Chapter 2: Dream a Little Dream

The dream closed around me without warning and set me down again in the bedroom of the party house. I was already naked on the bed. Tyler was already inside me, his weight pressing me into the mattress, his hips driving in that same urgent rhythm I remembered too well. The low sounds of pleasure in his throat were familiar. Everything else was wrong.

The sheets beneath us were no longer ordinary cotton. They were deep red satin, the exact color of dark, arterial blood, slick and cool against my overheated skin. The walls of the room expanded and contracted in time with my own breathing, as if the entire space were a living thing that had decided to watch. The air felt thicker, almost syrupy. The light had no clear source. None of it matched the real memory, yet the physical sensations were so vivid that my body answered before my mind could fully protest.

He was different too. The sharp, cocky edges of his face had softened into something almost tender. The way he moved inside me had changed as well—still powerful, still deep, but slower, more deliberate, as if he were trying to feel every inch of contact rather than claim it. He rolled us carefully onto our sides so that we faced each other, one of my legs draped over his hip, and continued to rock into me in long, measured strokes. The position felt intimate in a way that had never happened that night. I knew it had never happened. The knowledge flickered through the dream like a distant warning flare, but the pleasure rising through my core drowned it almost immediately.

“You’re so beautiful,” he murmured against my mouth, kissing me between the words. “Gorgeous. Sexy. So special. So important.” Each phrase was paired with another slow thrust and another soft kiss—on my lips, my cheek, the side of my neck, my forehead. “I’ve spent three years dreaming about the day you’d finally be mine.”

The confessions and the praise wrapped around me as tightly as his arms. Even knowing it was a dream, I felt myself falling further into him. Conflict twisted under the pleasure. Part of me wanted to push him away, to insist that this softness was a lie, that the real Tyler was the one who had taken what he wanted in the bathroom and the kitchen and the bed. Another part of me ... the part that had come so hard for his praise the night before ... leaned into every word. The orgasm built and broke, then built again. Fluid spilled out of me in heavy pulses, soaking the red satin until a dark puddle spread beneath us. I came a second time, then a third, squirting hard around his cock while he kept moving and kept whispering those same devastatingly gentle things. Each climax left me more tangled in the dream version of him, more reluctant to wake, more aware that something inside me was responding to the tenderness as hungrily as it had responded to the roughness.