Playnight

My brain had been hurting all day. There had been the sounds of helicopters three times—but each were the single-rotor medevacs traveling between the Mojave or Mount Charleston and the County Hospital.

Looked like the Lizard People were going to let me live another day, I guessed. Or blackbag me at four a.m. while I slept, my endless worry postulated.

If that were the case, might as well risk a little brainpower for some R and R before they got me.

I finished off the last of the eighth of grass, one of the strains that was designed to burn off any nanobots lodged inside the thinking tissues—noticeable, it was said, by a grey-tinged hue to what came up after a pot-smoker's cough. But I digress.

I finished the eighth and let its haze take me past midnight. Time to get to know my neighbors.

I did not bother locking my apartment door. Easier to place a Gateway Thought there, so that anyone trying to open it would stop to think about what they were doing for a long time.

I walked down the hallway to my nearest direct neighbor, the apartment on the other side of my bedroom wall. From my observations, I believed that a twenty-something man lived there with his twenty-something girlfriend and his recently-spayed Rottweiler.

I had seen the Rottweiler on their balcony with a cone around her neck.

The dog would be tricky, but I was feeling up to it.

I closed my eyes as I walked down the hall, just reaching out and feeling what was there. I could sense breathing, and movement. Sleepy thoughts, drowsy thoughts, but—they were awake. The sound of television, the drone of reality show and commercial break. The sound of someone getting something from the small kitchen on the other side of this wall.

Yes. Perfect. And a dog laying down near the balcony door, close to the air conditioning duct. Perfect. Just reach out, reach out.

It was my neighbor, the one whose name was on the packages occasionally outside their door. Arturo. Just grab hold yes, so easy, so familiar.

Feeling Arturo turn wordlessly, walk to the balcony door. Open it clumsily, disturbing the Rottweiler who got up from where she was laying in front of the door, swept out of the way by her Master and she rose with a yelp, quizzical. Arturo looked at the door and looked at the dog and then looked out the door to the balcony, holding the door open for the dog.

The dog snapped-to and trotted confidently out onto the balcony.

Then Arturo closed the balcony door, trapping the dog out there. The dog let out a bark, and then turned her enthusiastic attention to looking out at the fascinating parking lot beyond and the deluge of swells for her Rottweiler nose.

"Babe?" said the young woman on the couch. She lay under a blanket and looked at Arturo quizzically.

Arturo did not respond, but instead unlocked and opened the apartment's front door.

Where I was standing. Now Arturo and I were face to face.

I put Arturo's brain into park, and feeling my consciousness more fully, stepped into my neighbor's apartment and closed and locked the door behind me.

"Who are you?" asked Babe on the couch, under her blankets.

"Who are you?" I asked her.

"Babe, who is this, what's going on?" Babe said, sitting up and holding the blanket over her. She was a fit, young woman, hair straight and carelessly up-done in a messy up-do. She had a t-shirt on, a big, shapeless one like she might have slept in, or been preparing to sleep in. It was late, sometime after one in the morning.

Definitely after their proper bedtime. After all, this was a weeknight. Grown adults should know better.

"Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh," I shushed her gently, flicking-off the kitchen light. I was struck by how identical the layout in this apartment was to mine next door.

"Babe!" Her tone was nervous now. "Artie! Artie!"

But Artie was catatonic like I liked him. "Hey," I said, "you're right. Let me put away something when I'm done using it. Don't want it to collect dust."

And I opened up the hallway coat closet—same location as in mine. But instead of coats, their's is stuffed with boxes and clothes and all manner of personal detritus not immediately identifiable.

"How do you people live like this?" I asked, sneering. I could sense she was going to get up and I just

Held Her There, Right There

and in doing so I could sense her shyness; she was only in a pair of cotton sleeping panties under the blanket, and she was very afraid but this was also all-so-dreamlike and she had been so sleepy just moments ago . . . and I felt all this and just put the Hold on her while I slipped more deeply into Arturo's weak mind again, leading Arturo onto the balcony and giving him a deep instruction that should last for a few hours to

Keep The Dog Still

and I put a block for him on the balcony door so he would think it impossible for him to open it from the outside, or even to want to.

As I felt my body again, I decided to also lock the door physically, turning the latch on the balcony door's lock. There. The joy of it all.

And now the spoils.

"Hey, hun," I said, smiling. Crossing her living room like I would cross my own. Their taste in furnishings was much different.

"What is this? Who are you?" Hun said. Her fear tasted like salted caramel.

I smiled at her, stopping a few feet away while she struggled against the idea that the blanket—light as a down quilt could be—was in fact holding her down, wrapping her tight as if it were forged iron.

"How are you liking your blanket-shackles?" I asked her.

"How are you doing this?" she asked, struggling against the soft prison I had trapped her in.

"Blanket shackles are fitting for a princess," I told her. "We can't have someone like you in ties and chains. You're too fine for that, Honey Babe."

Try as she might, the blanket was not going anywhere.

"I'm sorry you're scared," I told her, "here, look me in the eyes, princess."

She did and that was all it took. Her mind was squishy and soft. It wanted taming and was easy to be tamed, to be shown the easy way.

I pulled back a little, until I was focusing on her pupils, watching them dilate. Our faces were now only inches apart. It was intimate and she was not struggling. I still did not know her name. I went in and I had not looked for it and it was not there, not bubbling up to the surface and unmissable. Interesting. File that fact away for later.

But her eyes were brown and densely brown against the blackness of her irises and as she felt her consciousness returning she broke eye contact and then of her own will, re-formed contact again.

"You mean we're all connected?" she said aloud to me, echoing the Belief I had placed there.

"Of course we are, silly goose," I said to her, smiling.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you're beautiful."

Her mouth was warm and wet on mine and she found the blanket now only a blanket again as she pushed through it to kiss me and slip her tongue into my mouth and hold my head in her hands and kiss me and let herself be kissed, be touched, be held, be conquered, be brought to a higher level of experience than mere mortals could provide.

Her breasts through the cotton of her top were full handfuls and her hips were also handfuls as was her ass, and I hyper-charged her responses for her, so every hard pinch of her nipples was the best pinching her nipples had ever experienced and the spanking I gave her was so arousing that when the spanks went so hard she could not hold back the tears anymore, that's when she found herself starting to fell it coming on and then there it was, a full-on interior orgasm while I tired out my hand on her bottom and her bottom ached and ached and hurt.

The panties she had been wearing were a lovely bikini cut, high enough to expose her sit spots to my palm perfectly.

While she checked her breath, I checked on her boy and his dog. He was standing and the dog was sitting, both looking out, neither turning their head to look back inside the apartment. Two good little watch dogs, keeping me and mine safe, as they and their kind should.

I took Honey by her hand, she was trembly and aftershock-y, but I led her down the hall to their bedroom. The door had been closed but now I opened it. The blinds were open but the lights were off, so the room was illuminated in the warm dim through the bedroom's large picture window by the parking lot's lights outside.

Holy fuck.

"Jesus, girl, you live like this?" I said to her, but her post-orgasm brain had slipped deep back into the Control Suggestions I laid there, in order to ensure her enthusiastic compliance with letting a stranger guide her into her boyfriend's bedroom.

The room was a mess of cheap, improvised chests of drawers and wardrobes and even an unpacked UHaul moving-box of clothes, ringing the room and themselves strewn with the silt of a disorganized twenty-something couple's fashion and life.

Piles of clothes made a crowded archipelago on the carpeted floor. There was a dog bed in one corner, but clothes had fallen on it and the dog had apparently taken to sleeping on the clothes left atop her dog bed.

But worst of all: the bed was stripped of linen, and the bare mattress—clean, not too old, and a pillowtop—was exposed.

"Bitch it is one in the morning on a Wednesday when the fuck were you all going to make your bed and go to sleep?" I asked her.

But as I reached into her brain, I could feel it, the very concept of laundry in her brain was a mess of colors and sudds and miracles.

"Laundry, yeah, we were gonna do it," her voice said in quiet tones.

"Z'okay," I said. "Here. Feel good," I said, and I looked her in the eyes and she

Feels Good, Like, Really Good

and I told her, "take your clothes off, honey," and honey did, t-shirt over her head, panties down her hips and legs.

"Ta-da!" Honey said. She's feeling good and she's smiling. Her body is the sort of casual hourglass perfection that someone who cares about her should do a much better job of protecting.

Her hips feel full of the lure of fertility and her hips feel perfect, naked skin, wrapping arms around her waist to hold this stranger's lover close, her warmth her skin her belly her breasts her mouth her kiss her oh so willing unwilling kiss.

I fuck her on her back on the mattress of the bed. Fortunate, I realized, that at least they had a box spring.

Her legs wrap around me and this stranger loves me like I'm her first and her favorite, her pleasure centers and dopamine and oxytocin and cortisol glands responding to the delicate waves this strange extra-sensory radio in my brain grew the ability to project onto the brains of other nearby humans. Playing her dopamine glands and her oxytocin production up to levels so dangerous, she can't help but have either a good time or a stroke or maybe both.

The night is young.

The mattress absorbs her sweat from our exertions as I fuck her on it, long and slow and long and fast and taking my time.

She's made for this, her body is smooth and silky and responds so warmly and wetly. She comes in missionary, adding her orgasm to the sugars and salts her pillowtop is getting seasoned with. Then I come in her, and we find a dry spot on the bed to cuddle, while my cum leaks out of her, onto their mattress.

Her body is warm and we stay warm together cuddling as we catch our breath.

I did not push any further into her mind, simply enjoyed the feel of her body, compliant and happy next to mine. Playing with her, tracing the lines and ridges of her form, teasing her sweetnesses, got me hard again, and I had her ride me as I came for a second time inside of her, grinding my sweaty back into the pillowtop mattress while I came inside her, holding her by the hips astride me, grinding my cock into her in ecstasy while I ground my back into the soft mattress, also in ecstasy and in the extra sensation of having so many pleasure receptors stimulated at once, by physical means.

Now all the dopamine and oxytocin was rushing through my brain, but not by any extra-sensory means.

I felt peaceful and tranquil, wanting sleep but not here.

I guided her to dismounting me, then took charge of her, redressed her in her pajama t-shirt and pajama panties, the cotton gusset catching my cum, and tucked her back in under the blanket on the couch.

Back in my body, I turned off the television and kissed her softly on her lips, the kiss that would bury these memories under the cloudy section of dreams in her subconscious, and would tell her hypothalamus to shift into a deep, undisturbable sleep at least for three full sleep cycles.

I then unlocked the balcony door, unlocked the front door, opened the front door, and let myself out.

Closing the front door, I felt for dumb, docile Arturo, and there he was. He turned, opened the balcony door. Stepped into the apartment, the dog following. Arturo locked the front door and then he lumbered into the bedroom.

At the dog's bed, Arturo crouched down and tucked his body as tight as he could to fit his large frame onto the Rottweiler's bed, pressing the layer of shirts that the dog had been sleeping on deeper into the foam dog mattress. Even holding Arturo in as tight a fetal position as I could manage, it was laughable how he overhung the small suede and foam bed.

The dog curled up next to him, and feeling that, I pressed that deep snooze button in the hypothalamus, and exited back to my own, naturally sleepy consciousness.

I walked down the hall, back to my own home and bed, content in the knowledge that I would be sleeping on the other side of the wall where this anonymous pretty now lay, as my bedroom backed up against their living room, my semen sticking between her legs and lips while she slept peacefully under my gift.

But then at my own front door, I found myself standing there, thinking and wondering what I was doing home when there was this fine beauty for the happy taking mere feet away. It took a surprising large amount of time and energy, just standing in the hallway outside my own unlocked door like a moron, before I realized that I put a Gateway Thought on the door, and I was locked up in that, caught in my own trap.

Luckily, I remembered the latchword without difficulty, reopened the Thought and my own door, and there I was, safely home in my near-identical but far-better-furnished-and-attended apartment home.

As I lay naked in my own bed, I reached out one last time, feeling her peaceful and happy on the other side of the wall, and I gave her a dream of her True Lover passing through walls to be with her in her locked tower room, and to love her and fill her and fulfill her like she always wanted, and who made her False Prince sleep in a dog's bed like a cur.

I crafted and pushed the dream into her subconscious mind, and I could feel it catch and take, and as I left her mind behind I felt her settle into it, and begin to live it over and over again, in each subsequent sleep cycle and in precise details, over and over again until as she woke, it was only the fading morning images of being a princess and of a castle tower, and of a Villain sleeping with dogs and catching fleas, as if they were the last images of some movie she fell asleep watching the night before.

I felt myself drifting to sleep and I wondered what her conscious mind would make of the scene in the morning when she awoke to see where her boyfriend had been passing the night.

God I love falling asleep with a smile on my face.