The first time it happened, I woke up straddling the banister, my toes kicking against the carpeted stair on the right and open air on the left. My jaw was stretched at the hinges and complained when I pushed against the cottony mass in my teeth with my dry tongue - the edge of my t-shirt, pulled over my breasts and jammed into my mouth. My panties were a wet mess, the inside edge of both leg bands worked tight into my outer lips. When I hazily dismounted and made my way to the bathroom, I was sure from the soaked cotton gusset and the clammy damp I felt down to my knees that I'd peed myself, but I was wrong. No ammonia on the smell of my panties, none on me, just the seashell musk neediness of having come and come and come again, riding the second floor banister in my sleep. My throat scratched with pulled-in screams the next day and I only figured out three days later that the lingering twinge along the inside edges of each breast when I put on or took off my bra must have come from me crushing and stroking them against the polished wood of the handrail.
Alan never noticed I was out of bed at all.
He's been travelling a lot for work, and was never even what you'd call a good sleeper at home. When he'd come home from the third trip hollow-eyed exhausted from the thousand complaints of the sensitive shoulder on the hotel mattress, I nuzzled my lips against the short hair just above his ear and made him promise me he'd talk to his doctor. He's been on Ambien now for three months, and it drops him like a rock no matter where his bed is.
We were warned about the side effects, to watch closely for not just sleepwalking and conversations in pajamas that he couldn't remember in the morning, but for the more exotic symptoms: eating endless bowls of cereal at 3 AM, driving to the corner store with no conscious mind. Beth, a good friend, warned me especially about the sleep sex. Her husband, a thick-thighed man who plays in a weekend rugby league had been on the drug a week the first time she'd woken up to his tongue rooting against her asshole.
Over the course of a month, the pattern repeated, not every night but always the same when it happened. He'd start by gently tonguing her ass open then he'd turn her onto her knees so he could put his thumb in her anus and two thick fingers in her pussy, rubbing the tips together against the thin membrane of muscle between the two. If she tried to move other than to stroke her clit or shake with orgasm, he held her firm by the nape of the neck until he was finished. Whenever his sleep-wrapped brain told him they were both ready, he'd mount her from behind and dig his hands into her hips, barreling at her until he pulled out and came on her back.
When he was awake, he liked her to ride on top of him, working his palms against her breasts. When he was awake, he always asked to start with her mouth pulling him into full hardness while he stretched out on the mattress. When he was awake, he'd never eaten her ass. Beth thought it was a game at first, she winked and smiled at what she assumed were put-on baffled looks when she teased him about being sore from his rough treatment the night before. It wasn't until he told her he'd asked his doctor at the follow-up visit if Ambien was causing him not to remember kicking her in the night that she realized he didn't remember any of it at all.
Before she could tie words enough to tell him around her pleasure and guilt for their early morning sex, he'd changed prescriptions. Now she tries to satisfy that part of herself by getting him to change positions and fuck her from behind sometimes - she can't bring herself to ask him to lick her. Instead, she looks through his porn history when he's at rugby practice for all the anal scenes and gets herself off with a dildo curved over on itself like a "c."
In hindsight, Beth and I probably shouldn't have split a second bottle of wine that night.
When Alan started on Ambien, I spent the first two weeks tingling with excitement that I might wake up in the middle of the night with his fingers inside me or the head of his cock probing against my sleep-sighing lips. Even nights when we'd had sex already, I waited for that secret door inside him to open up to me, for him to knock on my own secret doors under cover of sleep. I had trouble going to sleep and woke at the slightest turn of his body tugging the sheets. I fantasized every day about what carnality I'd find in him when the Ambien swept away his inhibitions.
He's so polite, my Alan. So Midwestern, so quiet. When we were dating, he would move my hand if it got too high on his leg in a restaurant but as soon as we got in the door of his apartment, he'd lay me out on the floor and fuck me until the hardwood left a sore scuff against my tailbone. He's a contained man, a ship in a bottle man. When we were dating, I knew just how to shake the glass to billow his sails. Living together, being married...there's something about that intimacy of sharing a towel when the rest are in the laundry and rolling your eyes over a forgotten bill that pulls the cork out of the bottle.
So we fuck politely all the time now, with him asking my permission by rubbing my shoulders or squeezing my hand after dinner, then coming to bed in nothing but his boxers a few hours later. He kisses my shoulder, I put my book away. I squeeze at his dry cock through his boxers and his thickness against my palm, it always makes me wet for him. I can't help the way I'm built, the way my body knows it was made to hold him inside me. He kisses his way on top of me and strokes the head of his cock against my clit while I bury my face in the black hair on his chest and breathe in his rich smell and imagine him as a pirate or a high school teacher or a hundred men in a long line waiting for my cunt. When he enters me it's always a tight fit, always feels like opening and giving on a bigger scale, and it pushes whatever other role I've cast him in out of my mind, out of my body from the bottom up. He never lasts inside me as long as I want, but I always tell him it is good.
I don't ask his permission at all anymore because I learned long ago that I ask in the wrong ways, that my tongue in his ear or my panties pressed against his hip turn him off when he's not expecting them. I used to have him use his fingers to make me come three, four more times after we were done with sex, but not anymore. He'll try anything I ask without complaining, and he'll try it enthusiastically for about a minute before he stops to kiss me instead. He'll never do it again if I don't ask. He'll try anything I ask without complaining because that is what's polite.
So that first time it happened, I really did think it was a dream, even as I stripped out of my wet panties and blinked in the half-light of the bathroom at the tiny divots my teeth left in the cotton of my t-shirt. I thought I might still be dreaming as I ran a cold washcloth over my thighs and stinging, swollen lips, pulled fresh panties from the hamper, and curled back against the mattress at Alan's side. I had to accept that something, however strange, had happened when I furtively wiped the dried residue off the bannister while my husband packed his suitcase. I was quiet with soreness and wonder as I drove him to the airport.
"Hey, don't be sad," he stroked my jaw with the backs of his fingers, mistaking the meaning in the tightness of my mouth. "It's this trip until Sunday, then the one to Atlanta next week, then I'm home for a whole month." He kissed me and I tilted my head against his shoulder, wanting nothing more than to hold him against me forever and for him to get the fuck out of the car already.
