"Sink Into Me"
"Wh-what are you doing to me?" The question sounds absurd, paranoid and naive at the same time, and Selena braces herself for the inevitable dismissal of her sudden, inexplicable fear. She knows that Lucia has a perfectly reasonable, perfectly innocent explanation for her behavior, because... because that's the way the world works. People don't really hypnotize and brainwash strangers they meet at bars, that's the kind of random bizarre shit you see in horror movies. The weird phrasing, the low breathy voice, the constant references to exhaustion and sleep and drowsiness... there has to be a simple explanation to it all. Selena just doesn't understand it yet. She knows she's going to feel so foolish once Lucia explains it all.
"I'm hypnotizing you, darling," Lucia says. Her facial expression doesn't even change. "I'm drawing you deeper and deeper into a helpless trance, isolating your thoughts from your body one by one before I erase them from your sleepy mind. It's already started. You can't resist. Just give in, sink into my eyes, and stop trying to think. It's going to feel so much better once you relax and stop struggling, pet."
The room seems to spin for Selena, the words somehow seeming so unreal and impossible that she can't fully process them. She tells herself that surely someone will notice, that there's no way that you could sit in the middle of a crowded room and hhh... Selena's mind recoils from the word, still unable to believe any of this is really happening. There's no way Lucia can do... this. What she's saying. Not in front of all these people, not to an unwilling subject. It's got to be a joke, a prank, one of those cheesy 'Candid Camera' type shows. You can't just walk up to someone's table, say, "Is this seat taken?", and start trying to, to...
"That's right, pretty girl," Lucia says, and Selena realizes she's been staring into Lucia's deep hazel eyes for almost a solid minute trying to come up with a reason why she couldn't be helplessly staring into Lucia's deep hazel eyes. "Just let my gaze fill your world, let everything around you fade away except the darkness at the center of my stare. You can imagine yourself sinking into it, slowly descending down and down and down into the silent depths of my pupil until everything in your mind is perfect, pitch black emptiness."
Selena shakes her head slowly, all too aware that her eyes seem to be moving in perfect sync to keep her gaze locked onto Lucia's stare. "N-no," she says, hearing a terrifyingly muzzy quality to her own voice. Like she's already started to doze off in her seat. She wonders how long she sat here, listening to Lucia ramble on about her long and exhausting day and the allure of her soft, warm, cozy, comfortable hotel bed, before it finally dawned on her that the words had stopped making sense and started appealing directly to Selena's subconscious. "I... I'm going to leave now," she said, wishing she could sound more forceful.
"No you're not," Lucia responds, the words as much a statement of fact as a command. "Because you're sinking deeper and deeper into the darkness in my eyes now, and it's so hard to find your body anymore. Everything else is fading away, remember? The more you gaze helplessly into the depths of my stare, the less you can think about anything else and the less important the world around you becomes. Your body is out there, out in the real world, but you've left that world behind to sink into me. It's so distant, so far away, that you can't possibly make your legs move now. It's too much like work to stand. Too much like work to lift your heavy, heavy limbs."
Selena tries. She really, really does. She tells herself that hypnosis isn't real, that it's all just mumbo-jumbo pseudoscience used by stage magicians and creepy characters on sop operas to ensnare the gullible and weak-willed. All she needs to do is shake off her lethargy, get up, and walk away. Maybe even give Lucia a slap for good measure, just for trying something so sleazy and manipulative. She should do that right now. Right this moment. Right this second.
But 'this second' seems to stretch out like taffy in her brain, convincing Selena that she's constantly on the verge of finding the energy to stand up and leave. She always seems to need just a little more time, just another moment or two to force her drowsy limbs into action, and Lucia never gives her that time. She keeps filling Selena's mind with images of relaxation and slumber, speaking in a steady cadence that lulls Selena deeper and deeper into helpless exhaustion.
"It's like the darkness has swallowed your body all up, my sweet little girl. You're so deep in my eyes now, sinking so deep into the warm, beautiful black center of my pupil that all you can see in your mind is that soft, sleepy darkness. There's no light to see yourself by down there, and it's almost like there's no 'you' to see at all. You know that if you turned, if you turned and looked back up out of my eyes you'd see your body looking back at you like it was miles and miles and miles away, but you don't want to turn away right now. You want to keep going deeper. You want to sink down... and down... and down."
