“What the fuck?”

A bit rough for a beginning, I am aware. Sorry about that. It was my initial reaction, and I’m afraid it’s still a very accurate portrayal of what I’m feeling. But we’ll get to that soon enough.

I’ve been aroused by mind control of various sorts for as long as I can remember. Long prior to understanding what erections were, I was experiencing them while watching television show characters “put someone under”. It was uncomfortable... and thrilling, and I spent furtive moments of my youth in public libraries looking up “hypnotism” and seeking the elusive instructions on how to perform it myself. Magazine articles, documentary videos, self-help books. You name it, I checked it out. I even swiped a buddy’s “improve your study habits” self-hypnosis cassette tape for a night to see what effect it would have. (I returned it the next day. My studies did not improve.)

When I hit young adulthood I was distracted by erections from other sources and didn’t think too much about mind control anymore; I had, indeed, after perusing all the literature, come to the conclusion that the whole thing was kind of a farce, anyway. Sure, there was some evidence people joined in a sort of “shared hallucination” with their hypnotist, but as it was all voluntary anyway it seemed obvious to me that it was just people play-acting at being under control and susceptible to suggestion, whether they were consciously aware of themselves faking it or not. Having seen one too many stage hypnotists will do that to a person. Or at least a skeptical person, which is what I was becoming as I matured. By college I’d given up on mind control as anything other than an interesting sexual fantasy which the then-blossoming Internet delivered to me from time to time.

Sheila entered my life. Amazing Sheila. I was dating someone else at the time—someone I went to school with—and taking somewhat infrequent trips home. At a club in Canada I watched a petite brunette with great legs dance dirty with her girlfriends. I prayed to God that she would have a face to match her legs and, to my joy and dismay, my prayers were answered. Joy because she was a little hottie (a word which was new at the time, if I haven’t already dated myself enough for you with my references); dismay because that meant I would simply have to approach her and I hadn’t had enough to drink to be confident in doing that.

She took it out of my hands, though. After leaving the dance floor and sitting on a stool with her cocktail, she noticed me staring. She stared back. And smiled. And uncrossed her legs, giving me a very lingering and moreover very purposeful glimpse up her skirt. An intervening crowd hid her momentarily from my sight, but soon the waitress came over and handed me a cocktail napkin with neat lettering in pink pen, and I looked up to meet her eyes once more. And stared at her thighs, which she parted again for me. “You’re not imagining things: I think panties are a waste of good fabric. Don’t you agree?” the note read; she arched an eyebrow at me and smirked as I looked at her in thrilled disbelief. “P.S. Please don’t be too rough with me. It always makes my pussy so wet.”

I don’t even remember walking over to her, grabbing her by the arm as if I owned her, and dragging her out to where my car was parked, but she tells me that’s what happened and I have no reason to disbelieve her. I do remember grabbing her by the back of her blouse, slamming her chest down on the hood of my car, yanking up her skirt, and fucking her pussy from behind without even a word of request or even discussion. I recall vividly her admonition, “Use me, please!” and my reply: a grunted, “Take it! Take me. Take it, you cunt!” as she slammed back onto me with the same ferocity I used to pound into her.

She’s told me since that was the best sex she’d ever had, and was why she married me. I’m flattered, though the best sex I ever had was on our wedding night; however, I’m a romantic at heart and this is neither the time nor the place to go into that.

Suffice it to say my life is a blast. I dumped College Girl, spent a lot more time on trips back home, and dragged Sheila back to Chicago with me once I finally graduated. I’d never met anyone before or since who was a better match for me. Even putting aside the fact that she was as naughty as a minx, she knew all the same songs I did, could quote movies with me, and even hated the same celebrities. We were both avid readers and I suppose when you come down to it that’s where the heart of the story really starts.

* * *

I don’t know when I started looking at the mind control porn again, but it did manifest. I don’t know why, either, but I sort of hid it from Sheila. It wasn’t a secret or anything, I just would tend to click on another window any time she came by and I was reading the stuff. It made no fucking sense, given all the things we had and have shared, but in some way I was worried she’d think it was too weird.

I needn’t have worried. She found my browser history files and, always blunt, queried, “Care to share something with me?”

She says it was cute the way I turned red, and that she wanted to take me right there but held off to get to the bottom of things. She asked what I’d been reading, and why, and whether it was something that turned me on. I confessed that it was smoking hot, and that it had been in my fantasies, lurking, for longer than I knew for sure. We talked that night about which stories I liked the most, thematically, and though she didn’t display any major interest in my newly-revealed fetish we certainly still fucked like rabbits that night and the next morning, too. It was like revealing that kink had been cathartic and my catharsis circuitry was celebrating with the need to bang her pussy into oblivion. And so I did.

Nothing came of it, really. There was some discussion on whether I had ever been hypnotized, or hypnotized anyone, and of course I had done neither. It was a lot of nonsense, I assured her, though that didn’t make it any less sizzling on the libido-meter.

She’s a lot more open-minded than me, though, and proved it months later.

“What the fuck?”

The opening line of this tale refers specifically to my reaction when I came home to her sitting in front of her laptop, typing away in a daze and completely ignoring me. I thought back to various things on the honey-do list I’d been neglecting recently and wondered which lapse was serious enough to warrant this silent treatment. She was still doing a great job of pretending I wasn’t there, typing a key at a time, and I went upstairs to cool down before talking to her about it. She enjoys being spanked, but I have a really bad temper and right now I was as likely to backhand her for being such a bitch; I didn’t really want to redden her face, so I took a shower.

When I came back down she was smiling and friendly and folding her laptop. “Hi, darling,” she said as I entered. “Welcome home.”

“Excuse me?”

She looked hurt and puzzled. “Did I do something wrong? Why the anger? Bad day at work?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Bad day at work?! You ignore me for ten minutes when I get home and you think my anger has to do with something at the office? What the fuck?” See, I told you it was an appropriate phrase.

“Oh,” she looked apologetic. “I’m sorry. I guess I must have been in trance, then.”

“In what?” Fury abated now, I was confused as hell instead. “In trance?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” My incredulity was evidently on display. “Damn, I could swear I did. Look, let me talk with you about it over dinner. The roast is done.”

I helped with the plates and tableware while she got the tasty morsels on the plate in front of me. Damn her, but she knows my weakness: roast beef cooked just right, and lightly crisped potatoes. (And eating pussy. Not at the same time as the roast, you understand, it’s just another one of my weaknesses. Love that stuff! But I digress.)

Sheila proceeded to tell me that she’d been playing around with hypnotism on a couple of the mind control websites I frequented.

“Define playing around,” I grumbled, and I could tell from her reaction my eyebrows were creasing together in just that way.

“Oh, don’t worry about that, sweetheart. My cyber-hymen is still intact.” She giggled at my jealousy. “No, I was just trying to see if I could go into trance. I wanted to see what it was like.”

“What?” The the fuck part was silent, but nonetheless present.

“I could swear I’d mentioned it to you.”

“Uh uh.”

“Huh. Well, anyway, it started a month ago with this—”

“A month ago?!”

“Can I finish?”

“I suppose.”

“This lady online said she wanted to test out new methods of trance, and I said I was game, and so she took me under.”

“Took you under? How?”

“She calls it a ‘text induction’.”

“With text? On a screen? No voice, no images?”

“Oh, no. That stuff comes later, she says.”

“Later? Later than what?”

Sheila looked troubled. “Honey, you seem really upset by this. Have I done something wrong?”

I was suddenly torn between ordering her to stop and laughing at her for playing the fool. It was a gimmick. I knew that. I’d watched people in crowded nightclubs play-acting, had read the literature which revealed that the feats demonstrated while in the “trance state” were easily duplicated by unentranced subjects who were given significant financial inducement to try very hard.

“No, dear. It’s nothing. I’m okay.” I felt better now. “You know I don’t really believe in any of that stuff anyway, so I can’t imagine any harm done.”

“You’re so closed-minded.”

“A closed mind helps keep my brains from falling out. So, you gonna tell me about what happened?”

“Oh, it was loads of fun. The first time, she just helped me relax by staring at her words on the screen and getting me to pay close attention to what she was saying. Getting me to focus on her words, you know, repeating them over and over...” It was surely my cock’s imagination, but I could swear she was glazing over right now as she talked about it. Nah.

She continued, less glazy. “It was so soothing. It was like surrender. All my cares and worries went away, and I felt so much better afterward. She mailed me the transcript, and I’m glad she did, because I didn’t remember a word of it.”

I kept a straight face, I know I did. “Really? That’s amazing.”

“You still don’t believe it, do you?”

“No, but it’s obvious you do, and that’s all that matters.”

“Good. Anyway, I do it now and then when she’s online. It always makes me feel so good afterwards.”

“What does ‘she’ get out of it?”

“Oh, she says she has fun with it. If you ask me, I think she has a little crush on me and is hoping to do evil mind control things to me when I’m under.” She dimpled. I love those dimples.

“And you’re planning on dealing with that how?”

“Are you implying you would have serious objections to my having cybersex with another woman?”

“Ahem. Okay, let’s put that aside for now.” It would be difficult to “put aside” my erection, though. I’m a guy. Two women going at it is hot, no matter how crackpot the reason. Do I really have to explain this to you? “Who is this chick?”

“She calls herself ‘Mistress Edralve’. With an ‘e’ on the end. Like it’s French or something. She doesn’t sound French, though.”

“She... hey, I thought you said the voice stuff came later.”

“The voice inductions, silly. I just talked to her over voice chat, you know, normal. Not in trance.”

“What about?”

“You know, the normal stuff.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever. Listen...” Why was I giving her the third degree about this? I was being a complete freako about something I didn’t even think was real. “I guess I’m comfortable with this on a couple of conditions: one, you won’t let it affect our home life... especially our sex life!”

“Like I’d let that happen.”

“True enough. And, two, no men!”

“I told you she’s a woman.”

“Yes, well, maybe she has boyfriends or something. Three, if I want you to stop for any reason, you’ll end it.”

She smiled broadly at me. “Is that all?”

“Yeah.”

“I accept. Now come over here. I have a feeling there’s someone down there who’s excited about this whole thing, even if your brain is not.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Sure, dear, sure.” She paused to unzip. “Mmmmm... I was right. Very tasty looking. Does he want to fuck the hypnoslut’s mouth?”

“Are you offer—” My question was cut off by my grunt of pleasure as her tongue went to work on the underside of my glans. She barely even throated me, just kept attention to the head and surroundings. It was less common than her taking my entire length (she said she liked the feeling of having me all the way in), but that made it more like a special treat.

When I spurted my come into her mouth she looked up at me and made a very obvious point of swallowing, then blinking innocently as if she’d just baked me cookies instead of giving me a sizzling blow job.

I finished the remaining dinner later. There were more important things to eat just then.

* * *

Things went along as normal, with the exception that sometimes I would come home to find my wife zoned out in front of the monitor, typing away, or a couple of times speaking into the attached microphone. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, but I made the effort to leave the room. So as not to violate her privacy or something; I don’t know. She was obviously still capable of comprehending that I was home since it was never more than five minutes before she shut off the computer and made her way to wherever I was, kissing me and asking me how my day was as if I’d not just seen her enthralled by some strange woman countless miles away.

It wasn’t until the night I came home to find her reeking of sex that I even began to feel a twinge of jealousy. I inhaled deeply and obviously, all grins. “Someone had fun today.”

“Huh? Oh, you mean...” She sniffed her fingers and blushed ever-so-slightly. “I’m sorry, I should have washed up.”

“Not at all. I like you dirty.” I kissed those fingers and she smiled. “What was the occasion?”

“Do I need an occasion to pleasure myself?” She cocked an eyebrow at me.

“I know I do. It’s extremely rare you don’t take care of my pleasure for me.”

“Yes, well, we wouldn’t want you to have to waste your time and energy on something redundant, would we?”

Our banter continued through dinner (as did my hard-on), and by the time I had finished the dessert (Sheila made a killer raspberry pie) it was evident we probably wouldn’t even make it up the stairs. We settled on the living room couch instead, and my hand invaded her skirt as I kissed her deeply. She moaned into my mouth as I pushed her tiny thong aside and applied my hand to the pleasant task of stimulating her clit. She was as moist as I was hard, and it didn’t take her insistent tugging on my cock to make me need her immediately.

“So what did you think about while you masturbated today?” I asked huskily as I slid into her for the first time that night. It was a game of ours: we told each other our fantasies while we were fucking, and it got us both off powerfully. I loved to hear her discuss what turned her on, and she asserted the feeling was mutual.

“I... I’d rather not say.”

“Come on, don’t play coy with me. Tell daddy what you were thinking. What you were doing.”

“I was on the internet.”

“Looking at porn? Hot!”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

“I was in trance. Mistress Edralve put me under.”

“And that got you off?” And why wouldn’t it? It was getting me off just imagining it.

“Not directly. She made me... she gave me suggestions that I wanted to stroke my pussy to her voice... that her words where like an aphrodisiac to me, and that I needed to get off while thinking about her.”

I grunted acknowledgement at this arousing admission. She rightfully took that as a sign to continue.

“I... she was right. I couldn’t help it. It was like my pussy needed... oh, that’s good, that rhythm, yessss... pussy needed to be touched, like it was calling out to me. My hands just fell into my lap and started fucking me. I tried to stop them, just to prove I could, but it didn’t work.”

“Rrrrrr...” I replied. This was going to go too quick. I needed to be less stimulated, so I carefully extracted my legs from between hers and, without leaving her juicy cunt, spun around to take her from behind.

This bothered her not at all, as her hissed “Oh, God!” attested. She started pushing her slit back onto me, lightly circling her ass in that way she knew drove me wild. My attempts to last a while were going to be fruitless, I could tell.

“So you fucked your slutty pussy while another woman had you hypnotized?”

“Uhnnnnh hunnh,” she acknowledged, and I could tell she was as aroused by my saying it out loud as I was. “I fucked my slutty pussy. My dirty, filthy whore cunt.”

I was close to exploding, and I figured the next bit would do it; I didn’t care, now, for making this last. I wanted to spurt into her. “And what then?”

“She...”

“Yeah?”

“She told me I’d rather be her cuntslave than be with you. That with one lick I would be so in love with her pussy that I would not be able to resist obeying her, and I would move in with her and leave you to be her lesbo slave-slut.”

I pumped into Sheila with a fury not entirely related to arousal. “Oh, yeah? And what did you tell that fucking bitch, huh?”

“I told her she was... uhnnhhh... she was right.”

I howled and violently jerked her back onto my cock, wrenching her tits in my fists. To this day I don’t know what kind of self-destructive shit was going on in my head but, God help me, I came hard right then and there and filled her with my spunk. That obviously went over well with her, because she began to make noises only dogs and fax machines could hear for a moment before finally collapsing into a puddle of worn-out flesh.

She slept then, and any questions I had about whether how serious she’d really been were lost in the shuffle.

* * *

I had my reservations after that night, but it wasn’t enough to make me really crazed. After all, I was getting laid as much as ever, and the fantasies she narrated were even hotter.

However, the evening I came home early to find her furiously masturbating to a flashing ice-blue spiral while she moaned “A good slut is an obedient slut” every time she slid her finger inside... Well, that was too much. I watched for a couple minutes-- okay, maybe I stroked one off into a conveniently located quarter-full coffee mug, but it was an angry jacking-off— and was infuriated when she ended the session with, “Goodnight, Master. I will always obey,” and shut down the machine.

“Master?” I inquired, seething.

She looked at me blankly as she pulled her skirt down and licked her fingers clean. “Huh? Oh, hi, dear! You’re home early.”

“What the fuck?” My mantra. “I thought we’d talked about this and you were only going to do this stuff with girls. With a girl. With Eclavdra or whatever her name was.”

“Sweetheart, what are you talking about?”

“You just signed off and told some guy you would ‘always obey’. ‘Master’, you called him.”

She laughed and said that was impossible—that sometimes when they “played”, she called the other woman “Mistress”, and that was probably what I’d heard, but I refused to be mollified. “That was a man playing with your head in trance.”

“Honey, now you’re just being silly.” And she looked at me so earnestly that even I started to wonder what I had seen. Are you gonna believe me or your lyin’ eyes?

Fuck that. My eyes don’t lie, and they’re not muddied with months of trances. Imaginary trances. “Honey, I think you need time away from the hypnotism stuff. It... seems to be affecting our marriage.”

She looked upset. “But you said—”

“Yeah, I know what I said, but it’s obvious it’s bothering me anyway. And you said you’d stop if I asked you to.”

“Yes,” she replied, reluctantly, “yes, I did. And I will. No more. I promise.”

“You sure?”

Annoyance, now. “I said I promised, didn’t I?”

“Hey, it’s okay, I believe you. Don’t worry about it.”

She sighed. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. Maybe I’m using the trances as too much of a crutch and now that you’re making me—now that I’m deciding to stop, I’m feeling like it’s going to be less easy to get through the day.” She puffed out a breath in resignation. “Well, I’m gonna take a shower, now, darling. Maybe later after dinner we could...” She smirked and let that trail off with a firm implication I’d be seeing her in something dirty and filthy and probably translucent later tonight.

“Sounds great, dear. What about dinner?”

“It’s in the oven. Can you set the table?”

“Sure. Have a nice shower.”

“I will,” she replied, downing the... er... coffee from earlier before setting it back on the ledge and going upstairs.

Before the shower door had opened I had pried the laptop open and was frantically searching for some kind of evidence what I’d seen was real. I hadn’t found any by the time the shower stopped, so I gave up. For the moment.

* * *

If the constant sexual stimulus had been negatively affecting Sheila’s libido for our marital relations, you couldn’t tell it by me. She was a wildcat in bed (and on the floor, up against the wall... all of her favorites), taking me in her mouth while thrusting her clit at my face in a frenzy of maddened desire.

While I was never naive enough to think I had imagined the violation of our agreement, after her initial annoyance at me for invoking the “give it up when I ask” clause she seemed content with the lack of trance sessions with Edralve or whoever else had been there. She spent her free time hiking, and often visited me in the middle of the day at work for lunch and sometimes a nooner. Things were back to normal again.

It wasn’t until the night I woke up at two in the morning to find her missing from the bed that things got uncomfortable again. It was rare for her to have insomnia, but it wasn’t totally out of the realm of possibility. I told myself this several times as I made my way to the office where the flickering blue light illuminated Sheila’s naked form. One hand stroked her snatch vigorously, and the other wiped saliva or pussy or both over her tits, neck and chin. Her eyes were glazed over again and her mouth was silently repeating the word “obey” over and over.

I came up behind her, and she was so deep in the throes of her masturbation she didn’t even notice. I yanked the headphones out of the jack, and the computer “conveniently” switched to speaker. A male voice (different from the one before, if I am any judge of such things) thundered out:

“... you are mine, slut. No one else’s. Not even Edralve’s. Do you understand and obey? Tell your master you obey!”

Sheila leaned forward to the tiny microphone, still oblivious to my presence. She licked her lips and began aloud, “I obey, mas—”

In retrospect I probably shouldn’t have smashed the monitor. Or the router. Or did that hammer thing to the cable modem. It didn’t matter; Sheila bought new ones at the local electronics store the next day, not even recalling watching me break them. I don’t think she knew why she needed them, but that didn’t stop them from showing up on my American Express card.

* * *

I’ve reviewed the network logs to the limits of my sparse familiarity with computers, and so far I’ve found dozens of addresses for people who have had or still do have access to my wife’s mind. Some were sending her text, some accessing her through voice chat, and I found three who had sent her crappy homemade spiral patterns along with MP3s with intricate music and mumbled commands. All male.

In addition, there were the transcripts from the original “Mistress Edralve” sessions, and there were big chunks of time missing from the timestamp on the early ones. Edited. There was obviously some stuff in there this woman hadn’t wanted Sheila to see initially, though as the sessions got more and more intense the editing dropped away and I noticed instead admonitions to be more and more helpless to see and remember “some of the commands which used to make [her] nervous”. Near the end there were orders to log into websites where a number of “masters” could use her for their own purposes, and Sheila was told to submit to them as well.

It’s all thoroughly insane. Whether I believe an iota of it or not (and I still maintain my skepticism), it’s clear she believes in it, and by my own admission the whole heart of the game that is hypnosis is that the subject convinces themselves they are under the control of the inductor. So, really, what does it matter if she’s “really” entranced and incapable of disobeying suggestions or not? If she thinks she is, then for all intents and purposes she is. Period. End of story.

I’ve lost nothing, really: she’s not changed her role with me, in bed or otherwise. She still cooks the meals, greets me with a passionate kiss at the door and with her legs wrapped around my waist when I tell her I want her. But somehow I feel there’s something wrong with our relationship... that she’s ceded some amount of control to others I can’t touch, that I’ve lost some imperceptible... something... that maybe I never had in the first place.

And why the fuck can’t I hypnotize her, if it’s so damned easy that anyone with access to Photoshop can have her for a song? (Literally!) Is it, as she said after I made the attempt a week ago, because I don’t really believe it can work, or is it because she knows I don’t really believe it can work or (and this is the thought that woke me up in a cold sweat last night) is it because she’s been programmed to be inaccessible to my attempts?

I can’t find “Mistress Edralve”, no matter what I try. The chick is a fucking enigma and the kid I hired to hack our PC and figure out who she was had no more luck than the private investigator I hired to do the same. They both asked for more information, and I’ll admit I am scared to give it to them—do I really need a pimply-faced high-school junior and a moustached forty-something added to the list of people forcing her to chant “Obey. Obey. Obey.” over and over again late at night?

My initial resolution to divorce her based on her broken promise has faded to a dull glimmer of frustration, but I have not, not struck her across that mesmerized facade with the back of my hand, much as I’ve wanted to, when I’ve discovered her antics several times since that night. I love my wife and I’m not giving her up to some charlatan bitch with delusions of grandeur. And the dozens of others... but let’s not go there right now. We’ll get through this somehow. God only knows how.

I’m a husband whose wife’s mind is not her own and, to make matters worse, it’s not mine either.

So what do I do now, huh?

Huh?!