Vivian wondered about the tattoo sometimes. It was only natural, really; she was a fairly meek and introverted woman, not generally given to impulsive behavior or wild, spontaneous decisions, and when the only time she broke that habit led to a week of Spring Break debauchery in Puerto Vallarta she didn't fully remember and a tattoo on her wrist that itched for a month and peeked out from even her long-sleeved shirts... well, it sometimes led her to wonder what prompted her to get it, that was all. Sometimes she looked down, noticed the thick black 'XIX' lettered across pale skin that made the image stand out even more strongly by contrast, and asked herself what she was thinking.

It wasn't an especially ugly tattoo, thank god. Given how blitzed or stoned or whatever she actually was when she got it, Vivian truly thanked her lucky stars that she didn't wind up with a man's penis emblazoned along the length of her forearm or a crude sexual come-on inked into the skin of her pooched belly just above her pubic mound. Vivian hadn't touched alcohol or recreational drugs since she was nineteen, and whenever anyone asked her why she absent-mindedly rubbed the tattoo and said, "I don't make good decisions when I'm drunk." Nobody had ever asked her twice.

Even the decision to get drunk felt like a bad decision she'd made when she was drunk; most of Vivian's memories of that week had disappeared down a rabbit hole of blackout alcoholic stupor, but she remembered getting to the hotel and wanting nothing more than to collapse into bed and start her vacation tomorrow before Melinda--a friend Vivian hadn't seen in almost a decade now, and one she was very glad to leave behind--cajoled her into going down to the bar for just one drink to celebrate the start of their vacation. And one drink became two, and then the nice gentleman sitting next to her bought her a third, and Vivian didn't have even the slightest recollection of sipping it because that was when the night went away into a warm and giggly haze.

And that was it. That was literally it for the whole weekend, the whole week, the whole vacation. Vivian didn't even remember waking up in the morning; as best as she could guess, she spent the whole time getting boozed up or stoned or both and woke up still so tipsy from the night before that it apparently sounded like a great idea to start the new day off with a hair of the dog that bit her. Presumably she was blackout drunk again before she even regained the capacity to form new memories, and it simply never felt like the time to sober up until she was on her last morning and trying very hard not to scratch her newly-healing tattoo. She honestly didn't know if she even saw Melinda that whole time, and she was too embarrassed to ask.

In retrospect, it was faintly terrifying, even if everything did turn out alright in the end and Vivian wound up blessed with the lucky invulnerability of the young and stupid. She could have wound up pregnant, she could have wound up with an STD, she could have wound up kidnapped and chopped into hamburger by a European tourist who hunted teenagers for sport or something... but instead she got a tattoo. A silly, meaningless tattoo she had to make up explanations for every time she was asked about it, because 'I got blind stinking drunk and made a stupid decision' didn't sound good no matter who wanted to know.

Okay, maybe that part of it was fun sometimes. Giving a straight-faced account of her victory in a pie-eating contest or her participation in a ground-breaking medical study or whatever nonsense Vivian could think of to justify an 'XIX' tattoo could be kind of entertaining, especially as she wasn't the sort of person who had a close-knit social circle that might compare stories. Sometimes she fancied it might even make her a bit mysterious, which was an oddly comforting thought for someone whose idea of excitement was wearing the same shoes two days in a row.

That was really where it rested for the next fifteen years. Vivian never went on another Spring Break vacation, Melinda got tired of trying to turn Vivian into a free-spirited party animal and the two of them gradually and unintentionally disentangled their friendship, and the whole episode gradually drifted into the rear-view mirror of Vivian's life except for the very rare times she looked down at her wrist and found herself wondering what she might have looked like walking into that Mexican tattoo parlor on that fateful day. Did the artist smell the liquor on her breath? Did they ask themselves whether this was a decision the teenage redhead was going to regret before they pulled out their needle gun and asked her what she wanted? Or was it just business as usual in a town that thrived on tourists making bad decisions?

Vivian could have gotten it removed, of course. She had a good job as a web designer, she made plenty of money and paid off her small one-bedroom condominium by the time she was thirty, and she could easily have afforded the thousand or so dollars it would have taken to erase the mistake from her skin. But somehow every time she thought about it, a wave of indecision swept over her and she always wound up putting the decision off a little while longer. It wasn't urgent, after all. She worked from home, she didn't have many friends... or any friends, not that she minded the solitude that carried her through her days... and it wasn't especially intrusive. She noticed it when she got out of the shower, she ruminated on it sometimes when she was reading. That was all.

But she did think about it. And she thought about it a lot more after she saw 'XXIX' tattooed on the wrist of a woman in her early twenties Vivian saw at the airport one day.

It was pure coincidence, honestly. Vivian didn't travel much, but she had a few clients who were still old-fashioned enough to want face-to-face meetings and they were willing to shell out a per diem that was well beyond what frugal Vivian thought of spending on herself on a daily basis. So she found herself sitting at an airport restaurant, having allotted herself plenty of extra time to get through security and as a result possessing a good few hours of free time before her flight, staring absently at the passing travelers until she noticed one with a suspiciously familiar tattoo peeking out from the sleeves of her zip-up hoodie.

Vivian surprised herself by leaping out of her seat to follow the stranger, shouldering her overnight bag and leaving a half-eaten plate of food behind her. She hadn't been given to impulsive decisions in over fifteen years, but she was sure as hell making one now, and her long legs carried her in rapid strides past business travelers and clusters of vacationing families until she came up on a woman in her twenties who might have been a younger version of Vivian herself. She darted forward a bit further, not wanting to startle the other person by clapping a hand on her shoulder, and said, "Um, excuse me?"

The woman looked over at Vivian, and the startled look on her face suggested she found their resemblance as uncanny as Vivian herself did--they both had the same fiery red hair, the same thick glasses magnifying emerald green eyes, and the same incredibly pale skin that Vivian, at least, blamed on her Irish grandmother and her indoor lifestyle. Vivian had a few inches on the stranger in height and a few extra pounds around the hips and belly, but otherwise the two of them could have been sisters.

Only they weren't. Because only one thing connected them apart from the physical resemblance. "Do, um, is yours....?" Vivian mumbled, fully aware that in the heat of the moment she probably sounded a little bit like a conspiracy theorist, before she gave up on words altogether and extended her wrist so the 'XIX' tattoo fully showed as her sleeve tugged back just a little. It felt like she was confessing to some kind of shameful secret, but at the same time she'd never felt anything more intimate in her entire life.

The woman extended her own wrist, and 'XXIX' peeked out from the sleeve of the hoodie. It didn't take either of them more than a moment to absorb the implications of that extra letter--anyone over the age of ten knew what Roman numerals were, and if there was a nineteen and a twenty-nine then there were almost certainly twenty-seven other women out there with tattoos of their own. Vivian found herself itching to dig into every detail of the stranger's experience, to find out whether she was nineteen and on vacation when she got her ink and what she remembered of that week.

Instead, they wound up dragging each other off to a restroom to have sex. It wasn't a spoken agreement on their part, or even really a conscious decision--Vivian looked down at the stranger's wrist, the other women looked down at hers, and then they were looking for the quietest place in a decidedly crowded building where they could shove their tongues into each other's mouths and make wild, passionate love to one another. Vivian knew it was decidedly out of character for her, and to find that the identical redhead with the near-identical tattoo shared the exact same impulse stirred all sorts of suspicions in the back of her brain, but she ignored literally every single one of them in favor of bolting hand-in-hand for the women's room and slipping into the stall together.

The sex was furtive, perhaps a little bit awkward, but Vivian didn't care. She squeezed up against the other woman in the corner stall and locked lips with her in a passionate kiss that seemed to unleash fifteen years of pent-up sexual energy--Vivian thought she'd been ace all this time, she certainly never had any interest in dating or hooking up with anyone, but the moment she saw that tattoo it unlocked something deep inside her head and before she knew it she had her hand jammed down the stranger's leggings to finger her soaking cunt.

The other woman did the same, and before Vivian knew it she was softly grunting into the stranger's mouth as her dim and distant awareness that they were in a heavily-surveilled building with a whole crowd of people who'd been drilled in the motto 'If You See Something, Say Something' warred with the screaming orgasm building up between her legs as the two of them finger-banged each other. It stirred... not memories, exactly, because Vivian didn't remember any of that week in Puerto Vallarta and it was only now that it occurred to her just how improbable that truly was, but at the very least a sense of familiarity that slotted neatly into the place where memories would go. She'd spent a lot of that week cumming her brains out. She'd spent a lot of that week following bizarre sexual compulsions. And all of it felt every bit as good as Vivian did right now.

The younger woman was moaning back at Vivian, her soft and breathy grunts of pleasure a bit less restrained due to youth or inexperience or just extra-potent sexual desire, but thankfully the sounds of the public address system and the echoing footsteps and the occasional whoosh of a flushing toilet covered it all up. If anything was going to give them away, it was the two pairs of feet in one stall, but either nobody saw something or nobody said something because the two of them managed to bring each other to multiple shuddering climaxes before they finally managed to get their raging libidos back under some semblance of control.

Vivian slowly withdrew her hand from the other woman's leggings, and it was only when she watched her near-double licking her fingers that she realized she was doing the same thing herself. "I... this, um, this isn't, I don't...." she muttered softly, unable to frame her own behavior in any kind of rational light. The momentary sense of familiarity was already fading, as though her mind was long practiced in the art of forgetting anything that might lead Vivian back to that lost week fifteen years ago, but the evidence in front of her kept bringing her back to it. She couldn't forget what had just happened. She needed to know more.

No. That... that was a lie, Vivian realized with great difficulty. That was a justification she was feeding herself in the moment, something her rational brain liked to believe because it didn't want to believe the compulsion she was experiencing and whatever planted that compulsion didn't want Vivian to believe it either. She really just wanted to meet this woman again so they could have more sex, lots of it. She wanted to get naked and film the two of them fucking like bunnies, and then she wanted to send the video to--to--

The thought grew heavy and fell out of Vivian's head. Before she could fully recover her wits, she'd already lifted up her shirt so the other woman could take a picture of her small, perfectly shaped breasts.

"Can I--can I get your number?" the stranger asked, after tapping the screen of her phone a few times to send the photo zooming through the Internet. Vivian realized to her shock that she wasn't shocked at all; if anything, showing off her tits to a random person awakened more of that inexplicable sexual arousal Vivian hadn't felt properly in fifteen years. It felt familiar, though, too; Vivian didn't recall sending nudes to people, but seeing that mental muscle in action and discovering just how good she was at obliviating her own memories made her wonder how many of her quiet nights at home were really that.

She was so bewildered by it all that she barely even noticed herself exchanging information with the younger woman... whose name was Diane, apparently, a detail it felt incredibly awkward to find out after jamming two fingers into her snatch. The two of them made plans to meet up when they got back home, and Vivian could feel the unspoken conversation happening around the words that left their lips--they were going to fuck each other stupid, and they were going to film every moment of their lesbian tryst the way they'd been programmed to. Vivian's cunt throbbed with arousal at the thought of pleasing her audience, and it throbbed even harder when her awareness of the entire incident began to fade into blissful irrelevance.

The two of them left the washroom, finally collecting a few irritated stares from a mother from Peoria who was helping her daughter wash her hands, and once again went their separate ways. Vivian had the feeling she was supposed to forget what happened altogether, but the implications of the event fascinated her so completely that she couldn't fully let it go despite a quiet insistence in the back of her head that didn't feel like it came from her at all. Someone planned for the eventuality that his marked subjects might meet someday. That person planted compulsions in their heads to override their surprise and concern with helpless, inescapable lust. And Vivian....

Oh. Shit. Vivian was still following her programming. The person who did this knew it would break their spell just a little to discover another identical subject. They knew they couldn't make Vivian forget it all. But her oblivious disinterest filled in the crack in her brainwashing with helpless lust instead, a desire for her fellow victim that would leave them both bound together and eager to reinforce each other's conditioning... and all Vivian could do with that knowledge was look forward to her next chance to mindfuck her new lover into obedience.

Until then, there was only one thing to do. Vivian stared down at her wrist, her eyes locked onto the outline of the tattoo, and squeezed her thighs rhythmically together in a pattern of masturbatory clenches that left her vacant and horny and consumed with the desire to obey.

THE END