Chapter 5
CHAPTER
FIVE
Your nightmare.
I jolt awake, his voice echoing through my mind, familiar but fleeting. He’s right; I am achingly familiar with the sound of his voice.
My psyche seems only capable of inventing one male voice. If I’ve met someone like my dad or one of my brothers, their voices are still theirs in my dreams.
But if I haven’t? If they’re a made-up person, it’s always the same voice.
Hell, now it’s even the same mask every time. It used to change. At first it was the hockey mask that the guy that attacked me wore, sometimes it was that screaming mask, but eventually, it settled to the multi-eyed and mouthless bloodied white mask.
At the thought, my hand flies to my lips and then my throat. That was a turn of events. My mind is really doing a number on me, because there’s still a tingle and slickness between my legs that tells me I was into it.
My lips still feel swollen from his kisses, and my throat even hurts a bit.
The iron-y tang of blood alerts me to a spot where I’ve bitten my lip, though for a second I can’t help but think he bit me.
My head spins, remembering the dream, and I purse my lips.
I remember fear. I remember feeling adrenaline pulsing through my veins like a freight train.
I remember the brush of his lips, the sharp tip of a fang as I ran my tongue along it.
I remember wondering what those fangs would feel like sinking into me.
I even remember the hot drip of my blood as it ran down my neck and the pressure of his fingers until it was tempered by the sharp prick of pain.
What I don’t remember… is wanting it to stop.
If it hadn’t been killing me, I wouldn’t have cared, I realize. I’d wanted him to keep kissing me. I’d been annoyed that the dream had shifted… betrayed, but if anything, I’d just wanted him to go back to kissing me.
Which is totally fucked.
“Uuuuugh,” I groan and cover my face. I’m learning all sorts of fun new things about myself these days. I order things in my sleep, and apparently I’m strangely turned on by the masked nightmare guy…even when he threatens to rip out my throat mid-kiss.
Perhaps therapy is in order, but I’ve still got a bad taste in my mouth from when I went as a teen.
Sarah was a specialist in “Recalled Memory Therapy,” which I’ve since learned is totally bogus.
She’d ask me all of these leading questions, creepily specific around ritual abuse, and made me feel like there was stuff happening to me that I had no memory of.
For a while, I started to wonder if someone in my life had been performing satanic ritual abuse on me.
But as soon as she started asking if—suggesting—it was my parents, I knew there was just no way.
We might disagree on a lot of things, religion being number one, but my parents are good people and were amazing parents.
She was part of our church and thought my dark makeup and clothes were a “cry for help, clear indications of satanic ties.” As soon as she’d implicated my parents, I knew my style wasn’t worth the fight.
Overnight, I cut a deal with them that I’d stop dressing like that if I could stop going to therapy.
Maybe my looks were a cry for help, but only a cry for help getting to the mall, because I wasn’t actually trying to wear navy blue.
I wanted black, but I owned virtually none.
Also, maybe it was a cry for help for makeup tutorials.
I crack a smile, remembering how horrible my makeup had been.
I only had black eyeliner, so I put that shit all around my eyes and used it as lipstick.
Was I a mess? Absolutely, just not in any of the ways they assumed.
Now, though… yeah, now I’m a mess. A mess who is terrified of therapy.
“Computer!” I call, because today I need the motivation to even get out of bed. “Good morning!”
Instead of the uncanny-valley voice of my speaker, the voice of Charlie Brown greets me. “I never thought it was such a bad little tree. It’s not bad at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love.”
Excuse me? I didn’t need to be gut-punched by a fictional ten-year-old first thing in the morning.
I don’t have much time to think of myself as the “not such a bad little tree” that “needs a little love,” because the lights in my room turn green instead of warm white, and “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” starts playing.
What the fuck is happening?
I lie in bed, eyes searching the ceiling as I try to remember if I changed some of my settings. Burl Ives croons in the holiday season while I try not to panic.
Anxiety creeps through me, digging its claws in deep, and I’ve never been very successful at banishing it.
The lights and the song, the arousal still settled low in my belly, all swirl together into a cacophony of distorted confusion.
I’m dizzy, like the room is spinning or like none of this is even real. Like I’m still—
That’s it!
I’m still dreaming.
I’ve got to be. I was dreaming about decorating for Christmas, so I must’ve just jumped right into the next dream.
I tingle all over, which is a weird dream side effect that still feels like an oncoming panic attack, but it’s got to be a dream side effect.
Well, if this is a dream, and I have realized it’s a dream, then I can control things.
At least I’ve heard that I should be able to.
Change songs. I concentrate, willing the song to switch even though Burl is still going.
Hmmph. Maybe that is an urban legend. I’ve never felt like I could influence my dreams before, but I’ve also never realized I was dreaming before. My breath is quick, and I don’t know if it’s from the tingly nerves that I can’t get rid of or the admittedly sexy-turned-horrifying dream.
My room, which often looks different in dreams, looks the same, except tinted green from the lights.
I’m sure my dream brain meant it to seem festive, but it makes my skin crawl.
Last night I remembered to pull the curtains before getting into bed, so my blackout curtains have made it so the only light available is green.
The shadows are darker than they should be, and my wall of dark-spined books seems like it belongs in a witch’s hut instead of on the pages of a Pottery Barn catalogue.
My heart speeds and my eyes dart around the room. In the green darkness, Burl’s voice and the scratches from the old recording sound less and less jolly and more and more like my imminent doom.
I want to sit up, but exposing my naked body to the room seems like the worst idea I’ve ever had. I’ve had this feeling in dreams before. I know it well.
It means he’s nearby.
Any minute now, my dream will shift, and he’ll come for me. Whether it’s already scary or innocuous, the second I have this feeling, I know the shift is coming. After the dream I just left though… that doesn’t seem as scary.
Maybe… maybe I can’t shift big things, but little things might work…
Little things like him continuing to kiss me instead of digging his fingers—nope.
We’ll stop that train of thought right there, because if I’m going to shift the trajectory of this dream, I need to focus on where I want it to go. What I want to happen.
Leaving my bed seems like a colossally bad idea, so I’ll stay here.
He’ll find me in my bed, which isn’t so strange.
I’ve often dreamed of him hovering over me here.
When I close my eyes, I can see him there, his sharp teeth peeking through the opening in his mask, his lips curling into a snarl or smile before he attacks me.
Tonight though, tonight I’ll fight back. Now that I’ve felt those lips, I want more.
With slow inevitability, I slip my hand down the length of my body, traversing the terrain and savoring the expanse of myself as I might if I knew he was watching.
Because I’m not going to fight back the way I have in the past. I’m not going to run, I’m not going to beat uselessly at him, or try to scratch at his thick skin. It’s never worked.
No, I’m going to go on the offensive. When he comes in… because he will… he’ll find me writhing pleasurably in my bed, and I can’t wait to see what he’ll do.
Some wires in my brain must have crossed during my last dream, because for the first time, I’m not scared thinking about his mask.
His kiss has changed everything. He’s a nightmare, he’s scary, but he’s…
mine. Maybe it helps that he sounds exactly like every handsome prince or knight I’ve ever dreamed of, and now they are all smushed together.
Regardless, now I see that mask in my mind and feel arousal coiling inside of me.
I sweep through my wetness and smear it around my clit, circling as I warm myself up.
In my mind, he waits just beyond sight, and I imagine his mask as it would look with the green lights reflected on it.
It’ll shift and change as he turns his head, tilting as he tries to figure out if I’m actually doing what he thinks I am doing.
Opening my mouth, I can’t help but moan at the thought of him realizing what I’m doing.
“Are you there, my nightmare?” I wish I had a better name for him. “Are you watching me from the shadows?”
My breath hitches, and I speed my rubbing, my body tightening as I anticipate his appearance. I won’t get to come—I never get to come in a dream—but he will surely reveal himself.
And then… then I’ll see if I can turn this dream into a much more pleasant one.
Breaths pant out of my lips, and my finger quivers against my clit, frantic.
I could come any second, every inch of my skin sensitive where it rubs against my blanket cocoon.
He’s got to come soon, because I’m going to come soon.
The most pathetic whine sneaks out of me because I want to rush toward my release and I want to hold off for him.
Where is he? Why isn’t he coming?