My Dreams Changed and Now I Wake Up Wet for Her

For several weeks now, my dreams have changed. I’ve always been someone who dreams a lot, who has whole nights filled with scenes that later I struggle to separate from real life. I dreamed about things that had already happened, about absurd things, about endless falls and houses that never existed. But never, until now, had I had a dream that came back. One that insists, that settles into the same chair every dawn and waits for me.

And I like that she’s there. It turns me on that she’s there.

The first one I remember was some time ago, before everything changed. I was at a gathering, a formal dinner with a huge number of people I didn’t know. Men and women dressed well, glasses clinking, conversations crossing in four different languages. At some point, without any explanation —dreams are like that, they take you by the hand without warning—, I found myself walking alone along a narrow path, between trees that let the moon through in pieces.

That’s where he appeared. A guy who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. I was twice his age and in the dream, that was part of the game. He said things that in real life would have made me laugh and roll my eyes; there, they made me move closer. I kissed him with my mouth open, held his chin, ran my tongue over his lower lip. Then I went down his neck, over his chest, down to his pelvis. I woke up with the feeling still stuck to my palate.

Another dream left my pajamas soaked. I was in an empty ballroom, alone with an instructor I had never seen before. We danced something like bachata, that rhythm that already comes loaded with invitation. At some point, without either of us taking off our clothes, we were both naked in front of a huge mirror. I pressed my palms against the cold glass and he entered me from behind, slowly, watching my reflected face as he did it.

That dawn I woke up furious with arousal. My partner was sleeping beside me, breathing heavily, mouth slightly open. I knelt down and gave him oral sex until I woke him. After that I fucked him on top, eyes closed, chasing the orgasm the dream had promised and never quite delivered.

My dreams had always been about men.

Until they weren’t.

***

The first time I dreamed of a woman, it was in a fitting room.

I was buying a dress in a small shop, the kind that has three garments per hanger and an attentive saleswoman who brings you things “that are going to look incredible on you.” The owner of the place —because it was her, I understood that in the dream without anyone telling me— was a dark-haired woman with straight hair to her shoulders, very dark eyes, and a way of moving that made the clothes hanging on the racks seem less important.

I was in the fitting room wearing black panties and nothing else. The dress I had tried on was hanging from the hook, rejected. She pulled the curtain open without asking permission, with the ease of someone who does it five times a day, and came in with another dress over her arm.

—I brought you this one. It’s from another season, but it’ll fit you better than the last one —she said, and I lifted my arms so she could pull it over my head.

I felt her gaze before her hands. A gaze that lingered on my breasts a second longer than professional courtesy allows. When she lowered her eyes and brought them back up to mine, I knew she knew I had noticed the pause.

—You’re very pretty —I told her, laughing, as if I were saying it as a joke to dodge the tension.

She dodged nothing. She ran her hands over my hips under the excuse of adjusting the dress and stayed there a moment longer. Then, without transition —dreams don’t need transitions—, I was with my back against the mirror, her mouth on mine, one of her hands inside my panties and the other holding the back of my neck.

I woke up with my jaw clenched and my crotch soaked.

***

There’s another dream that repeats with variations. It’s on a long trip, on one of those buses that cross entire provinces overnight. I’m going alone, reading. At the stop before mine, a woman gets on and the driver seats her next to me. She’s about my age, more or less. Her hair is tied back and she has a perfume that arrives before she does.

We talk. First about nonsense —the weather, the movie they showed, the awful coffee at the last roadside stop—, then about more intimate things. She tells me she’s going to see a friend. I tell her I’m coming back from a conference. At some point, when we’re already speaking in low voices because almost everyone is asleep, she rests her hand on my knee over my jeans.

I don’t move it away.

She slides her fingers up. Just a little. Just enough for me to understand it wasn’t an accident. I open my legs slightly, almost without moving, and she keeps going. When she gets where she wanted to get, the bus cuts into the darkness of a road with no towns and I bite my lip so I don’t make a sound.

In the most recent version of the dream, we end up in the last row, her between my legs, giving me oral sex with the precision of someone who has known me for years. She knew exactly where to stop, when to press, when to let go. I squeezed my nipples over my T-shirt and breathed through my nose, trying not to wake the rest of the passengers.

That’s what I dreamed two weeks ago.

***

Last night she showed up again. The same one. The bus one, the fitting-room one, the one who no longer has a clear name but does have a way of looking at me that I recognize the second she sits down beside me.

We were at a gathering, in a house that wasn’t mine, with people who weren’t mine either. I saw her arrive late, take off her coat, greet the hostess with two kisses. Then she walked straight toward me, as if we had already agreed on the place.

She sat next to me at the long table. She laughed with the others, nodded, asked questions. And I watched her mouth move and my crotch got wet as if I were eighteen and for the first time at one of those dinners where you sit near someone you like and you can’t think about anything else.

I found her leg with my hand under the tablecloth. I found it. She didn’t move. She kept talking to the woman across from her, answering something about a trip to Croatia, while I ran my fingers up the inside of her thigh.

At one point she turned her face toward me. She smiled. A smile not meant for the rest of the table, a smile made of pure complicity. She adjusted herself in the chair, opened her legs a little wider, and my finger found wet fabric before it touched skin.

—Excuse me, I’ll be back in a minute —she said, standing up.

I waited exactly thirty seconds. Then I got up too, murmured something about the bathroom, and followed her down a hallway the dream invented for me with moss-colored walls and crooked paintings.

I found her in a room at the back. She closed the door behind me, slid the lock.

I took her face in my hands and kissed her. Our tongues searched each other with the clumsiness of something new and the hunger of what we had been building up all night. She pushed me gently against the door. I slid my hands under her dress and found she had nothing on underneath.

We undressed without speaking. Each piece of clothing fell to the floor and no one picked it up. We ended up on the floor, on a rug that smelled like old perfume, my legs tangled with hers, our nipples brushing, our hips searching for the exact angle so our sex could touch.

We masturbated like that, vagina against vagina, in silence, with our moans muffled inside each other’s mouths. When she came, she made a barely audible sound, like a sigh in reverse, and that made me come too.

And then I woke up.

***

My partner was sleeping beside me. The same person I’ve been with for seven years. The one who knows my body by heart, who laughs when I snore, who knows I like my coffee rather weak.

I stayed there for a while looking at her back. Then I got up carefully, without making a sound, and went into the shower.

Under the hot water, with my hand down there and my eyes closed, I finished what the dream had not quite given me. I thought about her, about her mouth, about her fingers, about the way she had looked at me over her shoulder when she got up from that imaginary table.

When I got out of the shower, my partner was still asleep. I kissed the back of her neck as I passed and made myself a coffee.

I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t know whether to tell her. I don’t know if I’m telling myself something I already knew and just took a whole lifetime to hear, or if it’s only a season, a phase, a way for the body to play at something it won’t want later.

All I know is that tonight, when I go to bed, I’m going to wait for her.

She’ll come.

She always comes.