"I, uhh... I don't think it's working," Megan murmured apologetically, not quite looking away from the striating bands of black on white that flowed rapidly out from the center of the screen in front of her but definitely tilting her head in a way that suggested she was just about to if Simon didn't raise an objection in the next few seconds. She hated to disappoint him, especially because he was clearly so excited about showing her this weird new optical illusion meme he'd pulled up on his tablet and thrust into her hands, but Megan was never very good with these sort of things. Her uncle had one of those Magic Eye posters up on the door to his linen closet ever since she was a baby and she still couldn't see what it was supposed to be.

But Simon only said, "Wait a minute, it takes a little while before it happens," and Megan could tell by the sound of his voice that he'd probably get a tiny bit sulky if she gave up now. Not in a mean way, and maybe not deliberately, but Megan knew from rueful experience that she was one of those women who always had trouble saying 'no'. She inevitably did the lion's share of the work on any group project, she always tried her roommate's latest efforts at cooking no matter what they came out of the oven smelling like... and yes, she often wound up humoring the men in her social circle a bit more than was probably healthy. But it was only another minute. She could spare it.

So Megan stared at the tablet in her hands, watching the bands of alternating light and dark as they progressed rapidly out from the center of the screen to the edges too fast for the eye to follow. At least too fast for her eyes to follow--was that the problem? Was she supposed to be trying to single out a particular narrow strand of white or black and watch it the whole way out until it disappeared? Simon hadn't exactly been forthcoming with instructions on this. He'd just plopped the device down in front of her, said, "Check this out, it's really cool," and left her to figure out what she was supposed to be looking at. It was honestly a little bit frustrating.

She tried watching just a single band, just to see if it did anything different, but her eyes tripped over themselves trying to follow the incredibly fast motion and all it did was make her so intensely dizzy that she immediately returned her gaze to the very center of the screen. "Um, I don't--I don't know what it's supposed to do," she mumbled, the brief but incredibly powerful disorientation leaving her feeling light-headed and giddy. She gripped the sides of the tablet so hard her fingertips went white, not wanting to risk looking away again quite yet.

But Simon simply chuckled, resting one hand on Megan's shoulder in a way that suggested he knew exactly what she was going through and saying, "Just wait a minute," in a tone that wasn't exactly stern but certainly didn't suggest any alternatives to doing what he told her. Megan was pretty sure it had already been at least a minute, maybe even two or three, but there was no clock in the corner of the screen and Megan couldn't imagine checking the time on her phone under the circumstances.

So she continued to stare, trying hard to keep even from blinking--every time she blinked, Megan felt like her eyes briefly crossed and uncrossed refocusing on the center of the image--and waiting for whatever magic that was supposed to unfold to reveal itself. But all she felt was a growing sense of dissociation, as though her body didn't quite belong to her anymore and her head was floating just a faint few fractions of an inch above her shoulders. It would almost have been kind of pleasant, if not for the gradually increasing conviction that she couldn't make herself look away. As irrational as that sounded to her ever more abstracted mind, as absurd as she tried to tell herself it was, she couldn't help the suspicion that her gaze wasn't under her control anymore.

Her eyes crossed hard as she blinked a slow, lazy blink, and the only way to get them to uncross was to refocus her stare on the center of the screen. "I. Uhm. I need to get to...." Megan didn't know where she needed to get to, but she knew she needed an excuse to leave, and she knew the muzzy, vacant tones she heard in her own voice didn't sound at all normal. She couldn't quite make herself stop watching, and she definitely couldn't make herself do anything so rude as shove Simon's tablet back into his hands and tell her she had no idea what it was supposed to do but what it was doing, she didn't like--but a little white lie that made it obligatory to leave sounded like a very good idea right now.

It backfired. "Of course," Simon cooed, almost unctuously sympathetic. "Here, let me walk you there. You just keep looking at the tablet, I'll take you." He guided Megan to her feet, and put his arm around her waist with a familiarity that shocked her in a distant, glassy way as he walked her out of the student union. Megan's body followed along automatically, trained by years of cell phone addiction to avoid obstacles that only existed in the fringes of her peripheral vision... but it was different this time. The whole world grayed out around the pulsing, flowing bands of light and shadow, and within seconds she didn't even know which way they were heading. Only the screen existed. Only the image mattered, now shimmering with a thousand impossible colors every time she inevitably succumbed to the urge to blink.

And Megan was right. She really couldn't look away now, not even when she tried.

They went through a door, and then into an elevator, something Megan only vaguely understood from the slight pauses in their motion and the sounds around them. Even her kinesthetic sense felt vaguely numbed by the constant fixation on the screen in front of her--when the doors closed and they went up, Megan registered the downward force on her body only as another kind of dizziness that made her cross her eyes again in pure positional confusion. It took longer and longer each time to uncross them, and the effort of trying made her eyelids so heavy that it inexorably made them sting with the desire to blink all over again.

Megan eventually realized Simon was bending her over forward to lie on her belly on top of his bed, and a tiny glimmer of vestigial concern prompted her to recognize the unusual degree of intimate privacy this new setting lent to their previously casual interaction. "I... uhhhmmm," she slurred out, unable to pick a specific worry out of the mush her thoughts seemed to have dissolved into but nonetheless feeling like she needed to voice some kind of objection simply to prove she wasn't a total pushover. Despite her own growing doubts on that particular subject.

But Simon just brushed a lock of honey blonde hair out of Megan's face and propped the tablet up onto a pillow. "Wait a minute, let me get you out of those uncomfortable clothes," he said, his voice now so politely firm and insistent that Megan couldn't possibly gainsay him even though her clothes didn't feel remotely uncomfortable until the moment he mentioned them to her. But somehow, she supposed through the power of suggestion, the instant he brought it up Megan's t-shirt and jeans suddenly seemed to constrict around her until the only thought in her muzzy brain was shifting and wriggling to help him remove every last stitch.

Her growing susceptibility to suggestions, combined with her surprising inability to form thoughts of her own and her complete and total nudity felt like a definite cause for alarm... but Megan couldn't really stir anything up in her empty head beyond a faint, abstract sense of disquiet, and even that was ebbing further and further into numb and hazy lassitude with every passing moment. She'd held out a momentary hope that when Simon pulled her shirt up and over her head it might break the spell the image held over her, but instead it simply felt like a longer, more dizzying blink and when she felt her eyes crossing this time they simply refused to uncross. The tablet was propped up just a little too close, and Megan couldn't make her vision focus anymore. It was all just a pleasant blur to her now.

Simon sat down on the bed next to her, resting his hand on the small of Megan's back and stroking her soft skin with an increasingly possessive familiarity until his fingers were rubbing her pussy all over. Megan opened her mouth to... to... she didn't even know what she was going to do, whether she was about to object or consent or even just to moan in helpless pleasure... but all of them simply felt too much like effort now, and she simply let her jaw hang slack and vacant while she drooled onto the bedspread and let her eyes completely glaze over.

Megan had no idea how long she spent like that, staring in a thoughtless daze while Simon teased her pussy until it was leaking all over her thighs and her breath came in rapid, panting gasps. Time had ceased having any meaning for her anymore, and so when Simon said again, "Wait a minute," she couldn't really attach any kind of real understanding to the words. She just knew that his fingers had been there, sinking easily into her cunt to rub her swollen clit, and then they were gone and it was just her and the blurry screen for an indefinite stretch of mindless lust. It didn't even occur to her to masturbate until he came back.

He did return, though, stepping in behind Megan and pushing his cock between her slick and tingling labia as he began to pound her soaking cunt. She noticed the slight sticking sensation of latex inside her, and felt a tiny flicker of relief that he was wearing a condom, but that only made her drowsy mind relax even further and soon her eyelids were well over half shut and her tongue was lolling uselessly out of her mouth while Simon fucked her to one climax after another until they began to run together in her head.

It felt almost unfair how good he was making her body feel right now, and for that matter how blissfully content Megan felt to simply stare and relax and let her brains leak out of her ears while she sank ever deeper into the screen until her eyelids simply refused to stay open any longer. She wanted to be angry at him, to wake up filled with a righteous indignation over his manipulative tactics and at least spend a few minutes putting him on blast before reluctantly asking him to do it to her all over again. But the warm, mellow euphoria inside her empty head made everything feel too good to be upset. Too happy. Megan's consciousness slowly eroded into oblivion as even the baseline narrative of her memories faded into obedient rapture.

And without any real emotion to help her resist, or any thought to help the events of the afternoon stick in her memory, Megan found it easy to go along with Simon's murmured suggestion that she didn't need to remember any of this. He lay on the bed with her once his cock was sated, petting her back and whispering gently in her ears, and Megan accepted every last word of it without so much as a glimmer of defiance. Deep down, she was already waiting for the next time Simon showed her his tablet and put her back into trance... and although it would probably be more than a minute before his prick made it back up to full mast, she was happy to wait as long as it took for him to fuck her again, too.

THE END