I Dream of Demons

I've never enjoyed the heat. My mind lags and lulls and there's no reprieve in the stiff air. I am repulsed by the saccharine fruits that ripen in the summer, choosing instead to suck on half melted ice cubes, letting the thin trickle subdue the discomfort of the day.

The sun, piercingly bright, finally set on the day and the night drones on and on and has ended in an anticlimactic night of fitful sleep, where sticky sheets suffocatingly cling to my body. I doze in and out of sleep for hours after the sun sets. The air conditioner buzzing like a deafening cricket in my windowsill.

My body heaves awake, and is still goose fleshed from some disturbance I was not wholly aware of in my sleep when I move to turn the idle lamp on that sits by itself on a nightstand beside my bed. I reach across the breathless void to find the pull chain. The night is stifling warm, and despite the humidity, my mouth is dry, I have the urge to lick the sweat from my arm to wet my tongue.

An ache forms behind my eyes and I squint them closed against the burst of a dull headache. The air is so thick it feels like swimming when I push the covers off my bare legs. I sit up and rest my eyes in the palms of my hands. A plague of wicked thoughts run through my mind. What woke me? It could have been anything. How powerless and hopeless we are in our sleep.

I push myself back down into my sweat-damp pillow and keep my eyes closed against the lamp light. It feels late, but not so late that it is early. I sigh, and my breath doesn't move throughout the room. Instead it falls short and is lost in the quiet night. I blink open my eyes and peer through the blur of sleep at the clock on the wall adjacent to my bed. 12:34.

I've only been asleep for thirty minutes. My whole body is hazy and worthless. I turn the lamp off, and am immediately greeted with a darkness that feels greedy. Across my room, through a small window is a silver guess of a moon. A simple grin of silver light and not much else reaches through the darkness. I breathe deeply to calm my nervous thoughts, and will myself back to sleep. I feel my body drop effortlessly into the numbness of sleep, and my mind quiets until I catch myself in a dream.

I am standing naked in an empty room. The room is lightless. Motionless. Void of comfort, the air is sticky and thick. Breathing is pulling syrup into my lungs. My eyes confuse themselves in frantic searching, there is nothing to focus on. Not only is there silence, but the room absorbs sound quickly and carries it away. I try to speak but the words are pushed far beneath my tongue. I am aware that I am being made to wait. Hours pass and my eyes feel heavy and my body is rigid in the stifling heat. A draft of air trickles into the room. As if a door is quietly opened and someone has swiftly entered.

My body becomes alert. The bits of hair on my neck stand and seem to shiver themselves. My shoulders jerk quickly as if being jolted awake by the welcomed cool air. My belly is trembling beneath prickled flesh. My nipples tingle. I feel a cool touch on the backs of my hands, it moves to encase both my wrists, icy formless fingers gripping my arms and moving them behind my back. A graze along my spine, the same icy touch, buckles my knees. Before I fall, a glacial grip on my waist steadies me. I feel hands, frost fingers moving across my body, prodding my fevered body. In my hair are hands made of ice, melting when they touch me, and dripping in cave-water cold drops along my body. The water clings to my nipples briefly, keeping them erect, before falling into a pool around my feet.

My legs are slowly parted by unseen hands, delicate fingers motioning my knees spread apart. I am intensely aware of the warmth between my legs in striking juxtaposition to the frigid embrace my body is feeling. The hands move in every direction, pressing against the back of my thighs and holding my chin as icicles are pressed against my lips where they melt and I swallow the cold. It radiates in me. Glazing my body in hiemal chills. All of my body except the place I want it most.

A cacophony of sound bursts through the room, many voice all at once scrambling to assimilate and become one. A milky, dewy voice against my ear says simply, "you must ask me." All at once the cool embrace leaves my body.

I bolt awake. My chest heaves under the weight of the dream. I feel sweat rolling in beads across my body. The word "please," is idle on the tip of my tongue. I calm my breathing and notice the clock reads 12:35. I frustratingly fling myself back onto my pillow. Wriggle out of my clothes to combat the heat and turn to lay on my belly, forcing my eyes closed so I can get some sleep. I begin to drift when across the room, the voice calls out, "you have to ask me."

My body misinterprets my fear and seizes in a wave of horripilation. I feel the bubble of arousal in the pit of my belly. I roll over and standing just beside my bed, a figure darker than night. A shadow with no real form, daunting in its size, careens itself over my bed. A welcome breeze when he speaks again, "I cannot give you what you want, unless you ask it of me."

The assumption of absurdity is that I'm dreaming. I will myself to stay asleep, if that's what this is. My body is an impossible inferno. The heat rises to my cheeks and I feel them burn when I open my mouth to answer the being at the foot of my bed. My mouth forms the words, "please touch me." I am answered with a thunderous laugh, "that is a command. You must ask."

My body is aching under the heat, and I remember the icy touch in my dream. I sit up on my elbows and stare directly at the shadowy thing before me. The shape of his body changes form like most things do in nightmares. My eyes barely adjust on one broad shoulder and move across to the other, almost the width of my bed. No discernable limbs, just a shadowy mass bowing under its size. His body moves in shimmers, like heat waves on pavement, "you seem curious, shall I come closer?"

I speak before I realize it, "will you come closer, please?" Curiosity overcomes the initial fear I felt when I awoke from the dream. He obliges, and moves silently over the bed. Against his size my bedroom disappears. I cannot see past him, and his proximity has offered me nothing more as to what he actually looks like. I'm blind in the dark again. I feel the cool of his formless body close to mine, a continuous cool breeze of breath on my tempered skin. I reach a hand out to touch him, and my wrist is quickly ensnared by a cold hand. He pushes my hand back onto the bed, next to my head. I feel my breath quicken, and the rise of my chest presses me closer to the cool reprieve above me. I want to break the fever in my body with his gelidity. "Will you touch me, please?"

His voice is warm, and subtle, not quite stifling. It crackles like a flame in a fireplace when he speaks, "of course." His body is weightless against mine as he moves over me. More a shadow than a body. I press my hips upward and move myself closer to the headboard of my bed, to allow him room. My thighs graze his tepid form. It is like stepping naked into a snowy night. An involuntary gasp escapes my lips. The icy hand that is gripping my wrist moves slowly over my arm, slow as an icicle drip in the heat.

His hand slows indefinitely when he reaches my neck. My voice is lost, I feel a shiver in my teeth and it moves down my throat and renders me speechless. His icy hand rests across my collar bones. He is motionless. Anticipatory. My body aches in heat. I feel a pool of sweat beneath my back, my thighs cling to each other in a thin layer of salt and skin. I find my voice beneath his hand, "can I have more, please?"

Immediately, obediently, he reaches another hand across my belly where the muscles jerk and tremble beneath the cold. I feel icicles on my hip bones, a continual melt in rivers that run off my waist. The heat rising off my body feels unbearable where he isn't touching me, "I want you to touch my whole body." He swiftly releases me, and I feel my fever build again. I grit my teeth and succumb to near begging, "will you please run your hands along my whole body?"

His return to my skin pulls my breath out of me in moans. I feel an impossible number of hands gripping my body. Behind my knees, fingers latch and bend me until my legs are parted. A creeping massage along my legs moves around to my back where I am briefly lifted from the bed. Cold arms wrap around my shoulders, and a single icy finger carves a road of chills along my spine. With a pinch between cold fingers, my nipples stand and I feel the pull of pleasure between my legs, where he has yet to touch me.

I open my mouth to speak and am greeted instead by icicle fingers. Probing and moving across my tongue. Cold water pools in my cheeks and drips down my chin. My throat is frigid, I swallow and the icicle guides itself slowly to the back of my throat, coupling the heat from my body with his freeze, gracefully depriving me of words.

He is silent in his movements. Cupping my breasts, and moving slowly along my belly. A pool of cool water rests in my belly button, where it quivers when I breathe. He slips his fingers from my mouth, and I ask "can I have you inside me, please?"

There is a brief pause, I feel the wealth of his cool hands move down my body and onto my thighs, where he pushes my legs open as far as they can be opened. Icy lips move over my belly, and flickering in and out of his mouth is a fiery tongue. The contrast is exhilarating and maddening. When he reaches my sex, my body is weak and helpless. The first touch shudders my whole body, a tap of cool on my clit.

Once I recover, he wastes no time. I feel him press himself into me. Thrusting his frigid body into me, I feel the heat in my body give way to a satiating cool. Winter in my womb, a reprieve from the heat, finally, in ecstacy. My entire body is licked in cool water, soaked in his body. Inside me, I feel the depth of him pushing into me further and further. He strokes my clit with one cool hand, and continues to plunge himself into me. His hands are on my elbows and somehow on my knees all at once.

I feel impossibly relieved of the summer day, by more hands and more mouths than I can hold. In the dark, my eyes refuse to focus on his formless body, and I don't care to try. Moans are forced out of me as he thrusts harder each time. My body seizes around his member, I feel myself on the verge of an overwhelming orgasm. His voice is in my ear, "You have to ask me to cum." He slows his pace, and I feel my body ache, I do not want this to end.

My body rocks with his, slow and deliberate. My back arches as I feel his fingers drip down my spine. I feel his lips on my nipples, his flame like tongue singing my nipples lightly after every kiss. I feel familiar burn give rise between my legs, and my breath quickens. "Can I cum, please?" I ask him.

He does not answer, instead he pushes himself deeper into me, and thrusts with such vigor, my bed rocks against the wall. I steady myself with my hands against his grinding, and I let myself go. My legs shake, my toes curl. My breath comes out in small gasps and I can't control my body. I feel myself grip his cold appendage in a full body frenzy. At the same time I feel him burst within me, like melted ice cubes suddenly turning to lava. Filling me again with a heat, like thawing in front of an open fire after trudging through the snow. I fall back, weak, as he pulls out of me.

He is gone as quickly as he entered. The night returns, and I see the moon through the window again. Panting, I reach to turn the lamplight on. My hazy eyes read the clock on the far wall, 12:35. Impossible. I fall back into my pillow, close my eyes, and sleep soundly the rest of the night.