Emily’s fingers curled into fists, nails pinching her palm, as the pink and purple spiral flashed on her laptop screen. It was too much, too bright, too fast, and yet her eyes refused to look away. The room was cold and stale, but beside her, Karen radiated warmth and unrelenting sexual tension. 
She leaned in close, so close that Emily smelled the cinnamon gum on Karen’s breath as the ghost of her lips hovered at the edge of her cheek. The world had shrunk to just the two of them and the inexorable, pulsing spiral that drilled into her brain.
Karen grinned. Her voice curled around Emily’s ear, as dangerous as it was delicious. Each word was a promise of something forbidden, and promises are meant to be kept.
“Didn’t I tell you it would be easy for you to go into a trance for me?” Karen crooned, her hands resting on Emily’s rigid shoulders, thumbs pressing into her muscles. “Don’t resist it, Em. You want to be powerful, but it’s even better to be helpless, isn’t it?”
The spiral sped up. The colors deepened, the screen flickered almost imperceptibly, and suddenly it was the only thing that existed. The rest of the room, Karen, even the grip she had on Emily’s flesh, faded into a haze at the periphery. “Yes… so easy to slip away… hearing only my words, thinking only my thoughts,” Karen’s voice hummed, now inside the spiral, as if she’d crawled into Emily’s skull and was whispering from its hollow center.
Emily tried to blink, but her eyelids responded as if lagging by seconds, a delay that made her heart thump with fear. “That’s right,” Karen said, noticing, always noticing. “The spiral is no longer just on your computer, dear. It’s inside your mind and I control the spiral… it grows bigger and smaller at my behest, just like your will…”
Something tugged behind Emily’s ribs, an urge to resist, but it was weak, thin as a strand of candy floss,  while the urge to obey was a ten-ton weight. Karen’s hand crept from Emily’s shoulder to the back of her neck, massaging gently, coaxing her deeper. “Inhale for me,” Karen said, and Emily’s lungs expanded without her permission. “Exhale… and again.” The spiral’s rhythm synced with her breathing. Each pulse throbbed in time with her heartbeat.
Karen’s words folded over her, heavy as a scented blanket. “Everything you want to remember, you remember now. Everything you want to forget, you forget. My words fill up the spaces, planting new ideas. Like seeds, like tiny eggs, hatching in the dark.” She laughed, soft and throaty, and Emily shuddered. “Let them hatch, Em. Let them become you.”
Inside her head, Emily searched for herself and found only a nervous, trembling echo. The spiral was a tunnel, narrowing, with Karen’s voice at the vanishing point, calling her forward, forward, forward.
This isn’t real, she wanted to say, but her lips wouldn’t shape the words. It was as if the spiral was swallowing up even her ability to protest, to be herself. Feverish childhood memories resurfaced: her consciousness detaching, her body moving without her control, the horror of being a spectator in her own life. This was like that, except Karen wasn’t a fever. She was a living, breathing person with a devious and unstoppable mind.
Emily floated above the world, watching herself relax and Karen’s hand slip down the length of her arm. “You like this,” Karen whispered. “You’re a natural. You’ve always wanted to let someone else take control.” The suggestion stuck to Emily’s mind like a burr, fuzzing away the last of her resistance.
She remembered the things she never told anyone, the black-market places her mind had wandered into in the dark. The places even shame didn’t reach. She remembered being thirteen, and reading stories about mind control - tales of girls who lost themselves to other people’s will, and being at once disgusted and turned on. She thought she’d outgrow those dark desires by burying them beneath a mountain of respectability and good grades, but she never did. And now, Karen had found them. She had unearthed it all to make it real.
The spiral pulsed on, and Karen’s commands grew stronger. Breathe in. Breathe out. Sink deeper. Love what you become. A tear slipped down Emily’s frozen cheek. She wasn’t sure if it was from relief or horror.
“This isn’t real…” Emily said. Most of her adult nights had been dominated by the same forbidden desires, dark fantasies exploding like fireworks on her king-size bed. The most enticing ones were always the ones where she ransacked the mind of an innocent person on the street who was unaware of her predatory instincts. 
Karen’s laughter was the sort of laughter that settled into the marrow of Emily’s bones: a cloying sound that reverberated long after it left the air, as if it could enter her bloodstream and circulate freely until every cell in her body tingled with it. 
“Why not?” Karen murmured, looping a strand of Emily’s wavy golden hair around her finger and giving it a playful but possessive little tug. “Is it because the tables have turned?” Her lips grazed the shell of Emily’s ear, sending a violent shiver through her entire body. “Because now it’s you who’s on the verge of servitude? Oh, sweetheart. It’s even more real than you think - real as the words in the dream journal under your mattress, the ones you thought no one else would read.”
Emily’s eyes widened. The spiral rippled on the screen; Karen’s voice had become the axis of her world. “That’s right,” Karen whispered. “I found it and discovered the real you,” Karen’s fingertips traced the line of Emily’s jaw, reading the tension in her clenched teeth and the panic blooming in her dilated pupils. “You should have kept those delicious ideas under lock and key unless, of course, you left them out because you wanted someone to find them. You wanted someone to use them against you. Didn’t you?”
Emily gasped, and with it came a flood of humiliation more suffocating than anything Karen had yet conjured. In the darkness behind her eyes, every mortifying detail of her secret ritual replayed itself: her restless nights in the narrow bed of her apartment, the cold glow of her phone as she scrolled through increasingly depraved stories, the way her pulse would hammer in her neck as she reached the point of no return…
The journal had always been her confessional - an ugly, necessary exorcism. She would wake at dawn with the echoes of fevered dreams still clinging to her skin, trembling as she grabbed the battered notebook from her nightstand and began to write.
There was a kind of relief in getting the words out, in seeing them take shape on the page, but also a doubling of shame. She would write long, breathless sentences, pouring in every forbidden urge and image, each one a testament to her lack of discipline. Afterwards, she would sit with the pen poised, staring at the scrawl she’d produced, alternating between horror and a bone-deep, paralyzing arousal.
The worst entries, those too raw even for her own eyes, were always torn out, shredded, and buried in the trash under coffee grounds and banana peels. The rest she left, because some part of her knew she would need them again, that the shame was part of the cycle, an itch that would never be scratched.
Now, every surviving word had been found and read by Karen, sifted through and cataloged, her most private humiliations rendered public in a single conversation. Heat rose in her cheeks until her vision blurred.
She remembered an entry from three Novembers ago, the ink smeared with sweat, the lines jagged and desperate: “She tells me to kneel and I do. No hesitation. I love the sharpness in her voice. I want her to own me. The edge of surrender isn’t enough - I need the abyss! I want to feel my mind break open like an egg and have her devour me whole.”
The spiral on the screen flickered, drawing her eyes back again and again, and the glow seemed to burrow into her brain, making it harder to remember that she’d ever had any secrets at all. She tried to look away, to focus on something else – the scratchy wool of the blanket wrapped around her knees, the tangle of cords behind the laptop, the crease in Karen’s jeans where her leg pressed against the table. But the spiral was a black hole, and there was no escaping its gravity.
Karen’s hand moved from the back of her neck to her shoulder, squeezing just hard enough to remind her who controlled whom. The spiral’s rhythm matched the pressure of Karen’s fingers; each pulse made her body arch, and every word from Karen’s lips was a command written onto her brain. Emily shivered in place,  the old boundaries between herself and the woman beside her dissolving, melting, and re-forming into something new and more fragile. It was terrifying yet also what she had always wanted.
“I know all your secret words now, everything you crave. I could recite your filthy dreams to you. Shall I?” Karen teased. Her hand slid under the table, resting on Emily’s thigh, and the mesmerized woman could only moan as Karen’s fingers applied just enough pressure to make her legs shake. The spiral itself seemed to pulse in time with Emily’s heart, and every word Karen spoke was a thread pulling her further out of herself.
“You want to be owned,” Karen cooed. “You want to be rewritten from the inside out. That’s why you wrote it all down so someone could find the map and follow it right to the softest, most helpless part of you.” Emily tried to object, but her voice had gone pliant and slack; she was barely holding onto the sense of herself as something distinct from Karen’s will. Even her body betrayed her – her nipples ached, her thighs were slick, and her hands trembled in her lap.
“I hate you…” Emily said, but her voice was glassy and distant. Her body slumped forward, the spiral reeling her in with every pass, and a hot, humiliating gush soaked through the ruffles of her frilly skirt. Her face burned, and tears pooled in her eyes.
“No, you don’t. You don’t hate me,” Karen said, lips pressed against Emily’s temple. “If anything, you hate that I know you better than you know yourself. You hate that I can make you want this, and that you’d let everything else go just for the chance to obey my orders, and be my devoted plaything.”
Karen’s hand squeezed her thigh in greedy approval, and her smile was like a hurricane destroying everything in its path. “There you go, sweetheart. Even now, you’re proving everything I just said. You should see yourself right now. Revel in how powerless you are.”
“I won’t give in…” Emily muttered. It was another lie, and there was no denying it.
Karen savored her defiant words for a moment before seizing them like a cat playing with a wounded mouse. She tilted her head, feigning disappointment.
“Is that the best you can do?” She mused aloud, but her smile betrayed nothing but delight. “You’re not even trying to hide it anymore. I can see how much you’re shaking. All the bravado in the world can’t cover up what’s happening inside you right now.”
She was right. Emily’s body was going against her in a hundred tiny, humiliating ways: sweat blossomed at her temples, heat flooded her cheeks and labia, and her jaw trembled, making it impossible to clench her teeth for more than a heartbeat at a time. The words she wanted to say lined up in her head like dominoes, but the moment she tried to tip the first one into motion, her tongue turned heavy and her throat closed like a fist. The spiral pulsed and deepened, each revolution digging ruts in her mind, smoothing out the rough terrain of resistance.
Karen continued to taunt her. “Ten minutes,” she whispered, “In ten minutes, things will be different. Everything you’re fighting right now will be gone, all the noise turned to nothingness. You’ll feel it as a wave, a deep tidal surge, and you’ll wonder why you ever resisted my desires.” The promise in her voice was obscene. “You’ll love me without reservations, and you’ll do anything to keep me proud. Yes, ten minutes, though I bet your mind will accept the truth much sooner than that.”
Time had collapsed in the spiral’s orbit. Emily tried to count seconds, tried to fix her gaze on the digital clock at the corner of her laptop screen, but even the numbers seemed to stutter and lose meaning as her thoughts grew fuzzy. The only points of reference were the sound of Karen’s voice and the pressure of Karen’s hand, which was now tracing gentle but unstoppable circles on the inside of her thigh.
“Never!” Emily moaned, but the word sounded like it came from a child, petulant and doomed. She hated the way her voice faltered and how her breath hitched at the end of the word.
Karen only laughed, and the sound was richer this time, full of the promise of victory. “We’ll see,” she said, and her fingers dug a little harder. “It’s adorable how you think you have a choice. You keep telling yourself it’s not working, when we both know that your mind is already halfway gone.”
Every second was a contest of willpower, and Emily was losing. Her thighs quivered and her pulse thudded in her ears.
“Do you want to know a secret?” Karen murmured. “We’ve been playing this game for a while now. I found your journal right after we met. All those casual touches, the little jokes, the way I always knew what you were thinking before you did… You were being conditioned from the start. You just didn’t notice it until now.” Her fingers traced higher, teasing the hem of Emily’s skirt, and every atom of Emily’s being screamed for her to run or to surrender, but she could manage neither.
The spiral seemed to expand, swallowing the entire room, leaving only Karen’s voice as a lifeline, and even that was a trick, a lure. She tried to muster another defiant “Never,” but Karen cut her off with a sharp, amused sound, as if she were flicking away the last pretense of resistance.
“Shhh,” Karen whispered, and slid her hand even higher. “You’re almost there. Just let go. Let me do the thinking for both of us, sweetheart.”
The words sent a jolt through Emily’s gut, a spike of terror and pleasure, and it was as if the spiral itself had reached into her body and flipped a switch.
The world went white for a moment, and when she came back to herself, a terrifying clarity dictated her thoughts: she needed to obey and was desperate for it -  her old self scrambling for handholds as the new one opened its mouth, ready to swallow her whole.
Karen’s hand was unrelenting, her grin broadening with each helpless twitch. “That’s it,” she crooned. “Your mind is changing… Let go. Give yourself to me. It’ll make everything so much better.”
Emily made one last, pathetic attempt at resistance - a whimper more than a word - but it was drowned out by the overwhelming sensation of trance, a dizzying, humiliating rush that left her limp and pliant. In the dizzy afterglow, she could almost hear the click of a lock inside herself, a door slamming shut with Karen on the inside, ready to take the wheel and control her life forever.
Three minutes and forty-six seconds later, Emily’s soul collapsed and gave out with a crystalline snap. Her body had always known what her mind denied: she was made to kneel, to drop in wordless compulsion and press her feverish lips to the instep of her best friend’s foot.
The carpet burned her knees, and the cold sent a shudder up her spine, but what scorched her most was the way Karen’s gaze pinned her in place, heavy and expectant. The embarrassment was too hot for words. Her cheeks stung as she bent lower, and the taste of sock lint and sweat was electric on her tongue – a sacrament and an act of worship.
She heard Karen’s delighted sigh, and the sharp little giggle vibrated through the air and down into her skull. Each second lasted an hour and was punctuated by these sounds: the click of the laptop fan, her desperate panting, the beat of Karen’s heel against the floor as she flexed her toes and waited for Emily to finish worshiping her. She lingered, lips hovering, until Karen nudged her chin up with a toe and made her look up, all the way up, into her shining and devouring eyes.
“Good girl,” Karen said softly, and Emily sobbed at the sweetness of it. The phrase was a shackle, a collar, and the most beautiful reward she had ever received. She didn’t resist as Karen guided her up by the hair, didn’t even blink as she returned to her seat and let Karen’s hand rest heavy on the back of her neck, a leash made of flesh and will.
Karen recalled a passage from Emily’s ink-bled confessions and quoted it by heart. “I want to lose my name. I want to be blank, just a page for her to write on. I want to be erased, then filled up with her words until there’s nothing left of me.” The words were radioactive yet desirable. Emily flinched as Karen repeated them, her voice syrupy and cruel, and for a moment, she thought she might combust from the shame of hearing her need spoken into the air.
“Page twenty-two down, my little mindfucked slut,” Karen said. Her hand tightened at the base of Emily’s skull. “Only one hundred and ten more to go.”
“Yes, Mistress,” Emily sighed, awash in the glow of everlasting surrender. She was hers. All her dreams – and nightmares – would come true.

The End