Operant Conditioning

Fifteen minutes before class, and Evan already felt like he'd run a marathon in wet cement.

The lecture hall was slowly filling, the low murmur of overlapping conversations settling into a steady hum that vibrated against the high ceiling. Backpacks dropped onto desks with dull thuds. Zippers rasped. Someone laughed too loudly near the back. The fluorescent lights overhead cast everything in a pale, slightly sickly glow that made the room feel both overexposed and claustrophobic at the same time. Evan sat halfway up the tiered seating, aisle seat, psychology textbook open in front of him and a large coffee cooling between his hands. The pages were filled with highlighted terms, conditioning, reinforcement schedules, cognitive dissonance, but the words blurred every time he tried to focus on them. His eyes burned. His thoughts moved like they were wading through syrup.

When he'd signed up for a psychology class this early in the morning, he'd had in mind that he'd be showing up with having at least a little sleep. But now, thanks to the potion's magic, he felt like he was walking through a fog of exhaustion, the world hidden by the haze of his brain fog.

Every time he had drifted off during the night, just as his body began to soften into real rest, Stacy had rushed into his imagination, just as blood had rushed into his erection. It was ****, being denies sleep as he was, but it was torment to have his stepmother be the source of his arousal.

He lifted the coffee and took a slow swallow, welcoming the bitterness.

Up in the third row, slightly left of center, sat the girl who had started all of this.

Tamara.

Tammy.

Tanya.

Something with a T.

He stared at the back of her head, trying to will the correct name into existence. Her hair was pulled into a loose ponytail, a few strands catching the light as she leaned toward the girl beside her. She laughed at something, easy, unguarded, and for a brief second he saw her profile as she turned slightly in her seat. She looked exactly the same as she always had: casual, pretty, completely unaware that in some other version of reality, he had stood in a strange little shop with the intent to chemically, magically, override her life because he didn't have the courage to introduce himself.

He had wanted her enough to buy a potion.

Not enough to learn her name.

The realization pressed into him harder than the exhaustion.

What was wrong with him?

He exhaled slowly and leaned back in his seat. It didn't matter anymore. That version of him, the one who had been willing to tamper with someone's free will, felt both distant and embarrassingly close. A week ago. A lifetime ago. Either way, it had become was irrelevant.

Now he was a married man.

To Stacy.

The thought settled over him with a strange weight, not entirely unpleasant but impossible to ignore. Images from the night before flickered through his mind without permission: the photos she had texted him. The deliberate angles. The soft lighting. The way she had looked directly into the camera as if she could see him on the other side of it, as if she knew exactly how his body would respond. She had always known how to present herself. That was part of what made her so infuriating.

He wished she wasn't so hot.

It would be easier if she weren't. Easier to hate her cleanly. Easier to frame her as the villain in this mess and never waver.

But somewhere deep in the back of his brain, somewhere primitive and embarrassingly honest, something responded to her despite everything. Even now, after the arguments, after the blame, after the fact that she had drunk the potion without asking. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation stripping him down to his most basic impulses. Maybe it was just biology. Whatever it was, he couldn't pretend it wasn’t there.

Part of him wanted her.

And the magic wasn't helping.

They had literally covered this in this class: operant conditioning. Stimulus. Response. Reinforcement. The strengthening of behavior through reward. Every time he drifted toward sleep last night, every time his mind moved away from her, his body had been jolted awake with a surge of arousal so intense it felt engineered. It was as if the magic was training him. Pairing her with pleasure. Pairing distance with discomfort. Nudging, nudging, nudging him toward compliance.

He shifted in his seat, jaw tightening.

She was selfish. She was sharp-tongued. She had made his life difficult from the moment she entered it. Even before the potion. And after? She had taken something that he had explicitly said was his and swallowed it anyway. No hesitation. No apology.

And yet she still blamed him.

That part burned.

But the anger wasn't solely on her. Because he couldn't escape his own role in this either. He had bought the potion. He had walked into that shop with intent. Not curiosity, not research, intent. He had been willing to insert himself into the life of the girl in the third row without her knowledge, without her consent, simply because he wanted her and didn't know how to approach her like a normal person.

Stacy had been right to call that out.

It had been unethical. Cowardly. A stain he couldn't scrub away by shifting blame.

He closed his eyes briefly, then **** them open again. He absolutely could not fall asleep in this class.

The last thing he needed was to jerk awake in a silent lecture hall with a very obvious physical reaction he couldn't explain. The humiliation alone would be catastrophic. He imagined the snickers. The whispers. The girl in the third row glancing back with confusion or disgust. His face warmed just thinking about it.

He pinched the inside of his forearm, hard enough to sting, and chased it with another long swallow of coffee.

Stay awake.

Focus.

The classroom door swung open, and the professor entered with his usual brisk efficiency. He carried a worn leather briefcase that he set on the desk at the front of the room before carefully extracting a stack of notes and a small remote for the projector. The screen behind him flickered to life, bathing the room in a pale wash of blue light. Dense slides appeared: bullet points, definitions, diagrams that looked far more interesting than they ever felt in practice.

"Good morning, everyone," the professor said, already halfway into the cadence of a lecture.

A few students murmured back.

The voice began to drone almost immediately; steady, even, academically soothing in the most dangerous way possible. The kind of tone specifically made to lull exhausted students into microsleeps.

If there were any class to lose consciousness in, it would be this one.

Evan straightened in his seat, pen poised over paper he hadn't yet written on. He **** himself to track each sentence, to copy key phrases, to anchor his mind to something concrete. Married man, he reminded himself again, as if repetition could solidify the reality.

Married.

To Stacy.

And as the professor began explaining reinforcement schedules in more detail, Evan couldn't help but wonder how long he could resist before the magic decided he was due for another lesson.