"So if it's not affecting you," Dane said, fixing Lana with a piercing stare, "then why are you still sitting here?" Lana froze. Not literally, because as Dane had already noticed, she was already sitting almost suspiciously still on the couch with her head tilted back against the comfy cushions and her legs flopped out aimlessly on the floor. But her breath caught in her throat for a moment and she felt a rosy blush beginning to spread across her pale pink cheeks despite her best efforts to play it cool. She looked back down at Dane's ring, grateful for a chance to look anywhere but into his knowing eyes for a little while.

"I, um, I just don't need to," she mumbled, all too aware of the drowsy tones creeping into her voice as she stared at the sparkling sapphire depths of the crystal set into the ring. "I don't have anything to prove, here. I'm just... um, comfortable, that's all." 'Comfortable' didn't begin to describe it, if Lana was being honest with herself; she'd only been playing Dane's little hypnosis game for what felt like a few minutes, and already her limbs felt utterly boneless with relaxation. If she didn't know better, she'd swear she was sinking into the couch cushions like they were made out of quicksand.

A few minutes... Lana's brow furrowed as she struggled to remember exactly how long she'd been down in the basement with Dane. Most of the party was going on upstairs, and the few people who had wandered through had sensed the subdued and intimate energy between her and her brother's college friend and kept a respectful distance. Maybe a little too respectful, in fact. Not that she wasn't enjoying the way she felt right now, but she was beginning to wonder if maybe she hadn't bitten off a little more than she could chew after all. She might welcome a bit of a distraction to keep her mind from sinking deeper into Dane's warm, soft--

"Comfortable," Dane chuckled, giving Lana a smug, crooked little grin that startled her out of her reverie and made her feel unnervingly like he'd been reading her mind and knew exactly what word her brain was going to supply next. "Just like you're sinking into a warm bath, isn't it, Lana? The water keeps rising, engulfing more and more of you in that soothing, sensual heat. We were up to your hips, weren't we? That tingling, pleasant sensation flowing into your lap, unkinking your muscles into peaceful relaxation, making you float right where you are as you stare into my ring and think of sparkling blue tropical waters."

Despite herself, Lana let out a deep breath, sighing out her tension as her shoulders slumped visibly and her eyelids drooped another significant fraction of an inch. She didn't want to give in... or at least, she didn't want to give in quite so obviously, immediately after insisting it wasn't affecting her like she was a drowsy toddler at naptime... but Dane had such a lovely, smooth baritone, and the ring really was very eye-catching. And Lana did love her long, hot baths. Just her, a romance novel, the warm water, and her fingers--

Lana's fingers twitched. She caught herself squirming. And for the first time, she thought that maybe she really did need to use that safeword he'd given her earlier.

"The tide keeps flowing up and up and up your body, Lana," Dane continued, seemingly oblivious to her growing consternation. "You can feel that warm water lapping around your belly button now, submerging everything below it in soothing relaxation, leaving everything below the waist floating in peace and pleasure." Oh god, did he know? Did he realize that this was... Lana's hips squirmed ever so slightly on the couch, all the deep, drowsy catalepsy in the world not quite enough to keep her from reacting to the suggestions of liquid bliss as they saturated into the parts of her body that Dane tactfully wasn't mentioning. She felt wet, and it wasn't from any kind of post-hypnotic effect.

It... it really wasn't her fault, Lana tried to tell herself. She was just responding to the, the natural association she had between bath time and self-pleasure time. She was a young woman with a naturally high sex drive, and one of six kids in a house really only intended to hold three. Of course she'd gotten used to taking advantage of the privacy of the bathroom to masturbate until she got away to college, and of course that automatic connection was still there in the back of her head. And with her mind feeling comfortable and relaxed, and being as she was in the company of a handsome young man she'd been trying very hard this whole Christmas vacation to pretend she didn't have a crush on--

Oh shit. She really was incredibly horny for Dane, wasn't she? Lana blushed deeper, hoping that her arousal and embarrassment wasn't written all over her face and knowing full well that the more she tried to hide it the worse it would become.

Already, she noticed that Dane was leaning a little further forward in his seat, his eyes glittering with excitement as he watched her relax deeper into trance. "The tide is up to your chest, Lana, lapping away at your arms and hands and raising them along with it as they float in the deep, warm water." She could see in her peripheral vision that the power of suggestion was genuinely tugging her limbs up into the air, bringing them out and in front of her in the traditional sleepwalker pose that decades of media had conditioned her to associate with victims of hypnosis. It was quietly astonishing... but that wasn't really what was on Lana's mind right now.

The water was up to her chest. She could feel it against her nipples, really feel it as surely as she felt the couch against her back and the floor beneath her feet. That tickling sensation of the surface tension slowly creeping its way up her stiff, puffy nips was right there in her mind, so perfect and profound that it was utterly inescapable, and if Lana had ever doubted that hypnosis was real she lost those doubts in an instant at the genuine illusion her own subconscious was weaving around her. She let out a tiny whimper before she could stop herself, and once she realized what she'd done her cheeks reddened even further.

"That's a good girl," Dane purred gently. "That's a very good girl." The tone in his voice made it clear what was on his mind, and it suddenly hit Lana just how flirtatious she'd been when she agreed to play the trance game with him. She hadn't meant it, of course, or at least she hadn't believed it would wind up working on her... but she'd definitely hinted a lot stronger than she intended to that she wouldn't mind being helpless in Dane's power if he could somehow manage to arrange it instead of merely boasting about his skill with hypnosis.

"Sinking deeper into the warmth for me, now, Lana, all the way up to your neck." Or maybe it hadn't been accidental at all. Maybe she'd always hoped that she would lose this particular game, and lose herself in the undertow of Dane's soothing baritone voice until she was finally helpless to stop herself from doing what she'd secretly wanted to do for damn near two weeks now. Maybe the party at Lacey's was the right time and the right place and the right fucking excuse to sneak off somewhere private with an older boy and relieve the tension she'd been feeling for far too long.

"All the way up to your chin, and you can feel the tide inside your head now, submerging your thoughts one by one." It would certainly explain why she hadn't thought about her safeword in so long, Lana thought ruefully. She had an out, she knew it, but she just... she kept forgetting about it. It kept slipping her mind, sliding into the sparkling blue waters that looked just like the ring on Dane's fingers and sinking out of view. Even now, even when she was doing her best to concentrate on it and tell herself that this was definitely going too far and she was wriggling and squirming on the couch in obvious arousal, she couldn't quite make herself remember the actual phrase she was supposed to use. Because deep down, she didn't really want to.

"Sinking deeper and deeper for me, Lana, just a few last little islands of thought remaining in that sleepy, drowsy head," Dane continued remorselessly. She couldn't see his face anymore, not with only a few slivers of blue remaining in her increasingly restricted field of vision, but she could imagine his expression. She knew exactly how he must be looking at her right now, and she couldn't stop her legs from spreading wider and wider as her imagination painted a perfect picture of his wide, excited eyes and the bulge in his pants. The safeword tumbled down through fathoms of stillness, lost in the darkness of some oceanic chasm as she embraced the possibilities of the moment.

"One by one, they vanish beneath the surface, disappearing until there's just that endless, smooth, placid blue and you can't think at all anymore." Lana felt him take her hand and tug her gently to her feet, but she couldn't even be surprised by how easily her body moved under his direction. That required thought and volition and will, and Lana didn't have any of those left now. She didn't want them, either; they would only have gotten in the way of the pleasant heat that settled between her thighs and made her clit throb with lazy, languid sexual energy. When she heard a door close behind her, all she could do was look forward to the moment she realized she'd been dreamily picturing for months now.

It was a spare bathroom and not the fantasy boudoir she'd been daydreaming about, and Dane bent her over the counter and flipped up her skirt instead of slowly, sensuously undressing her one article of clothing at a time. But something about the urgency he displayed when he pulled down her panties felt more potent and powerful than any daydream could ever have been, and Lana didn't need any foreplay to make her pussy wet. He'd been teasing her with his voice and his words and his erotic, hypnotic power for so long that she was absolutely desperate to be fucked.

She was glad he was using a condom. Lana didn't think she would have remembered to ask him, and even though she was on the pill, she appreciated his caution. Not that she gave it that much thought at the time--she was too busy gasping in shocked delight at the way that she felt his penetration that much more intensely without consciousness to get in the way, and the thin latex only registered as another form of sensation with every thrust. But she felt a subtle sense of comfort and ease that only made the sex even better and the safeword dissolve into orgasmic bliss. Lana ground her hips back against him and whimpered meekly as his shaft rubbed back and forth against her swollen, sensitive clit.

Lana didn't know how many times he made her cum. The orgasms blended seamlessly into one another, her deep trance dropping out the moments in between and leaving her floating on a warm, drifting tide of pure ecstasy that left her shaking and trembling by the time she felt Dane's hips strain for a long moment in desperate effort. It was better than anything she'd imagined, better than the awkward teenage fumblings she'd endured from her ex-boyfriend would ever lead her to believe possible, and whatever happened next, Lana knew she would always treasure this moment.

What happened next was her knees giving way, causing her to tumble to the floor so rapidly that she banged her chin on the counter and bit her tongue. But even that didn't diminish the joy of the evening. Not when she could still feel herself floating on that tide of peaceful bliss. She chuckled ruefully, and after a moment of surprise and anxiety she heard her new lover joining in.

THE END