"Up All Night"
"RRRRRRRRRRGGGGGH!" Justine wasn't exactly fishing for sympathy, but at the same time she didn't exactly mind when Dylan looked up from his laptop to where she was angrily pulling her fabric off the sewing machine. She reached for the seam ripper, and let out another snarl of frustration when it slipped out of her fingers and fell to the floor.
"Something wrong?" Dylan asked mildly, setting aside his laptop and heading over to scoop up the seam ripper as it rolled across the living room floor. He handed it over with an expression of calm concern in his hazel eyes, like this was just another problem for him to fix-more trouble than a password reset, say, but nowhere near as significant as a critical patch failing to install. They'd only been roommates for about a month, but Justine had already come to rely on that calm competence.
Especially on nights like this. "Oh, I just fucked up this whole seam," she said, taking the ripper from his hand and undoing the last ten minutes worth of work. "And it's already twelve thirty and I've still got five more hours of work to do and the whole project is due at ten AM tomorrow and it's three-quarters of my grade and I'm just so tired!" The words gushed out like ketchup coming out of an upturned bottle, but Justine didn't care. She had big dark circles under her wide brown eyes and her dark hair felt stringy and greasy from exhaustion and she was officially at the point where she felt like cranky toddler wails were the only rational response to the situation.
Dylan pulled up the spare chair and sat down next to her. "Have you tried taking a nap? They say that twenty minutes of sleep can clear your head when you're pulling an all-nighter...and it sounds like this might be an all-nighter." He gave her a rueful smile. "Not that I won't be glad of the company, but there's a good reason why you don't normally stay up with me until six in the morning."
Despite herself, Justine smiled a little at that. Part of what originally made her agree to the whole living arrangement was Dylan's assurance that with his third-shift sleep schedule and her mix of classes and work, they probably wouldn't see each other enough to get on one another's nerves even if they didn't turn out to be compatible. It wasn't just that he was probably right, it was that he delivered the joke with a wry self-deprecating humor. That kind of easy-going playfulness...along with three months of increasingly desperate trawls of the Boston real estate market that had turned up nothing in her price range that seemed even remotely likely to open up before her current lease ran out and the rent in her building tripled...sealed the deal.
Still, she couldn't keep reality at bay with jokes for more than a few seconds at a time. "I've put in two double shifts in the past week and spent every waking moment at my sewing machine for the last five days," she said. "I just know that I go to sleep now, I won't be able to make myself wake up again. I'll keep hitting the snooze button until it's time for class." She put the fabric back onto the machine, silently cursing the way that her exhaustion made even the simplest of manual tasks an exercise in frustration.
Dylan gave her an appraising look, like he was wondering if it was worth making his next suggestion. "Well, there is one other thing we could try, if you'd like. I've done a little bit of hypnosis before, just sort of playing around with it, and one of the simple things it's good for is keeping you alert when you get tired." Justine quirked an eyebrow-she didn't have any experience with hypnosis beyond seeing it in cheesy old television shows, but it usually seemed like the exact opposite of 'alert'.
But before she could say anything, Dylan gave her another one of those self-deprecating grins that he was so good at. "I know how it sounds," he said, "but you can actually get by for a while on no sleep if you spend a little time in trance every couple of hours or so. Trance and sleep aren't the same state, but they're kind of close cousins, if you get my drift. It's like taking 'Concentrate of Nap' to get you through the night. I mean, you don't have to if you don't want to, but I thought you might be interested."
Justine rubbed the back of her neck, trying not to give away with her facial expression exactly how nervous the idea made her. She still didn't know Dylan all that well-he was a little bit more than a name in the classified ads and a face in a coffee shop now, but she wasn't really sure that she was ready to stare into his eyes and...and do whatever hypnotized people did in real life instead of that old episode of 'The Bionic Woman' she watched one night when she was stoned.
But just like when she agreed to move in with Dylan, Justine didn't see a whole lot of good alternatives. She knew she couldn't stay up much more than another hour, even if she drank Red Bull until her heart exploded. She needed his help. "Okay," she said at last. "What do I need to do?"
"You don't need to do anything," he said, his voice lowering just a little and somehow managing to become even more mellow. "You can just sit right there in the chair, keep looking at me, focus all your attention on my eyes and my voice, and simply relax. From time to time your thoughts may wander, perhaps drifting to the way that the muscles in your legs are feeling more and more relaxed and loose and limp and lazy, but you'll find that they always return to my eyes and my voice."
He reached out and very gently put his hand on Justine's shoulder, rocking her slowly and evenly back and forth as he spoke. "And every time you focus on my eyes and my voice, you'll find that it becomes easier and easier and you become more and more relaxed. You may find your attention moving to your chest as you take a long, slow, steady breath for me, but when your thoughts return to my eyes and my voice, you're going to be calmer and more centered on me. Those other thoughts get left behind whenever you return to my eyes and my voice. My eyes. And my voice."
Justine nodded, or at least she thought she nodded. The way he moved her body in a gentle swaying motion made her feel a little bit dizzy, and the exhaustion she felt only seemed to make it easier to follow his instructions. Thinking was the hard part right now; staring into Dylan's eyes and listening to his voice while her mind went blank seemed so easy in comparison. She blinked heavily, once. Then she forgot to blink at all for a while.
"That's right, Justine, deeper and deeper, down and down and down, feeling your body go limp and relaxed, feeling your eyelids become heavy." Dylan's voice sounded so soothing that Justine felt like a ragdoll in his grip. "Your head feels loose on your neck, it wants to slump into deep sleep so that you can listen to my voice and lose track of everything else, feeling so relaxed now, deeper and deeper and more and more heavy and relaxed and..."
He pulled her forward quickly, gathering her forward into his arms and saying, "Sleep," at the same time. Justine felt her breath go out in a soft sigh and her body went completely limp. The bubble of awareness in her mind burst, and she descended into a peaceful darkness.
*****
The next thing Justine remembered, her eyes were opening and she was looking up at Dylan from a prone position on the couch. She didn't remember lying down. She didn't remember standing up. The whole experience seemed like a fluffy white cloud in her brain-not a gap, exactly, just a soft patch that her thoughts felt perfectly comfortable steering around. Justine kind of wished she could go back under for a while, simply to enjoy the sensation, but she had a class project to-SHIT!
"Um...how long was I...?" she asked nervously, unable to even finish the sentence. The back of her head kept lurching in panic; her sense of time felt distorted and she had no idea how long she'd spent in the pleasant fog of hypnosis, but judging by how well-rested she felt, she couldn't imagine it being any less than three hours.
"About twenty minutes," Dylan replied, glancing over at his laptop to check the time. "How do you feel?"
"I feel..." Justine's mouth burst into a wide grin as she hopped lightly to her feet. "I feel wonderful! Thank you so much!" She leaned in and gave him a spontaneous hug and a kiss on the cheek before bounding over to the sewing machine, feeling almost lighter than air as she danced across the room.
When she sat back down, the work somehow felt like it went smoother-not just because Justine felt energized and alert instead of groggy and clumsy, but better than it had in days. She felt like her hands were rock steady and her fingers as nimble as a concert pianist. She seemed to notice everything in slow motion, like an athlete 'in the zone'...although it was difficult to imagine Michael Jordan stitching up a hemline on the sideline during a timeout.
Justine felt so good that she didn't even think about what had just happened for almost twenty minutes. When she did, though, she had a sudden lurch in the back of her brain that very nearly threw her newly-acquired super-stitchery off the track for a good few seconds before her hands went on auto-pilot and allowed her brain to think about what she'd just done.
They had a rule. Well, Justine had a rule, but Dylan agreed with it completely, because they didn't know each other that well and they were going to be roommates for at least a year together and it was always awkward when one person felt differently about another than the other did about them, or if they both felt the same way about each other for two weeks and then those feelings changed and there were still eleven months left on the lease. So the rule was simple. No Romance. And Justine had...well, not broken it, but at the very least possibly given Dylan reason to think that she was considering breaking it.
