Sea of Dreams
By Fewthistle

"You laugh at your dream's absurdities, and at the same time you feel that in the fabric of those absurdities some thought is hidden, but a thought that is real, something belonging to your actual life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart."
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky ( from The Idiot)

The dream was always the same.

The passionate embrace, the eyes of rich indigo, the heartbreakingly tender caresses, the delicate slip of cool silk across her body, the warmth of kisses that penetrated through her lips and skin to her very soul. Each time more intense, each time so real that she awoke flushed and feverish, a thin layer of sweat fitting her like a second skin.

Then there was the voice.

A voice that tasted of bourbon and chocolate, its cadenced tones hanging, smoky gray and silvery blue, in the air between them, haloed against the light. Despite her best efforts, that voice escaped daily from the deepest recesses of her mind, whispering to her the fleeting remnants of her dream.

Sometimes she could ignore those sultry tones, but often they caught her unaware, causing her to stumble, her words catching on her tongue, like a fish on the barbs of a hook, her face suffused with blood and heat at the not so subtle insinuations of impropriety.

Each night she tried, without success, to peer through the curtain of black that surrounded them. Each night she failed.

They seemed to float in an inky sea, weightless, the feel and taste and scent of their bodies the only tangible things in an ocean of nothingness. She could never see her face, this most beloved of lovers, this woman who stirred in her feelings she denied herself capable of having in the face of the often brutal regard of her enemies and of her friends. Fantasies, that was all they were, all they could ever be. Harmless, innocuous manifestations of her psyche, no more real or meaningful than a schoolgirl's crush.

Until she closed her eyes.