Zoom In

"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.

"And now that you know where it is," he continued, apparently determined to monologue her into submission both literally and figuratively, "you can just imagine your mind's eye zooming in on that tiny little spark. You can picture yourself getting closer and closer to it, descending deeper and deeper into your own subconscious so that you can get a better look at the ecstatic sensation that you saw in someone else and discovering to your amazement just how beautiful it feels. The nearer you get, the more you can experience every detail of what it felt to watch that slow, inexorable surrender to obedience and experience the sympathetic pleasure of relaxing into another person's total control."

Good grief, did Ricky ever get tired of talking? Joyce had already more or less tuned out the specifics of his blather, instead allowing her eyes to settle on his flapping lips while her mind wandered into anticipatory daydreams of firing his yammering ass... but he just wouldn't shut up. He kept going on and on about Brooke and how horny she got, and yes it was impressive in a sick sort of way just how enthusiastically the young woman embraced being degraded and objectified like that but it didn't mean that Joyce wanted to do the same. She just... well, obviously she had a physical response to a visual stimulus, that was all. She couldn't help feeling a little bit of, um, of sympathetic... pleasure....

Joyce blinked heavily, her brow furrowing just a little as she caught the echo of recognition in the words running through her head. She forced herself to blink again, determined not to let her eyes get too focused on Ricky; he might get the wrong idea if she started staring vacantly into space or something. For a moment she thought about interrupting him, but then his words cut smoothly into her train of thought and she decided to let him run his string a little bit longer. "And the closer you get, the deeper you go within yourself," he murmured calmly. "And the deeper you go, the easier it is to relax and the stronger that resonance between you and the woman on the screen becomes."

Joyce sighed in exasperation, certain her subordinate would no doubt mistake it for pleasure or arousal or something just as wrong. "That's it," he purred, his misjudged confidence growing with every word. "You're relaxing just like she relaxed, and you're enjoying it just like she enjoyed it. You can see how good it feels to mirror her pleasure with your own, and the closer you get to that flickering, glittering spark of arousal within yourself the more you can imagine exactly what she felt with every moment of her descent into obedience. Her pussy got so wet, didn't it? So slick and needy and eager to sink deeper and surrender to my will."

It was as good as a confession as far as Joyce was concerned, even if it wasn't like she was recording their conversation or anything. Not that she needed to--the only recording she needed was the video of poor Brooke spreading her thighs with mindless abandon to display her messy cunt to Ricky's hungry, lascivious gaze. He was right about one thing--that young woman was horny as hell. Joyce didn't watch much porn, but she had a hard time imagining that anyone could be that turned on just from a little bit of weird ASMR dirty talk. She squirmed in her chair, suddenly consumed by the worry that she might have gotten a little bit aroused herself from remembering it all.

But it was nothing to worry about. Just a little bit of, of sweat, probably. Nothing to concern herself with. She could just sit and wait and outstare Ricky as long as it took and not have to think about it at all. "You don't have to think about anything else at all," Ricky said, echoing her thoughts almost before Joyce could think them. "You're so close now, but it feels almost like you haven't really been moving at all this entire time. You've just been sitting there, relaxing into your chair, relaxing into your own deep and drowsy mind, and that flickering ember of arousal and submission has gotten bigger and brighter and stronger the more you remember the hypnosis that captured Brooke's will and made her blank and foggy and blissfully obedient to my will. Blank. And foggy. And blissfully obedient to my will." Something about the strange, drawn out emphasis on the words made Joyce blink again. Her eyes opened a little bit slower this time.

"Or perhaps that brightly burning ember has remained the same all along, Joyce," Ricky continued, his stare boring into her eyes and pinning her in place, "and it's you who've gotten smaller. Perhaps you've been shrinking into yourself this entire time, diminishing until the flame of arousal is as big as you are, then becoming smaller still until it's the largest thing you can imagine inside your head. And then ten times bigger. And then a hundred times bigger. And then a thousand times bigger than that." Joyce could hear a strange, heavy panting sound in her own ears. Slowly, sluggishly, she realized it was her own breath.

"Zoom in again, Joyce," Ricky went on remorselessly, his voice cutting off her train of thought again and again before it could even begin to form. "See it get ten thousand times bigger, feel yourself get ten thousand times smaller. You're being swallowed up by it now, studying it from within and finding that it's all around you and making you so very wet and needy and helpless to resist." Joyce's fingers slipped into the waistband of her exquisitely professional navy blue pencil skirt and underneath the cotton fabric of her panties. She was astonished to find a slick, feverishly warm mess between her legs. She was even more astonished to realize what she'd just done.

"That's it, pretty girl," Ricky cooed, nodding approvingly to her. Joyce's eyelids fluttered, and she knew that the exact same smile she'd watched on Brooke's face... six times? Seven times? Twenty times? It was blossoming on hers. She was echoing Brooke's surrender, echoing her pleasure in submission, and she could tell because she could see every tiny flickering flame within the raging fire of arousal she felt right now and they all looked exactly like the helpless blonde's descent into deep, hypnotic trance. Trance just like this one. Trance that made her so, so fucking wet. Joyce wriggled out of her panties with an impatient grunt, desperate to masturbate herself further into Ricky's power.

"And every time you think of that video, you're going to remember how good it felt to submit to my will. You're going to sink straight down inside your mind, all the way down until you're weak and tiny and that need to surrender feels so much greater than anything you can imagine. You're going to want to help me get Sally alone, so that I can talk to her and show her how good it feels to be a good girl like Brooke. You're going to want to be hypnotized by me again and again, anything to experience this wonderful warm bliss again inside your vacant and compliant brain. And every time, that invisible leash around your thoughts is going to grow stronger, isn't it?"

Joyce nodded helplessly, her clit throbbing with every bobbing motion of her empty head. She didn't know exactly when she'd given up control of the situation, but she knew it was gone now and she could never get it back. She was so small now, and the flame of her submission was everywhere behind her closed eyelids. All she could see was Brooke's smiling, hypnotized face, blank and blissful and eager to obey her Master's commands. She watched Brooke undress in her mind's eye, scarcely even realizing that her own hands mimicked every one of the young student's motions. And then she pictured Brooke spreading her legs for Ricky's throbbing cock, and she knew what had to happen next.

THE END