Gloria blinked. It was a long, slow, heavy blink, the pause between the instant when her jade eyes slammed shut and the moment when they finally and reluctantly opened again seeming to stretch out into a small eternity. When she finally did manage to unstick her eyelids from one another and pry them apart, her stare was glassy and unfocused; it took her another second or two to pull her gaze away from whatever she was seeing inside her own mind and back onto the ring on her finger. Her facial muscles looked ever so slightly slack, her lips parted in a vacant, expressionless yawp of confusion as she wiped a trickle of drool away from the corner of her mouth. Even though she was fighting the exhaustion that affected her, it was a battle she was clearly and obviously losing.
Best of all, she clearly had no idea what was affecting her. Tyler could see it on her face, etched with crystal clarity into the befuddled look in her eyes as she struggled to shake off the unexpected drowsiness that had gripped her and pay attention to his fascinating little lecture about the virtues of her new engagement ring. She no doubt wondered why her coffee wasn't doing its normal job this particular morning, perhaps blaming her unaccountable lethargy on an all-night study session or the dull sociology textbook that she'd been staring at for hours before he arranged their chance encounter. She had no idea. Tyler's cock throbbed inside his boxers at the thought.
He didn't so much as smile, though. Instead, he arranged his features into a carefully composed expression of sympathy and said, "I'm sorry, I'm probably boring you. If you need to get back to your studies, I can....?" He let the sentence trail off, instead gesturing with one hand to the door of the nearly empty coffee shop. It took Gloria a couple of moments before she was able to pull her gaze away from her ring long enough to follow the gesture, and her stare quickly returned to the sparkling diamond set into its center. She didn't seem to be fully processing just how deeply his words and the calm, soothing sound of his voice was affecting her.
Instead, she shook her head slightly and forced herself to meet his deep brown eyes. "No, no, it's fine," she said wearily, a lifetime of social conditioning pressuring her to reassure him in the face of his apology... and, by extension, to stay exactly where she was for fear of inadvertently offending him. "Honestly, I don't think I'd get much out of my textbook anyway right now. A study break is probably the best thing for me at the moment, what with my brain being so, um...." Gloria hesitated, her pale pink lips parting once more as she struggled to find a way to describe her thoughtless, distracted state that sounded endearingly self-deprecating instead of overly critical. Twenty minutes ago, the vocabulary would have come to her easily, but that was before Tyler insinuated an onslaught of hypnotic patter into his explanation of what to look for in a diamond. Now, she had to work overtime to find a single word.
Tyler didn't intend to give her a chance, though. "Tired," he cut in smoothly, once again asserting control of the conversation. "You're feeling a little tired, and you need to give your mind a bit of a rest. It's perfectly natural to feel tired, especially when you've been working so hard," he added reassuringly. He was careful to interject only when Gloria paused to gather her thoughts; the last thing he wanted to do was frustrate her, or give her the feeling that he was monopolizing the discussion. He wasn't concerned about giving her too many chances to speak--by now, her brain was so sluggish and lethargic that Tyler could practically drive a truck through her distracted silences.
He pressed his advantage. "You've probably been staring at that book so long that the words have just turned to squiggles in front of those tired, aching eyes," he murmured softly, pitching his voice in a low, soothing hypnotic cadence that Gloria responded to instinctively. "It's good to take a break every now and again when you get exhausted and groggy like that, just rest and relax for a little while before you fall asleep in your seat." The young woman's eyelids fluttered again, her glassy stare wavering back and forth between the diamond on her engagement ring and the page behind it as her conscious mind tried to decide exactly what she was supposed to be looking at. Tyler's cock twitched as he drank in the beautiful sight.
"You can always come back to the book in a little while," he continued, keeping his voice quiet and gentle. He wasn't worried about someone overhearing--Gloria had chosen her quiet, secluded corner of the cafe well, and Tyler knew from long experience that the staff knew better than to interrupt an intimate-looking conversation. But the soft, calm tones helped to lull his subject deeper into relaxation. "There's no hurry. The room is warm, the chair is soft and comfortable, and you've got the whole day in front of you. You can take your time, let go of the stress of studying and focus on something peaceful and happy for a bit."
Gloria smiled, her heavy-lidded eyes once again locking onto the ring in front of her. Tyler had noticed her gazing at it admiringly several times before he decided to use it as his opening to engage her in conversation, and his informal appraisal of its value had only raised her estimation of its beauty. Primed as she was to concentrate on the sparkling stone, he didn't need to do much prompting at all to return her thoughts to the rainbow-hued facets that caught the light so hypnotically and captured her attention so completely. She gazed down at the diamond in mesmerized fascination, drowsiness lending her face a soft, vulnerable expression. Tyler shifted in his chair, his boxers uncomfortably tight all of a sudden.