Moonlight Mist: A Limited Edition Collection of Fantasy & Paranormal)

by Nicole Morgan

  “I’ll take good care of him,” I promised. She looked at me appraisingly, as if seeing me for the first time.

  “You’d be surprised just how many girls have said those very words to me,” she said.

  I bristled at the word “girls” but didn’t protest. Again, it wasn’t the time or place.

  “You look like you might mean it,” she said.

  And unexpectedly, she bent down and kissed my cheek. She smelled of cigarette smoke and the woody, floral notes of Clive Christian No. 1.

  Before I could react, she was walking away, her four-inch heels sinking into the rose-colored carpeting.

  I pressed my hand against the scanner set at shoulder level, then pushed through the doorway and into the room.

  Chapter Four

  “I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.”—Emily Bronte

  The room glowed with a soft violet light. If you believe in color therapy, violet is supposed to help temper anxiety, reduce mental exhaustion, ease insomnia, and heal inflammation. I’m not sure I really believe that, but I love all shades of purple and I find the color soothing.

  In the cool light, Ebenezer looked like a sleeping alien angel, something Michelangelo might have carved from marble to decorate a nobleman’s tomb.

  He was laid out on temperature-controlled mechanical bed, his torso and head slightly elevated; covered from the waist down by a pure white sheet draped so artfully I wondered if it was intentional.

  His head had been shaved and his naked skull was so smooth it looked polished.

  His chest was smooth too.

  I wondered if he waxed it. I’ve never really liked hairy guys but I also hate it when I’m dating someone who uses more beauty products than I do.

  Not that I should have been thinking about Ebenezer Quarles’s chest. He was a patient, after all, and not some sexual fantasy brought to life for my own personal entertainment.

  Not that I had never done that—animated a dream lover for an hour or two—but that was definitely crossing an ethical line and my mother would have been very disappointed in me even if the dreams sprang from my own imagination and were not borrowed from someone else.

  But Ebenezer was no fantasy. He was flesh and blood and I couldn’t deny the almost irresistible urge to reach out and stroke that smooth chest, the abs so well-defined they almost looked painted on.

  To distract myself, I glanced at the monitors hooked up to him.

  Respiration and oxygen level normal.

  Heart rate, a steady 78 beats per minute, blood pressure perfect.

  The wires tethering him to the machines were almost invisible in the purple light.

  Was he aware of me? I couldn’t tell. We know that people in comas can hear people around them, even if they can’t respond. Was Ebenezer inside the prison of his mind watching me? Did he even know where he was? Did he even remember who I was?

  “My name is Reve,” I said to the silent figure. “I’m here to help you.”

  There was no response, but I hadn’t expected one.

  I looked down at him again. He looked peaceful. I was glad. It can be stressful when someone walks in on a dream if the dreamer is not expecting company. Usually when I go into my sessions the patients have been prepared and know I’m coming. Even if the experience is not what they expected, it doesn’t take them completely by surprise.

  I would be walking in on Ebenezer unannounced and I had no idea what to expect.

  I took a deep breath, centered myself, and closed my eyes.

  The construct of my childhood bedroom sprang into being and I opened my eyes.

  The bedroom remained there in front of me.

  I took hold of the doorknob, which I’d always liked because it was faceted glass and brass, like a big piece of jewelry.

  I turned the knob and pushed, and walked into Ebenezer Quarles’s dreamworld.

  It was not what I’d expected.

  Chapter 5

  “You're something between a dream and a miracle.” –Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Dreamworlds are strange places. That goes without saying, but “strange” is a relative concept. Is it strange that while you’re dreaming you can conjure up people you know and people you’ve never met, characters who never truly existed?

  You might have a dream where your mother is flirting with Idris Elba while riding a flying unicorn over a volcano and it would seem perfectly normal even if you know that unicorns don’t exist.

  Is it peculiar to find your dreamscape littered with the detritus of your life? With bits and pieces of half-remembered memories your subconscious has latched onto the way a jackdaw will collect shiny bits of trash to decorate its nest?

  Dreams are the subconscious’ way of making sense of our daylight lives. So in a way whatever you see is perfectly normal. And yet at the sane tune, it is strange…so very, very strange.

  But not to the dreamer, not while the dream exists. Once the dream is over, it can never truly be captured or replicated. I know this, because here at the clinic we’ve tried to duplicate dreams and transfer them to another sleeper.

  It has never worked.

  Every dream is unique, even for twins. There’s anecdotal evidence of twins sharing dreams, but we’ve never found proof of it even though we’ve had twins as patients at the clinic a couple of times.

  One of the things Mira studied when she was in grad school was the dream content of twins versus that of “singletons.”

  She found out some interesting stuff—more twins find themselves in unfamiliar dreamscapes than non-twins—and it drove her crazy that she couldn’t figure out a reason for that. But she came away convinced that true “shared dreaming” was pretty unlikely unless machine-assisted, the way the tandem dreaming at the clinic was. She might have done more research in the area but got distracted when a drug company paid her a ton of money to do research on what she called “dirty dreams.”

  Big Pharma is really interested in dreams. You won’t see those studies mentioned in the companies’ annual reports or on their websites but they’re all doing it. When people dream about sex with strangers, it usually means the dreamer’s overall libido is low. So, how do libido-boosting meds affect dreams? Will a patient have more sex dreams? Or stop dreaming about sex altogether? What’s normal? What’s not? One of the most common things people reported about their sex dreams—and it really unnerved some of our male patients—is that they saw themselves kissing…themselves. That’s actually a good thing. It means you accept yourself and love yourself.

  People have a lot of ideas about what can and cannot happen in dreams and almost everything they think they know is wrong.

  You can see yourself dead in dreams. If you dream about falling you may not wake up before you hit the ground. But you won’t die either.

  I’ve learned that it’s best to go into a dream without any preconceived notions but because Ebenezer Quarles had been as omnipresent in pop culture as a Kardashian, it was hard not to make assumptions. And also there was my previous connection, something I had never mentioned to mother or my sisters.

  There’s a common sex dream, one where the scenario is that a stranger seduces you, leading to what Kitta calls “wild monkey sex,” though that’s not the clinical term for it.

  Dream analysts will tell you that such dreams are a sign that the dreamer needs to be more assertive and to admit that they need to act on their needs—sexual and otherwise—and not just wait around for something to happen.

  Which sounds very nice and empowering, even if those seduction dreams include elements of dark fantasy, bondage, and the like. The stranger in the dream isn’t based on a real person, necessarily, even if he or she looks like someone you know or fancy. The dream lover is just a stand-in, a body double. It’s as anonymous and impersonal as bath house encounters used to be before AIDS came along to take all
the fun out of them.

  That’s how the dream is for most people, anyway.

  And that’s what I thought was happening the first time I had the dream. I was only 17 and still a virgin. I had never even been kissed by anyone who really knew what he was doing, just boys my age who had lunged toward me and thrust their tongues down my throat like they were auditioning for a porn video.

  So one night, I woke to find a beautiful stranger in my bedroom, pensively staring out the window into the night like some lost angel had dropped in to visit but was now looking for his way home.

  When you have the abilities I do, there’s not much of a line between waking and sleeping, so I wasn’t alarmed. Ever since I’d been rescued from Dr. Faustus, I’d been living in a benign state of house arrest. It would have taken a stealth team of Navy SEALS to breach the security surrounding my tower bedroom.

  So I wasn’t scared to see the stranger in my room.

  Far from it.

  He was around my age. That was weird because I was home-schooled and none of the guys I interacted with at carefully monitored social activities looked like him. They were still mostly boys and this nocturnal visitor was clearly a man despite his youth.

  I remember noticing that he was taller than the bookcase in my room and the bookcase was a foot taller than I was. So he was tall.

  He was slim but athletic looking, like a wrestler or maybe a baseball player. His skin was pale in the moonlight and his hair was midnight dark, falling over his pale forehead like a silky shadow.

  I wondered if he was a vampire. Such creatures exist in dreams and I’d met more than a few in my dreamwalking, but I had the feeling this boy-man was as flesh and blood as I was.

  “I’m awake,” I said softly and he turned away from the window to smile at me.

  “So am I,” he said, and came over to the bed.

  I knew I had gone to bed in an oversized Columbia University t-shirt that belonged to Kitta but now I was wearing a gauzy golden gown that squished my skimpy cleavage together to make me look voluptuous. I was lying on my back, arms at my side, displayed for him like a sacrifice.

  The phrase, “a virgin sacrifice” went through my mind, followed immediately by a feeling of desire so intense that it wiped out all rational thought.

  The leaned over me.

  “Sleeping beauty,” he said.

  “Wake me with a kiss,” I said. Which didn’t make sense because I was already awake, but that’s dream logic for you. What I knew with every breath in my body was that I meant “wake” in all senses of the word. I wanted this stranger to awaken the woman in me. I wanted to gift him with my virginity and take my pleasure in return.

  We had never met—he wasn’t yet the tabloid darling he would become—but I knew he was my soul mate. I reached for him. It was my decision. My choice.

  He bent down to kiss my lips, his tongue darting in as if to taste me, then withdrawing as I opened to him.

  I fell back against the pillows and he pinned me there with his weight as he trailed kisses from my lips down my throat to my—

  Oh. God.

  I arched my back as he kissed my breasts through the gauzy material of my gown, the sensation of his lips on my tender nipples almost too much to bear. And at his touch, the golden fabric covering me melted away so that I was naked beneath him.

  The sensation was like being hit with an electric current that was wired directly into my groin, like I’d been tazed with darts of pure pleasure.

  He put his hands flat on my breasts, as if taking ownership of them as he kissed me between them, then trailed lower and lower until—

  Oh.

  God.

  I let like my insides were melting and dripping out of me like heated honey and that was before he kissed me there. He twisted my nipples and sharp pain radiated from them, but faded into the white noise of my building need and the growing, aching warmth between my legs.

  His fingers slid off my breasts, which were slick with sweat, stroking down my body until they reached the already slick core of me. He rubbed my mound, teasing me with his touch and then he slid his hand into the cleft, rubbing against my clit in a way that sent thrums of sensation through my whole body. I pushed against his hand, craving the sensation and wanting more. Bu my body wouldn’t wait. As the rhythm built in me I found myself gasping for breath, riding a wave of sensation as helplessly as a surfer who’s lost her board.

  “Oh God,” I said, and this time I said it out loud.

  My dream lover looked up at me, a question in his dark blue eyes.

  Because it was a dream I could hear his thoughts.

  “I want to give you all of me,” he said.

  “I want you inside of me,” I replied. Mind to mind. Heart to heart.

  Body to soul.

  He shifted his weight and withdrew his hand.

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said and I knew he was agreeing with me, that the separation of our bodies felt like an amputation to him as well.

  I grabbed his dark hair and pulled him down to me. Taking possession of him, claiming him for my own. “Show me,” I said. He might be bigger, stronger, more experienced, but I knew he was mine to command. I wanted him to show himself to me. I wanted him to show me the way to womanhood. I wanted him to…

  He leaned back on his haunches with a smirk. He was wearing loose pajama pants of some silky fabric that was stretched taut by his erection.

  I’d played with vibrators before, so I didn’t expect there to be any pain. But when he pulled his penis out, I caught my breath . It wasn’t that he was enormously large, but he was thick. All sorts of absurd thoughts ran through my mind at the moment. The one I remember is—He is the key to my lock.

  I didn’t know exactly what he was going to unlock, but I was ready, so ready as he pushed his way into me. I felt my inner lips grip him as he began thrusting in and out like a flesh piston. It felt like I was breathing in synch with his motions and then the orgasm began building again and I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath at all.

  I clutched at him, my nails digging into the skin of his shoulders as he hammered into me, my own urgency met by his.

  As the tempo of his thrusts quickened, I wrapped my legs around his back to drawn him in even deeper.

  I felt myself approaching the cliff and just before I fell over it in delicious delirium, he exploded inside me.

  I came an instant later, my body shaking with the power of it.

  We clung together for a long time after, long enough that I could feel his heartbeat slow. We lay face to face, breathing in each other’s breaths, staring into each other’s eyes, our flesh still welded together from the heat of our passion.

  And because it was a dream there was no messy aftermath, no need to fetch towels to wipe ourselves, no need to worry that we might have made a child in our passion.

  It was perfect in a way that love in the waking world rarely is.

  And then it got even more perfect.

  “I love you Reve,” he said and it didn’t occur to me to wonder how he knew my name.

  “I love you too,” I said. And I knew his name as well.

  “Ebenezer,” I said.

  But before I could say anything else, he …disappeared.

  Then I woke for real, wearing Kitta’s t-shirt and aching for my loss.

  I didn’t know who Ebenezer was back then. I just thought I’d crossed paths with another dreamer. It wasn’t like I could just google the name “Ebenezer,” and find him. Though I did try. Turns out there are a lot of pizza and kebab places with that name. Also many video versions of a song called “Ebenezer Goode” that was released in 1992 and apparently banned by the BBC for its perceived approval of recreational drug use.

  So in other words, a dead end as far as searching for my dream lover.

  And then three years later, he’d ended up getting arrested in London after some escapade involving a dead ball python, a Swiss sex worker, and a stolen Italian car ful
l of drugs belonging to a Russian crime lord. His mug shot had gone viral, with more “likes” than Jeremy Meeks’ “hot felon” photo.

  His father had gotten him out of trouble and he’d been kicked out of Zurich, but had resurfaced at Cannes six months later, lounging on a yacht. And from there he seemed to be on a spree. Always with a different girl on his arm.

  He seemed to have a type. And I wasn’t it—he seemed to favor tall, curvy, biracial goddesses with their own clothing lines or makeup empires. Beautiful, brainy, businesswomen who looked like they lived in their own world, which probably smelled like tuberoses and orange blossoms like the scent of Gabrielle Chanel.

  These liaisons were often short-lived and I got the impression for a lot of the women, they were merely publicity stunts. They had their flings and then they moved on to more serious relationships with more serious men and women.

  Ebenezer didn’t seem to mind. His world was full of beautiful women who just wanted to have a good time with a photogenic companion.

  Until he’d dropped out of sight and ended up here at the clinic.

  I had no idea how I was going to handle seeing him again in such…intimate circumstances.

  But I was about to find out.

  Pretty much the last thing I expected was to step into a leafy neighborhood of brownstone apartment buildings that I somehow knew was Brooklyn, though I’ve never been there.

  And I certainly wasn’t expecting to see a kid about eight years old sitting on the front stoop of the nearest building, shivering in a pair of old jeans and a black hoodie that was too large.

  “Hey,” I said as I came up the steps.

  The boy looked up, regarding me seriously, his light blue eyes huge in his small face.

  “Are you waiting for me?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said solemnly. “Ben says you can help us.”

  Us? I wished Kitta was in here with me because she’s the shrink and if this was a split-personality thing I was in over my head.