"So wait," Ro interrupted, giving Cai a glance despite the sea of Italian traffic that seemed to obey neither the laws of the road nor those of consensus physics. "Hold on. You're saying it's not mind control?" He flicked his eyes forward again just in time to spot a tiny opening between two cars that he went for with the aggressiveness of a man who was used to driving on the streets of Rome, downshifting to give himself an extra burst of acceleration and sliding smoothly into the line of faster-moving cars heading out of town and toward the little villa they'd rented for the weekend.

Cai waited until Ro finished his maneuver to continue. "It may be in the colloquial sense," he explained, his voice becoming ever so slightly professorial as he warmed to his topic. "But classical conditioning isn't the same thing as operant conditioning, which is more along the lines of what we traditionally think of when we use the term, um... mind control." He tried with little success to conceal a slight blush of arousal; after a year of submitting to Ro's hypnotic talents on a regular basis, the phrase felt very different on his lips than it once had. He shifted position in the passenger seat, his thoughts already drifting ahead to the end of their drive and the very secluded country house they would share for the next few days.

"So what's the difference?" Ro asked, shifting into a higher gear as they got away from the heavy traffic around the airport and began to gain speed. "I mean, hypnosis, operant conditioning, classical conditioning, brainwashing... I know there are a few differences, but they're all just fancy ways to say mind control, aren't they? Pavlov was just the first person to discover it, that's all." Cai tried to keep from rolling his eyes in professional condescension. Despite Ro's intelligence and practical experience in the art of persuasion, it was clear that he was still one of those medical laypeople who was fully convinced that reading a single book on an airplane was enough to make him an expert on any topic. Cai would simply have to disabuse him of his confusion.

"There are, um, significant differences between all of those things," he answered, struggling not to sound didactic, "and some of them are... well, let's just say that there are some medically dubious terms in that batch. What Pavlov discovered was of limited practical application, at least in the field of... ahem... mind control, at least as, as we know it...." He felt his cheeks flush a bit hotter, his erection twitching slightly inside his tight briefs. It was going to be a long car ride if he couldn't keep his arousal contained. "It's mostly a, um, an interesting insight into the way the brain functions."

Ro's brow furrowed in bewilderment. "But, I mean, he made the dogs drool every time he rang a bell. That's not mind control to you?" Cai squirmed again, wishing their villa wasn't quite so far out in the countryside. He certainly needed a nice long break after four days of lecturing on immunosuppressant reactions, but every time Ro talked about controlling minds it only reminded him of just how good it would feel to stare into Ro's eyes and feel his will flowing into Cai's brain like a narcotic drug. He fiddled with the AC, uncomfortably aware of how stiflingly warm the car felt all of a sudden.

With a cool breeze blowing on his face, he felt a bit more able to proceed. "The, um, the dog s-salivated, yes," he murmured, trying to think of the word in purely biological terms instead of picturing his own drooling mouth staring vacantly at Ro's erect penis. "But, um, but that was a... it was a, um, a strictly limited response. It was something the dog already did anyway, what Pavlov termed a, um... an unconscious response?" Now it was Cai's turn to furrow his brow in confusion. "Excuse me, sorry, an unconditioned response. The dog didn't need to be trained to, um, to drool when it saw food. It did that instinctively."

Ro pressed the point again, though, his lawyer's instincts clearly unwilling to let it go. "But he still trained the dog to drool when he rang the bell, instead. He turned the bell into a trigger that would make his subject respond on his terms rather than the instinct biology gave it. He controlled its mind." Ro chuckled, taking one hand off the steering wheel to pat the older man's thigh disconcertingly close to his trapped, throbbing cock. "That sounds like mind control as far as I'm concerned."

Cai looked down at the hand resting on his trousers, its warmth soaking through to his skin. It was enough to derail his train of thought for a long moment, and when he did manage to resume speaking, it was with less confidence than before. "Um, w-well yes, but... um, the point is." His cock twitched again, almost brushing against Ro's fingers--they were passing through Settebagni now, and the cars on the SS4 were getting fewer and further between, but they still had a way to go to get to the villa. Cai almost didn't want to wait for them to arrive.

"The point is what, darling boy?" Ro asked, his voice now filled with the same smug tones that Cai thought he remembered in his own speech just moments ago. "You were making a point about mind control, weren't you?" Cai couldn't help openly wriggling now, trying to move the bulging tent in his trousers just a tiny bit closer to that warm, strong hand, but Ro kept it firmly in place where it was. Cai let out a frustrated sigh that was almost a whimper of denied, aching need.

But Ro was right. He, he'd trailed off again. "The, um, the point is that the bell wasn't a trigger. N-not like the ones you u... n-not like, um, not like what you're thinking of." God, Ro had so many triggers in Cai's brain. Triggers he eagerly, hungrily waited to hear and triggers he didn't even know he had, all just waiting to turn him into a dumb, horny slut for his lover to play with like a toy. He glanced at the GPS display in the rented car, hoping against hope that they didn't have far to go. His own hand twitched at his side, struggling against an urge to free his cock from its tight prison of fabric and stroke it for Ro.

Ro glanced over at him, clearly aware of the effect their little talk was having on his lover. "Not a hypnotic trigger, you mean? Not like one of the triggers I use in my mind control?" Cai's hand twitched again, slowly creeping along the soft fabric of his trousers toward his throbbing cock as though it had a mind of its own. Cai stared intently out the window, knowing that if he looked down at it he'd break down and give in to the aching need between his legs within mere moments.

"Nuhhhh...." The lane markers distracted Cai for a moment, beckoning his eyes endlessly forward in a way that the surgeon knew all too well. "N-no," he managed to finish at last, blinking heavily. His thoughts felt gummed together, and he had to work to get them unstuck from each other and go on. "It's, like, um... the dog was already drooling, right? And it just got, um, reminded of the meat when it heard the bell. It wasn't being trained to, to do something it didn't do. It was just being re, um, con... com... condish.... conndishamable... um. Reminded of something it already did." Cai wiped at his chin with his free hand, aware that he was making a little drool of his own. He swallowed hard, trying to get as much of it down his throat as he could.

It slowly occurred to him that he only had one free hand now. The other one was rubbing himself through his trousers, slowly and sleepily brushing up and down the length of his cock while he stared vacantly out the window. He felt strangely powerless to stop.

Ro chuckled triumphantly. "So it was conditioning but not mind control. I'd love to hear you explain the subtle differences between the two, my sweet silly boy." Cai felt his cock swell and pulse underneath his stroking, rubbing fingers. He had a sudden urge to ask what 'suttle' meant, but he felt like asking would only make him sound dumb. And Cai knew he was the smart one here. He knew why Pavlov's bell wasn't really the same thing as brainwashing, even if it was a little hard to explain without getting into a whole bunch of stuff that his aroused, distracted brain didn't really have the patience to talk about right now. Not when they were so close to the villa and the hard fucking he needed.

Cai only realized he hadn't replied when a gentle squeeze on his leg reminded him that he'd been staring at nothing for almost two full minutes now. "Um, s-sorry, what?" he mumbled, trying to blink the fog out from behind his eyes and focus on his lover. "I, sorry, I was thinking of... um, of something else." His cheeks flushed hotter despite the AC blowing directly on his face, and he could feel precum soaking into his briefs from the tip of his cock. He didn't know how he could stand to wait until they got to the villa now.

Ro gave his leg a bossy swat. "You were thinking about mind control, weren't you?" Cai nodded, his eyes going glassy for a moment. "Of course you were, silly boy. That's what we were talking about. And you were going to tell me why Pavlov wasn't using mind control, even though it sounds like mind control and it looks like mind control and we both know you love mind control so very, very much." Cai's breath escaped in a strangled moan, his fingers fumbling with his fly and tugging out his hard cock without a moment's pause.

"M-mind, I, yes, con... controlled," he moaned, sighing in relief as his hand began to move up and down his slick shaft and work the precum into every inch of the warm flesh. "The... Pavlov, he, um... he couldn't, like, make the dog do other, y'know, stuff. With the bell. The, um, the commishum, the commishable, the... the thing, it was the same as the other thing the dog was doing on its own. And it was a short, a short, um... responsible. Um, I mean... re, response. He couldn't make the dog, like, go fetch him slippers or something. It only did a thing it knew how to do under different, um, circumcisions." Cai knew that wasn't right, but all the big fancy words were starting to sound alike in his head now. He didn't care anyway. He just wanted to jack off for Ro like a good boy.

And anyway, it sounded like Ro got the idea. "Oh!" he exclaimed, his hand moving in to lightly tease Cai's heavy balls. "So you're saying that you can only associate disparate stimuli with classical conditioning, whereas with hypnotic conditioning you can build in more complicated psychological constructs and achieve a more nuanced and complex form of mind control in your subject's unconscious mind?" Cai's eyes glazed over, and his head drooped forward as he tried hard to follow Ro's rapid speech. He knew all those words, he knew that he knew them, but... but his cock was so hard right now. It drooled all over his stroking fingers every time Ro said something big and smart and fancy and made Cai feel so... so dumb. So dumb and horny and sleepy and confused. Just like all the other times that slept in the back of Cai's head when he didn't need to think about them.

"....uh, uh, uh huh," he mumbled, not even having the slightest clue as to what he was agreeing with but knowing that Ro asked him a question and he needed to answer. If he didn't answer, Ro might think his lover was too dumb to follow along with what he was saying, and he might think that he could... could do things. Sexy things to Cai's mind, things that Cai couldn't stop. He had to fake it until his head cleared and his cock spurted and his brains came back. With any luck, Ro wouldn't even notice how horny and stupid his boyfriend was right now.

"That's my good boy," Ro purred, taking his hand away for just a moment to put the car through a series of swift turns that brought them into the driveway of a country house miles away from the nearest neighbor. "That's my good little mind control slut. Isn't that right, sweetie? Aren't you just filled up with mind control mind control mind control?" The words echoed inside Cai's head like a bell, and he felt drool spilling down his chin and soaking the front of his shirt just like the subject of one of Pavlov's tests. He almost figured out what was happening to him, then, but his mind melted down into warm red lust faster than he could keep up. His cock throbbed and pulsed, then released gush after gush of hot sticky cum onto his fingers.

"That's my silly little slut," Ro drawled, daubing his fingers with Cai's semen and pushing them into the dazed, helpless man's drooling mouth. Cai sucked without thinking, eager to get the warm salty flavor onto his tongue. "Time to come inside now, pet. I want to continue this conversation somewhere a bit more comfortable." Cai only got about one word in three of Ro's sentence, but he knew they were at the villa and he knew what that meant. He got out of the car, his softening cock still swinging freely in the country air, and followed his lover into the bedroom to thank Ro for the mind control he loved so much.

THE END