Chapter 4: Truth Serum Hypnosis
The blue light from the television played over their tangled legs. Some nature documentary was on, something about deep-sea creatures, but the sound was down to a murmur. Matt’s head was in Cat’s lap, her fingers idly combing through his sweaty hair. Her other hand rested on his bare stomach, feeling the slow rise and fall of his breath. The room smelled of sex and jasmine incense, thick and sweet.
She scrolled through Netflix with the remote, the images flashing across the screen reflected in her dark eyes. A pause hovered between them, heavy and warm. She looked down at his peaceful face, the boyish slope of his nose, the long lashes against his cheeks.
“You never really talk about her,” Cat said, her voice casual, cutting through the drone of the TV.
Matt’s eyes fluttered open. “Who?”
“Veronica.” She let the name sit there, a stone dropped into still water.
His body stiffened almost imperceptibly under her hand. The easy rhythm of his breathing hitched. “There’s not much to talk about.”
“Four years is a lot of ‘not much.’” Her fingers traced a faint circle on his skin. “Come on. Give me the highlight reel. The fights. The bad stuff. Did she cheat?”
“No. God, no.” He shifted, trying to sit up, but her hand on his chest pressed him gently back down.
“Then what? She got boring? You got boring?”
“It just… ended.” He was closing up, pulling inward. She could see it in the tight line of his mouth, the way his gaze fixed on the silent, glowing jellyfish on the screen.
Cat sighed, a soft, disappointed sound. She stopped scrolling and let the remote rest on the couch cushion. Her thumb found the familiar, cool metal of the locket resting between her breasts. It was warm from her skin.
“Look at me, Matt.”
He turned his head, his eyes soft and trusting. They held a deep, placid devotion now, but the old walls were still there, buried under the programming. The walls she wanted to smash.
With a lazy, practiced motion, she popped the locket open. The spirals caught the TV’s flickering blue light and seemed to swirl on their own, a tiny, mesmerizing galaxy pinned to her chest.
His eyes locked onto it instantly. The focus was total, absolute. His pupils dilated, swallowing the hazel of his irises, his breath deepening into a slow, even tide. All the resistance, the hesitance, melted away like wax under a flame.
“That’s better,” she murmured, her voice dropping into a low, rhythmic register. “Just watch it turn. So beautiful. So deep. Everything else is just noise.”
She let him swim in the spiral for a full minute, sinking him down to where only her voice could reach.
“Now, Matt,” she said, her tone conversational, as if they were picking up a chat. “Tell me about the last time you saw Veronica. The real last time. Not the story you tell your friends.”
His voice was a monotone, stripped of emotion. “We met at our favorite coffee shop. The Grind on Eighth. It was raining. She was already sitting there. Her hands were around her mug like she was cold.”
Cat’s fingers continued to stroke his hair. “What did she say?”
“She said she loved me.” A flicker of pain crossed his blank face. “But she wasn’t in love with me anymore. She said I was a safe harbor, but she wanted to sail into a storm. She said she needed to be with someone who… burned.”
The word hung in the perfumed air. Burned. Cat’s lips curved into a faint, cold smile.
“How did that make you feel?”
“Empty. Like the floor was gone. I begged. I actually got on my knees, right there in the coffee shop. I said I could change. I could be more… passionate. More unpredictable.” His voice cracked, but the hypnosis smoothed it into a flat report. “She cried. She said that was the problem. That I would always try to be what I thought she wanted, not who I was. She said she was killing who I was, and she couldn’t watch it anymore.”
Cat drank in the details. The public humiliation. The raw, pathetic surrender. It was so much better than she’d hoped.
“And after?” she prompted, her heart beating a slow, steady drum of pleasure.
“I walked home in the rain. I didn’t cry. I just felt… numb. I deleted all the photos that night. I blocked her number. I told everyone it was mutual, that we’d grown apart. Liam and Jared saw through it. They tried to get me to talk. I wouldn’t.”
“And then?” she whispered, leaning closer, the locket swaying.
“And then… you invited me to your party.” A shift. A warm, artificial wave of programmed emotion colored his tone. “You saw me. You really saw me.”
“I did,” Cat purred. She closed the locket with a soft snick. The spell didn’t break, not fully; he was still under, floating in the aftermath. But the direct link was severed.
She guided his head off her lap and stood up, stretching. The documentary had moved on to anglerfish, their grotesque bioluminescent lures dangling in the blackness. She muted the TV completely. The silence was profound.
Matt blinked, slowly coming back to the room. He looked dazed, spent, as if he’d just run a long distance. A single tear had tracked from the corner of his eye into his hairline.
“You okay?” Cat asked, pouring herself a finger of tequila from the bottle on the table. She didn’t offer him any.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice rough. He sat up, rubbing his face. “I just… I had a weird flashback. To Veronica. It felt really vivid.”
“Memories pop up sometimes,” she said, taking a sip. The liquor burned, clean and sharp. “Especially when you’re relaxed.”
He nodded, accepting the explanation without question. He watched her, his eyes full of a helpless, hungry adoration. “Thank you for… being here. For me.”
Cat turned and looked at him, framed by the neon glow of her eclectic lamps, the vulnerable line of his skinny frame on her expensive couch. She felt a surge of pure, undiluted power. He was hers. Every sad, broken piece of him. A canvas of regret she could repaint every day.
“Of course,” she said, her smile warm and empty. “That’s what friends are for.”
She left him there, wandering towards her bedroom. She needed to shower, to wash the feeling of his need off her skin. In the bathroom mirror, her own reflection looked back—vivid, alive, utterly in control. The locket lay cool against her sternum. A simple, elegant tool.
From the living room, she heard the sound of the TV click back on. The gentle, safe murmur of a narrated documentary. He was waiting for her to come back. He would wait all night if she asked.
She turned on the tap, letting the water run hot, and thought about burning.
The steam began to fog the mirror, erasing her reflection in a slow, creeping gray. She stepped under the scalding spray, letting it needled her skin. The water was a violence she could control.
Her hands slid over her body, palms flat against her stomach, her ribs. She thought of Matt’s tear on the couch, of Veronica’s cruel metaphor about burning. Her fingers dipped lower, finding the slick heat between her legs.
This was different. This was hers. She pressed her forehead against the cool tile and let the images come—not of Matt, but of his pain, his raw, unfiltered humiliation in that coffee shop. The power of it was a current straight to her core. Her breath hitched, echoing in the tiled space. She came with a sharp, silent gasp, her body arching against the wall, the water sluicing over her clenched shoulders. It was a clean, efficient release. An act of reclamation.
She toweled off slowly, methodically, watching the steam recede from the glass. Her own face emerged, piece by piece, calm and composed. She dabbed on a little perfume, the jasmine scent cutting through the residual humidity. The locket felt cool and heavy when she clasped it back around her neck, a returned crown.
Matt was exactly where she’d left him, curled on the couch. He’d found a fuzzy green blanket and pulled it over his legs. He looked small, swallowed by her furniture and the aquarium glow of the television.
“You didn’t have to wait up,” she said, padding over to the sofa. Her hair dampened the shoulders of her thin robe.
“I wanted to,” he said, his voice soft with sleep. He made room for her. “I like knowing you’re close.”
She settled beside him, tucking her feet underneath her. She studied his profile in the shifting light. “Tell me about your family,” she said, her tone light, conversational. “Siblings? Crazy parents? I realize I don’t know any of the basics.”
He shrugged, a minute movement under the blanket. “It’s boring. Really.”
“Indulge me. I’m curious about the people who made you.” She reached out and picked a piece of lint from the blanket, her fingers grazing his knee.
“I’m an only child. Parents divorced when I was ten.” He stated it like reciting a medical fact. “It was amicable. No big drama.”
“Ten is a hard age for that,” she pressed, her voice a gentle prod. “Where did you live?”
“With my mom in the suburbs. Dad got an apartment in the city. Saw him every other weekend.” He was staring at a infomercial for a knife set, his eyes tracking the host slicing a tomato with absurd ease.
“And?” Cat leaned forward, resting her chin in her hand. “What were they like? Your mom? Your dad?”
Matt shifted, a tension entering his shoulders. “My mom is… quiet. She gardens. My dad travels for work. I don’t know, Cat. It was fine. It is fine.” He finally looked at her, a plea in his eyes to drop it. “It’s not interesting.”
“It is to me,” she said, her smile not reaching her eyes. The friendly pretense was a thin venere now. She could feel his walls, higher and thicker than the ones around Veronica. They were old, foundational.
With a sigh of mock exasperation, she let her robe gape open just slightly. She reached for the locket. “You know, you’re a terrible storyteller, Matt. All the good details are locked up in here.” Her thumb found the catch. “Let’s find them.”
The snick of the locket opening was louder than the TV. The spirals swung free, catching a flash of neon from a sign outside the window. His gaze dropped to them immediately, pulled by a force stronger than politeness.
His breath evened out. The defensiveness melted from his posture, leaving him pliant and open against the cushions.
“That’s better,” she cooed, her voice shifting into that low, resonant register. “Now, Matt. No more evasion. I ask. You answer. Fully. Completely. Tell me about the divorce. Not the ‘amicable’ story. The real one.”
The words left his mouth in a flat, uninterrupted stream. “They told me over dinner at the Oakwood Grill. I’d ordered chicken fingers. My father said they would always love me but they couldn’t love each other anymore. My mother cried into her salad. I asked if it was my fault. They said no. I didn’t believe them.”
Cat’s heartbeat was a steady, quiet drum. “Why didn’t you believe them?”
“Because I had wished for it.” The admission was chilling in its simplicity. “The week before, I had broken my wrist playing soccer. My father missed the championship game because he was cheating on my mom. I knew because I saw his texts. I wished, in the emergency room, that he would just go away. Then he did.”
“Did you have friends? Someone to talk to?”
“I had a goldfish named Captain. I told him everything. He died when I was thirteen. I flushed him down the toilet and didn’t get another pet.”
The flat, hollow tone of his voice hung in the air. Cat watched the spiral, then his eyes, seeing nothing but a reflected void. “And your father? You saw his texts. You knew about the affair. Did he ever explain?”
“No.” A long pause. The only sound was the muffled city traffic through the window. “He packed a suitcase. He kissed my forehead. He said, ‘Be the man of the house now.’ I was ten years old.”
Cat felt a familiar, cold thrill. This was the bedrock. She leaned closer, her voice a soft probe in the quiet room. “And when you saw him on those weekends? What was that like?”
“It was a checklist.” Matt’s blank face remained oriented toward the locket, but a slight tic developed under his left eye. “Dinner. A movie. Sometimes a museum. We ran out of things to say by Saturday afternoon.”
“Did he ever get angry?”
Another pause, longer this time. His breathing hitched, then smoothed out again under the trance’s influence. “He had a temper. It was quiet. He wouldn’t yell. He’d just get very still and his voice would go flat.”
“Give me an example, Matt.” Her command was gentle, absolute.
“I spilled a glass of milk at his new apartment. The white spread over the glass table, onto the floor.” Matt’s fingers twitched on the blanket. “He didn’t shout. He handed me a roll of paper towels. He said, ‘Clean it up. All of it. Don’t leave a single drop.’ I used the whole roll. My hands were soggy. The towel kept shredding. He watched me the whole time from his chair, just drinking his coffee. When I was done, the floor was covered in little wet bits of paper. He said, ‘Now clean up your mess.’”
Cat’s lips parted slightly. She could see it: the skinny boy, the cold father, the hopeless task. “Was that the worst of it?”
“No.” The word was a breath. “The worst was the silence. The way he’d look at me like I was a problem he’d been assigned to solve. I got an A-minus on a math test. He took the paper, looked at it, then just walked to the shredder in his home office. He fed it in. He said, ‘Don’t bring me almost-perfect.’ I stopped bringing him things.”
A shiver traced Cat’s spine, delicious and sharp. This was the raw ore. “Did he ever hit you?”
“Once.” Matt’s voice grew even flatter, if that was possible. “I was fifteen. I talked back. I told him he didn’t know anything about me. He backhanded me across the mouth. Not hard. It was the shock more than the pain. He looked at his hand, then at me. He said, ‘Look what you made me do.’ Then he went to the balcony and smoked a cigarette. I stood in the living room, tasting blood. I never talked back again.”
The image crystallized in Cat’s mind: the man on the balcony, the smoke in the dark, the boy frozen inside, swallowing copper and shame. She saw the direct line from that balcony to the coffee shop floor where he’d begged Veronica. He was always being left in rooms to clean up spills.
She let the silence stretch, feeling the weight of his confession settle around them. The blue TV light played over his placid features, so at odds with the memory she’d excavated.
“You did very well,” she whispered, her voice suddenly intimate. “You gave me the truth. That’s all I ever want from you.”
A single, perfect tear welled in the corner of his unblinking eye and traced a path into his hairline. She watched it, fascinated.
“Now listen,” she continued, the rhythm of her words slow and solid as a foundation. “Your father was a small, cruel man. His opinions were noise. His love was a transaction you could never afford. You are free of him. His voice is gone.”
She leaned in, until her lips were almost brushing his ear. “My voice is the only one that matters now. My voice tells you what you are. And I tell you… you are enough.”
She snapped the locket shut.
The sound was soft, final. Matt blinked, a long, slow shutter of his eyes. He drew in a sudden, ragged breath as if surfacing from deep water. He looked around the room, disoriented, his eyes finally landing on her.
“Cat?” His voice was hoarse, confused.
“You drifted off for a second,” she said softly, smoothing his hair back from his damp temple. Her thumb brushed away the trace of the tear. “You were talking in your sleep. About a goldfish.”
He sat up slowly, wincing as if his body ached. He touched his own cheek, finding the wetness there. “I… I feel like I just ran a marathon. My head is pounding.”
“Emotional exhaustion,” she said, nodding as if it were a common, understood thing. “It happens. You’ve been holding onto a lot.”
He looked at her, his eyes searching hers, wide and vulnerable. “Did I say anything… weird?”
“Nothing weird,” she said, offering a smile that was all warmth and no light. “Just sad kid stuff. Everyone has it.” She stood, the silk of her robe sighing against her skin. “I think you should stay tonight. The couch folds out.”
He looked so small then, so grateful it almost curdled the air. “Are you sure? I don’t want to be—”
“I’m sure,” she interrupted, her tone leaving no room for argument. She walked to her bedroom door, pausing with her hand on the frame. “Get some sleep, Matt.”
She closed the door behind her, leaning against it in the dark of her bedroom. Her heart hammered against her ribs, not with excitement, but with a profound, satiated stillness. She had mapped his fault lines. She knew where the pressure points were, where the foundations had crumbled.
In the living room, she heard the faint click and rustle of him pulling out the sofa bed. The quiet, obedient sounds of her making space for him.
She opened her locket again, not for him, but for herself. In the dim light from the window, the spirals were just dark curls on silver. Tools, like any other. She ran her fingernail along the groove, thinking of flat voices, of shredded paper, of the exquisite architecture of a broken man.
Tomorrow was a new day. There were more layers to peel, more tender places to press. She closed the locket and placed it on her nightstand, where it gleamed, a silent promise.
The gleam of the locket was the last thing she saw before sleep took her, its shape imprinted against the dark of her eyelids.
She dreamed of deep water and silent, glowing things.
A faint sound pulled her up from the depths—a shuffle, a hesitant breath just outside her door. The digital clock on her nightstand burned red: 3:18 AM. Her room was a cave of shadows, the city’s nocturnal light painting gray shapes on the ceiling. She lay perfectly still, listening.
The door cracked open with a whisper of sound against the plush carpet. A sliver of wan light from the living room cut across the floor, framing Matt’s lanky silhouette. He stood there, a hesitant ghost in his boxers and t-shirt. He seemed to be gathering himself, his shoulders rising and falling with a deep, shaky breath.
Cat didn’t move. She let him think she was asleep, watching through the veil of her lashes.
He took one step in, then another, moving with the exaggerated care of someone trespassing. The floorboard by her dresser, the one that always creaked, groaned under his weight. He froze, a statue of anxiety. When she didn’t stir, he crept closer until he stood beside her bed, a pale outline in the gloom.
She could smell the sleep on him, and the faint, sour tang of old despair.
For a long moment, he just looked down at her. She kept her breathing slow and even, her face smooth. She wondered if he would touch her. Put a hand on her shoulder. He didn’t.
“Cat?” His voice was a thread, barely audible.
She gave him nothing, playing the part of a deep sleeper.
He swallowed, the sound loud in the quiet room. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, a nervous dance on the dark rug. “I’m… I know you’re asleep,” he whispered, talking to the shape of her in the bed. “I just… I needed to say it.”
He took another trembling breath. The air in the room felt thick, charged with his pathetic urgency.
“I love you,” he blurted out, the words tumbling into the dark like stones dropped into a well. They hung there, stark and clumsy. He immediately whispered a frantic follow-up, as if trying to catch them and stuff them back in. “I know I shouldn’t. I know it’s too fast, or it’s not real, or it’s just the… the stuff with my dad and everything. Liam would call me an idiot.”
He let out a wet, shaky laugh that was almost a sob.
“But I do. I feel it. Here.” He pressed a fist against his own sternum, a dull thump she could hear. “It’s like… it’s like you fixed something broken in me. You see me. The real me. And you don’t look away. You don’t make me feel like a mess to clean up.”
His whisper gained a desperate, confessional speed. “You make me feel wanted. Important. Like I’m enough. I’ve never felt that before. Not from anyone.”
He was crying now. She could hear the tears in his voice, the soft, ragged intake of breath. “So I love you.I just do. And I’ll do anything for you.Anything. I just needed you to know.”
The silence after his confession was absolute. He stood there, waiting for a sign, a word, anything. Receiving only the steady, untroubled sound of her breathing.
After a minute, his shoulders slumped in defeat or relief. The confession was out. The burden was hers now, even if she was asleep. He turned and shuffled back toward the door, closing it with a soft, final click.
In the renewed dark, Cat opened her eyes. She stared at the ceiling, a slow, deep smile spreading across her face. It was a predator’s smile, cool and satisfied.
The locket on the nightstand caught a sliver of light, a faint silver wink in the black.