline to pay much attention to the pain.

Obviously, Mr. C was having an even harder time getting out of the house than I was. Whether that was because Hunter was still trying to stop him or something else, I had no idea. The area nearby was very open, so with nowhere to hide, I simply ran in a straight line. Once I’d put some distance between me and the house, I stopped for a moment to put my shoes on properly before I started running again. I did my best to finish getting everything else on as I ran so I wouldn’t draw attention. A few people had already noticed me as I sprinted away from the house barely half-dressed, obviously wondering what was going on. From the occasional smirk, it was obvious that some of them were making up their own stories about what had happened.

Looking around and trying to figure out where to go, I spotted Hunter’s father in the distance. Wherever I was going, I had to go there now! I took off again, heading into town in the hopes that either I could lose him in the buildings, or at least that people might step in if he became violent. I must have been quite a sight, sprinting wildly down the street in a tux, but despite not being all that athletic, I managed to elude him, largely by dodging into alleys and changing streets as often as I could. I kept running long after I lost him, mostly in terror.

Eventually, after running probably a couple of kilometers in my now thoroughly disheveled tux, I was pretty sure I’d eluded him and decided that running around any more was just going to serve to draw more attention. It was a good thing I’d convinced the tux shop to “forget” to charge Hunter and me for our tuxedos and instead just write them up as lost—the thing was a wreck.

Figuring that I was safe enough, at least for the moment, I decided to head home, circling around the area I’d just been running from, just to be on the safe side. I wasn’t sure how I was going to explain this all to my father when I got there, especially now that I couldn’t use the pendant to convince him that nothing was wrong. I’d never used the pendant on him before, nor did I want to, but given the situation, it would have been helpful. Of course, if I’d still had it to use on him, I wouldn’t have been in this situation in the first place!

When I finally got home, I burst into the house, but then I just kind of stood there, not quite sure what to do next. Dad heard me come in and came to greet me after my night out, his face changing rapidly when he saw the state I was in. He was actually my godfather, but I’d always thought of him as my father—I couldn’t even remember my real parents beyond a vague impression of them; they’d died in an accident when I was two.

“What happened to you?”, he asked, more incredulous than worried. “You look like you slept in a briar patch. I thought you were spending the night at a friend’s place”, he suggested, a slightly knowing look coming over his face, though there was still a good deal of amused puzzlement there.

I looked at him helplessly, unable to figure out what to say or do, my face flushing slightly. All of a sudden, his face changed again, this time to alarm and disbelief. “Casper!”, he gasped, his eyes going wide. “Where the hell is your pendant?”, he demanded.

My eyes must have gone at least as wide as his were. He knew about the pendant! And somehow, he knew I didn’t have it anymore. What’s more, he would only be this alarmed about its absence if he had at least some idea of what it did, I realized, followed almost immediately by the realization that he must have been the one who’d given it to me in the first place. I stood there, stunned by all the revelations inherent in his question.

“I lost it”, I admitted after I recovered, my face going red as I replayed the events of the morning.

“What do you mean, you lost it?”, he demanded. “You can’t lose it, or at least I didn’t think you could. I admit, I don’t understand everything about how it works, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t allow itself to be casually lost. What exactly do you mean when you say ‘lost’?”

“I mean, I went to bed with it last night, and when I woke up this morning, it was gone”, I told him. “I looked around for it, but I couldn’t find it. Wait, what do you mean when you say it wouldn’t ‘allow itself’ to be lost?”

“There’s very little I can tell you with certainty, but I’m about as sure as I can be that the pendant is…aware. At the very least, it has some kind of affinity for some owners, and an aversion to others. That’s why I gave it to you. It wanted to belong to you. The only reason I can think of for that to change—and this is just a guess—is if you used it for something it didn’t like or wasn’t meant for”, he suggested. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning and tell me everything.”

I blushed furiously, feeling ashamed and unable to bring myself to admit to him what I’d done. This was all happening too fast. Even if he knew about the pendant, what if he’d used it for something completely different than what I had? For that matter, how could I know that that was the only thing it could do. I could be blurting out everything I’d done with it, only to find out it made pretty flowers for him or something inane like that. Or maybe it hadn’t done anything for him at all—he’d said it had aversions to people, maybe he was one of them. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what it did.

And even if he did, how could I possibly tell him all of what I’d done with it? He didn’t even know I was gay. Nobody had known until prom, and seeing me with Hunter had pretty much floored everyone. I’d known I’d have to tell him I was gay once I’d gone public with it, and I was prepared for however that might have gone, but I didn’t want to see the look on his face if I admitted to using the pendant on both Hunter and his dad!

“Okay, let me backtrack. Maybe I should start at the beginning. Wait…even before that, we’ve kind of gotten sidetracked from the bigger issues here so, first, are you okay?”, my godfather asked me.

“Yeah, I think so. For now, at least”, I replied, blushing again.

“Ooookay. I think I’m beginning to get the broad strokes here. Leaving aside the specifics for the moment, are you in danger?” I nodded, blushing. “But not immediate? Not something that’s going to happen in the next, say, ten to fifteen minutes?”

“No”, I confirmed quietly. “I don’t think so, anyway. They don’t know where I live, I don’t think.”

“Right, I’m getting a much clearer picture now, but we’ll get to that in a few minutes. At the moment, I think we need to talk about a few things that we’ve never talked about until now. So, let me start with my history with the pendant, then we’ll get to how I came to give it to you”, Dad suggested.

I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for this discussion at all, but my godfather knew me well enough to tell me to sit down and take some deep breaths before he got started. It didn’t help much, but I was at least able to focus on what he was saying. I kept asking myself if we really had time for a history lesson, but obviously he thought it was important.

“As you know, in my job I tend to come into contact with a lot of cultural artifacts. I found that particular one in a collection of Roman artifacts when I was an assistant professor at U of T in Mississauga, right around the time you were born. It was part of a collection of phallic objects known as fascinum.” I couldn’t believe he was lecturing me like I was one of his students, now of all times, but lecturing came naturally to him, and I knew he’d eventually get to the point.

“I discovered its most basic use, quite by accident, when trying to show it to one of my female students—one to whom I was strongly attracted. Once I had, I stole it, putting it on a leather thong and making a pendant out of it. It was easy to get the theft overlooked once I knew how to use it. Anyway, back to the student I mentioned: like I’m guessing you have, I used it to convince her that she enjoyed doing things she otherwise wouldn’t have, and she and I had a very enjoyable, if secret, ‘friendship’ for a couple of months after that.

“Over the months we were together, I developed a basic understanding of what the pendant could do. The more often I used it, however, the more wrong it felt, and the more difficult it was for me to do so. Let me be clear here, I don’t mean that I was having a moral dilemma—I was younger and she was a total babe, and I’d gotten myself over any qualms about using it in short order. No, what I mean is that the pendant was resisting me. It didn’t want to be used the way I was using it, and I increasingly felt revulsion at using it. Eventually, it got so bad that I couldn’t make myself use it anymore. Without the ability make her think and do what I wanted, things soured and we broke up not long after. Having no other choice, I put the pendant in storage, never using it again.”

“Did you ever find you had to repeat commands…like every day or two?”, I interrupted, now that I knew he’d used the pendant in similar ways to what I had.

“Only once”, he replied, looking at me with a mixture of suspicion and understanding. “The girl I was dating was quite a prude and had pretty much always gotten her way because of her looks. I had tried to make her swallow after we’d had oral sex once. She was so prudish, she wouldn’t even have been having oral sex if it weren’t for the pendant, and I guess swallowing was a bit much for her. She still did it, of course, but a few days later, she became upset that she had. I encouraged her not to think about it too much and tried to take it a bit slower after that. The breakup happened not long after, though, so I never figured out the exact nature of the problem. My best guess is that the more averse someone is to something, the less likely the command is to stick.

“Getting back to the story, and this is where you come in, I put the pendant away after I realized that I was unable to make myself use it anymore, given the overwhelming revulsion I now felt. I didn’t dare get rid of it, knowing how dangerous it could be in the wrong hands. Instead, I put it in a box in the garage and left it there, never to be used again…or so I thought.

“While the revulsion only occurred when I used the pendant, I noticed that whenever I went into the garage, I became aware of it. It wasn’t the revulsion I’d previously felt from it; it was more of a warning, like a dog emitting a low growl—a feeling that I should stay away from it. That continued every time I went into the garage—so much so that I got used to it—until about a month ago.

“You and I both came into the garage one day, like any of the hundreds of other times we’ve done so over the years, and for the first time, I got no warning from it, but something else altogether. Continuing with the dog analogy, it was like it was wagging its tail and asking for a treat. I was so shocked, I almost fished it out of the box right then and there, but I realized that I would’ve had a hard time explaining to you what I was doing.

“When I went back later that night, on my own, it was straight back to the warning sensation. The next time you were with me, it was the begging-for-a-treat sensation. I put two and two together pretty quickly at that point, but just to be sure, I waited a few more times before drawing any firm conclusions. It was flawless—when you were with me, it wanted a treat, when you weren’t, it warned me away.

“I can’t say what triggered it at that particular time. There’s nothing I can think of in either our culture or Roman culture that would be relevant: you were already considered a man by the standards of both, you weren’t doing anything unusual at the time that I was aware of…”, he looked at me questioningly at that point, but continued when I gave him the beats me face and shrug, “…and there was nothing about its circumstances that had changed, either. It seems unlikely it was entirely random, but perhaps it was something unknowable: a combination of circumstances, you reaching the age of its maker when it was first created, or even just a decision on its part that you were ready for it now. Hell, for that matter, maybe it came to me nineteen years ago specifically so that it could come to you later on. Who knows?

“In any event, that was when I decided to give it to you. I went out and bought a better chain for it, one that actually matched the colouring of the pendant, and then slipped it into your school bag one morning when you’d stepped out of the room.

“So, now it’s your turn”, Dad wrapped up. “Just to get the preliminaries out of the way, I know you found it the same day I put it in your bag because I could see the chain around your neck. I know it took you a while to figure out what it does, but to be honest, you’re not very good at keeping secrets, at least not from me. One afternoon a couple of days later, you came home bouncing like a kid who’s been to the fair-ground and was pumped full of sugary drinks. It wasn’t much of a leap to assume that that was the day you’d figured out what it did. I’m less sure of when you started using it for, shall we say, more interesting uses…but I’d guess that was about a week ago or so. Your bounciness became a bit more ‘king of the world’.

“Oh, and one more thing that neither of us has spoken of for far too long: I’ve known since you were fourteen that the kind of person you’d use the pendant on isn’t the kind of person I’d use the pendant on”, he finished, staring me in the eye meaningfully.

I just stared back at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, my mind incapable of believing that he meant what I could only hope he meant. I started to tremble as I saw in his face that he did, and I could feel tears welling in my eyes.

“So, who’s the lucky guy?”, he asked, making sure I knew I wasn’t wrong.

The tears flowed then and Dad’s arms were around me, and I was sobbing like a baby. When I could finally make my voice work, I told him, “Hunter”. I wasn’t sure if he’d even know who Hunter was, but Dad nodded in recognition.

I looked up at him then—almost paralyzed with the fear of rejection, but needing to get it all out at long last. “And his dad”, I finished.

“Oh”, he said seriously, though the rejection I’d feared was nowhere to be seen. The tone of the hug changed then, to one of consoling and patiently waiting for a deeper explanation. “Just to clarify”, he asked after a few minutes, “are we talking about one and then the other, or…?”, he left it hanging. His tone was neutral, but the guilt painted on my face answered for me.

“Casper, I won’t judge you for that. As an anthropologist, I know that not all cultures throughout history have felt the way we do, and having owned the pendant myself for a time, I understand the power it gives you to fulfill even your wildest dreams. The trick is not to lose yourself in that power completely, and that can be a difficult thing to learn.

“But getting back on track, what happened with the pendant? When did you realize it was missing?”, he asked.

“I don’t know what happened—I just woke up and it was gone!”, I wailed, despite my best efforts to remain calm.

Dad jumped ahead of me then, figuring out the rest. “I take it one or both of them are no longer under the pendant’s power and are coming after you?”

“I think it’s just Hunter’s dad for now”, I admitted.

“Just how bad is it? Actually, forget that”, he countered himself as soon as he’d asked. “I know how I’d react if I were forced to have sex with you, and while we don’t mention it often, we both know you’re not even my biological child. I don’t know if that actually makes a difference, given how close we’ve always been, but I’m certain Hunter’s dad wouldn’t be any less upset than I would in his place…and that bruise forming on your cheek pretty much confirms it.”

He paused then, thinking everything over, and giving me time to think as well. It showed just how much he had become my dad that I’d hardly said anything since I’d gotten home, yet with the few words I had said, he’d figured out everything that was going on. Of course, his knowledge of the pendant contributed a lot to that.

“Like I said before”, he continued eventually, “I don’t want to judge, but if you’ve forced Mr. Cavanaugh into incest, I can’t see this ending well if you stay here, Casper…all the more so if the effects on Hunter wear off as well”, Dad told me, doing his best to comfort me despite his words. “They’re bound to realize that they can’t go to the police with their story, so they’re likely to take matters into their own hands at some point.”

That was the first time I realized that there was really only one choice of what to do next—I was going to have to leave. I also understood on an instinctual level that Dad wouldn’t be coming with me—that he couldn’t—though I hadn’t quite figured out why not yet. “What are you going to do?”, I prompted him, when the answer still refused to come to me.

“What I’ve always done since the day you came into my house. Protect you”, he said simply. I nodded in acknowledgement, my mind making the intuitive leap now that it hadn’t before. He was going to protect me by staying here, genuinely having no idea where I’d gone. If he came with me, he’d be much easier to track than I was, if it came to that. He couldn’t just drop off the grid at this point in his life like I could.

We hugged each other tightly for a minute, but now that I’d understood what had to happen, I realized that sooner was better than later. There was no reason to believe that they knew exactly where we lived, not in a town of fifteen thousand, but even with the common last name of Jones, I wouldn’t be able to hide here for long.

“You stay here and pack—only what you can carry with you. I’ll go to the ATM at the corner store and get you what cash I can”, he told me soberly. “The way I see it, unless you’ve developed a foreign citizenship I don’t know about, you have two options: lose yourself in a large city or lose yourself in the middle of nowhere. I’d suggest the latter, since it’s closer to what you’re used to, but there are advantages and disadvantages to each. If you choose a large city, try for one of the largest: Toronto, Vancouver, or Calgary. If you choose the middle of nowhere, you can head east to the northern townships of Quebec or the Maritimes if you can make it that far; or head west to one of the small towns in the prairies. I can think of several reasons for different locations in what I’ve just mentioned, but the more I say, the more I influence your choice, so you’ll have to figure things out from here. I’ll be back soon.” He returned with five hundred in cash, the most I’d ever seen him carry at once—now, the most I’d ever carried at once.

“I can’t say what caused it to become lost, but if there’s any way out of this, I believe figuring that out has to be it. As I said earlier, and I believe it even more strongly after hearing your side of things, my guess is that it’s something you’ve done that the pendant was unwilling or unable to do on some level. It could be that it’s more aware than I ever realized, and is making some kind of moral decision, or it could be a simple safeguard of some kind.

“Your first thought might be that the incest that was the problem, but I’m not so sure that’s the case. I understand ancient Roman culture very well, since it was a large part of my studies and, later, my teaching. While they didn’t approve of incest much more than we do, it was nevertheless somewhat more common at the time. Claudius, Caligula and Nero are all known or rumoured to have had incestuous relationships, though they were all with women.

“The Romans had no issues whatsoever with male-male relationships—they didn’t even have a word for it at the time—but they did have certain social mores that came into play among men. In particular, in a relationship between two grown men, there was a strong mentality of sexual conquest. Given the pendant’s affinity towards you, I suspect it was originally designed for that very purpose: to allow the sexual conquest of other men. Because homosexuality was moderately well accepted, though, I would further speculate that it must have been designed with the intention of allowing its creator a relationship that didn’t conform to the cultural norms that governed those relationships. Most likely, that would be a relationship where the physically inferior partner assumed the active role rather than the expected passive role. As I see it, that’s precisely what you did. Given all that, it seems highly unlikely that it would become lost strictly over your chosen sexual conquests. Don’t completely dismiss it in your thinking, but don’t presume that it was that, either.”

Giving me a solemn look, he finally sighed and said “Well, I guess we should go. I’ll drive you south to Sioux Narrows Park, just to avoid the remote possibility that they spot you while you’re trying to get out of town. From there, you can hopefully hitch a ride with someone to wherever you decide to go. Or better yet, let them decide. Just ask them which way they’re going, nod as if that’s the answer you were looking for, and ask them for a lift.”

We hugged each other again for a long time at the park, but eventually, I had to go. For the first time since my parents had passed away, I felt completely alone. I hadn’t even realized I’d ever felt that before now, but feeling it once again brought back a primal fear from my early childhood.

It didn’t take long to find someone willing to offer me a ride. A friendly family brought me all the way to Thunder Bay, and from there, I got rides from various truckers until I found myself in Montreal.

I had to agree with my Dad that a big city really wasn’t the place for me, so I bought a bus ticket to some random town I’d never even heard of, then hitchhiked again randomly, usually sleeping outdoors and washing in bathrooms or sometimes campground facilities, until I found a restaurant in the tiniest town imaginable, somewhere in Quebec, that had a job opening for a dishwasher. I barely knew enough French to understand that there was a job available, and the owner’s English was only marginally better, but it didn’t take a whole lot of either to cover my job duties or salary. I could count at least that high in French.

Despite the linguistic barrier, the grizzled old owner sized me up instantly. There weren’t exactly a lot of eighteen-year-old guys showing up in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere to apply for a dishwasher job in his restaurant. Between words and pantomimes, he figured out that I had nowhere to stay and offered me a cot in his basement in exchange for a reduction in my salary. He also offered me free meals at the restaurant if I was willing to stay from at least mid-morning until closing seven days a week, even though he couldn’t afford to pay me for all the hours that meant I’d be there. While it was distinctly a lopsided arrangement, I understood that he wasn’t doing it to be unfair; he was giving me food and a roof over my head when I needed it in a way that he could actually afford. It was really a win-win. The best part of all, though, was that I was quite certain nobody could find me here, since I didn’t know exactly where I was myself.

Washing dishes for a living and scraping by, largely on the kindness of a complete stranger, was a humbling, life-altering experience for me. While I often fantasized on a purely sexual level about the events of prom night, I was also constantly replaying it in my mind in search of what had gone wrong. Whatever it was, though, it eluded me. About the only progress I made was that I decided that the issue was either with what I’d done with Mr. C or something specific with the sex. I’d used the pendant on Hunter for days before that with no difficulties apart from having to repeat commands sometimes, so it seemed unlikely the problem was there.

It wasn’t until September that the answer came to me, and even then, it took me a while to put it all together. One of the waitresses, Jacqueline, had figured out that I was gay—I hadn’t been hiding it anymore, though I hadn’t been advertising it, either, in a town this small—and decided that that made me one of “les filles”, as she put it. Her English was better than the owner’s, and over the months I’d been here, my French had picked up considerably, so between the two of us, we could usually manage fairly coherent conversations.

She often spoke about her boyfriend, frequently sharing the most intimate details of their lives. I thought I knew more about his sexual preferences at this point than I ever had about Hunter’s, even counting when I decided for him what they would be! One night, she was complaining to me and the other waitress about something he’d done. I’d missed the specifics, since she was speaking exclusively French now for the benefit of the other waitress, but I understood at least the idea that he’d done something he thought she’d enjoy, but she actually hadn’t, and she hadn’t had the heart to tell him. So now, he thought she liked it and wanted to do whatever it was again.

It wasn’t until the next night that I put that together with prom night. As I often did, I started thinking back, going over the details of everything I could remember saying or doing on prom night. For some reason, Jacqueline’s complaints about her boyfriend kept popping into my head. Something about that conversation was bugging me, and I had a strong feeling that they were related somehow.

Finally, a couple of days later, as I was masturbating to the memories of prom night, it suddenly hit me. She had done what she did because she loved him and not because she wanted to or even liked to. In a way, I’d done the same to Hunter and Mr. C. At least some of the time, I could remember quite clearly telling them to want to do something, but I’d never actually said anything about liking it.

My hand fell away from my dick as I started thinking more about the potential implications of that. As hot as it was for me to fantasize about incest, Dad had hit the nail on the head when he’d suggested I think about how I would feel if it had been me and him. At the time, I’d only thought about what he’d said in passing, but now I forced myself to really imagine it happening. I went over in my mind all the things that I’d made Hunter and his father do to me and to each other, but I imagined doing them with my godfather while knowing full well how perverted they were, but unable to stop myself. Suddenly, the whole thing didn’t seem so exciting.

Now that I’d allowed myself to consider the possibility, I saw the signs that I should’ve seen that night—the unexpected outbursts of anger, the sense that sometimes Mr. C or Hunter were acting like automatons rather than people. It was all there, I’d just been too blind and self-absorbed to see it! What had I done to them? It was impossible to gauge just how badly I’d hurt them, I realized, since I couldn’t remember every last word I’d said so many months ago, but even a few poorly worded phrases would have had massive consequences, and I was pretty sure it had been more than just a few.

Worse, what had they been going through since? When I’d lost the pendant, all I’d thought about was how it affected me—how lost I’d felt without it—but for the first time, it occurred to me that, at the very least, Mr. C was clearly aware of most or all of what he’d done, and had presumably had to live with that ever since that night. Had Hunter had to deal with it as well? I’d still been renewing most of the commands I’d given him every day or two, and most especially on prom night, to make things as perfect as I could. Even if he hadn’t thrown off the effects by the morning I lost the pendant, he surely must have by now!

I didn’t get much sleep that night, or for several nights thereafter, understanding for the first time the full magnitude of what I’d done. I felt horrible and would have done anything to fix the problems I’d caused, but I had no way of doing so now.

Another issue occurred to me as I began to dwell on just how much pain I must have caused them. Dad had said that his “friend” had broken up with him when he’d stopped being able to use the pendant, and he hadn’t mentioned any negative consequences apart from the breakup itself. That implied that she continued to think that their entire relationship had been mutual and never realized that many of her decisions weren’t her own. I didn’t know if it would apply to Mr. C, but there had been a few reasonably benign commands that I’d never had to renew at all for Hunter. What if he’d never thrown them off, even after prom night? What kind of confusion would those be causing him now? Or were they causing any confusion at all? Were they just so ingrained that he never even gave them a second thought? I really wished I could know or, better, that I could somehow help, but there was nothing I could do at this point. It was both frustrating and painful for me, but I knew it was nothing compared to what they must be going through.

Everything changed a few days later. Normally, as the dishwasher, I didn’t interact with customers, but it was near closing time, and Jacqueline was busy with the last few customers, so the owner sent me out to clear the dishes from the tables of a couple of customers who had just left.

A well-groomed, fairly good-looking guy in his thirties saw that I was collecting dishes and motioned that I could take his. I nodded and dumped my current load in the kitchen, then headed back out to his table. “Merci”, he thanked me as I took his plate and coffee mug, giving him room to dump a pocketful of crap on the table so he could dig out appropriate change for his bill. I almost dropped the plate into his lap as my eyes glanced over the pile of stuff.

It was the pendant! My pendant! Somehow, my pendant had been in his pocket, and now it was on the table right in front of me. I had a hard time resisting the temptation to snatch it from the pile and use it on him to make him not care, but if this was somehow just a massive coincidence, and it was just a normal pendant that happened to look exactly like mine, I’d be robbing a customer in plain sight. That definitely wouldn’t have ended well.

Seeing my stare and misinterpreting it, he spoke rapidly in French. “Tu peux l’avoir, si tu le veux. C’était un cadeau-blague de mon frère pour mon anniversaire. Je ne le veux pas, moi.”

I hadn’t understood all of it, but I thought for a moment that I must have been delusional—hearing exactly what I’d wanted to hear—because I was pretty sure he’d told me that I could have it. “Uh…excusez, ummm…répétez, plus lent?”, I asked. I knew I hadn’t gotten all the words the way a French person would’ve said them, but the key words were there: repeat, more slowly.

“I said, it’s yours if you want it”, he repeated, switching to only slightly accented English upon hearing my own much stronger accent in French. “My brother sent it to me as a gag gift for my birthday, but I don’t want it.”

“A- are you sure?”, I checked.

“By all means!”, he confirmed, fishing it out of the pile of stuff and handing it to me. Understanding what it did, I had a nervous moment as he started picking it up, but he made no particular attempt to show it to me or to say anything. Not that I’d know if he had, I thought to myself with an inward smile.

Once I had it in my hands, I knew I needed to test it to be sure it was mine, and that it still worked. “Tell me where your brother got the pendant”, I ordered, holding it in front of him. It wasn’t an ideal test, but it was the best I could come up with on short notice, and it had the advantage that if this somehow wasn’t my pendant, I could pass off what I’d said as nothing more than slightly rudely worded curiosity.

“I’m not sure exactly which house or anything, but my brother works in junk removal around the Kenora area in Ontario. He said on the phone that he found it in some guy’s room they were cleaning out”, he told me, seemingly following my command.

“Well, thank you”, I told him normally. “I really appreciate it.” With the tentative success of the first time, I decided to take the plunge. “Tell me what your plans are for the next week”, I commanded him next. I knew from my previous experimentation that simply asking a question would produce no result at all, but stating it as a command worked fine. His eyes focussed briefly on the pendant as I spoke, then back up to me. From his perspective, he was probably wondering why I was just standing around doing nothing at this point, but I’d take care of that in a moment. The waitress and the owner were probably wondering as well, and I wasn’t sure how well the pendant would work in the face of a language barrier, but one problem at a time. At least I could use a chatty customer as an excuse.

“I took the entire week off for my birthday”, he responded. “With the weekends on either side, that means I don’t have a single thing to do for the next nine days! Mostly, I’m planning on lounging around the house, with the occasional dip in the pool for a change of pace.” Now that he mentioned it, he did have the build of someone who swam fairly regularly, I thought.

“Tell me if anybody will notice or care if you change your plans”, I ordered.

“There’s not a soul in the world who will care what I’m doing for those whole nine days”, he informed me, as though he were simply continuing the conversation. I was now positive that this was indeed my pendant. If he’d been aware of what I’d ordered him to tell me, he would likely have objected to a dishwasher ordering him around, and he certainly would have objected to the implications of it. I had to fight hard not to punch the air and yell out in my exuberance at having the pendant back, but there were still a couple of things that needed to be done before I could let loose like that.

I paused for a moment, considering the monumental unlikelihood of this whole situation. An obviously well-off, attractive guy whom I’d never seen before and who was probably from out of town had shown up at my restaurant, in a tiny Quebec village, carrying my pendant, which had been sent to him by a brother who just happened to be from my hometown and, unless I missed my guess, had helped remove junk from Hunter’s room. The guy then happened to put the pendant on the table right in front of me on one of the rare times that I’d been outside the back of the restaurant, and he coincidentally had the next week off with nothing to do and nobody to notice if he did something other than planned. What was more, he almost certainly had a vehicle, since I knew he wasn’t a regular and therefore probably not a local, and I could see car keys among the various things on the table. And all of this came together a week after I’d come to the realization of just how badly I’d screwed up while using the pendant. It was hard to deny at this point that it had some level of awareness, just as Dad had said.

“Hé là, Casspurr”, I heard the owner admonishing me as I stood there lost in thought, “au travail!” The guy had now put money on the table for the waitress and was giving me a funny look as I just stood there.

“Sorry”, I called back. Holding up the pendant for the guy at the table to see, I caught his eyes as he was just about to get up. “Nod if you have a car in the restaurant parking lot”, I ordered, just to be sure—I could only imagine what would happen if I gave him an order to wait in a car that he didn’t actually have or that was on the other side of the country. At his confirmation, I continued, “Wait for me in your car, then. This won’t seem unusual to you in any way.” It was a little abrupt and simplistic, but effective nevertheless; I was out of practice.

I tucked the pendant into my pocket, grabbed the rest of his dishes, and hurried into the back. I actually finished loading the dishwasher and put it on, since there were only a few dishes left, and it was faster than using the pendant on both the owner and Jacqueline. When I was done, I went to tell them that tonight would be my last night. The owner looked at me for a moment and simply nodded. I was leaving him just as suddenly as I’d shown up, and he wasn’t surprised in the least. He offered to pay me my remaining wages from the cash, but I told him he could keep it as compensation for my sudden departure. Jacqueline gave me a quick hug and a peck on both cheeks, and then I was gone.

As I walked out to the parking lot and looked around to see which car the guy was in, I gave some thought to what he’d told me so far. The fact that his brother had been moving junk out of what I assumed was Hunter’s room worried me. Was Hunter okay? Were they moving? What had happened? I felt a sense of urgency to get back there.

Locating the right car, I hopped in and told the guy—his name was André, apparently—what we’d be doing for the next few days. Despite his stated intention to lounge around the house, with the help of the pendant, he was only too happy to go on a road trip with me. It would be a long drive to Kenora—just under thirty hours not counting stops for food and fuel, according to Google—but I didn’t really see many better options, given that it was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. With the pendant only able to affect one person at a time, public transportation seemed like a poor choice and the options to get there were so limited, it wouldn’t have done me much good anyway. A pendant-induced chauffeur providing door-to-door service was definitely the better bet. Besides, I needed to get back in practice and confirm that at least some of my theories about the pendant were correct before I tried to use it again on Hunter and his dad.

We drove for a few hours that night before I told André to find us a hotel, stopping just over the border to Ontario. It had been a very interesting and informative few hours for me. With a little encouragement via the pendant, André had answered every question I asked about him during the drive, while asking me very little in return. I wasn’t exactly eager to explain to a total stranger—even a pendant-controlled one—everything that was going on.

While he wasn’t able to tell me anything more about where his brother had found the pendant, it turned out that André had a mild interest in BDSM and had had far more practical experience than Mr. C had. On the drive through Montreal, he eagerly provided me with any number of ideas for things I could do as the dominant partner, and I found myself looking forward more than ever to trying them out.

We talked a little more once we were in the hotel room, and for the first time in far too long, I used the pendant for my own sexual pleasure, telling André that he would find it perfectly natural and enjoyable to stay naked while we were in the hotel room. It felt amazing to be getting back into using the pendant that way, though I was much more cautious than I had been before, paying particular attention to how I worded things. While I was at it, I also ensured that he was perfectly comfortable with me staring at his body, getting hard or going soft when I told him to, not to mention letting me take a good, close look at him whenever I wanted to.

Not that I’d really expected anything different, but I was pleased to see that he had no problems with anything I’d ordered him to do. Even when I told him that I was gay and thought he was attractive, he seemed quite content to stand still while I took a close look at his cock, despite the fact that he was getting an erection. I wanted to do quite a bit more than that, and I knew I probably could, but after everything that had happened, I was afraid to push too far too fast. The pendant had come back to me this time, but would it come back the next time if I fucked things up again?

After we each got into our own bed, I used the pendant again briefly, encouraging him not to care if I masturbated around him. After I’d flipped it around to my back, I turned to him and asked if he would push his sheets down and get a hard-on for me while I jerked off. I wasn’t at all surprised that he did, though I was amused to note that, even though he fell asleep while I was still busy, his cock stayed hard at least until I was done, maybe even all night for all I knew.

When the two of us got up the next morning, I was prepared to use the pendant on him again if he needed it, but he seemed completely fine with everything I’d instructed him to do so far, continuing to follow my command to stay naked until it was time to leave, even when I started playing with my cock and getting hard right in front of him.

I probed his BDSM experience some more as we continued our drive, discovering that he tended to be more submissive and that, while not common for him, he’d been to a couple of public events where he was naked, even knowing that there were a couple of gay and bisexual men in the room who might be looking at him. Thinking about that, I realized that that might be why my commands hadn’t needed any renewal—what we’d done so far wasn’t actually that far outside of his experience. I needed to push things further and then wait to confirm that my commands still held as long as he was unaware that there was anything unusual happening, or he was encouraged to like it.

While it added a little time to our trip, once we’d made it past Ottawa, I had André take back roads for a bit and instructed him to completely ignore what I was doing if I did anything sexual to him. It was a deliberately open-ended command, which would allow me to ramp things up as much as I dared over time, and see how he reacted each time. André seemed to enjoy the scenery immensely as I undid his pants and started playing with his cock, remaining totally oblivious to everything I was doing.

After about an hour, I decided that that had been a more than sufficient test, and ordered him to zip himself back up, forgetting that he’d done so once he was done. We headed back for the main highway after that, but I groped him several more times throughout the day when nobody was close enough on the highway to see. Even when I started groping him forcefully and squeezing his nuts, André ignored what I was doing completely, not so much as blinking at the pain I knew he should be feeling.

We made good time overall, stopping for the night at a cheap motel along the highway about an hour past Sault Ste. Marie. If all went well, I expected to hit Kenora sometime in the late afternoon tomorrow. Once again, André rented us a room. As soon as we were in the door, he stripped off all his clothes without any prompting from me. I took it as a good sign and decided to push things a little further as we got settled in.

He seemed a bit surprised when I got into bed next to him, but made no complaint whatsoever when I started playing with his cock. He ignored my attention, just as he had every other time I’d fondled him today. Curious to see just how oblivious he was, I struck up a conversation with him while jerking myself off in one hand and him in the other. We continued chatting for several minutes with no indication from him that he was in any way aware of what I was doing, not even when I changed positions, kneeling over top of him and slapping his face with my dick.

Buoyed by my success, I pulled the pendant around to my front and suggested that he take over masturbating me, getting just as much pleasure out of jerking me off as if he’d been jerking himself off. He seemed completely unperturbed by the idea, continuing to chat with me the whole time, apart from when I’d actually used the pendant. I had to laugh as I got closer to cumming, though, when I realized that the more I started panting and moaning, the more he did as well. Once I was confident that everything was going exactly as I wanted it to, I used the pendant once more, telling him to stop talking, finish me off, and then go to sleep. My cum was still dribbling down his face when he rolled over and closed his eyes.

“So, how did you enjoy jerking me off last night”, I asked him when we got up the next morning, casually playing with my morning wood.

“It was quite enjoyable”, he assured me. “I’ve never done that with a guy before. I was surprised at how much fun it was—it was almost like I was doing it to myself! Who knows, I might even do it again sometime”, he laughed.

Remembering what Mr. C had suggested about pissing inside of someone, which André had mentioned in passing as well, I decided to really push the limits and see what happened if I did. It was a bit of a risk, and I knew it, but the more I used the pendant, the more I realized that I needed a better idea of the dos and don’ts of it before I approached Hunter and his dad.

Everything went fine, at least at first, as I asked him to kneel in front of me and then stuck my dick in his mouth. By the look on his face, he was a bit puzzled by the unusual request for him to kneel, but he stayed patiently on his knees the whole time I fucked his mouth, even though, from his perspective, we weren’t doing anything. Clearly, either the pendant or his own mind provided some minor creative interpretation of my commands; otherwise, I was quite sure he would’ve asked what he was supposed to be doing at some point. When I started to actually piss down his throat, however, I could tell something wasn’t quite right. His eyes seemed a bit strained, and he shook his head slightly a couple of times—just enough to cause me to wince and pull out, stopping in mid-stream.

Quickly pulling the pendant around front again, I tilted his chin up so he could see it. “You really love the taste of my piss now that you’ve had a bit of it”, I told him, “and you want to finish the rest off, then thank me for letting you have it by blowing me until I cum and eagerly swallowing that too. You’ll enjoy it all immensely, but once we’re done, you will completely forget that you did any of it. You will remember only that we each took a morning piss in the bathroom, remaining oblivious to anything that suggests otherwise.

“Hey, where are you going with that?”, André demanded as I flipped the pendant around to my back again. “I wasn’t done with it yet! You taste really good! Can I please finish the rest?”, he begged.

“Oh, sure thing, André”, I agreed, grinning down at him evilly and relaxing into it as he started chugging everything I had left. Thanking me verbally once I was done, he continued thanking me orally as well, just as I’d told him to. After he’d finished me off and swallowed my cum, I pulled out of him, noticing that there was still a slight trail of cum left on my head that he’d missed. The moment my head left his mouth, however, he stood up, ignoring the position we’d each been in, and started packing up and getting dressed to leave.

“You should probably brush your teeth before we go for breakfast”, I suggested. “Your breath really smells!” Truthfully, I thought pissing down someone’s throat wasn’t something I was likely to do often for that very reason. Sure, from the dominance perspective, it was a real turn-on, but I didn’t want to be anywhere near André right now because of how he smelled, and pissing inside of him had actually been really hard. It had taken all of my concentration not to stop every time he swallowed.

“Really? Oh!”, he blushed. “Thanks for telling me. And here I was, thinking something tasted really good in there!” I smiled with amusement, my dick throbbing in response. The mind-fuck aspect of things definitely appealed to me. I was reasonably confident now that he would have no memory of what he’d done, but even if that command didn’t stick, I thought that having him enjoy the experience would serve as a backup, if need be. I was clearly pushing limits here, though, and decided that it was safer not to take things any further with André, especially given the limited time we had left before I got home.

The various things I’d tried with him over the last few days had made it pretty clear that anyone I used the pendant on had to either remain oblivious to what I’d done or to believe that they’d been having fun. Thinking back to what my godfather had said, though, I decided it was better not to assume that I had the full picture yet. If nothing else, it didn’t make sense to me why the pendant had stayed with me when Hunter had resisted being gay so strongly, needing his commands repeated regularly, yet had disappeared after I’d been with Mr. C. I was pretty sure I was in the right general ballpark, though.

I didn’t pay much attention to André as we drove this time. While I’d been thinking about it off and on for the past few days, knowing that we’d hit Kenora this afternoon, I focussed much more on my ideas for fixing the situation with Hunter and his father. I’d definitely need to get them separately, and I thought the best plan was to find Hunter first, and then, once I had him under control, I could work on his father. That would also let me get a better sense of where things stood with each of them. Although I’d gone over any number of potential scenarios in my head, I couldn’t really make firmer plans than what I had until I had more information about where they were and what they were up to now, assuming they hadn’t moved out of town, that was.

Another idea that I’d had once things were a little more under control was to get them to tell me what they were feeling more often, or to leave a standing order to tell me if they ever felt upset or concerned about something. It seemed like a sensible precaution, though I expected it would only work once I’d fixed things well enough that they were no longer upset or concerned about anything, which would probably take some doing. Maybe if I worded it correctly, like having them report any new problems? I’d have to give it some thought.

It was mid-afternoon when André dropped me off at home. I used the pendant on him one last time, reinforcing my suggestions that he’d decided it would be more fun to take a road-trip rather than staying at home, and that he’d enjoyed our time together immensely. I also suggested that he should feel really good about himself for helping out a young guy who’d so clearly needed it. Lastly, as a thank you for everything I’d made him do, I told him that anytime he stopped at a motel for the night along the way back, before he went to bed, he’d masturbate and have the longest, most mind-blowing orgasms he’d ever had in his life. I smiled once I was done and thanked him for the ride, knowing that he was in for a very pleasant trip back home.

Dad wasn’t there when I got into the house, so I hung around, waiting for him to show up. It felt both reassuring and yet strange being back at home again. Little had changed since I’d left, but the things that had made it feel slightly off. It was only about twenty minutes later when I heard his keys in the lock and I went to meet him at the door.

He froze when he saw me, obviously surprised at my being there, then came forward and gave me a bear hug. “This is much sooner than I expected”, he told me after he’d let go. “I was hoping you might call me sometime soon, but I certainly wasn’t expecting you to just show up.”

He said nothing further, only staring at me questioningly. I knew him well enough to know that he was waiting for me to explain what had prompted my return. Silently, I pulled the pendant out from underneath my shirt, though by the time I’d gotten a hold of it, I could tell by his face that he’d already started to sense its presence. I gave him the thumbnail version of what had happened since we’d last seen each other and filled him in on my beliefs about what had gone wrong.

“That would make a lot of sense”, he concurred after I was done, “and given that it seems to have not only forgiven you, but actually sought you out, I think it’s fair to assume that it has at least as advanced of an awareness as I’d started to suspect.”

“Why do I feel like the Dark Lord Sauron all of a sudden?”, I grinned. “Only for me, The One Pendant actually did make its way back to me.”

“Oh, great, that’s all we need: The Dark Lord as a horny gay teen. The men of this world are doomed!”, Dad joked, though I could see just a hint of wariness in his eyes as he said it, and knew he couldn’t help but wonder how things would end up for me, given this kind of power. “Seriously, though, if it has that kind of awareness, figuring it out will probably be much like figuring out a pet, or even another person. That is to say, you can learn to understand it very well, but will probably never understand it fully.

“As you already know, I can feel it, or at least I can tell how it feels about you and me. I think you need to learn to do the same, if you can. Unfortunately, I only came to that awareness after using it for a few months, and I didn’t do so consciously…it just sort of came to me as the pendant started disliking what I was doing more and more. You have an advantage that I didn’t, though: you know that it’s aware and that it’s possible to sense how it feels about things. I only wish I could give you more guidance than that”, he told me seriously.

I returned his look, the humour from his joke dying in my eyes, to be replaced by an acknowledgement of the seriousness of his concerns. It was the first time in my life that I felt like we were talking man-to-man as well as father-to-son, and I realized just how much the last few months had changed me.

“So, onto the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question”, he continued after a moment. “What do you intend to do now? I assume you didn’t come back just to say hi.” I could see a whole different concern outlined on Dad’s face now.

“The pendant came back to me when I’d realized the nature of my mistake”, I told him. “I can’t ignore the message in that. Even if I were completely oblivious to that message, though, fixing things is just the right thing to do. You understand, I assume…everything that that implies?”, I looked up at him somewhat sheepishly.

“The pendant is what it is. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, he recited. He’d understood perfectly. “Is there anything you need? Anything I can do?”

“Do you know anything about where they might be now or how they’re doing? I heard that something might have happened with Hunter. Did he…ummm…move?”, I said, deliberately choosing that word to avoid a different outcome that I didn’t want to think about.

“No, he’s still here”, Dad confirmed. I wasn’t sure if he’d understood what I hadn’t said, but he was usually pretty empathic, so I suspected he had. “He’s working down at the garage near your old school. He was doing about as well as can be expected the last time I saw him, which is to say he’s drinking very heavily. Other than working at the garage, I almost never see him. As for his father, he’s still got his old job for now, but between the two of them, they’re probably responsible for keeping the local liquor store open. The few times I’ve seen him around town, he’s been drunk enough to have trouble staying on the sidewalk. I can’t imagine it’ll be long before he’s fired, at this rate—there’s no way I can believe someone who’s in the shape he is can maintain a steady job for very long.” Dad was working hard at avoiding recriminations, but we both knew that, in the end, all of this was my fault.

I was both relieved and saddened at what he’d said.

“He came to see me after you left, you know…Mr. Cavanaugh. He…really wasn’t in his right mind. I played dumb, repeating that you and Hunter were just out for prom, and that the two of you would be back soon, even though I could see Hunter sitting in their car. When he realized—or at least assumed—that I’d been affected by the pendant and would never believe anything that went against those commands, he left me alone.”

“I’m sorry, Dad, for putting you in that kind of danger”, I told him, looking down at the floor.

“Hey, that’s why I stayed, remember? I knew what I was getting into.” He pulled me into another bear hug, this time holding it for a minute or two until I finally pushed back from him.

“I should get going”, I told him sombrely. “I’ll need to deal with them separately at first, and if Hunter’s at the garage today, that’s probably my best chance.”

“Watch out for Mr. Cavanaugh”, Dad said with a worried look. “I don’t know if they’re true, but there are rumours around town that he sometimes carries a gun in his jacket. I can’t imagine that he’d have managed to get himself a permit, being as unstable as he is, which means he almost certainly got it illegally. If they’re not just rumours, it’s a safe bet that he doesn’t care if he gets arrested or worse at this point. If he’s not too drunk to aim, I don’t think he’d hesitate to use it.”

We hugged again, tightly and for a long time. “I won’t make up your bed”, he said with a sigh after we’d disengaged, forcing a smile. “If all goes well tonight, you won’t need it, and if it doesn’t…”, he left it hanging. “Call me when you’re sure.”

“I will”, I promised, and headed resolutely out the door.