“It was just a dream?” she whispered, slowly sitting up. “My God, that was intense.”
Beep, beep, beep.
The sound that had been coming from that man's mouth was still echoing throughout her room. Only now, it actually made sense. It was her alarm, which she'd set to wake her up so that she could get ready for work.
“Goddammit,” she whispered, reaching over to turn off the alarm on her nightstand. “Why do I always have to get woken up during the best dreams?”
I was just about to get to cuddle up with him, she thought. That would have felt so nice.
It wasn't the first time she'd had a dream like that. In fact, there had been several times over the years that she'd had similar ones. Sometimes they took place in an empty warehouse and sometimes at night, in a vacant parking lot. The surroundings were always different, but the man in them was always the same man. He always felt familiar, but for some reason, she was never able to fully see his face in the dreams. It didn't really matter, though. She knew exactly who it was.
I've got to stop dreaming about him, she thought. It's not right. In fact, it's straight up weird. What is wrong with me?
She kicked off the covers, to find that she'd pulled her panties down to her knees in her sleep. The inside of her thighs were a little wet and so were the index and middle fingers on her right hand. The powerful dream had caused her to masturbate in her sleep.
“Jesus Christ,” she said, pulling her panties back up. “I seriously need to get laid. This is ridiculous.”
She got up and walked to her bathroom, quickly cleaning herself up. Then she changed her underwear and slipped into some jeans and her work shirt. It was a black polo with a green emblem on the front. Once dressed, she combed her dark blonde hair. It fell just above her shoulders and curled at the bottom. She would have straightened it, but with only twenty minutes before she was supposed to clock in at her barista job, there wasn't time.
Once she was ready, she grabbed her cell phone from its charger on the dresser. Out of habit, and just to see if she'd missed any calls or texts while she had been asleep, she unlocked the screen. Like it always did, a picture popped up on her background image. It was a photo that she'd had on her phone for years and one that she never planned on removing. In it, there was a family on the beach. It wasn't her family, though. Just one that she was very close to.
The father in the photo was the man from her dream. He was there, standing in the sand wearing a white button-down shirt and khaki-colored shorts. His dark hair was blowing to the side from the sea breeze and his blue eyes reflected the sunlight. Standing to his right was his wife. She was a pretty blonde woman with a wide and warm smile. To his left, with pigtails in her blonde hair, was his daughter.
I seriously need to stop dreaming about him, she thought to herself.
With a sigh, she slipped the phone into her back pocket and went to work. The memory of the dream she'd had continued to visit her throughout the day, though. She just couldn't shake the image of his sexy body and the way his muscles flexed while he pounded the daylights out of her. It made it extremely difficult to concentrate. She knew that she shouldn't be thinking about him in that way. Still, though, there was a part of her that was excited to go to sleep again that night in hopes of encountering a similar dream.
Chapter 2
Wyatt
“Daddy, wake up!”
Wyatt stirred in his sleep and slowly rolled over. He knew it was early. Too early. He could tell because the bedroom window was open and the air that seeped in was cool. Also, the birds weren't even chirping yet. They were still sound asleep, just like he should have been.
“Wake up!”
His eyelids felt like they were still way too heavy to open. He was in that half-asleep state now, floating somewhere between dreamland and reality. His daughter had stopped shouting at him for just a second while she climbed onto the bed. He could feel her little feet patter across the mattress. When she got close, she started jumping up and down on the bed. Each time she landed, she dropped her hands onto his side.
“Daddy!” she shouted.
Between her yelling and jumping, Wyatt finally woke up completely. He squinted as soon as he opened his eyes. Every light in the bedroom had been turned on and it felt like he was being blinded by it.
“Maggie, what is it?” he asked, rolling over to face his daughter.
He was greeted by her smiling face, which was hovering less than two inches away from his own. Her blue eyes were open wide, staring back at him. If she wasn't so darn cute, he would have been annoyed. It was hard to get upset at a face like that, though.
“You have to get up right now,” she said.
Suddenly concerned, Wyatt hopped out of bed. His mind always tended to go to the worst case scenario. Ever since his wife had passed away a year before, he had been on edge. He worried constantly and found himself more jumpy than he'd ever been in his life.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, turning back to the bed where Maggie was seated.
He glanced at the clock. It was barely six o'clock in the morning. Something
was definitely wrong. Maggie never woke him up that early. In fact, she usually slept in later than he did. Anxiety burst into his gut, immediately pulling him the rest of the way out of the fog of sleep.
“Daddy, I can't find my swimsuit,” she said, crossing her arms. “I've looked everywhere.”