✅1️⃣ | Hypnosis Doesn't Work Like That!

11: It's Easy to Resist When You're Expecting It

This morning, the traffic was unusually bad. There was a major snarl up coming into town, maybe caused by a thoroughly confusing sign indicating that the lights were working in some directions but not others. As they passed, Adi and her mom saw several people trying to cross the junction in ways ranging from careless to downright stupid, not properly understanding what was happening with the traffic coming the other way. But no amount of rubbernecking would cause an accident to materialise, and before too long they were through the nexus of the problem, and merely had to navigate the tentacles of congestion that it had spread all around it.

Adi sipped at her coffee, glad for being in a fairly new car with hydrophobic coatings on the windows to stop her breath fogging it up as they sat there. The drink went from hot to warm, and they were still ten minutes away from school. Adi had to admit that if she'd been there on her own, she would have been running late already, increasingly frustrated at a difficult situation to drive through, and she was sure that there was no way Mom could have afforded to get her a car that managed to be comfortable. Then her cup was empty, and she was reduced to staring out of the car at whatever was displayed in shop windows along the route. It was mostly discount stores, pawnbrokers, and second-hand electronics. The signs of a city on the long slide into municipal poverty, according to some of the edgy economics bloggers she read, but to an almost-adult young woman, those stores were a treasure trove of mysterious items that always held something she wouldn't have expected. It could be a fun day out just looking through the boxes of miscellaneous used products. But as far as window-shopping went, they weren't really the best.

Mom tried to make conversation, but she really didn't know what to say. A couple of times Adi thought about asking her mother to use a shorter form of her name, but she didn't know how she could phrase that so it didn't sound weird. And in any case, she would only need to avoid it for a few days at most.

"Do you think–" Mom was just starting when her phone rang. She tapped the button and answered it. Adi didn't hear the voice on the other end, so she guessed Mom must have an earpiece in. That meant she was stuck with one side of an obviously rather tepid conversation with a person or persons unknown.

"Hi, yeah!" Mom put on a cheerful air that was obviously false from the strained look on her face.

"I'm stuck in Schwingford. There's total gridlock, they're fixing the lights or something."

"No, can you get through that way?"

There was a long pause, which Adi found herself filling with the drumming of fingernails on the outside of a plastic travel mug.

"Well, maybe. But I have to drop Adelaide off at school first."

Adi didn't catch the next part of the one sided conversation. She felt her bladder twitch as she heard her baby name, and then the warmth was spreading around her crotch. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to keep from swearing while her mother was in such close proximity, and clenched as hard as she could to stop herself from peeing. And a second later, her slow breath turned into a gasp of surprise as she found that she couldn't stop. She knew she could just clamp down and stop the pee flowing, but she couldn't feel the right muscles, or she couldn't find them. It was like trying to roll her tongue or wiggle her ears, both of which she'd failed dramatically at after meeting freaks of nature who actually had control over those muscles. She knew what she needed to do, but she couldn't find the right muscles and nothing she tried seemed to make any difference at all.

She sat there in silence, sneaking a peek at her mother's distracted nodding to reassure her that Mom wasn't going to notice her alarm as the diaper started to swell up under Adi's jeans. These things were only meant for kids, she knew, even if the numbers on the packet when up to age fifteen, and she could only hope that it wouldn't burst or leak as she felt her bladder discharge two large cups of coffee and a glass of juice. For all she kept on trying, there was absolutely nothing she could do to stop it, and it was taking all her self control now just to keep from crying in despair.

Eventually the flow subsided, and her pull-ups seemed to be doing their job. But they were still stuck in traffic, easing forward foot by tortuous foot, and it didn't seem there would be a chance to get out of the car any time soon.