“Head Games”
Ian thought his arms were about to fall off by the time Madison finally opened the door. Not that he blamed her or anything; if anyone should feel bad about the armload of games that seemed to be getting heavier by the second, it was him. He should really have grabbed a duffel bag or something, but his original plan only involved bringing along a copy of Munchkin, and that was easy to carry.
It was only at the last minute that he decided to grab Uno, just in case Madison wanted to play something a little bit easier to learn, and then his copy of Zombies, just in case she wanted to play something more involved, and then Red Dragon Inn, just in case she wanted to play something that was sillier, and then his copy of Citadels, just in case she wanted to play something more strategic, and then his chess board, just in case she wanted to play something classic, and then a couple of card games because they fit in his jacket pocket and he wanted to give her a lot of options, and somehow he made it all the way out to the car before it occurred to him that he was now carrying a significant portion of his game cabinet and he should have put it all in something.
Luckily, Madison didn’t seem to think he looked like an idiot carrying everything. Or if she did, at least she thought it was funny. She wore an amused half-smile on her face, the same half-smile she had at work when other people were absolutely losing it over the new client’s latest bullshit. Like she was just letting all the stress flow around this little bubble of Maddy-ness, and inside the Maddy-bubble she could see the funny side of even the biggest crisis. Ian thought about that smile a lot. It was one of the big reasons he was so excited to find out that she loved tabletop gaming too.
Not that he was thinking this was a date or anything. That would be really rude and pushy and presumptuous and a total jerk move on Ian’s part. Madison suggested they have a board game night, and okay, yes, he did get flustered enough to bring along about a quarter of his collection, but he wasn’t about to get so flustered that he acted like a creeper. Unless she dropped some hints that she was interested in something more, Ian was going to treat this as strictly, purely, one hundred percent platonic.
Unless she already had, and he’d missed it. Ian was the first to admit that when it came to flirting, he probably wouldn’t recognize anything short of a woman taking her clothes off and shouting, “LET’S GO HAVE WILD, PASSIONATE SEX IN A VARIETY OF ROOMS AND POSITIONS!” While holding a neon sign over her head that said, ‘I Lust for Your Body’. Even then, he’d probably just turn around to see who she was talking to.
Madison broke into his train of thought. “Come in, come in!” she said, scooping half the games off the top and carrying them in. “Here, let me,” she continued, “if I don’t at least give you a clear field of vision you’d never make it to the table. Sorry about the mess, I tried to tidy up but I have an SCA event next week and everything’s just chaos right now.” She gestured with her free hand to the bolts of cloth propped up against almost every available vertical surface. “I always overcommit for these things. Anyhow, drop the games on the table and let’s see what you brought.”
Ian wound his way past scattered shoes and over to the dinner table. “Oh, I just grabbed a bunch of stuff,” he said modestly, trying not to sound boastful despite the fact that he was, after all, talking about his pride and joy. “Um, I grabbed a copy of Grave Robbers From Outer Space, and We Didn’t Playtest This at All, and Cthulhu 500, and...um...” He trailed into silence as he noticed a sizeable freestanding cabinet next to the table, one that appeared to have its own copy of almost everything he brought. He looked over at Madison with a new light of respect in his eyes.
She shrugged modestly in response. “Sorry, I probably should have made it clearer that when I said, ‘You don’t need to bring anything,’ I really meant it.” She looked at the stack of games on the table, then over at her collection. “Can you imagine if we ever moved in together? Just sorting out the duplicates would probably take a whole day.”
Okay, Ian told himself, that had to be a hint. Didn’t it? Was that flirting, or did she just need a roommate? She might have heard Ian mention to Steve that his lease was coming due and he wanted to find a better place, and maybe she was just making a joke about it, and acting all weird about an off-hand comment would be totally creepy. So instead he just replied with a joke of his own. “Nah, it’d take no time at all. Neither one of us could give up our personal copies.”
Madison snorted. “Point.” She went over to the game cabinet and pulled out a board game Ian didn’t recognize, not that his pride was vaguely stung by the fact that Madison had games he’d never even heard of or anything. “I was thinking we could try this one for a start? It’s a pretty quick play, and it’s a good icebreaker. We can just do a round or two, and then see what we’re in the mood for.”
She set the box on the table, and Ian took a look at it. After just a glance, he no longer felt guilty about not having heard of this one—judging by the production values, ‘Brian Shaw Games’ was barely a step up from making stuff in their basement. The logo on the side of the plain cardboard box was just a little skull with lightning bolts shooting out from it, with a slogan that said, ‘Scrambling words and brains since 2014.’ The top of the box had the same skull-and-lightning-bolt picture, only larger, and the words ‘Brain Teaser’ in large letters written in one of the ‘zanier’ fonts.
Ian looked at her, a dubious expression on his face. “You sure this one’s...um, I mean...?” He tried to find a delicate way to finish that sentence, conscious of the idea that Brian Shaw might be a friend or a family member that Madison helped with the game. “Um, it just looks a little rough, is all.”
“Oh, it’s more fun than it looks. Here.” Madison opened up the box to reveal a folded board, a scattered handful of small poker chips in a variety of colors, and a stack of white notecards bound together with a rubber band. “It’s really simple, The board has a bunch of words on it, and the cards have a list of words from the board. I read off the list to you, and you find the words on the list and put chips on each word. Then we switch, and I try to beat your time. I mean, it’s a little unfair, because I’ve played before and you haven’t, but as long as you don’t mind losing your first round or two...”
Ian tried to let that go. He really did. There was a tiny split second of a fraction of an instant of a pause where he told himself that nobody liked a hyper-competitive jerk, and she probably wasn’t intending that to come off as a challenge, and he could totally let it go and not make this all about winning because the fun was in playing the game...but all that ran into a truth as solid as a brick wall. Ian didn’t like losing.
On the surface, he just gave Madison a slightly fixed grin and said, “You’re on.” He sat down at the table and helped her stack up the chips (“Since it’s just the two of us, we don’t really need to separate the colors,” she said, but they did anyway—some gaming habits were just impossible to break) and unfold the board. Ian was a little bit surprised to see that it actually had some nice design work; the words on the board were written in a variety of different fonts and sizes and hues, and they sprawled at angles and twisted around each other in a way that almost felt dizzying.
Madison took off the rubber band and pulled a card from the stack. “Okay if we just use the clock on the wall as a timer? I think my phone has a stopwatch app if you’d rather get precise, but the game didn’t come with one. It would have cost too much.” The way she said it really made Ian want to ask who Brian Shaw was, but he pushed the thought away. He needed to focus if he was going to do well on this.
“The clock is fine,” he said, sliding a stack of the red chips his way. (Ian had been picking red ever since he was four, and by now he barely even noticed himself doing it.) There were eight of them, presumably one for each word. “Ready when you are.” He fixed his eyes on the board, waiting for Madison to begin.
“Okay, here we go,” Madison replied, glancing up at the clock and then back down to the card. “Your words are: Down, Deeper, Eyes, Heavy, Relaxed, Sleepy, Soothing, Trance. I’ll repeat them as you go, so you don’t forget. Down. Deeper. Eyes. Heavy. Relaxed. Sleepy. Soothing. Trance. Down...”
Ian picked up the central theme of the card right away, but guessing themes wasn’t the goal of the game. Finding words was. He began to scan the board from left to right and from top to bottom, searching for any of the items on Madison’s list. It was definitely harder than he thought it would be—the different fonts and sizes and angles conspired to make it seem like there was a pattern to the way the board was organized, and Ian had to concentrate to keep his eyes from following that pattern in random directions. There were also a lot of very similar words, too—he almost put his chip down on ‘Relax’ and ‘Relaxing’ before realizing that they weren’t quite what he was supposed to be looking for.
“Deeper,” Madison intoned as Ian continued to search. “Eyes. Heavy. Relaxed. Sleepy. Soothing. Trance. Down. Deeper...” At first Ian thought it would distract him, but thankfully she was pitching her voice low and speaking softly so that he could just let her speech fade into the background while he focused on the board. Even so, he almost tripped himself up—he almost put a token on ‘Focus’ when his eyes passed over the word just as he was thinking it, and he had to listen through a full rotation of Madison’s list before he could remember for sure whether he was supposed to be looking for it or not.
“Eyes,” Madison continued, still at that same methodical pace. “Heavy. Relaxed. Sleepy. Soothing. Trance. Down. Deeper. Eyes...” Ian’s own eyes crossed once or twice as he scanned the board too rapidly; he kept thinking that he spotted a word out of the corner of his field of vision, but when he looked directly at it, it would be ‘Deep’ instead of ‘Deeper’ or ‘Drowsy’ instead of ‘Sleepy’, and then he lost his place and had to start over. It felt like a small eternity before he finally found ‘Soothing’ and put one of his tokens on it. One down, seven to go...
“Heavy. Relaxed. Sleepy,” Madison said, continuing her recitation of the list. The endless repetition gave the whole experience a timeless quality—since the clock was behind him, he really didn’t know how long any of this was taking. Which technically meant that Madison could cheat if she wanted to, but Ian couldn’t imagine that she would. She seemed too nice for that. His eyes momentarily glazed as he passed over ‘Trust’ and ‘Listen’ on the board for the fifth time, but he ignored them. He was looking for... “Soothing. Trance. Down. Deeper. Eyes. Heavy.”
He gave a tiny grunt of triumph as he found ‘Relaxed’ and ‘Trance’ back to back, but his momentary rush of elation was negated when he spent a solid minute looking for ‘Soothing’ before remembering that he’d already found it. He wondered if he should ask Madison to stop reciting the words he’d already put a token on, but he didn’t want to interrupt her to ask and she didn’t seem to have any intention of pausing in her recitation of the list. “Relaxed. Sleepy. Soothing. Trance. Down. Deeper. Eyes. Heavy. Relaxed...”
Ian put down a token on ‘Heavier’, then picked it up again a few seconds later when he heard Madison go through the list and realized his mistake. “Sleepy. Soothing. Trance. Down. Deeper. Eyes. Heavy. Relaxed. Sleepy...” He felt like he should remember the words better after so many repetitions, but instead it seemed to have the opposite effect. Everything blended into a muddle with the words on the board until they all sounded alike after a while, just a mess of ‘Lazy’ and ‘Deep’ and ‘Hazy’ and ‘Fuzzy’ and ‘Blank’ and ‘Thoughtless’ and ‘Mindless’ and ‘Obedient’ and ‘Sleep’ and ‘Sleepy’ and ‘Down’ and...
Ian blinked rapidly. He stared at the spot his glassy eyes had just passed over, almost unwilling to believe his luck. But there they were, just like on the list Madison kept reciting. “Soothing. Trance. Down. Deeper. Eyes. Heavy. Relaxed. Sleepy. Soothing...” He slapped his token on ‘Sleepy’ and ‘Down’ with a sense of triumph. Just three words to go, and he would be able to call time. He forced himself to go over the board methodically, saying each word in his head as he went to make sure he didn’t miss any of them. ‘Hypnotized’. ‘Drowsy’. ‘Submissive’. ‘Blank’. ‘Sleepy’. ‘Gaze’. ‘Heavier’. ‘Body’. ‘Relaxing’. ‘Going’. ‘Deep’. ‘Thoughts’. ‘Fading’. ‘Mind’. ‘Wandering’. ‘So’. ‘Relaxed’. ‘Can’t’. ‘Think’. ‘Eyes’...
Ian stared at the word for a long moment, suddenly and inexplicably confused about what to do with it. He knew it was important, because Madison kept repeating it, along with all the others—“Trance, down, deeper, eyes, heavy, relaxed, sleepy, soothing, trance—” But it took him a surprising amount of time to remember what he was supposed to do next. He felt like he was ‘Floating’, like his ‘Brain’ was ‘Empty’, like he was ‘Confused’ and ‘Foggy’...he finally put a token on the word, but he no longer felt like he could explain exactly why he was doing it. It was just something he’d been told to do, so he did it.
“Down deeper,” Madison said, the words seeming to chain themselves together into sentences in Ian’s mind. “Eyes heavy, relaxed. Sleepy, soothing trance. Down...” He forced himself to focus on the board, letting all the other thoughts flow out of his head so that he could concentrate his attention on finding the last two words. ‘Heavy’ finally came to him, almost near the bottom, but when Ian got to the end, he realized he had missed the last word on his list. He went back to the top and started scanning from top to bottom rather than from left to right, hoping to spot it the second time.
“Deeper,” Madison said, seeming almost to emphasize the one word that continued to elude him. But she kept saying all the other words, too, softly purring out, “Eyes heavy, relaxed, sleepy. Soothing trance, down deeper,” and Ian kept finding himself staring vacantly at the board and listening to her voice while his eyes drifted to random words like ‘Surrender’ and ‘Obey’. He dragged his eyes back to the side, trying to fix each word in turn to keep from losing his place, muttering the word he was looking for under his breath to keep it fixed in his head.
“Deeper deeper deeper,” he mumbled softly, trying so hard to keep his ‘Tired’ ‘Eyes’ from ‘Slipping’ ‘Shut’ as he read every word, one after another, looking for ‘Deeper’ but not finding it. He felt so ‘Exhausted’ now, his ‘Thoughts’ felt ‘Loose’ and ‘Dreamy’ and ‘Muzzy’ and he couldn’t ‘Focus’, but repeating his final word over and over kept him concentrating on it. “Deeper, deeper, deeper...”
He saw out of the corner of his eyes that Madison had that beautiful half-smile on her lips again, but he couldn’t look away from the board. He had to keep going, had to win the game, couldn’t stop ‘Staring’ ‘Blankly’ at the ‘Hypnotic’ words and ‘Relax’ ‘More’ as he went “Deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper...” Ian felt strangely light-headed, and his eyes crossed again and again as he strained to keep them open. He had no idea how long he’d been staring now, but his pride wouldn’t let him stop.
Madison must have noticed that he’d found all but one of the words, because now she was only saying, “Deeper,” too. She kept repeating it, fitting it into the gaps between his repetitions so that it felt like they were saying it back and forth to each other. “Deeper.” “Deeper.” “Deeper.” “Deeper.” “Deeper.” “Deeper.” Ian lost track of whether he was saying it or simply parroting it. It didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was finding it. A second search of the board had produced nothing.
Finally, in desperation, Ian simply let his gaze wander over the board at random, just following the patterns of font and color and hoping to spot it by chance. He saw so many other words, words ‘Hypnotized’ and ‘Lost’ and ‘Dazed’ that seemed to resonate in his mind like an echoing chorus under the constant repetitions of “Deeper”, but he couldn’t find the word. And he couldn’t stop looking until he found it. And he couldn’t stop listening until he found it. And it kept getting harder, the words were now nothing but a blur as his eyes went glassy and unfocused, but he had to find “Deeper”, he had to go “Deeper”, he had to be “Deeper...”
Madison reached across the table and brushed her hand over Ian’s face. Obediently, his eyes slipped shut and he slumped into his chair with an air of boneless relaxation.
“That’s a good boy,” Madison cooed. Ian heard her step out from behind the table, and a moment later she took his hand in hers. “You’re a very good boy, and you played so well. You feel very happy and relaxed right now, don’t you?”
Ian wanted to speak, but it felt like too much effort. Instead, he gave a tiny nod. Even though he couldn’t remember finding the last word, he felt like he’d won somehow. It felt even better than just winning, though—Ian seemed to be floating on a warm cloud of bliss. When Madison guided him to his feet, he couldn’t shake the sensation that they weren’t quite touching the ground.
“I think we’re going to play a different game now,” she said, guiding him carefully through into her bedroom. “One I’ve been wanting to play with you for a while now, only you didn’t quite seem to notice.” She sat him down on the bed and gently toppled him backward. Ian felt his body relaxing even more as he sagged into the mattress. “Is this something you would want if you were awake?” she asked, gently resting her hand on his chest.
Ian didn’t quite understand what she meant by that—his mind felt too foggy to process words properly—but he knew that he wanted this. All of this. Even the things he couldn’t really think clearly about anymore. He mumbled a tiny, whimpered affirmative, his voice strangled by a powerful arousal that he hadn’t even noticed before now.
“Good boy,” Madison whispered in his ear as she slowly undressed him. “Good boy.” She took his cock in her hands, playing with it as though she’d found a new toy...or a new game. “You know, there was a word in that list that we had to find somewhere outside the board. But I think you know exactly where it is now, don’t you? It’s in your mind, my heavy, relaxed, sleepy boy. Go ahead and say it for me, knowing that you’ll always be able to find it now.”
“Deeper,” Ian moaned out, as Madison slid onto his cock and his thoughts faded away into pleasure.