Kiara knocked urgently on the dressing room door, her mahogany brown knuckles beating out a nervous, almost desperate rhythm against the ancient, dented surface. Her teeth worried away at her lower lip, her dark eyes flitting anxiously from side to side to make sure nobody was watching her. Not that anyone seemed to care what she was doing backstage-she'd gotten a few disinterested glances the second or third time she came to see Paul after the show, but for the most part, everyone was too busy to care.
Irrationally, though, Kiara felt like that could change at any second. She tapped out another swift flurry of knocks, her mind already convincing itself that this time Paul had decided not to bother going back to his dressing room after the act. Maybe this time, he was sick of getting impromptu visits from some weird, obsessive, chubby little black girl with coke-bottle glasses and a boring plaid dress. Maybe he'd decided to duck out early to avoid her. Maybe he was in there right now calling security and telling them to kick her out and maybe call the cops if she came back again-
The door opened, revealing a tall Caucasian man with slicked back blonde hair and sallow, sunken blue eyes. He wore a dark blue bathrobe over a pair of plain white boxer shorts, and his face had the freshly-scrubbed look of someone who'd just washed off a coating of stage makeup. He looked down at Kiara with a disdainful expression on his face and said, "Oh. It's you." Then he turned and walked back into his dressing room without another word.
But he left the door open. Kiara scurried through and closed it behind her before nervously approaching Paul as he flopped back down into his chair. "Um, hi, Mister Dallas," she mumbled, staring down at the floor as if she expected a trap door to open at any moment and banish her from his sight. "I, I thought your show went well? I, um, I really liked the thing you did with that girl, the one where her hands were... were stuck to the, um. Chair."
Kiara's voice sounded high and squeaky in her ears, and she couldn't stop wiping her sweaty palms on her jeans. Paul didn't respond, didn't even look at her, and Kiara decided to just go ahead and cut to the chase before she annoyed him so badly that he simply kicked her out of his dressing room. "So I was wondering if we, um... if we could try again. To, um. To hypnotize me. Like the girls in your shows. I, I really think that if we give it just one more try, I'm sure I could..." Her voice momentarily dried up in her throat, and she forced herself to squeeze out the last few words. "Go under. For you."
Paul looked up at her skeptically. "Mhmm," he muttered, somehow managing to make a sentence with exactly zero actual words sound sarcastic. "Tell me again... how many times have you come to my dressing room after the show asking to be hypnotized?" The way he asked the question left no doubt in Kiara's mind that he already knew exactly what the answer was, but she didn't dare ignore it. He hadn't turned her down yet, but with every evening she slipped backstage after watching his hypnosis show, Kiara felt like she was getting closer and closer to the limits of his patience.
So instead of making a cutting remark, Kiara kept her eyes down and mumbled, "S-seven, sir," in a meek, hesitant voice that her friends probably wouldn't have believed her to be capable of. She fidgeted like a schoolgirl in front of a strict headmaster, her left foot nervously rotating back and forth in place as she struggled to control her desire to apologize and beat a hasty retreat. She couldn't do that, not if she was going to get what she wanted.
"Seven." Paul repeated the word like he was carving it onto a tombstone. "And you think that this eighth time is going to do the trick. You think that this time, I'm just going to snap my fingers and say, 'Sleep', and you'll drop right down into a deep hypnotic trance for me. No more struggles, no more false starts, no more misplaced resistance. Just eighth time's the charm." Sarcasm dripped from every word, as if they'd spent all day marinating in an acid bath right up until he flung them at her.
Kiara steeled herself against the storm and said, "I... I hope so, sir. I think I'm getting better. I... I really felt like something was happening last time." It wasn't true at all-Kiara knew that last time had been a miserable failure just like every other time, a solid hour of letting his words wash over her and staring at his swaying pocket watch and experiencing absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. But she couldn't tell him that, not when he was trying so hard for her.
"I see." Paul leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, exposing the pale flesh under his robe carelessly to Kiara's gaze. "Why do you even want to be hypnotized so badly, anyway?" he asked, his voice softening a little into honest bewilderment. "I mean, you've come to see my show every night for a week now. You've spent hours watching the watch, listening to the inductions, and none of it's worked, right? So why keep trying? Why not just look for something else to do with your evenings?"
