Page 46 of Somno Slave

sleep paralysis feeling touched

waking up aroused from nightmares

can stress cause physical arousal during sleep

Medical websites flood the screen one after another, bright white pages filled with explanations I latch onto immediately because they sound clinical and safe and human. Forums. Sleep disorder articles. Long medical terms wrapped in calm language that promises the body can malfunction in ways that feel impossible.

Parasomnia.

Hypnopompic hallucinations.

Sleep paralysis. Stress responses. False awakenings.

I read frantically, dragging myself from page to page until the words begin blurring together beneath my eyes, until none of it feels fully real anymore. Every explanation offers relief for a few seconds at a time right up until my gaze catches the inside of my thigh again.

None of them explain the fingerprints.

My breathing turns shallow again. I stare back toward the bed. The sheets are tangled around the centre of the mattress. The shape of my body still pressed into them.

For one awful second, I can almost feel hands there again.

I look away immediately.

Chapter Sixteen

Rheda

By Friday, I start waking hours before the alarm. It’s like something drags me violently out of sleep before my body fully understands why. I jolt upright with my heart already hammering, thighs locked tightly together hard enough to ache afterwards. Sweat clings cold to the back of my neck while heat pulses everywhere else in slow, humiliating waves.

Feeling...touched.

Not used, not penetrated, but...held in small ways I can’t explain without sounding insane.

Some mornings my nipples still ache beneath my shirt, tender enough that even fabric brushing across them makes my stomach tighten. And lower still, heat lingers stubbornly between my thighs long after the dreams let go of me, in a way that makes nausea crawl up my throat the second I become aware of it. And there’s something worse underneath all of it...the longing.

It’s something mean, deep; a horrible throbbing need my body keeps circling back toward no matter how violently my mind recoils from it.

I stop trusting my own memory. Not because I believe in ghosts but because I believe in exhaustion. In stress. In the human brain’s ability to quietly rot under pressure.

I buy a camera on my way home from work. It’s nothing expensive. Just something small with motion detection and night recording.

I tell myself it’s practical.

Sleepwalking. Parasomnia. Night terrors.

There are medical explanations for all of this. There have to be.

I position it opposite the bed.

Proof.

That’s all I want.

Proof that this ends when I wake up.

I swallow hard and I drag myself out of bed too fast just as the room tilts unpleasantly around me. My knees knock weakly against the side of the mattress before I steady myself.

I move to the shower, though it helps less every day. I stand beneath water hot enough to sting and scrub at my skin until it burns pink beneath the sponge, but the awareness underneath it never leaves completely. Sometimes it gets worse. A tingling pleasure dragging slowly through me every time the water slips between my thighs. My own body responding to sensation now like it’s been trained into it.