Keys to My Heart

Tabby felt guilty, but the first thing she noticed when Mr. Hong opened the door was the cast. It covered his left arm from the elbow all the way down to the fingertips, and it didn't help that it was bright pink. She stared down at it for a moment, then realized she was staring and jerked her eyes up to his face just as he smiled sheepishly at her. "Car accident," he said in a rich baritone voice, betraying just a hint of a Chinese accent. "I keep trying to tell myself it could have been worse, but the damn thing itches like crazy!" He chuckled, laugh lines crinkling at the corners of his eyes. "Come in, come in."

Tabby walked inside, glancing around for a place to set down her purse. It was a small house, with a living room barely longer than the couch on the far wall and nothing separating it from the small kitchen but a high counter, but in San Francisco that still meant Mr. Hong had some serious money. And if he made it writing like he said, well... Tabby looked back over at the balding man with the fringe of salt-and-pepper hair and the thick, chunky glasses. She'd never met a successful writer before, and she didn't know entirely what to expect, but Leo Hong did kind of fit the part. There was something about his eyes that suggested he lived inside of his own head a lot.

"You must be Tabitha... Butler, right? The woman from the agency?" he asked, gesturing to the couch. "Please, set your stuff down anywhere. This is as close to an office as I get." He swept his arm widely around, pointing over to a computer desk set into a large cabinet. "I work here, I eat here, half the time I fall asleep down here. Upstairs is mostly where I keep my books." He chuckled again, and Tabby couldn't help smiling back at him. He had one of those infectious grins.

Once she set her purse down in front of the couch, Tabby went over to the computer desk and sat down in the comfortable chair. She was pleasantly surprised to discover it was expensive and almost new-most offices gave the temps the janky old office chairs that were one step away from going straight into the trash. She glanced back over at Mr. Hong, who had just settled himself into a seat a few feet away and was giving her a patient look. "Does that feel okay?" he asked. "I can probably have something shipped in by Thursday if you don't like it. You're stuck with me for a month, the least I can do is give you somewhere nice to sit."

Tabby reached out experimentally to the keyboard, adjusting the chair slightly to make sure that the ergonomics were good. She wiggled the mouse a little, and the monitor just underneath a shelf of knick-knacks and fantasy-themed tchotchkes came to life. "No, no, this is good!" she said, with perhaps a bit more warmth than she'd intended. She didn't mean to sound relieved, but at the same time, Tabby hadn't been entirely certain what to expect when she showed up outside the little townhouse with the drawn window shades. She'd run into more than a few employers who developed a little hostility when the temp service sent them a black woman, and it was a load off her mind to find that Mr. Hong seemed perfectly comfortable with her and confident in her abilities.

And just plain nice, too. "Good, good!" he said, starting to clap his hands together excitedly before visibly remembering the potential consequences of the act. "This is why I made it pink," he chuckled, carefully resting his left arm on the cushioned easy chair. "So, yes. The temp agency told you what I needed from you? I can't type for shit with my arm like this, and if I don't type, I don't make money. It's cheaper to pay you to write what I say than to take a month off. So I'm going to sit here in this chair and ramble like a crazy old man, and you're going to-" He mimed fingers rattling on the keyboard with his free hand. "-until the cast comes off."

Tabby rested her fingers on the keyboard for a moment, waggling them a little to get the tendons nice and loose. She opened up a blank document, clicking through a few settings to disable auto-formatting. If she was going to type everything that Mr. Hong said, she didn't want to spend a lot of time arguing with the computer over spelling or grammar. "I think I'm ready," she said, giving her fingers one final stretch until the knuckles popped.

"That's excellent!" Mr. Hong said, reaching over to the edge of the desk and grabbing a tiny remote control. "So I was thinking, just so you don't have to wonder about whether to put in stuff like, 'No, that was stupid, delete that whole sentence,' we could have a system to tell you when I'm dictating and when I'm just talking. Behold!" He pressed a button on the remote, and one of the tchotchkes-a little crystal ball with a smooth white surface resting on a wooden pedestal-lit up in a display of smoothly swirling colored lights. "I'm a wizard!"

Tabby couldn't help snorting with laughter. The little novelty lamp looked like it came straight out of a bad 80s movie, with green and red and blue and purple lights shifting and shimmering under the white plastic. Tabby could easily imagine some guy with a fake beard and cheesy wizard robes staring at it, pretending he was divining the mystic secrets of the universe. "Got it. So lights on means dictating, lights off means talking. Right?"

"Exactly," Mr. Hong nodded, before realizing he hadn't switched the lamp off. "Um, exactly," he repeated after hitting the button on the remote control again. "Don't type that bit, we haven't started yet. Oh, um, speaking of..." He pursed his lips for a moment, a slight blush forming beneath his tan cheeks. "Did anyone tell you, um... what I write?"

Tabby furrowed her brow in confusion, looking back and forth between Mr. Hong and the computer screen. "No?" she replied, bewilderment turning her answer into a question. "Why, is it... like, some kind of gory horror novels or something?" She wouldn't really mind if it was-Tabby had a weakness for cheesy old horror paperbacks from the 80s, the kind with the foil covers and the cut-out windows that you had to scour old bookstores to find. But something was embarrassing the hell out of Mr. Hong, and nobody got that shy about writing unless it was horror or porn.

"It's porn," Mr. Hong said. "I write specialized fetish erotica and publish online. I'm very sorry, I thought the agency told you... I told them, make sure whoever it is has an open mind, don't send me some little old lady who gets all mad if I say the word 'fuck', she'll probably jump right out the window and I can't afford to pay her medical bills, but..." He sighed. "If it bothers you, go ahead and go. I'll tell the temp agency they fucked up."

Tabby knew that she was supposed to say that it absolutely bothered her. She knew that she was supposed to be shocked, utterly horrified, that Mr. Hong was secretly a dirty old man and a pervert and a horny old goat who wrote smutty books and she wasn't the kind of girl who sullied her fingers typing out the adventures of some slut getting gang-banged by strangers or whipped by leather-wearing men with smoldering eyes or spreading her legs for another woman or... "What kind of porn?" she asked, trying to force her voice to sound hesitant.

"Usually mind control," Mr. Hong said, sounding remarkably matter-of-fact about it. "There's a good market for stories about young women getting hypnotized into mindless sex slaves, and it's pretty easy to write. You just come up with a convincing reason to get a gorgeous woman into a room with a hypnotist, find an excuse to get her to listen to him, and it's all downhill from there."

Tabby gave him a mock-suspicious look. "And are you a hypnotist?" she asked, crossing her arms and scowling at him for as long as she could hold the expression before bursting into laughter. It sounded like ludicrous, implausible bullshit even by the low standards of pornography-as if a woman would just wind up getting turned into some kind of horny, blank-eyed sex slave just by listening to some dude talk. She'd probably just get up and walk out as soon as it started to get kinky, excuse or not.

Mr. Hong laughed right along with her, his dark brown eyes sparkling with merriment. "I am, actually," he said, setting off another round of giggles from Tabby. "But it turns out that writing porn pays better than therapy. Here, we'll write a sample scene and I'll show you what you're in for." He pressed the button on the remote as Tabby's chuckles finally subsided, turning on the swirling glow lamp.

"The hypnotist smiled wickedly as the trap closed," he said, and Tabby rushed to set down every word. Her fingers rattled over the keys, trying to keep up with Mr. Hong's smooth, baritone speech. "His victim thought she was simply listening to his calming voice, letting his words flow into her ears without really thinking about what he was saying. It didn't matter, she told herself. She didn't need to pay attention, she only needed to repeat. Little did she know she was already beginning to slip away into a deep, hypnotic trance."

Tabby typed quickly, the words flowing from her ears to her fingers without really touching her brain. She didn't need to memorize any of it; she just needed to get it all down on the screen in front of her. She barely even glanced down at her fingers as Mr. Hong continued, "Her focus deepened, all of her concentration devoted to the task her new boss had set for her. Little did she realize-" He paused. The lamp went off. "Ugh. I just said that, didn't I? Delete 'little did she realize'."

The lamp went on again, swirling colors flowing from red to purple and from purple to blue as the green glimmers wove in and out of the sea of light. "She had no idea that the more she focused and the harder she worked, the less she resisted the subtle suggestions her boss slipped into the conversation. It was just words, she told herself. Just words appearing on the screen in front of her. She didn't even need to look at them. She could just stare at the pretty lights instead and let her fingers type all by themselves."

Tabby let out a little snort of laughter, amused by the obvious connection between the scenario he was dictating and her own circumstances. Was this really how pornographers worked, she wondered? Did they just look at whatever was happening to them right now and say, 'Hmm... I wonder what it would be like if all these people just started having sex?' It probably made it easy to crank out the word count, even if it did make it awkward for anyone who knew them and read their work.

"Before long, the helpless young woman had settled into a calm, soothing rhythm. Her fingers flowed easily over the keys, catching each and every word and turning them into text flowing over the blank page," Mr. Hong continued, his voice low and gentle. "She quickly found that the best way to avoid mistakes was to let her own mind go still and quiet. Thinking only got in between her and smooth, effortless typing-it tangled up her brain, kept her from easily and automatically filling in the emptiness on the screen with her employer's words. The more she listened and the less she thought, the easier it was to perform her task. She didn't know that her boss was counting on exactly that."

Tabby rolled her eyes a little. Taking dictation wasn't exactly the hardest thing in the world, even if Mr. Hong did seem to be speeding up just a little as he got into his narrative flow. But the idea that this girl would have trouble typing if she didn't switch off her brain and let herself get hypnotized? That was stone cold bullshit. Tabby could-the girl in the story could probably do just fine, if she wasn't there just to get turned into a hypnotized sex slave for some dude to bang whenever he got in the mood to-

"Um, hang on," Tabby said, wincing as she realized she'd just typed 'some dude to bang' in the middle of the last sentence. "I'm sorry, just got to..." She frantically backspaced, cursing herself out internally for doing exactly what she just got done thinking she wouldn't do. She needed to keep her head in the game if she didn't want Mr. Hong to give a bad review of her work to the temp agency.

The light went off, and Mr. Hong said, "All fixed?" She nodded, feeling a little too sheepish to speak. "Okay. Don't worry, you might make a few mistakes at first. Once you get used to it, you'll have an easy time. As soon as the light goes on, you'll just be all, 'No time to think! Got to type like a mofo for Mr. Hong!'" He cackled, his laughter setting Tabby a bit more at ease. Clearly he wasn't going to scream at her just for one little mistake.

The light went back on, and Tabby snapped to attention as she watched the smooth white surface pulse into life and color. "The hypnotist was secretly conditioning her," Mr. Hong said, settling back into his narrator's voice as he leaned back in the chair. "The colored lights told his victim when to stop thinking and let her boss's words flow into her still, silent mind as she repeated them on the screen with her fingers. The words themselves were hypnotic, mesmerizing, filling her head with a deep and drowsy fog that made it easier and easier to listen and harder and harder to think. She didn't want to think, she realized. She wanted to focus on her typing and watch the lights and please her boss."

Tabby's hands moved automatically over the keyboard, touch-typing without needing to look at the keys at all. She felt a tiny surge of pride, knowing that she had no problem keeping up with Mr. Hong's words without a single error, even when her eyes drifted up above the monitor to stare at the shifting, captivating colors of the lamp. "The words filled the screen, inscribing themselves into her head until she could no longer be sure where the woman in the story ended and she began. It didn't really matter, of course. She'd long ago begun to accept every word her boss said as true, deep down in her unconscious mind. Her waking self was simply beginning to understand what her deep self already knew."

Tabby's eyes began to burn just a little, as though she'd forgotten to blink for a while, but she didn't want to close them. Even if she was confident that she could type in her sleep, she didn't want Mr. Hong to think that she wasn't listening. She wanted to focus on her typing and watch the lights and... Tabby's head swam momentarily with deja vu. She pushed it aside, forcing herself to keep her fingers moving and get down every word that flowed into her ears.

"And so when she typed, 'I am feeling sleepy,' she could feel the powerful drowsiness that washed over her groggy mind just like the helpless victim in the story," Mr. Hong continued. "Her eyes burned with exhaustion, her mind felt thick and sluggish, but she couldn't stop listening and repeating every word onto the screen. 'I am feeling sleepy, I am feeling sleepy, I am feeling sleepy,' over and over until she couldn't resist believing it." Tabby could see him watching her out of the corner of her eye, his smile replaced with a penetrating stare, but she couldn't break her concentration and look away from the lights. Not without making a mistake. And Tabby didn't want to make any mistakes.

"Her mind had slipped into a powerful, irresistible hypnotic trance, and even though she knew deep down that it was real, her waking self continued to insist that it was impossible for her to be controlled so easily." Tabby smiled faintly as she typed the last few words of the sentence, glad to hear that at least some part of the story acknowledged how ludicrous it was to hypnotize someone in just a few minutes simply by having them type words on a screen. "But even that was part of the hypnotist's cunning, twisted plan. By letting her think she was still free, he lulled her into a false sense of confidence that kept her glued to the keyboard, staring at the lights, typing out the very words that enslaved her will to his own."

That... wasn't possible, Tabby thought, her mind feeling thick and sluggish. She... she wouldn't just sit here, not if she was being hypnotized. She'd... she'd get up and walk out. She wouldn't just keep typing and staring, even if... even if... "The chair felt too comfortable to imagine standing, the lights too pretty to think about looking away. Just like the girl in the story, she felt too relaxed to try to move. It was too much like work to move, too much like work even to think. It was easier to let her boss's words fill up her blank and empty mind now, and think his thoughts instead."

Tabby let out a slow, soft sigh as her fingers moved over the keys. She blinked once, heavily, then her gaze settled into a fixed and vacant stare. She sagged slightly into the comfortable chair, her muscles relaxing bonelessly into the cushions even while her arms seemed to float in the perfect position to type. "Seeing her resistance collapse into delicious vulnerability," Mr. Hong said, "the hypnotist pounced. He began to dictate first-person sentences, knowing that the helpless girl's blank and obedient mind would instantly accept every single one of them as an immutable, inexorable truths. Her soft, malleable will couldn't help believing everything she was told now, no matter how hard she struggled."

Tabby realized at that moment just how serious her predicament really was, but the sudden understanding was swept away by Mr. Hong's smooth, calm voice pouring into her drowsy brain. "'I am mindless and obedient,'" he said, and Tabby's fingers moved automatically to type every word. "'I am deeply hypnotized, and helpless to resist my Master's commands.'" She could see the letters appearing on the screen with every keystroke, inscribing themselves into the endless emptiness, but only in her peripheral vision. Her gaze was consumed by the captivating lights and their constant, mesmerizing motion. All she could do was watch and type and obey now.

"'I am becoming more and more aroused with every word I type,'" Mr. Hong continued, and Tabby felt a rush of liquid heat between her thighs as his speech flowed effortlessly through her fingers onto the screen. "'Being a mindless, hypnotized slave is powerfully erotic, and all I want to do is sink deeper into a sexual trance and give my mind away to my new Master.'" Tabby typed out her new instructions, feeling strangely as though she was watching herself follow them from a great distance. It was like she wasn't really in her body at all, like she was a puppet performing on strings and her real self was out in the audience watching. Her jaw hung slack and vacant as she imagined seeing herself mindlessly obey.

It was incredibly fucking hot.

"'The less I think, the better I feel.'" Mr. Hong said, rising from his chair to stand behind Tabby. He leaned down, whispering each word into her ear with a ticklish rush of air that sent shivers all the way down Tabby's spine straight to her cunt. "'The better I feel, the more I obey. The more I obey, the less I think.'" His hand stroked Tabby's shoulder, brushing its way down over her chest and belly to caress her pussy through her slacks. She whimpered, unable to hide her arousal at his touch.

"'I'm a good girl, and I want to be brainwashed into total obedience for Master,'" Mr. Hong purred, his voice silky and triumphant in Tabby's ears. "'I want to be fucked by Master, I want him to claim my cunt as his plaything. I want to feel his fingers inside me. Stroking my will away until there's nothing left but obedience.'" He undid her fly, and Tabby let out a gasp as she felt his hand slide into the waistband of her panties.

"She kept going, unable to move her fingers from the keyboard," he said. She could feel him, caressing her labia, wriggling his way inside her soaking cunt, and she knew that there would be no escape from the bliss of his control. He owned her, owned her mind and body and heart like the slave she wanted to be now, and all she could do was spread her legs wider to give him easier access to her slick and throbbing clit.