Stop!
Chapter 4 — Stop Talking
For just a second, Jen wasn’t entirely sure if she’d gone mad. Once she’d pressed that button, there was nobody else in the whole world she could talk to. If she heard anyone else saying they had nobody to talk to, she’d assume they were being melodramatic, but in this case it was literally true. Carlos’s invention stopped time, so there was nobody in the world she could share her feelings with. In the circumstances, it had seemed entirely natural to start talking to Carlos—frozen like a statue—as a way to get her thoughts in order. She was talking to herself really, just trying to take her mind off the fact that if the watch went wrong, she’d be stuck without any human contact at all. Even just one voice made the world feel less empty. Half the things she’d said were silly and frivolous. She certainly hadn’t meant it literally when she said he’d be kneeling before her. It was just an expression of how much she loved the feeling of being in control. But then she’d said the magic words “Carry on!” and pressed the button, and …
“Why are you on your knees?” she eventually asked. She’d tried to find a more discreet way to put it, but really that was all there was to it. At first she didn’t have a clue, but then as she said it she remembered that kneeling had cropped up momentarily in her time-stop soliloquy. That didn’t tell her what was going on, but it at least made it less worrying than an action completely out of the blue.
“My legs were getting tired,” Carlos shrugged, apparently seeing nothing unusual about kneeling on the floor in front of one of his friends. “A bit weird, I guess. I’ve only been here ten minutes, but my legs feel like I’ve been standing still for an hour. I’d guess maybe stopping time doesn’t stop you getting tired, but that would just be crazy.”
Jen nodded. Kneeling would take the weight off his legs, that much was clear enough, but so would sitting on the sofa like a normal person. But it seemed he didn’t find anything strange in the answer he’d just given. Maybe he’d thought about it, and then decided that the chances of hiding his erection were better if he just dropped to his knees straight away. He did seem embarrassed about that, even though he had no idea what might be turning him on so much.
“Have you heard of subliminal messages?” she asked, again after a few seconds of thought and finding no better way to express herself.
“Yeah. Single frames in a TV show, or inaudible messages buried in music CDs. Yet another crackpot technology invented by conspiracy theorists to explain how the government are taking over people’s minds. It’s a myth. Why?”
“Oh, just wondering. I might have said something about kneeling down while you were frozen, just talking to myself, and then as soon as time started again you were kneeling. I wondered if maybe…”
“No.” He sounded pretty firm, “I couldn’t hear anything when you had the watch running, because for me no time was passing to hear it in. I’ve looked at genuine scientific studies, not the Internet rumour mill, and I think I’m one of the most qualified people to say that subliminal messages have no measurable effect.” Jen nodded, though from her own experiences in the past 2 minutes she felt that she already knew better. He’d got horny from seeing her naked, even though it was for literally no time, and he’d done what she told him to. The problem with that was how to prove it to Carlos: Even if she stopped time again and told him to do something, he’d rationalise it as easily as he had the first instruction, and wouldn’t realise he’d been any more suggestible than normal.
In this moment, though, experimenting was more important than convincing him of the truth. Jen was starting to feel daring. She wanted to test the limits of her power, and she had no end of ideas how to try it out. But most of those ideas would really be taking advantage of her friend, and as much as she wanted him she wasn’t going to risk hurting someone she cared about so much. She couldn’t decide for a moment, until an idea struck. The demon on her shoulder just wanted to get him sitting on the couch and take him while he was frozen solid, see if he’d even notice. She ignored that urge, even though it would be so easy. She needed to know what he really wanted, whether he just saw her as a friend or if he was harbouring the same kind of thoughts that plagued her.
“So,” she smiled brightly, “You’re absolutely sure I couldn’t make you do something?” He nodded, but opened his mouth to elaborate further.
“Stop!” Jen cut him off, familiar enough with the watch now that her thumb found the button without having to look at it. Carlos froze right where he was. She hesitated, though. There were too many temptations here, too many things she wanted to try while she was in control. She walked over to Carlos and slowly peeled off his T-shirt again, balling it up and leaving it in one of his hands. This time she was a little more forward about running her hands over his chest, feeling the firmness of the muscles, and even briefly stroking a circle around his nipple with her thumb.
Jen could square that much with her conscience, that was being playful but not indecent. And then on to the real part of this experiment. She wanted to convince him that subliminals were real, and also find out if he had any feelings for her without pushing him into something he didn’t want. She thought she could kill two birds with one stone here.
“You don’t need to kneel any more,” she told him clearly, “But you’re going to be even more curious about the effects of stopped time on people.” And there she paused, her earlier nervousness coming back in a rush. She knew he was a nice guy, that he wouldn’t hurt her, that he deserved the truth, that she wasn’t pushing him to do anything he didn’t want to. All the boxes were ticked, to satisfy both her conscience and her inner demons, but it still took a conscious effort to push out the words that had seemed like a stroke of genius just seconds earlier.
“You’ll take the watch back for a while, it will seem the natural thing to do so you can experiment. And you’ll try commanding me while time is stopped, to do the thing you want most, as if I already told you that you can try whatever you want.”
Again, Jen hesitated. That was really giving the guy free rein, and she was already pretty confident that if he followed that instruction as readily as the kneeling one, she would be just as unable to resist whatever came to his mind. It was crazy to think that she’d been so turned on by feeling in control, and then it was so exciting to give up control completely just a few seconds later. It was as if her libido couldn’t make up its mind, and the rest of her was along for the ride.
She’d said it now, and there wasn’t any obvious way to take back subliminal words, so she only had one real option if she wanted to resist any further temptation.
“Carry on!”
“Of course—” Carlos started to speak, and then his mouth hung open for a second as he tried to work out what exactly she had changed.
“Feeling any different?” Jen asked playfully.
“You didn’t change anything this time?” He looked around the room, apparently not noticing his own bare chest for a second. Jen just grinned, and waited for him to respond.
“Did you turn the heating off, or something? It’s getting awfully hot in here,” and he just threw his T-shirt across the arm of the couch as he sat down, “Hope you don’t mind me stripping off, you probably seen as much if you ever walked past the basketball court anyway.” His eyes still roved around the room, returning to examine Jen’s clothes at every opportunity.
“No, I didn’t change anything,” she giggled, “I just wanted to see if subliminal messages worked. I mean, you said they don’t, but isn’t the scientific method all about testing everything to make sure it’s what you expect?”
“Well, unless you told me to get really… excited…” he started, and then trailed off blushing cherry-red. Before she could say anything, he grabbed at a slightly different topic: “It didn’t do anything, anyway. I’m not obeying your instructions, I didn’t even hear them. Hypothesis debunked. But… when I used the time machine near you, did you notice any physiological results? Feeling hot, or, well… anything like that?”
“No,” Jen just answered honestly, resisting the urge to mess with her friend’s perceptions anymore, “Maybe it’s only men. Although you only showed me a couple of times, bouncing around the room like that. You didn’t do anything that would take more than a minute, so maybe that’s the difference.”
“Yeah,” he stood again, and took the pocket watch out of her hand in a movement so quick she didn’t even see it coming. “Maybe we should experiment a little more. If you don’t mind, of course?”
Jen nodded. She wasn’t sure if that meant he’d accepted her instructions or not, but he seemed to be pretty good at rationalising every time she changed his clothes. She figured it would be a good idea to give him a little nudge in the direction of subliminal instructions. She was curious how it would work on her, and if she might be a little more aware of it while she was expecting those effects. So she wanted to try it, even if her instructions to Carlos had been too complex. “Yes, you should—”
“Stop!”