Chapter Fifteen
Rheda
Sleep feels wrong long before it takes me.
Every sound feels too loud tonight. The pipes inside the walls. The distant rush of a car outside. The soft movement of fabric every time I shift beneath the duvet.
And every time my eyes start to drift shut, heat curls low in my stomach hard enough to wrench me awake again.
My thighs tighten instinctively beneath the sheets.
My pulse jumps at absolutely nothing. I feel aware of my own body in ways that make me sick.
Every brush of fabric against my skin feels amplified.
Wrong.
It feels like something is waiting for me to fall asleep.
I squeeze my eyes shut hard enough to hurt but at some point, exhaustion wins anyway. I slip away too quickly like I’ve fallen from a height.
The air behind me changes immediately.
Awareness crawls sharply through my body before my mind fully catches up to it. My breathing falters halfway through an inhale as the mattress gives slightly at my back, the movement so faint I almost convince myself I imagined it until I feel it travel through the springs beneath me.
My heartbeat knocks hard once against my ribs. Then again, faster.
I lie perfectly still.
No. It can’t be.
Maybe I imagined it.
Maybe—
Something brushes against my waist. I flinch so hard inside myself it hurts.
A hand.
There’s no mistaking it this time. I try to move beneath the duvet, and nothing happens properly. My fingers twitch faintly before stopping again.
Panic starts low and then tears upward violently.
No.
My breathing turns shallow immediately. I try harder to move this time, to force my arm upward, roll over, sit up, anything, but my limbs feel heavy and wrong, buried deep beneath layers of concrete sleep that refuse to crack open completely.
It slides slowly across my waist beneath the duvet, fingertips dragging lightly enough to make my skin tighten around the touch. My chest jerks hard against the mattress. Nothing else follows.
Panic surges hotter.
Rough skin catches against my waist beneath my shirt.
Real.
Oh God.
My body jerks faintly beneath the touch but I can’t move. I can feel everything, but I can’t move!
Another hand slides between my thighs. Terror flashes white-hot through me as pressure parts my legs slowly beneath the duvet. My muscles fight weakly against it, trembling with effort, but the strength never fully arrives. My thighs only twitch before falling open again.
A broken sound catches in my throat. A hand covers my mouth instantly.
“That’s a good girl,” it whispers, voice dragging through my skull.
The panic that follows is so huge it almost tears through whatever is holding me under. Tears sting my eyes instantly. I try to bite down. Scream. Move. Something.
My teeth barely scrape against the hand over my mouth. It stays there anyway, firm, unhurried, like whoever this is already knows I can’t stop them. My breathing turns ragged against the palm covering my mouth.
And worse, there’s a sudden, low pulse between my thighs.
Heat.
Need.
No no no—
I squeeze my eyes shut.
The hand between my legs pauses for a second, almost like it’s feeling my reaction. I can almost feel the smile stretching across their face, and my stomach turns harder.
“You’re so fucking wet for me,” they press harder. A pathetic sound escapes me. I want to crawl out of my own skin. My body keeps fucking answering it.
Every breath seems to drag the feeling deeper.
My hips shift weakly beneath the pressure before I can stop them and horror crashes through me so hard my vision blurs.
The hand between my thighs drags higher slowly enough to make my stomach knot painfully.
My body arches before I can stop it. I could throw up.
The shame of it hurts almost more than the fear now.
It lingers there like it has all the time in the world, dragging reaction after reaction out of my body while I lie trapped inside it, forced to feel every betrayal as it happens.
My thighs twitch. My breathing catches. Heat keeps pulsing low through me no matter how violently I want it to stop.
It feels cruel suddenly. Deliberate. Like the point isn’t pleasure at all but showing me how easily my body can be turned against me.
I don’t know how long it lasts but eventually the room starts pulling away from me again. My panic dulls at the edges first. Then the weight behind me softens into something less certain. The hands blur into heat and pressure and distant sensation.
The last thing I feel is fingers pressing hard into the inside of my thigh.
Then... nothing.
I wake gasping. I sit up too quickly. The duvet falls from my legs. My body aches in small humiliating places again, thighs tight, chest oversensitive beneath my shirt, awareness lingering low in my stomach like a bruise beneath the skin.
“No,” I whisper immediately.
I look down slowly, and stop breathing.
Four faint marks stain the inside of my thigh.
Fingerprints.
Dull reddish pressure marks high against sensitive skin.
My pulse stumbles violently. “Fuck.”
I touch beside them carefully without pressing directly against the marks.
The spacing is wrong for my own hand. My stomach twists so hard I nearly gag.
I throw the duvet away from me and stumble out of bed too fast. The room tilts sharply.
My hands shake violently as I check the lock again.
The windows. The wardrobe. Beneath the bed.
Nothing.
There’s nothing.
My chest hurts from how fast I’m breathing by the time I grab my phone.
The brightness burns against my eyes.
I type too quickly the first time.
sleep paralysis feeling touched
waking up aroused from nightmares
can stress cause physical arousal during sleep
Medical websites flood the screen one after another, bright white pages filled with explanations I latch onto immediately because they sound clinical and safe and human.
Forums. Sleep disorder articles. Long medical terms wrapped in calm language that promises the body can malfunction in ways that feel impossible.
Parasomnia.
Hypnopompic hallucinations.
Sleep paralysis. Stress responses. False awakenings.
I read frantically, dragging myself from page to page until the words begin blurring together beneath my eyes, until none of it feels fully real anymore. Every explanation offers relief for a few seconds at a time right up until my gaze catches the inside of my thigh again.
None of them explain the fingerprints.
My breathing turns shallow again. I stare back toward the bed. The sheets are tangled around the centre of the mattress. The shape of my body still pressed into them.
For one awful second, I can almost feel hands there again.
I look away immediately.