Jim and Ellen couldn't help feeling a little bit guilty when they looked back at 2020. They knew how rough it was for so many people, not just from the abstract numbers they saw on the news every night charting the progress of the pandemic but from the stories they heard all around them. Jim's cousin lost his job and was forced to rely on public assistance, with only the federal mortgage forbearance program preventing him from losing his house as well. Ellen's sister watched her marriage crumble around her over the course of seven long, agonizing months of forced intimacy, reduced to hiding in the garden shed for hours to get away from the constant arguments with her husband over every trivial domestic incident. And Jim and Ellen....

They'd never been happier. It was so awkward to realize, during those early spring months when the world seemed to be collapsing around them in real time and every day brought some newer and more dreadful news, but it was undeniably true. They had an October wedding because both Jim and Ellen loved Halloween and wanted to make it their anniversary, and they were still in that blissful honeymoon stage when the first murmurs began to trickle into the media of a virus sweeping the globe. Jim had inherited his family home some five years previously, a slightly ramshackle old farmhouse his father had added onto several times over the years even as he sold off the surrounding land piece by piece to his neighbors, so they didn't have to worry about isolating.

They didn't have to worry about money, either. Not that Jim's dad was especially wealthy when he passed away, but owning the home free and clear meant that Jim could put nearly every penny into savings, and he had a tech job that allowed him to work remotely even before the pandemic made it mandatory for everybody. That left Ellen free to pursue her passions, and it just so happened that 2020 was the year that everyone was stuck at home and looking for something to do online. She wound up making more than he did that year.

Their proximity to so many local farms allowed them to buy fresh meat, milk and vegetables without having to worry about shortages and panic buying. Jim had a habit of ordering things in bulk, since the nearest town was almost an hour's drive away, and they wound up being so fully stocked on toilet paper and hand soap that they didn't even work their way through their current supplies until the vaccine was already rolling out. The only thing they wound up missing was fresh bread, but their involuntary Atkins diet became a shared joke between them instead of a source of stress.

And most importantly... well, not to put too fine a point on it, but Jim and Ellen fucked like bunnies that whole year. They had the kind of complete and total privacy that only came with a big house in the country and a government mandate regarding social distancing, they didn't have anywhere to go even if they wanted to pile into the car and drive for a solid hour, and Jim got a vasectomy a few months before the wedding so they didn't have to worry about Ellen accidentally catching pregnant. It was the perfect recipe for hours of energetic sex even before the other factors got involved.

The other factors wound up being pretty compelling, though. Ellen and Jim were always careful to be fairly vague about how they met when talking to Ellen's family, because even though they lived in a relatively liberal state that didn't mean the progressive politics were evenly distributed and Ellen was pretty sure her parents would freak out at the very notion of their little girl going to a kink convention, let alone finding her future husband there. But there was nothing quite like bumping into someone at an 'Erotic Hypnosis 101' workshop to tell you that there was at least one important hobby they shared with you, and Ellen soon discovered she enjoyed practicing with the nice young man who lived only a few hours away and had a place for her to stay on the weekends.

That led to their marriage two years later, but it also led to Ellen's second career, which became her primary career when she took a look at the household finances and discovered that they could afford to get by on one income for a while so she could see if she could really make a living doing erotic hypnosis videos. She developed the persona of 'The Emerald Enchantress', using colored contact lenses and a brunette wig to change her appearance just enough to give her plausible deniability if someone who knew her family saw her online, and a latex hood did all the necessary work of concealing Jim's appearance. Unless someone knew what his cock looked like, and Ellen was careful to keep that between her, him, and a few trusted friends from within the community.

It was a shame they had to spend a whole year putting those friendships with beneficiaries on hold, of course, but all that extra sexual energy went into filming new videos in a room of the house decorated with blackout curtains and glitter lamps. Jim soon found that being Ellen's subject in clip after clip of inductions, suggestions, fractionations and brainwashings made him even more submissive and obedient than ever before, and Ellen found new heights of creativity when her whole day job was dreaming up new ways to mess with her husband's malleable mind. Before they knew it, they'd fallen into a twenty-four-seven lifestyle D/s relationship, one so complete that Jim almost forgot he even had free will sometimes.

It was easy to let it slip out of his head, honestly. Jim's boss didn't care much about Zoom meetings and conference calls so long as his employees met their production goals, and the few times Jim needed to remember to put on clothes for work he had plenty of advance notice that it was time to take off the leather collar and slip into something a little less comfortable. (Jim was never one of those people who got caught on the webcam dressed only from the waist up. He and Ellen agreed that if he was going to have to wear clothing, it shouldn't be a half measure.) And the kind of detail-oriented work he did actually benefited from a state of relaxed focus and calm, attentive concentration. By the time 2020 was over, his stressed-out colleagues were asking him what his secret was, but Jim never told.

It also didn't hurt that they never had to worry about anyone walking in on them, either. Before the pandemic, Ellen's family members had a nasty habit of dropping by unexpectedly, meaning Jim and Ellen had to at least maintain a certain amount of plausible deniability about their bedroom activities even if Ellen did politely but firmly draw a line with her parents about the use of the term 'living in sin'. Once the lockdown began, though, contact with Jim's in-laws was reduced to a very manageable level of phone calls and FaceTime chats, and Ellen quickly developed a standard line of excuses for why they couldn't answer right away.

And what they were left with was absolute bliss. Ellen made sure to set her alarm about thirty minutes before Jim's, with a little post-hypnotic suggestion ensuring he'd sleep soundly through the alert she used so she could begin the day by murmuring softly in his ears and playing with his cock right up until the time he needed to wake up for work. He spent most of the morning with a throbbing erection and a drowsy smile on his face, chasing down bugs with the kind of rapt attention most managers would kill to see in their employees, and took his lunch kneeling at Ellen's feet while she hand-fed him using her favorite clicker to condition him even deeper into obedience with every morsel.

The moment work ended each afternoon, Jim put on his latex hood and sleepwalked to the home studio Ellen had set up, his mind already drifting into scenarios she'd spent hours programming into him. Sometimes she allowed him to wake long enough to hypnotize him again on camera, using her boundless creativity to drop him with spirals or pendants or simply her own body as a fixation object. But other times he'd never even emerge from trance until after they were done shooting and he was flushed and shaking with arousal... or sometimes just sweaty and spent. Ellen liked to keep her husband's life full of pleasant surprises.

They usually had dinner after that, with Jim doing the cooking wearing nothing but an apron and a dazed grin, and by the time Ellen watched him prepare and serve her an entire meal with mesmerized devotion behind his glassy eyes she was usually in the mood to fuck him silly all over again. She showed him some of the solo videos she worked on during the day, using them to entrance him into blank, mindless ecstasy, then dragged him off to the bedroom and rode his stiff prick until he begged her for permission to empty his aching balls. Ellen tried to be stern about it, but she had to admit she could never resist his sweet little puppy whimpers.

And on weekends they did chores together, because Ellen wasn't about to use her total dominance of her husband's mind and body as an excuse to make him do all the housework, and then Ellen played with her wonderful toy of a man for hours in between breaks for food, snuggles, and their favorite television shows. Sometimes they brought in a third for those sessions, remotely of course, and Jim had the wonderful experience of using his own deep and abiding submission to lead someone else into service to his enchanting Mistress.

But those calls were really the closest brushes they had with the outside world for several months. It began to feel faintly unreal to them, something they only encountered second-hand, and there were times Jim allowed himself to forget it entirely under his wife's hypnotic influence. That was something he didn't admit to many people, of course. He understood that their experience was a uniquely privileged one, and he appreciated that others struggled where he and Ellen blissfully thrived. But all the same, if he was truly honest with himself he wouldn't have minded if their quarantine lasted another year or two.

When it did end, though, things didn't ever go quite back to the way they were. Ellen's parents got used to calling their daughter instead of making the several hour drive out to visit, which gave Jim the freedom to wear his collar around the house full-time even if he did eventually get back into the habit of wearing clothes. Ellen's videos continued to do well even after the concert venues and movie theaters opened back up; it turned out there were some kinds of entertainment people preferred to watch in the privacy of their own bedrooms. And once the travel restrictions ended, Jim and Ellen used a little of their saved money to fly some of the kinky friends they'd been video chatting with out to come and see them in person... and one or two of them had so much fun they never left. Or at least they only left long enough to hire a moving van and drive back with all their stuff.

And so, even though Jim and Ellen felt guilty about it, they looked back fondly on the year everyone else thought of as the dumpster fire of history. They enjoyed the depth it brought to their dominance and submission, they loved the memories of what felt at times like a twelve-month-long extension of their honeymoon, and they tried to keep the pattern of their lives closer to what they did in 2020 than anytime before it... even if the first loaf of crusty bread, fresh from the oven, brought tears of joy to their eyes when they finally got a chance to taste it.

THE END