Dreaming

The dream took me without asking.

I was still in the bedroom, but the lock was gone and the air had turned thick and humid, the way it feels just before a summer storm. The sheets stuck to my skin. I knew I was dreaming - some distant part of me registered the unreality - but the knowledge did nothing to stop the slow, deliberate sound of someone breathing inside a mask.

He stood at the foot of the bed.

Black latex from throat to ankle, the suit gleaming dully in the moonlight that should not have been so strong. The head was smooth and featureless except for the dark circles of the eyes and the small, circular mouth hole. No face. No voice. Only the quiet creak of the material when he shifted his weight.

I tried to sit up. My limbs felt heavy, as if the house itself had pressed me into the mattress. The anger from earlier still lived in my chest, but in the dream it mixed with something hotter and more helpless. I knew this figure. The house had been showing him to me in fragments since the first night - glimpses in doorways, the soft squeak of rubber on wood. Now he was here, fully formed, and the dream would not let me look away.

He climbed onto the bed with unnatural silence. The latex-covered knees pressed into the mattress on either side of my hips. One gloved hand settled on my thigh and slid upward, the material cool and slightly tacky against my skin. I should have screamed. Instead my back arched, a small, involuntary sound escaping my throat when those fingers reached the place between my legs that was already wet from what I had done to myself earlier.

The Rubber Man tilted his head, studying me. Then both hands gripped the hem of my nightgown and pushed it up to my waist. There was no tenderness in the movement - only purpose. When the head of his cock - thick, covered in the same slick black material - nudged against me, I realized the suit was open there, the only break in the seamless black.

He pushed inside in one long, relentless stroke.

The stretch burned. The latex dragged against sensitive flesh in a way skin never could. I cried out, half protest, half something far darker, and the sound was swallowed by the mask’s silence. He began to move - slow, deep, almost mechanical thrusts that forced the air from my lungs each time he bottomed out. One gloved hand pinned my wrist to the pillow. The other pressed flat against my lower belly, holding me in place so I felt every inch.

In the dream I hated him and needed him in the same breath. The anger at Ben, the shame of Constance’s fingers, the house’s constant pressure - all of it funnelled into the place where the Rubber Man was fucking me with that same patient, inhuman rhythm. My free hand clawed at the suit, finding no purchase on the smooth surface. My hips lifted to meet him anyway.

He never spoke. He only watched through the dark eye holes while he used me, the wet sounds of latex and flesh filling the dream-bedroom. When I came it was sudden and violent, walls clamping down around the invading heat, a broken sob tearing out of me. He did not stop. He kept thrusting through the aftershocks until a second, smaller orgasm ripped through me and left my thighs shaking.

Only then did he still. Deep inside. The masked head lowered until the circular mouth hole brushed the mark Constance had left on my breast. I felt the faint, warm exhalation of his breath against the bruise.

Then the dream fractured.

I woke with a sharp gasp, heart slamming against my ribs, nightgown twisted up around my waist, fingers still buried between my own legs. The sheets were damp. The room was dark and empty. The door remained locked.

But the phantom stretch of him lingered, and the house around me felt closer than it had before I slept - warm, attentive, almost satisfied.

I lay there breathing hard, staring at the ceiling, and understood that the dream had not been only a dream.

The man in the suit was already inside the walls.

And he was waiting for the night I would not wake up.