Joan looked up at the clock. It seemed to have stopped at 3:28, but that was probably just her imagination. Her watch also said 3:28. Mind you, she'd been pretty sure for a while that her watch had stopped too. Maybe both of them had stopped.
Time seemed to have been doing funny things to Joan all day. At some points, it had been going by unpleasantly quickly, sneaking past her when she wasn't paying attention. Now, when she was just getting to the moment she'd been dreading for the last week, it had apparently decided to stop completely. She fidgeted in her chair, examined her reflection in the window for a moment and tucked a few stray strands of long black hair back into her ponytail, looked down at the small sheaf of papers, pushed her glasses up on her nose, and looked at the clock again. Still 3:28. It must have stopped. She stared at it more intently, trying to determine if it was moving. It didn't have a second hand, so she had to watch the minute hand very closely...
When the intercom buzzed, Joan let out a tiny yelp of surprise before she realized what the sound actually was. She pressed the button. "Yes, Amy?" she asked, trying to compose herself.
"Doctor Eisen? It's Lori Hilton, here for her 3:30 appointment."
Joan nodded. Lifetime bad habit, but one she never could break. "Go ahead and send her in," she said. She looked down again at the papers on her desk. Her hand ached with the desire to press the buzzer again, to tell her secretary to send Lori away. She just wanted to hide in her office for the rest of the day and then go see if she couldn't find a bottle of liquor, a dark corner, and quite possibly a time machine. But she knew that the right thing to do was to see Lori and make amends.
Lori walked into the office, her curly blonde hair freshly permed, looking as always like she'd just stepped out of the pages of 'Maxim'. "What's up, doc?" she said with her usual dazzling smile. Same corny joke, but she told it every week. Joan usually laughed as much from the familiarity as any humor value. Today, she didn't even crack a smile. She could barely bring herself to look at Lori.
She opened her mouth to speak, and had to spend a few moments swallowing before she got any words out. Finally, she managed a few words. "Lori, I..."
Lori sat down in the chair across from Joan's desk, the one Joan would usually sit in as Lori took her position on the couch. Not today, though. Not ever again. "What's wrong?" she asked.
Stunned amazement almost shocked Joan out of her misery. 'What's wrong?' Did she honestly not understand? Did she not remember somehow, had she blocked it out of her memory due to trauma or shame or...or...had Joan imagined the whole thing, perhaps? She dearly wished she had, but...no. It was real. Joan had to deal with it, even if Lori apparently couldn't. She stood up and took the papers from her desk, walking around to hand them directly to Lori.
"Here," she said. "These are some recommendations for other hypnotherapists you can see, as well as contact information for the American Medical Association and the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. If you want to bring up an ethics charge against me, I understand completely. I won't fight it. What I did last week was...it was wrong, it was unethical, it was unprofessional, I should never have...have..." She trailed off, not sure how to put the enormity of her shame into words.
Lori seemed confused for a moment, but then understanding dawned on her. "Doctor Eisen...Joan..." she said. "You don't have anything to feel bad about! I'm not upset with you. I enjoyed it."
"That's exactly the problem," Joan said.
*****
"Now, Lori," Joan said, "I want you to watch the metronome, and as you do, I want you to remember all those sensations that you've felt so many times before. It's very easy to drift into trance, and you're going to find it happening just as easily and naturally as always." She watched Lori's eyes as they followed the swaying pendulum. Already, they were half-closed, and a wide, dreamy smile spread across Lori's face as she relaxed into the couch cushions.
Lori was an excellent hypnotic subject, as always. That was half the problem. Some clients took weeks, even months of sessions before they could achieve a state of trance at all, but Lori would sink under for just about anything. Metronomes, pendants, watches, penlights...it didn't matter what Joan used as the focus. She could probably just snap her fingers the second Lori walked into the room, and the girl would go into a trance right then and there. Joan tried very hard not to think about that. It only exacerbated things.
Lori let out a little whimpery sigh as her eyes closed. Joan stilled the metronome, trying not to think about the way that sigh sounded. She looked over again at the piece of paper on her desk, the one she'd been planning to give Lori before canceling this week's session. The one she'd decided (again) to give her at the end of the session instead. Trying to keep her voice steady, she said, "Lori, I want you to relax and let yourself go deeper now. Just count down from ten to one, and let each number take you further into trance. If you lose track of where you were, or forget a number, that's alright. That's a sign that you're going very deep. Just relax and count for me now."
"ten," Lori said, in that soft, purring voice. She wasn't making any progress at all, Joan could tell just from her tone as she continued to count. "nine...eight...ssseven..." Lori slurred her words a little as her lips became too relaxed to enunciate clearly. "seven...six...three..."
Joan waited for a moment for more numbers, but it was pretty clear that Lori was too deep to remember how to count. She really had never seen a hypnotic subject as good as Lori. It wasn't just natural susceptibility, of course. She'd had plenty of practice. "Lori," Joan said, "we're going to talk about your week now. You're very deep, very relaxed, and you know I'm not going to judge you. I'm just going to listen, as you tell me openly and honestly about what's been going on the last week. Let's start with your last session. What happened after you left here?"
"i went into the restroom and masturbated," Lori said. She didn't even look ashamed. Hell, she looked thrilled. "i went into one of the stalls, and i pulled down my panties and i pulled up my skirt and i remembered how you'd hypnotized me, and how good it felt, and i just rubbed my clitty until i came all over my hand..."
"Alright, Lori," Joan said. Part of her wanted to interrupt sooner, but she didn't want to make Lori feel ashamed of sex. "Tell me about the rest of your week." She just wished she could get the poor girl to disassociate sex from hypnosis. Joan looked down at her notebook, at the conclusions she'd come to over a month ago. 'Patient shows no sign of improvement, or even of wanting to improve. Her hypnofetishism seems not to have abated at all in the six months she's been in my care.' Joan tried to push the words to the back of her mind as Lori began to speak.
"it was a nice week," Lori said in a half-sigh. Joan knew what that meant. 'Patient shows no signs of wanting to improve.'
"Lori," Joan said, trying to keep reproval out of her voice, "did you let anyone hypnotize you this week?"
"uh-huh," Lori said blissfully. Joan had learned by now to make sure to hypnotize her before asking her any of these questions. Lori might lie when she was awake, but her subconscious mind had been too deeply conditioned by too many successive hypnotists to be able to lie to Joan when she was in trance. "a boy was texting me when i was at my computer. we were talking about hypnosis, and he told me he could tell that i was a very good subject. he told me i would keep reading his words as they scrolled up the screen, and my eyes would just follow and i would go deeper..."
She was going deeper just remembering it, Joan knew. Lori had no hypnotic defenses at all. She'd go into trance for anyone. She wanted to go into trance for anyone. She got off on going into trance for anyone, and despite the fact that she'd come to Joan specifically to get help with that exact problem, seven months had gone by and she was still trancing for random strangers over the Internet.
"and he had me put on the headphones, and connect to him in voice chat..." So why did Joan keep doing this? Why didn't she just hand over that list of other hypnotherapists to Lori and admit the obvious, that she wasn't doing anything worthwhile to help the girl? (Assuming she wanted to be helped at all, which Joan had begun to doubt.) Joan looked down at the next sentence, the one she hadn't wanted to read. 'My sessions haven't done anything to separate hypnosis and sex in her eyes. Instead, she's begun associating me with the sexual pleasure she gets from hypnosis.'
"he just kept talking to me, telling me to sink deeper, and it felt so good that i had to obey..." She hadn't ended the sessions because Lori was attracted to her. No. That was a lie. She hadn't ended the sessions because she was attracted to Lori. Every time she thought about breaking off their therapeutic relationship, every time she made the resolution to send Lori somewhere else to get her help, or to get her fix, or whatever it was she was getting out of this...she remembered those soft, dreamy tones, the way Lori looked so sweetly helpless on the couch, all the intimate, erotic fantasies the girl confessed in trance, and she put it off another week. She hadn't ended it because she wanted to keep trancing Lori. And knowing it was wrong hadn't made it any easier to stop.
"...and he told me to turn on the webcam, and i did, and it felt so niiiice...it felt like his voice was caressing my mind, and i wanted to be naked for him so much..." Joan glanced over at Lori, embarrassed to have been woolgathering during a session. But what she saw embarrassed her even more. Lori wasn't just remembering the hypnosis, she was reliving it. Her hands had unbuttoned her blouse of their own volition, and she squirmed on the couch obscenely, causing her dress to bunch up around her hips.
Lori hadn't even bothered wearing panties today.
*****
"Don't you see, Lori? I took advantage of you. You were in a very vulnerable emotional state, and I...I..." Joan still had trouble finishing the sentence. She still couldn't believe she'd done it. Five years of professional practice with both men and women, and now this...she only wished she had the courage to report herself. She deserved to have her licence stripped, she deserved disgrace and humiliation and ruination. But Lori just looked at her with that bright, beaming smile. That made it so much worse.
