Chapter 2: Fever dream
The first sensation was the cold.
Kevin’s eyes snapped open. He was on his back, the pre-dawn grey light sculpting the familiar angles of his bedroom ceiling. A dull throb pulsed behind his temples. Bourbon. Too much of it. The second sensation was the absolute, airy lightness of the sheets over his lower half. He was naked. Completely naked.
A wave of disorientation, thick and sickly, rolled through him. Fragments of memory, vivid and tactile, assaulted him. The feel of her throat. The slap of skin. The taste of her—salt and shampoo and Ashlee. Her choked, willing sounds. The crushing, possessive finality of being inside her.
Holy shit.
He turned his head slowly, muscles tight with a dread he couldn’t name.
Ashlee was asleep beside him, on her stomach. One arm was tucked under the pillow, the other flung out. The white sheet was tangled around her hips, leaving her entire back exposed. The sight was a punch to his gut.
Her skin was pale, scattered with faint freckles across her shoulders. Her red hair, a wild flame against the white linen, fanned around her head. And there, centered between her shoulder blades, was the familiar, absurd sea turtle tattoo, its tail comically large, forever swimming nowhere.
She wore a pair of simple, cotton panties. Lavender. He could see the band of her bra, snapped open but still tangled around her ribs under her arm. The cups were pushed down, unused. The smooth, full curves of her bare breasts pressed into the mattress, the sides swelling softly.
She was topless. Not naked. Not as he’d… dreamed.
A dream. It was all a fucking dream. A feverish, hyper-real, pornographic ghost spun from too much alcohol and… what? A lifetime of proximity? The subconscious unraveling of a boundary he’d never consciously acknowledged?
Relief, acute and dizzying, washed over him first. He hadn’t ruined everything. He hadn’t fucked his best friend, his stepsister, into the mattress while calling her filthy names. The friendship was intact. The world was still right-side up.
Then, a second wave hit, colder and more insidious: disappointment.
It pooled low in his belly, a tangible, aching weight. His cock, which had been soft, began to thicken against his thigh, responding to the phantom memories as if they were real. The dream-Ashlee’s mouth, her tight cunt, her submission—they had felt more real than this quiet room. The details were etched into his nerve endings. He could still hear the exact pitch of her whimper when he’d pushed inside her.
It wasn’t real. None of it was real.
He watched the steady rise and fall of her back. The turtle seemed to mock him. You thought about it. You wanted it. You came in your sleep like a teenager thinking about her.
A new, dangerous thought crystallized, clean and sharp as a diamond-tipped drill. The relief was gone. In its place was a calculated, hungry curiosity.
She’s right here. Topless. Sleeping. Trusting you completely.
What if…
He didn’t finish the thought. Instead, he let himself look. Really look. Not as her brother. Not as her friend. As a man, lying naked next to a half-naked woman he had just, in the most vivid way imaginable, destroyed.
Her panties were simple, not sexy. The kind she bought in multipacks. The fabric stretched over the generous swell of her ass. In the dream, he’d spanked that ass. It had jiggled, and she’d cried out, and he’d loved it. His mouth went dry.
His cock was fully hard now, a heavy, insistent presence against his stomach. Nine inches of stupid, traitorous ambition. You can’t, he told it. That’s Ashlee. That’s the girl who helped you bury your hamster.
But the dream had opened a door. And through that door, he saw not a sibling, but a woman with sea-size tits pressed into his mattress, a gap between her teeth that would feel… interesting. A woman who trusted him so implicitly she could sleep nearly naked beside him.
Could you? Could you actually get her to do it? Not like in the dream. Not by force.
Not by force. By whimsy. That was their language, their currency. The stupid inside jokes, the tickle fights, the relentless, affectionate mockery. He could use that. The idea solidified, a plan forming in the haze of hangover and hard-on.
He shifted, the mattress dipping. He let his arm, which had been lying at his side, drift across the expanse of sheet until the back of his knuckles brushed the warm skin of her lower back. Just below the turtle’s oversized tail
She didn’t stir. Her skin was sleep-warm and smooth. He let his hand rest there, a phantom weight. His own breathing sounded too loud in the quiet. The city below was still hushed, a distant concrete ocean under violet sky.
His thumb moved, a millimeter, tracing the inferior line of the tattoo’s shell. The curiosity hardened into intent. It was a monstrous thought. He embraced it fully. What was their friendship but a series of dares disguised as comfort?
“Ash.” His voice was a dry crack in the stillness. He cleared his throat. “Hey. Weirdo.”
She made a soft, grumbling noise, a sound he’d heard a thousand times on couches and in passenger seats. It was ordinary. It grounded him and propelled him forward in equal measure.
“Your turtle’s lopsided,” he murmured, his hand sliding a fraction lower, fingertips now just beneath the waistband of her lavender panties. “The tail’s too big. It’s going to sink.”
“Piss off,” she mumbled, her face still buried in the pillow. “It’s… aerodynamic.”
He almost laughed. This was their language. This was the bridge. He shifted closer, the heat of his body radiating toward her. His erection, which had flagged slightly, surged back to full, aching rigidity. It bumped against the curve of her hip.
She stilled. The sleepy, loose quality of her body vanished, replaced by a sudden, wire-taut awareness. He felt it happen under his hand. She didn’t pull away.
“Kev?” Her voice was muffled, but clear.
“You’re hogging the sheet.” He kept his tone light, teasing. His fingers dipped another half-inch, nails scraping gently over the swell of her ass. “And you passed out topless. Real classy, Rovhards.”
She turned her head, one green eye peering at him from a mess of red hair. Sleepy, confused, but with a sharpening focus. She could feel his hard-on against her. There was no way she couldn’t.
“You’re naked,” she stated.
“Astute.” He didn’t move his hand. “You’re not. Mostly.”
A long silence stretched. He watched her process it. The shared bed. The nudity. The thrumming, unfamiliar energy displacing the old, comfortable quiet. She glanced down, between them, though she couldn’t see it. Her throat worked as she swallowed.
“We drank a lot,” she said, a feeble offering to the god of normalcy.
“We did.” His fingers flexed, pulling the cotton of her panties down just a hair. He saw the goosebumps rise on the skin he revealed. “I had the strangest dream.”
Her eye locked on his. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He leaned in, his mouth close to her ear. He kept his voice low, a conspiratorial rumble. “You were being a brat. A real mouthy little shit. And I had to… quiet you down.”
He felt her shiver. Not from cold. Her breath hitched. “How?”
His free hand came up, not to touch her face, but to grasp a handful of the sheet near her shoulder. Claiming the territory. “I used what I had. You talked a big game. But you took it. You sucked my cock like it was your job, Ashlee.”
The obscenity hung in the air, brutal and specific. He watched her eyes widen, then darken. He saw not horror, but a dawning, thrilling comprehension. And a challenge.
“Bullshit,” she whispered, but it was breathless. “You wouldn’t.”
“In the dream, I did.” He pressed his hips forward, letting her feel the solid, undeniable length of him grind against her hip. “And you loved it. You cried a little. But you swallowed every drop.”
She was breathing faster now. He could see the rapid flutter of her pulse in her throat. The self-deprecating girl from the call center was gone, burned away by a sharper, hotter curiosity. The dream had been his. Now, he was making it theirs.
“Prove it,” she breathed, the words barely audible.
A slow smile spread across his face. It wasn’t kind. It was a hunter’s smile. “Yeah? You want proof that my dream was a prophecy?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. In one fluid motion, he pushed himself up and back, sitting against the headboard. The sheets pooled around his waist, leaving his torso bare and his cock standing thick and upright against his stomach. The morning light caught the sheen of pre-cum at the tip.
“Get up here,” he said, his voice dropping from a tease to a command.
She hesitated for only a second. Then, moving as if in a trance, she pushed herself up. She kept her back to him, modestly crossing her arms over her bare breasts. She knelt on the mattress beside his hip, staring at his cock with a mixture of terror and raw fascination.
“You’ve seen one before,” he said, not gently. He wrapped his hand around the base, giving it a slow, firm stroke. “Just not this one. And not like this.”
“No,” she agreed, her voice hollow. “Not like this.”
“The dream you,” he continued, pumping his fist slowly, “was a champion. A natural. Took it all the way down. Made a mess of herself. It was disgusting. It was perfect.” He stopped stroking, just holding himself, offering. “Show me what the real you can do.”
She uncrossed her arms. Her breasts hung full and heavy, the nipples tight. She didn’t try to cover them. The gap between her teeth was visible as she bit her lower lip. She leaned forward, her red hair curtaining her face.
Her first touch was a shock of cool, tentative fingers encircling him where his hand had been. Her grip was loose, unsure. He had to fight not to buck into it.
“Tighter,” he instructed, his jaw clenched. “It’s not a fucking microphone. You own it.”
She tightened her grasp. He hissed through his teeth. “Good. Now look at it. Get used to it. It’s going in that smart mouth of yours.”
She stared, her pupils blown wide. She leaned closer, her breath hot on the sensitive head. Then, with a resolve that seemed to surprise even her, she opened her mouth and licked a broad, clumsy stripe from root to tip.
The sensation was a white-hot wire pulled through his core. “Fuck. Yes. Just like that.”
Emboldened, she took the head into her mouth. Her lips stretched wide, a perfect ‘O’ of effort. The wet heat was immediate and devastating. She swirled her tongue, exploring the slit, and the unique drag of her slight gap-tooth sent a bizarre, electric thrill through him.
“There you go,” he groaned, his head falling back against the headboard. “See? You’re a quick study.”
She began to bob her head, taking an inch, then two. Her inexperience was palpable—the rhythm was awkward, her teeth grazed him once, making him flinch. But the earnestness, the sheer filthy novelty of it, was more potent than any technique. This was Ashlee. On her knees. Trying to deep-throat him.
He let her set the pace for a minute, his hands fisted in the sheets. Then his control, so carefully presented, began to fissure. The sight was too much.
He tangled one hand in her hair, not pulling, just anchoring. “Deeper, Ash. You can take more.
"Deeper, Ash. You can take more."
His voice wasn't a suggestion anymore; it was a dark, taut wire of intent. The hand in her hair applied steady, downward pressure. She resisted instinctively, a muffled protest vibrating around the head of his cock. He held her there, letting her adjust to the intrusion, his own breath shallow.
Her mind was a white noise of panic and arousal. This is Kevin. This is Kevin’s dick in my mouth. It tastes like skin and salt and him. It’s so wide. I can’t. My jaw is locking. But he said I could take it. In the dream, I took it all. He thinks I can. The pressure from his hand is inexorable, not cruel, but absolutely certain. He’s not asking. I have to prove I’m the girl from the dream. The champion. I have to.
His thoughts were crystalline, focused. She’s fighting it. Good. I want her to fight it a little. Makes the surrender sweeter. Feel how tight her throat is just at the entrance. Christ. She’s trying to breathe through her nose. Watch her shoulders tense. This is the part where dream-her let go. Come on, Ash. Stop thinking. Just do it.
He released the pressure slightly, letting her pull back to the tip, gasping. Strands of saliva webbed her lips to his skin. "Breathe in through your nose," he coached, his thumb stroking her temple. "On the exhale, let your throat open. I’m gonna help you."
She nodded, a quick, jerky movement. She inhaled a shaky breath, held it, and as she slowly exhaled, he pushed her head down again. This time, she didn’t resist. The thick crown breached the tight ring of muscle at the back of her mouth.
She gagged violently, her body convulsing. He held her firm. "Shhh. There it is. That’s the spot. Get past it."
It was a brutal, minute-by-minute negotiation. He would guide her down another half-inch, hold until the frantic clenching of her throat subsided into a strained acceptance, then retreat. The sounds were obscene: wet, choking gulps, his low grunts of encouragement, the slick slide of her saliva coating his shaft. The seven minutes felt like an hour, a dedicated, degrading tutorial.
She was drowning in the sensation. I’m going to throw up. I’m going to throw up all over his perfect bed. My eyes won’t stop watering. I can’t see. All I can feel is him stretching my throat into a new, obscene shape. It’s in my neck. I can feel the bulge in my neck. He’s watching it. Oh god, he’s fascinated by it. I’m a science experiment. His favorite experiment.
He was mesmerized. Look at that. Look at her throat stretch around me. I can see the outline of my cock pushing against her skin. She’s really doing it. She’s taking it for me. This is better than the dream. This is real. Her tears are real. Her struggle is real. My control is fucking absolute.
My control is fucking absolute.
He let her rise all the way, gasping, strings of spit and mucus connecting her swollen lips to his glistening shaft. Her face was a wreck of tears and flushed skin, eyes glassy. She looked shattered. Beautiful.
“I can’t believe it,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. His heart hammered against his ribs, a wild, frantic rhythm that matched the throbbing in his cock. The sight of her, broken down and obedient, was a narcotic.
“I can’t believe I’m in my little sister’s throat with my cock.” The words came out in a rush, a raw confession that hung in the air between them. He wasn’t smiling. The playful mask had dissolved into something stunned and grave. “My best friend is a great cocksucker. A fucking natural.”
Ashlee stared up at him, chest heaving, saying nothing. Her silence was more profound than any agreement.
He smoothed her damp hair back from her forehead, the gesture oddly tender against the brutality of the last few minutes. “This doesn’t change our friendship.” His voice was low, intense, willing it to be true. “You’ll always be my little sister. Always my best friend.”
He guided her mouth back onto him, not with force, but with a terrible, deliberate purpose. She went willingly, her tongue flattening against his underside as she took him deep again, bypassing the initial struggle. Her body had learned.
“I’m going to feed my best friend the biggest cum she’s ever had,” he groaned, his hips beginning a shallow, involuntary thrust. His balls drew up tight, a familiar, urgent pressure building at the base of his spine. “So they are a little secret.” He emphasized the childish phrase, a relic from their past, now dripping with depravity.
He was losing the rhythm, his control fraying at the edges. His fingers tightened in her hair, setting a faster, rougher pace. The head of his cock punched the back of her throat with each drive. Gagging sounds punctuated the wet slaps of his pelvis against her face.
“No one needs to know.” His words were gritted out between clenched teeth. The climax was a seismic wave gathering force, undeniable. “This changes nothing. Understand, sis?”
She couldn’t answer. Her only reply was a muffled, desperate hum of affirmation, her throat convulsing around him. It was the permission he needed.
He came with a ragged, guttural shout that echoed off the penthouse windows. It was a violent, pumping release, jet after hot jet spilling deep into her gullet. He held her down, buried to the root, as his body shuddered through it, his vision spotting at the edges.
The pulses seemed to go on forever, wringing him utterly empty. He finally released her hair, his hand falling limp to the sheet.
Ashlee collapsed backward, choking, his spend dribbling from her lips as she gasped for air. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her eyes wide and unfocused. The taste, metallic and bitter, coated her tongue. The physical reality of it, the sheer volume, was a shocking anchor in the surreal morning.
For a long moment, the only sound was their ragged, mismatched breathing. The city outside was beginning to glow with proper daylight, indifferent to the rupture inside the glass tower.
Kevin slid down the headboard, landing beside her, spent. He stared at the ceiling, the hangover now a dull throb completely overshadowed by a vast, ringing emptiness. What had he done?
Ashlee rolled onto her side, facing away from him, curling into herself. Her shoulders trembled once, a silent seismic ripple, then went still.
The space between them in the king-size bed felt infinite.
The space between them in the king-size bed felt infinite. Kevin watched a thin shaft of sunlight climb the opposite wall, illuminating a faint scuff mark from when Ashlee had drunkenly tossed a shoe years ago. His heartbeat, which had been a frantic drum against his ribs, settled into a slow, ominous thud. He felt scraped raw, hollowed out.
Beside him, Ashlee lay perfectly still. He saw a single, silent tear track from the corner of her eye into her hairline, disappearing into the crimson tangle. The sight punctured the strange, post-climax haze.
He opened his mouth. No sound came out. What do you say? Thanks was monstrous. Sorry was a lie. The silence coagulated, thickening until it was a physical substance in his lungs.
Then Ashlee sniffed, a wet, clogged sound. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, smearing it. The childish gesture shattered the tension.
“God,” she croaked, her voice ruined. “That was… graphic.” She didn’t look at him.
A startled laugh punched out of him, brittle and sharp. “Graphic?” He ran a hand over his face. “Yeah. That’s one word for it.”
“I feel like I just lost a boxing match with your dick,” she mumbled into the pillow.
He laughed again, the sound loosening something in his chest. The grim spell broke, replaced by a shaky, surreal normality. This was their language. Finding the joke in the wreckage.
He glanced down at his softening cock, lying damp and spent against his thigh. A final, glistening pearl of come beaded at the tip. An old, crude memory from a college teammate surfaced.
“Hey,” he said, his voice softer now. He nudged her shoulder with his elbow. “You missed a spot.”
She turned her head slightly, one green eye peering at him with wary exhaustion. “What?”
He gestured downward with his chin. “The last few drops. Gotta suck it out. It’s a respect thing.”
She stared at him. Then her face contorted, a bewildered smile breaking through the tear-stained mess. “A respect thing? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I am completely serious.” He kept his face deadpan, though his eyes crinkled. “It’s proper etiquette. You don’t just leave a job half-finished. It’s messy.”
“You are the most bizarre person I have ever met,” she said, but she was pushing herself up on one elbow. She looked from his face to his cock and back again, the absurdity of the demand warring with the sheer, undeniable fact of what they’d just done. What was one more obscenity?
“Fine.” She sighed, the sound exaggerated and put-upon. “But this is the last time I’m taking career advice from you.”
She leaned over, her hair falling around her face. With a quick, almost clinical motion, she took the softened head between her lips and gave one firm, thorough suck. He felt the last pulses of sensation, a clean, stripping pull.
She released him with an audible pop and flopped back onto the pillow, wiping her mouth again. “Satisfied, Your Majesty? Did I pass the respect test?”
“A-plus.” He grinned, the genuine, easy grin he reserved only for her. The one that had been absent minutes before. “You’re a natural. I always knew you had hidden talents.”
“Shut up,” she said, but she was smiling now too, shaking her head. She stared at the ceiling. “I can’t believe that just happened. I can’t believe I did that.”
“Which part?” He rolled onto his side to face her, propping his head on his hand. “The deep-throating championship, or the post-game cleanup?”
“All of it.” She turned to look at him, her expression open and wondering. “Your commentary was… something else. ‘This is mine now. This cunt is mine.’” She imitated his guttural growl, then dissolved into a fit of coughing laughter. “Who talks like that? You sounded like a pirate claiming treasure.”
He winced, but laughed with her. The crude words, aired out in the cool morning light, lost their dark power and became just ridiculous. “I was in the moment! It was an all-time moment. You can’t script that shit.”
“An all-time moment of being a complete cheeseball,” she shot back, shoving his shoulder. “A fucking pirate. ‘Feed my best friend the biggest cum.’ I mean, really, Kev.”
He caught her hand, lacing his fingers with hers. The contact was sudden, electric, but neither pulled away. They lay there, holding hands like they had as kids walking home from school, while the ghost of his semen cooled in her stomach.
“So,” she said after a moment, her voice lighter. “Breakfast?”
“I’m starving,” he admitted. The normalcy of it was a lifeline. “I could murder some eggs.”
“You always murder the eggs. You turn them into rubber.” She sat up, letting the sheet fall to her waist, completely unselfconscious now. Her bare breasts were marked faintly with pink pressure lines from the mattress. “I’m cooking. You’ll just stress out the yolks.”
“I do not stress out the yolks.” He sat up too, swinging his legs out of bed. He stood, stretching, naked and utterly at ease in front of her. The weirdness had been named, mocked, and seemingly boxed away. “I’m an excellent cook. I julienne.”
“You julienne your self-esteem,” she said, hopping off the bed. She pulled her lavender panties back up, then shrugged her arms into the open bra, fastening it with a practiced twist before slipping on her discarded t-shirt from the floor. “Now come on. I need coffee to wash the taste of your respect out of my mouth.”
He pulled on his boxer briefs, following her out of the bedroom into the stark, sunlit hallway. The polished floors were cool under his feet. The abstract art on the walls looked the same. The world had not ended.
In the kitchen, she beelined for the Italian espresso machine, a hulking stainless steel monument he never used. He leaned against the marble island, watching her examine the controls.
“It’s not a coal center phone, Ash. It won’t bite.”
“Says the man who calls IT when his printer says ‘PC load letter,’” she muttered, pressing buttons. The machine grumbled to life.
He got eggs, butter, and a block of cheddar from the refrigerator. The silence was comfortable, filled with the domestic sounds of her battling the coffee grinder and him cracking eggs into a bowl. He whisked, the rhythmic clink clink clink of the wire against glass a calming metronome.
She brought him a tiny cup of violent black espresso. “Here. Drink this and try to be less of a pirate today.”
He took it, sipped, and winced at the strength. “You trying to kill me?”
“Just matching the intensity of the morning.” She leaned on the island opposite him, cradling her own cup. Her eyes, over the rim, were thoughtful. “Seriously, though. No weirdness, right?”
He met her gaze. He saw the earnest hope there, underpinned by a trace of fear. She wanted the bridge back. She needed the path to normality clearly marked. He could give her that. He had to.
“No weirdness,” he affirmed, his voice firm. “It was a thing. A bizarre, one-time, woke-up-horny thing. We got it out of our system.” He poured the eggs into the sizzling butter. “You’re still my best friend. My annoying little sister who can’t operate a simple coffee maker.”
She threw a dish towel at him. It fluttered harmlessly to the floor. “And you’re still my pretentious big brother who gives terrible throat-fucking commentary.”
They both laughed, the sound echoing in the sleek, expensive space. The eggs scrambled, golden and soft. The coffee steamed. The morning unfolded, ordinary and bright.
He plated the eggs, sliding a portion to her. They ate standing at the island, shoulders almost touching. She told a story about a customer at the call center who’d tried to pay his bill with a handwritten poem. He recounted a vapid conversation from a deal dinner.
Everything was precisely, meticulously as it had always been.
Except he noticed, as she laughed, the way her throat moved when she swallowed her coffee. The specific curve of her lip where the gap in her teeth was. The memory of her choked, gagging rhythm was a phantom pulse in his groin. A secret, dormant.
He watched her lick a crumb of cheese from her thumb. A simple, innocent action. Heat, low and undeniable, coiled in his gut again.
He looked away, out at the sprawling city view. He forked another mouthful of egg.
It wasn’t out of their system at all. It was just beginning.