Dream Lover (2 page)

Finally, I owe tremendous gratitude for my love of all things otherworldly to Stephen King. Thank you, Mr. King, for thirty years of inspiration. You haunt my dreams in the
best
possible way.

 

Kristina Wright
The dark woods of Virginia

 

 

 

 

 

 

S
he knows the way it starts, and she knows the way it will end. Only the intervals between the first soft hiss by the bedroom curtains and the final valiant ungluing of Freya’s eyelids ever offer anything in the way of variation.

First, her book will slide out of her hand and the curling fog of sleep will claim the outer fringes of her consciousness.

Next, the room will darken and her limbs will lose mobility, sinking into the mattress in fixed positions.

There will be a fluttering by the curtains, which aren’t the fluttery type—heavily lined brocade with gold embroidery—and then a sound, a continuous gentle exhalation, like the escape of air from a child’s inflatable toy. But it gets louder, and Freya’s limbs are made of lead, and her eyes can see shapes but no definition, and then there is
something there
.

She wants to cry out, “Who are you? What are you?” but her lips are frozen speechless. That might be the end of it, on a good night, but more often there will be sensations, as if her
body is being flung hither and thither. One night, the mattress lurched her statue-body to the right, as if someone had sat down beside her. One night, the rushing, hissing breath came right up to her ear, and she felt its urgent heat. She waited for words, but none came. Every time, she waits for some concrete statement of intent, and every time she is frustrated, left to battle for the return of her waking perception, when the room goes back to normal. Whatever
normal
is.

Nothing is normal in my life
she thinks fretfully, waiting for Him—she knows it is Him—to come to her again. She came here to be closer to Him, so why should she be dismayed when it seems to be working?

Speak to me, Lucien
, she appeals, without saying the words, to the shadows thrown by the curtains.
Speak to me, lover.

The sound is like the roar of millions of crickets now, all around the bed, pressing into her ears and her face and her skin. She is surrounded by a presence so intense it is almost tangible. She thinks of that medieval punishment, Pressing to Death, and feels she might have an idea how that would be: the weights on chest and belly, the forceful downward pressure, the fear and the helplessness. Only the pain is absent, but perhaps that will come later.

If Freya could move, she would pivot sharply at the waist and sit bolt upright at the sudden sensation of lips brushing her ear. Warmth circulates around the lobe and then the slight dampness of human breath settles like dew on the flesh.

But no words come. Instead, her body blooms into a state she has not experienced for some time—a state of sexual receptiveness. Her nipples stiffen beneath the flimsy nightdress and she wonders if she is blushing. She has a strong urge to grab the bedspread she kicked off in the remains of the summer evening
humidity and pull it over her for protection, but she cannot. She knows that there are eyes upon her, devouring her long white legs, naked where her nightdress has rucked up while she tossed and turned over her late-night reading. If they follow the line of those sweat-sheened thighs, they will come to her unprotected sex, which now fattens and grows wetter under the phantom gaze, ready for it, offering itself to it.
Oh, god, is this what you wanted all along? Is this what I am here for?

A lingering vapor settles over her breasts and belly, extending downward, tingling along the line from her navel to her pubic triangle and then diving closer, to fit itself between her sex lips, enjoying the answering moistness it finds there. Can a presence, a vapor, express enjoyment? It really seems to do so, reveling in the prepared state of Freya’s most intimate places. She feels an insidious rubbing, something softer than fingers but drier than a tongue, curling around her clitoris and teasing it with an expertise that is entirely new to her.

This is weird, this is bad, this is…
But Freya cannot articulate thought anymore, not with this divine, forbidden rush charging around inside her.

Her lips cannot frame words, but when the surge of orgasm breaks through the walls of her reserve, her mind cries,
Lucien, Lucien, Lucien
.

 

“Sleep well, madam?” asked the receptionist politely as Freya crossed the marble-floored lobby to the breakfast room.

“Fine…thanks.” Freya was distracted, forgetting to engage in her usual mental rant about the insulting inappropriateness of turning Lucien Mountfitchet’s ancestral home into a tourist trap. Not even a Blue Plaque, for heavens sake, when the whole place should be a museum, hallowed to the memory of the great poet.

But then
—she sipped at orange juice, nodded when the waiter hovered beside her with a coffee pot—
nobody else appreciates his genius. He is a victim of fashion
. Lucien Mountfitchet was considered by the academic establishment to be a minor Victorian poet, rather a novelty, more celebrated, like de Sade, for his shock value than his writing. Freya had been trying to stage a revival of his fortunes for more than a decade, ever since she happened across a copy of his epic poem
Lysistrata Avenged
in a secondhand bookshop.

“I can’t understand his obscurity,” she had raged at her friends. “He’s sexier than Byron, angstier than Keats, kinkier than Swinburne. He didn’t get published much in his lifetime because he antagonized so many people, but now—I don’t know what’s holding us back. He is…zeitgeisty. Don’t you think? And his life would make such a brilliant movie. Just…think about it.”

Her friends were editorial assistants and film students, so she was hoping her pleas would fall on some fertile ground, but they laughed politely, promised to read a few of his poems and promptly forgot all about it. She had managed to snag some funding for research, though, and this was what she was spending on an extended stay at Hatton Stacey, the former pile of the Mountfitchets, now tragically reduced to its current commercial purpose.

So what was that last night?
Freya found herself unable to face digestion of anything other than liquids. She had a high, airy feeling at the top of her lungs that reminded her of the one and only time she had been in love, all those years ago. It was Lucien, it had to be. She had booked that room—his room—deliberately, in the hope that some trace of his spirit would reveal itself to her, and it was certainly answering the call. The first lines of one of his schoolboy poems, “Uncorseted,” wandered into her mind:
Athena had no need of stays/ No, nor Aphrodite laces/
Coy mistresses must give their way/ To bawdy girls with brazen faces.
A slut’s charter, she had called it in her sketched-out introduction to the book she meant to write. Lucien loved bold girls, fast girls, girls who enjoyed sex and made no bones about it. Was she such a girl? If she was, Lucien had made her so, for she had had the reputation of ice maiden at university and beyond. He had come to her and…touched her, in a way she had never been touched. She had offered no resistance. She had welcomed him, encouraged him. He had chosen her for a lover.

“I accept,” she murmured to the bronze bust of his handsome head that stood on a plinth on the right side of the breakfast room fireplace. She stroked his cold, smooth cheek. “I am your lover.”

She showered before bed that night, taut with anticipation, ignoring the emptiness of her belly after another unsuccessful attempt to eat. No progress had been made on the book, and she had abandoned the day, in her giddiness, to a tour of the surrounding countryside where Lucien had spent his adolescent summer holidays tumbling wenches in haystacks and trying to call up demons. It was as if he sat beside her in the passenger seat, pointing out local landmarks and explaining to her their personal significance. The warm breath of summer air was him, at her elbow, kissing her neck.

Will you come tonight?
She smoothed scented lather everywhere, every curve of neck and hollow of back, paying special attention to the neat mat of curls between her legs and the hidden crease under her breasts. He liked a girl to be clean for him so that he could make his sullying mark on her. Freya knew this from his writings, though she also knew that he was not fastidious about the natural effusions of male and female bodies. He had had erotica published in Holland under a pseudonym. She knew what he liked, which was a blessed relief. Having to
second-guess the tastes of more corporeal lovers had been an exhausting waste of time and partly why Freya had withdrawn herself from the mating game. With Lucien, you simply knew that he liked everything and would try anything new: so much easier.

She stepped out of the shower room, wrapped in towels, and smiled at her neatly folded nightdress on the pillow. No need for that tonight, she decided, placing it in a drawer. She sat on the bedside, brushing out her long dark hair, much more carefully than was her wont. Looking at herself in the mirror, she felt a sudden jolt of melancholy, recalling some words of her mother’s.
You’re lonely, Freya. You should stop obsessing over dead men and get yourself a nice live one. It’s not healthy to lock yourself away the way you do. Real men can be nice, you know!

Humph. What did she know? She was constantly picking up pieces from failed relationships with men who would never be Freya’s late father. Her talk of nice real men would be more convincing if she had one of her own to use as an example.

Freya slammed the brush down on the dresser and gasped at a shimmer from the mirror, almost as if it was saying, “Careful there!”

“Sorry,” she said reflexively, then she laughed at herself, watching her hand fly to her mouth’s reflection in the glass. “I’m not going mad, am I?” she appealed to her image. She laughed again, less confidently, before taking the hair dryer from the wall and switching it on, letting its dry roar blot out the cacophony of opposing thoughts in her head.

Lying on the bed, legs out straight, palms upward in supplication, like the painting of Ophelia drowning, she waited for him. She worried that her too-easy surrender had bored him and he would not return. She worried that she would not be able to slip into that intermediate state between wakefulness and dreaming
tonight. She worried that it was all a trick of her overwrought mind.

She worried that she had lost her overwrought mind.

And then her eyelids were sliding and the curtain billowed and she was pinned down by the invisible force again, calling the serpentine sibilance into her ears, letting it pour into her head and fill her body.

The sound streamed toward her, a flow of movement that she could follow, crossing from the curtains to the bed, where it loomed over her for long minutes as if waiting for a sign, perhaps an indication of consent.

Come to me, Lucien
.

The mattress buckled; there was heaviness on either side of her hips, a strong grip that slowly pinioned her until those upraised palms were pushed back down, lying leaden above her head, leaving her exquisitely vulnerable to ravishment.

Her eyes, stupefied with lustful adoration, looked for forms in the darkness above her, but she could make out no lines to contain the physical force holding her in thrall. Her lover, invisible and yet so unmistakably present, could not or would not show himself to her.

Now he bore down, the hissing was close, the heat on her face, the weight of him. Oh, his skin! That slick, porous warmth against her rib cage, that nudge of what had to be a knee between her thighs—and there was a crinkle of hair wedged between his flat hard chest and her breasts, tickling and abrading her delicate skin. She wanted to raise her leg, to rub it joyfully against his, but of course she could not move except according to his will, so she had to content herself with sketching the mental image of him according to what she felt on her body.

Tall—he stood “six foot three in stocking feet,” if she recalled her readings—broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with a
tumble of luxuriant hair, the attributes of her nocturnal visitor certainly seemed to tally with the few pictures of Lucien she had seen. If she had had control of her vocal cords, she would have laughed with recognition of the long, proud nose that suddenly butted hers, but the laughter would soon have been stilled by the urgent pressure of full, curved lips, muffling her soundless cries in a violent kiss.

She could not writhe, could not squirm, could not clasp him against her and bury her face in his neck. She could do nothing but accept the disembodied embrace and hope that her enthusiastic compliance would be interpreted correctly.

If only you would speak
.

But the plea was not acknowledged. Something flexible and wet pushed its way into Freya’s mouth, leaving her lips to expand helplessly in accommodation of it. It sent pulses of wild excitement hammering across her body, up to the fingertips, down to the toes. Between her legs, she was wet and ready, and then a hard length nudged against an inner thigh.

She gasped at a hard pinch of her nipple, then there was sucking, greedy and lascivious, at her neck. A lick of wet warmth shocked both nipples into yet tighter uprightness once they were exposed to the cold air, and then there was gentle rocking on top of her captive belly and pelvis, a spreading of her lower lips, a deft stroking of her clitoris—oh, how she longed to arch her back!—until she quivered inside, a raw mess of desire and emotion.

He had heard that thought all right—or was it simply serendipitous that he chose that moment to launch his first stroke, lodging his substantial cock firmly inside Freya in one swift swoop? As she lay impaled on Lucien’s experienced shaft, Freya
concentrated on the sensation, narrowing down the focus of her mind until all that existed of her was her sex, filled and stretched by this weighty invader, finally taken in the way she had always wanted.