Dream King by Elise Knight
31
Islept like a baby, cradled in Dreams arms, the warmth of the sand offering a warm bed beneath me and the quiet lapping of the lake nearby serving as a rhythmic backdrop.
I opened my eyes the next morning to find him already dressed, including his armor and crown.
“I brought you breakfast!” he said when he saw that I was awake. I wanted to be excited by the offering of berries, but I was getting sick of the same old thing. “No monkey-rabbit this morning?”
He knitted his eyebrows. “Monkey-rabbit?”
“You know. That little animal thing that you’ve cooked a few times.”
He smiled. “Nope, sorry, I have no time for hunting. I’ve been away from the doors for too long. I need to get back. He handed me my dress, which I pulled over my head. The other dress and his bandages, he balled up and held onto.
“I really think that buying Aethelu a crapload of dresses might be a good way to repay her. I’ve lost count of the number of hers I’ve ruined.”
He shrugged. “I have no money unless you want to learn to make it out of leaves,” he said, gesturing to the trees around us.
“Some king you are,” I joked. “Aren’t you supposed to be dripping in gold and diamonds and furs?”
His face shuttered slightly. “Don’t have any of those things anymore except for my crown, but I cannot give that to Aethelu.”
I sensed that I’d said the wrong thing. He must have grown up in the lap of luxury, and even when he was sent away as a child, he had his own palace. For his own reasons, he chose to leave it all behind.
“Why do you still wear the crown?” I asked as we set off into the forest. Raven took off from the branch he’d perched himself on over the last couple of days and flew ahead of us.
“Because I am the king,” he replied simply.
“Why don’t you do that teleporting thing for us rather than having us walk everywhere?”
He laughed. “Still full of questions, I see. I suspect that part of you I’ll never be able to satisfy.”
I nudged his side playfully. “So why not then? Why is Aethelu so special that you can whisk her around the forest?”
He raised an eyebrow, a decidedly un-Dream-like smirk on his face. “Do I detect a hint of jealousy?”
“Don’t get too cocky, mister. I just want to know. No jealousy here. You can whizz all the girls in the neighborhood around the forest all you want. I just want to know why I’m the one that has to get sore feet hauling my ass through these trees all the time.”
“And miss out on this beautiful scenery?”
I groaned. “If I knew how corny me tugging on your tadger would make you. I’d have let you stick to your frustration.”
“I honestly don’t understand a word of that sentence, but I get the gist. If you must know, I was born with the ability to summon people to me. It is a trait brought down from hundreds of generations before me. I come from a long line of slackers who thought it was easier to summon servants rather than do anything themselves. I’ve lost the ability to some extent as I’ve gotten older. I can only summon those in my own court now.”
I worked the words around in my mind. “So let me get this straight. You can get other people to come to you, but you can’t teleport yourself to them?”
“I can’t teleport myself anywhere. When I go anywhere, I walk, and before you say anything about me teleporting you, I cannot do that either. You are not from my court and have no magic in you.”
I stopped in my tracks. “May I remind you that I made my mother’s door come to me. If that isn’t magic. I don’t know what is!”
He gave me a quick kiss. “You have all the magic in the world inside you. Everything about you is magic. However, it’s not the kind of magic that lets me send you off around the forest, so you’ll have to walk just as I do.”
“Nice save, buddy,” I huffed.
Despite his uncharacteristic enthusiasm for life, which I suspected was more to do with him coming for the first time in his whole life rather than the long walk, he still kept his wits about him. He held my hand, his eyes darting about, looking for goodness only knew what. More nightwalkers, probably.
We got back to the clearing where Dream used his magic to set a fire.
“Want to come with me?” he asked, nodding to the doors. My legs hurt with the effort of walking, but there was no way I was going to sit by the fire without him. I think he knew that, too, because he didn’t demand that I come with him, merely asked.
“Sure.” I plastered a smile on my face. I’d done this before; I could do it again.
Once we were in one of the dreams, my feet forgot about the pain they were in, and my aching calves were salved by the excitement of watching other people’s lives. I’d hated it when Dream wasn’t here, but with him by my side, it was fun somehow. Yeah, I’m a voyeur; shoot me.
We watched a hundred lives, snippets of hopes and wishes and memories all drifting together, and yet, all I could see was Dream. I’d never noticed before the way he watched each dream with such intensity, even the mundane ones. His eyes took in every detail of everything—the people, the places, the interactions. Neither of us spoke in any of the dreams. To do so would be to spoil them. I understood that now and I understood just how important these dreams were to Dream himself. Humans were the family he’d never had. He’d once told me that he hated all humans, but the truth was he loved us all. He loved us all, and it had destroyed him because while we were all he’d had from the time he was a child, he was never involved, never included, destined to live on the sidelines of other people’s lives without having any kind of life himself. My mother had once told me that love and hate were different sides of the same coin. I thought at the time she was talking about my father, and she probably was, but that’s how Dream was with the billions of people he saw. He loved us, and he hated us. As we went from dream to dream, I only saw love in his eyes. He was mesmerized by all of them.
“You’ve changed,” I said, grinning as we came out of our tenth or so dream.
“You have changed me, Ana. I am who I am because of you.”
Oh, he knew how to make my insides squirm with happiness. “When I first came in the dreams with you, you watched with indifference, eager to get away, but now you can’t keep your eyes from the people. I’m practically dragging you away each time.”
“I can’t keep my eyes from you,” he growled, pulling me to him and kissing me playfully. I closed my eyes and fell into it as the swoosh of doors sounded behind us. He was becoming so familiar to me now. His scent, the way he kissed. We’d fallen into a rhythm, and it was blissful.
After a quick lunch of sandwiches and a glass of wine each that Dream had procured from somewhere through the red door, we went back into the dreams. The first ten, twenty, thirty were similar to the ones we’d seen in the morning, but it was late in the day when one of the dreams stopped us both in our tracks.
Dream’s hand tightened around mine as the darkness began to clear. There was a woman on a bed, completely naked, her face contorted in a silent scream. Her arms were being held above her head by a man. Another man positioned himself between her legs, his erection easy to see, even in the dim light. A third man knelt beside her, his head obscuring her chest.
“Come, I cannot subject you to this depravity again. We do not need to see this dream. Dream’s hand tightened on mine, and he pulled me toward the door.
“Wait.”
“What must we wait for?” Dream asked, his face dark with rage. “This dream won’t end here. We cannot save her, Ana. I thought I made that clear the last time.”
I pulled back on his hand. “Who’s dreaming this? Is it one of the men, or is it her?”
Dream stopped, his hand on the door. I watched the rage in his expression drop, to be replaced with a hint of confusion. “It is her. The woman dreams this. Why would she dream about her own attack?”
“And there is no way that we can see nightmares here, right? They all go to your brother.”
He furrowed his eyebrows. “Beyond the small ones of people losing their teeth and finding themselves naked in supermarkets which sometimes get mixed up, yes, it’s impossible, but you can see it for yourself. We need to get out of here. Something is very wrong.”
I glanced back at the scene playing out and allowed myself a small grin. “I think you need to turn around and look again.”
Reluctantly, Dream turned. The positioning had changed slightly as we’d been speaking. Now the first man was running kisses down the woman’s neck. The man that had been kneeling over her had one of his nipples in her mouth, and the third moved inside her in slow strokes. The scream on her face was not pain, but ecstasy.
“She is enjoying this?” Dream asked, incredulity filling his voice
I nodded my head. “I do believe she is.”
The soundtrack kicked in. Her soft moans echoed around us as she was taken by the three men, each of them worshiping her. Her body writhed in pleasure as they kissed, stroked, licked, and nibbled at her body. My own body heated at the scene. I was so close to them I could reach out and touch them, and I couldn’t take my eyes from them. From the beauty of it all. Something told me this was a memory rather than a wish. Each of the men moved in perfect choreography, knowing how to tease her, how to draw her pleasure out. It was fucking beautiful and was making me so fucking horny, I could barely stand it. I tore my eyes from them for a second to see Dream’s reaction. He was taking it all in, watching it all hungrily. Now that he knew that it was consensual, it was affecting him in ways that turned me on even more. His lips parted slightly, and his breathing was more rapid. I wanted to reach out to him so badly, but I didn’t want to break the spell he was under watching these people come together in their lovemaking. I was momentarily taken from the wonderment and arousal in Dream’s face by the sound of the woman crying out. Her eyes shuttered closed, and her head fell back as her body trembled with orgasm. My own body began to ache with need at the sweet torture of watching this play out. I clamped my legs together as a surge of want and desire pulled together at my core.
“I think it’s time to leave now,” I whispered huskily, barely getting my words out. If I had to watch this any longer, I was going to come on the spot. My legs began to shake with the sheer intensity of need. Spending the day with Dream had been enough of an aphrodisiac in itself, but watching this with him had tipped me over the edge.
Dream didn’t need asking twice. He drew me up into his arms and carried me through the door back into the forest. The last thing I heard as the door closed was the scream of another orgasm renting the night.
He carried me to the clearing and laid me down upon the leaves. Thankfully Raven had made himself scarce because what I was planning to do with his master would scar him for life.
“I never knew...” Dream groaned, his body held over mine by his straightened arms. He was so close to me, and yet, there was still a gap between us. His legs straddled mine, so I was completely trapped beneath him.
“Not the best time for a conversation here, buddy,” I said, reaching down between us to unbutton his fly.
“I thought it was something horrible, something painful and insidious you humans did to each other, and yet, upon watching it, I feel...”
I licked my lips. desperate to feel him against me, desperate to sate this need that had been building in me for hours. “Feel what?” I urged, slipping his pants down over his hips, the tip of his erection skating my lower stomach. As his knees were on the outside of mine, the pants couldn’t go very far. I shuffled into a sitting position, pushing him up so he was facing me, his legs still straddling mine. I dragged the dress I was wearing out from under me and pulled it over my head, throwing it to one side in a heap.
“What is it you feel?”
His eyes moved down to my chest where they held as his breathing increased. He looked at me as one might gaze upon the Mona Lisa for the first time, taking in every inch of me. My body throbbed in exquisite torment as he slowly drew his eyes up to mine.
“What do you feel?” I asked again, this time, my voice coming out in ragged breaths. If he didn’t touch me soon, I was going to combust in flames.
“I feel that if I don’t touch every part of you, I might die right here, right now, and that my entire life has been a lie that has brought me to this moment that I might finally know the truth of it all.”
I took hold of his hand and laid it on my breast. His touch was agonizingly slow as he took it in. He ran his thumb over my nipple, and I bit on my lower lip to stifle a moan. Heat pooled between my legs as his cock twitched against my stomach. With anyone else, I would have ripped their pants off and demanded they take me on the spot, such was the ache of need, but Dream was taking his sweet time to explore, to discover, to set my body alight with a desperate longing of beautiful agony. He dipped his head and took my nipple in his mouth, causing the moan I’d stifled earlier to escape my lips. I reached out, wrapping my arms around his neck, pulling him closer while the need throbbed harder still. I fell back, and this time, he followed, finally kissing me. I felt the press of his cock against my stomach, jammed between us as he brought his full weight down on me. My body arched against him as he kissed me, driving his tongue into my mouth. I kissed back, matching his desire which had finally found the intensity of my own. He ground his hips against me, rubbing his cock against my stomach, making the ache within me unbearable.
“Stop!” I huffed, my breathing ragged. “We need to change position.” I wriggled out slightly from underneath him and pulled my legs from between his. His eyes never left me as I drew my legs up, parting them in front of him. Awe filled his features as he gazed down at my core. He shifted himself so he was between them, his pants still halfway down his thighs as he knelt before me, as though he was worshiping at an altar. God, he was so utterly fucking stunning I could barely breathe.
He moved forward, so once again, he was hovering over me, his weight on his arms and his cock at my entrance. I bucked upwards, desperate to feel him inside of me, but he pulled back.
“I have to know that you want me to do this,” he breathed, and in those words, I could see he was suffering too.
“You won’t be doing it to me; we will be doing this to each other. This is not an act one person does to another. It’s an act of two people working together.”
He sucked in a breath. “This is like no work I’ve ever participated in. It is transcendent of anything I have ever known.”
“Keep your words for what comes next.” I reached down between us and grasped his cock, causing him to intake a short breath. Arching my hips again, I guided him to me. He hesitated a half-second of excruciating eternity before pushing forward. I gasped as he filled me. His mouth opened as his eyes filled with wonder. He let out a long shaky breath as I lowered my hips to the ground, pulling slightly backward, causing a delicious friction between us. He soon followed, filling me back up again deeply. It was his first time, but it was nothing like anything I’d ever known before. He moved back again and slowly thrust forward, getting into a rhythm. I pulled him toward me, one hand on his beautiful ass, the other wrapped around his neck as our mouths crashed together like the rest of us. He let out a groan as he tasted me, and he increased the speed in which he moved. I matched his speed, bucking beneath him in a frenzy of desire, holding onto him for dear life and dear release as the clench of orgasm began to take hold. I dropped my hand from around his neck, down his back, firmly resting it on his other ass check as I tightened around him.
“I’m hurting you!” Dream whispered, pausing his rhythm.
“Only if you stop now, “ I heaved out, gripping my fingernails into his skin as a thin coat of sweat broke out all over my body. He thrust forward again, this time more deeply than before, and I shattered around him, crying out his name. He thrust harder now, taken by his own pleasure. I held on as a second orgasm crept up on me. My hands fell from him to the ground, and I clawed at the forest floor as bliss took me away somewhere to the heavens themselves.
“Oh, fuck!” I heaved out, my voice barely above a strangled whisper as my body trembled beneath his. He let out a long groan and shuddered as he came inside me, filling me with his warmth.