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He’s dreaming.
Hob knows he’s dreaming, because He is here. The Stranger.
He had dreamed of little else, of late.
Since that damned wine bottle had somehow breached the veil between dreaming and waking to appear on his bedside table, Hob could think of little else during his waking hours, and his subconscious offered him no reprieve during sleep.
At first, Hob was hopeful that his stranger was really there, like he was in that pivotal moment. But after a while he understood that the visages before him, night after night, were only figments of his imagination and nothing more. The dreams were slippery things, difficult to focus on or even remember the following morning. Usually they involved him calling after his stranger, who more often than not had his back to him, walking away to blend in with the mists. Hob would wake, sweating, still calling after him as his consciousness returned.
Tonight, the image of his stranger is clearer, standing before him in profile. They are standing in a field, dead of night, with no company but the galaxies shining brilliantly in the night sky. His stranger turns toward him unnaturally slowly, eyes burning with starlight.
Hob approaches him with the focus of a predator stalking his prey. He doesn’t exactly have a plan; just that he can’t bear another night of chasing after a ghost.
The closer he gets, the harder his heart begins to thrum in his throat. His stranger is still there, watching him approach. Perhaps tonight, he will not escape.
“I’ll have you, now,” Hob says as he comes to a stop right in front of him, with that open confidence only permissible in dreams. It surprises even himself.
“Will you?” is the only reply, save for a minutely raised eyebrow. The starlit eyes shimmer, shifting to a more familiar crystal blue. “And how, Hob Gadling, are you going to take me?”
That voice; it reverberates all around him, inside him.
Hob urgently, desperately, wants to hear new sounds from those lips.
And with a snap , the scenery changes to something resembling a bedroom. The walls are covered in velvety red drapes; a plush bed stands in the centre, pillows and covers matching the sinful red of the curtains; the only light source comes from sparse, low-burning candles scattered in the corners of the room.
The room drips with sensual intent, with lust, and Hob spares one glance at his friend before shoving him full-strength onto the bed. The stranger’s eyes widen as he sprawls across the decadent bedding, lips parting on a sharp inhale.
Blue eyes track him as Hob maneuvers onto the bed, straddling him. He grabs the slender wrists and pins them to the mattress, hard. When he releases them, in his hands’ place appear silver handcuffs, their elegant chains attached to the bedposts, spreading slender arms wide like a sacrifice.
“Like this,” Hob answers the question from the previous scene, grinning down at his friend. The smile he offers isn’t friendly – it’s a warning, all teeth and intent.
Hob begins to undress, a growing animalistic need inside him becoming desperate for release, and he wants that release to be granted by the man splayed before him. He watches as his friend tugs at the restraints – curious, not resisting. They hold him perfectly, exquisitely still.
Now naked, his need ever so evident between his legs, Hob doesn’t waste any time removing heavy black boots, socks, intricately tailored black trousers and matching underwear from his friend. He is fast in his ministrations; desperate.
Momentarily cursing the order of events (he should have removed every article of clothing from his stranger before manifesting the cuffs), he settles for hiking up the tightly fitted black shirt as high as it will go and leaving the sweeping black coat as it is, splayed underneath his friend like demon wings.
He leans back briefly to examine his work. His friend is as close to nude as he’s going to get tonight, watching him with a stricken look interlaced with something like interest or expectation.
“Hob –”
Hob doesn’t allow him to speak further. He crushes his mouth against the parted lips and drinks in the muffled sound of surprise.
Those lips. They’re full; they’re sinfully soft. They belong on a siren meant to lure men to their deaths. What right does this man have, to lips like these?
He faintly hears the tinkle of silver chains as the man attempts to move underneath him. Hob responds by carding his hands through thick, dark hair, clenching his fingers into fists to hold the head still while he continues to devour his mouth. “Hold still,” he breathes against the other man’s mouth after finally releasing him; his friend just breathes, lips kiss-swollen and still parted. He wants to plunge into the depths of that perfect mouth; Next time, he promises himself.
Tonight, Hob needs to be inside him elsewhere.
He takes a few moments to lick and bite an impossibly sculpted neck. The body beneath him writhes against the chains and against Hob’s full weight pressing down on it. Distantly, Hob notices the movements don’t necessarily feel like an attempt to escape.
His vision swims with need, every nerve thrumming with the urgency of release; another snap transitions his friend in an instant from lying on his back to splayed on his front, chains still imprisoning him, coat rucked up in piles of fabric to reveal the perfectly sculpted, decadent swell of his backside. Hob can’t help himself; he outright bites one cheek, eliciting a startled yelp from the chained man. He bites the other, hard enough to leave marks, urgently caressing flawless thighs as he does so.
Not able to stop himself now, Hob takes himself in hand and aligns himself with the dark entrance between those impossibly long legs; he slides in with relative ease, though the muscles of his stranger’s opening spasm around him involuntarily.
His friend cries out in surprise; then, as Hob falls into a rhythmic thrusting, the other man begins to breathe, raggedly. It’s an animalistic sound of being taken, of being claimed. Hob ruts into him from behind with pure instinct, one hand holding onto a bound wrist and another grasping his hair hard enough to hurt.
“Oh, god,” Hob moans, the warmth and the depth and the tightness quickly unraveling him. One more thrust, two, three; and Hob comes, loudly, possessively, into the depths of his friend. He slumps over him, spent and shaking, pressing every inch of himself to flawless, silken skin, molding himself into divine perfection. He closes his eyes and buries his face in the crook of the other’s neck, breathing him in, desperate to commit his scent to memory.
Then slowly, the edges of the dream begin to waver, the bedroom destabilizes, and then everything is gone.
*
Hob jolts awake in the pitch-dark of his bedroom, chest heaving, drenched in sweat and the aftermath of sleep. He can feel a stickiness under the covers, his belly covered in the evidence of his release.
“Hello.”
The voice is low, rumbling, but lacks the physical reverberation that was present in the dream world.
It’s more human, here.
It’s real.
“Christ Almighty!” Hob shrieks, unceremoniously flinging himself out of bed, not sure if he should look for a weapon or concern himself with concealing the semen covering his sleep top and boxers. “What in the fuck! ”
“Did you think,” the voice murmurs as he emerges from the shadows, slow and sure, “you could take what you wanted in my realm… and pay no price?” The question is punctuated with a brow raised in admonition.
“Fucking Jesus,” responds Hob, still eloquently taking the Lord’s name very much in vein. “Your – your realm? What are you talking ab – wait, how are you here? Will you in the bloody hell tell me what is going on?!”
A smirk, a little too self-satisfied, appears on the other man’s face. “You may call me… Dream . I am the King of Dreams; I am the Dreaming, as it is me.” He steps closer still, until he’s standing mere inches away. Hob realises, for the first time, that the other man is taller than him. “When you tire of the waking world and sleep… you come, to me.”
It makes sense. Sort of. Hob is having trouble organising his breathing, much less his thoughts. Suddenly he feels a hot flush of humiliation crash over him like a tidal wave threatening to knock him off his feet.
“Hey, I’m… I don’t know what got over me. I’m sorry. I didn’t think it was actually you. ” He waves his hands vaguely in the other’s direction. “I didn’t think you were real . You hadn’t been, nearly all the other times!”
Dream tilts his head slightly, considering Hob through his lashes. “You did nothing to me in my realm that I did not allow.” His lips – still looking fresh-kissed – twitch in a small smile. “Your control is an illusion,” he says, voice dropping to a low, intimate growl that coils hot in Hob’s belly. “There… and here.”
Hob notices belatedly that, during that speech, Dream’s slender fingers had undone the button and zip of perfectly tailored trousers. He watches, immobilized with the sight, as Dream frees the length of himself, passing a thumb over the tip, catching the wetness gathering there.
“On your knees, Hob Gadling.”
And with that Hob drops to his knees like a man in prayer, taking Dream’s erection into his mouth and letting his lips and tongue ask for absolution.
Dream thrusts with deliberate force. Hob chokes on the girth and length of him, but decides that air is immaterial for now. His eyes track upwards; up the man’s stomach, his torso, his neck, his face. Dream stares down at him through dark, heavy lashes – every inch the fallen angel, sculpted from shadow and sin. Hob takes him in his mouth with reverence, spittle dripping from the corners of his lips. The thrusts become erratic; he feels fingers yanking at his hair, unapologetically mirroring his own actions from another realm.
And then Dream is coming deep into his throat, the orgasm shuddering through the length of him; filthy, savage moans escape the other man as Hob struggles to swallow his load. Some of it seeps out despite his efforts, mixing with the spit trickling from his mouth.
Suddenly he is yanked to his feet by his stranger, his friend. Mouth clashes with mouth; bodily fluids are mixed in the dance of tongues; Hob is grasping blindly at clothing, at hair, at the base of a slender neck – at anything he can reach.
Hob makes a sound of protest when the other finally disentangles them, stepping only just out of immediate reach. Dream’s lips are swollen; his pupils are blown; his hair is a mess; his breathing is still ragged. He is desire incarnate; he is wickedness and temptation made flesh.
“Know your place, Hob Gadling.”