Sleep came over her like warm water, slow and heavy, the kind that pulls you under before you even realize you’ve stopped fighting it. The room was quiet, still, too still — the kind of stillness that feels like someone else is holding their breath right beside you.
She drifted into a dream that didn’t feel like a dream.
The air was thick. Warm. Sweet.
And she wasn’t alone.
A presence moved behind her, gentle at first, like heat rising inches from her skin. A whisper grazed her ear, soft as silk but deep enough to curl her toes.
“I’ve been waiting.”
She should’ve been scared, but the sensation sliding down her spine wasn’t fear. Her pulse slowed, then sped, then slowed again, syncing to something that wasn’t hers. A hand — warm, deliberate, impossibly real — brushed the back of her hip. Her breath caught. Every nerve woke up at once.
Fingers pressed into her waist like they knew her body before she did.
Her dream-self leaned into the touch without thinking, drawn like metal to a magnet.
The figure never spoke again.
Didn’t need to.
The room around them glowed dim and red, like desire had its own light source. She felt lips at her shoulder. A palm sliding across her curves. A grip, firm, claiming. Heat pooling low, rising higher. The dream turned physical fast — the kind of physical she had no business enjoying as much as she did.
She reached back to feel them — and that’s when everything snapped.
Darkness.
Silence.
Gone.
Just her, waking up alone, heart racing like she sprinted out of a storm.
She tried to remember their face. Their voice. Their heat.
Nothing.
Just the lingering sensation of being touched by someone who wasn’t human enough to stay and not wild enough to forget her.
Two days later, she caught a glimpse of her skin in the mirror —
a thin scratch curving across her hip like a signature.
A reminder.
A promise.
A mark left by someone who belonged to the world behind her eyelids.
She stared at that line, heat crawling up her neck.
So it wasn’t just a dream.
Whatever reached for her in the dark…
could reach again.
And part of her — the part that remembered the warmth and the whisper — didn’t mind at all
