All a dream...?

Your vision swims into focus, not the dim hallway, but the familiar popcorn ceiling of your own bedroom. The sheets cling to your skin, twisted around your thrashing legs. Your throat still burns, phantom bitterness coating your tongue. A whimper escapes as you claw at your own jaw, half-expecting to find bruises blooming beneath your fingertips.

The mattress dips beside you. Cold air rushes in as the comforter lifts. Your girlfriend stirs, her sleepy exhale warm against your shoulder. "Mmm… bad dream?" Her fingers graze your bicep, tentative.

Your fingers tremble against your own throat, still feeling the ghost of his grip. The bedroom smells of sleep and laundry detergent, so different from the musk of that other room, but your skin crawls as if his cum still dripped down your chin.

"It can't have been a dream," you rasp, voice shredded from phantom screams. "It happened."

Her fingers still. The silence stretches, thick with the unspoken. Then her breath hitches, tiny, almost imperceptible, but you feel it. The mattress shifts as she sits up slowly, her warmth retreating.

Moonlight cuts through the blinds, painting stripes across her bare shoulders. When she turns, her eyes are wide, wet. Her fingers hover near your wrist, not touching, not yet, but trembling with the weight of the question coiled in her throat. Moonlight catches the wet tracks carving down her cheeks.

"You keep saying it wasn’t a dream," she whispers. The words crack open between you like an egg, yolk-thick with something unspeakable. Her breath hitches again. "But do you understand yet?"

Your own pulse thrums against your fingertips where they still press into your throat. The phantom salt on your tongue. The ache between your thighs. The way his laughter curled around you like smoke.

Her hand finally lands on your arm, "Do you understand now?!"

It dawned on you the night before, how you'd shouted at her, about how she wished you'd understand. Well...now you'd experienced it all, and it wasn't how your brain had made you imagine, there was always something off. Exactly how she'd said.

"You, made that?" The word splinters in your throat. The sheets tangle around your legs, binding you to this moment, to her wide, wet eyes reflecting the moonlight like shattered glass.

Her breath hitches again, louder now, ragged. "You felt it, why I did all that, you know now, why." she whispers. Not a question. A confession.

Your stomach lurches. You'd taken all of this for granted, you'd blamed yourself for her not having sex with you, when, in her experience, it was never a good thing, ever. The realisation, that she hadn't told you these things to make you feel bad, none of those experiences were good to her, she was sharing them, because she felt like she trusted you, because, unlike all those guys, she loved you. And how you'd shouted at her, let those intrusive thoughts win, you'd hurt her, and she had to show you exactly why she felt the way she did.

You turn to her, and embrace her. You had no idea, before you could only imagine, it all flooded your mind, making you worse. Now, now you knew, you knew why, and how, and it just made you feel one thing.

Love. You loved this woman with all your heart, and she, she loved you. How she made you dream that, you didn't know, right now, you'd learnt your lesson of overthinking, never again would you take what you have for granted.

Because, her past, was not who she was today.

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I know this one may be a bit boring lmao, but I've been having some very annoying feelings and felt I could write it out in the form of a story. May have lost myself a bit there but then, no one reads my stuff anyway lmao.