Page 1 of Demon of Dreams

1

CORY

Ihad the dream again last night.

Rough hands against my skin, bared teeth against my neck, the scent of smoke and sweat invading my nostrils. A heat so all-encompassing that I couldn’t think straight, let alone find my voice to speak.

A low growl filled my ears. It lasted a minute, or possibly a lifetime. The surprise and confusion and heart-pounding terror obliterated my concept of time. Something soft—or maybe several somethings, I was never quite sure—caressed my skin and left a trail of burns. It was agony. Torture. And pleasure like I’d never known.

And pulsing underneath it all, like a beating drum, was the part I dreaded most: desire.Mydesire.

I woke up covered in sweat, on the edge of a scream, and my heart sank when I glanced at the sheets puddled around my waist. I was hard. Revulsion and guilt fought for dominance as I shook myself—hell, I was still shaking from the dream—and tried to think of anything that would make it go down.

I’d been having these dreams for weeks now. It had gotten to the point where I was afraid to go to sleep. I avoided it as long as I could, but working the opening shift at a diner and the evening shift at a motel on the edge of town meant I was constantly tired. The only thing worse than the dream itself was the idea of accidentally drifting off in public, and having peopleseeme dreaming.

My skin crawling at the thought, I pushed myself out of bed and into the bathroom. I’d gotten home at ten last night and had been so tired, I hadn’t bothered to shower. It was 4:30 a.m. now, which meant I had five minutes to get clean if I wanted to make it to Carla’s Diner in time to let Anthony in. He was the cook, and he came from farther away than I did. He hated when he had to wait in the cold.

I ran the shower cool, hoping that would help my erection go down, but it was stubbornly insistent. A shameful thought crossed my mind. If the dream could make me this hard, maybe the fastest way to get rid of it would be to just…

My hand drifted to my cock, my fingers running through the beads of pre-cum at the tip. God, I was so close, it wouldn’t take more than a minute. I leaned against the wall of the shower, grimy-looking no matter how often I cleaned it, and let my mind drift back to the dream.

The heat, the smoke—they intoxicated me with their strangeness. My skin was on fire. My free hand rose, clawed, in a gesture I couldn’t interpret. I might have been trying to fight the…thingoff of me, or I might have been digging my fingertips in to pull it closer. That rumbling growl snaked across the back of my neck—

I pulled my hand away from my cock in shock. That growl. What had I been thinking? I couldn’t—there just wasn’t—there was no way I could jack off to this dream.

That growl was crystal clear, even if nothing else about the dream was. And it lit a match of fear inside me that grew and grew until I was near panic. Not because the growl belonged to something inhuman, but because of something much more mundane.

That growl was masculine.

There was just no way a woman would make a noise like that. I wasn’t trying to be sexist. I was sure that if the thing in my dream were some kind of female monster with fangs and eight eyes, she could make a terrifying noise all her own. Butthisnoise—I knew in my heart that this noise was male.

It would almost have been funny, if I hadn’t been cringing with disgust. My subconscious was apparently able to dream up the most unhinged, reality-defying, completely impossible monsters, and they weren't even what scared me the most.

What scared me was what that growl implied. Whoever was touching me—torturing me—in that dream was male.

And part of me liked it.

I felt nauseated. I knew there was nothingwrongwith being gay. Hell, my friend Neil was gay, and we’d been best friends since fourth grade. I didn’t have a problem with him. I’d never felt weird around him, or like I had to keep my distance.

But Dad…

Yeah. My dad. That was the problem. My dad had a very different way of looking at things.

My dad was the only parent I’d ever known. He said my mom had passed through our small town of Churchill, Iowa just long enough to get pregnant with me and have the baby before disappearing, leaving my twenty-one-year-old father with an infant he’d never wanted and no idea how to raise him.

He’d done his best. I couldn’t imagine how hard it had been, but with the help of a bunch of neighbors, he’d managed to raise me with some semblance of consistency in his little trailer by the water tower. At the very least, he hadn’t abandoned me like my mom had. I had to give him credit for that.

But that consistency… Sure, there was food in the cupboards (most days) and a fully paid electric bill (most of the time), but there was also his growing contempt, as I got older, with the type of son he had.

My dad had been the varsity quarterback in high school. He’d gotten a full ride to college only to blow his knee out sophomore year. He was a guy’s guy. He loved his guns and sports and beer. Boy, did he love his beer. He’d wanted a son who would grow up to be just like him. Instead, he’d gotten me.

I’d been underweight at birth and had never caught up. I remained shrimpy and short my whole life. I’d turned eighteen this past fall, and I still had customers at the diner asking why I wasn’t in school during the middle of the day.

It wasn’t just the physical stuff that disappointed my dad, though. No, I’d been a disappointment to him in other ways, too. I hated guns and violence. I’d cried the first time we went hunting and he’d shot a stag. I hadn’t been able to get the scent of blood out of my nose for days.

I sucked at sports, or pretty much anything that required hand-eye coordination, and I had even less interest in watching sports on TV. I’d never even done any of that normal teenage rebellion stuff, like stealing a case of beer from him and getting wasted with my friends. I honestly think he would have preferred it if I had.

But no, I had to make friends with Neil, the theater kid—singular, Churchill wasn’t big enough to have more than one—and Franny, the school’s one goth. I’d liked drawing, spending my Saturday afternoons at the town’s tiny library, and my Saturday nights in my bedroom with my friends, watching old movies on the janky VCR Franny had fixed up for us.

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