"I think my husband has his eye on you," Thea said one day, the words startling Laura out of her guided meditation despite the mellow tone her yoga instructor delivered them in. "I'm afraid it's probably my fault--you've been on my mind a bit lately, and... well, you know how men can be. A bit like dogs, really. As soon as your mouth starts watering, they come sniffing around to see what you're interested in. Between you and me, I think he's hoping for a threesome." She didn't sound like she thought it would upset Laura to hear any of this, that was the weird part. She said it like she was casually repeating a bit of church gossip to another one of the old biddies who clustered together after services ended.

She was wrong. "I'm sorry, what?" Laura burst out, gracelessly untangling herself from the lotus position and stumbling to her feet with astonished haste. "You, what, your husband? You, I--you never mentioned you had a husband!" It wasn't nearly the most important thing about Thea's shockingly lewd and inappropriate statement, but Laura couldn't help fixating on it--she'd just begun to acknowledge the fact that she was developing a tiny bit of a crush on the middle-aged woman, and to find out that she was married felt like a stinging disappointment. Even if it sounded like the two of them had something of an open relationship.

"Oh, darling," Thea chuckled, a wry and rueful smile crossing her face, "I've been married for simply ages. I'm afraid there wasn't much romance involved--my mother arranged it all, and my husband... well, he works nights. We don't really see each other that much in person. But he's always interested in my romantic life, and I'm afraid he thinks of any lover of mine as a lover of his. It's one of his more charmless qualities, along with his sexual appetites. Honestly, you'd think at some point he would learn the meaning of the word 'enough', but a harem of two hundred women wouldn't satisfy him."

She paused, her eyes going slightly distant. "Or three hundred, or whatever he's up to now."

Laura's eyes practically bulged out of their sockets in shock. "W-what the fuck?" she exclaimed, backing away from Thea as though the older woman had become suddenly radioactive. "What, wait, you what, you, you what? What?" She realized how completely incoherent she sounded, but at the same time she couldn't unpick the knot of astonishment and dismay that had pulled tight in her mind to figure out where to begin expressing her bewilderment at Thea's unexpectedly sordid past. She was in a loveless arranged marriage to a husband she never talked about who had a harem... an honest to fucking god literal harem... with over three hundred women? She thought of Laura as her lover? The husband thought of Laura as her lover too, now? It all felt like far, far too much to take in.

Thankfully, Thea immediately recognized how overwhelmed the young brunette was. "Take a deep breath, dear," she murmured, locking gazes with Laura's hazel eyes and speaking to her in a low, soft, quiet voice. "Take a deep breath and hold it in for me, there you go, one, two, three, and let it out now and send all that tension out with it. Deep breath in, one, two, three, deep breath out, one, two, three. Focus on your breathing, focus on my voice, and relax. There's plenty of time to talk about everything I'm telling you, and you'll have a much easier time if you relax, relax, relax."

It shouldn't have worked. Laura should have been even more infuriated at the older woman's effort to use guided meditation on her like it was some kind of magic spell. But despite everything that had just happened, Laura found her gaze fixating on Thea's emerald green eyes and pale pink features as her breathing settled into the same slow, soothing rhythm they used in their weekly yoga sessions. Her shoulders slumped as the tension in them unwound, leaving her arms dangling loosely at her sides, and within moments she could feel herself gently swaying on her feet. Thea always had that calming effect on her. After a long day of meetings with temperamental directors and tyrannical studio heads and fussy, hectoring agents, she practically craved it.

But she wasn't about to forget what she'd just heard. "You called me your lover," Laura murmured, her voice toneless but the sentiment behind them still clear. "We're not lovers. We have a...." She sighed, struggling to overcome the waves of blissful relaxation that washed over her mind and think the complex thoughts she needed to have in order to continue the conversation. "An employee-client relationship," she finished at last, slurring the 'ti' and 'sh' in 'relationship' just a little as her heavy eyelids fluttered in mellow euphoria.

"Well, yes, for now," Thea admitted, beckoning Laura forward with subtle hand motions that prompted the young executive assistant to stagger forward despite herself. "But I've had my eye on you for a few months now, and you've been such a good student and a good subject, and I thought you might want to give up control for a little while and let me show you just how nice it can be to surrender. You can imagine that, can't you, dear? You can imagine sinking into the peace and pleasure of perfect relaxation and letting me take charge?" Laura felt a gentle thump as she sank to her knees on the padded yoga mat, but her eyes weren't seeing Thea anymore. They were seeing something else.

In her mind, she could perfectly picture Thea reaching out to caress her pert breasts and stiff pink nipples. Her leotard seemed to have simply evaporated, leaving her naked and vulnerable to the older woman's lustful gaze, but every touch felt so good and made Laura quiver with so much arousal that she relaxed instantly into Thea's embrace. "It's so wonderful, isn't it, darling girl?" Thea asked, and Laura found her head bobbing up and down in amiable assent without even thinking about the words she was hearing.

She knew it wasn't real--her clothes were still there, whatever her senses might be telling her--but the hallucination was so pure, so perfect and seamless that Laura shuddered and quaked with desire at every sensual touch. She could literally feel Thea's fingers parting the cleft of her labia, sliding into the slick channel of her sopping cunt, finding her clit and rubbing it until Laura could hear her tremulous moans blending in with the older woman's purring words. "You don't want to resist this, pretty girl," Thea said, her voice so infinitely seductive that all Laura wanted to do was fall into it forever. "You never did."

That phrase sparked something, some loose and fuzzy thread of a memory that almost wasn't, but Laura followed it back out of the void of oblivious pleasure back to something approximating reality and found herself staring helplessly into Thea's eyes with a wet spot covering the crotch of her leotard. "Never did... have we, um....?" She couldn't quite finish the thought, not yet, but focusing on the unspoken implications helped to keep her from tumbling back down into the vivid hallucination of sexual ecstasy she'd been experiencing. She needed to know what was happening. She needed to know what Thea was doing to her. She definitely needed to know about this mysterious husband who thought of Thea's lovers as his property.

"Not physically, no," Thea cooed, her fingers tenderly brushing against Laura's flushed cheeks. "But you've been relaxing into my daydreams for quite some time now, darling girl. You've given me so much power over you, and it only grows with every passing day. What do you see when you masturbate?" It was a stunningly inappropriate question, but Laura felt too sedate to challenge it now. Especially when they both knew the answer already.

"You," she whispered meekly, her eyes desperate to flick down to the floor in embarrassment but unable to break the captivating stare that Thea held her in. "I... I see you. But--but you shouldn't--I mean, your husband, he--"

Thea's fingers caressed Laura's temple, and it felt almost like a drug in her muzzy brain. "My husband is off in the night somewhere. I can protect you from him, so long as you accept your place as my consort. It's what you really wanted anyway, isn't it? To kneel at my feet and worship me like the goddess I am?" Laura felt a powerful throb in her clit at Thea's words, making her vision swim and the daydream of cumming on her lover's fingers intrude on her sight once again... but Laura worked in Hollywood. She'd gotten offers to sleep with power couples before, and she knew better than to think they didn't come with a ton of messy drama and plenty of strings attached. With a titanic effort, she broke the stare between them and stumbled back to her feet.

"I, um, I... I should go," she muttered, turning away from Thea and forcibly banishing the visions of lesbian sex that crowded in on her. "I, I should go, and, um... and please tell your husband I'm not interested." She stumbled drunkenly across the room, grabbing her bag, not even daring to think about changing in the same building as Thea, willing to go home in her leotard if that was what it took to get away from the whole unbelievable mess she'd stumbled into. "I, I'm paid up for the month, you can keep it, just... I can't. I can't."

Laura staggered to the door, made it as far as the elevators, then sagged back against the wall and sank to the floor with both hands already rubbing her wet cunt. She didn't know who might be watching, her eyes weren't seeing the world around her anymore--they were seeing Thea, smiling at her in tender condescension as Laura stopped pretending she could fight the other woman's radiant charisma and gave in to that perfect touch right on her clit. "ofuck," she whimpered, nodding to the phantom in her daydream as she begged with her gaze for more pleasure, more submission, more sensual obedience to Thea's inescapable power, and the orgasm she felt practically soaked her goddamn leotard when it finally hit.

But Laura finally recovered herself, and she went not back down the hall but over to the elevators. She pressed the button, she went down to street level, and by the time she exited the building she'd tied a blouse around her waist to hide the mess she'd made of herself. And she felt pretty proud of her willpower. Laura knew she was attracted to Thea, and now she knew that Thea was attracted to her, but that was a relationship that sounded like it came with a lot of baggage. Laura didn't need that, not when every day was a struggle to keep her job and there were always a dozen twenty-something women out there desperate to do what she did at any given moment. Best to leave that all behind.

It felt freeing to have that kind of resolve. To know herself and know what she wanted. Laura took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and headed back toward her car, determined to leave Thea and her husband and their weird kinky dysfunctional relationship behind forever. She felt good about herself, right up until someone came up behind her and forced a copper bracelet onto her bare arm all the way up until it stuck fast.

*    *    *    *    *

"What the FUCK is happening, Thea?" Laura snarled, bursting into the middle of a class and shocking almost a dozen trophy wives out of their private reveries. "You said you had a husband, you didn't say he would show up in my dreams and try to turn me into some kind of goddamn sex zombie!" Laura was practically shaking with anger and fear, and her fingers kept tugging at the copper armband she wore in a perpetual nervous tic that did absolutely nothing to dislodge it. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying, bloodshot with exhaustion, and her dark brown hair hung lank on her head. She knew she looked bad. But she felt worse.

Thea looked at her and sighed. "Alright, ladies," she called out to the class, "let's all go as deep as we can." Eleven women suddenly slumped over in utter, insensate relaxation, their bodies limp and their faces expressionless. It should have surprised Laura, but she'd been dealing with a perpetual nightmare for the last four days now and she'd spent at least some of that time doing a little homework. She had an idea of what she might be facing, even if a part of her couldn't quite believe it.

"I'm sorry, dear," Thea said, patting the floor next to her in invitation. "I was working my way up to telling you everything, but I'm afraid our last encounter got cut short a bit, and... well, it's not the sort of thing you can simply drop into conversation, is it? I wouldn't have said anything earlier, except that I knew my husband was sniffing around and I was worried he might come after you. Some poor young woman found his talisman about a decade or so ago, and ever since then he's been finding pretty girls and taking their minds into the realms of night while their bodies act as puppets to his will. You probably know that by now, though, don't you?"

Laura nodded, her legs almost buckling beneath her as she sat down next to Thea. "Hypnos. The... the Greek god of sleep." It felt absurd to be saying it out loud, to be treating it like a real conversation she could be having and not some dusty old myth she found in a book somewhere and tried to turn into a screenplay in her spare time. But she'd fallen asleep six or seven times since the stranger in the parking lot forced the bracelet onto her arm, and every time she'd found herself in an ancient temple with black marble walls and row upon row of nude, sleepwalking woman. And he was waiting for her there, a dream in Laura's head and yet still terrifyingly real. He was Hypnos, the god of sleep, and he was reeling her in every time she drifted off into exhausted slumber. The absurdity of it all didn't negate any of its truth.

"Yes," the older woman said--the much, much older woman as it turned out. "And I am his wife, Pasithea. The Grace of Relaxation, promised to him by my mother Hera as a reward for tricking Zeus into enchanted slumber during the Trojan War. Mine is the gift of altered consciousness. Meditation, relaxation, hallucination... and yes, dear. What you mortals now call 'hypnosis'. I can't tell you how smug the little shit gets over that one." Thea smiled ruefully, but the usual warmth behind her eyes had vanished behind a cloud.

"We've never had much of a relationship, unfortunately--I walk the world of mortals like the rest of the gods, and he hasn't dared to show his face outside of the realm of Nyx ever since Zeus found out about his antics. But he still has his eye on me, and ever since he gained servants in the material realms he's been interfering in my love life." Laura listened wearily, her body listing slightly to the side as she fought the urge to simply curl up in Thea's lap and drift off to sleep. She'd been struggling so hard to stay awake for so long now, and the goddess's warm, soothing voice felt so comforting and familiar to her that she simply wanted to stop thinking and rest in it forever.

But Thea's next words reminded her of just what was at stake if she slept. "His desire is to take you into the realm of night forever, to obliviate your will and use you as another one of his sex slaves while I fuck your body. It's the closest we can get to a romantic encounter, you see, fucking the same woman in dreams and in reality at the same time, and he's hoping that it will persuade me to abandon the mortal world and join him in darkness." Thea sighed. "Just like a man, relying on a big romantic gesture instead of doing the necessary work to build a healthy relationship."

Laura listened a little longer, somehow expecting more to the speech, but instead the pause became an uncomfortable silence broken only by the gentle breathing of eleven semi-conscious women. "But--but you can help me, right?" she asked, finally breaking the hush with a plaintive murmur that was matched by the plea in her wide, soulful hazel eyes. "You can take this thing off and get me free, can't you?"

Thea cupped Laura's cheek in her hand, giving her a wistful smile. "That's something of a complicated pair of questions, my dear," she said, picking her words with infinite care. "I can't take the armband off, I'm afraid, not without taking your arm off along with it. There are certain spheres of influence in which gods hold unchallenged dominion, and that talisman lies squarely within my husband's." Laura tried not to sob--she knew all of her emotions were heightened by exhaustion, particularly the negative ones, but hearing Thea say that felt all too much like a death sentence for her very soul.

The goddess's next words stirred renewed hope, though. "But I can help you. In a way." Laura looked up at her in silent pleading, realizing only then that her body had slumped so far forward that she was no longer at eye level with Thea and that her gaze was once again locked in mesmerized fascination with the ancient deity's sparkling emerald stare. This time, though, with exhaustion sapping her energy, she no longer had the will to look away. All she could do was sigh helplessly as her breathing fell into the same relaxed and easy rhythm as the women on the floor around them.

"If I take you into my realm, Laura," the goddess continued, her fingers now stroking all over Laura's face and gently petting her dark brown hair, "you'll never need to sleep again. Your mind will simply enter a state of perpetual trance, so deeply hypnotized that you'll get all the rest you need simply by drifting through my beautiful daydreams of submission and cumming yourself into rapt, joyous obedience to my will. You'll be my good girl, my willing and devoted slave, and I promise you a lifetime of pleasure under my control if only you give yourself to me."

Laura could see it in her mind's eye, her clothing vanishing all over again as she sank completely into Thea's mesmerizing stare and spread her legs to give the goddess easy access to her soaking cunt. Every touch felt infinitely real, somehow more true to her experience than the world around her, and the orgasm Thea promised throbbed in her clit with a power and a potency no actual lover of hers had ever managed to elicit. Laura's stare went glazed and sightless as she drifted deeper into the fantasy, picturing herself bucking and moaning against her owner's fingers until the floor beneath her was a mess of dripping musk. She couldn't understand why she'd ever thought about resisting it.

"Or, of course," the goddess continued, guiding Laura's physical body down to rest with her head in Thea's lap, "you could wake from my trance and take your chances with my husband. I'm sure he'd make you say all the right things while we fucked, but... oh, my darling girl, I'd so much rather you be truly mine. Wouldn't you?" Laura nodded, feeling Thea's fingers on her forehead joined by the phantom sensations of all the hypnotized women in the class, each one caressing and stroking her nude body in the realm of fantasy until she shuddered and shook in helpless ecstasy. There were so many daydreams she could have, Laura realized, and every one of them would feel exactly this real.

"All you have to do is cum for me, darling," Thea purred, her words weaving a spell around Laura's mind more seductive than any promise of Hollywood wealth and power. "All you have to do is sink completely into that fantasy until the touch of my mind alone makes you release your desires, and you'll never need to awaken again. Or sleep. Or be anything but my devoted, obedient, lustful good girl. Is that what you want, darling? Do you want to cum and obey?"

Laura's mouth hung open for a long moment, her tongue stilled by the confluence of forces operating on her mind. She could feel the power of Hypnos promising an endless dream of fucking, the power of Pasithea offering an eternal daydream of pleasure and desire and hot lesbian sex... and somewhere, deep down inside, she could feel the tiny little spark of who she used to be wondering how it had all come to this so rapidly. But that was mortal, and small, and swiftly silenced. Then the choice was simply who she wanted to enslave her.

And that was no choice at all. "Yes, please, yes!" Laura squealed, her hips arching in pure ecstasy as she gushed out her orgasm and made her jeans into a dripping, soggy mess with the force of her release. Her eyes went wide and sightless, and Laura knew they'd already seen the last true thing she would ever know. But the visions of her Goddess were more beautiful than any truth, anyway.

THE END