Evergreen 3

Joe's parents were terrifyingly well-organized. Seriously, inhumanly well-organized. By the time he bumped into his seventh-grade science teacher, he was beginning to suspect that they had arranged special access to the time portal from 'Star Trek' just so that they could follow every single one of his friends, acquaintances, classmates, teachers, tutors, relatives, and well-wishers from their briefest encounter with him all the way up through whenever they started planning this surprise party.

Which also spoke to the 'terrifyingly well-organized' part, he thought as he shook hands with an old friend he hadn't seen since he was sixteen. He broke the news to them that he was making partner, what...three weeks ago? And in that time, they apparently got out the word to over a hundred of his friends and relatives, got the guest house prepared for a reception, roped in Aunt Meryl's catering firm into what had to have been a brutally short-notice flurry of cooking, flung up loads of decorations, and all of it without even once tipping their hand that they were planning it all. It was absurd.

Thankfully, the initial flurry of hand-shaking and back-slapping had died down a bit. He'd endured seventeen jokes about free legal advice (which he'd be happy to provide, if the drummer from his college band ever needed to merge two multi-national corporations), six pinches on the cheek from aunts and great-aunts, some forty really nice compliments and a surprisingly large number of, "Well, I never would have thoughts..." that he was trying not to take the wrong way. Partner at thirty-six was pretty surprising, even to him. Joe was determined to enjoy it.

He had just taken advantage of the lull to grab a plateful of Aunt Meryl's Swedish meatballs (the foundation of a goddamn catering empire) when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He tried to hide his grimace as he turned around to see yet another person he hadn't seen in...in...oh crap. He had no idea at all who this woman was. Shit. He gave her a bright, cheerful smile that about seventy percent of the guests probably recognized as his cover for social panic, and used the natural pause from having his mouth full to try to place a name with the face.

She didn't look forgettable, certainly. She looked to be about five years older than him, her face given beautiful character by the tiny laugh lines around her sparkling green eyes. Her red hair had faded a little under long hours of sunlight (did she work outdoors? Did she garden a lot? Was she one of his sister's friends in a gardening club?) but still hung down in long, lazy curls that looked casual without appearing messy. Her skin had more of a dusting of freckles than a tan, and she wore an emerald green dress and necklace that matched her eyes perfectly.

Joe tried not to apply the same kind of detailed examination to her body, but she certainly had a very nice one. She had a curvy belly and heavy breasts, and wide swelling hips that seemed made to be held. It was the kind of a body that spoke to a life well-lived, and suggested that there was still plenty of life out there to be enjoyed. Joe was frankly astonished he didn't remember her at all.

That was getting harder to hide. He finished swallowing, and tried not to widen his smile uncomfortably far. "Hi!" he said, making a vague gesture with his plate to excuse his inability to shake hands or hug or kiss or whatever it was she expected him to do. "It's so good to see you? Enjoying the party?"

She gave him a Mona Lisa smile that barely touched the corners of her lips. "You don't remember me, do you?" she asked, looking more than a little amused at the thought.

"I..." Joe gave it one last, desperate try. One of the senior partners had told him, that very first day he joined the firm, that there was no skill more important for a lawyer than remembering people, and he'd worked hard ever since at recalling every person he'd ever met. Today had felt a bit like a quiz, and he was proud of his success rate. But this woman, she didn't ring a bell at all. "No, sorry. I got nothing." His grin became self-deprecating as he tried to pass it off as a joke. "I'm clearly going to need to see a doctor. If I can forget you, there's got to be something wrong with me."

She chuckled, and Joe got to see those lovely laugh lines in action. "And here, I was just thinking there was something very right with you." She took a sip of her wine, her eyes falling away from his flirtatiously for a moment before returning to give him a challenging stare. "My name's Maura, and I tutored you during your gap year. In this very house, in fact. You'd just come back from your trip to Europe, and your parents were a little worried that your freshman year was going to be rough on you. So they convinced you to get a tutor. I think you felt better about the decision when you saw me pull into the driveway."

Joe sorted with rueful laughter, hoping that he hadn't made too bad an impression on Maura back when he was an nineteen-year old horndog. "Sounds like something I might have said in my wild teenage years," he said, running his fingers through his sandy-brown hair in embarrassment. "I must not have been too much of a handful, or I'm pretty sure I'd be wearing that Cabernet."

Maura gave that comment a long, loud laugh. "No," she said, once she could finally speak again. "No, you were a very good student. Mind you, that was back when you still thought you were going to become a famous psychiatrist like your uncle. I'm sure you haven't used many of my lessons in years."

None of this was bringing back any memories, but even if Joe's skill at recollection had inexplicably curdled, he still knew how to socialize. He shook his head and replied, "You'd be surprised. I might have switched majors after my junior year, but ninety percent of being a lawyer is understanding what makes people tick anyway. I probably learned more useful lessons from you than I ever did from Professor Durwood."

She rolled her eyes in amusement. "Oh, honestly," she said. "False modesty aside, you were a much better student than I was a tutor. I was preoccupied with grad school, I had all sorts of other projects on my plate. I think you probably learned more about the things I was studying than you did about Psych 101."

Joe gave a tiny shrug. "I'll have to take your word for it," he said. "I'm very sorry, but I don't remember studying with you at all." He blushed a little, hating to make the admission, but it was true. The eight weeks between returning from Europe and heading off to Yale were a blur of parties and lazy summer afternoons, far from his most focused time of life. He was a little embarrassed to meet someone who only knew him as a lazy and distractable freshman-to-be.

"And that's just what I'm talking about," Maura replied, if anything even more amused. "It's been seventeen years, and you've remembered all your lessons-well, all my lessons, really-just perfectly. Why, I imagine that you'd still respond if I said, 'Emerald Gaze', wouldn't you?"

"I..." Joe blinked heavily, suddenly lost in thought. He hadn't heard that phrase in years, not since...not since before he went to college, he realized suddenly. It reminded him of warm, sunny days, sitting in his bedroom in the guest house and...and staring at something? Something beautiful, something deep. Deep enough to look into for hours, never quite seeing the bottom. He sighed, caught in a reverie that somehow never managed to come into focus.

"It certainly seems to be having an effect," Maura said, her voice deepening into a husky purr. "Let's try that again. Emerald Gaze. What is that doing to you, Joseph?" She reached up to her throat and brushed her fingers slightly against the gemstone in her necklace, drawing his attention to it like his eyes were magnetized to its depths. Depths, he thought, the word echoing strangely in the sudden stillness of his mind. The stone had depths. The more he stared at it, the deeper they went. The more he stared at it...

"...the deeper I go," he murmured, his voice unusually soft in his own ears. He was only half-listening to himself, though. The rest of his attention was on the emerald gemstone, and the way it seemed to have hidden facets within facets that drew his gaze in deeper and deeper. He felt like everything around the edge of his vision was fading, leaving him swimming in fathoms of endless green. It all felt so wonderfully familiar, like he was returning to a place that he had never wanted to leave in the first place. Joe let out another sigh, loving the way that his tension flew out of him with every breath.

"That's right, Joseph," Maura said, taking a step closer, pitching her voice just a bit softer and lower. "You see? You're a perfect student, and you remember all your lessons. You remember to forget, and you forget to remember, just like I told you that you would. Doesn't it feel nice to be a good student?"

Joe nodded, his head bobbing like a marionette and his eyes never leaving Maura's necklace. "Nice," he mumbled, his conversational skills deserting him in the face of all that green, pleasant warmth. It felt too much like effort to think of words, now. Maura could tell him what to say, what to think, and he could just agree. That was so much easier, he remembered now. That felt so much better. Maura would teach, and he would learn.

Maura took his hand in hers, and said, "It's so good that it's all coming back to you, Joseph. But I think you'll remember even better if we were in the same room that you learned your lessons, all those years ago. Wouldn't you agree, Joseph?" Of course he agreed. Maura had just said it, and everything Maura said made so much sense to him. He nodded absently and allowed her to walk him past the kitchen and off into a hallway well away from the throng of guests. If anyone noticed him being led away, they didn't say anything to him.

She took him into his old bedroom, the one he hadn't been inside since he graduated from law school. It brought back a rush of powerful memories, some that he hadn't thought about for seventeen years. Memories of wanting to impress this pretty older girl, wanting to show her that he was listening and paying attention to her explanations of how hypnosis worked. Memories of agreeing to let her hypnotize him, thinking it would be more fun than studying and might even be a good way to get into her pants. Memories of sinking deeper and deeper into her pretty emerald, as she described how easy it was to stare into its heart and let everything else fall away...

"You remember now, don't you?" Maura asked. She locked the bedroom door behind them. Then she reached behind her and undid the snaps on her dress, letting it fall to the floor with a whisper of cloth against cloth.

"Yes," he said, his voice now a pure monotone. "I remember everything now." His cock tented the fabric of his trousers, but he wasn't really seeing Maura's nude body. He only saw the emerald now. Even when she began to unbutton his shirt, it was something he felt more than saw.

She pulled his shirt and jacket off his shoulders in a single smooth motion, leaving them bundled around his wrists. "And what is the most important thing you remember?" she asked, pulling up his undershirt to nuzzle his chest.

Joe sighed, hie eyes rolling back in his head as her lips found his nipples. He always forgot just how sensitive they were when Maura wasn't teasing them with her mouth. "I remember that a good student always listens to his tutor."

"That's a good student," she purred, toppling him back onto the bed with a gentle push. "And what's the next thing you remember?"

He whimpered softly in arousal as her fingers found his belt buckle, undoing his trousers and pulling them down around his ankles. It all seemed so familiar to him now, like he'd spent hours and hours over days and days lying on this very bed, staring at that exact necklace while Maura teased his deeply hypnotized body into new heights of pleasure. "A g-good student only cums," he husked out, his voice drunk with lust, "when it's time to cum."

"Good boy," Maura cooed, teasing his balls with her fingertips. "And when is it time to cum?" She tugged on the shaft experimentally, as if to see whether he'd lost some of his conditioning after years of disuse, but Joe was a very good student. His cock twitched, and an electric pulse of pleasure shot all the way up his spine right into his head, but he didn't release.

"It's time when my tutor says it's time," he whispered. staring blankly at the gem. He was lost in the green, now. Lost in the pleasure. Lost in Maura's soft sensual voice. It all felt so much better than any orgasm possibly could. She jacked his cock over and over, spreading the precum up and down the slick shaft and onto the purple, swollen head, but he was a good student and he was proud to learn all his lessons.

Maura reached down and took his hand, wrapping it around the base of his cock, and he began to stroke himself automatically. He found himself falling into the perfect rhythm of stimulation as she straddled his head, just strong enough to send him deeper and deeper into Maura's power without ever giving him the chance to release. "That's right," she said, her voice a growl of desire now. "And what's the last thing my good, good student always remembers?"

Joe sighed again as his mind inexorably turned to the correct answer. The correct thought. "A good student remembers to forget," he said, just before she lowered herself onto his mouth and he lost the ability to speak for a while.

"I always did mean to get back to your lessons," Maura said, her voice wavering slightly with pleasure as she rode his face. "But then I got on to my post-graduate work in Denver, and you were off in Connecticut, and it wasn't long before we just lost track of each other completely. But your mom was nice enough to keep track of me, and well...when she told me you made partner I simply had to come visit."

Cum. Had to cum. God, Joe needed to cum so badly, needed to spurt his heavy load out all over his chest and stomach and release his pleasure for Maura so much. But he needed to beg permission, and he couldn't beg Maura with his mouth full of her slick and dripping pussy. He redoubled his licking, desperate to give her the climax she wanted so that she would free his mouth to beg her for his orgasm.

"I talked to, to some of your...oh...your friends, Joseph," Maura continued, her voice now quite unsteady. "They said you don't have anyone in your life. That you've been too busy practicing to find a girlfriend. I think...I think you've just been waiting for the right woman. Someone who knows...oh yes right there don't stop...who knows what you want. I know what you want, Joseph. I know just exactly what you want right now."

Joe couldn't process the words anymore, they simply slipped through the fog of lust into the back of his brain and became his own thoughts. He couldn't concentrate on anything but flicking Maura's clit with his tongue, driving her to greater and greater heights of pleasure, wanting to make her cum, needing to make her cum. A good student always made his tutor happy, and Joe realized now that he had never stopped being Maura's student. He had never even wanted to.

"Oh yes," Maura moaned, "oh good boy, oh right there fuck me yes tonguefuck me good boy good boy oh good boy CUM!" She writhed and squirmed on Joe's face, smearing her musk all over his lips and chin as she climaxed, but all Joe's focus had narrowed down to the tiny point of white-hot pleasure at the very tip of his cock. He let out a strangled grunt of ecstasy as the pleasure released itself in spurt after spurt of thick, sticky white fluid.

"Oh, that was nice," Maura whimpered, sounding slightly dazed herself as she slid off of Joe to lie on the bed next to him. "Not exactly a traditional proposal, but I don't think that mouth has ever been put to better use. Wouldn't you agree, Joseph?"

Joe didn't know what he was agreeing to, exactly; the intensity of the climax had washed away his remaining awareness and left him utterly mindless, just like all the other times that he wasn't even capable of thinking about right now. He simply said "Yes, Ma'am," because his tutor wanted him to agree. And she was right about everything, he knew. She always had been.

"Good boy," Maura sighed, rolling over to rest her head on his chest. "Now, let's talk about our future together. And let's talk about what you're going to forget to remember, and what you're going to remember to forget." She began to speak, but Joe was already drifting too deep to understand her words. He knew he would recall them when the time was right, though. No matter how long it took.

THE END