Chapter 4: Public Humiliation
The echo of the showerhead was a deafening static. Ethan stood under the cold spray, teeth chattering, skin pebbled with goosebumps, trying to shock the images out of his head. It didn’t work. The phantom pressure on his tongue, the imagined taste of salt and skin, lingered like a ghost limb. He’d scrubbed his skin raw with a cheap, scratchy loofah until it was pink and stinging.
The stinging was a clean pain, at least, something he could understand. He turned the water off, the sudden silence in the tiled room a physical presence. His reflection in the fogged mirror was a blurry phantom, a boy made of steam and shame.
Work was a minefield of accidental focus. He stocked shelves at a cluttered downtown grocery, and every interaction became a test. An older man with rough, veined hands reaching for a bottle of wine made Ethan’s throat tighten. A construction worker in line, his bicep flexing as he lifted a case of beer, sent a jolt straight to Ethan’s groin.
“You alright, kid? You’re staring.” His manager, Brenda, a woman with kind eyes and a perpetual frown, snapped her fingers near his face. “That crate isn’t gonna unpack itself.”
“Sorry. Zoned out,” Ethan mumbled, hefting the box of canned goods. The weight felt good, solid in his arms, but it wasn’t the right kind of weight. He found himself pressing the hard corner of the crate against his chest as he walked, seeking a pressure that could somehow reach inside him.
His break was a torment spent in the stockroom, back against a pallet of rice. He scrolled on his phone, not searching for porn but for forums about hypnosis, about mind control, his fingers trembling as he typed ‘unwanted thoughts after trance’. The results were a mix of clinical jargon and paranoid ravings. None of them described this specific, humiliating hunger. He closed the browser and opened his camera, turning it to selfie mode.
His face looked tired, shadows under his eyes. He ran a thumb over his lower lip, pulling it down. He imagined a thumb that wasn’t his, broader, with a close-clipped nail. Dr. Thorne’s thumb. The thought didn’t disgust him. It sent a warm, liquid pull through his abdomen. He shoved the phone back in his pocket like it had burned him.
The walk home was worse than the day before. His body was a tuned receiver, picking up signals he’d never noticed. The swagger in a stranger’s walk, the deep rumble of a laugh from a car window, the way a man in a suit adjusted the line of his trousers before sitting at a bus stop. Each observation was a tiny hook in his flesh, tugging him towards a cliff’s edge.
He stopped at a convenience store, craving something sweet to fill the hollow. The clerk was a guy around his own age, lean and tattooed, with a sharp jaw and bored, heavy-lidded eyes. “Seven-fifty,” the guy said, not looking up from his phone, his voice a flat monotone.
Ethan fumbled with his wallet. A coil of something reckless, born of a week of sleepless tension, unwound in his gut. “Long shift?” he heard himself ask, the words sounding too bright, too forced.
The clerk glanced up. His eyes, a pale, tired blue, scanned Ethan’s face, then dropped briefly to his neck, his chest. A flicker of something—amusement, assessment—passed through them. “Aren’t they all?” He took the cash, his fingers brushing Ethan’s palm. The contact was electric, deliberate. “You new around here? Haven’t seen you before.”
“Just… passing through,” Ethan lied, his mouth dry. The clerk’s gaze felt like a physical touch, slow and appraising. It stripped the cheap fabric of his t-shirt away, lingered on the hollow of his throat. Ethan felt his nipples peak, tight and sensitive, under that look.
“Shame,” the clerk said, a slow smirk spreading. He held the gaze a beat too long before looking back at his phone, dismissal final. “Have a good night.”
Ethan stumbled out, the candy bar forgotten in his sweaty hand. That look. It hadn’t been friendly. It had been owning. He’d been sized up and found… what? Available? His heart hammered against his ribs. He felt a dizzying cocktail of violation and a deep, pulsing thrill. He’d wanted that look to continue. He’d wanted the clerk to say something filthier, to tell him to come around back.
The desire was a live wire in his gut, sizzling and shameful. He didn’t go home. He walked, a frantic pace with no destination, until his lungs burned and the cool evening air did nothing to clear the heat from his face. That clerk’s assessing stare was tattooed on the back of his eyelids. It felt like a promise, or a verdict.
He finally crashed through his apartment door, slamming it shut and leaning against the wood as if barricading himself from his own thoughts. Silence pressed in, heavy and expectant. The hollow ache returned, deeper now, centered in his jaw and radiating down to his throbbing cock. He knew, with a certainty that felt sickening, what would fill it. He was already pulling his laptop onto the bed, the routine now grimly familiar.
He didn’t search for general terms. His fingers, moving with a will of their own, typed specific, hungry phrases. ‘Amateur blowjob’, ‘deep throat training’, ‘hung boss’. The screen filled with the usual tableau of kneeling figures and looming cocks. He clicked one, the sound already up, filling the stale room with wet, gulping noises and ragged commands. “Yeah, take it, you fucking mouth.” He watched, his hand already down his pants, stroking himself to the rhythm of the piston-like thrusts.
But something was different tonight. The anonymous, tattooed torsos began to blur at the edges. His mind, traitorous and pliable, started dressing them in fine wool trousers. The hands gripping the kneeling head was elegant, long-fingered, with a silver hypnotist’s ring. The low, gritty voice of the porn actor smoothed out, gained a calm, measured cadence. It became a soothing, authoritative baritone.
“You see how well he listens?” the voice in his head murmured, syncing perfectly with the video. “He just wants to be good. To be used correctly.” On screen, the man spilled over the boy’s tongue. Ethan’s frantic hand stilled. He wasn’t seeing the stranger’s release. He imagined Dr. Thorne’s composed face, a faint sheen of sweat on his temple, his sharp eyes locked on Ethan’s as he emptied himself down his throat. The fantasy was so vivid he could taste the imagined bitterness, feel the hot pulses against his soft palate.
He gasped, cumming suddenly and violently over his own stomach with a broken shout. The climax was less pleasure than a brutal, mechanical release. He lay there panting, the porn video babbling on, the fantasy dissolving but leaving its residue. He was hard again in minutes, a dull, persistent ache. He clicked another video. Then another.
He watched for hours, a depraved marathon.
He watched for hours, a depraved marathon, until his eyes were sandpaper and the screen’s blue light was burned into his vision. He woke on top of his tangled sheets, still dressed, his mouth tasting of stale shame and the laptop whirring hot beside his thigh. The hollow ache was there, waiting for him, before he even opened his eyes.
Work the next day was a fog. He sliced open a box of pasta with a box cutter and imagined the blade’s edge tracing a different line, a faint pink line down the skin of a taut stomach he’d seen in a video. The day manager asked him a question twice. “Jesus, Hayes, you on another planet?” The sound of his own name, ‘Hayes’, spoken with that grating impatience, made him flinch. It was too close to ‘Thorne’.
The craving was a living thing now, coiled around his spine and whispering directly into the base of his skull. It had a texture: rough denim, hot skin, the smooth slap of flesh on flesh. It had a taste. He found himself chewing on his pen at the checkout counter, grinding the plastic between his molars until Brenda snapped at him to stop.
He drove to the gym after his shift, a decision made without thought. His body moved on a programmed directive. The air inside was a wall of sanitized sweat and rubber. The clang of weights, the grunts of exertion, they were not noises but invitations. He changed in a corner of the locker room, his back to the room.
His hands trembled as he peeled off his sweat-soaked shirt. The cool air hit his skin, pebbling it, and the friction of the fabric had already left his nipples hard and aching. They stood out, dark and sensitive against his pale chest. He kept his head down, fumbling with his lock.
A shower ran nearby, hissing. A locker slammed. Then, from the corner of his watering eye, movement. A man, maybe ten years older, emerged from the steam. He was all dense muscle, shoulders rounded from years of lifting, with a dark tattoo of a serpent coiled around one thick bicep. He was drying his hair with a towel, utterly unconcerned, humming some tuneless song.
He dropped the towel. It puddled at his feet.
Ethan’s gaze, against every screaming command from his rational mind, locked onto the man’s groin. He was thick, heavy, and half-soft, swinging gently as he turned to grab his jeans from a bench. A thatch of dark hair. A prominent vein. The image burned itself into Ethan’s retina: the sheer, casual weight of it.
His mouth flooded with saliva. A sharp, coppery tang followed as he bit his lower lip hard enough to puncture the skin. The pain was a distant flare, meaningless. The craving was a deafening roar. A needy, choked sound escaped him, almost a whimper.
The man heard it. He glanced over, his eyes—a flat, calm brown—meeting Ethan’s wide, horrified stare. His gaze didn’t dart away in mutual embarrassment. It lingered. It traveled down Ethan’s slender frame, over his heaving chest, his tight stomach, and back up. A slow, knowing smirk touched the corner of his mouth. He made no move to cover himself.
“See something you like, kid?” His voice was a low rasp, utterly casual.
Ethan bolted. He abandoned his open locker, his clothes, everything. He fled into the shower room, around a tiled wall, and into the farthest stall. He yanked the curtain closed with a rattling shriek of rings. His back hit the cold, wet tile. His heart was a wild animal trying to break his ribs.
His cock was painfully hard, straining against his gym shorts, a wet spot of pre-cum already darkening the fabric. The image of that swinging thickness played on a loop behind his eyes. He couldn’t breathe. His hand was down his shorts, fingers wrapping around his own leaking erection, and he was rubbing, frantic and clumsy, his fist a poor, desperate substitute.
He imagined the man following him in. He imagined those muscular hands pinning his shoulders to the tile. He could almost feel the hot spray from the next stall mixing with the phantom heat of another body. He pictured dropping to his knees right there on the grimy, wet floor. He saw himself opening his mouth for that fat, uncut cock, tonguing the slit, taking the whole heavy length until his nose was buried in coarse hair.
“Fuck,” he gasped into the steaming air, his strokes becoming punishing, his hips jerking. “Oh god, fuck.” He wasn’t sure if he was praying or cursing. His other hand pinched and twisted his own nipple, the sharp bolt of pain-pleasure making his legs buckle. He came in less than a minute, a silent, convulsive eruption that left streaks on the tile wall, his body slumping against it, spent and shaking.
The aftermath was immediate and icy. The water from the showerhead next door went silent. He heard the man’s low chuckle, then the sound of flip-flops slapping away on the wet floor. He’d heard everything. He knew.
Ethan slid down the wall until he was sitting in a puddle, fully dressed, soaked and shivering. The craving was gone, sated in the most pathetic way possible, but it left a vacuum filled with a terror so profound it felt like dying. He’d almost done it. He’d almost gotten on his knees for a stranger in a public shower. A stranger who had seen the whole wretched want in his eyes.
He couldn’t admit he wanted it, but his body, his face, his trembling hands—they were all confessing for him. Men saw him looking. They knew. They all knew.
He stayed there until the gym lights flickered, signaling closing time. He dressed in his damp clothes with mechanical movements, avoided his own reflection in the mirror, and drove home through streets blurred by a cold, mocking rain. The silence of his apartment was a judge. He stood in the middle of the room, dripping, and the only thought that formed with any clarity was a desperate, pulsing need that had nothing to do with cigarettes.
He needed to see Dr. Thorne. The thought was a quiet, absolute certainty. Only Thorne could fix this. Only he could make the noise stop. Ethan fumbled for his phone, his wet fingers slipping on the screen. He found the number, the one listed under “Focus & Clarity Therapeutic Hypnosis.” His thumb hovered over the call button. He couldn’t wait a week. He couldn’t wait another night.
He sent a text instead, the words stark and revealing on the bright screen: Dr. Thorne, it’s Ethan Hayes. I’m… struggling. Is there any chance you could see me sooner? Anytime tomorrow? I really need my next session.
The reply came less than a minute later, as if Thorne had been waiting. Of course, Ethan. Your progress is important. Come by at 7 PM. My last appointment cancels.
See. He could fix it. Relief, warm and syrupy, washed through Ethan’s chilled bones. He sank onto the edge of his bed, clutching the phone. He just had to make it until tomorrow night. Just hold on. He closed his eyes, and without wanting to, he pictured the chair. The velvet. The pendulum. The calm, authoritative voice that could silence the chaos. He pictured the doctor’s hands. A different kind of shiver took him, deep and unresisting.