Even after hearing my astonished question, it still takes Beth a moment to stop, dragging her hand out of her pyjama bottoms in slow-motion, like she’s pulling it through thick mud. I have time to take a few steps closer, along the side of her bed.

I’ve got a much better view of her pacifier now. It’s not the same as mine - the central piece is white, as is the handle that protrudes from it, while the mouth guard is translucent pink, whereas mine is blue.

But the aesthetic differences don’t matter. The headline is, Beth has a fucking soother. This is huge.

I have about a million questions, but they catch in my throat, mostly just from the tremendous, flabbergasting mindfuck of the situation. Besides, she can’t really answer me right now anyway. It’s still in her mouth. She’s reaching up to take it out, but if anything she’s moving even more slowly than when she was stopping herself jilling off. She keeps hesitating, her arm jerkily stopping and starting as it approaches her face.

I get it. Taking the dummy out is never easy for me.

I realise I’m just assuming it’s affecting her the same way as me. But to be fair, the evidence of my own eyes strongly supports that.

Finally, still staring at me in faint horror, she tugs the pacifier from her lips with a wet pop. “I - I can explain,” she whispers hoarsely.

My eyebrows jump up. I realise, from the angle she’s lying, she might not have seen the contents of my hands. I raise them into the air, telling her, “I don’t think you need to!”

Her eyes go even wider as they lock onto my dummy - and then flicker across to my other hand, which, I suddenly realise, is brandishing the dildo like some kind of royal sceptre. She casts her gaze downwards, blushing.

My own cheeks burning, I hurriedly hide the toy behind my back. Although why, I can’t say. Doesn’t seem I’ve got much to be embarrassed about, since I just caught her in the act.

“I - I don’t understand,” she mumbles, so quietly that I have to take another step fowards to hear her. “How do - how do you have one?”

“That’s what I was gonna ask you,” I laugh awkwardly, sinking down to perch on the edge of her mattress. “Where did you get yours?”

Pulling herself upright, she shuffles backwards and props herself up against her headboard, giving me a little more space to sit. She fumbles with the light on her bedside table, turning it on, illuminating us dimly.

“It, uh - it was a secret Santa present. I dunno who from - I didn’t do any secret Santa this year. I mean, last year. Last Christmas, just gone...” I nod to indicate I understand her meaning. “And it showed up like, a month late - near the end of January.” She holds up her dummy in front of her, staring at it thoughtfully as she continues to speak. I notice that its nipple is a rubbery yellow colour - another difference from mine, which has a transparent teat. “I was so confused and weirded out, but then I started getting kinda calm and... drifty, and my head went really empty and quiet...”

Her voice is getting even softer. Her eyes seem to have clouded over. Her face is so blank, her mouth so slack - she looks like a sleepwalker, eyes open but fast asleep.

Fuck, she looks beautiful.

“An’, the next thing I know,” she murmurs, “I’m... I’m putting it... in my mouth...”

She’s about to put it back in, I suddenly notice. I’ve been so intently focused on her face, I didn’t see her hand raising the dummy back towards it. Instinctively I reach out and grab her by the wrist, halting her arm’s advance. She jumps, the lights seeming to switch back on behind her eyes, and she grins bashfully, lowering her arm again. “Sorry. It... it’s really hard not to...”

“I know,” I assure her with a knowing chuckle, relinquishing her wrist. “Believe me. Your story - that’s exactly what happened to me. Sudden secret Santa, end of January, total mystery - then I just found myself sticking it in my mouth. And then I got - well, I guess you know. Super turned on. Like, madly, ridiculously horny.”

She blushes again, giggling nervously. “Uh... yeah. Guess there’s not a lot of point denying it, after you walked in on me. Sorry about that.”

“Oh, don’t even worry about it,” I say quickly. “I swear, all I’m thinking about is this.” I smirk, holding my own pacifier up again. “I mean, in general all I’m thinking about is this! It’s so addictive...”

“Right?” she exclaims. “I just - I keep coming back to it, whenever I’m alone. It’s like, it takes away all my stress, and just replaces it with pleasure...”

I let out a heavy sigh, smiling in the direction of my dummy. Damn, she’s speaking my language. That’s exactly how I feel about mine. Whenever I have it in my mouth, comfortably nestled between my lips, it’s like the entire world falls away, and all that exists is me, and pleasure, and the pacifier...

“Linz? Linz.” All of a sudden Beth’s hand is round my wrist, pulling my hand away from my face.

Whoa. Huh. OK, I was just about to put mine back in. I was staring right at it, and I didn’t even notice it getting closer and closer. Then again, my mind was going blank very very quickly, so maybe my lack of awareness isn’t so surprising.

I laugh awkwardly. “Whoops. Like you said - hard to resist!”

She smiles understandingly. “Yeah, it’s like, it’s always here -” she taps herself on the forehead with her index finger “- but when I’m actually thinking about it, its, uh, its pull is so much stronger. Plus, it’s hard not to think about it if I go without it for a while. Today’s been so tough, I’ve been busy and around people all day long... All tonight, when we were studying, and having dinner, and watching YouTube, it was all I could think about. It was driving me nuts...”

“Oh my God, same,” I blurt out, laughing. “I can’t believe we were going through the exact same thing this whole time! If we’d only known...”

“Woulda saved a lot of sneaking around, right?” she snickers. “I tried to go to sleep and ignore how I felt, but I just couldn’t no matter how long I was lying still for - I was just too pent-up. When I heard you go to the bathroom, it was like a dam burst, I couldn’t wait any longer...”

“I didn’t go to the bathroom,” I say without thinking about it. Damn. I could’ve just let her keep thinking that, it would’ve been less embarrassing by far. “Thought other people might be around, I didn’t wanna get caught...”

“Oh yeah - good point.” She frowns, puzzled. “Then where...?”

I just point over my shoulder, not meeting her eye.

Her hoot of laughter makes me squirm. “Your closet?! That’s... I mean, that’s kinda genius, but also, wow. You were so horny, you got in a closet to get yourself off?”

“Hey,” I protest, “you’re the one who started flicking the bean the minute you thought I was outta the room. Don’t go throwing stones!”

She raises her hands in surrender, spluttering with mirth. “Touché! Wow, these things have really done a number on us, huh?”

“I guess.” I have to stop myself from staring at my pacifier again. That’d just be asking for trouble...

“I mean, it could be worse,” she continues. “I can still function as a person - it’s not, like, some all-consuming addiction that’s totally taken me over. Today was kinda rough, but I’m doing OK. Except, uh, things with Freddie...” She trails off, chewing her lip.

“Have you told him?”

“Oh, Christ, no,” she exclaims, “he wouldn’t get it. He’d think I’m some kinda freak. I mean, I guess anyone would. ’Cept you. ’Cos you’re going through the same thing.”

She gives me a confidential little smile, which I return. I’m oddly relieved she didn’t tell Freddie. Not just because he’d probably ridicule her, which I don’t like to think about - but this feels like something she and I can share. It was private to me before, something I didn’t want to tell anyone, not only to avoid mockery, but because it was my own special secret. But Beth knowing feels even better - because, like she said, she’s going through exactly the same thing. We’re bonded by this bizarre experience, me and her.

Is that why I’m suddenly so enchanted by the sight of her? I mean, I’m not blind. I’ve noticed how pretty she is before, with her pale skin, her luscious red lips, her crimson curls... but now, out of nowhere, I can’t take my eyes off her. She’s... she’s breathtaking.

Is the pacifier doing this, using its strange sexual magic to make me crush on my roommate? Is this just the result of a month with my sex drive sky-high, so now I’m just horny for anyone? Or were these feelings already there, and they’ve only now been brought to the surface...?

“But keeping it from him is creating this distance between us,” she tells me. “And it’s not just that...” She sighs. “It’s just, it’s hard to get excited about seeing him, when anything he can do, this can do a thousand times better.” She gestures to her pacifier. “When nothing he does comes close to what it can do... When it makes me so much happier, so much hotter, than he - than he ever...”

“Beth,” I warn with a grin, putting my hand on her arm as it starts to creep up to her face again.

“Aah,” she laughs, literally pushing her own arm away with her other hand. “Fell into the trap again!”

“You’re hopeless,” I tease her.

She sticks out her tongue at me. “Yeah, like you don’t feel exactly the same as me!”

Of course I do. The thought of that rubber nipple back between my lips is so appealing... But there’s a mystery to solve here. I can’t get over it - it was fucking weird enough for me to get a magic pacifier, but that was like, a one-off, an inexplicable, fantastic enigma. Now my roommate has one too? That’s not a coincidence. It’s a pattern.

“It’s gotta be something we have in common,” I say aloud, staring into the middle distance as I think it over. “Or someone we have in common - they must have sent the dummies to us...”

She wrinkles her nose dubiously. “Mm, maybe... I dunno. Someone could’ve sent us just normal dummies, for whatever reason - but magic dummies that make us mindless and horny? That’s some freaky shit.”

“Well, how do you explain it?” I challenge her. “Where do you think they come from?”

“I dunno,” she says again. “I haven’t thought much about it - not since that first day. I guess I just kinda took it as a miracle or something - this magical mysterious... thing that came from nowhere and makes me feel so, so good...”

“I mean, yeah, me too. But now we know there’s two. Someone must have sent them to us, someone we both know...”

“The overlap in our social circles isn’t exactly small,” she points out. “I mean, there’s the whole of Psych class, everyone in our dorm, a bunch of other freshmen we both hang out with, Freddie... It’s a long list. How the hell do we narrow it down?”

I don’t answer, because I can’t. I don’t know where to start with that list. But at least we have a list. I’ve already narrowed it down from everyone I know to everyone we know. After a month of getting nowhere with my investigation (mostly because I haven’t really tried), it’s a start.

“We’ll figure it out,” I tell her in my most determined tone. “We have to. If we find who did this, we can find out why - and how.”

“You really wanna know?” she asks, looking unconvinced. I get it - she still wants to just chalk it up to a miracle. But I can’t.

“Yeah, I won’t rest easy ’til I understand. I should’ve been trying to find out from the start, but I just got distracted whenever I tried to figure out what to do. Like you said, every time I think about it, it’s so much harder to resist it, so whenever I started trying to think about where it came from and how to find out, I just got pulled back into thinking about how good it makes me feel, and how much it turns me on, and then I couldn’t think about anything else, and it’d find its way back in my mouth...”

Beth leans forwards abruptly, her eyes wide. I feel the rubber nipple brush against my lips, an instant before she drags my arm away.

Whoops. Failed again!

“Let’s link arms,” she suggests, already threading her arm around mine, the crooks of our elbows nestling together. “That way if one of us starts to give in, the other one’ll feel it, and pull back and stop them.”

“That’s a great idea,” I tell her earnestly. Maybe a little too earnestly. Damn, this new crush is already getting out of hand. In a more measured tone, I continue, “Anything we can do to keep ourselves, y’know, coherent. I know it’s late, and we’ve both been jilling off and we’re exhausted, but this is too huge to ignore. We’ve gotta figure this out, we’ve gotta think of the connection and figure out where the pacifiers came from, and that means we can’t put them in our mouths, we haveta keep them out and keep our brains working and resist them and I don’t wanna resist I wanna put it in my mouth I’m gonna put it in my mouth. I’m going to put it back in my mouth, Beth.”

Her eyes widen. “What? Hey, Linz, snap out of it...”

But there’s nothing to snap out of. I’m fully compos mentis right now. It’s just, in the midst of all my babbling, I suddenly realised that even this earth-shattering discovery, this colossal breakthrough, this giant step towards solving the mystery of the pacifier, isn’t as important to me as having it in my mouth.

“I’m OK, Beth,” I insist. “I’m just gonna -”

I try to ease my arm free, but she tightens hers around it, tugging my hand further away as I lean towards it. “You’re the one who said we’ve gotta keep our brains working and figure this out,” she reminded me. “You’re the one who said you won’t rest easy ’til you understand what’s going on, ’til you solve the mystery. You can’t quit now! We’ll put our heads together, we’ll find the solution, you’ve just gotta fight that temptation for a little whi-”

“You can have yours, if I get mine.”

“OK,” she says immediately. With a sudden burst of strength, she pulls her arm - and mine - towards her and sticks her pacifier back in her mouth. I almost topple forwards. I’m close enough to hear her stifled sigh of satisfaction, to see her eyes roll back in her head before fluttering shut.

Fuck... However beautiful she was before, she looks even more stunning with that dummy in her mouth.

But even as I’m gazing at her in gay panic, I’m sliding my arm free of hers. And the next thing I’m aware of is that familiar supple teat between my lips, and that delicious lemon taste on my tongue.

The pleasure pulsing through every bit of me is familiar, but no less welcome. The corners of my mouth rise into a well-worn smile - it doesn’t matter that the pacifier hides it from view. My eyelids droop, my head lolling back... The only thing keeping me from completely letting go and sinking back into blissful blankness is the knowledge that I’m not alone. I stare blearily at Beth, who looks back at me through equally hooded eyes.

God, look at her... Her lustrous locks, hanging over her forehead and her shoulders in a bedraggled state... The vacant expression on her pretty face... The pink-and-white pacifier sitting snugly between her lips... And I can hear her sucking it greedily as she gazes at me, making little muffled mumbles...

I want her so badly. I just don’t know if she wants the same thing, and that’s all that’s holding me back from pouncing on her. I know it’ll feel amazing, maybe even more amazing than the way my dummy makes me feel, which I didn’t think was possible - but if she doesn’t want to, even if she goes with it in the moment, later when we fully get our brains back she might never forgive me -

She’s suddenly very close to me, her hands on my shoulders. While my tiny remaining fragment of self-control was keeping me paralysed, she’s scooted across the bed towards me, and now she’s leaning in for a kiss. Mm, yes, I want to - I lean my head forwards, and - our pacifiers clunk against each other.

Oh, right.

Amusement flickers through me, but manifests as the faintest snort. Beth doesn’t seem to notice. She’s already moved on, improvising a different kind of display of affection - a nose kiss. The tips of our similarly small noses rubbing together actually feels weirdly nice. No wonder the Inuit like it so much. I put my hands on her waist, and we rock back and forth in that position, noses and foreheads pressed against each other.

Well, she did say we’d put our heads together.

Her hands are moving down, unbuttoning my pyjama top and pulling it open. I feel her fingertips on my nipples, caressing them a little clumsily, but that doesn’t matter because it feels fucking amazing. I groan and lurch backwards, and she pinches my nipples, maybe to stop me from falling. Putting an arm around my back to hold me up, she slides closer again, her leg thrusting between mine and underneath my right leg.

I’m basically sitting on her left thigh now - and vice versa, our legs interlocking on the bed. I’ve buried my face in a thick cushion of her hair, and again, I can feel her doing the same. I can hear her sucking her soother so loudly. So am I, I realise through my lustful mental fog.

The next thing I notice is that I’m compulsively grinding my crotch along her thigh.

Man, I thought I’d had enough for one night. Clearly, discovering Beth’s own pacifier predicament has revitalised me.

I’m humping her harder and harder, my arousal surging. She’s whimpering into my shoulder. I can feel her rubbing herself against my leg, too.

This is amazing.

I cum, clinging to her.

I want more. I don’t care about anything else. I’m just a horny bitch in heat now. Leaning back a little, I can see her flushed face close to mine, her intense stare showing me she feels the same.

I hurriedly peel off my soaked pyjama trousers, throwing them on the floor. She does the same with hers, spreading her legs wide, giving me a vivid view of her drooling slit.

I get up on my knees, straddling her, my ass raised high in the air, and rub the side of my face against hers. I feel her reach under me, find my cunt and - oh. Oh, fuck - her fingers are so - so - nimble -

I cum again almost instantly, but even as I’m doing so, I slide my hands down to her pussy, determined to give as good as I get. We masturbate each other pretty much in sync, my fingers stroking up as hers stroke down, the edges of our faces nuzzling together like they’re making out.

I’ve never felt closer to anyone, at any moment in my life. Any lover, any friend, any family member... I’m here having sex with a girl who has a magic pacifier of her own. Who knows exactly how it makes me feel, and feels every bit of it herself. It’s a connection beyond the physical or the psychological - it’s spiritual. It transcends everything real and tangible.

It’s making me cum on her hand, over and over. And I can feel her doing the same on mine, clenching around my probing digits.

Finally, we collapse in a heap on her bed. She wriggles around clumsily, her head coming to rest against my bare chest. My head’s on her pillow, and I’ve got my arms wrapped around her. Our bare legs are entwined.

We lie there, supine, cuddled up together, lazily sucking our soothers. My eyelids sink shut, feeling like ten-ton weights. God, I’m exhausted. It must be almost 5 AM by now.

Beth snores softly, and that’s the last thing I hear before I drift away too...

***

Two months later

Lifting my gaze from the PDF on my computer screen, I lean back in my desk chair and stretch my arms wide from side to side, and then up in the air. Exhaling heavily through my nose, I relax, and glance over my shoulder at Beth. She’s sitting in bed, back against the headboard, an open textbook propped up against her raised thigh. She happens to look up and meet my eyes, and I give her an affectionate wink.

I think she’s smiling. It’s hard to tell though, with the mouth shield in the way. She does wink back at me though, and sucks her soother audibly. The sound sends a shiver through me, and I give my own teat a loud suckle, as if in agreement. Then I turn back to my reading material, and let her return to hers.

It’s been so chill the past couple of months. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t get along with Beth before, but we were just roommates, really - friends, maybe, but the kind of friends you make through circumstance, not by choice. The discovery of each other’s secret - the discovery that we shared the same secret - has made living together a thousand times easier.

We no longer have to hide our guilty pleasure. We can put in our pacifiers the second we get home and wear them openly, in front of each other, and continue to bond over the feelings they induce. The moment of all-encompassing, mind-emptying euphoria when we put them in our mouths... The thrill we get from seeing each other going about our daily lives, casually holding a dummy between our lips as we study, and do our laundry, and eat... (Wait, no, not eating. We do have to take them out for that, sadly!) And of course, there’s the irresistible impulse to get ourselves off, even in full view of our roommate...

Yeah, OK, when we’re both in the room together we rarely have to get ourselves off. More often than not, we end up fucking.

That first time, it felt so... so right in the moment. So perfect, and blissful, and unutterably hot... And then we went to sleep in each other’s arms, and we woke up in each other’s arms, and it was just perfect. But then we took the pacifiers out, and they stopped playing keep-away with our brains, and we started thinking about what just happened. I mean, it was a big deal for both of us. I’d never have described myself as straight, but I’ve never gone that far with a girl before - I’ve never gone further than making out with a few fellow freshman at clubs, every so often over the past year.

And Beth is straight. Or, she was. Or, she thought she was. So she got pretty worked up over the fact that she just slept with her female roommate.

We dealt with it by not dealing with it - by ignoring it and not thinking about it. And the best way to not think was with the help of the dummies. Which inevitably led to more sex. Which led to more confusion, and overthinking, and ignoring the issue, and using the dummies again, and more sex. It was a vicious sexy circle - one that couldn’t last forever.

After a week or so, Beth told me that she had to face facts: nothing she’d ever done with Freddie, or any man, had felt as incredible as being with me. It was even better than her pacifier-induced masturbation, which was ‘like touching Heaven’, she said.

I was so moved by that. I feel the same way, and I told her so.

“Sooo... we’re a couple now, I guess?” she’d asked me, looking hesitant but also hopeful. She seemed to want to leave the final decision up to me - like she wanted to make it definite, but she hadn’t quite found all the courage yet. She’d got all the way up close to stating it outright, which I think was really brave of her. And I was more than happy to help her over the finish line.

When I nodded, she kissed me. We’d never kissed before. We’ve rarely kissed since, except a few chaste pecks of greeting or farewell. It’s an odd relationship, not kissing very often. In our defence, our mouths are usually full. That first kiss though - that was pretty magical. Her lips were as soft as pillows, and her tongue moved like a dancer, undulating sensually.

She broke up with Freddie, obviously. However much I disliked the guy, I didn’t want to two-time him (any more than we already had, mostly involuntarily). And since then, there’s not been much standing in the way of us frenziedly fucking whenever we’re alone together in our room. We’ve still been keeping up with our schoolwork (which is so much easier with the pacifiers keeping our minds relaxed and focused). We’ve been hanging out with our friends as much as ever (more, if anything, which they’re delighted by, although they obviously don’t know about the magic soothers making us chill the fuck out and take more downtime than we used to). And we’ve even been making small efforts to investigate where our little miracles came from (although we’ve had no more luck so far).

But most of the time, when we’re not in our classes, we can be found at home, in each other’s arms, rampantly pleasuring each other, often wearing nothing but the pacifiers...

OK, I’ve read the same passage three times now, and I still have no idea what it says. In my defence, I’m being distracted by fond (sexy) memories. But I need to focus. Just gotta get this reading done, and then I can go back to having horny fun with my roomma-

Something small and soft hits me in the back of the head. I flinch, instinctively putting my hand to the point of impact even though it doesn’t actually hurt, and I turn and look behind me to see a pair of pale blue rolled-up socks lying on the floor behind my chair.

The bitch threw socks at my head! How rude.

I shoot her an indignant stare, only to see her waving her phone at me, a meaningful look in her eyes.

Ah, right. She messaged me. We’ve been doing that a lot lately. Easier than having to take the dummies out whenever we want to talk to each other.

Picking up my own phone, I read her DM.

Hey, u know that thing we put out to find anyone else with a paci?

I frown, nodding at her from across the room. She quickly types and sends another message.

We got a response. Someone else has one.