If the world is all a single person’s dream, I know the dreamer. This girl I met in university was a witch, or a demigod, or plugged into the world engine or something. I was riding the bus to campus, listening to music in headphones and daydreaming about an argument I had with an ex-girlfriend, someone from years ago, just replaying it and seeing how I could have been more reasonable than I was. I do this often, replay conversations I handled poorly. And this girl, a beautiful Vietnamese girl with long black hair and bangs, wearing a skirt and a turtleneck sweater, leans forward from the row behind me, pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose and says in a soft voice, “You did the best you could with what you knew at the time.”
Her response lined up with my inner monologue so neatly—like, heptacontagon in a heptacontagon-shaped hole kind of fit—that I at first heard it as my own thought. When I realized she was looking at me, that she had said it, I was so confused I couldn’t settle on anything to say in reply.
She moved up the seat beside me and offered her hand. “Minh,” she said.
“Dakota,” I mumbled, not taking her hand.
“Want to see something crazy, Dakota?”
“…ok.”
She nodded and smiled like she knew she was about to impress me, then tapped on the shoulder of the woman in the seat in front of us. Up until this moment the inside of the buses in our district had always been blue, a teal sort of blue. So imagine my surprise when she asked this woman what color the buses usually were on the inside, and she answered “brownish red.” When I looked around the bus, I saw red, and seemed to have strange duplicate memories of all my time spent on buses, one copy of each in both teal and brownish red. The buses today are still brownish red.
It’s been a few years since Minh and I met, and for the most part our friendship is unremarkable. We have some mutual friends and go out to eat or hike together sometimes, but she is different in that she has no fear—for her all things are mutable without lifting a finger, from her health to the thoughts of others.
So when I overstayed my visa—a paperwork error on my part—and found out about a warrant for my arrest and deportation, I went to her for help.
She lived in a ten bedroom house with nine other girls. At least three of them lounged around in the living room reading a book or their phone at all times, and that’s where we had our conversation.
After I explained my predicament and asked her to intervene, she reclined in her chair and felt her jaw, thinking. Then she said, “What would you do for it?”
“What?”
“Like, in exchange. What can you offer?”
“Oh, I—”
“Really. You’re asking for something only I can provide. No one else has what I have. It’s only fair that you offer something only you can offer.”
“I’m not sure there’s anything only I can offer…”
“What about yourself?”
The girls splayed on the couch reading on their phones look up at me. Their faces are stoic, inscrutable. “What do you—”
“Let me in your head. Ten hours. I’ll tell you what to do, tell you how to feel. When it’s over I’ll make you a dual citizen.”
“You’re—You’re overstepping.”
“Am I? I could just do it to you and make you think you asked for it. This way, you get something and I get something. Fair trade.”
I had spent most of that morning walking around the city, anxious to be out of my apartment in case ICE showed up there. My thoughts were running in a tight, high-strung loop. When at that point in the conversation my phone rang with an unknown number, I assumed it was law enforcement trying to contact me. My desperation to be free of that stress made me want to bite and suffer anything if it would solve my problem. I said yes.
“Shirt, pants,” she said, with a give-it-here gesture.
My head felt the same inside. I still wanted to object. With her housemates staring at me, and more coming downstairs, I would be uncomfortable without my clothes. But even as I thought that, my body was moving, taking off my shirt and pants. By the time I’d decided to say that request crossed a line, I was in my underwear, handing her my clothes.
Minh pulled her chair up close to mine, put a hand on my shoulder and leaned in to whisper in my opposite ear. She said, “Feel really, truly shy. Get embarrassed.”
That’s when my headspace changed. As soon as I understood her instruction I complied involuntarily. My face flushed. I tried to cover myself with my arms and reach for a blanket. Thoughts about what these girls might be thinking of me, whether they would find me attractive, pangs of longing for their approval and affection, a compelling feeling to seek somewhere safe and away from anyone’s attention, these emerged into my consciousness from nowhere and kept emerging until my mind was filled with only these thoughts, and their product: a confused, emasculated arousal. I understood then that I had made a mistake, that Minh’s power was total, and the next ten hours would dilate into a lifetime.
—
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Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/odsk15/man_asks_woman_with_godpowers_to_help_him_get_out
Well that was fantastic