The Last Bridge in Pittsburgh Ch. 04

"You will not feel bad about wanting the things you want."

That was me, all right. Completely wasted, given the mumbling speech and fifth grade vocab. What the fuck had I done last night? I sat, somewhat heavily, on a pile of drywall before hitting play again on the nearly hour-long file.

"You will not feel bad about wanting the things you want."

Same thing, again. And then again. After each, a long pause before another repetition. Once, with a little hiccup at the end. Five repetitions later I noticed the hiccup again and realized the same thirty-second clip had been looped. I tapped the arrow key to jump through the file.

"You will not feel bad about wanting the things you want."

Same thing, over and over again. Finally, in the last two minutes of the file, a new instruction:

"You have no memory of conditioning yourself tonight"

Holy fuck.

-----

I had not been able to cope with my discovery, the night before - I had shut the computer, and gone downstairs to bed, where I tossed and turned for what felt like an hour. Finally, I had realized what keeping me from sleeping - the fear that I would repeat my drunken mistake out of sheer distress - and so I had gotten up to gather all of the liquor in my house and take it out to the neighborhood nutrition drop bin.

Now, though, sitting up in bed the next morning, it was time to confront what I had done to myself. There was, of course, the very small problem that I had drunk some of my own jizz, which to be honest felt a little gross. Then there was the much bigger issue that, if I had indeed been conditioned as my recording so clearly implied, that meant I was susceptible to my own effect - and much worse than last night could happen to me if I was not careful.

Well, maybe worse couldn't happen - maybe I'd messed myself up pretty bad already. Who knows what my intentions had been. You will not feel bad about wanting the things you want... - was I just trying to give myself a drunken buck-up session after a depressive night torturing myself for experimenting on Sara? Or had I been conducting an audacious pre-emptive strike on my own morality?

And my own now-lost intentions aside, what would be the effects of such a poorly worded instruction? It suddenly occurred to me I might be a ticking time bomb. What if I wanted to hurt someone, or worse? We all have someone who just rubs us the wrong way. What if I wound up wanting to snap the neck of that Federal Resettlement guy the next time he came around? Would I just do it? And worse, I had mind-bending abilities now. Good god, was I a comic book villain now? Persuasive cum and no impulse control? Was this how the world finally ended?

I was broken from my reverie by my phone ringing. It was Sara. Suddenly paralyzed, I let it ring. She must have hung up and tried again, because it went off a second time. This time she waited out the ringing and left a voice message. I left it. I was too hungry to think, and definitely too hungry to deal with feelings about what I'd done to Sara.

I stumbled out of the house to the Sheetz down the road and ordered a burrito on the screen before wandering past the freezers to pick out something to drink. The selection had really shrunk recently. In a funk, I leaned up against the cool glass doors of the refrigerators. I turned my gaze down to find my kryptonite: the Hostess Zinger. I immediately broke out in a sweat.

I know it's weird, but there was a time when I was addicted to the things. I had taken a box of them from a flooded grocery store when I was struggling through the Atlanta Swamp, and had carefully allotted myself one a week, as a treat. When I ran out, I missed them desperately. Later, when I was bouncing around the FEMA system, Zingers were in all the vending machines for some reason, and I had spent all of my meagre allowance on them. When I was finally awarded my house in Pittsburgh, though, I had made myself stop. My first month in the city, finally with disposable income, I had been able to gorge on the cakes, and gained a ton of weight. So I had sworn off them.

And now, for the first time since I kicked the little creme-filled fuckers, I was looking at one and not feeling any shame. I didn't feel that combination of hungry desire and meta-desire to not feel that hunger. My hand twitched, as if to buy the cakes, and I despaired for my newly cum-conditioned soul.

But then, miraculously, I stopped myself. I knew I shouldn't buy them. Just because I didn't have shame about something didn't mean I was going to do it. Through some feat of either logic or will, I turned and walked away from the Hostess display, feeling deeply relieved. Was this what therapy was like? Maybe I should go, I thought, as I picked up my burrito.

Stepping outside, I relaxed. I wasn't going to kill anyone out of a lack of self control, or otherwise cause the end times. My drunken self-conditioning had not eliminated my humanity - rather, it had just kneecapped the guilt I had felt for so many years. My worst fears assuaged by a standoff with an off-brand Twinkie, I turned towards home.

----

I got inside before the morning heat got going and sat down to eat. My phone beeped to remind of Sara's voicemail and I pressed play.

"Hi there - I guess you must be asleep still after last night!" Sara gave a soft giggle. "Just wanted to let you know I got to the Tube alright and we're boarding in a second."

Her voice got a lot quieter, and I could practically hear her blushing. "I really enjoyed sucking you last night." And then, louder than she had originally been as she grew flustered - "And, uh, the whole date! The Hilltop Inn was so nice." She trailed awkwardly off before beginning again in a more tender tone than I had expected. "I've really enjoyed the last few days with you, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in a week. Miss you already." She made an exaggerated kissing noise and the message ended.

In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be with her. And so I took out my notebook and began writing.

----

I spent the next two days planning and jacking off into little bottles.

The former, frankly, was kind of fun. Even though masturbating felt a little lonely without Sara, it was somehow novel to be jerking off for something. Nobody - well, other than sperm donors perhaps - had things they were trying to to achieve when they cranked it. So for me, jerking off for science proved to be an enjoyable experience - I set a schedule, and marked sessions on the little whiteboard by my front door. The only annoying part was having the presence of mind to jizz into the little travel soap bottles I had dug up out of storage. Aiming was hard when you were cumming.

The samples I stored in a variety of locations - some in the freezer, some in the fridge, and two at room temperature, in a cupboard above the fridge where nobody ought to ever look.

This was all in service of the three followup questions I wanted to investigate, now marked down clearly in my journal after several drafts.

- What condition (freshness, storage method, drinks it was mixed into, etc) affected the suggestibility of my cum?

- What caused the end of the suggestible state? Time, properties of the cum ingested, external factors?

- What were the long-term effects of suggestions accepted while suggestible? I was already testing this with Sara, but I ought to gather more data.

I had many other questions, too. What was the actual biological process that triggered suggestibility? Why had this ability only manifested now and not in my sluttier college days? But these were really more about curiosity than anything else. For now, I needed to understand the practical mechanics of my semen's power.

I was determined to get answers before I was back home with Sara. It was now a forgone conclusion that I would continue trancing her and giving her suggestions. Without guilt or shame slowing me down, trancing her was incredibly easy to rationalize. I loved her, she loved me, things had been going well even before I had made my discovery - it wasn't like I was grabbing someone off the street and making them devoted to me. And I could make our relationship so much better. For starters, she clearly had some general issues around sex in general - her own cocktail of shame and guilt. Specifically, she never let me do anything for her like eating her out or fingering her. And perhaps more generally I could find ways to make her happier, healthier... who knew.

Before I could make my relationship with Sara all it could be, though, I needed to ensure I wasn't going to hurt her. I needed to understand my abilities better. And for that I needed a test subject.

----

On Wednesday, I biked to work with three samples. Well, cum in shampoo bottles, but I was trying to be scientific. There was no reason to involve any more people in my little scheme in case something bad happened, so my last test subject, the lab head Gretchen, would do just fine. I had a list of little conditioning lines ready for her that would test long-term acceptance - sharing a certain article at a certain time, wearing red on Fridays, stuff like that.

When I showed up, though, Gretchen was gone. A scrawled note on her door announced that she was attending a yearly symposium for the rest of the week. The lab was almost entirely empty - I guess the grad students and post docs had mostly gone with. The only person I could find was Calpurnia, secluded in the isolation chamber at the back of the lab hunched over a synthesizer.

With practically nothing to clean, and with my plans of experimentation thwarted, I clocked back out and headed home.

---

My best and only backup was standing in her yard when I biked up the hill, sweating in the hot March heat. Kate was pounding a lawn sign into the ground in front of her house that read, 'Local Incorporation Now'. I pulled up beside her.

"What's with the sign?"

"Hey there!" Kate cocked her head and smiled at me. "Seeing a lot of you lately. Uh - yeah - the sign. I'm trying to get the city to incorporate the neighborhood as a township. If they do we'll be under the population limit for community enfranchisement." Seeing my blank look, she explained "That means we'd all be able to elect a community board to decide local issues."

As she was my backup option, I really hadn't developed a plan for how to dose Kate. I needed a way to pivot the conversation from local enfranchisement to getting her to drink something with my cum in it so I could run experiments on her. Before I could consider the absurdity of such a segue, my hand was forced by my ringing phone. I glanced down to see that it was the resettlement folks at FEMA.

"Sorry - I have to take this - but I'd really love to hear more. Do you want to grab some dinner later?" I unrolled my phone screen and held it up apologetically.

She chuckled when she saw it was FEMA. "Busy for dinner, but how about tonight on my roof? Bring some wine?"

----

I worked out my course of action while on hold with the pencil-pushers. I knew, from my own drunken self-experimentation Saturday, that the effect worked in alcohol, at least in low proofs like wine. I thought about bringing up one of my vials and slipping a sample into her glass, but frankly that seemed very risky - who knows if I'd have a good chance, or if she'd see. I'd have to come with a pre-spiked drink.

Once I got off the phone, I realized I actually didn't have any wine in the house after my freakout days earlier. A trip to the liquor store at the corner got me what I was looking for - an inexpensive bottle of Winnipeg White, with a cheap synthetic cork.

After a couple minutes digging around for my government-issued first aid kit, I had the last thing I needed - a syringe with a thin hypodermic needle. Filling the syringe with a fresh sample from the fridge, I carefully threaded the it in between the neck of the bottle and the spongy plastic cork to empty it inside, steadying my hand to avoid breaking the cheap steel needle. I repeated this twice until my sample bottle was empty.

It occurred to me that a couple days ago I would have felt revulsion at what I was doing - surreptitiously drugging my neighbor in order to experiment on her. Mad science, really. But guilt seemed to be off the table for me now, at least for things I 'wanted'. And I wanted data. And to know enough not to hurt Sara. And, if I was being really honest, I wanted to know the limits of what I could do.

----

After an afternoon of nearly electrocuting myself as I started doing demo on the house's old wiring, I showered and headed up to my roof. I was actually unsure if that was the right way to go over - perhaps I should have rung her doorbell. But when I opened the hatch, I could see Kate on the adjoining roof, lounging on a decrepit old couch. She waved me over.

"Hi there cutie! Cm'mon up!"

Wow. Kate had already been drinking, it seemed. She sounded pretty drunk, anyway, and was doing that little wavy-head-bobbing thing that people did when they were past tipsy but not totally befuddled. Was she OK? I scrambled up the railing that divided our two roofs, to land on the couch beside her.

"Heya Kate. Are you OK? Looks like you got a head start on me." I laid the bottle down between us.

"Ugh. Had a really bad dinner... thing. Got a couple drinks at the restaurant bar after." Kate leaned back, putting her hand over face before peeking out at me. "Sorry, it's bad form, knew we were supposed to hang."

"Little hair of the dog?" I waggled bottle of treated wine at her.

"Mmm, not just yet. Need a second to recover. From the drinks, but mostly the dinner." She closed her eyes and settled back into the decaying couch, sighing as its cracked leather half swallowing her.

"Do you... want to talk about it? I'm a good listener."

She shot me a look. "Neighbor wants gossip, huh?"

"Seriously, I won't tell anyone. Hell, I don't really know anyone in this neighborhood except you. What's up?"

Kate's hand returned to her face and she let out a long, low laugh.

"It's really nothing particularly juicy or anything. I was having dinner with my ex. I thought... I don't know what I thought. I guess I've been holding out this hope that we'd get back together or something. We broke up maybe six months ago when she went out of town for work, and when she came back, I..." She trailed off.

"You figured you'd get back together?" I chuckled, softly. I hadn't pegged Kate as gay, I thought to myself. Goes to show you never know.

"Yeah, I'm an idiot. Anyway, I spent the last six months obsessing about her. And now she's back, and honestly she was kind of a bitch at dinner."

"Well, good riddance, then!" I reached for the bottle, about to suggest a drink again, but she continued.

"That's not even the worst part!" Kate turned towards me, tucking her legs under her. "She was honestly always sort of a bitch, really. The thing that really got me was, afterwards, she got picked up by her new girlfriend."

She paused a long while before continuing.

"I guess mainly she hadn't told me she was seeing someone else, so that sucked. But also, this new girl was a knockout. Like, we're talking supermodel hot."

She held out her hands in front of her chest as if to imitate a larger-chested woman. I let out a short laugh, against my better judgement.

"I dunno, really. I'm really not insecure about my appearance, I think. I KNOW I look good. I even flirt with people sometimes to prove it to myself..."

I gave her a disapproving look out of the corner of my eye. She had been doing this to me for months. She swatted me on the arm. "Oh hush, all women do it. Anyway - being rejected sucks. Probably nothing more complicated than that."

"For whatever it's worth -" I paused, wanting to encourage without running the risk of offending. "You know you're stunning, right? And besides that - you're smart, you're engaged in your community, you have a good job, you're enfranchised..." I trailed off, realizing I actually didn't know a lot about Kate. "This ex-girlfriend of yours is missing out. Take it from someone who's been here before - You're going to bounce back from this."

I decided to suggest a drink. Time to dose her so I could start taking data - I felt a little out of my element giving neighborly dating advice. But when I reached for the wine bottle, I felt her hand clasp mine. I looked up to see her face an inch from mine and suddenly her lips were on mine.

I was about to object, in confusion or just in surprise, but... wow, Kate was a good kisser. She pressed herself into me with this energy and force I hadn't really ever felt, her tongue immediately coming into contact with mine as she moved into my lap and arms her wrapped around my shoulders.

"Wait." I managed to slip out after several seconds.

I needed to process. This had not been the plan. The plan had been to dose her with the wine, and to convince her to be my lab rat. I momentarily chastised myself for not having found someone less complicated to experiment on. Maybe I should have dosed the Resettlement guy.

Yet, at the back of my brain, I was already rationalizing. I could still run my experiments, except with some... benefits. Why not? It'd be much more fun. A week ago, the mental immune system that was my guilt would have been all over these thoughts, shaming me into pushing Kate away - reminding me of Sara, castigating me for lechery. But now my guilt was no more. And so, for a second, my common sense warred with my desire.

And then, as Kate shifted her weight in my lap and her thigh ground against my cock, I realized I was rock hard and decided to throw caution to the wind.

Kate was looking down at me somewhat expectantly and I realized my moment of clarity had taken more significantly more than a moment. I fumbled somewhat to save the mood.

"I... uhh... wait, aren't you gay?" Damnit. My mouth clearly was doing shit not approved by my brain.

"Hahahahah!" Kate leaned back and chortled, her blonde hair shimmering in the moonlight. "Very clearly I am bi. I figured you would have noticed."

Her face twisted with laughter again as her lips met mine.

-----

We spent ages out on her roof. Kate pressed me into the old couch as she drew a steady stream of kisses from me. Her kissing was forceful and self-assured... and wet. It was a whole new kind of making out for me, and I couldn't help but compare with Sara. Sara had initiated kissing plenty for the last few months during the doldrums of our sex life, but she always meek and reserved.

Sara gave you a kiss. Kate, I was discovering, took kisses. With her own.

After some time, Kate directed me to her neck. I've never been a huge fan of 'necking', but Kate seemed to love it, and so I applied myself industriously. The trick with her seemed to give it a little bit of bite - each time I nipped her, she yelped and rubbed herself against me.

Before long, she was grinding my leg as I moved between making out with her and kissing her neck. Her hands spread across my chest, feeling for the buttons...

And with that, the couch collapsed in a shower of splinters, leather, and springs. I guess our energetic makeout session had been the final straw. It broke in half, spilling both of us onto the ground. I hit my head a little sharply.

"Jesus Christ - are you OK?" I got up from the wreckage, clutching my forehead.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Holy crap, are you bleeding?" She got to her feet. I turned my arm to see that I did indeed have a large gash on my arm. Funnily enough, I couldn't feel it at all.

"Stay here - I'll get my first aid kit. Go sit down" She dashed off. I jumped down to my part of the roof and sat on one of my folding chairs, as Kate came back with a big black bag.