The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

8.

This time, Alice had hypnotized Meredith to fly.

She really was. Alice had told her that her arms were wings, and lost in Alice’s eyes with Alice’s voice shivering along every reach of her body, she ‘d known it was true.

Meredith kept completely focused on the wide-screen TV, deep in the image as the vantage swooped and soared, feeling the air on her skin sleeker than feathers. It hissed by her ears, whispering into them, and she let it, borne on the whisper as she was on the thermals she rode. In her mind, the whisper put to sleep any questions about whether she was staring spellbound into a television or soaring thousands of feet above every television there was. The whisper was simpler and wiser and always true.

She was a bird with smooth plumage, and the words meant nothing to her simple mind. She knew they meant something deeper inside her, but it was a place that only Alice knew and worked in, while Meredith played and flew and slept.

The image swung up and drew her to follow it. She rode a strong thermal into the higher sky, letting the warm air have its way between her spread thighs.

Higher was deeper.

Deeper into the sky. Forgetting the land below, weightless on her wings.

The image faded and she remembered she was in the flying room. Instead of the sky, the TV before her showed her the reflection of a nude girl with her legs braced apart and her arms held out on either side, her hair in a loose ponytail over her left shoulder. The girl’s eyes were wide and unblinking, staring into hers.

Alice’s touch was still in her mind, so Meredith knew she was still flying, still thoughtless. She still let the whisper flow through her mind. There was no reason to look away, so she didn’t.

The door opened behind her. Beside the nude girl in a flying pose was reflected another girl in tight black and yellow spandex, a supple wasp cruising close to the bird. Meredith shivered pleasantly but didn’t break pose.

She wondered how it would feel to be stung.

“Perch,” the girl said, and Meredith swerved, balanced on her spread arms, pivoting on one foot to see the girl crouched by a chair. Now Meredith remembered forgetting the chair, just as Alice had said she would, the moment the TV had flicked on to show her the sky and remind her to fly.

Stepping up onto it, Meredith squatted and drew her arms in, keeping her fingers flat.

“Settle,” the girl told her, and she let herself down onto the girl’s hand, grunting at the coolness against her crotch. She felt fingers enter her cunt and her ass at the same time and squirmed, making a soft kreee of pleasure.

The girl worked her fingers a little and Meredith whined. She felt breath on her arms, her ears, as the girl leaned up and over her, still inside her.

“Hood,” the girl whispered, drawing her other hand over Meredith’s eyes, and Meredith dipped her head, the soothed bird sleeping . . .

. . . the conditioned captive awakening. Meredith knew now that she was human, a nude woman squatting on a chair with another woman’s hand fingering her, and she wanted to come, and fall off.

Instead she let her wings become arms again and lowered them to her sides.

The girl withdrew her hand, ignoring Meredith when she whined again. She stepped back.

The door opened again and Alice stepped in, and Meredith smiled up at her, cheerfully mortified at squatting there naked on the chair.

Alice beamed at her and said, “So we weren’t bored today, were we?”

Meredith wanted to kreee again to show Alice how deeply she’d accepted Alice’s flying lesson, but found herself only able to murmur, “It was wonderful, Alice. Thank you.” That was true, and she was happy enough to say it.

“Mmm. You look cute on the chair, Meredith, but maybe you should stop playing birdie now.”

Meredith blushed and teetered, suddenly awkward in a bird’s pose, feeling her toes gripping the edge of the seat. She almost fell off the chair but kept her balance and stood. She was blushing so deeply that she forgot the room’s mild chill, and the gleam in Alice’s eyes as she watched Meredith’s skin darken made it even better. In the dimness of the huge TV screen, the spandex girl didn’t move.

Alice stepped to her, looked deeply into her for a moment, then reached slowly to her ear. “You’re going to forget this, soon.”

She waited as Meredith absorbed it, nodding when she saw Meredith’s eyes had stayed open and fixed to hers. She left her hand on Meredith’s cheek. “I’m very pleased with how you’ve been responding, Meredith. You were adorable just now, dismounting your perch, but what’s more important is that it told me how much of a birdie you really were, when I told you to be.

“Usually it takes a lot of intense conditioning and some powerful medication to induce a girl to accept what you’ve been able to.” Alice looked past her, and gently pressed Meredith’s cheek. Meredith turned, until she was leaning against Alice and they were both looking at the spandex girl who’d taken Meredith out of her flight trance. The girl stood straight, staring ahead.

“Slave Nine, here, took several days to realize that she was just a little bunny rabbit with a fetish for dancing snakes.”

Meredith stared at the girl, but Slave Nine stayed at attention, her eyes fixed in the middle distance.

“She heard me, Meredith.” Alice squeezed her reassuringly. “But there was no command or reprogramming for her to respond to.

“In any case, she doesn’t remember that anymore. It was just something she learned to be, on her way to becoming a slave.”

Meredith pressed closer. “She resisted you?” It sounded strange when she heard herself ask, but she tried to picture someone not wanting to let Alice’s soft strong voice into her mind to change it.

“Almost everyone resists, Meredith. I suspect even you would, if you thought I was about to drain your memories and turn you into a flesh-and-blood robot, instead of just keeping you tranquilized and helping you forget.”

She waited and they looked at Slave Nine together, and Meredith felt the question in her mind—but if Alice had wanted her to be a slavegirl, she knew she’d be one by now.

“I believe you, Alice. I do.”

“I know, Meredith. You can.” Alice’s arm tightened around her. “On top of everything, it’s been very interesting working with you, after the spandex girls. Like lamb after venison. You’re so sweet and easy and so tender, and I really enjoy the contrast.”

“I’m sorry,” Meredith said, looking up at her and feeling very soft. “It sounds like you enjoy it when they fight you.”

“Don’t be.” Alice stroked her hair and smiled. “Lamb can be tasty, too, Meredith.

“And the challenge isn’t just breaking a woman: there are things I can’t do to you because they’d last longer than I’ll have you, so I need to find other tools. I enjoy finding ways around them. Knowing I can flatten a girl’s mind if I want can make me complacent in some ways. It’s great exercise to condition you to cooperate and forget, without scars, without infinite access to your mind.”

She kept smiling but looked concerned. “Does it bother you, Meredith? All this talk about brainwashing and helpless mind-slaves?”

As she shook her head, Meredith had to close her eyes—she’d just come that close to wrapping her thighs around Alice’s and sliding against her. Instead, still in her captor’s embrace, she slid her hand down to her pussy and pressed. She was slick, and very glad now she hadn’t rubbed Alice.

“No,” she breathed. “It doesn’t. Bother me.” She looked back at Slave Nine and let herself feel the warmth.

“Did—?” She waited until an idea could form. “What was her name, before?”

“Nine?” Alice tilted her head for a moment. “Hmm. I’d have to look.”

Meredith tried to picture the cool, expressionless girl fighting for her free will under Alice’s brainwashing. She remembered how she’d been strapped down when she first woke up, before Alice hypnotized her, and saw this girl thrashing in it, slick with sweat, her struggles getting slower.

She asked herself, again, why the girl would have fought Alice at all.

She started to remember, and Alice felt her tense. It was still restful and arousing to be under Alice’s control, but there was more there. Something that hurt. She knew Alice heard her when she whispered.

“Leslie . . .”

Alice turned Meredith to face her, almost nose to nose. “Yes . . .” She sighed. “Leslie.

“Stop thinking. Sleep now.”

Meredith’s eyes closed.

9.

Meredith stared up into the spiral, sleeping and obeying. The whisper ruled her mind unchallenged.

Leslie looked so hot in spandex.

Before even the danger, or the shock of seeing Leslie here in the heart of Alice’s domain, dressed as one of Alice’s slaves, Meredith couldn’t tear herself from how damp it made her to see Leslie that way.

Meredith shivered before her as she stared into Meredith’s eyes, but even transfixed by that, Meredith’s mind was swimming in the way the black and yellow suit hugged Leslie’s curves. She looked rakish and dangerous, but still softer than the other spandex girls who’d followed her into the room and snapped-to on either side of the door. Leslie wasn’t the hardbody each of the other slavegirls seemed to be. It was as though she’d been bewitched into the costume—Alice hadn’t really converted her to a spandex girl, but had hypnotized her to think she had.

But Leslie’s posture was just as rigid, her face just as blank as the others. Meredith felt warm inside, seeing Alice’s hypnotic power manifested again. Alice had made Leslie believe. And obey.

“I am programmed to supervise your next training sequence,” Leslie said.

She sounded programmed. She didn’t even seem to be saying it to Meredith, as much as just obeying a command to say it. Meredith felt sure that she would have recited it just as firmly to an empty room if that was where she’d been told to go.

“You are to be hypnotized and instructed in household functions.

“Your sleep-response training is to be reinforced.”

Leslie didn’t seem to hear herself, or to be thinking of the words as she formed them. They had been put into her mind, and now they were leaving it. It scared Meredith to see her friend so helpless, even as it also scared her to wonder what Leslie might do to her, while under the spell.

She won’t do anything. She obeys Alice and Alice won’t let anything happen to me. Leslie isn’t—programmed—to hurt me.

“I will obey,” Meredith told her, feeling absurdly safer than Leslie was. She could at least think, and Alice hadn’t done more than hypnotize her into being tranquil and cooperative. But Leslie was entranced by believing she was like Alice’s other slaves, and . . . Meredith didn’t know what danger that could get her into, but Leslie just seemed so vulnerable like that.

“You will obey,” Leslie intoned, the same automaton she’d been when the lead slavegirl had commanded her outside the van.

So vulnerable. But—she’s already hurt me. She helped them kidnap me. She chloroformed me. She—

It stung Meredith out of the deeper calm, and she tried searching Leslie’s eyes for something, for a reaction. Did Leslie remember doing any of it?

She saw nothing in Leslie’s eyes but dazed obedience.

Maybe Leslie really had been turned into just another one of Alice’s robot-girls.

Oh no. Oh god. Leslie was—gone.

Meredith stared at her, trying to think of Alice’s eyes, trying to fall back into sleepy acceptance. She almost made it.

But she recalled Leslie’s little hesitations as she carried out Alice’s will, helping abduct her. Leslie had known what she was doing to Meredith, had known how frightened and sad she was making her dearest friend, and had tried hard to resist.

Oh, Leslie.

She didn’t move, but she felt the tears on her cheeks, warm and slow as they rolled down.

Leslie just stood there in Alice’s livery. She looked at Meredith’s quiet weeping and didn’t blink.

Meredith wanted to think of her holding out heroically as long as she could, tensing under the flashing lights or whatever Alice used to enslave her prey. As they’d grown up, she’d seen Leslie stand up to a lot of people who’d tried to control her, and she knew how brave she was.

But she knew that as Leslie lay in the straps, struggling to stay awake under the relentless pressure to sleep at last and obey forever after, the last thing in her mind would be the crippling memory of betraying Meredith. It would have cut the heart out of her.

She’d never have the consolation of knowing how gentle Alice was with Meredith. Her last thoughts might have been nightmares of Meredith alone and scared in a box, cramped in tight bonds and expecting to be killed or abused—and knowing she’d put Meredith there, that Meredith knew it.

Alice might have told her about the bubble she’d made for Meredith, a last mercy to ease what was left of her mind before enslaving Leslie for good. But there’d be no need to, and Alice had said she only did what served her purposes. Leslie’s last moments of free will were nothing to Alice but the delay before she had another mindless slavegirl awaiting orders. There was no reason to make them comfortable. Or even bearable.

Meredith struggled with that, since she knew how gentle and almost affectionate Alice was with her. But that was just for her—only room for one in her bubble.

“Leslie,” she said, softly, looking back into the other girl’s eyes.

Hearing the name aloud in this room she felt as lonely as when Leslie had leaned over her with the drugged cloth.

Then it hit her that only she and Alice might remember who “Leslie” was. This girl, here, was just a numbered slave with nothing in her mind but obedience.

Meredith hadn’t lost anyone close to her, and now she was learning to grieve. Not even Alice’s hypnotic bubble could help.

“Don’t cry, Meredith.”

Meredith nearly fell over.

Leslie’s face hadn’t changed expression. “Why do you want to?” Her voice was too quiet to read for feeling.

“Who are you?” Meredith whispered.

“I’m Mistress’ obedient slave, Meredith.”

“Who—am I?”

“You’re Mistress’ captive. She’s training you to cooperate.”

“I’m very grateful to her for that,” Meredith said. “She’s already trained me very well, because—” Because without her hypnosis I wouldn’t be crying now, Leslie. I’d be screaming myself deaf.

“I’m your friend, Leslie.” As she said that Meredith decided it was true, no matter who this was standing in front of her.

“Yes, I know,” said Leslie. “Mistress didn’t erase my memory. She just conditioned me to obey Her, and to realize that Her desire to have you was more important than any desires or values I had.

“Any desire of Hers is supreme, actually. That was just the one She programmed me to fulfill.”

“I don’t blame you, Leslie.” Meredith stepped forward and put her arms around her. “I don’t know what she did to you but I know her power.” Leslie felt good in her arms—more than good—and Meredith softened against her, almost as she did when Alice held her. Meredith rested her face in the hollow of Leslie’s throat, and then she kissed it.

Leslie stood straight and warm in her hold, but didn’t respond.

Ignoring that, Meredith left her lips against Leslie’s skin. “I’m all right, Leslie. She didn’t hurt me and I don’t think—” Meredith thought about being brainwashed and sold for sex like the girl who used to be Lisanne Wu, and then she closed her eyes and kissed Leslie again.

“—I don’t think she’s going to hurt me. You didn’t hurt me.”

She didn’t want to pull away from Leslie but she had to see her face again. Leslie still made no movements, but her eyes were tracking Meredith’s.

“Meredith, that didn’t . . .” Leslie blinked as she trailed off. “Hurting—you—wasn’t . . .”

Leslie’s eyes widened. “I must obey even if—even—if—” She was still holding her pose, but now she was quivering.

“I—must—obey—”

Meredith was against her once more, holding her. Now she could feel her friend’s heartbeat, galloping against her own chest. Her heart began to race too.

Leslie was still here—and she was in agony, because Meredith had awakened what Alice had put to sleep.

“Please, Mistress.” Leslie’s voice was quiet, urgent, desperate, over Meredith’s shoulder. Meredith held her tighter. “Please. I want to obey, You made me want to, I do. More than anything.

“I’m not—You programmed me so well, Your will is my will, but I’m too weak to . . . so weak . . .

“please.”

“Leslie,” Meredith whispered into her ear, but her friend still shook, lost in the trance.

She looked over Leslie’s shoulder, trying to find enough nerve to look a spandex girl in the eye.

“Please,” she said. “Please help her.”

The nearer slavegirl narrowed her eyes.

“She’s trying to obey the Mistress,” Meredith said. “Please help her.”

The girl left attention and came to them, reaching for her belt. She stared into Meredith’s eyes as she came, then looked at Leslie. Meredith stepped back but kept Leslie’s hands and tried to catch her eyes.

Then the spandex girl was holding a pocketwatch in front of Leslie, spinning it before it began to swing. Leslie was still staring ahead, past the watch and Meredith, and her prayer to her Mistress was silent now.

“Leslie,” Meredith whispered. “You can obey Mistress. You can. Just focus on the watch and let it hypnotize you. Just relax.”

Leslie blinked and her gaze refocused from infinity, and found the pocketwatch in its arc like a child mounting a swing. Her eyes began following it, and Meredith heard her sigh—with weariness, with suppressed sobbing, with relief.

“Just relax and watch the watch as it swings,” she whispered to Leslie, and saw her friend’s mouth move dreamily to form watch.

Even as part of her wanted to join Leslie in her trance, Meredith was keeping her eyes off of the watch, wondering whether Alice’s hypnotic sessions had left her more susceptible to being put under.

. . . Apparently it had, she reflected vaguely, as she realized she’d fallen into Leslie’s eyes and the way they were moving back, and forth, so soothingly, with the flash of the watch in them each . . . time . . . across . . .

She resisted the trance without really knowing it, but when she thought she heard Leslie breathing more easily she surrendered. She was whispering something over and over, but it didn’t matter.

It was like the wind, when she flew. She didn’t need to hear that whisper. She just had to obey it.

She closed her eyes.

She opened them, still trying to stare into the center of the spiral that was fading on the monitor that was floating over and away and . . . what . . . ?

She was lying on her back in a dim room, and Alice stood over her while a spandex girl moved the monitor from where it had hung over her.

She looked up at Alice, too overcome to speak.

Alice smiled down at her. “You’re performing perfectly. My obedient girl.”

Just hearing that made it better. Meredith smiled back up at her. “Thank you, Alice.” She purred happily as Alice stroked her belly, and kept purring as Alice ran her fingertips in a slow, maddening ellipse between her mons and her navel.

It melted most of the thoughts she’d been about to have, but one of them stayed. She couldn’t make herself think of the whole thing, but she could say, “Leslie?” Where was she? Was she being reprogrammed somewhere?

Alice leaned down. “You did everything right, Meredith. For everyone.

“There’s no pain now, in the bubble. No fear.”

“No face, no name, no fear, no blame,” Meredith whispered sleepily, already lightheaded from Alice’s nearness and touch.

“So obedient,” Alice said, and the pleasure in her voice was almost better than being touched.

Then she touched Meredith again, between her eyes.

“Sleep now.”

10.

Meredith stared up into the spiral, sleeping and obeying. The whisper ruled her mind unchallenged.

Meredith said nothing as the car started to move. She just sat curled in her seat, rapt in Leslie, oblivious to whatever was outside the windows as the night slid by, barely aware of the leather under her legs.

Leather.

Leslie looked hot in leather.

Meredith just watched her as she drove them . . . someplace. Meredith didn ‘t know and didn’t care where they were going, and Leslie didn’t really know, either. Meredith didn’t remember leaving . . . wherever they’d been, but she did recall standing quietly while Alice whispered to Leslie and then woke her to give her the keys to the T-Bird.

She watched Leslie now, as Leslie let the posthypnotic suggestions unroll in her mind like a guidance tape. She drank in how sleek Leslie looked in the green leather bustier and the matching hotpants, the heeled patent-leather boots that hugged her calves in a way Meredith wanted to.

Leslie smiled, feeling her gaze and enjoying it. At some point before now, she’d spoken softly, not taking her eyes from the road.

“Meredith, if it wouldn’t get us both killed right now, I wish I could look at you half as smokingly as you’re looking at me.”

“Shh,” Meredith had told her. “Just drive.” Just sit there and . . .

Meredith couldn’t remember when they’d started dating, or when it had turned into more, but in the glory of Leslie in skin and green leather in the shifting light, she didn’t care.

At some point after that, she’d leaned carefully over, bracing herself on the seatback and the dash, and kissed Leslie’s throat. She kissed the soft warm skin above and below the slave collar, and then kissed the cool leather itself.

As she settled back, she felt Leslie’s hand in her thigh for a moment before Leslie resumed driving. She swallowed and breathed silently, reaching up once to touch her own collar, just like Leslie’s. She fondled the tag that hung from it, feeling the metal warming in her fingers.

They were—here. She hadn’t noticed, but they’d driven into the city, some city, and now rolled up to what looked like a converted factory. Its mass loomed up invisibly from the brightly-lit first level and the line of stunning women who waited to get into the club that its lower floors had become.

Leslie pulled up next to a valet girl in a silver bikini and peaked cap, and the girl held a shining bit of metal out in front of the windshield. Meredith watched its gleam flicker over Leslie’s eyes as Leslie looked at it and then at the valet as she opened the door. Leslie stepped around it and took the metal claim tag from the valet, and then took the girl herself and kissed her deeply before walking, strutting, around the front of the Thunderbird.

Meredith watched her in the headlights as she moved, and forgot to breathe.

Then Leslie was opening the passenger door and holding her hand in, and Meredith took it and let herself be helped out. She came erect against Leslie, hearing and feeling the leather crackle modestly against her. She stared into Leslie’s face and almost hurt with it.

Anything, not to cry out with how deeply she felt.

“Hey,” she whispered, nearly choking on it. “The valet got a kiss. Don’t I—?”

Leslie took her mouth and Meredith gave it, leaning into her.

The warm breeze of the T-Bird’s passage against her bare legs roused her, and she looked up at Leslie, hearing some comments from the women in line. They warmed her, too.

Leslie smiled at her and slid her hand down to cup Meredith’s ass, and together they walked toward the building. They veered to the door, to the head of the line, and when some of the murmuring sounded doubtful at their cutting ahead, Leslie put her free hand to her collar and flicked the tag there. The murmuring stopped.

They were at the rope, and the muscular girl warding it stepped deferentially aside for a woman in a skintight black cutaway tuxedo and waistcoat. Her plunge blouse and the bowtie around her neck were bright yellow, and her smile at Meredith and Leslie was indulgent under the wraparounds.

“She sends Her prettiest, as always.” For a moment she just gazed at them, and her casual hunger moistened Meredith in a completely different way than Leslie’s sight and touch were doing to her.

Then she grinned and held out an imperiously upturned palm. “One of you has something for me.” She looked at Leslie. “It has to be you, dear, because your girlfriend isn’t even dressed to keep her dew out of sight.”

Chuckling, Leslie squeezed Meredith’s ass so that she melted further against Leslie. Then Leslie reached to her waistband, slowly for the avidly-watching woman, and drew a small envelope from the hotpants.

The woman in the tuxedo took it, looked at it, passed it under her nose with her eyes dreamily shut, and then kissed it, smiling at Meredith in happy envy. Then she opened it and read.

“Come here,” she said to Leslie, and Meredith felt Leslie tense. Another squeeze of her bottom and she stood docile as Leslie slid away from her to stand straight before the woman. The woman touched Leslie’s eyebrow and Leslie’s head drooped. She spoke to Leslie quietly and Leslie nodded, slowly awakening and walking to one side.

“Now you, dear.” Meredith suddenly felt compelled to go to her, and the compulsion to obey was as soothingly familiar as it was arousing. The woman touched her . . .

. . . the world spun, evenly, endlessly, and there was a silent whisper in Meredith’s mind . . .

She woke to Leslie’s kiss. “You looked so—I almost wanted to leave you asleep,” Leslie said, moving beside her again to walk them inside, to where a throbbing beat was already coming out to stun them.

Before Meredith could answer, she saw herself in the glass door.

At first she thought she was nude in her collar and heels. But then she saw the sheer minidress like a cloud over the moon. Even in the reflection she could see through it to the shadow under her breasts, the aureoles that someone must have rouged to darken and widen them so, even the dark triangle between her thighs.

The triangle riveted her. She saw it catch the light, saw why it caught the light.

Her dew, glittering.

She was dripping and anyone who looked could see. She wanted to die to hide it and she wanted to be tied to the door with her legs spread to show it, but when she looked at Leslie in the door’s glass as they came up to it, she saw only desire.

Pride at having such a randy whore clinging to her.

Love.

Leslie pulled away and opened the door for her. She twitched her hips to the beat as she walked past—and Leslie’s finger-stroke under her ass was hotter than a slap to it, skin on skin under the obscene hem. She felt the juice cooling on her inner thighs, knew some was falling gently between them to the smooth marble as her heels stalked across it, a subtle trail anyone could follow to find a slut at the end.

They found a booth near the dance floor, and Meredith almost fell onto the banquette, reeling in the sight of so many beautiful women writhing against each other. Others danced for still partners who watched—casting spells or caught in them, teasing or worshipping. The music was loud and the beat was in her bones.

A waitress in a chainmail shift leaned down and Leslie lingered by her ear. Both of them were smiling as the other girl minced away. Meredith leaned into Leslie and just looked around. “God. Oh my god.”

“So many women,” Leslie murmured alongside her cheek. “So little time?”

“One woman,” Meredith said, turning quickly and capturing her lips. She released them. “Forever.”

Leslie just looked at her, then seemed to shake herself awake. “What you can do to me sometimes. God. Now I really want to get you out there and see you move.”

“Ladies.”

A girl in a black and yellow catsuit stood over their table. She looked down through tiny oval glasses that tinted her eyes something darker than black, but left a gleam in them that drew Meredith even as she felt Leslie tense protectively beside her. “Always glad to see Her playtoys out on their own. Care to dance?”

Leslie breathed, choosing her words, and Catsuit waited. “Thank you, but we’re—”

“With this,” the girl said, and with a flourish held out a faceted crystal sphere that spun on its silver chain under the lights and send warm violet spikes into Meredith’s brain. She went limp, and Leslie’s shudder went though her.

It spun before them like a tiny disco ball and Meredith felt her thoughts travelling around it as it turned. She was already realizing that soon she would hear only the girl’s voice and obey only the girl’s will, and her mind was as cold as her pussy was hot, and she just had to stare deeper, deeper . . .

11.

She blinked, taking a moment to notice that the crystal was gone. Its chain curved up to Leslie’s fist, cupped around it. Catsuit smiled down at her. “She’s got you perfectly trained,” Catsuit smiled, waiting patiently for Leslie to let the ball go. She made it vanish with another gesture, and as the two of them flinched her eyes narrowed in deeper amusement behind the tinted lenses.

“But the night is young, and it’s amazing how easy some women find it to fall fast asleep here in the middle of the sound and fury. Just like—”

“No,” Leslie said, and Meredith heard the effort in her voice. Her hand cupped Leslie’s tight hip in its leather, and as she pressed against her girlfriend it seemed to stiffen Leslie’s resolve.

“Of course,” Catsuit smirked, seeing that, and bowed, and left them.

Their drinks arrived and Meredith threw hers back quickly. Leslie let her put the glass down and then leaned her back, looking both concerned and horny. Her hand took Meredith’s breast through the gossamer cloth and she lowered her head to it. “Half the women here are going to want to be me,” she said, and then obliterated any coherent reply just by circling Meredith’ s aureole once with her thumb.

Meredith let herself go limp again, using the last solid parts of her mind—melting into fewer with each slight lick—to think At least as many will want to be . . . me . . . She tried to say it but only a quiet meowing noise left her lips, and it turned her on enough to shut her thoughts off.

She was tasting herself on Leslie’s lips as she woke, and they sat there in the booth for a moment. Leslie squeezed her. “I need you dancing.”

Meredith gasped. “I need . . . oh.” As she shifted she started to catch up with her body, and grinned ruefully at her girlfriend. “Gotta go,” she said, and saw the mood wasn’t lost as Leslie grinned back. “Wanna come with?”

Leslie seemed to think about it. “No,” she breathed, leaning back, letting Meredith watch the lights play over her in her leathers, smiling as the soft motion of her belly started to mesmerize Meredith.

“First, we might spend all night in there . . . second, I think I want to see you come back to me. An arrival, without having to go through a departure.”

She’d started in a joking tone but Meredith heard the yearning as she finished, and she leaned down to kiss Leslie’s belly, tonguing her navel before it entranced her further. She dipped and pressed her face against the warm leather of Leslie’s lap and cherished the sound Leslie made.

“I’ll . . .”

She pulled away and stood and walked away from Leslie while she still could.

She found her way to the restrooms by instinct. There were four, but she smiled to see that each one had a very female silhouette in profile over its door. She chose the third at random and stepped inside, surprised to find it large but empty except for a young woman in schoolgirl kit leaning over a sink at the far end, who stared intently at her lip and didn’t move when Meredith came in. She entered a stall and sat, feeling a weird exhilaration at needing to do no more than pull her dress up an inch or two before doing that.

She went to the mirror afterward. The schoolgirl still seemed absorbed in herself, but she was pretty enough that it made sense. Meredith looked away and regarded herself. Her hair was a bit wild but her makeup seemed all right—which was good, because she couldn’t clearly recall whether she or Leslie had brought a purse.

“You’re perfect, kitten.”

She blinked, ready to smile at Leslie—but it was Catsuit who stood next to her, resplendent in the light from over the mirror, her eyes compelling behind the shades. Meredith glimpsed herself in her wisp of a dress, her breasts moving almost imperceptibly behind stiffening nipples, and felt deliciously in peril.

“Yes. Even you lust after you, as well you should. Everyone else is, kitten. Everyone wants to pet you.” She lifted lipstick and snared Meredith’s gaze with how she put it on, as though she were debauching the little shaft of red. “Or make you her pet.”

I’m taken, Meredith wanted to say, but being so close to the dangerous girl in black and yellow was like an anesthetic that sped her heart and dulled her wits.

But she was aware enough to worry that if she tried to flee, she might not make it to the door before Catsuit made her forget why she wanted to.

“It’s all perfectly fine, kitten. You can relax. I left the magic hypno-jewel out there with a dear friend. At least she is, now.” A smile. “But let’s look at you. Mmmmm.

“Perfect can still get better, kitten. Let me . . .”

She turned and stood close enough so Meredith felt the heat from her, but dizzied her by not touching. She locked eyes with Meredith in the mirror and lifted her lipstick, and Meredith sighed with the wait.

When the fragrant tip kissed her lips, warm from Catsuit’s own, she didn’t have the will to open them and only hummed her need against it. Catsuit chuckled and drew it gently where she liked, painting Meredith’s mouth with her own tastes. Meredith realized the other girl was speaking softly, telling her to let herself fall into the soft wet red, letting her mind turn to pussy—turn into pussy as something warm slid into it, and as her mind turned into pussy she lost track of the whisper.

She was sliding her lips together, drunk on the taste and on helplessness and on the gleam in Catsuit’s shaded eyes.

“You may still be damp, kitten. Someone should lick you clean.

“I could teach you to lick yourself”—she chuckled again and Meredith had the oddest urge to kneel—“but for now—Tracy, come here.”

The schoolgirl looked over once, and then pointedly looked back at the mirror.

“Thank you, Tracy,” Catsuit whispered. “I can always rely on you for a good time.” More loudly, she snapped, “Come when you’re called, class blowjob queen.”

Tracy jerked upright, and something, a mascara wand, clattered to the tiles at her feet as her arms dropped to her sides. She turned and walked to them, wide-eyed and graceful.

“Obey,” she whispered, starting to lick her lips.

“Yes,” Catsuit said. “Tend to this girl, queen.”

Meredith enjoyed what kneeling did to Tracy’s thighs but a touch from the lipstick refocused her on her own mouth in the mirror, and as Catsuit whispered, nothing broke her stare. Not the fingertips barely having to lift her dress, not the hot quick breaths on her shaven loins, not the finger exquisitely violating her asshole, not the probing slickness at her paler, nether lips or the insistent tonguetip questing for her—clit—finding—claiming . . .

She stood blinking, alone at the row of sinks. Her ass tingled and her pussy glowed. Her eyes were still full of stars as she moaned out the ecstasy she hadn’t been given permission to scream.

But she obeyed the whisper and stared at and thought about only her lips.

Soft wet red. Her mind turning into pussy. Yes. Yessss.

Someone kissed her and she climaxed again, this time hard enough to buckle and fall. But this time someone held her, and through the strange new scent under her nose she smelled Leslie’s hair.

“I must have . . .” Hypnotized myself? She tried to remember what happened.

“It’s OK,” Leslie said, guiding her out again. “If I let myself, I’d fall into that trap with you.”

“Maybe later,” Meredith whispered to her throat.

They hadn’t lost the booth, and as they sat the chainmailed waitress appeared with two deep goblets, almost like chalices gleaming darkly in the lights.

“Compliments of the lady at the bar,” she said as she set them down, inclining her head toward the one she meant of the several that ringed the dance floor. Leslie tensed and turned around to see, but as Meredith followed her gaze they saw a woman waving shyly and pushing a fall of ash-blonde hair back over her shoulder. Leslie relaxed and waved back, then turned to look at Meredith again.

“I’d ask her over, but she looks as though it might scare her off,” she said, and then took Meredith’s hand. “Of course, once she was with us she might not like being ignored.”

Meredith grinned and looked up again. She saw Catsuit step next to the ash-blonde woman and pass a hand before her face. The blonde straightened at once and stared fixedly into Catsuit’s eyes, nodding slowly as Catsuit spoke to her. Catsuit tapped her forehead and the blonde’s head fell to her chest, her hair sliding off her shoulder to curtain her as she slept.

It took only a moment. Meredith kept grinning and said nothing about it to Leslie, and could not make herself wonder why. Besides, she had to look down.

Curled in the bottom of her goblet was a faceted crystal ball resting atop its coiled silver chain.

“Oh, look,” she said, taking it out. She almost felt something wet and firm plunge into her cunt as she said more sharply, “Look.”

Leslie’s brow was starting to curve in puzzlement when her eyes widened. She managed to meet Meredith’s eyes for a moment, but her own were already reflecting the violet-tinted wonders of the ball as it spun.

“Look.”

It was hypnotizing Meredith too, but the whisper that owned her mind had prepared her and controlled her now. As her own trance deepened, it just made her continue to hypnotize Leslie.

“Meredith. Please. Don’t. Do. Thhhhissss—” Even as Leslie’s plea faded into a sleepy monotone, her desperation leaked through.

“Look.” Something new took her will and her tongue. Now her mouth fellated another word.

“Obey.” Meredith’s ass clenched as she saw the command hit Leslie. Her girlfriend wavered where she sat, but the crystal’s spell kept her upright and staring.

“Obey . . . Mere. Dith. She’s.”

“Obey.” Meredith felt it over her whole body like the dress everyone could see through.

“Use. Ing. You. Fight.”

“Obey.”

“F-fight? It. Sleep . . . no. Must—”

“Obey.”

“Obey.” Leslie’s face was losing expression, her eyes widening and glazing too quickly for tears. Meredith didn’t wonder why there should be tears at all. Her mind was too full of soft wet red whispering.

The woman Meredith had to obey stood by their table now, her black and yellow catsuit taut over her toned body. Behind her, a miniskirted schoolgirl and a woman with ash-blonde hair waited stiffly, staring into space, oblivious to the dancers and everyone else, but just as oblivious as everyone else was to the hypnotic induction that was ending now.

The woman in the catsuit touched Meredith’s forehead and she realized she had to let the crystal go now and just stare into Leslie’s emptied eyes. Neither girl blinked at the thud as the crystal hit the table.

“I’m going to take your lover away forever and make her my pet. One of many. You like that.”

“I . . . like that,” Leslie agreed.

“You just won’t remember it. She’ll finish programming you to forget her now, and then we’ll be on our way.”

“Programming me . . . to forget,” Leslie repeated.

Then she frowned. Her eyes started to focus.

Meredith felt the tingling in her ass again, and began juicing.

“No,” Leslie said. “I won’t. Won’t forget . . . her. I . . . love . . .”

Meredith had the crystal spinning again and Leslie’s eyes went flat before she could finish. Meredith almost came to see the light go out in them.

“Good girl, kitten. Make her behave.” Now Meredith did come.

The orgasm weakened her and she found herself staring at the crystal, still holding it. She tried to do something else, but her mind was so empty of anything but soft red wet.

She saw tears now on Leslie’s cheeks, but all she could see was how Leslie stared, and all she could think of was how Leslie would obey the whisper now, too.

She climaxed again, and passed out . . .

. . . to awaken again on the table under Alice’s gaze as the spiral display that had hypnotized her was moved aside again.

“I think it’s OK now,” said Alice, and smiled down at her.

12.

“I, umm, ohhh . . .” Meredith gave up trying to express the idea when she couldn’t remember what an idea was. It was so much easier to look at the yellow oval that pulsed on the wall as the offset lamp blinked on and off.

The blinking stopped again, and she stared at the flat white of the wall numbly for a moment, waiting for it to resume. This had been happening for a while, she was coming to know, but it was natural for her thoughts to be stopped that way. She sat and waited for some of them to reappear in her mind.

Alice laughed next to her. “You were saying, Meredith?”

She turned quickly without really becoming more awake—it was easy even when she felt this mindless, since Alice was so much better at thinking and always deserved her instant attention and obedience.

Obedience. Alice blurred for a moment as Meredith’s eyes rolled up. Then she was calm again, and a bit more obedient than . . . before . . .

Blur . . .

Alice snapped her fingers and Meredith looked at her.

“That felt nice,” she said. “just blankness, and I . . . wanted to do anything you told me.”

“Wanted, Meredith?”

She smiled shyly and sat straighter so Alice could see her nipples better. “I still do, Alice.”

Alice smiled back. “Think about Leslie.”

Meredith compliantly called her friend to mind. She saw Leslie as she went into trance for the spandex girls, and then when she was under their control, leaning over to drug Meredith for shipment. She saw her in improbable and unbearably sexy leather in the car, and then she remembered the crystal, the club.

“She wasn’t really here, was she?”

Alice smiled. “No. Just a hypnotically-induced dream. I control her through some indirect means, and it would be foolish to bring her here physically—I still don’t know if anyone thinks she was an accomplice in your abduction, though I doubt they’d guess her motives.”

“Do your slaves really have motives anymore?” It was the first thing off the top of her head, and she barely noticed that she’d called Leslie a slave. Meredith felt high. She wanted her mind to be as naked as her body was, for Alice to look at.

Alice’s eye twinkled a bit. “My slave Leslie does, just like the others. I was thinking of something more mundane.

“But you’re so suggestible by now that all I had to do was plant the idea in your mind and you rode the fantasy.”

Meredith licked her lips. “Was it all fantasy? She felt so real.”

Alice grinned. “You mean was there some other girl against you?

“No. You were lying on a table—alone—the whole time. Hypnotized and listening to the headset. It was all you. I kidnapped myself a very kinky young lady.”

As Alice’s words sank into her, Meredith wanted to play with herself, but her hands wouldn’t move. She didn’t fight to move them.

“I needed to desensitize you. My experience in conditioning girls has taught me what guilt can do unless it’s channeled and drained. I’m guessing that, now, you’re not agonizing anymore over Leslie’s slavery to me. Hm?”

Meredith shook her head. She almost said I’m too wet but there was something—off about that.

Not enough to worry about. “I think you’re letting her be happy,” she said.

Alice raised an eyebrow. “I could always just be brainwashing you into thinking that, while I continue to torment poor loyal Leslie.” She listened to Meredith’s breathing accelerate. “Perhaps by making her watch how I’m bending your mind about her.”

“Oh, no, Alice.” Meredith felt a little superior; she was a better pupil than Alice thought. “I know what you tell me is the truth.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well—because it’s true,” Meredith said, wondering what the point was but always willing to humor Alice.

“Oh. Of course.” Alice stood, reaching to run her hand thrillingly along the edge of Meredith’s ear and down her jaw. “Come. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

“I—” Alice turned at the door, looking a bit surprised that Meredith still sat in her chair. To the raised eyebrow Meredith said, “I’m sorry. I just can’t move.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t—” Meredith looked down. She sat with her legs together, palms open on each thigh. Each palm held a green marble. Their slow weight was enough to strain slightly, though neither her hands not her legs were too uncomfortable.

“Problem?” Alice asked.

“Well, I can’t move as long as I’m holding the magic hypno marbles,” she explained. Anyone would know that, but perhaps Alice couldn’t see them from—oh. Right. Of course Alice knew. She’d opened Meredith’s mind to what the MHM’s could make her do.

“What should we do about that, Meredith?”

Meredith rifled her mind for ideas, and didn’t take long to realize the obvious. “You could hypnotize me into being strong enough to lift them.”

Alice looked skeptical. “Hypnosis is not that convenient, Meredith. This isn’t as simple as, oh, quitting a bad habit, or learning to obey my voice with mindless devotion. These are magic hypno marbles.”

Meredith met her eyes. “You know how much I hate to disagree with anything you say, Alice.

“But I believe in you. You’re the one-in-a-million hypnotist who could control me into being able to do it. Please, Alice—I don’t have enough willpower to do it by myself. You know that.”

Alice stared at her for a moment and then walked back to stand over her. “You’re so cute when you beg. How can I say no to those big limpid eyes that are just locked onto mine?”

Meredith sucked in a breath as though something had touched her clit, realizing that she was already going under. She relaxed, trusting in Alice’ s power.

“I will obey,” she said, and realized Alice’s voice was in her mind, helping her think the way she needed to get through this. “I have no strength but Alice gives me power.

“I have Alice’s power.

“I am the tool of Alice’s power.

“I am in Alice’s power.

“Alice is power.” It was in her now. Warm, thick, brushing her own flimsy thoughts aside. She flexed, and by Alice’s grace she raised the marbles slowly, slowly until they were level with her chest. She wasn’t tempted to look at them again—she knew what effect they’d have on a mind as weak as hers—but fortunately Alice’s eyes were too deep and irresistible for her to think of looking at anything else.

Her eyes closed and opened and she saw the blank wall again, her whole body glowing with the power Alice channeled through her while her mind slept. She felt Alice’s voice inside her, and let it guide her to the table, where she lowered her arms carefully so the MHMs didn’t fall and break something with their weight. She stayed drowsily tense until she heard them click on the tabletop, and the sound triggered her back out of trance.

She staggered back to Alice, not too sore from the exertion, and forgot her tired muscles in Alice’s bright approval. “Very good, Meredith. Very good. A less obedient girl would have dropped them, maybe hurt herself.”

Meredith held herself for a moment, but yielded to the impulse as she’d learned to yield to anything at all, and hugged Alice. “You wouldn’t have tested a less obedient girl that way,” she whispered.

“Thank you for believing in me.”

Alice’s hand was cool on the small of her back, making her sigh. “I trust your obedience, Meredith. Completely. This will work better than I’d hoped.”

Then—she kissed Meredith’s ear, lightly, and Meredith nearly died of joy.

13.

Alice’s hand pressed. “Unless there’s another hypnotic trap you’d care to fall into, come with me. She’s waiting, though I can’t imagine she minds.”

She followed Alice to a bare room of cinderblock walls and fluorescent lights. There were a couple of lounge chairs and a picnic table inside, and two spandex girls stood mechanically alert while another young woman sprawled naked on one of the loungers with beach or pool accessories under it. Meredith was already reacting to the way the other girl’s gleamingly oiled body curved against the plaid plastic, imagining the indentations it might be leaving on her skin.

She thought of it as tongue-braille and imagined spending a day reading it with her lips moving.

Then she saw the girl wore a purple sleep-watch just like hers, and had to stop and hold her thighs together, the arousal driving her up on tiptoe. She was lost in the picture of how the girl might have melted to sleep on the lounger as the beeping stole her consciousness, the book slipping from her nerveless fingers, her eyes closing as it knocked her water bottle over.

Alice snapped her fingers. The girl opened pale blue eyes and they lit up to see Alice.

“Oh, hi, Mistress!” She sat up, pert and smiling interestedly at Meredith but only giving her a once-up-and-down before gazing back at Alice. “Wow, I wish you didn’t work so hard running this resort! You could lie here and I could wait on you. This is just the perfect day for sun-worship.” She waved a hand at the overhead fluorescents.

Alice waved a deprecatory hand. “I have my little amusements, Janet.

“Speaking of amusements—any luck with the lifeguards?”

Janet turned to the two expressionless slaves and sighed as she looked back again. “Starting to think they’re man-rated only. Crap. I almost dislocated a couple of things putting the lotion on, and I tried dancing to the radio, which I must say is something I do incredibly fucking well when I ‘m turned on, but they just stared.”

She slid her gaze to Meredith, and Meredith willingly fell into it. “Although it was kind of hot, doing that, in front of everyone else—even if the crowd was smaller than it is now. By now, half of Aruba knows what a slut I am and most of them know which way I swing”—her blue eyes bored frankly into Meredith’s now—“but it was still a kick reminding them.”

“I can imagine,” Alice said, and stepped over to reach down under Janet’s ear. “You’re having a wonderful vacation,” she said, and Janet sagged for a moment as her eyes lost focus.

She found her vibrancy again as Alice straightened and told her, “This is Meredith, by the way.”

“Hi, Meredith.” The invitation in Janet’s voice was engraved, and Meredith felt every embossed ridge of it between her thighs. “Care to help me change my oil?

“Or—do you need some?” The fluorescents shone off her limbs as she leaned down to retrieve the bottle.

“Oh, let me,” Meredith gasped, and went to kneel by the lounger, the concrete cool under her knees.

Janet looked at her, her mouth quirking in amusement at how excited Meredith was. She reached out gently and stroked Meredith’s face. “Shh, chill, girl. You might spill some.”

She looked at Meredith, and then leaned forward and kissed her. “Which I wouldn’t want you to do,” she whispered, “unless it was on me. OK?”

“’Kay,” Meredith managed, and poured some onto her hand to warm it. Janet writhed a lot more than was really necessary, giggling at Meredith’s reaction before settling onto her stomach and gently moving her ass to draw Meredith’s hands first. Meredith touched it before she could let herself kiss it.

“S-so. Janet . . . You’re here on vacation?”

“Mmmm. Yup. Two weeks away from the bank and no one to say how naughty I’ m—ohhh, Meredith, do that again, OK? OKayyyyy . . .

“Yes. Here on vacation. I’m having a wonderful vacation.

“How about you, Meredith? Getting away from it all?”

Meredith looked at the cinderblock walls and searched her mind, then looked at Alice, who just looked back.

It’s still a kick. “Actually, no. Alice kidnapped me and she’s keeping me hypnotized to calm me down and let me forget.”

“Oh, cool.” Janet relaxed. “That’s kind of what this vacation is for, too, I guess. When I’m not sunbathing or fucking pretty women, I’m getting hypnotized too, I think. Except I won’t remember that.

“There’s this table? It’s kind of hard but really comfortable, and then they put this TV thing over your head and it shows this spinning striped thingy that . . . just . . . puts . . . me . . . to . . .”

Her lids were nearly closing, and the way her pale eyes were nearly eclipsed as the memory put her under did something nice to Meredith’s pussy. She slid an oiled hand up the slope of Janet’s shapely buttock and down into the valley between until the other girl whimpered and shimmied.

“Yesssss.” Janet’s eyes were open now, and blazing at Meredith. “What was I saying?”

“Saying?” Meredith grinned back at her. Then she leaned forward, touching Janet gently under her ear, loving how loose she went. “You’re having a wonderful vacation,” she whispered.

When she looked back, Alice was beaming at her.

Then her hand was captured, having drifted between Janet’s thighs, and she let Janet draw her by rolling onto her side. She found her breast sliding against Janet’s slick hip and grunted at how deeply the arousal stabbed into her. She slid her hand out and just coasted up Janet’s smooth, fragrant front, homing in on the other girl’s crooked smile. They kissed, and Janet’ s tongue danced on hers as Janet put her hand on Meredith’s head.

Meredith started running her hands over Janet’s skin, no longer even pretending to be applying anything but herself to the other girl. She pulled back against the hand and let her fascination with Janet’s wide, mottled aureolae draw her to taste one through its sauce of lotion. Janet’s hand tightened on her scalp and she heard Janet hissing in through her teeth.

“You know,” Janet forced out, “I’ve been having an affair with one of the—ah—instructors. Here. We. Oh god.” Meredith did that again, sucking the breast gently between her teeth, but she knew she should have let Janet recover her wits. It was more fun to blow Janet off her track when she was still trying to make sense. She sounded so much sexier trying to speak evenly, and Meredith teased her harder.

“Not. Sure. Hhhhh!—which instructor. Might—parasail or racquet . . . racquet . . . b-ball . . .” Meredith’s tongue was moving barely at all, but she could feel Janet dissolving. “Mmmm. I . . .” She squeezed Meredith’s head as Meredith relented a bit, then stroked it. Her voice was thick.

“. . . I don’t know because we always start fucking before we get to wherever she was supposed to teach me.

“But, oh, Meredith, it’s so much fun to have someone to cheat on her with.”

Meredith looked up and saw the other girl looking down at her, and it hit her how much Janet believed in what Alice had hypnotized her to see and feel. She wondered if Janet’s lover were as illusory as Leslie had been in the hypnotic sessions.

“Very nice,” Alice said, and Meredith remembered they had an audience, even if it was smaller than the one Janet thought she saw. “You’re both very thirsty.” They looked at each other, realizing how utterly right about that their hypnotist was, and slid apart to walk to the table. Someone had put two tall tumblers of water with little umbrellas on the table, and Janet took one and sipped. She made a sound nearly as sensual as when Meredith had suckled on her and closed her eyes.

“Oh god they use good stuff in those.” She opened them and stunned Meredith with their gaze again. “Go ahead and have some, Meredith. I want to get you drunk and compliant.”

“I’m already compliant,” Meredith grinned, but took a glass and drank some of the warm water without taking her eyes from Janet’s.

“And how,” Janet said, staring her down.

Meredith started to try to speak but then Janet’s eyes flashed mischievously. “Or maybe we can just go for a swim!” She turned with nearly-sincere enthusiasm and pointed to the wall. “I keep wanting to. I do. Such a smooth, smooth ocean. So blue, so warm, so . . .” She stared at the wall, forgetting Meredith and the tropical drink she thought she held. “It’s just so hypnotic I keep—zoning out. Sometimes that’s where she finds me. When we fuck . . .”

Looking at the wall, Meredith almost let Janet’s brainwashed belief make her see the perilously soothing water instead. But it made her hot to see Janet so fooled, and while she wanted to protect her—she also wondered what she might be able to make Janet do.

14.

She looked at Alice. Alice already knew what she could make Janet do, and she felt a fierce liking for her captor flare out of her. Alice nodded.

“Janet? Tell Meredith what you’re learning when you’re hypnotized.”

“Hmm? Oh, right. I’m learning to obey some triggers so I can execute unauthorized transfers at the bank and then forget until I’m triggered again.” Obeying Alice’s suggestion to speak seemed to keep her trapped in the dream-ocean. She didn’t look away, but she started to finger herself. “I’m also learning that it’s all my idea, and no one else is involved, and I ‘ll just confess when I’m finally caught.

“I’m smart—Mistress says she picked me because I’m smart”—she preened without stopping her fingers—“but everyone who does that gets caught. I’ll just make more money for Mistress first.”

She smiled, and even deep in trance there was a delightful devil in that smile. “I’m already looking forward to prison when that happens. I’ll be really . . . popular . . . there . . .” Her hand was slower now. Then she pulled it away, and now her stare into the sea that wasn’t there was longing.

“But I have a squick I can’t shake yet. Even with the brainwashing I’m going to forget, I still . . . don’t . . . want . . . to . . .”

She closed her eyes. “Steal,” she whispered.

“But Mistress is—helping me with that, too.”

“Exactly, Janet.” Alice’s voice was warm and encouraging. “And here’s your instructor now.”

Another slavegirl stalked in, and Meredith took a moment to envy Janet. The girl wore a yellow and black neoprene wetsuit, unzipped to her mons and cut high over her long, strong thighs. She was taller even than Alice but she had the same robotic expression as the other spandex girls—focused now on Janet, who’d begun coming out of her trance when Alice spoke.

“Oh, right.” Janet breathed, riveted by the way the other girl moved toward her. “My . . .”

“Time for your scuba lesson, Miss Janet.” It was just the husky snarl Meredith had wished for, and she felt the envy for Janet spike higher. Janet hesitated, and the girl tapped something strapped to her thigh—what looked like a one-handed injector. “Behave, Miss Janet. I am not programmed to hypnotize when you’re disobedient. I am only programmed to tranquilize.”

“Scuba lesson,” Janet whispered, staring at her. “But—time for my . . . scuba lesson . . .” She turned to Meredith looking both horny and scared, but bewildered about it. She seemed to be trying to ask for help, even starting to wake from her dreamstate, but she couldn’t say anything but “I must go to my scuba lesson.” Saying it put her deeper under, but her fear kept buoying her up.

Meredith saw Alice watching them. She reached toward Janet and took the glass from her before she dropped it. Janet started as though waking, but looked sadly after the glass as though she’d lost a lifeline.

“It’s time for your scuba lesson,” Meredith said, realizing that she was simmering with a need to see what it was that made Janet so hot and so scared, and to see it happen to her. The whisper in her head was insistent.

Janet’s eyes glazed over. “Scuba,” she intoned, and without any more resistance went to the girl in the wetsuit and let her lead her from the room.

“Go with them,” Alice said, and Meredith skipped to obey. They only went as far as the adjoining room the slavegirl had come from, and to a high dais by one wall. Meredith watched avidly as the girl led Janet up the steps and they knelt on top of it, and then Janet started slipping into an elaborate harness.

“Scuba,” she said. The slavegirl was preparing something with a hose.

Janet was weaving, barely able to kneel erect, but she held still as the slavegirl strapped a facemask to her head. Meredith saw it was bulky and wired and wondered how safe it would be in water, but she forgot that as she saw how docile Janet was once it was over her eyes.

“Come here.” The girl’s empty eyes were on Meredith, and she went up the steps to kneel beside them.

Janet was still, and achingly helpless with her head imprisoned like that, as the girl slid plastic-coated headphones under the mask straps and then began fitting the breathing gear.

“Put those in.” Meredith saw them—two dildos on trays, already slick with lube at the ends of their cables. She reached for the narrower one and put her hand over Janet’s belly as she probed gently for the other girl’s asshole.

She remembered playing with her on the lounger, she remembered how adorably Janet writhed and teased her and enjoyed her. But it was just—so—much—hotter to grip her as she knelt numbly in trance and push a powered buttplug into her. She spared a moment to taste Janet’s asscheek, and another to nip it, and felt the girl buck like a sleeping mare at a fly.

Putting the larger plug into Janet’s pussy was even more fun.

Sliding the panty up to keep both plugs in place was so easy, up Janet’s oiled thighs when they stood her up, and then the slavegirl lowered her into the tank inside the dais, carefully keeping wires and hoses untangled.

Meredith knew it was some kind of sensory deprivation chamber, that Alice was destroying Janet’s will to train her to be used, to want it, to be discarded and to want that too.

She realized she still envied Janet.

It didn’t scare her. I’m hypnotized. I’m not afraid.

I’m hypnotized. I must obey.

“She will obey,” she said, and the girl in the wetsuit looked at her.

“She will.”

Meredith wanted to kneel and kiss the warm neoprene at the girl’s crotch, but she thought of something better. She went back to Alice, who was waiting by the table.

Alice gestured to the water glasses. “Pina colada?” she asked.

Meredith shook her head, and then slid a hand down to stroke herself. “Alice,” she whispered, and stopped.

“Mistress,” she tried, and cherished the look Alice gave her.

“I’m not keeping you,” Alice said. “No point in owning without possessing, is there?”

Meredith squirmed but she looked into Alice’s eyes and begged without speaking. Alice nodded, looking intrigued.

“I wondered if you might decide to keep me here.” She swallowed. “I believe you when you said you’d return me to my mother when she paid. I just started thinking . . .”

Alice smiled. “Keep you here.”

“Yes. I know you said you’d sell off a girl that wasn’t paid for, but—She swallowed harder. “If it were . . . I mean, if—”

“Meredith.”

“Yes, Alice?”

“Go into a trance now, Meredith.”

“Yesssss . . . Alicccce . . .” She felt her consciousness flatten out, felt the lassitude weigh her limbs. The endless drowsiness yawned below her and she leaned out over it, ready to fall deeply asleep, kept conscious only by Alice’s will. When Alice willed her asleep . . .

“Think only of the truth, Meredith.”

“Only of the truth.”

“What are you trying to say to me?”

“I want to belong to you,” Meredith said, and she realized tears were starting.

“Awaken.”

It was like stepping into weather, and the tears became sobs. “I can’t believe I said that,” Meredith said, and then waves of Leslie and crystals and helping put lively sweet Janet into a brainwashing tank hit her so hard she stayed upright.

“Meredith, what do you suppose life is like for a slave whore? Even one under mind control?”

Meredith’s breathing sawed in and out of her as she realized she was still masturbating. The answer to that wasn’t in words she knew, but she wasn’t sure she’d stay sane if she could say it anyway.

“Hmm.

“It’s a moot point, Meredith. If your mother pays—and she’s already agreed, we’re just working out the logistics—then I can’t keep you.

“You’re merchandise, and she’s bought you outright. You were meat on the hoof when I took you, free-range damsel in season, but now you’re her property.”

Meredith didn’t feel her knees hit the floor. She realized she was kneeling when she felt her heels against her butt. She kept stroking herself, looking up at Alice.

“Of course—do you think your mother might be open to an offer, once things settle down?”

Meredith thought of kneeling in the foyer of her house with a leash trailing across the marble while Alice and her mother dickered over her.

“I couldn’t match her price, or I’d lose my profit. Maybe she’d take Leslie in trade. To even it out.”

Meredith writhed. She wondered if Janet was still aware she was in a tank, that her scuba lesson was robotizing her into something that a little bit of her still didn’t want to be. She forgot Janet and gaped at Alice.

“That’s not the only option, of course. There’s all that value-added with your new obedience training, and if you don’t have the sex down quite yet I think you have all the other makings of a first-class whore.

“So your mother might find you’re a useful bit of capital now. She could use you to soften up negotiating partners or sweeten deals, without having to worry about using a secretary or housemaid, someone who’d freelance. Filial devotion and deep mind control would be the way to go, there, for an in-house party favor.

“Or, if she needs some funds quickly and doesn’t feel like liquidating anything valuable, she can sell you in any of several markets—harem, hentai, some of the European places. I could offer to take you back for training, or just sell her the triggers and she could do it.”

Meredith’s orgasm was sharp and intense.

Alice looked at her with pity.

“Meredith, it’s a pretty fantasy to be your own mother’s desk-candy, but we do have to face reality. You’ll be going home in a while, and you won’t remember any of this. Not even in your dreams.

“I’m sorry.”

Meredith was too spent even to cry. She wanted to, for Alice. “I understand,” she whispered.

“I know,” Alice said, softly. “My obedient girl.” She breathed.

“But, Meredith, you’re still here now, and there’s another dream I’d like to treat you to that I think you’re ready for, now.

“Up for being hypnotized again?”

Meredith rose to her feet, knowing she was already ripe for another climax but delighted to leave everything to Alice once again.

“Always,” she said, already savoring the cool table under her, the dim light and the irresistible spiral above her fluttering eyes.

“Always,” she whispered again, and repeated it all the way back to the room.