The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

—Galatea Gives Notes

Priya bought the dress in Amherst on a Saturday when Daniel had told her to buy winter gloves.

This was, she explained, his fault.

“You gave me an instruction with insufficient parameters,” she said, standing in the doorway of his room while his roommate’s microwave beeped three times in the kitchen and someone shouted that they were not done with it. “I went to acquire one necessary article and encountered a garment that made a persuasive argument.”

The gloves were already on her hands, dark wool, practical, the kind of thing she should have owned already. The dress was in a paper bag under her arm.

Daniel tried not to look too interested.

Priya saw him trying. Her mouth curved.

“Would you like to see the unauthorized acquisition?”

“You don’t need my permission to buy clothes.”

“I know that.”

The answer came too fast. Almost before he had finished speaking.

The old latency moved between them like a draft.

She entered the room and shut the door.

He sat very still on the edge of the bed while she took the dress into the bathroom to change. The apartment’s pipes knocked in the wall. Outside, Belden Street was a gray corridor of thawing snow and dirty tire tracks. February had softened everything without warming it. The world looked handled too much.

When Priya came out, he forgot the weather.

The dress was a dark, intelligent green, almost black where the fabric folded, warmer where it caught the desk lamp. It fit her body in a way her old clothes had refused to. Tight would have been forgivable. The dress was accurate.

Her shoulders looked narrower and stronger at once. Her waist, which he had learned by touch before he had learned to look at it directly, had shape. Her legs were still thin but no longer fragile. There was new muscle in them, a line above the knee he ed from the gym, from watching her grimly move a weight she had sworn she hated, then add five pounds the next week without telling him.

She held herself differently in the dress.

He was hard before he had decided anything. The dress only made the rest of him it it. He let his eyes move over her as he had once taught himself not to look at the thin girl in the group, openly, the full shape of her, the new strength in the arms and the legs, and what he could not get past was the power in it: built where there had once been only edges, grown in under his hands, until he could no longer tell his wanting of her apart from his having made her.

“Well?” she said.

Daniel’s throat had closed.

She looked down at herself. “I can return it.”

“No.”

The word came out too sharply.

Her eyes lifted.

“No,” he said again, trying to put gentleness around it. “Don’t.”

“Because you like it?”

“Yes.”

“Because I look like a good subject?”

The floor seemed to move under him.

There were moments when Priya’s accuracy felt like cruelty, but this was not one of them. She was not teasing him. Or she was, but teasing was only the top layer. Under it he kept hearing a question he could not prove was hers and not his own: Is this what you wanted me to become? And under that another: Is this what I wanted? And under that, the one he never reached the bottom of: Can you see me now?

“You look like yourself,” he said.

Priya’s face changed.

It was true, and it was also exactly what she needed to hear, and he had learned to distrust how easily he could give her that. He heard that too late.

She came closer. The skirt moved around her legs with a sound too soft to be called a rustle.

She noticed. Of course she noticed.

“Oh,” she said.

He looked away.

“No,” she said, and there was the voice again, the shape of his own returned to him in her mouth. “Look.”

He looked.

Priya stood between his knees. She touched his face with two fingers, lifting his chin a fraction. Not enough to force him. Enough to show him force was available.

“You like giving me rules,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You like that I eat when you tell me to eat.”

He swallowed. “Yes.”

“That I sleep more.”

“Yes.”

“That I go to the gym.”

“You complain the entire time.”

“That was not the question.”

Despite everything, he smiled.

Her fingers moved from his chin to his throat, resting lightly there. He felt his pulse strike against them.

“You like thinking you’re making me better.”

The smile vanished.

Priya’s eyes searched his face. “That one hurt.”

“It should.”

“Maybe.” She considered him with the grave interest she brought to difficult texts. “Or maybe you’re allowed to like it if I like being better.”

“You don’t need me for that.”

“No,” she said. “But I wanted a witness.” She heard it land and winced. “That sounded less pathetic in my head.”

He looked at her and said nothing.

She kissed him then, standing over him in the green dress, and the kiss had command in it. That was new, or newly itted. Priya’s hand stayed at his throat. Her other hand went into his hair. She kissed like someone making a correction in ink.

He reached for her waist, then hesitated.

She broke the kiss. “You may.”

The words struck him.

Her eyes darkened. “That,” she said.

“What?”

“That’s what I mean. You think you’re the only one allowed to notice what words do?”

He had no answer. His hands settled on her waist.

The dress was soft under his palms, and beneath it was her body, changed because he had told it to, because she had allowed it, new evidence neither of them knew how to read. He pulled her closer. She came willingly, but the word willingly no longer solved anything.

On the bed she would not let him reach for the index cards. “No,” she said, when his glance went to the desk. “Not tonight. Tonight you don’t get the script.” She smiled, slow, a smile he had never been shown before, and he understood that the shy girl who rehearsed coffee orders had been keeping this folded somewhere small the whole winter, waiting for a door.

She undressed him without hurry, narrating it, because she had decided the words were hers tonight. “Look at you,” she said, getting his shirt off, his belt open. “A whole fall I watched you not look at me in M-14, and now you can’t look at anything else.” She closed a hand around him, where he was already hard, already leaking, slick at the tip against her palm, and laughed low. “And look at this. I’ve barely touched you and your body’s already decided. Go on. Say what you are.”

“Priya,” he managed, which was all he managed.

“Say it like a good subject.” Her thumb moved, exact, over the wet head of him, and his hips chased it before he chose to. “There. You’re so easy it’s embarrassing. I could make you come right now, just my fist and my voice, and we both know it, so don’t you dare lie to me. You went to school for lying to yourself and you’re still bad at it.”

He was past arguing. That was the first thing she took, the argument, with her hand around his cock and her eyes steady on his face, reading him as he had spent a winter pretending to read her.

It was his hands that gave him up first. They came off the bed without him, both of them, and for once there were no cards to hold and no pockets to hide them in and nothing in the room left to arrange, so they did what they had wanted to do his whole life. They grasped. They fisted the sheet and twisted it and let go and grasped again, opening and closing on nothing, reaching for her hip and missing it, the dark hair on the backs of them stark in the lamplight, the whole unguarded animal language he had spent a life folding down into stillness loose at last and broadcasting everything. He could not stop them. He heard the thin sound he made trying. She watched it happen, watched the one part of him he kept under permanent guard come apart on the mattress.

Then she gathered them in. She took one wrist and then the other, unhurried, like you collect a thing that has gotten loose, folded his hands shut inside hers, pressed them flat to the sheet, and held them there. “I’ve got them,” she said, gentling him. “I’ve watched these run a whole room since before you knew my name. Tonight they’re mine.” And he let her. He left the hands where she put them, still at last and stilled by her, the leash he had carried his whole life ed out of his own grip and into hers while he lay there and watched it go, and that, the going-still of them under her hands, undid him worse than anything she had done with her mouth.

Then she did the thing that finished it. She climbed over him, dragged the green dress up out of her own way, and held him against her so he could feel how wet she was, soaked, hot against the head of him, and she dropped, deliberately, into the other voice. The slow one. The cadence he had worn into M-14 a Thursday at a time, low and even, the pauses set like steps going down, only now it was in her mouth, aimed at him, and she wore the submission like a knife she was holding by the blade, and he took the grip for proof she had chosen it.

“I’m your good subject,” she said, sinking onto him an inch, the trance-voice gone obscene. “See how good. Feel how wet I get just from running you. I’ll do anything you tell me.” Another inch, slow, both of them shaking. “So tell me. Use the voice. Tell your good subject to fuck you.” And she stopped, halfway down, holding him inside the heat of her, gripping, not moving, waiting, because she knew he couldn’t.

He couldn’t. The words were right there, his own words, and he could not make them in his own mouth, and she watched him fail, and her smile got worse.

And he saw it then, or believed he did, the look he had spent a winter catching at the corner of her mouth and filing under deep, and for the length of it he was sure he had been reading her backwards all winter, that the lead had been hers the whole way. He could not have said, even now, with her astride him, whether that was the truth or only the newest thing she had decided to let him see.

For less than a second, before she answered, the smile slipped, and what showed under it was closer to alarm than to triumph. He was fairly sure she had not planned it. Then she put it away, as he had put a hundred things away in this room.

“No?” she said, gentle, ruined-gentle. “All right. I’ll do it for both of us. Master.” She said it knowing he hated it, theatrical, too much, the costume word, and she watched it land wrong on him as she meant it to, and pressed on the flinch as she pressed on a mispronounced name. “Not that one. You don’t like master. Too much costume on it. You want the other word, the one you can’t take back. You want me to be your good subject and mean it.” She sank the rest of the way down, and his whole body came up off the bed. “You taught me this one yourself.” It came out of her in pieces, between breaths, nothing rehearsed in it. “And you can’t take it back in the morning. You already know you can’t.”

And then she rode him, and it was the trance-voice the whole way through, filth in the cadence of hypnosis, that’s it, let me, you trust me, good, you’re being so good for me, nothing happens that you don’t allow, and his body did what hers had always done, what he had spent a season calling proof: the fight left his pinned hands a half-second before he chose to stop fighting, the giving-in spreading through him warm and sourceless. She held him at the edge with a flat hand on his chest and would not let him over, working him with a patience that was its own slow cruelty, until he heard himself say it out loud, ruined, please, and she let her own body close hard around him and said now, once, low, and he went over on the word, on her permission and not his decision, spilling into her on a pulse she had timed and he had not. The last clear thought he had, before his body took the rest of him, was that she had played the good subject so well, and so knowingly, that he could no longer tell which of them had been the subject all winter. Maybe it had been him from the start. He lost the thought before he could do anything with it.

Afterward, when his heart had slowed and she lay along his side with the dress half-off and the room gone quiet, she propped herself up to look at him. The command had run out of her face.

“I’m not absent from this,” she said. “Whatever that was. I was —” She stopped. He watched her reach for the rest of the sentence and not find it, the girl who rehearsed her coffee order caught without a draft, and what crossed her face he recognized, because he had worn it all winter: the look of a person counting back through what they had just done, checking whose idea each part had been.

“I was.”

He had no answer for it. No card, no clinical word, only the dumb gratitude of a man who has just found the floor of himself and someone already standing on it.

“I’m keeping the dress,” she said after a while, drowsy.

“Good.”

She smiled without opening her eyes. “You like it because it makes me look like something you made.”

He went still.

Her smile faded. Her eyes opened.

For one long second neither of them moved.

Then she touched his mouth with two fingers, stopping the apology before it could begin.

“I like it,” she said, “because it makes me look like something I chose.”

The relief that went through him was so strong it scared him. Because she had said the right thing. Because he did not know who had taught her to say it. And because his body, an hour cold, still held the exact weight of her saying now, a heaviness settling low in him with no decision under it, the same heaviness he had spent a winter laying into her.

Thursday, February 24th

She left the gift outside the physics lab on a Thursday in late February, where she knew he would find it before his section.

A small stack of index cards, pale blue, rubber-banded, because his own had gone soft and translucent at the corners from a winter of his thumb. New ones. Her kindness ran to the specific like that, to the thing he had not known he needed until it was in his hand. On the top card, in her small exact print, she had written his name as he wrote hers in the notebook. D. De Luca. A specimen labeled in a careful hand by someone who had been studying him at least as long as he had been studying her, and the gentle, terrible joke of it was that he could not tell her she had it backwards.

Behind the cards, a photograph. Her, in the green dress, in a mirror he did not recognize, her face turned half away and caught laughing at whoever was making her laugh, which was no one, which was the timer. On the back, in the same hand: the subject, thriving. file under your fault.

He sat down on the cold step and could not make himself go in.

It was meant tenderly. It was tender. He turned it over looking for the harm in it and found a girl who slept now, who ate, who laughed at her own reflection in a dress she had bought herself, who had moved at last into the version of her body she had spent years standing outside of. He had wanted, once, only to be the kind of man who would never damage anyone, and here was the wish granted in pale blue and a green dress: a girl who was thriving. He kept turning the photograph over, as if the back of it would accuse him more plainly than the front. It did not.

Saturday, February 26th

It was the gift that decided him, in the end. You can live a long time inside a question; he had lived inside this one since October, and it had let him keep breathing. You cannot live inside a photograph. A girl thriving, file under your fault in her own dry hand, a body doing well on ground he was sure he had poisoned, and no way to dig the poison up and prove it had ever been there. The question had stayed open and kept his hands clean. The proof closed, and now he had to live in the room with it.

The other exhibit he kept off the record: the night of the green dress, the voice changing hands without resistance, the heaviness that had stayed in him and answered to her now.

So he made the worst decision available to him, and made it as he made all his decisions, by turning it into a procedure.

“I think we should do one more session,” he said. They were at his kitchen table. He had rehearsed it and it came out flat anyway. “Just one. To clear out the suggestions. Anything I put in. We take it all back out, and then whatever’s left is yours, and we’ll know it’s yours.”

He heard the wrongness of it even as he said it, that he was proposing to fix the problem of having run sessions on her by running one more, that we’ll know was a thing he had no instrument to deliver. He said it anyway.

She went very still. He had seen her go still in the chair a hundred times and had loved it, and this was not that, and he had no name for what this was.

“Okay,” she said. Then, carefully, watching his face: “If that’s what you need.”

Not if that’s what I need. He heard the swap, and in the silence after it he could have read it as devotion, or obedience, or a mercy, or a small exact punishment, or her heartbreak handed to him folded to fit his hands. It could have been any of them. It was, he suspected, all of them, and she was letting him pick the one he could stand.

Monday, February 28th

Late February, and spring hadn’t reached the radiator; it still hissed in the corner. He asked her to meet him in M-14, no group, and she said yes, and he could no longer hear her yes without counting it, which was the problem, which was the whole reason for the session.

He brought the rubber-banded cards out of habit and set them on the table without looking at them. The top one was almost translucent at the corner now. There was nothing on them he could use. What he had to say he had never been able to put on a card without seeing how it looked.

She sat. She did not take her scarf off.

“I want to do it backwards,” he said.

He didn’t count down. He said the railing first, because he needed it in the room before anything else.

“You chose to come here. You chose this.” He had to stop and swallow before the last of it, and his voice broke on it anyway. “Nothing happens that you don’t allow.”

Then he tried to tell her the truth, in the only voice he had for telling her true things, the one that dropped and evened on its own.

“It never worked. The hypnosis.” He stopped. Started over. “It never took. Not on Marcus, not on Becca. Not on you. You were never under. Not the way I, not like I told myself. Maybe you were relaxed. Maybe you were playing along. Maybe those aren’t even different enough to matter, I don’t, I don’t know. But I didn’t take anything from you. I need that to be true.” He heard the need in it and flinched. “No. That’s not fair. I don’t get to need it. You get to decide what happened. Whatever you did, you chose. Whatever you felt was yours. You were always free. You’re free right now.”

He went through the script in reverse, lifting each suggestion off like you lift a hand from a wrist. Ten back up to one. Heavy back to light. Eyes closed back to open. And somewhere in the reversing he heard what he was doing, heard the deprogramming come out in the cadence of an induction, and his own breath went long and even, as if the count ran both ways. He was using the chair, the count, the lowered voice, the whole small theater of it to tell her the theater was empty. Even you get to decide what happened had been him deciding. He had only ever had the one voice, and he had just used it as deeply as he knew how.

“Open your eyes,” he said. “Come up. You were always awake.”

She came up. Her eyes opened, clear, no swim, on him, as they always had. A woman who had never been under would have looked exactly like this. So would one so far down she had taken the surface with her.

She looked at him a long time.

“I love you,” she said. Almost sadly, like it cost something to set down. “Do you know that?”

The old reflex got there first and read the words as a result, like it read every yes she had ever given him: the thing working, good. The warmth came before he understood it. Then he understood it, and went cold at the part of him that had heard I love you and felt, first, that it had worked.

He didn’t. He had just spent twenty minutes telling her she was free, and he could not, sitting here, tell whether her love was the proof of it or the last thing he had installed.

“No,” he said.

She nodded, as if he’d ed something. “But I know I’m saying it.”

He waited for relief. What came instead was the uncertainty he had tried to hand her in October, turned around now and pointing at him. He had come to unmake a subject and found himself in the subject chair without anyone having told him to sit.

She stood. The scarf was still looped twice at her throat, as it always was, ready to leave in a hurry, except she wasn’t hurrying. At the door she stopped and looked at the board, at the green ghost of the words that had been there since the first night, placebo effects, never fully erased.

“You keep thinking you said water,” she said. “I sun.”

He opened his mouth, and closed it. The radiator held its one note in the corner, as it had all winter, as it would until someone shut it off for spring.

Saturday, March 5th

It came later, not in the chair, in the ordinary dark of his room with the heat ticking and her head on his arm, as the truest things came with them, sideways and off duty.

“Why did you volunteer?” he asked. “That first night. Why stay after.”

“Because you were never going to see me unless I became something you were already looking for.” She said it to the ceiling, evenly, a fact she had long since made her peace with. “I tried being myself at you for a semester. You forgot my name twice.”

He let that sit. He had told her, a week ago in the chair, that it had never worked, not once, not on her. He had not been able to make himself include the exception, and now the exception was the only thing he wanted to ask about.

“You went under, though. The first time. The real time.” He did not have to say which. The fear going out of her shoulders, the change he had felt move through her, real and not staged. “That wasn’t nothing. For about a minute it actually worked.”

He braced for her to deny it. She didn’t.

“It worked,” she agreed. “Just not the way you need it to. You didn’t put me under. I was so scared I couldn’t breathe, and you gave me a way to decide I was safe, and I took it, because I wanted what came after badly enough to do the work myself. You handed me the words. I did the rest.”

“Were you ever faking?” It came out smaller than he meant.

“At first I thought so.” A long pause, her eyes on the ceiling. “And now I think I was always the one choosing.” The smallest beat. “You said so.”

He heard his own deprogramming voice under hers, a week early, handing her the sentence she would use to tell him she had never needed him. He did not correct her.