Cut from the Dream

Coarse stubble rasped over tender skin. The dizzying sensation sweeping her lower body drew a fine tremor from me, and with the sharp bridge of his nose pressed into my pubic hair, the man's tongue licked the glistening wetness along my perineum.

"Nn—nnh, ah!"

For an instant my hips jerked up as if in spasm, but firm hands seized both thighs. Hot breath spilled over me, and his lips sealed against me again, thick and clinging.

"Aah, mm……"

Each time his tongue worked between the folds, lewd sensation layered over itself. The long, punishing caress had left my body so fevered I could barely hold on to a breath.

"Please…… haa, ah……?"

Pleasure clung to every inch of me with nowhere to escape, and just as it reached the brink of breaking, the mouth that had been swallowing me pulled away with indifferent ease. How many times already had I been dragged back by force from the threshold of climax?

I panted, blinking slowly through eyes gone hazy with confusion. Heat had every sense in my body strung tight, and gathering a single thought was more than I could manage.

"If you want something, you ought to ask for it properly."

He said it while watching me from a gaze set slightly aside. Knotted arousal clenched my inner walls until they ached. My body, heated as if it might boil, wanted something fiercer.

"Enough now…… come inside me."

"Again."

"I want you."

"……"

"Please…… I can't take it."

As if that were not the answer he had been waiting for, he shook his head, his expression stern. What on earth did he want from me? Something close to sorrow warmed the corners of my eyes. If his purpose was to torment me on purpose, then whatever I said was bound to be the wrong answer.

I flared and tried to push myself up, only to be pinned motionless beneath the man's torso pressed flush to mine. Our noses touched. Hot breath crossed between us.

"Beg me to ruin that filthy hole of yours."

At the vulgar phrasing I had never once heard, my eyes flew wide.

"I don't like talk like that."

I answered as if to provoke him, my feelings stung, and his smile only deepened. A tongue slid up along my ribs and drew a long lick over my breast. A tingling spread from my chest to my lower belly, and a short moan slipped out of me.

"Suffering?"

His eyes curved as he put out his tongue and flicked the tip of my nipple. I felt the pressure of him pressing hard against my perineum, wet to an almost unpleasant degree. Watching me flinch under the rule of sensation, he worked his fingers deep into the parted cleft. I panted, bracing my lower abdomen, breath coming in broken pulls.

"Hnn, ut, aah……"

In the instant my whole body tensed toward a climax that rose and would not crest, he drew his fingers out. I spilled a disordered breath and looked at him, desperate.

"Stop playing with me."

"Playing? We've only just begun."

"If you're going to keep this up, get off."

"Don't want to."

The heat surging up from below was agony. I thrashed, trying to twist out of his hold, but I had nowhere near the strength to shove aside a body built of muscle. In the end I surrendered. The insides of my eyes grew hot, and I parted the lips I had kept pressed shut.

"Please. My filthy hole."

"……"

"Ruin it. Pound it in."

The man's eyes, fixed on my face gone scarlet with shame, glinted cold. A short laugh followed, edged with mockery.

"Didn't think you'd actually say it just because I told you to."

His mouth crashed into mine, and I was crushed helplessly beneath him. My knees were spread wide. Without warning, the fiercely erect head of him forced its way into my aroused opening.

"Ahh—nnh!"

A messy moan broke from me as I wrapped my arms around his neck and tightened between my thighs. My mind registered the humiliation; my body, stripped of pride, obeyed him. He drew out slowly, then drove back in to the limit, spreading me open, and my toes curled.

Raking through the ember of pleasure knotted tight inside me, he spoke in a low voice.

"Feels good, doesn't it? Make a sound."

"……"

"Otherwise, where's the fun in fucking you?"

I flinched again at the crude turn of his mouth, but the question of why never became a sound. Pleasure stacked too quickly, stopping my ears, my eyes, my lips. He drove his hips back and forth with violent force, a motion that left me no choice but the climax stealing my breath.

"Haa, aah, ah……"

I was shaken without cease inside the waves of pleasure winding through my whole body. My breathing went short. My lower belly trembled.

"A little slower……"

He hauled my shuddering body in tight and drove his penis deeper still. In that moment there was nothing I could do but cling to the nape of his neck and take, helpless, everything he poured into me.

"I love you."

The cry clamoring through my whole body burst past my lips. The man who had been roughly stirring my insides stopped every movement. He stared down at me, frozen for a long while, then let out a hollow breath of a laugh. His face said that one more word from me and he might close a hand around my throat.

"Fuck. You've gotten shameless."

The air in the room went cold. The thick column of flesh slipped free, and the opening that had held it lost its owner; slick wetness drew out in a long strand onto the sheet. Where he had filled me, only a hollow ache remained. A gaze edged with chill fell across skin still humming with the afterglow.

What did I even do? I bit the inside of my cheek and tried to swallow the ache, but the tears that had risen to their limit spilled down my cheeks all the same.

For an instant the man's rigid expression broke. His ash-gray eyes wavered, and his jaw went tight with strain.

"Why are you crying?"

"……"

"Cry, and I end up flailing like a fool. Guess you've developed a taste for it."

He lowered his hand and slowly stroked my tear-wet cheek. I bit down hard on my lip and met his eyes, my own gone red.

"Why on earth……"

My head was fogged, my lips just beginning to shape the words, when my ankle was yanked without warning and my body was flipped. My cheek hit the sheet. My hips were hauled up high.

"Ah—too deep—!"

The pressure of him forcing the narrow passage open, as if he meant to tear it, was vivid and immediate. I reached back in a rush to catch his forearm, but the hard drive of his hips broke my posture apart. Hair that had come loose and fallen across my face was seized in his fist.

"Did you confess to him the same way?"

Sticky breath touched the nape of my neck, and the fine hairs along my skin stood up. Shame and flesh had nothing to do with each other. My body answered his every movement.

"I love you. Is that what you said?"

"……"

"Answer me."

Bella's eyes flew open as she woke.

"Haa, haa……"

For a moment dream and reality would not separate, and the confusion held her. She looked around. Through a gap in the open curtains, the world beyond the window lay buried under heavy snow and shone white.

Photo frames crowded the wall edge to edge, and the furniture was dark oak. This was where she had lived for the past three years. One small, modest room in the bungalow shared by the Raymonds and their grandson, Aiden, was hers.

The hands of the clock on the side table pointed to four in the morning. Bella pushed herself upright, leaned back against the headboard, and let out a long sigh. Her head would not clear. She lifted both hands and pressed her eyes hard.

Again.

Over the past three years she had dreamed dreams too shameful to recall, more times than she could count. They were not the same dream repeated. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she laughed, or grew angry. She was held by the man, and she melted in his arms.

At first she had taken them for nothing more than frustrated want finding an outlet. But the man who returned, dream after dream, was unmistakably the same person. The shoulders that had held her fast. The solid weight of his body. Even after she woke, the afterglow of the sex stayed hot and vivid, yet the moment her eyes opened his face blurred, as if it had slipped away into fog. However she groped back through the dream, that face alone would not come. It was as if someone had cut it out.

A thin ache went through her heart. Every time she woke, the same unrest circled her chest, and she had no way of knowing why. Perhaps, in the moment she fell asleep, some other self hidden deep inside rose up and took hold of her heart.

Her feet met the faded rug, and she made quietly for the bathroom. She kept her movements as soft as she could, but the old wooden floor creaked under every step. The underwear she had changed into before bed was soaked through.

One hand went to the wall, fumbling for the switch. The bathroom light came on, and the brightness stabbed her pupils until her brow furrowed of its own accord. She filled the cup by the sink, drank, and let the breath out of her. Both hands braced on the basin, she leaned forward and studied the face in the mirror as if it belonged to someone else.

The only memories she could speak of in the past tense were the ones from the last three years.

Three years ago, the Raymonds had found her in a deserted, out-of-the-way park here in Grand Bend. The impact of a fall from a cliff had split her head; she had been soaked in blood, her whole body covered in scrapes. When she regained consciousness days later, everything before that moment was gone, washed away like rain. DNA, fingerprints, dental records—none of it matched anything on file. Local news talked about her for a while. No one came looking.

She did not know her date of birth. She did not even know her own name. The reality waiting for her was cold, because there was no means of confirming who she was. To have no identity one could prove was to step outside the protection of the state. Without a SIN—a Social Insurance Number—she could not receive medical care, nor find ordinary work. Even a driver's license was beyond her.

At the time she had nowhere to go but the government shelters where the homeless were sent. The Raymonds brought her home instead. It was a humanitarian decision, born of the fear that a young woman with no memory might come to harm if she were left among strangers with nothing. After that she was called by the name they had given her for the time being: Bella.

Under the kindness of the elderly couple, she had spent three years pulling herself together and finding her footing again. Unlike those first days, when she had shrunk from stepping outside at all, she had slowly accepted the life she had been handed, and even recovered enough ease to be among people and laugh.

While their son and his wife, who had immigrated to Britain, settled into their new life, the Raymonds were raising their young grandson, Aiden. Bella had no other way to repay them, so she gave herself entirely to his care. The toddler who had once wobbled about on unsteady legs had long since outgrown his tricycle for a two-wheeler, and still the memories she had lost did not return.

Now and then an image with no source would flash through her mind from nowhere. But even if she gathered every scrap and fragment, she could not learn who she was, or why she had been found here in Grand Bend, a place where she did not know a single soul.

"Three years already. Time really does fly. I was so shocked—that day is still vivid in my head."

"Every time I think back on it, I catch myself shaking my head. If it hadn't been for Gillian and Neil, it's dreadful even to imagine what might have become of Bella by now."

"I've always believed this country's government doesn't neglect the lives of ordinary people. But the way they handled it back then was a real disappointment. Heavens, how can anyone be so irresponsible? It means any one of us, put through the same thing, would end up exactly where Bella is."

Brows drawn, the women denounced the government in a single voice.

"I see it a little differently. I understand the government's position. You can't simply hand a new identity to just anyone because they've lost their memory, can you? What if they're a criminal, or here illegally? Handle it carelessly, and people will turn right around and use it to wash a past clean."

Mrs. Taylor relished offering a barbed opinion whenever a debate presented itself. This was hardly the first time Bella's situation had come up in conversation, yet she insisted on saying her piece even when she knew the others did not want to hear it.

"Even so, a person ought to be given the basic rights it takes to live. If nothing else, on humanitarian grounds."

As if the remark were absurd, Mrs. Shepherd's face went hard.

"This is no better than trampling on human rights. And Gillian can't be easy in her mind, worrying over Bella the way she does."

Grand Bend was a small town in Ontario, Canada, home to some two thousand people. The Raymonds' bungalow, where Bella had been taken in, was always busy with neighbors who treated it as their gathering place. No one needed an invitation. They simply came, knocked, and settled in, and spending time together with no particular errand was simply how things were done. Today, of all days, Gillian Raymond's face was dark.

Not long ago the Raymonds had received an unexpected proposal from their son and his wife. Settled now in Britain, with a fine house bought on the outskirts of London, they wanted Aiden back from the grandparents who had been raising him. And while they were asking, they wondered whether Gillian and Neil might not move to Britain as well.

The question had kept Gillian and Neil awake with worry for days. Both were already retired, and they had no special reason to insist on remaining in Grand Bend. Close neighbors were a comfort, but not something one traded for one's own blood. More than anything, they could not bear to part from Aiden, whom they had raised with their own hands since he was a baby. He had been with them from the days right after his birth, and they feared the separation would settle on him as a wound.

After long deliberation, they concluded that going with Aiden to where their son lived would be the better choice for everyone. The joy of a long-separated family coming together lasted only a moment. Another trouble rose at once to take its place. Bella could be issued neither a visa nor a passport, and so she could not go with them.