If this was a horror movie, this would be the moment the foolhardy MC was warned by the wise crone, only to later stumble into the horror house or forest or dungeon or whatever. My problem was my Nan had been making these kinds of pronouncements since I was a kid. Used to have me up at all hours, shivering from nightmares until Mum threatened to ban her from seeing me. As her only grandchild that she was allowed access to, she reined it back until I was older.
“Well, it’d make for a nice change,” I said to the window, to her. My life was one long seamless line of taking photos, working on them in my office-slash-lounge room, having coffees with Jen, and seeing specialists. Maybe it would be a good thing to have Nan’s vague prognostications come true.
“Nice! Nice!” Her voice got shriller and shriller as I washed out my cup and set it on the draining board, then turned to leave. A heaviness settled over me as soon as half the drink had been consumed. I wasn’t going to be doing much of anything for the rest of the day. I needed to head to bed and sleep whatever this was off.
“Nan! I’m going to bed!” I snapped as she trailed after me, thrusting bigger and bigger bundles at me as I turned to leave.
She cringed back. I instantly felt a pang of guilt. She was kept here, under lock and key on the farm, the family too embarrassed to put her into a home but not really knowing what to do with her while she was here. We yelled, that’s what we did. She wouldn’t let things go, yammering on and on about whatever paranormal conspiracy theories she had going at the time until someone did. Then her mouth would shut like a trap, like it just had, and her eyes would shine with unshed tears.
I stepped in close, placing a kiss on her forehead. I tried to remember how she’d been when I was a kid, this magical figure who could turn a boring old walk through the forest into a swashbuckling adventure. I thought back to the times she’d held me on her knee, paging through beautifully illustrated botanicals and books about faeries, telling me wild story after wild story. This wasn’t her talking, it was the disease, and I needed to remember that.
“Thank you, Nan,” I said. “I know you just want to keep me safe.”
She nodded stiffly, then thrust a small bundle into my hand. “Put that over your bed when you sleep.”
“Sure.”
I tossed it on the table when I got to my place, then put my camera away in the locked cupboard I kept all my gear in and placed the memory card near my computer and the battery on charge. I washed my face in the bathroom sink, the cool water on my skin now pleasant rather than the ragged claws of sensation I’d experienced earlier, then I slipped into bed. My eyelids felt like stones, dropping down along with my consciousness, until I was swallowed by the darkness.
He came to me, as he often did, after I’d had a bad day. At first, it was just the press of someone’s lips against mine. Slow, dry, nipping kisses, the sound like the shift of a snake’s scales, then my eyes flickered open and I was staring into his.
He’d never told me his name, but he was as familiar to me as the whorls on my fingertips, the haphazard lie of my hair, the sound of my own breath. He grinned when he noticed I was awake, a sharp bright thing as effective now as it was the first time I saw it. It was his greeting, his answer when I asked personal questions, and a sadder one, his goodbye when I woke up to lose him again. There he lay, my dream lover. His dirty blond hair spilled over the pillow, soft as silk, and made my hand itch to stroke it. Those grey-blue eyes sparkled with a light that was a little intimidating to meet. Was he laughing with me or at me? I never knew, but it didn’t matter much. He knew I’d stare at them for as long as I could, for the same reason I listened to his music on high rotation, or watch videos of him on social media sites. Liam Hartley, lead singer of The Changelings, visited my dreams every night after I’d had a turn.
“You’re hurting again.” His brow creased slightly, and he reached out and smoothed my hair back from my face. For a moment, my eyes rolled closed, the stroking sensation, the feel of him close, the wild thyme and sandalwood scent of him, all-consuming. I should question this experience. How come unlike any other dream I’ve ever had, this was a 3D technicolour extravaganza and everything else was always muted and surreal? How come I woke up shocked to not find him next to me, even though my pose, my pillow, my bed were all exactly the same as my dream? That I had to blink several times at the end, let the lonely pall of reality re-situate itself—but I didn’t. I didn’t question his presence, because if lying beside my idol in a dream was a side-effect of my condition or yet another brain glitch, it’s not one I wanted to tamper with.
I covered his hand with mine, pressing it into my cheek. “It’s OK, I had some of Nan’s tea.”
“The one that dulls your abilities? You need to stop doing that, Ki.”
“You say that, but it’s not you that sees the world doubling, tripling, and flickering like a moth on a light globe. Usually Nan’s ‘cures’ are a bunch of dirt and crap, but this actually works. If that’s what it takes to be semi-normal, I’m all for it.”
“Normal.” His smile twisted into something both scornful and mischievous. “Why on earth would you aspire to something so bloody banal?”
“Banal sounds terrible to someone like you. Of course, it does. It’s all world tours and groupies. Caviar, champers, and cocaine.”
“Oh, that gets pretty banal too,” he said, moving in to kiss me again. It was deeper, and when we finally pulled back, we were both breathing heavily. “Not this though.”
His words were corny and his smile acknowledged that, but it didn’t matter. The heat there, in his eyes and my body, was real, despite them. It felt completely natural for him to roll his body over mine, to grab my hands with his and push them above my head, for his lips to descend, hungrily this time, for the long hard length of his cock to press up between my legs as he thrust against me. I assumed men and women around the world dreamed similar things about Liam every night, and some even lucky enough to experience it, if the tabloids were correct. None of that mattered right now. It was just him and me.
“Try to hang on,” he rasped. His hands and his body were moving faster. My shirt was shoved up, his tongue trailing over my skin, his lips closing over my nipple. I gasped at the sweet, sore tug of it, and it felt for all the world like something was tugging simultaneously on my clit. He switched from one to the other, until it was all a blur of sensation and we were scrambling free of each other, dragging shirts over our heads, pulling pants off.
“You’re so beautiful when you’re like this,” he said as he knelt between my bare thighs. His fingers slid through my folds, and then he held them up as evidence. “You get so fucking wet for me. No one else gets like this.” That’s what you have to love about dreams—that a man who had slept his way through the majority of the current pool of supermodels would say I was the most sexually responsive. Logic didn’t matter in the land of the id. “Just hold on, love. I think we both really need this.”
He crawled over my body, his hair trailing along my skin as he moved, his smile an acknowledgement of my gasp as it brushed over my more sensitive parts. “Open wide, little girl,” he said as he lowered his hips to mine. “I want to be so deep in you, I don’t know where I end and you start.”