“Zero Dumb Game”
Shanna had just ordered her third whiskey sour of the night when she felt the first stirrings of the old familiar tug at the back of her brain. The slight alcoholic buzz of the first two whiskey sours made it a little bit harder to notice than usual, but as she tuned out her surroundings and focused her attention inward, she could sense the force of her intellect aligning like iron filings under the influence of a magnet. And of course, she knew exactly where it was headed.
She pulled out her phone and texted, ‘For fucksake, Meg, NOT NOW!’ It felt like a strangely clumsy way to communicate, given that her twin sister was quite literally inside her mind; but years of experimentation had established that whatever the bond between them actually was, it wasn’t a telepathic link. They couldn’t hear each other’s thoughts, or feel each other’s pain, or any of the crazy bullshit you saw in bad Hollywood movies with cheesy split-screen effects whenever both twins had to show up in the same shot. If Shanna wanted Meg to know that she was bugfuck furious at her, she had to get out her phone and text like a normal sibling.
Shanna’s blood practically boiled when she got the reply a minute or two later. ‘Sorry,’ it said. ‘Date with Paul got moved up to tonight. I needs the brain.’ The three smiley-face emojis that followed were sort of the icing on the little ‘fuck you’ cake. Shanna wasn’t sure which pissed her off more—her sister deliberately shafting her on a night when she damn well knew Shanna had plans for the evening, the obnoxiously cutesy reference to the card game they used to play as kids that had stopped being funny years ago, or the fact that her sister had this amazing fucking literal superpower and she still used it to sleep with cute guys. As if her tits wouldn’t get the job done.
Shanna sometimes wished she and Meg had been born conjoined instead. At least you could sometimes get surgery to fix that. But there wasn’t a surgeon alive who could separate a shared soul.
A dizzying lurch in the back of her head told Shanna that if she didn’t stop fuming and start fighting, she was going to be spending the rest of the night trying to remember which side of the glass to drink from. She pictured the bond between her and Meg in her head, envisioning it as a thick rope that stretched through some other kind of space to connect them on a level that nobody else could see. Then she imagined herself, digging her feet in and pulling as hard as she could. The tugging sensation diminished, but it didn’t go away. Meg was too stubborn for that.
And too sober. That was part of what was making Shanna so genuinely furious—Meg knew she was going out drinking tonight, she knew that Shanna was going to have be vulnerable, and she either didn’t care or deliberately took advantage. Shanna hated not being able to trust her sister, not when they were stuck together for life like this. She hated not being able to let her guard down and enjoy herself without worrying about whether some essential part of her intellect and personality was going to be dragged kicking and screaming out of her physical body to join her sister in her attempt to convince Paul Stanhope to go down on her.
And Jesus, would it kill Meg to just find guys who liked eating pussy without superhuman charisma and willpower smothering their normal thought process? Honestly, at least when it was Shanna’s turn to take advantage of nearly-doubled intellect and irresistible mental force, she used it for things like getting a raise at the lab, or helping the team with some of their nastier protein synthesis problems.
But Meg seemed perfectly content to bum around from one low-paying drumming gig to the next, using her power whenever she needed to convince her landlord to cover the rent or when one of the cute shy boys that were perpetually her type needed a little extra push to stop being shy. Shanna just didn’t understand why anyone would want to get by with just the minimum amount of effort, not when she knew full well that Meg was capable of so much more. Not that this was the time to worry about the way her sister seemed to be drifting through life after college, and it was probably a bad sign that she was thinking about this instead of digging in against the inexorable pull on her mind, but—
A buzz from her phone further distracted Shanna, and the rope turned to flowing sand in her hands as she diverted her attention to reading Meg’s text. ‘Just get a taxi, OK? I’ll make it up to you.’ She probably would, but that wasn’t the point. Feeling that tug brought back ugly memories of struggling to keep her will inside her head while Meg tried to summon it all into herself just to convince Mom and Dad to let her have a slumber party. Memories of hours spent stumbling around in a daze, her thoughts fogged by confusion and her mind left so malleable that she would do anything the other kids asked. Memories of that sick feeling of terror far underneath the warm, mindless haze, as she convinced herself that this time Meg would break something, this time her mind wouldn’t come back to her when they fell asleep like it always had. Memories of coming to desperately hate her sister.
She thought they had put all that behind them years ago, right after the trip to Seattle, but nights like this brought it all back. She gave the rope in her mind a furious yank and texted, ‘NO!!!’ It moved, but sluggishly. Meg already had a little bit of a hold on their shared willpower, and that unbalanced the struggle between them even more than the alcohol. It was always like this when they were young; whoever struck first usually won. The advantage they got from surprise was just too hard to counter. The more Meg pulled, the stronger she got and the weaker Shanna became, until she forgot exactly what she was struggling against and giving up control to her twin sister seemed like just another one of Meg’s great ideas.
Shanna was determined not to let it happen this time. She closed her eyes, closing out the distractions of the bar and letting her mind fill with the image of herself holding the rope tightly with both hands. She could see Meg in her imagination—not the actual person, but a representation like the rope represented their shared spirit. She pictured herself walking backwards, step by slow, effortful step, pulling the rope along with her a fraction of an inch at a time. She imagined leaning hard against the tug of her sister’s willpower, refusing to give in to the exhausted feeling that sapped her energy and left her drained and subdued. She just needed to hold out a little bit longer, just until things got hot and heavy enough between Meg and Paul that the distraction of arousal neutralized Meg’s advantage. She just needed to—
The waitress tapped Shanna on the shoulder and said, “Ma’am? Your drink.” Shanna’s eyes flew open in startled confusion, and she felt her mind reel for a moment as an amorphous and intangible energy flowed out of her and halfway across town. She looked at the whiskey with a perplexed expression on her face, and it took her a surprisingly long time to make the connection between ordering the drink and its arrival at her table.
“Oh,” she mumbled, her words suddenly tumbling out in a stammer of incoherent bafflement, “um, yeah, just put it on my, uh...” She paused, trying to remember mundane details while still struggling against the pull of her sister’s increasingly powerful will and failing at both. “Did I have a tab?” she asked, no longer able to recall something so minor in the face of her rapidly weakening intellect.
“You did,” the waitress said, giving her a concerned look that suggested she was already thinking about cutting Shanna off. She probably wouldn’t; Shanna on low brain-wattage tended to give off just enough of a different vibe that people didn’t mistake her for a drunk. She wasn’t clumsy or groggy or anything, she just...kind of went along with things without thinking. Left to her own devices, back at her apartment, that meant eating all the candy in her bedroom and playing video games. But in a crowded bar...
“Can I, um...can you bring the check?” Shanna asked, fighting to keep the chain of thought together in her increasingly-fuzzy head. Meg wasn’t giving up, and she’d gotten a lot stronger during the moments when Shanna let herself get distracted. Shanna was still hanging on, but she could already tell that she wasn’t going to win this one. Which meant she needed to take her sister’s advice, call a taxi, and get the hell home before her brain turned into cotton candy. And that meant...that meant...
“Absolutely,” the waitress said. “I’ll be right back.” Right. That meant she had to get the check. With a sigh of frustration, Shanna devoted her attention to the mental tug-of-war again while her server went over to the cash register.
The worst part was, she wouldn’t even have the satisfaction of getting even. They’d both learned the hard way that petty frustrations built up into angry grudges, and Seattle had taught them a brutal lesson about how far their shared soul would ultimately stretch. Shanna still had the newspaper clipping, a tiny one-paragraph article in the local paper that the supermarket tabloids spun into a full-page spread: ‘Local Twins Collapse Simultaneously Hundreds of Miles Away’.
They’d cleared the air during their hospital stay, sharing a ward and their feelings at the same time, both of them trying to find words to describe a tearing sensation that dug into their mind and flattened them with psychosomatic pain until the doctors finally shipped Meg home and they could begin to stitch up the psychic wound. That was when they realized that like it or not, they were stuck together. Which meant that Shanna had to let it go for her own good. She was going to have to be the responsible one...again. At least, as responsible as someone who was about to go home and eat three boxes of Thin Mints could be.
The waitress returned, and Shanna gave up trying to calculate the tip on an eighteen dollar tab and just threw three tens on the table. Her server scooped up the money with a grateful smile, and Shanna was just getting up when a man sat down beside her and said, “Leaving so soon? You haven’t even finished your drink.”
He was...cute, Shanna thought, feeling the faintest stirrings of her libido underneath the alcoholic buzz and the growing haze of confused, puppyish happiness. Not like the kind of guy she usually looked for, but he seemed to be pouring charisma out into Shanna, so much that her thoughts were practically drowning in it. He was skinny, and he had dark hair with long bangs that fell forward into his warm brown eyes, and he smiled at Shanna with an easy confidence that made her want to smile right back. She wished she could have met him on another night, a night when she wasn’t...when she was...she had an odd, incongruous image of a rope slithering through her hands like a living thing, but she couldn’t quite remember what it meant anymore.
“I, um...I have to get going,” Shanna replied, her voice sounding slightly uncertain. She wasn’t uncertain, though—she remembered really clearly that she did have to get going, she had to find a taxi and tell them her address and go home. But she didn’t really remember why. It was all kind of fuzzy. There were some texts from Meg, but she didn’t think Meg was in any trouble—Meg wanted something! That was it! Meg wanted something, and Shanna was going to give it to her, and she had to go home for that. She wasn’t sure what—the image of a rope kept coming back to her, a rope that was almost all played out until it was practically taut—but she could figure it out at home, right?
“Oh, stay for just a little while,” the man said, giving her a winsome smile and flashing his soulful brown eyes at her. “You can have the drink you already paid for, I can tell you my name, and maybe we can make plans for another night when you don’t have to leave early.”
“I...” Shanna had to admit, he made a lot of sense. The drink was sitting right there, after all, and he was cute. She couldn’t stop staring into his eyes, almost like he was hypnotizing her into staying. Almost like she couldn’t resist doing what she was told. That seemed silly, but...whatever Meg wanted could probably wait just a few more minutes, couldn’t it? She could sit down, talk to a cute boy, and then get a taxi or a ride or something. “Okay,” she said, putting her purse back on the table with a little giggle. “But just for a little while.”
“Sure thing,” the man said, handing Shanna her drink. His fingers touched hers as he placed it in her outstretched hand, and Shanna felt a warm happy tingle where his skin brushed against hers. “I’m Tom, by the way. Tom Patterson, I live a few blocks away on Kelley. And you are?”
Shanna took a long sip of her whiskey sour, using the silence to figure out what she wanted to say. She wanted to come up with something clever, something cool, something that would get him interested in her. She set down the drink and fixed him with her best flirty smile. “I’m Shanna,” she said. “I’m...ummm...” She blushed. “Sorry, I forgot what I was going to say.”
She thought for a second that she’d screwed everything up, but he actually seemed to like that. He put the drink back into her hand, giving her wrist a warm caress as he did so, and said, “That’s okay. Sometimes it’s fun to get lost in the moment, isn’t it?” He smiled as he said it, but it wasn’t a smile like he’d just said something funny. It was a crooked grin that kind of went straight into the back of Shanna’s brain and shot down her spine to tickle her pussy. He was radiating interest in her, and Shanna couldn’t stop picking up on it. She literally couldn’t.
Shanna also couldn’t help smiling back. “It is!” she said with a helpless giggle, almost blowing bubbles into her drink as she took another sip. “It’s like, I’m doing stuff at the, um...” She struggled to recall the name of her workplace. “The lab, and I just totally lose track of time doing science stuff. And it’s all so cool!” She really hoped that she didn’t sound as dumb as she felt right now; her brain felt foggy, all the details of her scientific work melting like chocolate on a hot day. Her thoughts felt like a soft, sticky mass, warm and sweet and easily molded.
“I bet it is,” Tom replied, flagging down a waitress. “I’ll have a coke, and the lady will have another whiskey sour,” he said. Shanna was a little confused—she hadn’t even finished the one she was drinking now—but Tom seemed to think it was a good idea and she didn’t want to be rude. She knew that he was probably having better ideas than she was right now, that was for sure. Ever since she, um...since the...the thing with Meg, whatever it was...she felt all scattered. It felt familiar, in a weird way, but she couldn’t remember why because she was all scattered. That was, like, a paradox or something, right?
Tom slid the whiskey sour in front of her when it arrived, and said, “I don’t have much of a head for science, I’m afraid. I’m a musician. Well, I do a little painting on the side, but that’s mostly to pay the bills. My real passion is sax. My friends all joke that I’m a real sax fiend.” He chuckled, and Shanna laughed along with him. It was funny because ‘sax’ sounded a lot like ‘sex’, and guys were supposed to like sex a lot. Thinking about sex reminded her of something that happened earlier, but Shanna couldn’t remember what. Maybe it was when Tom sat down next to her? He was pretty sexy. Not normally her type, but...but he seemed so sure of himself. Like he already knew what she was going to do before she did it. Shanna felt an instinctive need to respond to that.
She picked up the new drink just as soon as she finished the old, thoughts of going back home already blown away on the breeze. All she knew was that Tom was a cute guy, he was buying her free drinks, and he kept looking at her with this warm, hungry expression on his face that was making her clit tingle a little. She felt like she didn’t need to know more than that—the force of his desire for her stamped itself into her brain without him even needing to speak it, until Shanna couldn’t imagine not wanting to feel his hand on her thigh. It felt almost real to her now, like it was really happening right there in the bar.
She looked down to see his hand on her thigh. Shanna realized she didn’t know how it got there. She stumbled for a topic of conversation, but her mind felt like it was slipping into a channel, one carved by Tom’s interest in her body. She couldn’t see over the sides, she couldn’t think of anything except how good it would feel to respond in kind. “I like sex too,” she said with a sly smile, forgetting for a moment that she was supposed to disguise it with the double entendre. “Um, sax, I mean. Sax is cool.” She didn’t think he would mind. He wanted to fuck her, she could already tell, and it felt so nice to just go along with that feeling and let her brain take the night off. She was making Tom happy, and that felt so nice.
“Well, if you enjoy sax, why don’t we head back to my place?” Tom said. “I can play you a little something, and frankly I make a better drink than they do here. I’ve got a couch you can crash on if you don’t feel like you can drive afterward.” Shanna couldn’t evaluate his statement critically; she couldn’t remember if there was something else she wanted to do tonight or if she was here for the music or if she was meeting friends or if Tom was using cheesy pick-up lines that she’d gotten tired of by the time her twenty-first birthday was over. All she could do was nod and smile. Tom had something he wanted her to do. So naturally, Shanna wanted to do it. She finished her drink in a single gulp, then took his hand and they headed for the exit.
He put his arm around her as soon as they got outside, steering her body with his, and Shanna let her thoughts slow to a stop as he guided her along. It felt so much better to be guided, so good not to have to make decisions at all or think or do anything she wasn’t told to do. She was going along, responding, obeying, and that felt so much better than anything she remembered. Because she didn’t remember anything at all. She was living in the moment, lost in a warm haze of pleasure and compliance, and thinking felt too hard for her now. She wanted to be a good girl, and Tom seemed to know just what he wanted from her. So Shanna had to go along with him. It all seemed so simple now.
She walked along with him in a haze of pleasure, her mind half-broken by the waves of charisma coming off of him. She didn’t know how long they walked, or where they were going, and she didn’t need to. He was telling her where to go with his body. He was telling her what to do, wordlessly and easily, and Shanna had forgotten how nice that felt. She walked along blankly, almost not even seeing the route as her mind distracted itself with arousal and surrender.
When they got to his apartment, Shanna was a little surprised that he didn’t even look at the saxophone standing in the corner of the room. Instead, he just took her over to the couch and sat down next to her. “Do you want a bite to eat? Maybe another drink?” he asked, running his hands over her legs as he spoke. Shanna didn’t know whether she did or not—she only knew that she wanted what he wanted. And right now his hands were telling her one thing and his mouth was asking her another.
Shanna spread her legs a little, and the questions stopped. That helped make things clearer for her. She leaned back into the couch cushions as Tom’s fingers roamed up her thighs and began to rub at the crotch of her pussy. His hands weren’t what she would normally have called talented, but Shanna could feel a wave of heat swamping her thoughts with desire anyway. Tom wanted her wet, turned on, so horny that she wasn’t able to resist him, and Shanna couldn’t resist his will any longer. Her mind was so soft and pliable now, so blissfully obedient that it was like he had some kind of superhuman influence on her. Like...like...
He pulled her panties down, and the connection flew out of Shanna’s head as quickly as she had made it. His fingers were inside her, teasing, stroking, rubbing her clit (or at least sometimes rubbing her clit) and Shanna felt herself melting into a puddle of lust under their influence. It didn’t even matter that he was mostly just thrusting in and out of her cunt with frantic urgency; she responded to his intent as much as to his actions. She moaned, spreading her legs as far as they could go until her panties tangled around her ankles like they were tying her up, and she squirmed on the couch until her dress rode up her thighs to expose her pussy fully to Tom’s view.
“That’s right, kitten,” Tom said, his expression almost astonished at how readily she responded to his touch. “You want to get fucked now, don’t you?” He kept fingering her as he spoke, and Shanna could barely talk—her every word dissolved into a moan of pure pleasure, her pussy clenching around her fingers as she felt the spark of arousal grow into a flame of orgasmic bliss. She knew she needed to cum, she knew she needed to cum again. Tom was such a masterful lover, she could feel that belief sinking into her soft and malleable mind, and his touch would make her cum until she was exhausted from the pleasure. She would beg him to fuck her. She was going to beg him to fuck her.
“Please,” she whimpered, her voice high and soft like a little girl. “Please fuck me, please fuck me Master, please fuck me hard with your big strong cock...” She couldn’t even see his cock—she was too overwhelmed by pleasure to open her eyes anymore. But she knew it had to be huge the same way she knew he loved to be called Master. The more time she spent around him, the more his desires became her certainties and his will became her mindless, euphoric joy. She needed what he wanted. She couldn’t think about anything else. She came again just thinking about how good it was going to feel when he fucked her.
“Damn,” Tom whispered softly, half in awe. She couldn’t understand why—surely someone like him must have his choice of women. He could have had anyone, but he chose her. He chose her to be his sex toy, his fuckpet, his concubine of the night, and he didn’t even need the liquor or the pills this time. He—
Shanna was almost surprised by the speed with which her hand came around to punch Tom in the face. Not nearly as surprised as Tom was, though. He went sprawling into the cushions, his hand yanked out of her like a cork from a bottle. Which was probably a good thing, and saved Shanna a little effort, but it still felt kind of weird. She decided to pull up her panties and think about it later. Or better yet, not.
“Agggh, what the hell, bitch?” Tom mumbled as he sat back up, clutching the side of his face in agony. “What the fuck was that for, I didn’t even do anything!”
“I’ll say,” Shanna grumbled, standing up and fixing him with a glare that dared him to fight back. “You’re just lucky my sister finishes quickly, or I’d have given you a lot worse.” Privately, she couldn’t wait to get out of here and have a quiet freak-out, followed by a little chat with her sister on the importance of safety, but she wasn’t about to let Tom see her shake. She got just enough of an impression from him in those moments where she went from being his compliant fucktoy to her old self again to realize that he was the kind of guy who thought he could exploit vulnerable women.
She’d also picked up that he didn’t like being punched. “Jeez,” he said, “there’s no need to be such a bitch about it. I thought you were into it.” Shanna felt a little bit guilty about that; at the time, she had been. The control he had over her easily bridged the gap between his inept fumbling and the sex god he wanted her to see him as. But then she remembered the bottle of pills he had in his pocket, the one he had decided not to use when she responded so well to his ‘game’, and the guilt faded.
“You thought wrong,” she said, turning on her heel and heading for the door. She tensed up a little, wondering if he was going to grab her or shove her or something, but apparently her left hook was intimidating enough to keep him pinned to his seat. She walked to the door unhindered, and didn’t look back.
But she did stop. For just a moment, just long enough to gather the full force of the spirit she and her sister shared in one single angry yank. She let it fill her, giving her words and her thoughts a power that neither she nor Meg could ever hope to fully understand, and let it flow back out. “Oh, and Tom?” she said, not even bothering to glance in his direction. “Flush your roofies.”
As she closed the door behind her, she heard him scrambling to comply.