There were butterflies in her stomach an hour before Riley’s next lesson. She had little communication with her students in the week between lessons, only as much as was needed if a rescheduling needed to happen, but with her knowing now that Riley knew she was attracted to him, Paek Keunhee had almost expected him to break that rule and send her some kind of flirtation, or some kind of message, at least.

He had not, and as a result she had spent the week in a sort of rising anticipation and fear of the event.

She had risen that morning with the firm intent to treat it as a regular working day, to view the lesson as something other than the special occasion that it was. She had dressed as if it were any other day.

All through the morning she had fought down and suppressed the idea that this was wrong, that the plain cream bra and panties beneath her long pencil skirt, blouse, and blazer were too humdrum, too mundane. It was, she reminded herself fiercely, an absurd idea in any case. It wasn’t as if Riley would ever know what her bra that day looked like, and if he learned which panties she was wearing, it would be because he had mastered a second piece and she gave them to him as a reward. That was all perfectly normal; she imagined he would quite likely be perfectly satisfied to receive plain panties in that context.

Try as she might, though, she couldn’t shake the idea that Riley deserved better. Her lessons with him were, as nobody else’s lessons were, a special occasion, after all, and even if he never saw the proof that she took special occasions seriously all the way to her core, she would know, and would have to live with the knowledge that she’d let him down.

At any rate that had been how she’d rationalised it when, immediately after seeing Jade out of her house after her own lesson, she hurried upstairs, already unbuttoning her blouse, wriggled out of her skirt, discarded her drab underwear and selected some lingerie before dressing again.

It just wasn’t right to take Riley’s lessons if she wasn’t wearing something sexy under her business clothes.

She quite liked the skirt and suit for her lessons. They added a certain gravitas, and they absolutely highlighted that this was business, that she was working and her students should think the same way. They weren’t really her, and some students had occasionally commented on how different they’d been from the purple off-the-shoulder silk dresses she’d worn on her tours, that had become for many synonymous with her image there.

She never delved deeply into the reason she’d changed from those dresses, but she also never explained the blazer, blouse, and pencil skirt of today; both of them were about presenting a certain image, rather than about her own clothing preferences. Discussing that felt like it would weaken the message the outfits themselves had sent.

In some ways, wearing her lingerie for Riley was one way of expressing herself and her own preferences without watering down the image she wanted to present. It didn’t even feel like a shame that he knew only very rarely what she was doing.

When Riley arrived at her door, a good half an hour ahead of his scheduled lesson, she stood aside to let him in and followed him into the studio. She paused in the doorway. “Before we begin today,” she said, “I need to address something and, ah, clear the air between us.

“Last week, I behaved… I must have seemed… I think you perhaps perceived me as…” It was deeply embarrassing to say anything about this, however determined she’d been to address it at the start, and she was trying, as best she could, to find a gentler way to put it, but the sentences all seemed to crumble just after she embarked on them.

Riley was looking back at her with a gentle, knowing smile, and perhaps it was that and perhaps it was something else but she couldn’t lie around him, couldn’t even hide the truth around him. Her attempts to muddy the waters or make light of what had happened were what was making her fail, she thought.

“I’m very attracted to you and the way you play,” she said instead, and as embarrassing as it was, it was so much easier to just lay it out clearly. Riley deserved the truth. Without ever having told her, he seemed to command truth from her. It must be something about his presence, she decided.

“I know you know that. Your… When you offered me your fingers last week, it was clear you know. But this is inappropriate, Riley. It’s not something we can continue with.” She wanted to tell him, had planned and promised herself to tell him, that if he tried anything inappropriate again she would end their lessons, but lies weren’t available to her. Not in his presence.

Oh, dear. Perhaps she should have done this over texts after all.

Riley’s smile hadn’t changed. “I don’t want you to do anything you find inappropriate, Ms Paek,” he said. She was aware, keenly aware, of the way he was choosing words there. God - she was weak at the knees at the idea; a good thing she was wearing the skirt as it could lie about that where she couldn’t - but it was like he was already planning out how to make her see it as appropriate. To manipulate her into changing her beliefs, her standards. To make her redraw her boundaries for him, by twisting or tricking or just plain manipulating her.

Paek Keunhee discovered in that moment how terribly arousing she found that idea.

That made no sense, but she knew now that it was true.

Riley set his violin case down, as he now did often, on the small table with her favourite metronomes. She found she was excited that his hands were so close to them, that she seemed to be anticipating something, but she had no idea what it could be or why it excited her so, except that everything about Riley seemed to excite her.

He set the metronome she never touched to swaying, and she watched it move.

*

Riley had also been thinking, in the time between lessons, and what he had mostly been thinking about was the skilful way her lips, tongue, and even teeth had toyed with and teased his fingers. All the way back from her home to the dorms, he had felt phantom sensations as his mind relieved what she’d done, and if he concentrated, he still could at that moment.

It had made it clear to him that, while he had been taking her advancement slowly, it had still been long enough now - and enough sessions of conditioning and reinforcement - that ‘taking it slow’ didn’t mean he couldn’t reap some rewards.

Last week she’d handed him soaking wet panties and sucked his fingers clean of her own juices. He’d had her unbutton her blouse and bare her tits and, later, had her strip down to her heels and panties over the course of her music. Yet he hadn’t done more than stroke her ass through her skirt a couple of weeks earlier.

It was definitely time for that to change.

After her eyes glazed, her lips parted and her shoulders slumped, but before he even spoke to her while she was in trance, he made his way over to her, standing once again beside her, and he unbuttoned the middle three buttons of her blouse.

Some part of him was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for her to reach a limit and wake. As he slid his hand through the opening he’d created and his fingers found one of her breasts under the fabric of her lingerie, he was all too mindful of that, watching her closely for any kind of reaction.

As his fingertips first brushed against the swell of her breast she began to hum. By now he was so certain that her humming indicated acquiescence, if not agreement per se, that he relaxed instantly, and found the top of the lingerie material so that he could explore underneath.

With skin to skin contact her humming became louder, and as he flexed his fingers, the note she was carrying started to modulate.

Intrigued despite himself, Riley started to experiment, squeezing, tugging, and letting his stroking reach further and further afield from her tit itself. The noises that emerged from the entranced virtuoso became almost musical in nature after a time, once her had learned which changeovers of behaviour produced discordant results.

He rested his other hand experimentally on the buttock on her other side, and found that when he squeezed it gently, the tone of her humming became deeper.

Riley had not expected that a discovery like this could make him as hard as it had as quickly as it had, even in concert with the deep satisfaction and pleasure he was still taking in groping her.

He’d believed already that her humming connected to the instrument suggestion. Now he had discovered that with hands-on attention, he could actually play her.

He wondered just how wide a range she would turn out to have once he mastered her, and what to make the prize she gave him for that mastery.

But first, he reminded himself firmly, to business. He knew a lot more already about how she felt under his touch and, far from any signs of resistance, he considered her humming to count as encouragement instead.

“Keunhee,” he said, “what are your rules on truth?” If he’d known that those rules had been shaping her thought processes just a few minutes before he arrived, he wouldn’t have bothered but he would have been very deeply excited.

“I must answer your questions truthfully. I simply do answer truthfully. Lying, or hiding the truth, is something I can’t do around you.”

“Very good. Now, Keunhee, are you an instrument?”

There was a hesitation. “Yes and no.”

Which, while not exactly nuanced, was a more complex answer than he’d expected, given how deep she was into trance. The porn actresses almost never said something that wasn’t completely clear, and instantly useful. The real world, Riley might lament, was more complicated - although he would hasten to point out that it was far more rewarding, perhaps as a compensation.

“Explain,” he said.

“My body is an instrument,” she said. Riley stopped himself before he could actually say what difference is there, and instead he weighed up the possible answers. His hand inside her blouse roamed over her body again, prompting a new trill of musicality from the entranced woman.

“But you’re not.”

“No.”

“What are you?”

“I am Paek Keunhee.”

He nodded thoughtfully. She couldn’t lie to him, couldn’t hide things from him. This was the truth as she understood it, a truth he’d given her by accident. He could probably undo it, but it would be far better, he thought, if he could make use of it.

So she, the whole person, was a person. But her body was an instrument… “What is the instrument called?” he asked, not because he wanted to know but to cover him while he thought through what he wanted to know.

“Paek Keunhee,” she answered. Riley laughed.

“I should have seen that coming,” he said. “What is the difference between Paek Keunhee the person and Paek Keunhee the instrument?”

“The instrument can be played. The instrument doesn’t know the rules of the music I play.”

He’d said something, he knew, about instruments being happy to be played. Since she hadn’t mentioned that, he assumed that the person was happy with what was happening, too. Probably, he reflected, because he’d made her happy to be manipulated. Manipulating a person was like playing an instrument… right?

“Alright,” he said. “Keunhee, you have been worried, while awake, about the direction your thoughts are taking toward me. You have worried about what I might do about it.

“I’m going to do something today that will push past thoughts to reality.” He smiled to himself. “You’re already going to let me, you just don’t understand why yet. You will.” He wasn’t sure whether this would be interpreted as a rule or not, but he didn’t need it to be. He just wanted to set the stage for a new rule. “As a result, you’re going to decide that it’s fine for me to do as I please. You may keep it a secret for now, but you will feel no guilt over it.

“What will you decide?”

“It’s fine for you to do as you please.”

“What won’t you feel?”

“I won’t feel any guilt.”

“Very good.” Riley considered adding more for a moment and the thought occurred that he almost certainly didn’t need to.

On the other hand, he absolutely could, and be sure - and besides, it would be a lot of fun. “When you wake up, you won’t know any of this is coming. But you will find that you’re hoping for me to do something. You’ll be wanting me to overrule you on this.”

The pencil skirt wouldn’t lift up easily, nor would a handful of fabric bunch it up in a way that let him get his hands on her crotch easily. He couldn’t check that what he was saying was true, so he elected to pretend that he didn’t need to and to press forward instead. “You’re already so wet at the idea that I push past your boundaries, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to win.”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I want you to win.”

“An instrument wants to be played.”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“An instrument wants to be played.”

Riley smiled, and did up the buttons on her blouse, and walked back to the table with his violin and the metronomes.

It was, he thought again, incredible how much power he had over this woman that just took one finger to activate; a nudge to start or stop the metronome, or even just to offer her to suck, and her mind was blank, she was an instrument to be played, she was eager to be manipulated.

And it didn’t even have to be a finger; but at that moment, when he reached out and stopped the metronome, that was all he needed.

*

The world swam back into focus and Paek Keunhee was instantly only vaguely aware that it had ever gone out of focus; she dimly registered that Riley had changed his stance in almost no time, but the little time that had passed she had spent watching the metronome, and it made sense for him to have shifted position before too long.

He had his fingertip on the metronome and he was smiling at her. She collected her thoughts hastily. What had he been saying? Oh, yes.

“Good,” she said. “But that’s not enough, Riley. You need to accept that nothing is going to happen. Is that understood?”

She had managed to summon steel into her voice for that. She hadn’t threatened to end his lessons - in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to lie to him, and she knew that she wouldn’t, whatever he got up to, unless he chose to end their tuition himself. But she thought that, perhaps, he would understand there were consequences, and he would take steps to avoid suffering them.

He had listened patiently through her assertions, and the smile hadn’t left his face. He took his hand away, now, from the metronome, and both of his hands went to his belt, which he unbuckled.

Her jaw dropped. After everything she’d said, he was taking his pants off?

His jeans were unzipped next, and he lowered them just enough to be able to also draw his boxers down and reveal his cock, which was already standing proud.

“Riley,” she said. “I’m warning you.” She hoped it was enough to stop there. It wasn’t really hiding the truth, she told herself.

“Oh, I completely understand, Ms Paek,” Riley answered. “This has nothing to do with anything inappropriate.”

Which was a flagrant lie, but before she could say anything about it he’d pressed on, saying “I just thought you’d enjoy having something to suck, that’s all.”

Her throat was suddenly dry with anticipation and she swallowed. She couldn’t in good conscience turn down an offer he made to her to suck. Not in private. “I… uhhh…” Her head swam, but her vision remained perfectly focused on the tip of his cock. “That’s very kind of you,” she said primly. She took a step forward, swaying slightly, and then another.

Paek Keunhee couldn’t think how he’d manipulated her into this position, but he clearly had and she loved it; he was going to push right past her boundaries, and that idea made her wet. She was already so wet.

“No,” Riley said, easy and confident. “Approach on your knees.”

She took another step forward, then another, and was rewarded by seeing some slight uncertainty in his eyes - but then he seemed to realise something, and the easy smile was back.

And besides, there was only one more step to take before the only reasonable thing for her to do was to go down on one knee, then the other, and then lean forward, her mouth open, and take his cock into her mouth, which she did, happy to be sucking and just as happy that Riley had manipulated her into this, happy to have his cock inside her, however inappropriate it was - and it certainly was, she thought, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore, and he seemed to fall out of focus just as she was thinking I’m glad he overruled me on this. I wanted him to win so badly…

*

If he’d thought the feel of her mouth around his fingers was amazing, he knew better now. This was amazing. She’d clearly had a lot of practice in her past, and while he wasn’t about to ask where she’d learned or anything like that he was more than happy to benefit from it.

Her eyes had crossed, then rolled up until only about half of her pupils were visible, but the angles gave the impression of her glassily gazing up at him for approval as her head slurped up and down on his shaft.

He hadn’t been ready for how purposeful she’d been, either; the moment her second knee touched the floor her mouth was opening wider and shaping itself to his cock in anticipation, her head moving forward. There had been no hesitation, none of the awkwardness one of Riley’s exes had shown, nor the treat-it-like-a-chore-and-get-it-over-with attitude that had been in the set of the shoulders of another sometime lover.

There was only her desire to suck and the implanted compulsion to suck anything he offered her; everything else had been absent even before, as she slid down his cock, she slid back into trance.

Even with her conscious mind dispersed into emptiness, or perhaps because of that, the way she used her whole mouth in unity was astonishing, and his breath had left him in one long, delighted exhalation almost immediately, when her tongue first found that sweet spot under his erection that sent a shudder up his spine and made the crown of his head tingle.

Riley wasn’t sure how much of what he was feeling was due to the efforts of the entranced woman on her knees before him, her arms dangling listlessly, the backs of her hands almost flat on the ground as she’d dropped into trance before finding a place to rest them, and how much was the excitement, the anticipation, even the sheer glee of discovering that it all had worked.

Ultimately it didn’t matter which way round it was. What mattered was what he was getting to enjoy, and he was enjoying himself so much it was an effort to keep enough of his mind off what she was doing to say the things he’d worked out he needed to say.

“Keunhee, when my cock is in your mouth, you will be in trance just like you are unless I tell you otherwise. You will be hypnotised, and you love to be hypnotised, don’t you?”

The “Mm-hmm” that escaped around his cock was more muffled than the one that had emerged from around his fingers, but it was still there, and still just about distinguishable from the humming contentment of the instrument on her knees before him.

“That’s right. But there’s one difference to your trances when my cock is in your mouth. You will consciously remember how good you are at sucking me off. You’ll love remembering everything you did and all the ways I react. In fact, you’ll spend some of your time when you’re alone thinking about my reactions and dreaming up ways they can be even better, won’t you?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“What you won’t remember, consciously, is anything I say to you while you’re doing it. You’re going to keep all that secret from yourself, Keunhee, and you’re going to keep all that secret from yourself because that way I can more easily mould and manipulate you. And you like that, don’t you?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

This time the agreement had more urgency to it, more excitement. Riley decided not to waste too much time wondering whether that was because she liked the suggestion or because she was enjoying the way his cock responded to her tongue, to her lips, to the gentle, grazing caresses of her teeth. She withdrew her head almost completely off the cock, swirling her tongue around the tip, and in her glassy, vacant eyes he seemed to see need, he seemed to see desire, he seemed to see all kinds of things that he wanted to luxuriate in.

Riley lost the ability to speak for a few moments, his coherent thoughts almost as scattered and defunct as her own - she was doing good work, and she was drawing on a level of experience his other conquests had never had.

Mastering the violin was definitely still on the list of things he wanted to do, but he was thinking less and less that he’d ever use it to get dates. With Paek Keunhee as his obedient instrument, why would he ever need to? And even if he did, who could live up to this devoted, near-worshipful service?

Christ, he thought, if she’s like this right now, how good is it going to be when I finally tell her to straddle and ride me?

The thought was a mistake; he almost came right there, and he was afraid he might had slipped out of her mouth and allowed her to wake if he had. She shouldn’t remember anything he’d done with her, not after the work he’d done, but there was more that he wanted to give out.

“Keunhee, it’s not just the way I can manipulate you or my playing that makes you so hot for me. Once you wake up you’re going to remember the way I taste in your mouth and especially remember the flavour of my cum, and you’re going to find in both cases that it’s the best you’ve ever had. Isn’t that right?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“That’s right. There’s no one whose cock you’d rather suck. I’m your favourite student, with your favourite cock, and as you’re going to decide after we’re done here, there’s no guilt or shame in being my lover. You’re so glad I pushed you past your old limit, aren’t you?”

“Mm-hmm.”

He was just barely hanging on at that moment, would cum at any time, and he didn’t want to slip out. He put his hand on the top of her head and slid her, unresisting, back down his cock until she was taking all of it, and he noticed that the humming that was near constant when she was in this state had grown louder and deeper.

She wasn’t just an instrument, he thought; she was an instrument as designed by a musician, and there were rules to her playing.

He’d deal with that later, he decided, and he stopped fighting to hold back his orgasm, filling her mouth with his cum and his pent-up excitement and frustration from the past several months. She gurgled happily around his seed, and with his cock still in her mouth, she remained entranced. If anything her eyes seemed glassier than before; it was like her emptiness was now clouded into the bargain.

“Swallow,” he ordered, and she obeyed.

“Before you allow yourself to wake up,” he said, “clean me up with your tongue, and then recite your rules as you know them.”

Her eyes rolled further back until there was no trace of pupil and only a hint of iris in either one as she plunged herself further down his length, almost to gagging point, then slowly withdrew, not once but four times in succession, her tongue lapping at him each time, teasing and coaxing his load off his skin. In between each plunge she took the time to gulp down the cum she now had at her disposal, with every indication of enjoyment.

Her mouth finally left his cock with a slick wet sound that he deeply enjoyed. Still on her knees, her hands sprawled out on the floor beside her, unseeing, she began to recite, not in a monotone but as a melody.

“I am hypnotised. I hear and I do not think. I can hear and not think and not wake while talking at normal volume.

“You are my favourite student. I see great potential in you. I would never stop teaching you without your request. I want to go deeper.

“This metronome is one I do not touch. This metronome brings me back to trance. I sink deep when this metronome is on.

“Every time you get a note right, I feel more excited. The more notes you get right in a sequence, the more excited I get. It’s very hard to hide it.

“I have no idea why I feel this way. I don’t even know what’s exciting me. But the better you play, the more turned on I get.

“I must answer your questions truthfully. I simply do answer truthfully. Lying, or hiding the truth, is something I can’t do around you.

“I appreciate your attitude. I feel good when you’re nearby. I want to make it easy for you to get here early again.

“I will make sure the hour before and the hour after your lesson are always left empty in case we need it. Instead of undoing one button each time either of us says the word ‘motivation’, I’m going to remove my clothing, one item at a time.

“I consider my rule about motivation to apply to lingerie, too. I always wear lingerie for your lessons.

“I’ll change with an hour to go, if I have to. Because your lessons are special occasions, and because I want to impress you. I will follow my rules. But I won’t let myself know I’m following rules. I don’t need to know.

“Instruments don’t know the rules of the music they play. Instruments are happy to be played.

“I love sucking things. If you and I are alone together, and you give me something to suck, I will always suck it. If you and I are alone together, and you give me something to suck, I will fall back into trance as I suck it.

“Whenever I think you master a piece, I’ll give you the panties I am wearing. This will seem completely natural, normal, even logical. But it’s still a great achievement, so I will make a ceremony out of it.

“I’m so easy to hypnotise. I love that about myself. I don’t remember any of this, but I still love how easy I am to manipulate when I’m hypnotised. I’d like you to manipulate me like this more often.

“I’m going to decide that it’s fine for you to do as you please. I won’t feel any guilt.

“I hope for you to do something.” Riley tensed for a moment; he’d been talking about her hoping for him to act just then, before now, but she didn’t keep talking. The rule, for her, was complete there, a generalisation, not a single moment. The instrument, wanting to be played, accepted directions as rules, where a person might have seen them as one-offs. He would have to watch for that. “I want you to overrule me,” she continued.

“I’m already so wet at the idea that you push past my boundaries. I want you to win. An instrument wants to be played.

“When your cock is in my mouth, I am in trance unless you tell me otherwise. I will consciously remember how good I am at sucking you off. I love remembering everything I did and all the ways you reacted. I’ll spend some of my time when I’m alone thinking about your reactions and dreaming up ways they can be even better.

“I won’t consciously remember anything you say to me while I’m doing it. I’m going to keep all that secret from myself because that way you can more easily mould and manipulate me. And I like that.

“It’s not just the way you can manipulate me or your music that makes me so hot for you. I remember the way you taste in my mouth and I remember the flavour of your cum. In both cases it’s the best I’ve ever had.

“There’s no one whose cock I’d rather suck. You’re my favourite student, with my favourite cock. There’s no guilt or shame in being your lover. I’m so glad you pushed me past my old limit.”

She took a deep breath and he could see her shoulder sit straighter. Her eyes uncrossed and refocused on him, and she sighed, secretly glad he’d pushed her past her old limit. “Alright, Riley,” she said. “We’ll have it your way.”

And as she said it, she felt a weight lift from her, her scalp tingling, and she knew there was no guilt or shame in being his lover. Her tongue ran around her lips absently, hungry for any remaining drops of the best tasting cum she’d ever had.

She quietly decided Riley didn’t need to know he held that particular title. He might ask how strong the competition was, and she didn’t know how well he’d cope with that.