The Adjusters #59, Part 2

Still rough, of course. But existing.

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Intermezzo: The Medicine Man (Part 2)

Colin Blackstone had some difficulty tracking down the girl, Cindy Barnes. Bryan had said she took classes at UCLA, and that she hung out at a bar near the campus, but he had no other information about her. A quick online search revealed nothing about Cindy Barnes.

The old Colin, the Colin that was carefree and not trying to better himself and make Madeleine proud, that Colin would have walked up to the registrar’s office at UCLA, found a female administrative assistant, touched her so that his Gift made her malleable, and simply asked her to look up Cindy in the internal directory. Then, if the assistant was even a little attractive, he would have taken advantage of her, curious to see the level of depravity he could elicit.

But he was different now. He was serious, about his life, about his writing. This girl, Cynthia Barnes, would be his last collaboration, if you could call it that, with Bryan and company. And he wanted to do the job clean.

Colin unfortunately had no other idea than to wander around the campus helplessly, keeping an eye out for the girl. He hung out near the bar that Bryan said she frequented, but did not see her. He went inside, sat and stayed there for two hours. doing crossword puzzles on his phone—a great way to build up and test his vocabulary—sipping large cups of iced coffee, thinking all the while that the ones at Roadside Buddy Coffee were better.

Colin returned to the bar the next day, and Cindy still was not there. Not that Colin was particularly eager for her to show up—but he wanted Bryan off his back, and the sooner Cindy was handled, the sooner Bryan would be out of Colin’s life.

Not knowing what to do, wanting to avoid at all costs snagging another person in his ugly clutches, Colin wandered into one of the main UCLA quads, open and green and welcoming. He affect the penetrating air of a student out for a stroll thinking about a deep problem of philosophy or logic or composition. No one paid any attention to him.

He stopped by a small on-campus convenience store, grabbed a soda and a crossword puzzle book, and found a spot by a low wall that afforded him a good view of the bar. He settled down with his crosswords, and waited.

It afforded him the time to think, to reflect.

Reflect about his relationship with Madeleine, and how he could avoid messing it up further. He was meeting with Radhika at the end of the week, for their weekly meeting, and she had tasked him to try to verbalize what he wanted out of that relationship.

It was a good question. He cared about Madeleine, there was no denying it. He might even love her. But he had to admit he preferred her before, when she was studying, than ever since she dropped her studies to become an underwear and glamour model. And the part that galled at him—that he had tried to explain to Radhika but she had interpreted him as being metaphorical and hyperbolic but of course he had been literal—was that she became a model because at an unconscious level that was something that he, Colin, wanted her to do, because it turned him on, because it had been one of his deep-seated fantasies to date a lingerie model. And because it had been one of his fantasies, she had become it.

Because she had had no choice.

It was insane, but it was true. It was his Gift. Or his Curse. His view was shifting on that topic, had for the last few years—ever since running into Madeleine and falling for her, and falling hard.

He could control his Gift, most of the time, even play it like a finely tuned fiddle. But it was always there, lurking in the background, and sometimes his subconscious had desires even he was not aware of and an inadvertent touch would trigger the Gift and he would affect someone. And Madeleine, because she was around much more than anyone else, would often be at the receiving end of his unconscious drives.

Colin was distracted by a trio of giggling sorority girls, judging by their tank tops, with short skirts and push-up bras, and he stared helplessly, and they saw him stare of course but did not seem to mind and they giggled again, looking at him from the corner of their eyes.

He knew that all he had to do was reach out and touch those three girls and he would feel that spark from his fingertips to their skin like a static electricity discharge and then, well, the sky was the limit, wasn’t it? He could direct them to be however he wanted, could direct them to be whomever he wanted. He could make them strip and beg him to fuck them, could make them fall in love with him, could make them fall in love with each others. He could have them enjoy themselves, could have them hate every second of it but be unable to resist, could make them act like the most debased sluts and then forget all about it even as people around them stared at them in disgust.

All those things flashed in his head as he watched them walk by, all giggles and long hair and fresh young exposed skin, but he did not move. He forced himself to look straight ahead, and think of anything to distract himself from visions of parted legs and young bouncy tits.

Madeleine. Think of Madeline.

Colin thought back to the previous night, when Madeleine had done exactly what she had promised him she would do when she had dropped by at the coffee shop, what he had ensured she would have to do though his Gift.

He tried hard not to think having affected her, despite his best intentions, despite trying hard to be the person that he knew Madeleine—the real Madeleine, the girl he had fallen in love with—would want him to be, the person that he wanted to be.

He had been oddly apprehensive going to visit her the previous night, almost reluctant, almost avoiding it altogether. He had debated staying home or going out to catch a play—there was an ongoing adaptation of Titus Andronicus that he really wanted to see—but experience told him that Madeleine would have simply waited for him, like a dutiful girlfriend (like a dutiful fucktoy), doing absolutely nothing but go through her Gift-induced role until she fell asleep. And since she had told him that she would be working out, that meant that she would collapse in exhaustion unless he showed up and ravished her, or touched her again and affected her out of her single-minded obsession (but then what sort of other terrible thing will you turn her into, you sick pervert?)

He had gone in with the firm desire to correct her, girding himself to restore her to a semblance of normalcy, and he had even spent a good two hours before going to see her masturbating to online porn—he wanted it recognized that he had not gone not to fuck a little floozie but reverted to good old one-handed love instead—to make sure he was sexually satiated.

Of course, that plan, as good as he might have thought it had been, failed miserably. For when he showed up at her place, he had found Madeleine in her living room, exactly as she had said she would be: bumpy music in the background, squatting down on all four in workout gear that would have had her thrown out of any non-X-rated gym—a pink sports bra that supported and thrust out her chest, a painted on pair of lycra shorts that did little more than emphasize her tight ass—she was doing side leg lifts, relentlessly, her hair in a ponytail, looking like any beautiful innocent girl working out in the privacy of her home.

And as soon as he entered, as soon as he stopped to stare at her, he wondered whether she knew he was there. For all he knew, his Gift had changed her so that she was convinced that she was indeed working out and not expecting a visitor, truly innocent, but he could not be sure; she did not stop her lifts, did not acknowledge his presence, and she did not move when he stepped behind her.

It was wrong, of course—he convinced himself that she was role-playing, the dutiful girlfriend happy to fulfill one of her boyfriend’s dark fantasies—but he could not help it. She was beautiful, and there was something enticing about the way she did not even acknowledge his presence.

He knelt behind her, and grabbed her hips. It felt perfect, and it made sense: it was like walking into a fantasy that at some level you were completely comfortable with, because it was your fantasy, it emerged from the depth of your month, and you knew the beats but following those beats, rather than being boring, was heady in and of itself.

Madeleine shouted in surprised, and tried to fight him off, at the same time splaying her legs out, her skin white and soft. His hands roamed and Madeleine begged him not to hurt her until he put his hands on her mouth and told her to shush and then crushed her with his weight as he pawed her breasts.

Whatever good intentions he had held before visiting, and they were indubitably good, flew out the window as she squirmed underneath him, her body at the same time struggling to get away and pressing against him , as her crotch rubbed against his cock, as her hands grabbed his hair in a mimicry of passion.

He fucked her so hard and so long that night that she almost passed out. He still had the scratches on his back to prove it.

He was so distracted by his thoughts—he was trying to figure out how to discuss what had happened to Radhika without going into the details of his afflication because he was not convinced that she was not required to report him, assuming she even believed him, and of course he could make her believe because he could touch her and change her so that she believed him but that would nullify everything that she could do for him—that he almost missed Cindy Barnes.

Across the street, strolling down the sidewalk and turning into the doors of the bar that Bryan Seeker had told him about, came his target.

Colin tensed immediately. Dutifully—it would not do to screw this up—he checked the photograph that Bryan had forwarded him. The picture did not do the girl justice. In real life, because of the way she carried herself, the way moved, the way her face was illuminated by a vibrant smile, she was even better looking than he had originally believed.

Which went a long way towards explaining why she had attracted Bryan’s attention. Colin had no difficulty imagining just how good Cindy would look on camera, getting ravished on film.

He cultivated that thought, that image. If he wanted to turn her, it helped a lot for him to be aroused—it would prime not only his conscious mind, but also his subconscious. As far as he had been able to determine, when he wasn’t kidding himself and what he wanted was clear, his Gift, when he touched a girl, did something to her to make her go along with what he wanted, especially when it had a sexual component. Or maybe just when there was a strong emotional drive underneath it.

Problems arose when his subconscious or his real desires did not match what he consciously wanted, and those subconscious desires sometimes overrode his plans. It had happened before. It had happened often with Madeleine.

He did not think he was in any danger right now of messing things up, but to be safe, he elected to bear down on a fantasy of seeing that girl, Cindy, getting taken over and over again and loving to show off on camera—turning her into a helpless and uncontrolled exhibitionist would be the easiest way to go, one with a strong drive to obey Bryan Seeker’s requests. He cemented things by imagining Bryan plowing into the petite girl, with her short dress rucked up around her waist, her legs spread wide, moaning and groaning and screaming at him to take her harder, all the while surrounded by cameras immortalizing her ordeal for all time.

He was ready.

But he did not move.

His initial reluctance, the one that he thought he might plow through by simply taking care of this dirty business head on, came back with a vengeance.

He remained against his wall, the local paper on his lap, wondering what his next step might be.

What would Madeleine say, if she knew?

What would Radhika say, if she knew?

He waited, unsure of everything, and convinced himself that he did not want to use his Gift in the courtyard of the bar, in full view of everyone, in the middle of the day. It was too risky. Maybe she was not alone? Maybe she was meeting someone?

He went back to his crossword puzzle, unable to make progress, stuck on an eight-letter word for make weak with an f in third position and an e in last. Every two minutes, he looked up, both worried and hoping that he might miss her.

He did not. Forty-five minutes later, Cindy emerged from the bar, cell phone against her ear, bag across her shoulder, her step still as springy, her smile still as wide, her legs still as alluring. Seeing her from the front, he elected to reevaluate his initial assessment. She was more than cute. She was attractive, and extremely desirable.

And he could have her if he wanted.

He watched her look left and right before crossing the street, still on her phone, talking away, heading for the campus.

He followed her, puzzle book in hand, a backpack over his shoulder, looking like any other student, albeit perhaps slightly older, but still fitting in, complete with jeans and run-down sneakers.

Cindy walked quickly, and Colin stuck behind her, sneaking in and out of the students that were strolling the main yard. He watched her the whole time, his sunglasses he hoped camouflaging where he was looking, trying to look busy and casual and taken by a destination only he knew about.

The trick, he had always heard, was to act as though you belonged.

He watched Cindy’s ass sway with every single one of her steps, her dress bouncing about as she walked, always threatening to reveal more than the long expanse of leg it already did.

While he was still prevaricating, it was obvious where his desires lay. He was sufficiently clear-eyed to realize that.

He followed Cindy through campus. He did not know where they were going. It was a glorious day, and he did not mind being outside. And if he were honest, following this pretty girl was not as boring as he might have feared. She was certainly easy on the eyes.

He wondered where Madeleine was now, what she was doing—she had said she had another photoshoot today, a bikini shoot with two other female models. He knew the company, who specialized in skimpy swimsuits.

In front of him, Cindy had run into another girl, and they started talking animatedly. Colin stood by a tree, half hidden, and watched them casually, most of the time staring about as if he were waiting for someone, tapping his foot impatiently, and glancing at his phone.

You had to look like you belonged.

He almost missed Cindy and the new girl turning right into a building. He followed them inside after a pause. An almost empty lobby, a triple set of doors leading into a hallway.

He spotted Cindy and the girl in an elevator just as the doors closed. Heading down. A quick glance to the right revealed that they were headed to the microbiology laboratories.

He frowned. Didn’t Bryan tell him that Cindy was an artist?

He looked around, spotted the stairs going down. There were few people in the building, and he looked casual, grabbing his backpack, try to look like a typical student. He was ready, in case he were stopped, to say that he was lost and he was looking for the Microbiology Department office to get information about one of its courses to fill his schedule. Typical student request.

He pushed the doors open carefully at the bottom of the staircase, peeking in, and saw Cindy and the other girl head down a corridor before turning right.

Once they made the corner, he ran down, holding his bag close to his chest, trying to make as little noise as possible.

He peeked around the corner and spotted them entering a room, chattering away, never having noticed him.

He waited for a few minutes before approaching that door. Like every other door down this hallway, it had a large glass pane.

He peeked inside the room, slowly, saw that it was a laboratory of some sort—microbiology, he guessed, given the building they were in—and he spotted Cindy and her friend put their bags down and pull out books and notes that they spread out on a table before going to a set of lockers and pulling out white laboratory coats.

He watched the girls slip them on, part of him saddened at the fact that the long coat hid Cindy’s luscious body, and watched them chitter away, smiling and laughing as they got ready to do whatever it was that they were there to do.

Cindy’s friend headed to the whiteboard to write down something that Colin could not decipher—it looked like gibberish to him—but that seemed to mean something to Cindy, for she nodded and went up to the board and changed something the her friend had written.

An artist my ass, Colin thought. You’ve been bamboozled, Bryan my friend.

Inside, Cindy said something to her friend and headed to the back of the laboratory, where Colin could not see her, and the first girl remained at the board, staring at it with a scowl of concentration on her face, twirling a blue marker between her fingers.

The silence of the basement was marred by the sound of heavy duty air conditioning and filtering units.

“Why are you following me?”

Colin jumped at the sound of the voice coming from behind him, and nearly slipped and fell as he turned around faster than his body was ready to.

Cindy was behind him, still wearing her white lab coat, her head tilted slightly to side as though she were studying a particularly intriguing species of bug, one arm gently at her side, one hand in her pocket.

Colin surmised that the hand in her pocket was wrapped around a mace or pepper spray bottle, or something equally unpleasant for him.

He felt stupidly proud of her for being able to defend herself. And for not appearing in the least bit scared.

Not that it would help her in any way again him.

“I’m not—”

“You were behind me all through the campus, but you’re not a student here. You were standing by a tree when I met Raina. You followed us in, taking the stairs instead of the elevators. And you’ve been peeking inside the lab window.”

There was no anger in her voice, just mild curiosity.

Colin sighed. He had underestimated her. As had Bryan, he could not help think with a smile, which indubitably explained why said Bryan had come to him.

“What’s so funny?” Cindy asked.

“Didn’t realize I was smiling. Sorry… I think I just realized exactly why I’m here.”

Cindy’s eyebrows tilted in a most endearing puzzled frown. “That’s an odd way of stating things.”

“It’s an odd situation.”

“You don’t work for them, do you?”

Colin had to be careful. She was obviously smarter than Bryan had given her credit for. Much smarter. “What do you mean, them?”

Cindy’s frown deepened, and she looked at him more deeply, as if she were staring into his soul. “No, you don’t work for them. You’re not their style.”

She seemed to visibly relax at that, though Colin noted that her hand never left her lab coat pocket. “I’ve seen them around, the team that they have on me, and they try to look casual but they have that stiffness in their backs that speaks of military training. I should know.”

What the hell is she talking about? Colin wondered.

“I’ve got not military training,” he answered truthfully.

Cindy actually laughed. “Yeah, I can tell. You’d be cannon fodder.”

“Hey, I resent that.”

“You’re the one stalking me.”

“I wasn’t stalking you! I was—” Somehow, he did not think the “looking for the Microbiology Department” lie would fly. He sighed again. Decided to lie, but in a minor key. “I spotted you on campus a couple of days back, was too shy to go up and talk to you, figured I’d see if you showed up again and then I just didn’t know how to move on from there and I just followed and… well… here I am…”

Cindy smiled a little smile. “You don’t strike me as the kind that gets flustered around women too too much, though.”

“Well, not usually. But when they’re smarter than I am, it sort of makes me self-conscious.”

That seemed to have struck a chord with Cindy, who nodded as if she had thought the same thing at some point in her life.

“I’m Colin,” he said, almost shyly. “Colin Blackstone.” It was stupid to use his real name, but he felt that anything but the truth she would see through, and beside, she would forget all about it after the Gift affected her.

She looked at him, appraising him. “Cindy,” she said, coming to a decision.

Colin nodded. “I feel I haven’t quite presented myself under the best of light right now. Made a right fool of myself, honestly. I wonder if we could start again. Perhaps over a drink? Coffee, tea, soda, beer, I’m very open-minded.”

Cindy looked at him. “So after I’ve caught you following me like a creep, you think I’ll give you a second chance by going to get a drink with you? So that you’ll what, show me that you’re really a good guy even though you act like a sleaze? Entitled much?”

Colin did not know what to respond to that. There was no way he could come out of that argument in a clean way. Checkmate, a voice inside him came up with. Yeah, really helpful, said another.

He had no other choice. He could leave and hope he would find another opportunity later, go back to Bryan and tell him that he could not do it, or he could deal with it now and be done with it. After all, he did not need her approval. Thought thinking of it that way made him cringe. He definitely needed to talk to Radhika about these things.

He tried the oldest trick in the book. It would not work for long, but it would be long enough. After all, he did not need to subdue her.

He looked over her right shoulder sharply, focused onto something in the distance, and frowned deeply.

As expected, Cindy flinched and almost reflexively started to turn to look behind her. She did not in fact do that—and again Colin had to recognize that she was much better than Bryan had given her credit for—but her eyes left him for a fraction of a second and her whole body was ever so slightly off balance so that when Colin lunged forward with his hand out to grab hers, she could not pull back in time.

He grasped her hand, and felt the spark of energy jump from his skin onto hers and he knew that the Gift had done its job again.

He was looking at Cindy’s face the whole time, and he noted her expression of surprise as she felt what he felt, and her face clouded for a few seconds, as if she did not know what she was supposed to do or think or feel.

When he did it because he wanted to, it always gave Colin a sense of power. Unprompted, the image of Cindy pulling him to her and kissing him and letting his hands roam over her fine body, underneath that short dress, rose up in his mind’s eye, and he felt himself get hard. Which was good, because it made his Gift all the more effective.

Cindy did not let go of his hand, but her face reasserted herself in a look of genuine surprise.

“Interesting,” she said, in a tone of wonder, looking at Colin and at his hand and back at Colin.

What? Colin was confused.

“You felt that, right?” she asked him, her voice full of questions. “Yes, of course you did. Silly me. Oh that’s so interesting.”

She stepped up to him, her eyes fixed on his, and if he thought she looked at him like an intriguing bug before, now he felt like he was a bug that she had trapped into a glass jar and that she was bringing up to her face to study closely.

He expected her to kiss him, the way he had imagined before, the way he clearly wanted, and the image of Cindy disrobing right then and there, shedding her lab coat and then her dress and appearing before him in whatever underwear she wore—was it utilitarian, flimsy, or was she possibly completely naked underneath the short dress?—and offering herself to him was difficult to suppress.

She ran a light finger over his lips. She was looking at him curiously. “Very very interesting,” she said.

She let one of her hands drop down to his crotch and he groaned as he felt her hand press against his cock, hard and throbbing. She gave him a squeeze through his jeans, and grinned. “I’m so excited. Okay, I’ll take you up on your drink offer,” she said. “Tomorrow night. Meet me at the bar where you were spying on me earlier. Seven o’clock.”

She then stepped back from him, gave him a quick look up and down, and reiterated. “So interesting.” She then walked back into the laboratory.

Colin had not moved, had merely followed her with his eyes.

What the hell just happened?