Graded On A Curve

Sandi slowly became aware that she was slumped over on Professor Tate's couch, her face pressed into a wet spot on the cushion where she'd been drooling. She opened her eyes, blinking away a heavy, groggy sensation that didn't fade no matter how hard she tried to push it away, and sat up. "Um, I..." She looked over at Professor Tate, who was sitting in his armchair staring at her sympathetically. "How, how did I do?" she asked.

Professor Tate massaged the back of his neck nervously, his facial expression telling Sandi everything she needed to know. "Well," he said, trying to sound encouraging, "I think we're definitely seeing some signs of real progress. I could certainly tell that you were trying very hard to resist, and I know you've done much worse in the past."

Sandi rubbed her eyes, trying to massage away some of the sleepy sensation. "That's good, I guess," she said ruefully, "but we're not grading on a curve, here. I don't want to resist hypnosis better than I did, I want to be able to resist it completely." She shivered a little, unable to resist the tiny thrill of fear that passed through her every time she thought about being hypnotized. "I have to," she finished emphatically.

Professor Tate gazed at her with warm, sympathetic eyes. The only eyes she could really let herself look into anymore, ever since that day in his 'Approaches to Therapy' course when he first demonstrated hypnosis to the class. She didn't even volunteer, but just listening to his warm, soothing voice as he went through an induction was enough to leave her slumped semi-conscious in her seat gazing vacantly at the floor. The other students hadn't noticed, thank goodness, or she'd no doubt have been turned into someone's mindless slave long before now, but Professor Tate had spotted the signs. He could tell that Sandi was a natural hypnotic subject, virtually incapable of resisting trance.

Or escaping it, Sandi realized, as Professor Tate snapped his fingers a few times to pull her free of his gaze. "That's better," he said, as her eyes refocused. She sat up straight and looked away from him, determined to keep her mind on their work as he went on. "Now, let's talk about your attempts to resist just now. How much do you remember after I told you I was going to hypnotize you?"

Sandi tried to pull her scattered memories together, drawing them into a narrative as best she could. "I remember you took out a, a pendulum," she said, her eyes staring at nothing as she pictured the image in her mind. "And you told me that...that the more I tried to look away, the more...exhausted I'd become." She could already hear her voice taking on a loose, drowsy quality as she let the memory grow more and more solid in her head, knowing she was slipping away into its grip but unable to stop herself. "Had to keep...staring..." She sighed, feeling her body becoming more and more deliciously relaxed with every passing moment.

It would be terrifying, if it was anyone other than Professor Tate. Sandi knew how vulnerable she was to hypnosis; every practice session she had with the professor reminded her of just how dangerously precarious her grip on her own thoughts really was. Looking back, she could spot all the signs-all those times she got lost in a good book so deeply that she didn't even notice her parents calling her down for dinner, or zoned out playing video games so badly that she missed classes. But it wasn't until Professor Tate spoke to her after his lecture that she understood that what she thought was merely an imaginative and focused mind was actually a symptom of her susceptibility to trance.

And despite all their work since then, she was still going under just remembering going under. Professor Tate snapped his fingers again, jolting her back to reality. "Do you remember any of your suggestions this time?" he asked, his face a picture of concern. He tried to hide it, of course. He told Sandi each session that she was making progress, that any day now she'd be able to resist him. But Sandi could tell he was worried about her. And deep down, she was worried too. It was what drove her to push him for more and more practice sessions, more and more time spent struggling against the tug of trance on her thoughts and will. If she couldn't resist, she'd be easy prey for the first unscrupulous hypnotist she met. She had to get better at fighting hypnosis. She simply had to.

She had to get better at fighting suggestions, too. "I think you said...I think you...um...I think..." She squeezed her eyes shut, straining against the fog of warm, lazy bliss in the back of her mind to grasp at even one of the thoughts Professor Tate had planted in her head during her last trance. She could almost feel the shape of it, like a name on the tip of her tongue, but the effort only drained her energy more and more until she sighed in defeat and shook her head. "I...no, sorry."

She felt terribly guilty about wasting the professor's time like this-she knew that he was making more and more room in his schedule for her, to the point of meeting her here at his home on the weekends in order to help her practice resisting hypnosis. He wasn't married or anything, but Sandi felt sure she had to be disrupting his social life with her constant insistence on more and more sessions. He never complained, but it had to be frustrating him that all his work was going to waste on someone who went under at the slightest glance from a captivating pair of eyes.

"It's okay," he said. If he was frustrated, he didn't show it. "We know that memory is one of your...less strong suits. Just knowing that there's something you can't remember is a good sign." He was right, but that didn't make Sandi feel any better. She knew all too well how easy it was for her hypnotized mind to elide over memories that she'd been instructed to forget, or even to construct false memories to smooth over the inconsistencies in her hypnotic commands. She recalled with a shudder the time that she'd spent five whole minutes convinced that women never wore anything under their skirts, attempting with a fully lucid determination to take her panties off right in front of Professor Tate.

The worst part was, it all made so much sense at the time. Sandi's subconscious mind would accept any instruction, it seemed, and her conscious mind would happily construct a framework of rationalizations for it that she accepted without question. She wouldn't wonder what had happened during missing time, she wouldn't think twice about following any hypnotic compulsions no matter how absurd they appeared to a rational person-once she went into trance for someone, they could put her under their complete control and she probably wouldn't even notice.

Thank goodness she could rely on Professor Tate to protect her until she learned how to resist. "You're doing fine, Sandi," he said, giving her another sympathetic smile. "Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint. The more you practice something, the better you get at it. We'll beat this together, okay?" Sandi nodded. Somehow, despite all the evidence so far, she managed to believe him.

"Good." He leaned forward in his chair a little, giving her a mock-stern look. "Then let's see how you do at resisting those suggestions I gave you. There were three of them, this time. Now I know you don't consciously remember them, but I still think that when you experience them, you're going to find it very easy to notice that there's something unusual about your behavior and resist the urge to comply with any hidden commands. Don't you?"

Sandi grimaced, slipping her shoes off so that she could put her feet up on the couch. "I really hope so, Professor," she said, a bit wary of expressing any confidence given her track record. She tried every time, she really did, but it always seemed like the professor's suggestions slipped right past her conscious mind without her even realizing it. "Okay, ready when you are."

The professor gave her a look. Sandi recognized that look. It was a look that said she was already doing badly at the test, but he didn't want to tell her because that would only dent her confidence further. "Remember, you need to try to keep a positive attitude," he said. "I know it's easy to give up on yourself, but if you start out believing you can't succeed, it'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"No, I understand, sir," Sandi said, as her fingers played idly with the buttons on her blouse. She wished she'd brought her fidget spinner to keep her hands occupied, but they both agreed that giving her something eye-catching to look at during these sessions was probably counter-productive. "Believe me, I really do want to resist you. It's just that if I don't know what the suggestions are, they're that much harder to fight." She mentally cursed-she'd accidentally gotten her shirt undone again. She tried to do up the buttons, but her fingers seemed to have come over with a bad case of fumbling. Sandi pulled the shirt off altogether, hoping she could pass off her incompetence as a desire to cool off or something.

Professor Tate chuckled. "Well, it's not like a real predatory hypnotist would only give you easy suggestions to fight, Sandi." His voice grew a bit more serious as he continued. "You need to be able to identify the signs that you're complying with a post-hypnotic trigger even when you don't remember what that trigger was or what it did. Otherwise you'll simply be easy prey for anyone who wants to make you their slave, and we both know you don't want that, do you?"

"N-no, sir," Sandi said contritely, her bra falling from her outstretched hands to the floor. It was a lecture she'd heard dozens of times over the past two years, to the point where she practically dreamed every night about all the things a sinister hypnotist might do to her. She woke up flushed and sweating, her mind still half-dreaming about falling to her knees and mindlessly parting her lips to allow a cock to slip into her mouth or bending over and presenting her wet pussy to be fucked. Some days it was all she could think about. "I'll, I'll try harder, I promise."

She shimmied out of her skirt, wriggling indecently as her hips raised and lowered and squirmed to push the fabric down and off of her body. She hoped Professor Tate didn't mind the show-it was the only way she could keep her stockings from wrinkling when she was lying on the couch like this, and of course she had to wear stockings under her dress. She thought back to the absurd, yet oh-so-logical sounding idea that women didn't wear anything under their skirts and winced at her susceptibility to suggestions. Who would go out without a pair of stockings on?

"I'm glad to hear it," Professor Tate said, his voice sounding just a little bit distracted. Sandi crossed her legs, hoping that it might help if he wasn't staring right at her shaved pussy. "Um. So yes, your suggestions. Um, have you noticed anything you've been able to, um...repel?" Sandi smiled a little. The professor was so cute when he got flustered like this. She tried not to think of him in sexual terms-even if she'd long ago finished his course, he was still a professor and she was an undergrad. But when he started blushing, and the little 'ers' and 'ums' started to get into his sentences like he was too horny to remember the next word, well...Sandi squirmed a little. She couldn't always help herself.

She traced the curve of her breasts with her finger, mischievously deciding to give him a little show. "No, sir," she said, her voice studiously innocent. "I don't think anything unusual is going on here." At least nothing hypnotic, she told herself with an internal chuckle.

"Oh," Professor Tate said, looking a bit crestfallen. "But you still feel confident that you could repel anything you, um...needed to...repel?" He swallowed hard, his eyes drawn almost magnetically to Sandi's crotch as she uncrossed her legs. She put one on the floor and drew up the other, exposing her cunt to his gaze. Something about the way he stared at her made Sandi feel like she was just about ready to make another wet spot on his couch right then and there.

But she wasn't here for that. She was here for important, serious business. "I...yes, sir," she told him, reminding herself that she had to stay confident or she was already giving up half the battle before she even started fighting. "I'm really going to resist this time, sir, I can feel it." Most of what she felt was a tight, hot tingle right on her clit, if she was being completely honest with herself, but she didn't want to tell that to Professor Tate. He was being so kind to her, and she'd hate for him to get the impression that she was just doing this as a way of coming on to him.

The way he stared at her suggested she might not be doing a great job at that, though. "Not just resist, Sandi," he corrected, leaning forward in his chair and rubbing his cock through his pants. "Repel. It's vitally important that you repel every implanted suggestion, that you repel every desire, that you repel the deep hypnotic compulsion even if it seems irresistible to you. Do you understand, Sandi? Repel."

"Y-yes, sir," Sandi whimpered, her fingers sliding down between her thighs to rub her pussy lips. She hated to masturbate right in front of the professor like this, but there was simply no way that she'd be mentally composed enough to resist any suggestions when she was so fucking horny. She had to make herself cum for him; it was the only way to clear her mind and fight her hypnotic compulsions. Her index finger dipped into the folds of her cunt and came away dripping, and she massaged the slickness into her labia with slow, devotional intensity. "M-must..."

"You must repel, Sandi," Professor Tate said, his cock like an iron bar in his trousers. She could see it outlined perfectly, and she couldn't look away. "You have to be a good girl for me, and being a good girl means listening very carefully as you repel and resist. As you repel your resistance. As you resist the urge to repel and repel the urge to resist. You understand perfectly, don't you, Sandi?"

"Um, I...um, yes sir, I...oh..." She didn't, really; the professor's words were starting to sound like gibberish in her ears, like a record playing at the wrong speed. All she really understood was that she needed to rub her clit, needed to stare at Professor Tate's thick, stiff cock as it tented the fabric of his clothing and imagine how good it would feel to have it inside her. Sandi licked her lips as the daydream of slow, languorous fucking became more and more solid inside her mind, as her fingers acted out her fantasy and plunged into her cunt two, then three at a time. "Oh, yes, sir!" she cried out, as her pussy clenched tightly around the intruding digits.

"That's a good girl, Sandi," the professor cooed. "That's such a wonderful job, you're doing so good for me. You can repel all those thoughts, all those inhibitions, repel everything except the pleasure and the peace that comes with obedience. Repel. Repel. Repel..." His voice echoed in Sandi's ears, warm and sweet like thick honey. It clogged her thoughts, and Sandi realized she was sinking into trance all over again just listening to him. She knew she should resist. She knew it was important to resist. Vital, even. But...

But she had to cum. Nothing could be more important than that. Sandi's eyes rolled back in her head as the orgasm finally took her, moaning in ecstasy as her mind finally gave up a struggle she didn't even notice and let herself climax. "Y-yes, sssir..." she slurred out, her hips straining up to meet an imaginary cock as she let her fingers fuck away her thoughts into warm, wet bliss.

She lost track of her orgasms; the count went one, two, lots, fuck fu-fuck FUCK! Numbers seemed too hard to concentrate on, everything seemed too complicated except for the constant piston motion of her fingers in and out of her slick and dripping cunt. She heard Professor Tate talking, and she tried her best to respond, but she was certain that her answers weren't making any sense. All she could do was moan out, "Yes sir," over and over again. It was the only answer she could think of. It was the only answer she wanted to think of. "Yes sir. Y-yes sir. Yes...sir..."

At long last, the pleasure subsided, and she pulled her dripping fingers out of her pussy with a last tiny mewl of pleasure. "Alright, Sandi," Professor Tate said, as his words finally came back into focus. "I'll admit, this probably hasn't been your best showing, but we're going to keep trying. How about we make this last suggestion an easy one to resist?"

A part of Sandi wanted to say, 'Last suggestion?' But she already felt embarrassed enough by her shameless masturbation break; admitting she didn't even notice him testing out the first two suggestions on her would sound a bit too much like she wasn't taking the session seriously. And that would probably break his heart. So she just said, "Yes sir," hoping that he would at least approve of her diligence and respectful attitude.

Judging by his smile, he certainly did. "Okay, Sandi," he said. "For this last suggestion, I'm going to tell you exactly what you're trying to resist. No surprises, no hidden triggers, just a very simple and straightforward hypnosis attempt. When I pull out my cock, Sandi, you're going to find yourself helplessly staring at it until the only thing you can think about is sucking it. The only thing, Sandi. Once you have my cock in your mouth, you're going to go completely blank, totally mindless and open to programming. You won't even remember what happens while you're sucking my cock; my words will go deep into the center of your mind and you'll simply suck and accept. Do you understand, Sandi?"

Sandi nodded, uncomfortably aware of how hard she was staring at the bulge in his trousers already. "Um...yes, sir," she mumbled, struggling against the drowsiness of her afterglow that threatened to pull her into a lazy trance already.

"And do you think you can resist?" Professor Tate asked, his fingers working at his fly, slipping into his boxers. Holding his cock at the ready, prepared to pull it free of the confining fabric at any second to stand straight and erect and captivating...Sandi realized she was drooling again. She swallowed heavily and nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

"That's my good girl," Professor Tate said, sliding his cock up and out of his trousers. Sandi didn't remember what happened after that.

*****

Sandi slowly became aware that she was slumped over on Professor Tate's couch, her face pressed into a wet spot on the cushion where she'd been drooling. She opened her eyes, blinking away a heavy, groggy sensation that didn't fade no matter how hard she tried to push it away, and sat up. "Um, I..." She looked over at Professor Tate, who was sitting in his armchair staring at her sympathetically. "How, how did I do?" she asked.

Professor Tate beamed at her, his smile somehow making her feel good about a performance that she felt certain must have been terrible even by her standards. Not that she wanted to be graded on a curve, but even the worst student needed a little encouragement from her teacher. "You did just fine," he said, reaching over and patting her head. "Maybe a little extra homework before next session-you've got those hypnosis recordings you can use to practice resisting, and I think you'll need to listen to them nightly for a while. But you're coming along wonderfully, Sandi. Just wonderfully."

"Thank you, sir," Sandi said, a touch of hesitation in her voice. Surely she hadn't done very well at all, had she? But the more she thought about it, the more the conviction on Professor Tate's face convinced her. Sandi was coming along wonderfully. She just needed to let the professor hypnotize her more so that she could practice resisting hypnosis more. It was the most important thing in the world to her, and she would allow him to hypnotize her anytime, anywhere. It was the only way to avoid being turned into a hypnotized slave.