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You’re asleep, because it’s easier to get to you that way. Also, the state of your dreams lately. I know you don’t remember them, but I do.
I’ve chosen now because you have reached a critical mass, Harrow. You can’t keep having hot dreams about an unknown ginger and expect me to ignore that forever. It’s hard to watch you trudge through the unyielding horrors of reality without an inkling of the ecstasy you experience pretty much nightly, nowadays. I see any further action of my own as an act of mercy. I pity you. This isn’t for me, promise.
So, about that further action: I’m pretty sure that any extraneous meddling, i.e. the kind that isn’t specifically related to helping you help yourself, like, in a sex way, will make your brain very angry with me. It may even kick the hot ginger out of your dreams for a while, and as much as I hate you, I couldn’t bring myself to take away one of the precious few bright spots in your miserable existence. It’s not like hating you and respecting the hell out of your fantasies are mutually exclusive.
Anyway, you’re welcome, Nonagesimus. I’ve done my best to pick a night where you won’t be attacked, because attempted murder can sometimes be a mood-killer, and I’d like to be able to give you my full attention. I’m sure you’re asking - why, hot stranger, are you doing this? Is my own subconscious imagination not enough? The answer to the second question is no. No, Harrow, your subconscious imagination kind of sucks. You could use some help.
(To answer the first would be a paradox, given what I said earlier about extraneous meddling. Read that as you will.)
In addition to extraneous meddling, I don’t think I can do any external meddling upon you either, you know, like a normal person with their own body could do to you. I’m really sorry about that, because I promise it would be better - bones can’t make the good part of mouths, and a pelvis is just a frame. For now, I’ll do my best with what I have. Your hands are my hands.
Lastly - really, this is the last thing, I promise, I know you’re getting antsy - I want to feel your pleasure.
That sounds invasive, I know. But hear me out. I’m testing a theory; you like those, right? Your pain, the heaps and mounds of it you have, is dull. It’s boring. I know you’ve stopped caring about it, and that’s bad . Not feeling things is bad, Harrow. Trust me, it would be a tragedy if the same dampening was occuring with your pleasure.
Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think you’ve forgotten what pleasure feels like - more likely, you never really knew - so much that you can’t do anything to mute it. You can’t watch it distantly, bored and unaffected, like you do your pain. Pleasure can be poisonous. You won’t even know it’s coming, no pun intended. It won’t be like a bomb going off next to your ear, leaving you deafened, but a whisper on the edge of your hearing, one you listen harder for, hoping it will speak to you again. That’s the whole point of this exercise, really. There’s an element of symbiosis for us. I won’t call it an ulterior motive, but immersing myself in a part of you I have heretofore watched politely from the sidelines will do wonders in getting my mind off any lingering existential crises I haven’t been able to shake. As fun as it would be for me, it would only harm my cause to make you throw your walls back up.
They’re so weak tonight, Harrow. You fell asleep so eagerly that it was like you knew I was waiting for you. You’ve chosen the same setting you choose every night. It would be dishonest of me to pretend I was tired of it. Canaan House’s pool is not a creative or original idea, but like I said, your imagination sucks, and if I had to pick something from our actual history together, that’s the correct choice. It’s no steamy Second House barracks locker room, but it’s the closest we’ve ever gotten to that.
You sit at the side of the pool cross-legged, leaning back with your hands digging into the cracked white tiles, ignoring her. (That's right, 'her'. Were you expecting first-person pronouns?) You know exactly what you're doing - you've had lots of practice. You’ve cunningly arranged your features to be neutral. Your black robes are thin and wet, and they cling to your outline, they nestle tight between your legs, turning the space between them into a sort of sinister invitation. You don’t look any more appealing than you normally do, because in this fantasy, you’re always perfectly appealing to her.
Unlike you, I remember when we were really at this place: you had suddenly become right about that, and I still don’t know whether you knew it or not.
You wait for her, because you like to passively seduce, you don’t want to do the work, you want her to instigate. She’s in the deep water, where she can’t touch the bottom, and she struggles to float, weighed down by her robes and her boots, which are very difficult to swim in. Why was she over there in the first place? Because this is your sex dream and not reality, and it’s an innocent reason for her to start taking her clothes off. Just the outer layer for now - let’s not rush - and you watch as she pulls them off herself violently. Torn swaths of fabric begin to cover the water’s surface, but they can’t stay afloat for long, and slip under, making the pool look like it has suddenly become infested by eels.
In the process of disrobing, the red-haired girl has drifted closer to you. You uncross your legs and let them hang over the side, your knees farther apart than you would normally have them. The water is breathtakingly cold. She swims up to you, but doesn’t desperately hang to the wall between your legs; she can stand now. She offers you her hand. The paint on her face, drawn so precisely that you might’ve thought you’d applied it yourself, has been harmed. There is a scar crossing one cheek, curving from her eye down to her jaw. The sliver of skin gives you a heave of undefined emotion.
Compliantly, you disentangle your corset of bone and shrug off your robe, too. Underneath, there is very little. Just the bare minimum to keep you modest, but of course, modesty isn’t really the effect when you’re drenched like this. The black fabric tries to hide the hard peaks interrupting the smooth hills of your chest and the crease where your legs meet. She would have to be looking to see them, which is what you want. You don’t take her hand immediately, you ask silently to be perceived, and she doesn’t let you down. Even in the sickly green reflection of the pool, her eyes are frozen honey, and they are hungry for you.
Once you’re convinced that she knows what you want, you take her hand, and she repays you by yanking you into the water nearly hard enough to dislocate your shoulder. There’s no reason for slowness or subtlety, but you force it anyway, because you can’t bear for something to be easy. You wipe the water from your eyes and keep your distance, sculling backwards into shallower water where your shorter legs can reach solid ground. Being chased is a good way to confirm that you are wanted.
Her shirt was irrevocably torn when she removed her robes, you find. So too the seam holding the sleeve and body together has been stressed beyond its limit, and it gapes open, revealing the hard curve of her right deltoid, and any more strain at the collar will render the whole shirt useless. The girl gives you the smallest of smiles and dives forward. When she emerges, it’s right in front of you, and you realize she’s a better swimmer than she’s been letting on. (She’s not, it’s just your dream logic.)
She doesn’t stand up to her full height, but hovers with her face just above the surface, asking you to look down at her, which inevitably involves peering down what remains of her shirt. This stirs something in you that you wish was a memory, but it can’t be. In the synchronizing fluorescent lights of the pool deck, it is a miracle to see so many warm hues: her crimson hair, her copper irises, the twilit pink of her nipples filtered through the dark green water. Oh, right. She’s seen you looking; it wasn’t as if you were being subtle. She laughs and tilts your head back up, pauses just long enough to see your blush simmering through the white paint on your cheeks, and then she kisses you.
Her lips are rough and cracked, but full enough to feel soft upon yours. They are breathtakingly cold. You’ve never kissed anyone, you don’t know what to do, only that you will take what she gives, and then demand more. Curiously, she tastes like nothing to you, not even salt or chlorine. She tastes like your own mouth.
You begin to reach your arms up to take her neck, but she moves faster through the water and catches both of your wrists in her left hand. She holds them extended down tightly, making even your middling breasts press together, but more importantly puts her own hand in range of the triangle at the center of your hips. And then it is her who gets to clasp your neck, and kiss you again, and keep your focus torn between her lips and the proximity of her hand to your pussy.
(Sorry, Harrow, but I give up on trying to figure out which words you’d use for certain body parts and how they will be used. Hope you like "pussy".)
Continuing: it’s not fair that you only got one look at her and she’s been occupying your face ever since. You’re a lot stronger in your dreams than you are in real life, you actually have a chance against her. So you pry your hands from her grip and pull away. You both stand up; you are submerged to the waist, her, a little less. At some point, she lost what remained of her pants. The hem of her shirt hovers just above the surface, and below it, you’ve churned the water into indistinguishable turbulence. There’s a strip of bare skin stretching between her hips that the swaying water plays with. You've never been jealous of water; you'd be jealous of anything that got to play with her like that.
The red-haired girl’s eyes are wide, perhaps surprised at your unabashed eagerness, and even more so when you tear at her collar and unsheathe the rest of her, to which she does not protest. She looks how you’d always imagined her to - pray tell, Harrow, how can you imagine someone who doesn’t exist? - aggressively perfect, you'd beg her for a punch in the face. The crevices between her muscles are shadowed in the odd light, which only serves to make her look more imposing, but the image is combated slightly by the vulnerability of her ribs, where muscle doesn’t go, where she can’t shield herself or disguise the fact that she is just as human as you are. You find this concept deeply appealing, and the sight of it doubly so, where the water glistens and drips like falling stars on those ridges. And, on top of all that... great tits. Very eloquent, Harrow; well said.
She lets you have your fill; it’s like she knows exactly what you want, and because I am a generous person, she does. You startle when she speaks to you - somehow, you didn’t think she could do that.
Put your arms up.
No, all the way up, above your head, dumbass.
You’re embarrassed that you followed her orders wrong, but soon you don't regret your stupidity. She peels your shirt off for you and arrests your worry by sliding her hands down your torso, clutching you tightly around the waist, her thumbs arcing in and out of the water following the path of your hipbones. She sees past your skin, you think. Then she steps back, and tells you to take off your leggings.
You’ve never done something more wantonly in your life. But the red-haired girl does not immediately ravish you. Instead, she holds out her hand, and this time, when you take it, she doesn’t yank you down into the water, but leads you purposefully to the side of the pool at the shallowest end, where it’s only a couple feet deep. You both stay carefully submerged as you move, as if the water’s warping is like gift wrapping, and neither of you have permission to open it. When you reach the end, she instructs you to stay put and hops up quickly on the edge, moving too fast for you to see anything. You kneel and sit back on your heels. At this depth, the water struggles to conceal you.
Her legs are tightly closed. She leans forward and narrows her eyes at you. The dream takes a hard turn; you're desperate to follow this twisting, gutting path through to the end.
A sourceless knowledge of a relationship you've never had bursts forth. You’ve always been such a bitch to her. Why do you deserve her? Why should you get to see her, to touch her?
You keep your composure and quietly ask how you may earn the privilege. For the third time, she takes your hand, and gives you your instructions.
Close your eyes.
If you open them, you’ll never see me again.
You’ll regret it for the rest of your miserable life, which is only going to get worse as it is, and without me...
I’ll tell you when you can look.
You agree to her terms in full. If you need to, you’ll shutter over your eye sockets with bone to keep from looking. You don’t even try to picture what’s happening around you, because you think she would be able to tell. You will feel, you will not perceive. You are a body, you are your senses. From inside your eyelids, you see only blue.
She pulls your hand closer and you have to shuffle forward to reach, then closer still; your knees bump up against the wall. The cold eases. Your hand is lifted and slowly, your middle finger is encompassed by staggering warmth and sweltering wet. Something soft rolls around it, and then you feel teeth sinking gently down into your skin, the pressure enough to leave only the subtlest of marks. Then, you are evicted from her lips, and your hand is tortured downward, leaving you time, too much time, to imagine where you are going next. She places your palm gently upon the smooth pool deck.
You had promised yourself you wouldn’t imagine, but you can’t quiet your heart. You don’t know what’s coming next - she could be cruel, of course she would be cruel in your fantasies - but you hope for it, you hope fearfully, because you are not rational in your dreams, and you cannot bear her rejection. You would rather dissolve.
Which is just you being stupid again. The other problem with you not being rational in your dreams is that you don’t realize that she only told you not to look. She never said anything about not being allowed to do what you wanted.
So that’s the farthest you ever got on your own. The limit of Harrowhark the First’s imagination. You could never make that leap, so you’d wake up sweaty and breathless, misunderstanding yourself, ignorant of how hard it was for me that you ended it so soon. Every fucking time, you can’t convince yourself that you are capable of overcoming your own fear. You’re pathetic. This is where I come in; this is why you need me. This is why I hate you.
The red-haired girl knows you. She knows you’re weak. You hear the squeak of her sliding forward on the wet tiles towards you, you feel faint radiant heat warming your chest and arms and shoulders, and fire in your hands, for the one she hasn’t asserted control of waits, ready, between your own legs. The waves pacing the length of the pool, which had been almost imperceptible, now rock you dizzy. She is very close - this is not your imagination, but your senses begging you to comprehend. She speaks to you again.
Why is this so fucking hard for you?
Don’t give me excuses.
Don’t pout at me like that.
You need to earn it, Harrow.
I don’t want a coward.
You can’t listen to her any longer. You hate the sound of her voice. Your eyes are shut tight when you rise from the water and place your knee next to her hip to give you enough leverage to push her shoulder back; you want to consume the breath forced from her lungs when she hits the ground. Of course, contrary to your hopes, she’s much stronger than you, and nothing of the sort happens. She pulls you on top of her, straddling her, so you agree with this change of plans and sit down in her lap, you press forward, you make it difficult for her to balance. The gap between you radiates like asphalt in the sun. She can’t talk if you’ve stolen her mouth.
You kiss her and the blue behind your eyelids begins to kaleidoscope. Crimson, copper, twilit pink swirl and drip into each other and tangle like so much viscera. With considerable effort, you disentangle a hand from her hair and reach down between your legs, between her legs. There’s no reason for slowness or subtlety, so you abandon them, because you can’t bear for something to be difficult. You’re supposed to be proving to her that you aren’t a coward. She didn’t say anything about not being a bitch.
That’s an easier starting point than generosity. A smaller mountain to climb. You rub hurried circles around your clit and try not to exhale too many pleased sighs into her mouth; she knows exactly what you’re doing. There’s nothing to get angry over, you’re not selfish for long. You sink your fingers into the slit between your legs, coating two of them in the slick fluid you’ve already produced so much of. She’s so close that you don’t lose any of it in turning your attention to her. You can tease her later. For now, you shove yourself gracelessly inside of her. Her gasp tells you to keep going.
You reach up inside of her as far as you can go, depositing yourself in her, then back out a little, fluttering your fingers up and down and using your palm to rub between her folds. Your other hand is on her neck, feeling her pulse, how it speeds and slows in rhythm with your curling fingers. Her sighs begin to color with smatterings of her voice, higher in pitch than how she speaks to you, but no less rough. When she’s so focused on your fingers inside of her that she can no longer kiss you, you pull them out and trail them lightly, barely touching her at all, up above her clit, down a fraction of an inch, back up again. This is all you’ll give her until she submits.
Brief pause for commentary: Harrow, I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe you’re this good in real life. I have a strong suspicion that you absorbed this expertise from me and you didn’t know shit when it was just you in here, and it’s not going to translate to outside of your dreams. You’re welcome to prove me wrong at your earliest convenience.
Anyway, back to the show. The ginger doesn’t last ten seconds with you teasing her like that. Her arms, impressive as they are, can no longer hold her up. Her elbows collapse and she falls back upon the ground, taking you with her - you get that breath you had wanted - and once you’re both horizontal, she grabs hold of your hips and slides you forward, lifting your knees over the top of her shoulders and shoving them roughly outwards to settle your hips into place just barely above her head. You are not given a chance to process this turn of events. She wraps one hand around your thigh and another reaches up and scratches down your side, sending a tingle across your entire body. You melt down onto her mouth.
Believe me, of all people, when I say that this is beyond your wildest dreams: this sweet sapping, ebbing, these eddying shivers that gleam up through your bones. You are at her mercy. She decides when to tease your clit, when to slink her tongue along the creases of your legs, when to lap at your folds, when to spread you so deeply onto her mouth that you don’t think she can breathe. It’s not only what she’s doing to you, but the knowledge that it’s her doing it to you that intensifies your lust, your thunderous gratitude that she wants you. Whoever she is - you know that is why you feel this way.
You grab at her hair to try to steel yourself against the tempest. She does not relent. She clutches your thigh harder. She reaches up and squeezes your breast. When you hear her laugh - a beautiful little flutter echoing up your cunt - you remember that you can hear, and you realize that you are filling the entire pool area with your little whimpers and moans, and they are whimpering back at you louder and louder.
Indefinitely, you hover at the moment before finishing. There’s only one thing you can do to break the spell.
You sit back on her chest and open your eyes: there is a masterpiece below you. You’ve really fucked her up, Harrow. She was all strong and stoic and intimidating, and look at her now. She stares up at you, her mouth half-open, too tired from overuse to form a full smile. Her lips are bare and flushed and shine with the wetness you gave her. She’s practically begging you to kiss her.
Which you will, but not on her face, because you want to taste her, not yourself. You extricate yourself from her grasp and shimmy awkwardly to let her get out from beneath you. Because she can literally read your mind, of course, she knows what you would like most, and, suddenly whole and untired again, she stands. From your kneeling position, the red-haired girl is at once imposing and so, so vulnerable.
In her eyes, you can see how much she needs you. How, without you, she wouldn’t exist. You deserve her by wanting her.
You rest your head on her leg and run your hands up over her hips, anchoring yourself to her steady bones, allaying yourself in reverence. You say, out loud, a prayer. In response, the walls echo your whimpers back at you. And then you look up at her cunt - you imagine her dripping into your mouth, anointing you - and you can wait no longer.
Desperately you bury yourself between her legs, beneath her crimson hair. You brush your lips upon hers, feeling the catch and pull of dry skin on wet, letting the friction open your mouth, slowly filling your lungs with her. Betraying her dominant position, she doesn’t push into you like she made you do to her. This is at your pace, and you don’t want it to end, though maybe it won’t. Once your lips have explored all you can reach, it is your tongue’s turn. You’ve enjoyed the taste of few things in your life, and you really fucked up by waiting this long to get to the best one.
Though it was a noble goal, you don’t make it very long trying to go slow, because you are very weak, and you know that she likes you to feel weak. Your mouth is wide open now, and your tongue swirls and waves along the crevice between her folds; the hardening bud at its apex quivers against your upper lip. Above you, she is being just as loud and whiny as you were, which makes you think you must be sufficing. Sufficing is not enough, you will give her more. You bring your fingers to the entrance of her cunt and shove two of them inside, as deeply as they’ll go, and you hold them there. She nearly cries out at this - her hand knotted in your hair pulls your head away. For a senseless moment, she looks at you. And then she shoves you back in.
Finally, real life you, the one fitfully asleep in your wreck of a bed, is stirred into action. I’m impressed that you made it this long, honestly; I wouldn’t have. You’re no longer fully asleep, but you wouldn’t know the difference either way. You’re so lost in yourself - lost in me - that you’ve destroyed the barrier between dream and flesh. One of you has her fingers sunken into an imaginary ginger and her tongue tirelessly working away at her clit, and the other one lays curled up on her side, one knee pointing awkwardly into the air, struggling to get herself off in the stupor of half-sleep. You’re not very good at this, you never gave yourself the chance. You’re forcing my hand here, pun intended: I suppose I can use my own extensive experience to share some tips.
First, we need to get your stance right. The basics; you’re not ready for anything greater. Roll onto your back - if you can scooch your dress all the way up to your neck, that’d be really helpful. Pull your feet up towards you and spread your knees wide. That’s right, keep eating out your dream ginger, you two have fun while I do the real work here. I steer your hand back upward because you’ve tried to go right to penetration, which is a classic beginner’s mistake. Sure, you’re perfectly wet already, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Treat yourself with kindness, Harrow.
Trail your fingers over your thighs, run your nails as lightly as you can over your ribs, give yourself those shivers you seem to like. You probably don’t think you need this, but lick your fingers, get them as wet as you can. I like making you wait. You’re practically throbbing, and we’ve hardly even started. Now, hold on one second. I need to commemorate the final moment before I break you. You owe me the honor of lingering on how pathetic you look.
I spoke too soon - there, you’ve gone and started rubbing yourself before I said go. Fuck, Harrow. Guess I'll skip ahead.
Remember what you were doing to your beloved ginger earlier? You’re going to do that again, only with less wrist strain. It might be hard to recall, since you’re currently very busy sucking clit and digging your fingernails into her ass (she likes that, I’ll concede), so I’ll generously reiterate for you. Seeing as you’re clearly warmed up already, go ahead and push your fingers into yourself. Wait - slowly - you’re tight, tighter than you think you are. I’m surprised you don’t wake yourself up with the cry that escapes your throat. I’d caution you against waking anyone else up, but I’m pretty sure they soundproofed these rooms ages ago for this very reason, and thank God, because your throat just doesn’t stop, does it? You remembered how you’re supposed to flutter your fingers to and fro, but you don’t have to reach so far, it shouldn’t be too hard. One small change from earlier: you have two hands, and the palm/clit/rubbing thing never works as well as you want it to, so I encourage your other one to help. You learn quickly.
As you’re getting close, so is the red-haired girl of your dreams. She puts her foot up on your shoulder so you can reach deeper, spread her wider over your tongue; she holds your head in place so you can feel more used. So you can feel what it’s like to have somebody else controlling your body. It’s overwhelming to you - you never imagined that losing your control could feel so good. In your IRL bed, it’s the same; this is your body, but these are not really your actions, you could never make yourself feel like this on your own. In your dream, you are both no longer limited to the suspended animation of almost coming - now that your body has joined in, there’s no halting the inevitable. It only takes you a few minutes.
Not that you care. But I feel nothing, until -
You tear me asunder. You organize my bones back into place.
You reduce me to dust. You cement me back together.
You overflow me. You suck me dry.
I run out of metaphors before you stop coming - before you stop making me come. What little of me there is feels nothing except this thunderous, fearsome pleasure, continuing long after your own ends, long after you fully awake, sweaty and breathless as ever. You are slightly less ignorant of what’s just happened than you usually are. You haven’t the faintest idea of what could’ve driven you to such heights, but whatever it was, it’s gone now. It won’t happen again, you think. Not with you the way you are. You’re broken, you can’t feel that way. You’ve experienced an anomaly.
You fear the return of this pleasure.
But for the rest of the night, at least, you have nothing to fear, and I think you know that. In the most arduous sense of the word, I am overstimulated. I’ve got nothing left, Harrow. And now you get to sleep it off, while I am blessed with the psychological burden of having experienced probably the greatest pleasure in the entire universe, while also being absolutely furious with you for being the only conduit I have for the damn thing at all. Because you’re going to do everything in your power to keep us both from feeling good. Add that to the pile of evidence for you being evil.
Good teamwork, Harrow. Question answered. Theory proven. I can, in fact, feel your pleasure. You’re welcome for all of the help. I think this was effective, that you’re a little less of a selfish usurper witch today than you were yesterday, but we have a long way to go. A lot more fantasies, a lot more orgasms, a lot more of you not seeing what’s right in front of you. But hell, at least I get something out of it. Just to spite you, I’ll be doing everything in my power to make us both feel good. I’ll still hate you, but fuck, hate feels good sometimes.