He was going to flunk freshman French, and he never should have done.

That was the thought going through Andrew’s head as Madame Juliet proceeded through her lecture. He hadn’t really taken any of it in; he was just replaying what was written on the paper that had been handed back to him at the start.

Very poor. See me afterwards.

Andrew was the first of his family to go to college, and he had the kid of anxiety only a gifted kid can develop when they are, suddenly, no longer the centre of the universe for their achievements. Where someone with a different upbringing might have met this news without worrying, Andrew was in panic mode, tinged with a little guilt.

He really hadn’t been working as hard as he should have been on his French assignments. To begin with, he hadn’t felt the need to; he just needed the language credit for his degree, and he’d picked French not from interest in the language or a local enclave speaking the language, nor even with future travel plans in mind, but simply because he’d seen Madame Juliet manning a booth on the day he signed up for courses.

It had been impossible to miss her accent, and he wouldn’t deny that had caught his attention, but what had kept it was her figure, which managed to fill out the loose folds of a white blouse while doing quite stunning things to the skirt she wore. Andrew was confident he wasn’t the only one in her classes to have made their decision on the same criteria.

He’d discovered since that she the accent wasn’t the put-on he’d assumed; Madame Juliet was French, and in fact hadn’t really started to learn English properly until moving to Canada, having grown up in a rural part of the Bourgogne in Burgundy. After some time north of the border, she’d made her way to America, and eventually fetched up on the Languages faculty of the college Andrew had then gone on to attend.

Andrew wasn’t a slow learner. Not usually. He worked hard, when he was interested in the topic. He was proud of it, proud to consider himself a hard worker, proud to consider himself smart. But he had a tendency to hide away from himself the times he wasn’t as hard working, the times he was daunted by a challenge, the times he didn’t have the emotional investment to work hard.

Choosing French had been a mistake, and he’d spent more time listening to the way her voice sounded and watching the way her body moved than he’d spent on actually learning what she had to teach him; his resolution to use Duolingo to keep up had lasted barely a month.

But to Andrew, the facts were very simple: he was going to flunk freshman French, and he never should have done.

When the lecture was finished, he lingered in his seat as had been requested and waited, sitting lower and lower in his chair every time he saw one of his fellow students glance at him curiously as they went past. Not rising to leave as everyone else filed out made you much more conspicuous than he’d realised.

He didn’t approach Madame Juliet until the last straggler had left the room. He recognised her; unlike him, she was clearly attending the class with the goal of becoming fluent, and she had plenty of questions, often asking them in French. He wasn’t the only student in the class who slightly resented her, and certainly it came as no surprise to him that she would hang around and speak to Madame Juliet before moving on to her next class.

Andrew shouldered his backpack and walked down the stairs into the semi-circle from which the lecturers held forth. Madame Juliet had finished tucking away her things, and looked up at him. “Andrew,” she said briskly. “How are you?”

“Uh - tres bien,” he answered, hoping that even a little French would put her in a better mood.

She gave him a nod, respecting the effort; all the same, she said “That would be tres bon.”

“Uh.” He could feel the prickly redness of his embarrassment on his face. “Right. Sorry, Madame Juliet.”

She waved her hand dismissively and gave him a small smile. “Andrew,” she said simply, “have you been tracking your grades in my class this year?”

“I… um… no?”

“At this point,” she said gently, “you can’t scrape a pass with the remaining assessments.” She gave that a moment, and offered a sympathetic nod to his wide-eyed sudden panic. “We’re well past the cutoff to withdraw a class without that going on your record, but I don’t think that’s fair. So I wanted to sound you out about, well… this idea.”

He stood there, embarrassment closing his throat; he was barely even breathing, let alone able to speak.

The majority of his classmates would have seen this for the kind offer it was. Andrew was caught up in the fear that it was, instead, a failure; that this would go down on his record when in fact her goal was to keep it from the record.

She was waiting quietly, politely, for him to answer. How long had she been waiting for? It had felt like time standing still. Was that just his own reaction, or had he been standing there without saying anything, staring at her without seeing her, for minutes?

Having helped to seal his throat, the sensation of embarrassed humiliation helped him find words again. “I want to stay.”

“But you can’t pass,” she said again, just as gentle and patient beyond what he deserved. “You could sign up to take the course next year; you’ll have to sign up for some language credit. And next time-“

She broke off at last because it was clear he wasn’t listening. He’d swept his bag from his shoulder and it now rested on the desk where her notes and laptop usually lived during lectures. He had one of the front pouches open and was rifling through it.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking here,” Madame Juliet tried. “There aren’t exceptions, Andrew. If I were to try and make you one, all that would happen is that both of us would be facing trouble. I - what are you doing?”

Andrew had to admit it was a reasonable question; he’d pulled a small black pouch out of his backpack, one sealed by a drawstring. It had a little golden emblem on the front, advertising whatever it was his uncle had bought and used to store the stone in.

“I’m fixing this,” he said. “You’ll see.” The wobble in his voice, he told himself, was barely audible. Anyone listening wouldn’t know he was fighting back tears.

God, he’d feel so embarrassed if he cried.

Not half as embarrassed as if this didn’t work, though.

“Andrew,” she said, and her voice was warm with sympathy, “I’m trying to help you to fix this. Whatever you’re doing won’t help.”

The stone in the pouch was smooth under his fingers to the point almost of being slippery. It was warm to the touch. And as it started to emerge from the pouch, it seemed to be shimmering, shining with a light of its own.

He held it up, where it could pulse in front of her, and he watched her eyes. That was what his uncle had told him to do; watch the eyes, and there would be a change when the stone was starting to work.

(Andrew had, when he first accepted the pouch, taken it with the attitude of someone trying to get the awkward conversation over and done with, and who planned to hide the new thing away unless visited by the person who’d given it to them, in which case it might have to take pride of place.)

He hadn’t really realised he was going to use the stone until he was doing it, an act of desperation that came out of instinct as much as any conscious choice, maybe even more so. Or maybe it was just that he trusted his uncle more than he’d believed he did.

He hadn’t known what to watch for in her eyes, hadn’t been able to decode the long, rambling explanation he’d been given. But when it began, he saw it, where he might never have noticed if he hadn’t been looking out for it; a strange change to the way the light coloured them, a pinkish hue slick and only half-glimpsed over the pupil, that reminded him somewhat of oil spilled on the ground, its ephemeral rainbow sheen.

That was the moment where he knew he’d been right to trust his uncle. He felt the tension leave him like a weight vanishing from around his shoulders. He hadn’t imagined what the sign of the eyes would be. Hadn’t guessed. He’d just seen something, something he wasn’t expecting, something that didn’t seem to fit with reality.

It was going to be okay. He had the power to make everything okay.

He held the stone closer to her. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

“It… um…” Her eyes shifted slightly, darting from one point on the stone to another. Andrew thought perhaps she was trying to look away.

Perhaps she was finding she couldn’t look away.

Perhaps she had an opinion on that, and couldn’t make it clear. Her voice seemed to be faltering.

He was meant to do more with the stone than hold it up and hope, he remembered belatedly. His uncle had been very clear in his instructions, and the ones that had been strange enough had stuck in his head.

So he put it to her head, resting it on her forehead, and watched those faintly pink pupils roll upward, looking toward it as best she could, her mouth open vacantly, lips twitching as if she wanted to say something.

“You hear me,” he said.

“I hear you,” Madame Juliet answered. There was an emptiness in her voice - Andrew couldn’t think of a better way to describe it. There was something missing which had previously been something there.

He found that exhilarating, and couldn’t for the life of him tell you why.

“You hear me,” he repeated, “and you obey.”

“I hear you,” Madame Juliet responded, “and I obey.” She blinked, very slowly, and when her eyes opened Andrew wasn’t sure if the pinkish slick staining her pupils was deeper, fainter, or just as it had been.

He wondered how long it would stay. If his uncle had been telling the truth, on that long, drunken Thanksgiving evening…

Well, if his uncle had been telling the truth, the stone had been charged twice while in his hands, used on Andrew’s aunt and also used on Emmy, who the family usually described as a lodger if they had to acknowledge her at all. Andrew’s mom could never speak her name without her lips tightening so thin they could barely be seen. Grown men could choke on that disapproval.

And there was no pink, Andrew would swear, in either woman’s vision. The pink haze would fade.

Did that mean the obedience would fade? That he had a narrow window to make changes?

He shook his head. It wasn’t as if it mattered, he told himself firmly. He was just going to fix the situation. Just change her mind about how she was grading him. And then everything would be fine.

Beneath the stone, her lips had parted, her mouth spreading open in a wide, dopey, dazed smile. She didn’t look like a professor, barely even like a college student; she looked… well… simple. A delightful naive fool, who could easily be led. Easily manipulated.

Something about that smile was an ache in his belly, a sudden irrational need.

Let’s see, he mused. I said the first thing, and she answered. The second was…

“You feel the stone,” he said.

“I feel the stone.”

“You feel the stone, and it weighs down your will.”

“I feel the stone, and it weighs down my will.”

He was pretty sure those were the important parts of it. Mostly he was just glad he’d charged the stone, spending an awkward and uncomfortable week with it under his pillow. Better to have it and not need it, he told himself.

It was definitely going back under the pillow that night.

“Madame Juliet, do you hear me?”

“Yes, Andrew, I hear you.” There was still that something missing from her voice, something in the way her words spilled out with a steady pace, no hesitations, no shifts, her intonation somewhere between the one she had when she spoke French and the one she used the rest of the time. Like she was only half there.

“And that means?”

“I hear you and I obey.”

“Madame Juliet, you need to-“

He stopped abruptly and looked around the empty lecture theatre. Was there going to be another lesson here any minute? It didn’t seem like a good idea to be caught giving orders in that scenario.

His backpack had a mesh pocket on the back. Andrew slipped the stone inside, glancing back at Juliet to check that her eyes were still following it.

“Madame Juliet,” he said again, “you need to follow me back to your office.”

“I hear you, Andrew. I will obey.”

He shrugged his backpack back onto his shoulders and set off. At the door to the lecture hall he glanced over his shoulder and was relieved to confirm Madame Juliet was still following, her eyes on his back.

So far, so good…

*

Getting her to open the office door while her eyes stayed on the stone had been a challenge, but now they were both inside and the door was shut (and locked, and he’d taken charge of the key) he felt a lot happier to continue.

He set his backpack down on the desk and took the stone back out, then turned back to her. The closer the stone got to her, the wider that happy, silly smile spread back across her face.

Andrew didn’t know where the stone came from, how his family had discovered what it could do, or why it worked. Before that day, he’d never been sure that it would have any effect; right then, his attention was too much on her. He’d have his questions in time.

“Madame Juliet,” he said again, “You need to up my grades. You know I’m a good student. I deserve better.”

“I hear you,” she answered. “I will up your grades. I will obey.”

He squinted at her. She wasn’t moving to act yet. She hadn’t agreed to his other points. Was that a sign of something?

No, he told himself. It wasn’t. It couldn’t be. He’d seen the results of his uncle working on those women, and there were times when his uncle acted dumb as shit. He, on the other hand, was the first member of his family to make it to college. Anything his uncle could do, surely he could do better.

“Do it.”

She moved wordlessly to her computer, but her eyes never left the stone. He moved closer, wanting to watch, coming around behind the desk with her.

He set the stone down just in front of her monitor and watched as her fingers mechanically entered her password, her eyes still oil-slicked in pink.

It was fascinating to watch her work at the computer without even looking at it, her eyes elsewhere, her body running on reflex, obedient to his command.

Standing close by, he could smell the subtle fragrance of her shampoo in her hair, just slightly distinct from the perfume she wore. Both were professional, clean, and quite delicious.

Intoxicating.

Most of his attention, though, was on the screen, especially as her attention seemed to be almost entirely on the stone. But over her time at the university her hands had clearly learned the motions to move mouse from icon to icon, had memorised the codes and keystrokes to process information in the student record system.

He’d never seen one of the staff go through this process before, but he was far from convinced she could do this faster if she was consciously aware. It was like her own mind had been taken completely out of the circuit; like his order sufficed in its place.

She was thorough; maybe because he’d told her to up his grades, not his grade? Each one went up by a single boundary, one by one, starting from the beginning of the year and up until the one that had just been returned to him at the start of that lecture.

Well, he could definitely pass the course now…

He debated telling her to raise his grades again. There was no question that she would.

He did hate how low in the class’ rankings he seemed to be…

“Up my grades, Madame Juliet,” he instructed.

“I hear you,” she answered. “I will up your grades. I will obey.”

This time she began the process without needing any more instruction. He thought back to his previous instructions. He’d barely even given them as orders, thinking about it, just talking about needs, but they’d been clearly things she could do, obedience a possibility. The other stuff he’d said, he’d just been explaining himself. Justifying himself.

Maybe she couldn’t process that? Or at least couldn’t process that while the stone was in her view, its charge gradually flowing into her.

He could do anything, he told himself. Anything.

And was it wrong?

“Madame Juliet,” he said, “Enjoy my commands.” And he held his breath.

“I hear you. I will enjoy your commands. I will obey.” If anything, her smile got wider.

He’d put his hand on her shoulder, he found, and he wasn’t sure when, but now he was noticing the warmth under the palm of his hand, and he was blushing, and he wasn’t at all sure why.

Although really, deep down, he knew. From where he stood he was looking down on her short blonde hair, the soft curve of her cheek, lips that even without decoration looked impossibly kissable, and the smooth skin of her neck, the crisply defined collar bones, and then the blouse hid everything else.

Andrew wasn’t sure he liked what his impulses at that moment said about him.

He released her shoulder and paced over to the window, his jaw clamped shut with emotion, his body almost rigid. He felt like he was in a fight with himself.

Had his uncle ever considered the morality of his actions? Or had he given straight into temptation?

After two or three minutes of silence in which he stared out of the window, looking down on many of the students milling in the quad, he realised he had already given in. There was no reason not to.

He walked back to where she still sat, spine bolt upright, hands loosely resting on the keyboard, eyes fixed on the stone, having not moved since she finished obeying his command to raise his grades.

Andrew put his hand back on her shoulder and pushed her backward. It took a moment for her spine to begin to bend but once it did she sagged backward against the chair back like a puppet with her strings cut - well, he thought, all but one string; for her eyes were still fixed on the stone, her head still raised to make that possible.

Experimentally, he slipped his hand under her blazer and cupped one breast, feeling the soft worn cotton of her blouse, the yielding squish of a padded bra beneath. Enough thickness, just about, that he didn’t get the sense he could actually feel her body by doing it.

It wasn’t enough. Biting his lip, he undid the buttons of her blazer, sliding it open and apart; he made to step in front of her so he could push it back off her shoulders but realised, possibly just in time, that he’d be blocking her view of the stone, and he wasn’t sure how she’d take that.

Would she accept whatever he did? Would she continue to obey? Or would only the changes he’d already made stick?

It was better he not make that mistake.

Andrew went down to one knee and adjusted the chair’s settings until he could tilt it even further back, then he reached out and grabbed the stone with his other hand, holding it pinched between thumb and forefinger so she never lost sight of it.

His uncle had been very dismissive when Andrew had called it a magic rock but Andrew honestly couldn’t see any other way to describe it that made any sense; he brought it forward slowly, watching as the tilt of her head changed and her eyes refocused, step by step, never losing track, always locked to it, following it as if compelled.

With her body tilted further back he could hold the stone over her, causing her to look up so that the back of her head touched her headrest. Then he just placed the stone so that it rested on her forehead and her nose, and he watched Madame Juliet go cross-eyed in her focus on it.

“You hear me,” he told her, “and you obey.”

“I hear you,” Madame Juliet responded, “and I obey.” Her eyes did not blink, but they seemed to shine, as if they were reflecting a pink light from the stone, a light he couldn’t see except as that reflection.

“You feel the stone, and it weighs down your will.”

“I feel the stone, and it weighs down my will.”

The idea didn’t seem to upset her; the lazy, slow, simple smile on her lips was as good as sign as anything could be that she was enjoying it.

“You will want to obey me forever,” he tried, experimentally. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you, Andrew. I will want to obey you forever. I will obey.”

That was either when Andrew’s cock stiffened to erect, or when he realised he was already hard. His focus was so much on her reactions, on her expression, on the way she looked, that he could believe he hadn’t noticed at first.

Andrew hadn’t really believed that he’d given his uncle’s gift much thought in the time between receiving it and pulling it out of his backpack that day. But he found there were words coming to him. Not the words his uncle had told him - he was pretty sure he’d said all of those already - but things he wanted to say, now he had decided that this woman should no longer be this woman, should instead be his woman.

Perhaps they’d come to him in dreams. Perhaps his idle wonderings, easily dismissed, had been more extensive than his memories had made them seem every day.

“Fall in love with me,” he ordered.

“I hear you. I will fall in love with you. I obey.” And while her voice still sounded as if not everything was there, as if something was out of place and missing, there was something more to it by the time she finished speaking than there had been to begin with.

Her hands were in the air, her arms bent forward as they had been to put her fingers on the keyboard; they had not moved, having had no reason to. He took one hand and moved it to the side, watched as it hung where he put it, then moved it down, put his fingers under the blazer lapels on that side, and pushed the blazer down her shoulder.

He did the same with her other hand, then the other blazer, and then he started to unbutton her blouse, glancing up occasionally at the silly, simple grin that was her expression now, that the Madame Juliet he knew was only barely recognisable beneath, as if something in the stone had suspended the real woman while its power allowed him to reshape her.

The bra was soft white cotton, undecorative, and probably as cheap an option as was available for her size. Under the stone’s spell and its mental weight she breathed only shallowly, her bra barely moving at all, yet this tiny movement filled his mind with possibilities. His breath caught for a moment as he stared and pondered.

“You will obey me,” he said.

“I hear you. I will obey you. I obey.”

“You will never disobey me.”

“I hear you. I will never disobey you. I obey.”

He realised some of what was missing suddenly. In that empty voice of hers, her accent was all but absent. Alongside her figure it was the thing that had drawn him to her, caught his attention. It was why he had even taken freshman French in the first place.

“Respond to me in French,” he said, as a way to recapture that idea.

“Je t'entends. Je t'obéirai. J'obéis.”

Fuck. If anything, he was harder from that. But it was probably a good thing he’d known what she was going to say, and that the word was similar in both languages. Of course, you often had words that were similar in both languages; he could probably handle it. And it was definitely hotter now.

“You will want to fuck me.” Saying it like that, like something she was going to have to do, seemed like the best way to make it stick.

“Je t'entends. Je vais avoir envie de te baiser. J'obéis.“

“Nothing else about America will matter to you as much as I do.”

“Je t’entends. Rien de l'Amérique n'aura autant d'importance pour moi que toi. J'obéis.”

If he hadn’t already known what that meant, he’d never have guessed. On the other hand, hearing it in another language, in a voice that seemed to have much of its earlier vivacity back, somehow made everything much more real. “You will want to suck my cock.”

“Je t'entends. Je voudrais te sucer la bite. J'obéis.”

“Fucking me will make you feel better than anything else.”

“Je t'entends. Coucher avec toi me fera me sentir mieux que rien d’autre. J'obéis.”

Andrew hesitated for a moment, playing that back through his head. Some of this vocabulary hadn’t exactly come up in any of their lessons, and Duolingo was tragically missing a When We Talk About Sex category. Was she agreeing to the things she should be agreeing to? How would he tell?

“You will become my willing slave.”

“Je t'entends. Je deviendrai votre esclave volontaire. J'obéis.”

Andrew had finally run out of things to say to her that his subconscious had already planned. He was in the middle of trying to think something else up when the sound of someone trying the office doorhandle broke his concentration and gave him a huge shock to his system.

He froze. “Who is that?” he asked, his voice no more than a whisper. Madame Juliet didn’t answer. But then, she hadn’t been answering his questions while she was affected by the stone unless he told her to. And she might not know.”

The doorhandle rattled again, and then there was a knock at the door. “Madame Juliet?”

Even through the door he recognised the voice. Jamie Hawkins.

Conventional wisdom had it that a college was too big for anyone to be recognised by everyone; even sporting stars weren’t of any interest to some of the other campus cliques. But if anyone could prove that untrue, it’d be Jamie Hawkins.

He was one of those golden children who you couldn’t help but like, even as he effortlessly outclassed you at everything you had in common. And he always shone in Madame Juliet’s lectures, asking all the right questions.

“Did you forget our appointment?”

A chill ran down Andrew’s spine. Once he’d got her back to her office, he’d written off any other distractions.

For a moment he contemplated just staying silent a while and waiting for Hawkins to leave, but he’d got an appointment; he wasn’t going to just leave any time soon. Might even try and find some other solution.

Thanking his lucky stars that he’d worked through what was probably enough new rules - what his uncle had described as new tracks for their minds to run in - to cement what he’d done to Madame Juliet, he went back to her. “Cover your tits up, make yourself presentable, and get rid of him. Be firm but don’t make him suspect anything,” he instructed.

“Je t'entends. Je vais couvrir mes tétons et me rendre présentable-“ He dropped her office door key on her bare belly in the same motion he used to scoop the stone from her head, and her answer broke off immediately the stone broke contact.

Andrew felt something strange as he picked it up, realising only afterwards that it had been an odd resistance to being lifted, as if he were plucking a small metal weight from a magnetic surface.

Blinking rapidly, her eyes closing for the first time since entering her office, Madame Juliet rose, collecting her door key and hastily buttoning up her blouse. “Un instant s'il vous plaît,” she called out, raising a voice that had all her usual vitality and character.

Andrew opened the door to her stationery cupboard and slipped inside, leaving the door just a little open. Just in case, he didn’t want anyone to see him there.

He heard the door key click in the latch, then, “Oui?”

“Madame Juliet,” Hawkins said, and Andrew envied how cheerful he could sound when coming to an appointment with his tutor. And then Hawkins dropped his voice. “Babe,” he continued, “don’t worry, I’ve checked and the TAs are all busy. God, it’s so good to see you agai-“

There was the sound of flesh on flesh. It wasn’t loud enough to be a slap; Andrew pictured Madame Juliet swatting an exploring hand away from her body. His jaw had already dropped. Jamie Hawkins was fucking a member of the faculty?

(It didn’t occur to Andrew to think that he was also about to be, because Andrew’s use of the stone was something he considered cheating. Jamie Hawkins, on the other hand, was cheating in a completely different way; he had a girlfriend, almost as popular as he was, but not quite well enough known for Andrew to know her name too.)

“J’étais faible, Jamie, mais c'était une erreur. Cela ne peut pas continuer. N’est-ce pas?”

“Babe, why are you speaking French?”

“Ne me poussez pas là-dessus.”

There was a long pause. “Es-ce que j’ai fait quelque chose de mal, Madame Juliette ? Tu n'as pas apprécié la semaine dernière?”

“Je ne peux pas discuter de ça. Nous n'aurions jamais dû commencer.”

Another long silence, then Madame Juliet spoke again. “Taylor doit t'attendre, Jamie. Vous vous correspondez.”

“I…”

“Au revoir.”

Andrew heard the door click closed and the key turn in the lock. He waited a few seconds longer, counting in his head, trying to guess how long Jamie would take to leave.

Whatever number he would have settled on, he didn’t get the chance. The cupboard door was flung wide open and Madame Juliet flung herself on him, squealing with joy, her arms wrapping around his neck and pulling him into a passionate kiss.

It took Andrew a few moments to regain his composure, but his excitement was just as fast to respond. His own arms swept around her and his mouth opened to the kiss, one hand in her hair controlling her head, the other on one buttock as her thigh pressed firmly against the inside of his.