Sleepwalker

The first time it happened, I woke up straddling the banister, my toes kicking against the carpeted stair on the right and open air on the left. My jaw was stretched at the hinges and complained when I pushed against the cottony mass in my teeth with my dry tongue - the edge of my t-shirt, pulled over my breasts and jammed into my mouth. My panties were a wet mess, the inside edge of both leg bands worked tight into my outer lips. When I hazily dismounted and made my way to the bathroom, I was sure from the soaked cotton gusset and the clammy damp I felt down to my knees that I'd peed myself, but I was wrong. No ammonia on the smell of my panties, none on me, just the seashell musk neediness of having come and come and come again, riding the second floor banister in my sleep. My throat scratched with pulled-in screams the next day and I only figured out three days later that the lingering twinge along the inside edges of each breast when I put on or took off my bra must have come from me crushing and stroking them against the polished wood of the handrail.

Alan never noticed I was out of bed at all.

He's been travelling a lot for work, and was never even what you'd call a good sleeper at home. When he'd come home from the third trip hollow-eyed exhausted from the thousand complaints of the sensitive shoulder on the hotel mattress, I nuzzled my lips against the short hair just above his ear and made him promise me he'd talk to his doctor. He's been on Ambien now for three months, and it drops him like a rock no matter where his bed is.

We were warned about the side effects, to watch closely for not just sleepwalking and conversations in pajamas that he couldn't remember in the morning, but for the more exotic symptoms: eating endless bowls of cereal at 3 AM, driving to the corner store with no conscious mind. Beth, a good friend, warned me especially about the sleep sex. Her husband, a thick-thighed man who plays in a weekend rugby league had been on the drug a week the first time she'd woken up to his tongue rooting against her asshole.

Over the course of a month, the pattern repeated, not every night but always the same when it happened. He'd start by gently tonguing her ass open then he'd turn her onto her knees so he could put his thumb in her anus and two thick fingers in her pussy, rubbing the tips together against the thin membrane of muscle between the two. If she tried to move other than to stroke her clit or shake with orgasm, he held her firm by the nape of the neck until he was finished. Whenever his sleep-wrapped brain told him they were both ready, he'd mount her from behind and dig his hands into her hips, barreling at her until he pulled out and came on her back.

When he was awake, he liked her to ride on top of him, working his palms against her breasts. When he was awake, he always asked to start with her mouth pulling him into full hardness while he stretched out on the mattress. When he was awake, he'd never eaten her ass. Beth thought it was a game at first, she winked and smiled at what she assumed were put-on baffled looks when she teased him about being sore from his rough treatment the night before. It wasn't until he told her he'd asked his doctor at the follow-up visit if Ambien was causing him not to remember kicking her in the night that she realized he didn't remember any of it at all.

Before she could tie words enough to tell him around her pleasure and guilt for their early morning sex, he'd changed prescriptions. Now she tries to satisfy that part of herself by getting him to change positions and fuck her from behind sometimes - she can't bring herself to ask him to lick her. Instead, she looks through his porn history when he's at rugby practice for all the anal scenes and gets herself off with a dildo curved over on itself like a "c."

In hindsight, Beth and I probably shouldn't have split a second bottle of wine that night.

When Alan started on Ambien, I spent the first two weeks tingling with excitement that I might wake up in the middle of the night with his fingers inside me or the head of his cock probing against my sleep-sighing lips. Even nights when we'd had sex already, I waited for that secret door inside him to open up to me, for him to knock on my own secret doors under cover of sleep. I had trouble going to sleep and woke at the slightest turn of his body tugging the sheets. I fantasized every day about what carnality I'd find in him when the Ambien swept away his inhibitions.

He's so polite, my Alan. So Midwestern, so quiet. When we were dating, he would move my hand if it got too high on his leg in a restaurant but as soon as we got in the door of his apartment, he'd lay me out on the floor and fuck me until the hardwood left a sore scuff against my tailbone. He's a contained man, a ship in a bottle man. When we were dating, I knew just how to shake the glass to billow his sails. Living together, being married...there's something about that intimacy of sharing a towel when the rest are in the laundry and rolling your eyes over a forgotten bill that pulls the cork out of the bottle.

So we fuck politely all the time now, with him asking my permission by rubbing my shoulders or squeezing my hand after dinner, then coming to bed in nothing but his boxers a few hours later. He kisses my shoulder, I put my book away. I squeeze at his dry cock through his boxers and his thickness against my palm, it always makes me wet for him. I can't help the way I'm built, the way my body knows it was made to hold him inside me. He kisses his way on top of me and strokes the head of his cock against my clit while I bury my face in the black hair on his chest and breathe in his rich smell and imagine him as a pirate or a high school teacher or a hundred men in a long line waiting for my cunt. When he enters me it's always a tight fit, always feels like opening and giving on a bigger scale, and it pushes whatever other role I've cast him in out of my mind, out of my body from the bottom up. He never lasts inside me as long as I want, but I always tell him it is good.

I don't ask his permission at all anymore because I learned long ago that I ask in the wrong ways, that my tongue in his ear or my panties pressed against his hip turn him off when he's not expecting them. I used to have him use his fingers to make me come three, four more times after we were done with sex, but not anymore. He'll try anything I ask without complaining, and he'll try it enthusiastically for about a minute before he stops to kiss me instead. He'll never do it again if I don't ask. He'll try anything I ask without complaining because that is what's polite.

So that first time it happened, I really did think it was a dream, even as I stripped out of my wet panties and blinked in the half-light of the bathroom at the tiny divots my teeth left in the cotton of my t-shirt. I thought I might still be dreaming as I ran a cold washcloth over my thighs and stinging, swollen lips, pulled fresh panties from the hamper, and curled back against the mattress at Alan's side. I had to accept that something, however strange, had happened when I furtively wiped the dried residue off the bannister while my husband packed his suitcase. I was quiet with soreness and wonder as I drove him to the airport.

"Hey, don't be sad," he stroked my jaw with the backs of his fingers, mistaking the meaning in the tightness of my mouth. "It's this trip until Sunday, then the one to Atlanta next week, then I'm home for a whole month." He kissed me and I tilted my head against his shoulder, wanting nothing more than to hold him against me forever and for him to get the fuck out of the car already.

"I'll see you on Sunday."

The second time it happened, I woke up in the 4 AM dark with my naked skin pressed to the front door, my hands clenched painful tight against the curtain of the nearby window and the doorknob lodged wetly inside me. I must have used the curtain to pull myself up, because I didn't see a chair or anything else nearby I could have used as a step. Any move I made, any shift of weight, turned me on the hard, smooth brass of the doorknob and stretched and pressed my inner lips. When I tried to gently slide off to one side, the intensity of it made me come, my knees and nipples stiff against the door.

After several more painful shifts, I finally got enough leverage that, with a hard yank on the curtains, I fell in a heap on the floor. The curtain rod pulled its screws from the wall and bonked me on the head to punctuate the reality of the situation. My vulva ached and I could feel the puddle under my calf that couldn't have been anything but my own wetness, slick-pooled on the floor. My throat tasted like dust. I rolled onto my back, tangled in the curtain, to collect what I remembered about how I got there, what dream I'd been having, what thoughts I had before bed. Nothing. I had nothing that even partially explained how I'd ended up fucking the front door.

Three hours and a shower later, I picked Alan up from the airport. We grabbed lunch and ran a few errands. In the grocery store, he rubbed my shoulders and sniffed my hair, as clear a sign he wanted sex when we got home as a billboard. My skin stretched over me tight as wire mesh with the desire to have him inside my bruised and aching pussy but it violently rejected the idea at the same time. After ten minutes of dithering over shampoo as a cover, I finally dropped an offhand comment about my menstrual cramps. That was enough to stop him cold. Sex on my period is messy. It's impolite.

I did give him a long, enthusiastic blowjob at home, kneeling between his spread legs on the bed. When he drifted off into an afternoon nap after coming, I carefully slipped away from his side to open his suitcase. Tucked into his shaving kit was the orange bottle of Ambien. I took it into the bathroom with me and spilled the tablets out on the vanity. I counted, re-counted. The bottle held exactly thirty-seven pills, the number it should have if Alan had been taking one every night since he got the prescription filled. I hadn't taken one accidentally and he certainly couldn't have given me one last night, when he was still away. That had been my best guess to explain my two sleepwalking episodes and it was dead wrong.

I was jumpy about sleep for the rest of the week and didn't get nearly enough of it. I didn't have any more episodes, but I watched myself all the time when I was awake for any weirdness of thought, any missed turns driving to work. My boss noticed and told me I had plenty of paid time off saved up and was ahead on all my projects - when Alan's out of town, I tend to go into work early and stay late - and gently suggested I take a few days off. I agreed, and finished up what I was doing for the day and went home at lunch.

I paused just inside the closed front door and dropped to my knees, hazily licking the smooth surface of the doorknob. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought I could still taste traces of myself on the brass. I dug my hands under the hem of my skirt and rubbed them furiously against my outer lips. I wasn't wearing panties. How had I forgotten to put on panties before going to work? Had I taken them off? My confusion only added to my arousal; half-awake I was fully free. I came three times. I took a nap on the couch with Pi, our black and white cat, curled on my feet.

It happened for the third time that night and I didn't stop myself. I woke up on my back in the kitchen in nothing but my t-shirt, pulled up to my throat to accommodate my hands frantically clutching and kneading at my breasts. The only light was what spilled in the window from the sodium lamps outside, so my pale skin looked orange and my pink nipples were dark brown. My hands looked like someone else's hands, they gripped and twisted my nipples, pulling my skin into tight pyramids. My ass felt full but not stretched. I brushed my heel against my anus and couldn't feel anything outside its puckering grasp. The only things I could see on the tile floor with me were a ten pound bag of coffee beans and my biggest kitchen knife.

My hands were like gloves controlled by some other hands with other desires pushed inside them. They left my breasts and spread wide the lips of my soaking pussy, my clit jolting at the sudden exposure to the cold air of the kitchen. My right hand dove at my clit, rubbing with two fingers, while my left dug into the bag of coffee. I sighed as the hands that were and weren't mine pushed bean after black bean inside me. I counted them: thirty-seven. When there were exactly thirty-seven coffee beans inside me, my left hand clamped against my lips as if to stifle the coffee from screaming out of me and my right hand rubbed me over the edge to orgasm.

Twice more I put another thirty-seven beans inside myself, though the last ones had me so stretched and soaked I came twice before they were all inside me. They warmed with the heat of my body and the smell of fresh coffee spread over all the other sensations of the kitchen. Perhaps that's why I started stroking the flat of the carving knife blade down my nose first. I don't know. I don't remember making any decisions, just delighting in my own unexpected actions and the pure, weird sensations they produced. The cold, smooth steel was comforting against my face after the frenetic stuffing and masturbation with the coffee.

Down my nose, across my cheek, pressed against my lips - the knife was all the softer and more innocuous because of my awareness of the red promise along its edge. My tongue darted out to tease the dull back, my teeth clicked against the steel as I sucked on every dull part of the blade. I pressed the flat against my throat, the sharpness teasing my clavicles. I put the handle between my breasts and pushed them together, the tip grazing my chin. I arched my back as I carefully squeezed and stroked my breasts along the knife, the coffee beans shifting inside my vagina, a few falling to the floor.

I took the knife back in my right hand and teased each of my nipples with the cold flat of the blade, then stroked it down my stomach. I knew where this was going, had known since the moment I curled my fingers around the handle, but there was nothing I could do but watch and wait, riding the experience. My left hand spread my outer lips again, and coffee filled my nose as my right hand dragged the dull edge of the knife smoothly across my clit. The knife turned, spreading and pressing against my inner lips as I rubbed myself against the cold, flat steel. I came gulping and gasping, my shaking hands and stone-stiff thighs making it impossible to keep my skin as safe as I had before. The fog that had wrapped into the crenulations of my brain through the whole dreamy thing covered me over entirely and I dozed off.

I woke up fully myself, fully in control, and still half naked on the kitchen floor with a knife in my hand and my pussy and ass stuffed full of coffee beans. Dawn sliced in from the windows and I heard Alan's alarm clock chirp upstairs. I knew I'd never be able to get upstairs to the bathroom in time to put on clothes before he saw me. The urge to crawl into a cabinet and just hide from him, for him to wake up in a house without me or any trace of why I left overcame me, but the rational part of my brain made me shift to my feet and go to the laundry room instead. I dug into the hamper for a short bathrobe and tossed it over my shoulders before gently digging the coffee beans I could easily reach out of my vagina and into my palm. I heard Alan's feet on the stairs down from the bedroom and hurried to the kitchen.

Just as he rounded the corner and smiled sleepily at me, I dropped my handful of coffee beans into the grinder and pressed my thumb against the button that whirled them into aromatic dust. He leaned over the breakfast bar to give me a kiss on the forehead and, while his eyes were closed, I slid the carving knife across the floor with my foot to the space underneath the overhanging cabinets. Other than a few stray coffee beans, there was no visible evidence of what I'd been doing an hour before.

"Morning, Love," I sighed at him.

"What are you going to do with three whole days off and me in Atlanta?" He asked, wrapping his forearm across my chest from shoulder to shoulder and pressing against my back.

"Sleep in."

"Not today."

"Nope. Got up early, couldn't get back to sleep." It sounded so true coming out of my mouth that I believed it, I believed it entirely until I felt the fullness of my ass still stuffed with an unknown multiple of thirty-seven coffee beans and a vague sting on the inside of my left thigh. "Thought I'd make the most out of it and get a jump start on breakfast."

He kissed my cheek and unwound from me, then sat at the table to check e-mails on his phone. He didn't notice me put the carving knife in the dishwasher or any unusual flavor to the coffee. He did notice something I hadn't as I brought plates of eggs and bacon to the table.

"What's that on your leg? Is that...blood?"

I looked down and saw smeared trickles of fresh red, mostly on my left thigh, inside and well above the knee. "Oh."

He got up and took the plates from my hands. "How about I take these and you go clean up? Seems like it's been a rough week with...that." So polite. That's the closest he'll get to openly acknowledging the period I've had every month we've ever been together.

In the bathroom, I wiped away the blood and finally saw the shallow cuts along my inner thigh like layers in creamy sandstone. Most of them were already closing and the deeper nicks were easily soaked with bits of toilet paper, like I made a disaster of shaving. Back at the table, Alan rubbed my shoulder in the non-sexual way. It's a subtle language we share, a joint physicality I've never had with anyone else.

"I've been thinking, instead of you taking me to the airport today and picking me up Saturday, I should just take the Metro. We're so close to the station and my flights are at times it's easy to get a train."

"Yeah, okay," I agreed. "I want to go to the hardware store, anyway," I added, the idea forming in my mind as soon as the words did on my lips. "I want to use my time off to do all those little house projects we've been putting off. Really go HGTV all over this place." His poorly-covered worry opened up on relief that I was back to business as usual.

"Just make sure I can recognize the house when I get back."

You know, I've done exactly what I said. I've probably made a dozen trips to the hardware store these past few days for spackle, paint, light bulbs, nails, shelves, picture frames. Everything we've ever said might be nice, I've done. I work against sleep, always finding some excuse not to get into our bed at night. It was covered in drawers I was lining with lavender-scented paper on Wednesday; mounded with laundry on Thursday; freshly ironed curtains laid out across it like a wedding trousseau on Friday. I nap, never more than three hours at a time, curled in on myself on couches and chairs. This afternoon I slept in a pile of freshly washed and dried sheets on the laundry room floor before balling them into the washer again. Pi curls with me, for the most part, or watches from a higher surface with her legs tucked under her, a black and white Buddha with a bottle-green blink. She probably thinks I've finally taken all her painstaking lessons in how to be a proper cat to heart.

Even though my Winchester House routine is designed to stave off more sleepwalking, even though I wear two pairs of panties layered over each other at all times, my hands still haunt me. I wake from one nap pulling at my nipples, one in each hand, my body steepled across the back of the couch like an open book. In the shower, I reach for my razor but come back with my fingers wrapped around the handle of the carving knife. I have somehow purchased thirty-seven claw hammers.