Joyce blinked in confusion, certain she must have misheard Geoffrey's words. She looked over at the clock on her bedside table, but it still read 7:32, the same time it displayed just moments ago when she and Geoffrey went up to her bedroom to enjoy a little 'trance time' together. (Which was very probably going to be followed by a little 'Geoffrey fucks Joyce's deeply hypnotized brains out with toys, fingers and cock time', but Joyce always liked to pretend that there wasn't an unbroken line stretching directly from hypnosis to sex in her brain, at least until the moment she went under. At which point she quite blissfully stopped thinking altogether.)
She looked down at herself, wondering if she'd somehow been hypnotized into remembering the wrong time on the clock then or now, but her clothes were still on. That was usually a good sign that they hadn't done any significant play yet-their sessions usually took only a few minutes before they got Joyce turned on to the point that she was begging to be naked for her Master. And she didn't see a scenario where Geoffrey would use his nefarious wiles to entrance her and take her will and thoughts away and then have her put her clothes right back on. Something strange was happening here.
She looked over at Geoffrey, whose ruddy cheeks spread wide in an innocent smile. His blue eyes were the absolute picture of tender care and affection, but he didn't look like he was trying to pull anything. Which meant that he probably was-Joyce wouldn't call him sadistic or anything, but he loved to mess with her head at times like this. (Which made him the perfect match for Joyce, who loved having her head messed with.) But he usually messed with her head to send her deeper into hypnosis, not to...um...she really must have heard that wrong. "I'm sorry?" she said, hoping to prompt at least some kind of clarification from him.
"I said 'wake up', Joyce." His hand gently caressed her pale cheeks, trailing down to her neck in a gesture more suited to relaxing her into trance than pulling her out of it. "It's time to wake for me now." He shifted position slightly to look directly into her eyes, which felt like the textbook definition of 'mixed signals' to her trance-hungry brain. "Time to come out of trance."
Joyce furrowed her brow, so busy trying to figure out where Geoffrey had come up with this and where he was going with it that she almost forgot to respond. "I, um...I'm not in trance," she said, not even trying to disguise the bewilderment in her voice. "I'm awake."
"Are you sure?" Geoffrey replied, his voice calm and confident. He sounded so certain that for a moment, Joyce felt like it must be her who was misremembering. She was very used to forgetting things she was told to forget, and remembering things she was told to remember, after all. But she was also very good at accepting without thinking...so didn't the fact that she was thinking about this mean it couldn't be hypnosis? Or did it mean it had to be hypnosis, because her brain wasn't processing it correctly?
She must have spent at least a few moments woolgathering over the question, because Geoffrey's voice cut smoothly through her thoughts as he gently prompted her again. "You sound very confused, dear," he said, his hands stroking her face and neck in an easy, familiar manner. "Confusion comes from trance, doesn't it?"
Joyce was tempted to say 'yes', if only because it felt so deliciously easy to agree with everything Geoffrey said. But if she was hypnotized, surely she'd remember the missing time. Or remember forgetting the missing time. Or something. She at least felt reasonably sure that she didn't feel like she'd been hypnotized-her mind and body both felt too eager for trance to believe that she'd already spent some time under the influence. "I, I'm not confused," she said, wishing she didn't sound quite so uncertain when she was talking about how certain she was. "I don't think I was hypnotized."
Geoffrey gave her a gentle, insistent kiss. "But you don't know that you weren't," he said as Joyce tried to make her eyes refocus. He'd used kisses as triggers often enough that her subconscious sometimes decided that he probably intended to hypnotize her even in the absence of a specific suggestion, and her brain was already pretty uncertain about whether she should be awake or not even before he kissed her.
But he'd told her to wake...and she was a very good girl for him. Joyce did her best to keep her mind from drifting, staring at his lips to help herself focus on his words as he continued explaining to her in a soft, soothing voice. "It's so hard to be certain of anything right now," he purred, "because the moment you went up those stairs, your will was already sinking deep into my hypnotic control and your mind was already preparing to surrender to me. You can't be sure when you went into trance, because everything feels like trance when you're with Master. You want to be hypnotized, don't you?"
Joyce felt a little surge of heat between her legs, even as she tried to find a way to agree with Geoffrey without actually admitting he was right. "Well, yes, I do, but I'm still, um...awake." The word felt odd and clumsy to her, like she should be saying something witty and flirtatious about wishing she weren't, but she was too perplexed by this odd line of conversation to think of anything clever. Geoffrey seemed so insistent, so certain, and as a result Joyce felt anything but.
