"Whatever it is you're planning," Joyce snarled, not even bothering to turn in her chair to look at the man who'd just barged into her office, "go ahead and give it up. I'm not one of the vapid blonde sluts you're used to dealing with, here. I'm not interested in whatever little head games you like to play, I'm not going to take any of the bait you are doubtless going to offer me in a futile effort to distract me from dropping you into a goddamn world of shit, and there is nothing on this earth you can tempt me with. Are we clear?"
She really hoped that was Ricky Drayson behind her. Otherwise that was going to sound pretty fucking stupid.
But of course it was. He'd no doubt gotten her email and come straight over to see if he couldn't somehow weasel his way out of the self-inflicted catastrophe that was about to torpedo his fledgling academic career; and since he couldn't exactly argue with the video evidence that Brooke Sanderson's roommate had collected, he was no doubt going to try to use the same bullshit psychobabble seduction techniques that had worked on a starstruck nineteen year old on an older, wiser, and entirely less patient woman. God, Joyce was going to love chewing him up and spitting out the pieces.
She could already hear the flop-sweat panic in his voice, hidden beneath a veneer of oily charm that had no doubt gotten him through the hiring process despite his marginal qualifications for the teaching position he was about to be fired from. "Of course, Joyce. I absolutely understand. You're a strong, powerful woman. You wouldn't have gotten to where you are if you weren't. And it would do you a grave disservice to suggest that you had a deep submissive streak like... like some people we might know." He was smart enough not to admit to anything, then. Or desperate enough.
Not that she really thought she could do anything more to him than see his pathetic ass out of this university and make sure the stink of scandal clung to all his future endeavors. Sally Mayberry might have gotten him on video seducing one of his students, or hypnotizing her or whatever the fuck that whole scene was about, but he hadn't technically done anything illegal. Unethical, certainly, but any prosecutor watching that footage would have to conclude that Brooke went along willingly with his suggestions. And she was technically an adult, even if she was an adult who still wore pigtails and who apparently called her genitalia 'my little kitty-cunt'. Jesus fucking Christ.
"If you did have a little ember of submission flickering away, all the way down inside the center of your mind," Ricky continued, apparently deciding to dig the hole for himself a little deeper, "it would be so tiny, Joyce. So tiny you could barely see it. So tiny you'd have to focus all your attention within yourself to catch even a glimpse of that tiny spark of relaxed, comfortable surrender to another person's will. You'd have to concentrate very closely, sinking into yourself and thinking closely about how it made you feel to see someone giving in and obeying and falling into a warm, blissful trance."
Oh god. He was really fucking trying it, wasn't he? Joyce swiveled around in her chair, half expecting to find him holding a pocket watch or wearing a pair of big dumb steampunk goggles with spirals where the lenses should be... but of course he hadn't done that in the video with Brooke, had he? He'd just sat there, talking to the bubbly blonde student in that exact same calm, soothing voice he was trying to use on Joyce now. Obviously he thought that if it worked on one woman, surely it would work on all the others. Even a furiously angry one who planned to fire his ass the second he got done giving her enough rope to hang him with.
And it sounded like he might do exactly that. "Perhaps if you focus on that feeling, on what it was like to stare at the screen and watch that slow, thoughtless smile blossom with every mesmerizing moment that passed, you might be able to spot that tiny, flickering glimmer of arousal deep within your own mind. It's very small, of course, and it's buried beneath years of forcing yourself to be strong and powerful and determined no matter how weary and exhausted you really felt. But if you can just imagine what it might have been like to sink into sleepy bliss and give up all that will, all that energy and just relax into another person's control, you might just spot it."
Oh, Joyce knew how she felt, alright. She'd only watched the whole thing once--after that, she'd stopped the footage as soon as Brooke began to take her clothes off out of respect for the young woman's privacy--but she'd studied Ricky's patter several times to find out exactly how he convinced his student to slip away into whatever kind of erotic trance he induced. And every single time, it made her fume with hot, trembling rage. Reminding her of how he used Brooke's vulnerability and the imbalanced power dynamic between them to make her into some kind of, of... compliant slut.... Joyce couldn't believe he thought that would be to his advantage.
But he kept pressing the point. "Just think about how happy those pretty, vacant eyes looked as they fluttered shut. Think about how relaxed and dreamy those soft, sweet sighs of pleasure sounded. Think about all those moans and whimpers, all the begging and pleading to obey and cum for me. Go deep inside your own mind, so deep down inside yourself that the outside world doesn't even exist anymore, and I think you'll be able to find that tiny part of yourself that responds to that kind of attention. It pulses just a little bit whenever you think about being hypnotized and controlled, doesn't it?"
Joyce stared back at him in stony silence, meeting his gaze with an almost indifferent dismissal that she knew had to be driving him up the wall with anxiety. Of course she could feel a little bit of arousal, somewhere deep down inside; she was a human being, after all, and human beings were animals and animals had sex drives. But that was what her vibrator was for, not the goddamn student body. If he thought he was going to get a rise out of her by talking dirty about Brooke, she was perfectly happy to wait him out until he sputtered to a nervous halt and she had the chance to have her say. Her very brief, accompanied by paperwork and followed by an escort to the edge of campus by security guards, say.
