Helen still read comic books as a grown-up, and it was one of the things that impressed Mary the most about her. When Mary got to high school, she let the scornful glares and mocking comments from her fellow students shame her out of her love of 'World's Finest' and 'Wonder Woman', and even after she graduated and got a job down at the local drugstore the thought of someone seeing her with something so obviously childish as a comic book kept her from taking the hobby back up again.

But Helen Griffin came in every Friday afternoon like clockwork, stopping at the bank to deposit her paycheck and making sure to keep five crisp, clean dollar bills for herself before walking into the drugstore and buying one of each and every new comic on the spinner rack. She didn't sneak off and read them furtively in her room at Alma Lake's boarding house, either; she took the change, walked over to the soda jerk, and bought herself a chocolate milkshake the size of her head before working her way through the entire stack with a distant smile on her face.

Nobody ever made fun of Helen, but perhaps everyone had used up all their snide comments on her by now. In a town as small as Beaver Dam, Washington, everyone at least thought they had a pretty good idea of everyone else's business, and Mary Bailey knew that Helen was still unmarried at thirty and turned every man who propositioned her down colder than the ice cream she was spooning into her mouth. Most folks thought it was because she was fooling around with her boss, or at the very least pining for him, but Mary just thought the older woman valued her independence. It was another thing she admired about her.

She didn't realize just how obvious her admiration had become until one afternoon when Helen finished up her milkshake, tipping back the very last rivulets of chocolatey cream down her throat before carefully wiping her fingers on a napkin to avoid getting any stains on her new purchases and said to Mary, "You know I keep them, right?" Mary blushed, suddenly aware that she'd just been standing there at the counter watching Helen read the entire time, and she did a momentary goldfish impression as she struggled to find the right words to respond.

"Um, wha, sorry, w-what do you keep?" she stammered, feeling her youth and inexperience closing in on her under the weight of Helen's amused stare. Mary was twenty, but she couldn't imagine even in ten years achieving the kind of poise and grace and unselfconscious self-confidence Helen had, and she felt sure in that instant she sounded like such a nitwit Helen was probably already regretting talking to her at all. Her chubby pink cheeks went beet red.

But Helen's indulgent, knowing smile only widened into something sly and conspiratorial. "The comics, silly," she replied, scooping up the entire stack and tucking them under her arm. "I don't throw them out once I'm finished with them, or give them away to the neighborhood kids. Only thing I do is sometimes cut out the coupons you can use to send away for free stuff, but you can just read around those parts. They're in a box in my room if you'd ever like to stop in and take a look--you stay just a few doors down, right?"

Mary never imagined that a tall, elegant blonde like Helen who dressed in silks and satins and wore a pearl necklace would ever notice where someone round and short and mousy like her lived, but she nonetheless nodded. "Well, that makes it very simple," Helen chuckled. "Alma never makes any mind about girls being girls, so long as we're quiet, so you just knock on my door any time you want." She leaned in, putting her hand to her mouth as if to hide a secret from the world, even though it was just the two of them in the drugstore at the moment. "Alma bought a blender last month, so I can even whip you up a milkshake if you ask nicely."

Mary didn't even know how to answer that. She felt like she was made of glass and Helen was staring right through her. "I, I, I guess I'd like that," she mumbled, feeling like she'd fumbled every last bit of that conversation, but before she could try to salvage it Mister Bitterman came in looking for some stomach pills and she had to attend to him instead. By the time she got him sorted out, Helen had headed out.

But Mary thought about her offer the whole rest of the afternoon.

*    *    *    *    *

She didn't take her up on it, though, at least not that day. She stopped at Helen's door, knuckles poised above the wooden surface in an agony of indecision for a long, silent moment, but in the end Mary convinced herself that the older woman simply had to have been joking, or maybe just being polite. There simply wasn't any way a woman as poised and graceful as Helen Griffin would want to spend an evening alone and on purpose with a Mary Bailey. They might as well have named the spinster in the movie after her, not that Mary had much interest in being swept off her feet by a handsome man. She'd seen first-hand with her big sister the trouble that could cause for a young woman.

She stopped by without knocking again the next day, and again the day after that, and she probably would have done the same a fourth time if the door hadn't unexpectedly opened just as she was raising her hand for another attempt at convincing her knuckles to rap on the hard wood. "Well fancy meeting you here," Helen drawled, as though she'd been just about to leave the room rather than very clearly standing there in her housecoat just waiting to hear Mary's footfalls right outside the door. "I've been hoping to run into you again. Why don't you come inside and you can peruse my collection?"

Just the way she said that made Mary blush; it was as if she gave the words the smutty twist of a Mae West or a Marilyn Monroe, a flirtatious spin that the actual meaning didn't imply at all. Mary didn't understand why, not when it was just the two of them in the hallway without a boy to be found in the entire building, but she couldn't help squirming a little as she muttered out, "Yes, um, I, I'd like that very much," before stepping inside.

Helen closed the door behind them, gesturing over to a steamer trunk in the corner that was practically overflowing with dog-eared comics of all different genres. "I figured we'd take a look together, see what kinds of things you liked, and maybe save that milkshake for a little later. Once we've worked up an appetite." She crossed the room to the heavy trunk, plucking an issue off the top seemingly at random. "Here, you look like the kind of girl who likes a Wonder Woman," she said, sitting down on the bed with her prize and patting the mattress next to her expectantly. Almost unable to believe what was happening, Mary joined her.

And it was... honestly, it was wonderful. Mary hadn't read a comic in almost six years now, hadn't even so much as snuck a peek at the titles on the spinner rack lest one of her old high school chums walk in at that exact moment and remind her mockingly that comics were for kindergarten babies, and so it was like revisiting an old friend to see Diana Prince and Etta Candy and even boring old Steve Trevor. She got so into the story that it struck her like an almost physical blow when she got close to the end and discovered that there was a hole in one of the pages.

"Sorry about that," Helen said, somehow managing to sound apologetic but not the slightest bit sheepish. "They had an offer for one of those Hypno-Coins, and I couldn't resist sending away for it. The ad says it can hypnotize anyone in minutes or my money back, you know?" She reached into the nightstand and pulled out a small disc, larger than a real coin but still small enough to fit neatly between thumb and forefinger, and held it out.

"See, you just tilt it back and forth like this, and the spiral flickers like it's moving." She gave a little snort of laughter. "It came with a booklet, too, with all these lessons on how to use the coin to draw someone's attention to the moving spiral, keep their mind focused and intent on the motion while your words slipped into the back of their mind and convinced them it was okay to just relax and let go and stop thinking for a while. The book said anyone could be hypnotized if they just kept staring at the spiral, because once you're calm and drowsy and concentrating on just one thing your mind is very open to suggestions."

Mary nodded, already vaguely aware of what Helen was doing but finding herself unexpectedly eager to simply let it happen. There was something so intimate about the way Helen dropped her voice into a husky contralto register, speaking in low soothing tones that felt almost like they were caressing the back of Mary's neck while she stared at the hypno-coin and imagined what kind of suggestions she might receive from the other woman. It unlocked something inside her, a sultry heat between her thighs she thought girls only got around boys, and even though there was a tantalizing void inside her head where the details of what it all might mean would go, she found herself wriggling gently on the bed in anticipation of finding out.

"And when your mind is open to suggestions," Helen continued, her right hand continuing to move the coin while her left hand fiddled absently with the sash of her housecoat, "it's so easy to listen and accept and drift even deeper into that warm, thoughtless state. You might find your eyelids getting heavy, Mary, you might find your whole body getting heavy and going limp as that wave of deep drowsiness crests again and again, each time taking away a few more thoughts with it, each time leaving you more docile and lazy and ready to sleep. Sleeping for me sounds so good, so warm and happy and peaceful, that while your waking mind is fully occupied with the spiral the rest of you is taking in every word without question. Isn't that right, honey?"

It was that one word, 'honey', that absolutely flattened Mary. It didn't sound companionable or friendly; it sounded like a term of endearment, something you'd say to a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a husband or a wife, and it made some long-hidden compass inside Mary's head finally orient itself to true north. Mary wanted to hang on Helen's every word, to do every last thing she was told to do with the docile servility of an utterly helpless slave, and the more she thought about it the more something deep within her mind made the prospect of drifting into a waking dream sound irresistibly enticing. Mary's eyelids slammed shut before she could so much as nod, and she slumped forward into Helen's arms with a dreamy sigh of pleasure long deferred.

She heard the rustle of fabric as Helen's housecoat came off, and there must have been nothing at all on underneath it because the next thing Mary felt was warm, soft skin brushing against hers. Helen pushed Mary's skirt up until it was little more than a belt, and settled her fever-warm cunt against Mary's broad thigh while her own leg pressed up against Mary's fabric-covered pussy. It felt like nothing Mary had ever experienced, nothing she'd ever even imagined, but it also felt so inexpressibly right that she couldn't help letting out an animal groan of pure ecstasy.

It must have been a little too loud, because before she knew it Mary was holding the hem of her dress in her mouth while the two of them ground away at each other. Helen continued to speak to her the entire time, using that seductive hypnotic tone of hers, and Mary discovered to her utter delight that the throbbing pleasure in her cunt focused her captivated mind more effectively than the coin ever could. All she could think about was how good it felt to rub herself off against Helen's leg, and it thrilled her beyond measure to realize that Helen was lulling her mind even deeper into obedience. She'd never wanted anything so badly in her entire life.

She discovered something she wanted more when the relentless stimulation pushed her over the edge into her very first climax--Mary had never thought much about sex before now, had certainly never known enough about herself to understand why the things that ought to arouse her instead left her bemused and indifferent, and so the peak of ecstasy she discovered almost simultaneously with her interest in women made sex into an almost religious experience for her. Mary felt so hungry for more that she tore her dress right down the seam getting out of it, but she didn't care.

They fucked for the better part of an afternoon like that, with Helen introducing Mary to the delights of cunnilingus and sixty-nining until the younger woman was limp and trembling on the mattress, and it was fully dark out before Helen snapped her fingers and Mary's eyelids fluttered open to see the most beautiful woman she'd ever imagined lying next to her. "So you can see why I had to send away for that coin," Helen giggled, running her fingers possessively along Mary's hip.

"Uh huh," Mary murmured dreamily, still feeling like at any moment she could simply drift back into that same helpless trance that had claimed so much of her mind that day. It wasn't even that she felt helpless to resist Helen's control; deep down, she knew that the power of suggestion was only that, a suggestion and not a command. But it was a suggestion she wanted to follow, for the rest of her life if at all possible, and it took every last ounce of Mary's willpower not to beg the older woman to hypnotize and fuck her some more.

Instead, Helen helped her get dressed and tame her wayward hair before they headed down to the kitchen. "Looks like we missed dinner," she murmured, surveying the empty kitchen. "Still, I think I know what we can have to keep our energy up." She gave her new lover another one of those conspiratorial smiles, and giggling, they made themselves a pair of tall chocolate milkshakes to take back to their room.

THE END