It’s a looooong preview cause this is a very story focused story.
The Dangers of Trust
A Smuthunter Story
“Do you think there’s any chance,” Ethan looked deep into Nadia’s eyes as she spoke, “that when this Lynda hypnotized you, and, well, you know she seduced you with hypnosis right? Do you think this mysterious woman might have had ulterior motives? Do you think she might have even targeted you?”
Nadia’s narrow, purple framed glasses sat low on her nose, and she looked over them at Ethan as she asked him that question, and he sat there, thinking about it.
Dr. Nadia Saunders was Ethan’s age, and like Lynda, the British woman who had indeed randomly hypnotized him, and played with him for a stretch of time on a work trip in central Europe several years ago, she had red hair, blue eyes, soft, pale skin…
Ethan had told his new therapist that story, alluding to it in previous sessions, though he didn;t exactly know why, and having told her about it this time, he found himself truly noticing that indeed, like Lynda, this woman also had large, beautiful breasts.
Her question still hung there, unanswered, and he looked up from her chest, which he’d sincerely, accidentally been admiring, fully covered by her dress as it was, up into Nadia’s eyes. His therapist couldn’t have been more similar to Lynda, but Nadia wasn’t British, her hair was straight, and she had a much more angular face. More so, she said she was not a hypnotist and did not use it in her practice.
His therapist was also considerably more forceful than Lynda was, and either through a combination of height and heels, had six inches on the mysterious hypnotist from Ethan’s past. It was strange, he wasn’t expecting her to sound so judgemental, or confrontational, but then again, she was his new therapist so he didn’t really know her style, and he was also just plain new to therapy in general.
“I don’t know why she would have.”
It was strange to even think that Lynda would want anything from him. It was hard to think of her as anything other than sweet, kind, caring, and nurturing. It was easy to think of her and remember how good it had felt to be with her that weekend.
“Ethan, I think you might be disassociating.”
Her voice was soft but strong, and he had a moment where he realized he was staring at nothing, well, her tits and nothing, as his mind had wandered.
“Sorry, I uh… I mean, we had some basic security training, so I understand that with any social engineering, the point is to get an in, and it doesn’t matter how big or small, but that’s kind of bullshit for my position I think. Like getting to me, wouldn’t do anything.”
“That’s interesting Ethan, why do you think that?”
Her eyebrow arched as she asked that, and her hand came to rest on her collarbone as she watched him and waited for his reply. Her eyes were sharp and fierce, not as soft as Lynda’s were. Lynda’s entire energy was soft, and welcoming. Being with her, being near her, was like being pulled into bed.
“It’s not a self-esteem thing or anything, it’s just, anything I have access to someone could get at with brute force with much less time and effort. And any time I’ve had contact with her, we never talked about my work.”
“That you’re aware of.” Unlike her last comment, this one was simply a matter of fact. “And how long has it been since you’ve been in contact with her?”
“I’m sorry, what do you mean?” He tried to raise an eyebrow, but that always just made him scrunch his face a little bit.
“You told me she identified you as a highly suggestible and receptive subject, and given how hypnosis can work, there’s really no way for you to know what you’ve told her, or what she’s compelled and drawn out of you.”
“Okay,” Ethan stopped making eye contact with ehr and looked up at the ceiling as he thought about the times he’d talked to Lynda since they first met. “I can see why you might think that. So I guess, I don’t even know how long it’s been since the last time we talked. She could have made me delete any records of her calling me. Who knows, maybe I have a secret burner phone I don’t know about and…”
He had intended his last comments to be a joke, but she was not smiling.
“It’s possible,” Ethan had looked back at her to answer, and now he saw her move her tilt her head ever so slightly and raise her pointer finger from her collar bone to the corner or her mouth. She was wearing noticeable, professional makeup, and it brought out her features. “So let me rephrase that. When was the last time you remember having contact with her?”
“It’s been…”
All the random, paranoid, fantastical thoughts he’d had about her, things he hadn’t been able to articulate, things that were incongruous with her sweet, warm, nurturing energy, started to take real form in his head. He was trying to think about the last email they exchanged, and how he had been so excited to read it, to what from her, and all he could think about was, what if there was something there, some secret code or activation phrase.
“Hold on,” he took out his phone, opened his email and started scrolling, “I can tell you exactly, and show you.”
The emails were banal back and forths, pleasant exchanges, and nothing more.
“Do you feel anything as you read them?”
She was watching him as he read those words. But no, there was nothing that he felt, nothing that felt urgent, nothing that reminded him of anything else.
“No, but here, you can read them if you’d like.”
He handed her his phone, and when she handed it back she said, “Nothing stands out, no repetition, no references to what you told me of your time together past checking in on your well being. It also appears that you have not had contact with her since shortly after your encounter. Still, could there be other modes of communication, other accounts and platforms possibly? Could she have had you set something up while you were in her presence?”
She was so matter of fact about all of it that it made things seem less absurd than they clearly were. But the most absurd thing of all for Ethan was what he said next.
“I have wondered about that, but…”
He had, he really had, he just never let himself admit that. It was too hard to hold sinister thoughts of her alongside how soft, gentle, and how soothing she was. It was too hard for him to hold those concerns when he thought about her… her body… her voice… her breasts…
He caught himself drifting when he meant to be digging into himself, trying to find something. “But I, uh, I mean, I feel like if I told her anything I shouldn’t have, or shared anything damaging, it would have come up at work by now.”
She watched him, she was watching him so closely, and she nodded slightly, still looking down at him over her glasses.
“Not if she only wants business intelligence that doesn’t directly impact your position, or branch. There are all sorts of things you know, based on your position, that could help other people profit off of things that wouldn’t necessarily come back to you.”
Nadia’s finger had dropped from the corner of her mouth, and now she was brushing down the fabric of her dress, down the side of her breast. She was wearing a high necked, short sleeved black dress, and had her hair up in a bouffant. She wore a white belt around her waist, and didn’t wear any jewelry except for small studs in her ears.
She pushed her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose and looked him dead in the eye, waiting for him to return eye contact and answer her.
“I’m curious Doctor, how do you know anything about this kind of thing?”
He thought it was a fair question, but she tilted her head in a way that said are you serious.
“My clientele is made up exclusively of white collar professionals that are usually in upper or middle management, or who have an above average level of professional stress and responsibility. I have to understand all the stress points in the lives of people like you, including the dangers you face working in competitive fields like yours. I actually teach seminars in preventing psychological and emotional manipulation, but you already know that about me. You might not have clocked it as part of your decision making process, but it is why you chose me Ethan, that and, as you’ve described it, my physical similarities to this mysterious hypnotist, Lynda.”
“Honestly Doctor,” the way she stared at him, the way her eyes dug into him, it didn’t feel like she was undressing him, it felt like she was stripping him down to the bone. “I’m not entirely sure how I ended up here.”
“In your previous visits you talked about stress, and unfulfilled emotional needs, and a sense of accomplishment. You also talked about anxiety, lack of professional motivation, and struggles to connect with romantic and sexual partners. Which are all very normal reasons my clients have in coming to see me.You selected me from a list of therapists you were referred to by your doctor because of your disposition towards being physically attracted to me, and because of my presentation, which caters towards people like you, with your needs.”
Ethan didn’t know what to say to that.
“Look, Dr. Saunders, I don’t really feel that stressed out by…”
She held up a single finger to stop him, “Self-minimizing is a natural response, but we do it to deny problems, not to manage them. And if this Lynda woman is inside your head, training you to provide her with intelligence and manipulating your perception of what’s happening, that can create tremendous, unsustainable stress on your psyche. It can even put you in a position to have a mental breakdown. I did my residency in a private, voluntary commitment mental health hospital, I’ve seen how high functioning people implode.”
“I don’t think I’m imploding, and I don;t think that Lyndia has turned me into a sleeper agent. I think it was just an odd, almost unbelievable chain of events that…”
Maybe he was imploding?
Maybe Lynda was in his head ina real lasting way.
Maybe she had been planning to do something more with him, or to him.
Maybe she had made it so he couldn’t have doubts about her, not that he was just naturally wanting to hold on to his very good, very strange, unbelievable time with her.
“Ethan?”
He had drifted off again, disassociated again, and as her voice shook him back on track, he realized he’d once again fallen into staring at her tits.
They stood out in her dress, and while there was nothing, not even a hint of cleavage, they were still undeniable.
“I’m sorry, there’s just a lot going on in my head and I…”
She held up her finger again to stop him.
“What you are describing sounds like what she would want you to think happened. And because you are, as you have told me she told you, and I believe that she more and more rightly observed, are in the five percent of the population that are highly suggestible to hypnosis, more than able to believe this. One can use the premise that a subject is highly suggestible, even if the subject is not, relying on the position of and appeal to authority, to convince a subject to respond more favorably and agreeably to hypnosis before they are hypnotized, but you, with what you described, are actually a soma somnambulist. So, she could have you respond to hypnosis in ways that others wouldn’t, causing hypnosis to affect you in ways it would simply not other people.”
“This isn’t really what I came here to…”
She raised her finger again.
Fuck, what if this was what he actually came here to talk about?
“And yet, this is what we are talking about, because you couldn’t keep it inside. Telling me about her is a cry for help, especially when paired with your own belief that you are not suffering an unmanageable amount of stress. So tell me, Ethan…”
Nadine adjusted her glasses again, and let go of the firm, almost brusk tone she had been using with him, “What do you actually remember about being hypnotized by her?”
If he really didn’t want to talk about this, he wouldn’t have brought it up. If he wasn’t struggling with reconciling this strange event, he wouldn’t have confusing feelings about if he was afraid of what she may have done, and if he was even allowed to have those feelings.
“She, uh… she put me to sleep on the train, then in our room…”
Nadine held up her finger, “Your room. It wasn’t hers, she maneuvered herself into your room. It’s important you understand that.”
“Okay, then in my room, she hypnotized me again, and she made me cum by massaging my thumb. Then later, she took me through a more formal, I guess, hypnosis session, and she made me cum again.”
“Yes,” she gave him a slight nod, “you said that. I mean, more so, what do you remember about the experience as a whole, and the types of things she said to you? Do you recall her reinforcing anything, or repeating anything in particular?”
“She uh…” Ethan felt a flush of embarrassment despite the fact he’d already talked about ejaculating. “Sbe noticed my, I guess, appreciation for her breasts, and she had me call her ‘mum’, which I guess is a British thing?”
“That’s very interesting. Mum is a term for mother, but depending on her accent, she might have been telling you to call her ma’am. Still, with noticing your attraction to her breasts, there is some chance it was more manipulation, playing on certain Freudian clichés. Did her breasts feature prominently in your hypnosis?”
The curious, more gentle tone in Dr. Saunders’s voice had become surprisingly disarming. Ethan had thought that maybe in their first few meetings He hadn’t had the best read on her because things seemed combative, or at least aggressive in their sessions, but he’d also felt that she was interested, engaged, and supportive at the same time. Now, in that moment, it was obvious that she was capable of being both, almost in the same breath.
“I don’t know what you mean…”
He said the words and waited for Dr. Saunders to clarify, but the woman pushed on her glasses slightly and sat back in such a way that she was sitting bolt upright with her shoulders back and her chest out. He noticed, and he saw her notice him noticing and a slight smirk worked its way to one corner of her mouth.
She sat there, looking directly into his eyes, waiting for him to keep talking, breathing deeply and slowly, her chest rising and falling as he sat and stared, thinking of what to say next.
“I mean, yes…” The image of her cleavage behind the candle she used, and the way she told him how her tits had hypnotized his cock sent a wave of calm and arousal through him.
He wasn’t expecting to feel that, and now that the feeling was there, it was tugging at him, encouraging him to drift back into those soft, gentle, erotic memories of her breasts. “Yes, but only at the end when she had me really focused on them for part of, I guess, the hypno-sex we had, or…. I don’t have the term for it.”
Ethan took a deep breath in, and as he exhaled, he tried his best to keep focused in the moment.
“Did she ever physically stimulate you to climax? Did you ever have physical, penetrative sex with her?”
Nadia’s questions were matter of fact observations, and they made him think of the way her caress of his thumb made him cum, and the way her breasts had compelled an orgasm out of him. It was getting harder to stay fully present, and he was surprised by how powerful the memories were, and how he also came to realize he hadn’t really thought of them in a long time.
“No,” Ethan shook his head when he realized he kept admiring her breasts, and to emphasize his answer. “There wasn’t any physical intimacy, not even kissing.”
“So when you say she had you focus on her breasts to lead you into climax, that was the extent of the roll her breasts played in hypnotizing you?” Again, there was an even, professional level to her voice. “Think back to those nights as best you can, did she ever give you clear suggestions while inducing trance, to focus on her breasts, or that her breasts were hypnotizing you, anything along those lines?”
“No, it wasn’t like that. I mean, she knew I was having a hard time not looking at them, and maybe she distracted me with her hand, getting me to stay focused on them, but no, she wasn’t like, look at my tits, now you’re hypnotized.”
“I see.”
She sat there watching him, and he felt watched, and exposed.
“It’s rather funny if you think about it Ethan,” she put her hand to her chest again and smiled a sharp, privately amused smile, “if she had done that it would have worked just as well to hypnotize you, wouldn’t it?”
“I uh… I don’t know… I guess? I mean, if I am that easily hypnotizable.”
Ethan wonders if Nadia, Dr. Saunders, was doing that on purpose, like she was pointing at her tits, if she was doing exactly what Lynda had, but that wasn’t her.
No, she wasn’t a hypnotist, she wasn’t hypnotizing him, she was his therapist.
He trusted her.
“From what you’ve told me, and from what I am observing about you, you are. As I said, I am not a hypnotist, and I do not practice hypnosis with my patients, but I am familiar with it. You may not realize this, but when you actively think about her, and when you actively call up memory, I can observe you entering into moments of trance. You have moments of micro-submersion into the trance state just by remembering being hypnotized, and that makes me think more and more that you were identified and targeted for corporate espionage by this woman.”
“Can I ask, why are you so focused on that, and why were you asking about her breasts so much?” Ethan felt proud of himself for asserting some initiative.
“There is an…” Nadia sat forward and put her hands flat on her desk, and Ethan did wonder what her cleavage would look like if her dress had a scoop neck, “…organization that focuses on people in potentially valuable positions who are psychologically vulnerable to sexual manipulation and seduction through hypnosis. The operatives in this organization are women, and they reliably deploy their breasts to hypnotize and compromise their targets.”
Nadia lifted her hand to her chest, and rested her fingers on her collarbone again,
“Women’s breasts, especially ones like mine, occupy space and power in our zeitgeist and culture. Our obsession with breasts, and the hyper-sexualization of them is one component, while another is the constant cultural reinforcement of what breasts do to the male mind. These spies that hypnotically seduce men with their large breasts do so because of the cultural leverage and power that comes from their awareness of their breasts, and how their subjects think of them. This makes their uses of hypnosis extremely effective, as they embrace cultural norms and assumptions about the power of breasts, and then deliver on them. The end result is that the subject subconsciously expects what is happening to them, and agrees with the premise, and in turn willingly succumbs to their hypnotic seduction.”
As she spoke, her smirk returned, and while she didn’t move her hand, her focused, intense gaze seemed to be daring him to look down at her tits, and it took all of his will power and deliberate focus not to stare at them.
But half way through what she had to say, Ethan was glancing down at her breasts, and while they were fully covered, she did seem just as powerful and just as compelling.
Much like Lynda’s tits were on that first night, when hers were also fully covered by her sweater.
“These women can and do change their approaches, but they are not the only operatives in the field doing these things. There is another, much looser organization, one that is more like individual cells or franchises, that instead of corporate espionage…”
Dr. Saunders brushed her hand down over her breasts, “They focus…”
She looked down at her hand and traced a fingernail down over her breast and did not look at him.
“They fixate.”
She did it again.
“They obsess over, and brainwash each other into sexual dominance over men and women they want to control completely and totally, for their own private, greed, ends, and desires.”
“By any chance,” Nadia’s voice was soft again, compelling in its curiosity and concern as she looked up at him, and spoke, catching him looking down at her finger, down at her tits, “”did this Lynda woman wear a blue crystal necklace?”
Ethan shook his head again, “No, I don’t think so, is that something particular?”
“Hmmmm,” her fingers moved up and down along the inner side of her breast, pushing the fabric of the dress in as she did so, giving even more clear shape to her chest. “I didn’t think she would, and you would remember if she had. It’s a calling card for some organizations. How about a pearl?”
Ethan had a moment of confusion as her question lingered, and he blinked.” He had the distinct sense she was distracting him with her hand on purpose. “Dr. Saunders, I feel like you might be trying to hypnotize me.”
“I understand what you might think, and I’m sorry about my hand. These things happen to us subconsciously, talking about women’s breasts, and as we established, you are highly susceptible to hypnosis and highly suggestible, so for your own mental wellbeing and the sake of our dynamic, you have to trust me that I am not a hypnotist, and I am not trying to hypnotize you. If you are being hypnotized, you are simply doing it to yourself.”
Her hand moved down her chest slowly, and his eyes followed it down, down, down, until it was flat on the table, and as her hand moved down, so did his eyelids, until they shut. And even though he registered everything she just said, and even though he agreed with her that he had to trust her, and saw no reason why she’d lie to him about hypnotizing him, he recognized the feeling, and struggled to open his eyes and look at her.
He stared deep into her blue eyes as she looked down at him over her glasses, and before he could say anything, she asked,“What about a pearl?”
He blinked and felt disoriented, “I’m sorry, I think, I did just kind of…”
“It’s alright Ethan, this isn’t surprising to me. Let yourself relax and focus on my questions. Was there a pearl? Maybe in another piece of jewelry? She would have worn it prominently, most likely visibly between her breasts, but also maybe as a ring?”
“I don’t…I… I’m really… I think you were right…” he was going to say more, but her soft, understanding, sympathetic voice stopped him.
“I know I was, I know I am, and it’s alright. Just try your best Ethan. I know you can try your best for me because I need you to remember so I can help you. You do want me to help you overcome and understand what’s happened to you, don;t you?”
He was struggling to stay above the surface and to stay wholly conscious, but he didn’t even know what exactly he was feeling. “I do… but I don’t understand…”
“It’s okay, you do trust me, I can tell you do, it’s why you’re here, why you’ve come back, and why you’re still here, so you can just trust me to understand what’s happening to you, and what you need. I am not a hypnotist, I am not hypnotizing you. If I wanted to hypnotize you, it would be so easy that you wouldn’t even notice it happening. So anything you think you notice, or feel is simply what you’re doing to yourself.”
She stood up as she spoke and leaned towards him over her desk, still looking down on him, and she seemed very understanding and very capable as she did. He looked up at her, then down at her tits, drawn by something compulsive, not deliberate, and he felt himself melting down into his chair.
“I am not hypnotizing you, because hypnotizing you would be effortless and instantaneous for me, even though I am not a hypnotist. You have to trust me when I say this, and just realize anything you are feeling really and truly is just happening because you’re letting it happen to yourself now. Anything you feel or think is happening is just what your subconscious mind is letting happen.”
Her voice was smooth and steady, soft, compassionate, and certain, and she walked around the desk to stand over him, and as he looked at her, as he stared up at Dr. Nadia Saunders, he felt himself powerlessly staring at her figure, at the promise of what her tits would look like.
It was just something that was happening to him.
Probably something Lynda had put in his head.
He was highly suggestible, so talking about it was making him remember.
That was all.
He was just reflexively having a highly suggestible response.
Nadia wasn’t doing this to him, she was helping him to manage and understand what he was feeling.
Had she just said that to him?
