Dogs Can Grow Beards All Over

"Wow, Matt, you really look like shit," Donna said from the doorway of the common room. On any other day, Matt would probably have argued the point-hell, on any other day he probably would have disagreed with Donna on just about anything, up to and including the color of the sky. But today he knew she had a point. He could feel the scratchy, dark brown stubble of two days covering his chin, his short hair hung in limp, greasy strands, and his hazel eyes felt like they were ninety percent red vein right now. He felt worse.

"Hi, Donna," he said, sitting up in his chair in a vain effort to look presentable. He'd moved his cram session from his dorm to the common room about four hours ago, hoping that the general commotion would help keep him from nodding off into his biology textbook, but he never bothered changing out of his flannel pajamas. Which probably meant he was overdressed by dormitory standards, but he still felt kind of sheepish with Donna's ice-blue eyes boring into him. "I, um...I've got mid-terms in about ten hours." The words took a surprising amount of effort to mush together into a coherent sentence.

"It's clearly going great," Donna said, taking a seat at the table across from him. She turned her head a little, her sandy blonde hair waterfalling over her shoulder as she read his textbook upside down. "Oh, you've got Thorndyke," she said, her breath drawing in like she'd just learned that he was going in for a double root canal. "Better get your sleep, that test's a nut-buster."

"Takes one to know one," Matt blurted out before he could stop himself. There was just something about Donna that always brought out his confrontational side like that; he wasn't sure what bugged him more, the fact that she could get under his skin so easily or the fact that she took evident enjoyment from their sharp-edged conversations. It was like she was pushing him up to his challenge line every time, waiting to see whether she could get him to back down, and he always felt guilty even if he was just giving back as good as he got.

This time, he tried to make nice. "Sorry," he mumbled, staring down into his textbooks. "I'm just a little on edge right now. I'm going to have to crash soon if I don't want to fall asleep during the exam, and I still feel like everything's all jumbled. I can't keep my taxonomy straight, and I keep forgetting the...the...shit!" He looked down at his book. "Anaphase. I keep forgetting the goddamn anaphase!"

"Oh, that's no problem!" Donna said brightly, shifting her chair over so that she was sitting next to him. Matt was almost startled out of his seat-normally, this would be her cue to remind him that she was on the Dean's List, or mention that she aced Thorndyke's class with 102% or something. But apparently this time she planned to use her smug know-it-all powers for justice by dragging Matt kicking and screaming into knowledge.

"The trick is to get a good mnemonic," she went on, grabbing a piece of paper from his notes and his pen. "You need something that has a vivid mental image, so that the image always leads you to the mnemonic and the mnemonic always leads you to what you're trying to remember. So for taxonomy, the order is 'Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species'." She wrote down on the paper a hasty D, K, P, C, O, F, G, and S.

"Now you take that and you turn it into a sentence," she said, writing in a word for each letter. "Like, say, 'Do Kindly Pull Clothes Off For Goodness Sakes.' And you associate an image with that, like stripping naked in the middle of biochem class. And now you're never going to forget that for the rest of your life, are you?"

Matt blushed. He hadn't expected the conversation to go in exactly that direction, but he had to admit that Donna was right-he probably wasn't going to forget Donna talking about him taking his clothes off in public. The incredible awkwardness of his biggest frenemy for the last six months suddenly cozying up to him and making up dirty mnemonics for him was acting to cement the lesson in a way that normal tutoring never could. He might want to forget, and he might very well spend the next week trying to forget, but as long as he didn't actually forget until the test was over, he'd take it.

"I can tell I've struck a chord here," she said, taking his silence for acquiescence. "Let's try another one. The lifecycle of a cell is Interphase, Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase, Telophase, Cytokinesis." The letters I, P, M, A, T and C joined the others on the sheet of paper. "Again, we just need a vivid phrase that leads to a vivid image to cement that into your sleepy brain." She gave Matt a grin that he couldn't quite categorize, a smile that didn't exactly feel genuine but didn't look like the normal plastic smirk people gave when they were just trying to be polite.

"So let's turn that into a sentence. Say, 'Intelligent People Make Awesome Toys, Commonly.' Now you can just picture me playing with you like a human Ken doll, and that'll bring back your sentence, and your sentence will bring back the cell phases. You'll never forget anaphase again when you remember that it's also Awesome, right?"

Matt blushed even more deeply now, staring down at the piece of paper like he was committing it to memory. Which he was, but he was also avoiding Donna's gaze. Couldn't they just argue about her taste in movies or her feelings about letting cats out at night or something? They'd argued all the damn time over every little thing, but this was something completely new and he didn't have any defenses up. It was like she'd walked right around his challenge line and picked him up by the scruff of the neck or something, and he couldn't think of a single snappy comeback. He couldn't even find a response that didn't sound like something a thirteen year old boy would say.

"Good, you just get those words deep into your head," Donna said, patting him on the shoulder with a shocking familiarity. "Honestly, I can teach anything with mnemonics. I could get 'Donna Compels Gentle Brainwashing And Obedience' stuck into someone's head if I turned it into 'Dogs Can Grow Beards All Over' and gave them a picture of a scruffy-looking poodle to think about." She chuckled, seemingly oblivious to the way Matt's blush had risen all the way up to his forehead like a thermometer on a hot day.

Matt continued pretending to study his notes while he struggled to find a response, but the silence stretched out into conversation-killing eternity as he felt Donna's amused stare on the back of his neck. Every time he glanced up from the corner of his eye, he could see that same weird smirk on her face. There was something appraising about her smile, like she'd finished sizing him up and had zeroed in on his weak spot. He almost longed for a good political debate at this point, if it would just take his mind off of the awkward confluence of being stripped naked and posed doing God knew what.

It was a tremendous relief when Donna finally said, "That's enough studying for one night. Thorndyke doesn't usually put the functional groups on the midterms, so you're probably safe getting some shuteye before the test." She swept his papers up with a single authoritative gesture, rapped them loosely on the table to straighten them, and tucked them into his textbook. "Off to bed with you. Plenty of REM sleep, that'll help you lock in everything you need to remember from tonight." She handed him his textbook with the authoritative air of a governess tucking her charges into bed.

It was all too much for Matt. He stumbled to his feet and mumbled out a hasty, "Thanks," before scurrying out of the room and back to the safety of his dorm. He set an alarm for forty-five minutes before class, then flopped onto the bed and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. He had strange, uncomfortable dreams of staring at gibberish exam questions while completely naked in a lecture hall filled with shaggy dogs, until Donna came up behind him and started stroking his cock and reminding him that it would be so much easier to understand it all now...

He woke up feeling unsettled and confused, and it took almost five whole minutes for his erection to finally subside. But he aced the midterms.

*****

Three days later, and Matt found himself outside Donna's door with a slightly bewildered expression on his face. He knocked on the door, half-hoping he wouldn't get a response, but he barely lifted his knuckles after the first rap when he heard her say, "Come in!" Awkwardly, he slipped inside, closing the door behind him.

Donna was lounging on the bed wearing her own pair of pajamas, these ones pink silk instead of checkered flannel. She had a copy of Psychology Today in her hand, but she tossed it on the pillow and sat up when she saw him enter the room. "Matt!" she said, her face lighting up in an unnervingly excited grin. "Come back for some more memory tips? I've got a good one for the periodic table if you're interested..." She wiggled her eyebrows in a way that suggested that all of her mnemonics were just as perverted as the ones she'd shared with Matt a few nights ago in the common room.

"Um, actually," Matt said sheepishly, "I was kind of wondering, um..." He could feel the blush creeping back in, along with the memories of Donna's almost-sinister grin as she described her memory enhancers in all-too-personal terms. She had a similar smile on her face right now, watching him stammer and squirm like a nervous schoolboy. "I was going to ask how you got rid of one once you had it."

He felt so stupid saying it, but it really was true. He'd done two labs on canine anatomy and a shift at the local animal shelter since finishing up his midterms, and every single dog he saw reminded him of that stupid 'Dogs Can Grow Beards All Over' mnemonic. Which reminded him of what it stood for, which bugged him because sticking it in his head in such an unforgettable way so that it kept popping up in his brain every time he saw a dog when Donna knew full well he was training as a vet seemed like it was sort of brainwashing him, and then he felt squirmily awkward thinking about being 'compelled to obedience', and three days of it finally made him decide to stop by Donna's dorm room and...

And what? Tell her to knock it off? Deliver a firm 'No brainwashing' speech? Make her take back her gypsy curse? The more he realized how idiotic he looked, the more he wanted to slink back out of the room and pretend he was never here, but judging by Donna's reaction, it was way too late for that now. She leaned forward with a predatory air, and said, "Oh? And which one is giving you problems? 'Do Kindly Pull Clothes Off For Goodness Sakes'?"

Matt flinched at the words, before his brain inserted the quote marks in the appropriate spaces and he realized what she was intending to say. (Or what he hoped she was intending to say.) "No," he said, knowing that she already knew the answer and also knowing she would wait all day for him to say it if she had to. "The...the other one. The one you said as a joke."

Donna scratched her chin theatrically. "I don't recall joking about anything the other night," she said, her voice filled with a mockingly faux-musing quality. "In any event, I'm afraid I don't have any good advice for you on how to get something unstuck from your head. I still remember a bunch of random lists of things just from their mnemonics. Like the Great Lakes-'Helplessly Obedient Men Enjoy Slavery'. Or the order of the planets-'Mesmerizing Vixens Enslave Men Just So Uncontrollably Nicely'. The whole point is that they get into your head and stay there."

Matt let out a steam-whistle sigh of frustration. "But I don't want it to stay there," he said, aware that he sounded more than a little petulant. "I don't need to remember that Donna Compels Gentle Brainwashing and Obedience!" He tried not to imagine the capital letters in his voice, but they somehow seemed to be there anyway.

Donna looked ostentatiously nonplussed. "Really?" she said. "Why not?"

The room settled into another awkward silence as Matt sputtered, trying to find an obvious reason. Because he and Donna couldn't spend more than five minutes in a room before narrowing down their entire range of topics to the one thing they were ready to fight over. Because he wasn't into weird kinky shit and she had decided to make it really obvious to him that she was. Because he was an independent person and not some sort of, of submissive slave boy. Because...because...

And yet, every single one of his objections always seemed to have the same elegant counter-argument, one that played on an increasingly frequent loop in the back of his head. Donna Compels Gentle Brainwashing and Obedience. It didn't matter if they used to fight; it didn't matter if he never thought of himself as submissive. That was what a compulsion was, after all. It was irresistible. That was what brainwashing was, too. It changed patterns of thought. The more Matt tried not to think about it, the harder it became to think of anything else. Donna Compels Gentle Brainwashing and Obedience.

"You can keep doing that, sweetie," Donna said. Matt realized with a start that his hand had drifted all on its own down to the unexpectedly tight crotch of his jeans, and was...not exactly rubbing, just yet, but definitely enjoying the way it felt to put a little rhythmic pressure down there. He jerked his hand away, looking at it as though it was an alien being at the end of his hand. Startled, he fled the room.

The sound of Donna's laughter followed him the whole way down the hall.

*****

He lasted a full week before he returned. "Help," he whispered, in a voice that showed the strain of seven days of struggle. His eyes were shadowed again, hooded from exhaustion. He couldn't sleep-every dream turned into Donna's voice, whispering in the back of his head, reminding him that Donna Compels Gentle Brainwashing and Obedience. He was constantly horny, but her mantras were the only thing he could think of when he masturbated. He couldn't fight it anymore. He needed her to tell him what to do, how to stop this constant obsession. Even though he had the sinking feeling that she wouldn't tell him to stop at all.

"Of course I will, honey," Donna said, her smile soft and sweet and utterly triumphant. "But first, why don't you pick up where you left off?" She reached down between her own legs, brushing away the folds of her robe, and began to gently trace the outline of her labia through her panties. Unthinkingly, Matt began to mirror her motions.

"That's right," Donna whispered, as her fingers swirled in slow, mesmerizing circles around the silken fabric. "Just keep going for me. Don't stop. Don't think." Matt had a last desperate urge to pull his hand away, but the intense pleasure he felt when Donna told him to keep going made him rub a bit more openly instead.

"See? It's not so bad, being obedient," Donna purred, as Matt's fingers ran up and down the length of his shaft where the fabric of his pants outlined it. "It feels good when I brainwash you, doesn't it? When you stop struggling and give in to that compulsion. It was bound to happen sooner or later anyway, honey-that's the thing about trying to get something out of your head. The harder you try to stop thinking about something, the more you wind up thinking about what you're trying not to think about. I'm kind of surprised you resisted this long."

Matt squirmed, although he couldn't say for sure whether it was from embarrassment or arousal. Donna had lowered her voice into a throaty purr that seemed to go all the way down his spine to buzz at the base of his cock, and his rubbing was becoming more and more urgent with every passing moment. He tried to tell himself that he wasn't into this, that he shouldn't be enjoying it, but the surges of electric bliss shooting through his twitching shaft spoke with far more elegance and force than the fading voice in the back of his mind.

The front of his mind was repeating one phrase. Donna Compels Gentle Brainwashing and Obedience.

"That's a good boy," Donna husked out, absently rubbing between her own thighs as she watched him with eyes hooded with lust. "It's so easy to let that cock do the thinking now, isn't it? Just relax, let yourself become helplessly obedient for me as you stroke up and down. Up...and down. Listening to everything I say, because Helplessly Obedient Men Enjoy Slavery. Because Intelligent People Make Awesome Toys, Commonly. Because Mesmerizing Vixens Enslave Men Just So Uncontrollably Nicely."

Matt nodded along, his eyes now staring vacantly into the distance as he let the pleasure overwhelm him. He couldn't stop stroking anymore, couldn't stop agreeing, couldn't stop being mesmerized and enslaved and compelled and brainwashed and obedient. He was panting with arousal now, aching with the need to wrap his hand around his cock and jerk it until he descended into mindless bliss. He just needed something, some final push over the edge into complete surrender for Donna...

"Do Kindly Pull Clothes Off, For Goodness Sakes," Donna said. Helplessly, Matt complied.

THE END