Page 20 of My Wedding Night Massacre

I try not to think about that and instead let the pill do its work, making me float.

The window.

I notice it the way you notice things at the edge of sleep, without urgency, without the snap of full attention. The curtain moves. A shape. A man coming through. I watch him from the bed with the slow processing of someone whose brain is running at half speed.

I’m dreaming.

I’ve had versions of this before. In the worst months, before the hatred turned into empty blankness, when the grief was still raw enough to create him out of thin air. I’d wake reaching for him. I’d hear his voice in adjacent rooms. Once I turned around in the kitchen and was so certain he was standing in the doorway that I said his name out loud before reality caught up.

So I know what this is. My brain is doing what it does when the suppression slips.

The shape moves wrong, though. Or differently. Beard, longer hair, heavier through the shoulders than the version of him I keep in my memory, the version from the wedding night, dark suit, and grey eyes. This version moves with the same confidence he did, but it also looks and feels different. I watch him cross the room toward me. If this is the last hallucination I get before I marry someone else in three days, I’m going to take it.

I sit up.

He stops and looks at me with an expression I can’t read in the dark. Hallucinations usually aren’t that complex. More often than not, they just give me what I want.

“Slava,” I say.

He goes very still.

I reach for him. My hand finds the front of his shirt, real fabric, real warmth underneath it, and I pull him down, kissing him before either of us can think about it. He makes a sound against my mouth that I haven’t heard in three years, and my whole chest cracks open around it.

He kisses me back. Not the way the other versions did, passive, soft, and dissolving. He kisses me like he means it, like he’s been holding it, his hands coming up to my face, thumbs at my jaw. I can feel the weight and heat of him. This is, without a doubt, the best hallucination to date.

“Don’t talk,” I say against his mouth, unsure what would happen if he did. Would my mind make him disappear? “Just stay.”

He stays.

His hands move from my face to my throat, my shoulders, down over the curves of me. I feel him exhale slowly when he gets his palms on my waist, his hands spreading wide, taking in the full measure of me. It’s the same hands, the same certainty, the same way he always touched me like my body was something he’d been thinking about all day. I spent years being ashamed of what I am, soft and round and too much of everything. He was the only person who ever made that feel wrong, who made me feel like my body was exactly right. And now, his hands are on my hips, pulling me closer. I go without resistance, melting into him.

I pull at his shirt. He helps me, gets it over his head, and drops it. I put my hands flat against his chest, feeling the muscle under my palms, the warmth of his skin, the realness of him. Then, I press my face to his throat and breathe him in. Even that is right, even that matches, the smell of him is familiar.

He lays me back against the pillows and looks down at me in the low city light. He looks at me like a man trying to solve something. I reach up and touch his face, the beard unfamiliar, but the jaw underneath exactly right. He turns his face slightly into my hand and closes his eyes for one second.

That one second is what undoes me.

I pull him down, and he comes, his body covering mine, his weight settling over me in a way that feels like the first thing in three years that has fit correctly. His mouth finds my throat, my collarbone, my shoulder. I arch up into it and get my hands in his hair. It’s longer than it used to be, but I don’t care. I simply hold on.

He gets my dress off me slowly, not rushed, his hands moving over every inch he uncovers, and I let him look. I’ve spent three years not being looked at, not really, not by anyone who saw me, rather than what I represented. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be seen. He runs his thumb along my hip, the curve of my waist, and makes a low sound that I feel in my sternum.

“Pavlina,” he whispers.

“I know,” I say, because I do, because whatever this is, I know it, I’ve always known it, I’ve been knowing it for three years, even when I was trying not to.

His mouth moves down my body, my ribs, my stomach, the soft skin below my navel, and I press the back of my hand against my mouth to keep the sounds in because the house is quiet and I’m not ready for this to end. He takes his time, his lips at my inner thigh, first one side then the other, and I’m already trembling before he gets where I need him, already desperate in a way I forgot I was capable of being.

When he finally puts his mouth on my pussy I stop breathing for a full second. His tongue finds my clit and works it in slow circles, unhurried, like he has all night and intends to use it. I grip the sheets in both fists and arch up into him because three years is a long time, and my body remembers exactly what this feels like, even if I’ve been trying to make it forget. He slides one finger inside me, slow, and I clench around it, making a sound I can’t entirely muffle. I’m wet and tight and so ready it’s almost embarrassing.

He adds a second finger and curls them, and I see white.

“Please,” I say, to no one, to him, to whatever this is.

He doesn’t stop. He works me with his mouth and his fingers together, his tongue relentless against my clit, his fingers finding that spot inside me that he always found like he had it mapped. I press my hand harder against my mouth and let my thighs fall open wider, giving myself over to it completely, because this is a dream and in dreams I don’t have to hold anything together. I’ve been holding everything together for three years, and I’m so tired of it.

The orgasm builds slowly and then all at once, rolling through me from somewhere deep. I come apart quietly, shaking, my whole body clenching around his fingers, his name locked behind my teeth where it’s been living for three years, finally finding its way out in a breath that’s barely sound at all.

He moves back up my body, and I put my hand on his chest and push him onto his back, which surprises him. I can see it in his face. I take a moment to just look at him in the low city light, this version of him that’s different but exactly the same, before I move down his body.