Old Habits Read online

Dr. Kovacs was conspicuously courteous upon our next appointment. I knew it was because the memory of me slapping my ass over his arm chair was something he’d not yet gotten over, but I took it as another good sign. I wasn’t quite ready to “David” him, but I was considering it.

  “So, last week you told me your goal was to free yourself of these mental compulsions you say a man instilled in you. Is that an accurate synopsis?” he began once we’d finished small-talk.

  “That’s right. I asked around, and everyone says you’re the go-to guy for hypnotherapy. I can’t wait to get started and see if we can make progress.”

  He held up a hand. “Whoa now, Harmony. Hypnosis isn’t something I recommend my patients just dive into – especially not in a case as, erm, complex as yours. The brain is a complicated instrument, and moreover, proper, long-term hypnosis requires a bond of trust between therapist and patient that we simply do not have yet.”

  I shook my head. “As I understand it, the trust is necessary because it requires willingness to submit on a subconscious level for the patient, right?”

  “Well… that’s more or less accurate, but–”

  “Dr. Kovacs, I promise you, you’ll never have a patient more accustomed to deep submission. I can do it.”

  He paused. “Harmony, I do believe you. But even so, hypnosis can have powerful effects, especially on people whose minds are susceptible to it. Now we don’t know if hypnosis is how your triggers were introduced, but I’ll say it seems at least possible.”

  “So?”

  “So, that means you’d essentially be handing a veritable stranger the keys to your mind on blind hope.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t trust you?” I frowned.

  “No, not at all. You can trust me. I’m only saying it worries me to see that you’re doing so with so little cause. For instance, I always instruct my patients, at least for their first hypnosis, have someone else present, someone they trust. That way they can feel comfortable knowing that their vulnerability can’t be exploited.”

  “No.” My voice was iron, so firm I almost surprised myself. “No one is ever, ever allowed to sit in on our sessions.”

  Dr. Kovacs tapped his pencil to his lip thoughtfully. “May I ask why not?”

  “Doctor, if the whole idea is to learn and remove these triggers, the last thing I would ever want is for someone I know to know them! My best friend doesn’t even know about any of this. And I want it to stay that way.”

  “And your family?”

  “No. My family and I don’t speak.”

  “May I ask why not?”

  I sighed. Why was he being so obstinate about this? How had I found a hypnotherapist so averse to hypnotizing his patient? “I’d rather not talk about it right now, if that’s all right. It’s complicated.”

  “Of course it’s all right. But it also goes to demonstrate my point, that if you have these kinds of issues, I should know them before I go poking around blindly.”

  “Why would you go probing for details about my family? The whole idea is to get rid of my triggers, and I promise you, my family is nowhere involved in my fucked up ex-sex-slave issues.” Not directly, anyway. Not that I knew of. The off chance of stumbling across a repressed memory of a betrayal by a family member was miles down the list of priorities from making me not have to juice up every time I caught someone checking out my butt.

  “Harmony, I want to help you, but the pressure you’re putting on me here… you have to understand that even if I induced a trance, it’s entirely possible it would do and reveal nothing about your past. What happened to you… they don’t exactly cover that in the manual. Moreover, I don’t want to risk making things worse.”

  There it was. In his tone, I picked up the source of his real hesitancy. If someone had the skill to scramble my mind so, could tapping into it wind up scrambling things further? I tried to think of what Master had done to me as another art form, which surely it was, however selfish and cruel it had been. If Master had written a masterpiece in me, could Dr. Kovacs ruin the work by his editing?

  He was afraid for me. That right there was what sealed my trust. “David… Please. I need this. Please try for me.”

  Even with this unremarkable semi-doughy forty-something man across from me, there was a part of me that thought how much better it would be if I sunk to my knees, removed my clothes. Begged properly, like Master had taught me.

  That was the instinct I needed removed, no matter how delicious the thought now seemed.

  “Very well, Harmony. We’ll try. Still, if you won’t make an allowance for a witness, I insist that we at least record the session as a simple matter of liability. One of my patients early on in my practice tried to bring a lawsuit against me for making her smoking worse, and it very nearly went to court.”

  “That’s fine, do whatever you need to do.” I fidgeted in place while he retrieved a camera from his closet and inserted a fresh memory chip after labeling it with my name and the date with delicate penmanship.

  “Where do you want me?”

  “Wherever you’re comfortable. The chair reclines, if you like, or there’s the sofa. I even have a beanbag chair I could bring out if you’d rather; a few patients have requested it.”

  I shrugged and remained seated in his ultra-plush chair. “I’m fine right like this.”

  He set up the camera on a tripod and pressed a button. A red light told me it was now recording. David immediately stated my name, the date and time into the record, and had me assure the camera that I was of sound mind and body and entered into this of my own free will. A self-contradictory claim, that, a woman looking to have her sex slave brainwashing undone having to swear to her free will and sound mind before the work could begin.

  He activated a metronome on his desk, adopting a soft tone of voice so that its sound was always in my ears. “As we proceed, Harmony, I ask that you try to breathe deeply and evenly. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes,” I replied. We were quiet for a few minutes as I did just that. It actually was quite relaxing.

  “Good. Now I want you to focus on the sound of my voice. Listen to my words, and breath deeply.” I inhaled. Exhaled. This really was rather calming. He spoke quickly, but in a fluid sort of a rush, like water running through my ears and over my mind. “You and I, we’re going to go to a place of total relaxation. Total calm. You want to be totally calm, don’t you?”

  “Yes, David.”

  “That’s good, keep breathing. We have to get there, to that place of relaxation and calm, but right now we have cares and wants and anxieties. Feel them, feel them like a weight on your shoulder, feel them holding you down. You could float away without that weight on you, but it’s so heavy. Do you feel it?”

  “Mmhm.” I scrunched up my nose. I imagined the weight of my broken brain on my shoulders. It was heavy indeed.

  “That’s right, deep breathing, so we’re going to little by little let go of the weight, let some of those individual cares and worries go, feel lighter and lighter. Right now we’re at a five, so heavy, but we can let go of it, just a little of it. Feel it growing lighter and lighter on your shoulders as we go to level four. Do you feel lighter, Harmony?”

  I nodded. “Lighter, David. Yes.”

  “Good good, another deep breath in, now let it go. Each breath we let out takes away some of our weight as we get lighter and lighter, as we get to level three. We’re feeling light now, the weight’s barely slow us down as we breathe in, good, now out.”

  I sighed dreamily, paradoxically sinking deeper into the couch as the weight lifted from my shoulders.

  “That’s right, we’re very relaxed now Harmony, and we’re letting everything go, so little weight left, barely enough to hold us down. We breathe in, and we breathe out all that bad air, we’re lighter and lighter and almost ready to let go as we reach level two…”

  The metronome and his voice were barely present to me now. Just my breaths. In, and out. Lighter and lighter. />
  “Very good, now we need to be ready to take off, to float away on the air. We’re going to let the last of that weight go breath… by breath… very good, by breath… as we reach… level… one… and trance.”

  I hadn’t really known what to expect when I’d signed on for this, whether being hypnotized would be like a dream, or if I’d be conscious but relaxed the whole while, or if I’d remember anything at all and simply black it out.

  I definitely had not expected what actually happened.

  As soon as I entered the trance, my mind went from blissed out and passively accepting to hyper-alert and frantically probing. It was like I suddenly remembered a hundred things in an instant, then forgot them in the next. Flashes of my training, of my servitude. Flashes of injections and inductions and triggers and trances. At Master’s ranch. In a basement somewhere. In a shower. In a rainstorm. With Master. With another slave. With a stranger. With three strangers.

  The whole experience was like seeing something out of the corner of your eye, but when you look, there’s no sign that you ever saw it. But you know you saw something, even if you don’t know what.

  But all that is nothing compared to when I snapped back out of it.

  I was on my knees on a pile of scattered papers. I was naked. My back was arched, thrusting my rear backward and my tits forward to maximum visual allure, as Master had trained me. My neck was craned up to gaze directly into the eyes of Dr. Kovacs, whose pants were bunched up around his ankles, my hands planted on them as if to make sure he couldn’t cover himself.

  My mouth was full of cum, wide open and tongue extended.

  I froze. It was if I’d jumped forward in time, no way of knowing how I’d gotten here, no clear path forward. As I felt my stomach lurch in shock at this sudden development, I did the thing that came most naturally to me.

  My tongue slipped back into my mouth, and I swallowed, eyes still locked on his. He was still hard.

  My brain began to catch up with my instincts then, and I realized that patients don’t blow their doctors, that this hadn’t been something that I had asked for, that no matter how much of a rush I could feel in my system at finally finally getting to service a man, it wasn’t natural. It was programmed. It was my slavery reasserting itself.

  I made myself wipe off the smile that had crept unbidden onto my lips. Now put on your clothes, I commanded myself.

  During my enslavement, my placid temperament had been bent by Master into full submissiveness. Even now, I liked to obey. I did better at work when my boss simply told me what he wanted rather than invite me to handle it my own way. I always made my friends pick the restaurant, the bar, the radio station. Sometimes I even had them order for me. I had also discovered, however, that if I was firm with myself in my own head, I could spur myself to action, even when everything in my body said to be passive.

  Right now, my instincts told me to ask if I had done a good job. He looked rather shaken, which only served to make me want to reassure him by expressing my gratitude. Maybe to play with myself a little until he told me how he wanted to get off next. My thinking self, however, knew that this wasn’t right. This was so, so far away from right.

  Get dressed Harmony, I ordered myself again.

  I looked for my clothes, and began to put them back on.

  “Harmony, I… I can’t believe you… I mean we… That wasn’t…”

  I ignored him. I needed to be clothed so it would be harder to revert. He realized he was still exposed and pulled his pants up so fast he almost tripped himself. He couldn’t bear the silence, and continued to stammer apologies; I continued to get dressed, doing my best not to turn the act into a show, as Master had trained me.

  “Thank you, Dr. Kovacs. I don’t think I’ll be needing another appointment. If I hear from you again, I’ll assume you’re there with ill intentions, and defend myself physically if possible, legally if not.”

  “But Ms. Reed…!” he stammered behind me. But I was already out the door. I had to order myself every step of the way to keep from going back and finishing the job.

  Chapter Three

  I called off sick to both jobs the next couple days, and begged off social engagements. My friends were worried, but I told them I’d picked up a bug at school and they bought it. I hated lying to them, but the truth was no choice at all.

  The incident at Dr. Kovacs’s had gotten to me.

  I wish I could say I’d been examining the memories I recovered, was finding pieces of them that meant something to me, gave me clues about what had been done and how I might be able to reverse it. That wasn’t so. The flashes weren’t really memories at all – as ephemeral and firm as my memories of the dreams I’d had as a child. There was nothing.

  No, that wasn’t what was troubling me. Really, it wasn’t even that my shrink had taken advantage of me to indulge himself with a trademark Harmony blowjob. It was objectively repulsive and beyond unethical, sure. From the look on his face as I’d left he regretted it already, though whether that regret stemmed from having used me or from having been caught using me, I couldn’t say. Regardless, his office didn’t try to contact me.

  So. I’d been used as a sex slave once again, after most of a year of freedom and clean living. And what troubled me? How much I had fucking missed it.

  I tried not to masturbate as I thought about how amazing it had felt to have pleasured a man, to have been used for the purpose I was re-born to. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t, though. I refrained from letting myself climax most of the time, relishing the old feeling of keeping myself on edge, horny to the point of desperation.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t feel up to going to work; it was that I was worried I’d go home with the first halfway decent-looking guy who hit on me.

  I suppose I should clarify that, despite how it may sound, I’m not some total slut. I was horny. I’d gotten a taste of my kink, and my libido wanted more. You’re probably the same way when you have a good roll in the hay. I remember a man who came to Master’s ranch to fuck some of Master’s slaves, and I was the one he selected. He told me he had a presentation to make the next day which would make or break his shot at a seven-figure salary, but all he needed to feel confident was to have a gorgeous babe go crazy over him.

  “What woman wouldn’t go crazy over a man like you?” I’d said, giving him the same meat-market perusal I was so used to being on the receiving end of. I’d been triggered already, and I knew this routine well, as it was popular with all these big shots that came and went.

  The flatterer.

  I walked around him, examining from all angles, and soon couldn’t help myself. I had to feel those arms, those shoulders. “Your hands are soooo big,” I gushed, addressing his fingertips one by one, little sucking kisses.

  “Yeah, you know what they say.”

  “No, I don’t. Can you tell me what they say?” There it was in my voice, the sound of a woman who loved nothing more than being told things by men. Men were so smart; I loved hearing the things they said.

  “The bigger the hands, the bigger the… you know.”

  My eyes lit up. What a clever observation, they said. They darted down to his groin then, elated at the thought of the King Kong Schlong that surely lurked within. I helped myself to a feel of it, and he was already hard. I giggled in disbelief that I’d gotten so lucky to land a man so virile as this.

  “That is big,” I said, then sucked his index finger into my mouth as just the thought of his huge cock filled me with the need to suck.

  “Baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Raw arrogance. I trembled at how good it felt to know that I was helping to feed that colossal ego.

  “I can’t wait.” And I couldn’t.

  I don’t know how his presentation went, but when I saw him some months later, he went with another slave and barely spared me a second glance. It didn’t sting; we slaves weren’t allowed egos. But I was curious if he’d done it, and if so, whether I’d helped.

  So yeah,
like I was saying, I’m not some crazy slut with no self-control. A better way of thinking about it is like being a drug addict. I knew the drug was no good for me, and I remembered how it had fucked up my life in the past. But that didn’t mean I didn’t still crave the damn thing, even as I fought to avoid it.

  I had to get myself better. Only my first attempt at doing so had ended in disaster, engaging the exact opposite of the kind of behavior I’d hoped to erase. It had taken urges which, if I hadn’t buried altogether, I’d at least dumped a few shovels of dirt over, and brought them back to the surface.

  I remembered, occasionally, the day Master had died. I’d run to where the body had hit the ground, and I remembered being surprised at how grotesque it was. Compound fractures and blood everywhere. Not like when people fall on TV and they just lie still. Master was convulsing, and the convulsions seemed to aggravate all the broken bones. Even so Master held on for probably an hour, just trembling and gasping. Master died before managing a single word.

  “What do you want me to do?” I’d asked over and over for probably an hour after Master had stopped breathing, just in case some part of him was still going. I wasn’t a doctor after all; Master had reminded his slaves often how stupid we were. (Not that I think I’m actually stupid, but I was never a good student and certainly not the sort to pioneer mind control techniques.)

  Still, it was harsh criticism from a Master who’d commanded me never to contact the outside world without expressed permission, then died on account of the ambulance that order had prohibited me from calling. I wished I could take comfort, but still I could only regret my inability to serve Master better in those final moments.

  Once I was satisfied that he was dead, and then processed what that meant – that I was free again – I had to decide what to do. Mind you, I literally hadn’t decided anything for myself in years at that point. Not what to wear, not what to eat, not how to spend my time. Now that I could decide what I wanted to do, there was only one thing that came to mind. The thing that came most naturally to me.