Mia
I dreamt of hands touching me. Of hands sliding over my body, caressing and igniting a pathway of fire in their wake and burning me all over.
I chased the bliss, shuddering and reaching, hands bunching at my blankets because there was no one I could reach for or grasp, even if it was what I desperately wanted.
Hands skirted across my nipples, tweaking them into turgid peaks of desire. They traveled lower then, never staying in one place to explore for too long. The desire was just out of reach and yet so close at the same time.
I cried out, moaning when a hand slid between my legs, a finger sliding between my leaking pussy to tease my own wetness against my clit.
It left shocks through my skin and I leaned towards it. Wanting–no, needing–more.
A few seconds later, I got it. Something hard slipped between my legs, stroking through the inside of me.
I moaned then, leaning into the friction as the finger, so thick and long, slid in and out of me.
My hips began moving of their own volition, chasing, seeking.
Everything inside me erupted. It had been so long, too long, since I had anyone against me.
Inside me. It didn’t take much for me to detonate.
For the orgasm to explode through my system.
I bowed up in bed, my eyes flying open as the orgasm from my dream chased me to my waking consciousness. My eyes opened and a cry formed on my lips.
Darkness greeted me, illumination from outside my open window shining through. The orgasm kept me in its clutches, like a warm embrace that was reluctant to pull away.
I sighed onto my mattress, my hair spanning against my cheeks, my fingers grasping at my silky sheets in its own tight grip. I felt languid with the release, unable to muster up embarrassment at the fact that I’d orgasmed from a dream without even being touched.
It had felt so vivid, though. Like it had been happening in real time.
Perhaps I’d just gone far too long without intimacy that it hadn’t taken much to set me off in the first place.
The aftereffects of it had me in an almost drunken daze of bliss. Another sigh pushed past my lips, and I found my lips moving, moaning out a single name.
“Xavir…”
My lids fluttered closed. I didn’t know what he looked like, but my own mind was so needy for him that I’d conjured up shadows and named them after him. I wanted to meet him. I needed it like I needed air.
I wondered if I had frightened him with my eagerness in opening the door. What was holding him back? Or was he shy, like me? Honestly, those were the vibes I got from him. Like he was being reserved. Or maybe, like me, he had been worried about talking with a stranger.
I wanted to ease those fears. To let him know that I was afraid too, but maybe, just maybe, if we let go of our fears, we could try to build something.
Together.
I awaited Xavir’s letter the next day, but it never came. Like clockwork, his letters always showed up, and even though I waited well into the night, it never arrived at my door.
There was a panic that came with that fact. I couldn’t help the negativity grasping for me, telling me that I’d ruined it all by asking to meet. I’d frightened him with my eagerness and now he was pulling back and away from me. He wanted nothing to do with me.
And that was his right, yet…
It hurt.
My chest was tight all day. Every time I waited for a letter that never came. Every time I opened the door to find it empty of little slips of paper…
I was sad in a way that I hadn’t been in such a long time.
My fingers itched with the urge to write to him again, to ask if he was mad at me. But if he didn’t write back, that meant he didn’t want to hear from me, right? And if I wrote to him knowing that, I’d be breaking a boundary…
At a complete loss, I had nothing to do except stew in my anxiety and stress-eat cha siu bao throughout the day.
When they did nothing but give me a slight bit of nausea, I forced myself to stop and lost myself in my music.
My fingers slid across rough chords, my neck aching as I turned my heartache into its own little soundtrack, playing and jotting down notes, and then playing again.
It was only when my roughened fingers began to crack, threatening to bleed, that I finally put the instrument away.
The call of my dreams eventually enticed me and with an exhausted body and mind, I slipped into bed, trying not to think about him.
It felt useless, though. I tossed and turned, until sleep finally claimed me…
The dream was the same as the night before. It started with the shadows slowly morphing into hands that slid over my body, exploring every little piece of me. A faceless man watched down from the ceiling, but in my heart, I knew who it was.
“Xavir…” His name left my lips like the wisp of smoke curling from the tip of a burning incense. Those hands gripped me tighter as I uttered it, explored across my skin like they wanted to consume me and were afraid of losing me at the same time.
“I’m yours,” I sighed. This felt real, too real and too good, and I couldn’t stop moving into the touch and wanting more of it. “I’m yours, Xavir.”
It was just a dream, but the sadness I’d felt before was nowhere to be found. In dreams, anything could happen. In dreams, I could have whatever I wanted.
And I wanted him.
This mysterious stranger who had captivated me with his words and with pen and paper.
His hands, nothing but shadowy figments of my own imagination, slid across every inch of me. I leaned into it, desperate to hold onto anything, anything, that he was willing to give me.
When phantom fingers slipped into my sleep shorts, I welcomed the touch against my aching pussy.
Wanton, my hips sought friction, but it was only a whisper, and not nearly enough.
So I searched for more, moving against the lightest of grazes, faster and faster until it was enough to detonate me from the inside out.
I exploded with a cry, Xavir’s name on my lips, and the orgasm awoke me from the delicious, erotic dream that had consumed me. The orgasm chased my consciousness once again, an echo of what had happened the night before.
My heart pounded in my chest as I stared up at my ceiling. At the darkness. My window was open, though I remember closing it before bed.
Outside, a truck rumbled by on the street, bright lights flashing and illuminating my bedroom for a brief second. It was just a flash. A small tease…
And yet…
I saw it.
A figure hovering above my ceiling, shrouded in shadows.
The face of something I’d never seen before.
The face of a monster with sharp teeth and a blue-black tongue that was forked at the end. Marble black eyes with no color, no whites, no pupils, glared down at me.
My breath caught in my throat, fear tightening my tongue. I couldn’t speak. I was too afraid to say a word, even as the lights dimmed and the creature disappeared from view completely.
I hadn’t imagined it.
That hadn’t been the vestiges of a dream morphing into real life. It had been real. I knew it was there. I could suddenly feel the presence so keenly that my arms broke out in goosebumps and a frightening cold swept over my body.
The creature was there, above my bed, watching me.
My breathing kicked up and I took stock of my situation. Of the dream, and everything else that had followed. Had the creature… seen me?
Had it touched me?
My body was too gripped with fear to jolt. I’d imagined Xavir was the one touching me, only to wake up to a figure above my bed.
Creatures roamed the world alongside humans these days.
It wasn’t unheard of. In fact, it was a normal occurrence to run into all manner of people and interspecies relationships.
My cousin, Kendra, was dating a wolf shifter.
I remembered when she introduced him to the family and they hadn’t been concerned about what he was, rather what type of job he had.
He was a doctor, so it had all worked out for her, really.
I knew the thing above me wasn’t a werewolf, though.
In fact, I wasn’t quite sure what it was.
I’d never seen anything quite like it before.
But the more I stared at the ceiling, the more I could pick apart the different shades of darkness like puzzle pieces allotting into place.
I could make out the outline of a massive body that wasn’t supposed to be there.
It was unlike any body I’d seen before, but a body nonetheless.
Nothing but a dark silhouette. I could make out curving claws, the tips sharp like something out of a horror film.
There were feet that weren’t quite feet, but curved and talon-like. And… were those wings?
And then, another thought trickled into my head the longer I stared and picked the creature apart.
Xavir?
Almost as if the creature heard my thought, as though I’d spoken it aloud, the darkness moved. It shifted, almost as if it meant to flee.
“I know you’re there,” I whispered into the night.
The figure paused.
My heart beat louder.
Could it be?
Could the creature above my bed be Xavir? Or was I completely and utterly insane for even thinking that?
Maybe I just wanted to believe it. Maybe I was convincing myself. Maybe I should have been running, screaming, calling for the police.
But, as always, my curiosity, my bone-deep loneliness got the better of me.
“Show yourself.” I paused. “Please?”
There was a rumbling, like rocks sliding together. It was the sound that had come from Xavir the night before. I recognized it, even through the flimsy barrier my door had made between the two of us.
I could feel my bottom lip trembling.
“Xavir?”
Slowly, like a face slowly emerging through water, he showed himself. The shadows pulled away and I could see him clearly, and every image I’d ever conjured up of what Xavir would look like were swept away in a single instant.
In none of those daydreams had I pictured him to be this.
His skin was gray like stone, with the slightest blue undertone.
Even in the dimness, even from where I lay, I could make out the rough, grainy texture.
He was slim, with twin horns that rose, skinny and tall on his forehead.
Long, inky black hair slid over wide shoulders, falling across sharp cheekbones and thin lips that pulled back to reveal sharp teeth.
He was frightening.
But he was also…
“Beautiful,” I whispered, unable to contain my awe. “You are beautiful.”
He jolted, as though that were the last thing he’d expected to hear from me, and in that surprise, his body shuddered and suddenly…
He was tumbling from the ceiling and slamming down onto the floor of my bedroom.
It was like stone dropping and I winced, scrambling up to peer over the edge of my bed at him. My downstairs neighbors were going to complain, I was sure of it, but at that moment, I was more concerned with him and his well-being.
He’d fallen at an awkward angle. And yes, those had been wings I’d peeked at, and he’d landed right on top of them, one of them folding in half, appearing to have broken beneath him.
“Xavir! Are you okay?” I hissed.
His body twitched like a bug’s.
Did I kill him?
Did my compliment about his appearance end his life?
I wasn’t sure how I was going to cope, if that was the case.
“Please don’t be dead,” I whispered and yelped as his body twitched a second time.
But still, he did not get up.