It had all started, from Riley’s perspective, when he found that outside his small hometown, the dating pool was much, much larger, but that didn’t make finding someone much easier; instead it meant that there was always competition that outclassed him, and time after time in the first semester in Denver, he found himself losing out to others by the second date at the latest.

From Paek Keunhee’s perspective, of course, it all started much later. But then, if Paek Keunhee were to tell the story, it would be a very confusing thing to listen to; hardly her fault, of course. A listener would pick up on a number of gaps and logic jumps that made no sense; a listener might question some of the assumptions.

Riley, of course, would not be willing to tell the story, so it was all a wash. His focus was a different one; he had set out to make himself interesting. Having a skill seemed to be what did it; his roommate, on the football team, was never starved for romantic attention.

His study group all seemed to have something they could point to that made their dates smile inwardly, and blush, and admire them; something that made the conversation easier, and made everything else go easier to boot.

There were some things that weren’t worth doing, he’d decided; there was a guy elsewhere on the floor who’d decided the way to pick up women was to speak fluent French, and that might have been a reasonable idea if - and in Riley’s opinion only if - he’d already spoken okay French.

Riley had been a passable guitarist early in high school, at least passable for his age; he gave taking up the guitar again some thought for a long while.

In the end, though, he had to face facts; there were too many guitarists already for him to stand out. Better to parlay the family musical interests into something else.

He took a long time weighing up his options; it had to be something cool, or what was the point? It had to relate enough to guitar that he had some advantage in picking it up - so a stringed instrument, though pretty much anything else he went for would move from the guitar pick to the bow - and ideally it should be something he could make conversation about.

What eventually sealed the decision was discovering that Paek Keunhee had settled down on the outskirts of the city, in a lovely little house, and while her career appeared to have ended early, she had decided to offer one on one violin lessons with candidates she considered to be deserving.

He absolutely had to try; while probably most of the people in town had no idea who she was, she was definitely a celebrity in classical music terms, and he’d grown up hearing his mother and his older sister playing recordings of her performances, had used them himself early on in his first year to shut out the party boys on his dorm room floor and the internal nagging doubts he had about his own future.

She’d retired just before forty, a few years earlier, and while Riley didn’t know she’d settled in Denver when he’d chosen Colorado for college, it wasn’t exactly a downside when he did find out, and it was definitely why he’d chosen to pick up violin lessons as his way to open up more interesting conversations while dating; he’d also been looking at a life drawing class and an old Buzzfeed article on ‘Sexy Male Celebrities Who Knit’ had also given him some pause.

But the chance to learn from one of the great virtuosos of his time, someone who’d become an international star on talent alone before she was even old enough for college, that was something he couldn’t get anywhere else; and she wasn’t even charging that much for her lessons.

I’m not doing this for money, the listing had read. I don’t need to. I’m doing this to reward the passion of my students, and if you’re paying me, I’m not going to feel too bad refunding you if I have to end your training.

He figured he could fake the passion well enough to discover if he really felt it.

He made the appointment.

It was a ridiculously lovely room; lots of space, tastefully decorated with soft, warm cream walls, a bookshelf along one wall, a big bay window with a comfortable chair placed just perfectly to enjoy the sun, enough decoration to catch the eye, but it didn’t seem cluttered. Riley wasn’t sure if it was his host’s taste, or if she’d just paid for a really good interior designer.

Not that it honestly mattered all that much, and not that the one unusual collection, resting on the table that could be a desk or a coffee table depending on the mood of the moment, didn’t catch his eye to the exclusion of all else in any case.

On a small end table near the window where he made himself comfortable and took out his violin were arranged nine metronomes, each of them obviously expensive, each of them a slightly different height, enclosed in a different wooden case, their pendulum bars made of different metals.

Near the centre of the room, and Riley was sure without asking (or checking, not that he would have known how to check) that it had been placed there after careful calculation of the best acoustics the studio had, was a chair, a sturdy high-backed armchair with a low stool-cum-table by its side on which rested a notepad, a pen, and a tall glass of water.

It looked, more than anything, like Ms Paek had thought everything through, and had built a studio where she could easily prepare for each musician.

“Well,” she said, with a smile. “You have how many years practice?”

“Uh.” He had to clear his throat before any more understandable sound would emerge. “None with the violin, Maestro.”

She tutted. “Don’t call me Maestro,” she said. “I’ve never been that pretentious.” There was something about the way she said it that took away the sting; there was a joke in her tone, and while he was sure she’d said it before to other musicians, it didn’t feel like something she was sick of saying.

He nodded. “Sorry, Ms. Paek.” That won him a smile and a nod of appreciation; he’d bothered to learn which name was the equivalent of a surname, even if he was sure he wasn’t quite nailing the vowels. “Uh, I’ve played the guitar on and off since I was eleven. I just… the violin is something different, and I really want to learn it.”

After a thoughtful moment she nodded again. Sitting down in her chair, she took a sip of her water, crossed her legs in the severe, long black skirt she wore, and picked up the notepad and pen.

“Very well,” she said. “Let’s start with the fundamentals.”

He took a deep breath, feeling like he’d got away with something, but Ms Paek continued. “I’m afraid your grip on the bow is the first thing that’s going to need work.”

Riley flushed, but he listened carefully and followed her directions, and the further on she got, the more confident he got.

At the end of the lesson, as she was showing him out of the door, she said, “I think there’s something there. You’ve got the makings of something special. But to get there, we’re going to have to keep your motivation high.”

He swallowed again, and he nodded, and he made his way home, telling himself that she’d given him very positive feedback and he shouldn’t feel daunted.

*

Truth be told, Riley still didn’t entirely believe she was his violin tutor.

He’d Googled it after the second or third visit, when he’d finally calmed down enough from THE Paek Keunhee is giving me violin lessons and maybe I should have started with another teacher so I wouldn’t suck in front of her.

When he’d Googled about her metronomes, he’d found out a lot more about her, and had some idea why she’d stopped touring. Being able to say no to people was important to her.

That was probably less surprising than the metronomes, but they made sense too; she’d mentioned using one to practice in an early interview and they’d become something the directors of concert halls often bought for her as a gift after her performances were done. In fact the nine on the table were probably just a sampling of the collection; each one probably represented a concert or a place Keunhee felt a deeper connection to.

The more he thought about what this all represented, the more he worried about being one of the people Paek Keunhee wanted the freedom to say no to.

It wasn’t even that he was still hoping to pick up any women with his skills (although he certainly was, and had even had a few nibbles of interest at parties that convinced him it was the right idea), but he was beginning to enjoy the violin for itself, he was getting better, and the way she taught, the feedback she gave especially, it was so clear and so good; he was sure that it was the way she’d been taught, the way some violinist, thirty years ago, had reached her budding genius and helped it turn potential and talent into skill.

He didn’t want to give it up. It had only been a month, but it was precious to him already.

He kept thinking about those metronomes, though. Not just what they represented, nor even the way they looked - there was a certain understated elegance to them - but the metronomes themselves, in general.

There were nights when he nodded off to sleep thinking about them.

*

“Don’t worry about it, ma’am,” a woman was saying. “I’m sure he wouldn’t try anything of the sort with me, and even if he did, I’m far too stubborn not to win any contest of wills. I’ll soon cure him of this obsession with hypnosis.

“Whatever this is, you’re a fool if you think… uh, if you think… uhm…”

“You’re not weak. You’re stubborn, right? And that’s good. That’s what’s going to hypnotise you.”

“What are you… talking… about?”

“You’re stubborn. You want to prove me wrong. You’re not going to look away from the metronome.

“You’re not going to look away from the metronome.

“You cannot look away from the metronome.”

“I can… uhm… not… look away from the metronome…

“I… will… obey… I… must… obey…”

*

The scene as it might be played out in his head over and over again, usually on his walk back from Ms. Paek’s home.

He had a very firm idea of how it would go, how it would look; he was tempted every time, but every time, he would see another image in his mind. The problem was that he couldn’t just imagine how it would go assuming everything went right; he could also picture it going wrong. Picture himself having to explain what he’d thought he was doing afterward. His cheeks burned just imagining it; doing it would be all but impossible.

He avoided it for a long time. On the seventh time he’d been here, he’d had the same wild impulse in mind.

Keunhee had a sequence of actions she went through before the lesson every time, and she was halfway through it on that seventh visit when Riley looked at the table full of metronomes again. The same impulse as always crossed his mind.

Really, Riley had always known that sooner or later he’d give in to that impulse.

With two quick steps he was over by the metronomes. “Have I said before how cool I think these are, Ms Paek?” he asked. His pronunciation of her name wasn’t quite right, he knew, but it was close and getting closer, and she seemed to appreciate that. His fingertip found the first of the metronomes and he set it ticking with a nudge.

“The whole collection, I mean,” he carried on over her first sharp words of objection. He’d set off another, and then a third, not quite at the same time. “Seeing them all together. It’s really something.” A fourth was moving now, the pendulum bars rocking back and forth, ticking and clicking just slightly out of sync with each other.

“But I heard something else about metronomes.” His fingers were flying now, but he gave it a moment in between each one that he set off, so that they each started out out of time with all the others, a constant rattle of clicks as each one completed a movement.

Riley glanced up quickly and saw that Ms Paek had turned from the bookcase and taken a couple of steps closer, but she had hesitated now. She was staring at them all swinging, all out of sync, and as he watched her face seemed to twitch.

It made sense, he realised; she practiced with these, she used one constantly. To have them all out of kilter was going to mess with her own mental reflexes. Which meant that far from being a dumb idea, this was actually going to work.

“We’ll get to that soon,” he said. “But, you know, Ms Paek, I was thinking about what you said last time. You mentioned I didn’t have the focus I needed. And my mind was like this table. All those different thoughts and worries and concerns all nagging at me, completely out of harmony. It’s overwhelming when that happens, isn’t it, Ms Paek?”

She answered, but it wasn’t really a word, just a garbled sound. All that escaped.

“And I can see you’re overwhelmed,” he continued. “Just like I was. But what you’re realising now, as everything floods by and you lose track of your worries, as you find concerns too numerous to follow, as the stresses and questions of the world mount up until they become nonsense… what you’re realising now is that there’s a better way to be.

“And that’s what these metronomes have to teach you, Ms Paek. Are you watching?”

The noise she made was closer to being a word this time, and her head moved fractionally up and down, as if perhaps it had been a nod. “Good,” he said, his words almost tripping over themselves in the eagerness to get out. He wasn’t sure how long he had. “Because like I said, these metronomes, they have something to teach you. All that busy activity in your head, so difficult to keep up with, so difficult to think through, but it doesn’t really matter. Because if you keep following all those beats, then sooner or later, all at once-“

There was an audible shift in both volume and tempo as the metronomes synchronised, first two, then three, then five, then all nine clacking in unison. “-everything drops away into peace,” Riley finished smoothly, and he looked up to see the slackness of Ms Paek’s features, the emptiness in her eyes.

Hypnotised.

*

He hadn’t been at all sure that would work.

Indeed, he’d almost have bet against it. That was the single biggest reason he’d resisted the temptation before.

And yet…

“Ms Paek,” Riley said, then he licked his lips and shook his head. No. No nervousness. And no false divides, like the formality. “Keunhee,” he said instead. “You’re hypnotised. Understand?”

Her lips moved, but he didn’t hear anything. He approached her, taking care not to block her line of sight to the metronome table. “Repeat.”

“I understand,” she said, but even stood so close to her that if she’d had her full wits about her she would certainly have enforced her personal space, it came out as little more than a whisper. If anything he thought her lips had moved less the second time.

“Do you know what that means?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means I hear and I do not think.”

Which, while it was clearly something she’d picked up through movies and bad sitcom episodes, was a close enough start that he could probably have some fun.

“You can hear and not think and not wake while still talking at normal volume,” he said, and after a few moments in which she didn’t answer he nudged her, “right?”

“Yes, I can hear and not think and not wake while talking at normal volume,” she answered in her regular speaking voice.

No. Not her regular speaking voice, he realised; there was a vivaciousness, a love of life, a joy in existence in her normal speaking voice. There was no emotion; it was flat, steady. It wasn’t… it wasn’t musical.

Riley had made his peace some time before with finding that kind of thing hot. He stood for a few moments trying to decide exactly what to do, intelligence catching up finally to impulse. He could still wake her without making any suggestions…

…but then the point had been to make one suggestion, hadn’t it?

“Keunhee,” he said, “I am your favourite student. You see great potential in me. Repeat.”

“You are my favourite student. I see great potential in you. You are my favourite student. I see-“

“You would never stop teaching me without my request,” he cut across her. “Repeat.”

“I would never stop teaching you without your request,” she responded. “I would never stop teaching you without-“

“Alright, pause.”

She fell silent immediately. Riley realised he was smiling.

The metronomes had meant, ever since his first lesson with Ms Paek, that he’d thought about hypnosis every time he left her class. The conversation she’d had with him the previous week had solidified the idea of that one suggestion, based on an idle ‘if I were to hypnotise her’ daydream that he now recognised had been far from idle, had in fact been his subconscious preparing.

He crossed back to the table full of ticking metronomes, still taking care not to block her view to it at any point, and picked out the metronome he liked the most. The wooden surround had a light, reddish varnish, most of the mechanicals were in a copper, but the pendulum bar was a bright silvery steel that stood out wonderfully.

“Keunhee,” he began, “you are in a state of hypnosis. But you are not yet deep. And you want to go deeper.” He didn’t make it a question, didn’t give her a chance to push back. Just waited a few moments, in case her mind took longer to process it.

He stopped one of the other metronomes with his thumb. “Deeper…”

Another. “Deeper still…”

By the fifth he stopped, he didn’t bother with the words, just watched the way her eyelids fluttered and her shoulders, her arms, seemed somehow more boneless and limp than before.

From there he slowly stilled three more, until only the metronome he liked the most was still moving. “Keunhee,” he said, “this metronome is one you do not touch. Repeat.”

“This metronome is one I do not touch. This-“

“This metronome brings you back to trance. Repeat.”

“This metronome brings me back to trance. This metronome brings me back to trance. This-“

“You sink deep when this metronome is on. Repeat.”

“I sink deep when this metronome is on. I sink deep when this metronome is on. I sink deep…”

Riley had crossed to the doorway, opened the door out of Ms Paek’s studio, and walked into her wider house while she was occupied. He couldn’t imagine she’d be able to wake from that instruction without prompting.

*

The studio door was one of the first ones you saw when you entered her home, opening off a hallway that was just as tastefully elegant in its decoration. The other doors were always closed when he arrived, and he had never been upstairs; he’d only really seen the studio.

He found he was curious, now that his tutor was entranced, who it was whose mind slumbered, and while he had learned a lot about her through her music, there were whole sides to who she was that he simply didn’t understand. The stories he read suggested these would be useful in getting her to do what he wanted her to do…

…as soon, that was, as he worked out what that was. Now she wasn’t going to call off his lessons even if he was still learning slowly, he didn’t really need to do anything else. But it would feel like a waste if he didn’t come up with anything else fun to do, he knew.

The moment he pushed open one of the other doors and stepped into her living room, he knew that the beautiful simplicity of the studio was something an interior designer had brought forth.

Everything that was hidden of her personality in the studio or by the high-necked blouses and severe black jackets and floor-length skirts she wore, it felt like, was visible in this room; while it was still well-decorated and had obviously cost a lot of money, it was crowded, cosy; the bookshelf held an assortment of brightly coloured book spines, an array of odds and ends, and a handful of DVD box sets; the big screen TV and sound system were part of a nest of wires, in which Riley also recognised every Nintendo system from the original up, and a large cardboard box that appeared to be full of games, played and then tossed back into place with no regard for organisation.

But the other wall was where her personality really showed up clearly. She - or someone at her request - had attached a fabric noteboard that ran the height and length of the wall, and it was more than two-thirds covered in photographs.

Publicity photos. Places she’d been. Formal photographs of entire orchestras and impromptu snapshots of just Ms Paek, or her and one or two other people. Evidence of friendships, connections, even romances.

Evidence, too, of Keunhee having a much wider taste in outfits than those she’d seen from her concerts or from the lessons he’d had so far; it was easy to think she lived exclusively in severe suits or evening gowns, but by the looks of these photos, jeans and halter tops had been much more common for most of her life - and a few of the nightclub pictures showed a surprising fondness for PVC.

He took his time looking everything over, curious now. There didn’t seem to be any photos that looked romantic with any backgrounds he recognised, or even any that looked like they might be Colorado.

Maybe she hadn’t been dating much lately or maybe they just weren’t on display; he wondered if she’d sworn off romance or was going through a dry spell.

Maybe she’s feeling frustrated, he thought.

He headed upstairs and found the bedroom and looked it over; decorated for two, but definitely only lived in by one. Half the closet space and an entire dresser were empty.

Riley headed back downstairs deep in thought, closing the doors behind him. He turned the handle of the studio door and started to open it, hearing, “-is on. I sink deep when this metronome is on. I sink-“

He closed the door again and tiptoed to the kitchen, then wondered why he was tiptoeing. Keunhee’s attention was definitely occupied.

He brought a glass of water through and put it into Ms Paek’s hand, closing the fingers around it until she was gripping it properly.

“Stop,” he told her, and she stopped. “Drink.” The glass was lifted to her mouth, below unseeing eyes, and she began drinking. He waited for her to lower the glass for a moment before realising she wouldn’t, then told her, “Stop. Lower the glass.”

She obeyed.

“OK, Keunhee,” he said, “We’re going to try something fun today, when you wake up. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. So, every time I get a note right, you’re going to feel more… uh… excited.” He looked closely at her expression, wondering if he needed to spell it out further.

“The more notes I get right in a sequence, the more excited you get. You might find that it’s very hard to hide it. Isn’t that right?”

“Is it?”

That wasn’t a response he’d expected. “It is.”

“Yes.”

“You will have no idea why you feel this way. You won’t even know what’s exciting you. But the better I play, the more turned on you get. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, good. When I stop this metronome, you won’t even remember I’d started playing with them, but you will wake. It will seem like no time has passed. Understand?”

“Yes.”

He stopped the metronome.

*

Paek Keunhee wasn’t sure where she’d got her glass of water from. She looked at it, puzzled, wondering when she’d fetched it. Her lips were drier than usual before a lesson, too, much more as if she’d taken the session and talked for several minutes toward the end.

She shook her head and returned her attention to Riley, and her expression softened into a smile. She couldn’t help it. He was her favourite student. She saw such great potential in him.

“I assume you’ve been practising,” she said, setting down her glass and running through the last parts of her usual pre-lesson rituals a little more hurriedly than normal. Smoothing out her skirt, she settled primly into her chair and looked across to Riley, who nodded. She could see the slight reddish flush to the tips of his ears, the biggest sign he was still feeling that lack of confidence she’d pushed him on last week.

“Uh, yes,” he said. “I think…”

“Riley,” she said briskly, “don’t tell me you can’t play because I’m here. Not because there’s nothing flattering about that - actually I’d say it’s very flattering - but if you truly follow your calling, one day you will be playing in front of crowds.

“So you must conquer this nervousness. Yes?”

He took a deep breath and nodded; for a moment Keunhee wondered whether that was really what he had been going to say, but then he was lifting the violin, and she settled back to listen, knees crossed in the long, tight skirt, hands clasped over the upper knee.

What followed, Keunhee would remember for a long time to come. Riley began to play.

He was still green. His fingering was far from perfect. His uncertainty, his lack of focus, it all hindered his ability to pour emotion into the music. He needed greater confidence.

But he evidently had been practicing, and he stumbled less and less. And the more he played, the more she found herself responding curiously, responding in a way she truly hadn’t expected or prepared for.

It was, she decided, that he had achieved a new level of emotion in his playing, even with his nerves; that he was making her feel through the music better than he had.

She didn’t notice it at first, but the longer he played, the better he played…

…well, the better she felt. She shifted position, feeling her thighs clench against each other, almost luxuriating in the way the sound made her feel.

Riley was watching her; he often did, when he played, his eyes flicking up from the music to see how she was reacting. It was clearly very important to him, and usually she did her best simply not to give him anything to react to that might upset him; today she found herself going to some lengths to keep her face completely straight and not to show anything of what was going through her head - more accurately, her head and her body.

The next thirty minutes - she wasn’t really sure why but the lesson seemed to be a bit shorter than usual - gradually became a strange, delicious kind of torture.

She held out as best she could. He’d certainly improved, and the professional in her wanted to be sure that she recognised that improvement, that she note it so he could learn from what she’d seen; even after he’d stopped playing she felt the desire inside her, warming her between the hips, warming her cheeks too with embarrassment.

She was sure that Riley knew she was hurrying him out, but he seemed amused, not frustrated, when she moved as quickly as possible from offering him advice to encouraging him to leave. He was practically smirking.

On his way out, he tapped her favourite metronome, set it moving.

Time seemed to slow and draw out, even though the metronome tocks were keeping perfect time, and Keunhee felt a brief moment of growing absence within her, and then she blinked and he was stopping it again. Keunhee had a dizzying sense, for a moment, of discontinuity, but nothing had changed, and Riley left her in peace with perhaps the merest puzzling hint of a giggle when he did so.

She closed the door after him and stood in the hallway for a long time, her heart pounding, reliving again the startling erotic potential of his playing.

*

It was harder for Riley to concentrate as he walked home than he’d expected. The sheer excitement of watching her squirm (and try to hide it) while he was playing was still thrilling through him - he actually had to concentrate to stop his hands shaking.

And when he’d tapped the metronome, at the end, just to test, she’d sunk back toward trance without him even needing to do anything. He wasn’t sure, of course, if she’d fully entered trance, but the suggestion looked like it should hold for a while.

The fantasies he read and the videos he watched, of course, all promised that suggestions just lasted, sometimes for months, even if you didn’t use them. One of his favourites saw the POV brainwash his aunt, then return her to his control on every family visit for the next year just by snapping his fingers. Riley didn’t get the incest thing, but he enjoyed the rest of it.

Riley had a slightly more inquisitive mind than someone who might have taken this for granted, though; while watching tutorials on the real deal wasn’t something he’d bother with, he’d spent plenty of time on Reddit and knew that, especially for people who hadn’t been hypnotised before, how long a suggestion would last varied.

If they lasted to the next week, Riley told himself, he’d put Ms Paek back under, get her nice and comfortable, and he’d undo everything but her commitment to keep him on as a student. That was really the only thing he needed.