"Well hey there, champ," Randi heard a man say, as she stumbled out of an unfamiliar bedroom into an unfamiliar apartment in an experience that had become a little too familiar. "You're looking kind of groggy there--you doing okay? I got some bacon and eggs going, some coffee in the pot if you're up for any of it." Randi half-expected the words--and the scent that accompanied them--to hit her with a wave of nausea, but she wasn't waking up with her usual agonizing hangover. Honestly, apart from being muzzy and confused and still half-asleep, she actually felt... pretty good.
"Um, uh, yeah, in a minute," she mumbled, shambling over to the kitchen island and slumping down on a stool with her head in her hands. There was no headache, which was a nice change--she must have hydrated like hell the night before--but she still couldn't shake the unreal, dreamlike sensation permeating everything. "Was I, um... did we....? I'm sorry, I don't really remember a lot of last night. I think I must have had too much to drink." She was pretty sure she wound up sleeping with him, though, whoever he was. Randi had managed to find her underwear scattered around her bed, pulling them on over her muscular tattooed body so she at least felt like she was wearing something, but her clothes had vanished in the chaos of the previous evening and that was another sentence she wished she wasn't used to.
The stranger smiled at her. "Actually, you didn't have anything to drink," he replied, scooping bacon and eggs out of the frying pan and onto a plate. "You'd just ordered your first round of shots when we got to talking, and I told you that you didn't need alcohol to get drunk--" He looked at her quizzically. "This isn't ringing any kind of bells for you? You don't remember anything that happened to you last night?" Randi opened her mouth to answer, pausing as she tried to recall exactly what the last lucid moment of the night was... and her jaw hung open as she realized she didn't quite know.
That was weird. Usually, she at least had a memory of the first couple of shots, the dancing and the drinking and the bad decisions, and it was somewhere around the time she was leaving the club for an afterparty with some dude who lived nearby that her recollections fell off a cliff. But this time, when she probed that gap in her mind for something to prompt her addled brain into reminding her what she did, she instead found this weird soft spot in her thoughts that felt... good. "I, uh, no, it's...." She blinked heavily, realizing her eyes had just rolled back into her head for a moment. "Nothing, sorry."
The man chuckled, reaching out and giving her pale, tattooed wrist a squeeze with hands that had seen a lot more sun than hers. "That's not as unusual as you might think," he said reassuringly. "My name's Lucas, and last night I hypnotized you to experience the effects of alcoholic intoxication. We just sort of tricked your brain into thinking you were drunk, and your subconscious mind must have decided that it was safe to forget the details of the experience when you woke up. It happens to a lot of people--you relax, your waking mind gets intensely focused on one thing, like pleasure or the sound of my voice, and everything else kind of fades away. How are you feeling now?"
Randi's fluttering eyes refocused, and she realized that she'd kind of drifted off again while Lucas was talking--it wasn't exactly like he was stirring a memory, but his little speech brought her back into some warm and familiar space inside her head that felt kind of like that luxuriant sensation of being just awake enough to know you were still asleep and you didn't need to wake up anytime soon. "I, uhh, a bit muzzy, I guess?" she murmured, wiping at the corner of her mouth and discovering to her astonishment that she'd left a tiny trickle of saliva there while she was zoning out and listening to Lucas.
Lucas nodded. "That's not unusual either," he explained, his voice still so calm and certain and reassuringly confident that Randi could feel herself swept along by its flow. "Last night you were so drowsy by the end of the evening, so sleepy and relaxed and deeply hypnotized, that I decided to just take you down and down and down into a warm, peaceful sleep." Randi noticed her eyes rolling back in her head again until only the whites showed, her eyelids fluttering and her vision becoming the narrowest band of sight as only the very glimmer of her pupils remained visible, and it took her a moment before she remembered how to open them properly again.
"Sometimes that just means you wake up still a little bit in trance," Lucas continued, as though he didn't even notice Randi's head drooping forward until her long black hair fell in front of her face like a veil. "I tell you what, how about we just drop you back down for a minute or two, and then count you up again so you'll wake up properly. Sound good?" Randi caught herself beginning to nod almost without even thinking about it, her groggy mind still so mazy and bewildered that she gratefully allowed Lucas to direct the conversation. It simply felt better to let someone else think for her.
"There's a good girl," Lucas cooed, reaching up to caress her cheek. Normally Randi's hackles would have risen at that particular term--she worked security for a record promoter, she lifted weights competitively, and she probably stood a good three inches taller than the man who was so casually patronizing her. But the strangeness of the situation, the lack of memory and context and any kind of real framework to fit the morning's experiences into, left Randi feeling strangely adrift and she found herself leaning into his touch even before he whispered, "Sleep for me."
