Chapter 21: The Taunt and the Takedown
The city outside was a silent, deep blue world, the kind of quiet that only exists between three and four in the morning. Jiahao eased his apartment door shut, the click of the lock echoing like a gunshot in the stillness. He was soaked, the chilled drizzle of his walk from the all-night garage seeping into his shoulders. The negotiations had been brutal, a six-hour marathon of threats veiled as offers across a polished table.He felt stripped, hollowed out by the performance. His own scent carried the stale, metallic ghosts of the office tower: recycled air, bitter coffee, and the faint, cloying note of someone else’s expensive perfume.He dropped his keys into a ceramic dish. The sound was too loud.He stood for a moment in the dark foyer, listening. The only sound was the soft, rhythmic hum of the refrigerator.And her breathing.
He knew the shape of it, the gentle pull and sigh from down the hall.He’d memorized it lying awake beside her. He toed off his shoes and padded down the hallway, his wet socks leaving faint, damp prints on the hardwood.His body was a wire pulled taut, every nerve buzzing with a residual, vicious energy. The meeting had required a cold, dispassionate control. Now, with the adrenaline fading, what rushed in to fill the void was something darker, more primal, and entirely focused on the woman in his bed.
Her door was ajar.He pushed it open silently.
The bedroom was bathed in the weak, silver glow of a streetlamp filtering through the blinds. It painted stripes across the rumpled sheets and over her sleeping form.She was curled on her side, facing him. One hand was tucked under her cheek, the other draped across her waist. She wore one of his old shirts—the gray one from college, soft and frayed at the collar. It was so large it swallowed her shape, yet in sleep, it had ridden up, exposing the gentle curve of her hip and the entire length of her legs.She wasn’t wearing his sweatpants. She wore only the thinnest scrap of black lace, a stark contrast against her pale skin.
The shirt was cotton, threadbare in places.As she breathed, the fabric tightened and relaxed across her chest. Her nipples were hard, visible as two distinct, dark peaks against the gray. He remembered the feel of them in his mouth in the garage, pebbled and sensitive. Remembered her broken sobs as he’d pinched them.He remembered more. A wine-hazy night weeks ago, her head lolling on his shoulder on this very couch, her voice a tipsy whisper.” I have this… God, it’s so embarrassing.This fantasy.Where I’m asleep. And you just… take what you want.And I don’t even wake up. I just… feel it.In my dreams.”
He’d stiffened, the casual dominance of the image hitting him like a physical blow.He’d simply grunted, changed the subject. But he’d filed it away, a loaded gun in the vault of his mind.Now, here it was. The perfect chance.The ultimate power.
She was utterly vulnerable, trusting in her sleep, offered up on the platter of his sheets. And he was a man vibrating with the need to claim, to possess, to erase the feeling of other people’s demands with the pure, simple truth of her body.
He approached the bed, his movements fluid, predatory. He could smell her sleep-warm skin, the vanilla of her lotion, the faint, sweet scent that was uniquely her pussy. The shirt she wore smelled like him.The combination was intoxicating. He owned the space, he owned the scent, and he was about to own her complete, unconscious submission.
He sat on the edge of the mattress, the springs whispering.She didn’t stir. Her lips were parted slightly, her breathing deep and even.He reached out, his fingers hovering just above the swell of her breast. Then he touched her.Through the shirt. A soft, slow grope, his palm covering her entire breast.He squeezed gently. In her sleep, she made a soft sound, a little mmph, and shifted, pushing her chest more fully into his hand. A bolt of pure, undiluted lust shot straight to his dick, which was already hard and straining against his zipper. She was offering herself, even in oblivion.He leaned down, his mouth close to her ear. His voice was a low, rough scrape in the silence.“That’s it, baby.Just sleep. You’re so pretty like this.All undone for me.”
His other hand moved to her hip. He traced the line of the lace waistband with his thumb, then slid his hand down, over the curve of her ass.The lace was damp. Not soaking, but tacky with her natural moisture.His breath hitched.She was wet in her sleep.For him. The idea was filthier, more possessive, than anything they’d done awake.
He hooked his fingers into the side of the thong and began to tug it down, an inch at a time. She murmured again, a sleepy protest that dissolved into a sigh as he freed one cheek, then the other. He pulled the lace down her thighs, past her knees, until he could slide it off one foot and toss it into the shadows.She was bare now.His shirt, her skin, and nothing else. He spread her legs, just enough.Just a few inches.The movement was gentle, inexorable. She complied in her sleep, her muscles loose and pliant.
He looked his fill in the monochrome light.The neat, trimmed thatch of hair. The glistening folds, already slick.Her cunt was pink and open, beckoning. He remembered the violent, clenching grip of it around his dick in the garage. Remembered how he’d come inside her, marking her.The memory was a live wire.
He pushed the hem of the shirt up, bunching it around her ribs, exposing her completely from the waist down. Then he leaned over her, one hand resuming its slow, possessive groping of her breast, his thumb circling her nipple through the fabric. His other hand went between her legs.He didn’t plunge inside.Not yet. He traced her with his fingertips, learning her all over again in this strange, passive state. He stroked her outer lips, slick with her sleep-slickness. He circled her entrance, feeling the soft, giving flesh.She moaned, a deeper, more resonant sound this time. Her hips made a tiny, involuntary undulation.
“Shhh,” he whispered into her ear, his lips brushing her skin.“ your just dreaming of my hands on you. Of how much your pretty little pussy wants me.It’s dripping, baby. Dripping in your sleep like a slut.”
His words were filthy, deliberate. He wanted them to seep into her subconscious, to stain her dreams. He pressed two fingers against her clit, a steady, pulsing pressure.Her reaction was immediate.A sharp intake of breath. Her back arched slightly off the mattress, not enough to wake, but enough to press her cunt more firmly against his hand. A thin, needful whine escaped her throat.
“That’s it,” he murmured, working slow circles.“Chase it.In your sleep.Beg for it in your head. You know who’s doing this to you.You know it’s me. Your body knows.”
He watched her face as he continued to play with her clit.Her brow was furrowed in concentration, her lips moving silently.She was close. He could feel it in the trembling tension of her thighs, in the increasingly ragged pulls of her breath. He wanted her to come like this.Asleep.Taken.Without even being asked.
He increased the pace of his fingers, the pressure becoming more insistent.“Come on, baby. Come for me in your sleep.Let me feel you shake. Show me how good I make you feel, even when you’re not awake to thank me.”
Her mouth fell open. A silent, breathy cry.Her body tightened, a beautiful, coiled line from her toes to her throat. Then the orgasm rolled through her, a series of deep, internal flutters he could feel with his fingers on her clit. Her cunt pulsed around nothing, and a fresh rush of wetness coated his hand. She let out a long, shuddering moan that faded back into the rhythm of her breathing.Her body sank into the mattress, even more limp, more deeply asleep than before.
Her body sank into the mattress, even more limp, more deeply asleep than before. The aftershocks of her unconscious climax still hummed through her muscles, leaving her pliant and utterly defenseless. Jiahao watched her, his own breath held, a predator mesmerized by the completeness of his conquest.Her surrender was absolute. It ignited a furnace in his gut. The civilized man from the boardroom was gone, incinerated by a need so dark it felt geological. He stood and stripped off his damp clothes, the wet fabric hitting the floor with a heavy slap. The cool air touched his skin, but it did nothing to temper the heat coiling within him.
He looked at her splayed form, his shirt rucked up, her legs parted just as he’d left them. She was a feast offered in the silver gloom.He crawled onto the bed, the frame groaning softly under his weight. He knelt between her thighs, his knees pressing hers wider. The scent of her, of sleep and sex and vanilla, flooded his senses.His hands slid up her inner thighs, feeling the softness there. He leaned forward, bracing himself over her. Her face was serene, eyelashes dark against her cheeks.He lowered his mouth to hers, stealing a kiss from her sleep. Her lips were warm, unresponsive, but they yielded.It was like kissing a statue that breathed. The passivity of it, the total lack of reciprocation, sent a jolt of pure, deviant electricity straight to his core.“Caitlyn,” he whispered against her mouth, a testing murmur.
A soft sigh escaped her, a sleepy exhalation. Her head lolled to the side on the pillow.It was an invitation. He nuzzled the column of her throat, tasting salt and lotion. He bit down gently on the tendon, not enough to mark, but enough to feel the life thrumming beneath the surface. Her pulse beat against his lips, a steady, oblivious rhythm.
“You’re mine,” he breathed into her skin, the words a hot, damp secret.“Even like this. Especially like this.”
He trailed lower, his tongue tracing a path between her breasts. He took one nipple into his mouth through the shirt, sucking hard, the cotton rough against his tongue.Her back arched, a silent, exquisite reflex. A low, pleading sound vibrated in her throat.It wasn’t a word.It was pure, animal need.
He switched to the other breast, giving it the same brutal attention.The fabric grew wet and dark. He could see the precise outline of her areola, taut and desperate under the soaked material. He released it with a soft pop. Her chest rose and fell rapidly now, her breathing shallowed by the phantom sensations haunting her dreams.
He moved down her body, his hands smoothing over her waist, her hips.He settled his shoulders under her knees, her legs draping over him. He was eye-level with her cunt, glistening and swollen from his earlier touch and her recent climax. The sight was obscenely beautiful.He didn’t dive in. He blew a soft stream of cool air across her slick folds.She jerked, a full-body flinch. A sharp, bitten-off moan escaped her clenched teeth.Her hips lifted an inch from the mattress, seeking the source.
“So greedy,” he muttered, his voice gravel. “Even dead to the world, this pussy knows what it wants.”
He finally brought his mouth to her.He didn’t lick. He covered her entirely with his mouth, sucking her outer lips, feeling the softness give way. The taste of her sleep-arousal, musky and sweet, flooded his senses. He licked a broad, flat stripe of her clit.Her response was instantaneous and profound. Her legs tensed around his head. A guttural, choked cry tore from her throat, strangled by sleep.Her hands fisted in the sheets, the fabric twisting in her grasp. He did it again, slower this time, savoring the fluttering tension in her thighs, the way her whole body strung itself tight on an invisible wire.
He focused on her clit, circling it with a ruthless, practiced precision. He fucked her with his tongue, plunging deep, then retreating to worry the sensitive bud. He was painting a masterpiece of sensation on the blank canvas of her subconscious.Every twitch, every stifled gasp, was his doing. He owned her nervous system.“That’s it,” he grunted, his words muffled against her flesh. “Dream about this.Dream about my tongue in your cunt, making you come again. You’re nothing but a sleeping fucktoy for me.”
Her moans became a continuous, desperate stream. They were wordless, formless sounds of agonized pleasure. Then, through the haze, a syllable broke through.“H…ha…”
He froze, lifting his head. Her face was contorted in sleep-pleasure, her brows drawn together, lips parted.
“Hao…”
It was a slurred, dream-slow version of his name. It slipped out on a breathy exhale, followed by a shaky inhalation.His entire body locked.She was moaning his name. In the depths of a sleep so profound she’d just survived an orgasm without waking, her mind, her voice, still found him.It was the most profound submission he could imagine.
ALL SHE COULD DO WAS MOAN OUT HIS NAME.EVEN IN SLEEP SHE MOANS FOR HIM. IT’S LIKE SHE COULD HERE HIS DIRTY WORDS HE WAS MURMURING. BUT SHE COULDN’T.SHE WAS OUT COLD. HE NEEDED TO RUIN HER.FUCK HER UNCONSCIOUS BODY.The last threads of his restraint snapped. The intellectual pleasure of her fantasy was consumed by a more urgent, physical imperative. He needed to be inside her.Now.He needed to feel that impossible, sleeping tightness clamp down on him. He needed to ruin the peace of her slumber with the brutal, undeniable reality of his possession.
He moved up her body, his knees pushing her legs wider. He positioned himself, the head nudging against her soaked entrance.He was painfully hard, every vein throbbing. He looked down at the junction of their bodies, at her relaxed, open flesh accepting the pressure of him. He looked at her face, serene again, her mouth softly saying his name once more, a whispered “Hao…” that was barely sound.
HE LINED HIMSELF UP AND SLOWLY PUSHED IN.The resistance was immediate, breathtaking. She was tightened from her recent climax, a slippery, clenched fist. He pushed forward, a millimeter at a time, feeling her body fight the invasion even in its passive state.The heat was intense, a wet, clinging furnace. Her inner muscles spasmed, a sleepy, automatic recoil that only served to pull him deeper.
HE NOTED HOW IMPOSSIBLY TIGHT SHE WAS.It was a different tightness than in the garage. That had been a fierce, competitive tension, her body actively milking him. This was a primal, physiological defense, her very anatomy resisting the intrusion of a world she was unaware of. It was maddening.It was perfect.He sank deeper, the slow breach a torturous, magnificent burn. He watched her face.A small frown appeared between her eyebrows. A soft, pained whimper escaped her lips.
“Shhh,” he soothed, his voice strained with the effort of his control.He was halfway in, lodged in that devastating, snug heat. “Just a dream, baby. Just a bad, good dream.”
He retreated an inch, then pushed forward again, gaining another fraction.Her whimper morphed into a low groan. Her hips tilted, a subtle, instinctive adjustment to accommodate him.He felt her open, a gradual, sleepy yielding. He pushed again, and suddenly he was fully sheathed, buried to the hilt inside her unconscious form.
He held there, trembling.The feeling was catastrophic. Her warmth enveloped him completely, a slick, sleeping embrace. He was so deep he could feel the subtle, resilient barrier of her cervix pressed against his tip.She was utterly filled, stuffed with him, and she didn’t even know it. The power of that knowledge was narcotic.He began to move. A shallow pull back, then a slow, grinding thrust forward.The friction was exquisite, a wet, tight slide. Her body accepted him with a passive, overwhelming heat. He set a rhythm, languid and deep, each stroke measured.The bed creaked softly in time. The only other sounds were their breathing: his ragged and controlled, hers deep and intermittently interrupted by soft, choked sounds.
He leaned down, capturing her mouth again as he fucked her. He kissed her with a bruising intensity, his tongue mimicking the thrust of his hips. She responded on pure instinct, her mouth moving sloppily against his, a marionette with tangled strings.He broke the kiss, trailing his lips to her ear.
“You feel that?” he whispered, his breath hot and rapid.“That’s me. Deep inside your sleeping pussy.You’re so fucking tight around me, Caitlyn. Like you’re trying to keep me in there forever.”
Like you’re trying to keep me in there forever.”
He withdrew almost completely, until just the swollen head remained caught in her clutching heat. Her body made a wet, sucking sound of protest. The vulgar noise seemed to jolt something loose in the air. He sank back into her with a single, relentless thrust, punching the breath from her lungs in a soft oof. Her eyes didn’t open, but her features tightened, a ripple of sensation crossing the placid lake of her sleep.
“Yeah,” he grunted, setting a harder pace. “Take it. You can take it.”
His rhythm lost its initial caution. The intellectual fantasy was now a physical imperative. The sight of her unconscious and the way he was taking advantage of her in her sleep it just made him more riled up. He groped her body, his hands rough on the softness of her stomach, the curve of her waist, the underside of her breasts. Her sleeping form arched into him, a seeking pressure against his palms even as her mind remained adrift in some other world. This unconscious compliance, this total physical surrender without the complication of her sharp wit or challenging eyes, was a drug. It stripped the act to its bare essence: his need, her body, his use.
He fucked her with deep, measured strokes, each one a claiming. The room filled with the sounds of it: the slick, rhythmic slap of skin, the creak of the bedframe, his increasingly ragged breaths. He watched her face, a canvas for the sensations he painted. A tiny frown. A fluttering of her eyelids. A soft, bitten-off moan that seemed to surprise even her sleeping self.
“Who is it?” he whispered, bending close, his lips brushing her ear. He drove into her particularly hard, jolting her body up the mattress. “Who’s fucking this sweet, sleeping cunt? Say my name.”
A pause in her breathing. Her lips parted. “H…Hao…” It was a sigh, a dreamy exhalation threaded with pleasure.
The sound of his name, a fragile thread spun from deep sleep, coiled around his spine and pulled tight.It was a surrender more complete than any scream in the garage. Her body accepted his invasion, but her voice, even unconscious, acknowledged the conqueror. He lowered his forehead to her damp temple, his thrusts ceasing for a long, suspended moment, buried to the hilt. He was a knife resting in its sheath, feeling the warm, rhythmic pulse of the life he’d pierced.
“That’s right,” he breathed, the words smoke-rough and hot against her ear.“Know who’s fucking you. Even in your dreams, you know.”
He began to move again, but the tempo changed. The driving, possessive rhythm fractured into something slower, more deliberate, almost hesitant. The intense need to chase his own climax, a urgent drumbeat in his blood, was suddenly dampened by a more profound hunger. To live inside this moment, this perfectly unbalanced equation of his awareness and her oblivion, for just a little longer. It was too perfect to end. The slick, muted sounds of their coupling, the feel of her inner muscles fluttering in confused, sleepy spasms around his length—it was a drug specific to this shadowed room, to this version of her.He didn’t want to cum.Not yet. So he went slower.
He withdrew until just the tip remained, a faint, teasing connection, and watched her face. Her lips pursed slightly, a faint line of tension appearing between her brows as if she’d lost something precious in a dream. He pushed back in, a slow, inexorable penetration, filling the empty space he’d created.A soft, gratified hum vibrated in her throat. He did it again.And again. Each lazy, deep stroke was a word in a sentence he was writing on her nervous system.He was fucking the dream itself.
He needed to fuck her out cold for a little bit longer.
His hands, which had been gripping her hips hard enough to leave marks, softened. One slid up her side, tracing the dip of her waist, coming to rest over the frantic beat of her heart under his damp shirt. The other snaked beneath her, curving around the swell of her ass, pulling her more intimately onto him as he ground deep, a corkscrew motion that drew another of those breathy, half-formed moans. He was savoring her like a stolen delicacy, eating her alive in tiny, torturous bites.
HE CONTINUED TO WHISPER FILTHY WORDS IN HER UNCONSCIOUS EAR. “You’re just a warm, wet hole for me right now,” he murmured, his voice a low, continuous stream. “A perfect little sleepwhore. Your cunt’s so soft when you’re like this. It just takes whatever I give it.” He nipped her earlobe, feeling her shiver.“You dreamed about this, didn’t you? Dreamed about being so deep in sleep you couldn’t stop me.And here I am. I’m in your dream and I’m in your pussy, and you can’t tell the difference.”
He felt his own control, that precarious dam, beginning to tremble. The slow, dragging friction was its own kind of torture.Every atom of sensation was amplified.The squeeze of her as he bottomed out. The cool air on his wet skin as he pulled back.The scent of sex and sleep weaving around them. He closed his eyes, trying to anchor himself in the darkness behind his lids, but it only made the physical world more vivid. He focused on the whisper of his own voice, a dirty lullaby.“I could do anything,” he whispered, a dark wonder in his tone. “And you’d just lie there.Pretty and pliant. You trust me that much, even now.” The thought was a terrifying thrill.It had edges. He remembered the garage, the rough metal against her back, her tears.That had been a violent claiming.This was something else. A violation so quiet it echoed in his bones.He rocked into her, a slow, relentless tide. “I should wake you up.Make you see what I’m doing to you. Make you look at me while I’m buried inside this unconscious, dripping cunt.”
But he didn’t. He kept the pace agonizingly slow, each movement a studied act of possession. He watched the faint tremors in her thighs, the way her toes would curl occasionally against the sheets. Her body was having a conversation without her mind.It was telling him everything.That it was close again. That the steady, deep stimulation was coiling a spring low in her belly. He could feel the tell-tale flutters becoming more frequent, a rippling, involuntary clench around his shaft.
He sped up, just a fraction. Not a frantic plunge, but an increase in pressure, in the certainty of each stroke. “There it is,” he coaxed, his breath coming harder now, his own resolve thinning.“You’re gonna come again in your sleep, baby. You’re gonna soak my cock and you won’t even know why you’re shaking. It’s just gonna happen.Because I said so.”
His whisper became a gritted chant.“Come on. Let go.Come on that sleeping pussy. Come for me like a good girl.”
Her breathing hitched, turned ragged and loud in the silent room. A high, thin sound escaped her, a plea without language.Her back arched off the bed, her head pressing back into the pillow. The hand that had been fisted in the sheets flew up, grappling at nothing in the air before coming to rest, trembling, against his cheek.The touch was electric. Accidental, blind, but her skin was on his.He turned his face into her palm, biting the soft pad of her thumb.
It was the catalyst.The orgasm tore through her, a silent, seismic event. Her eyes flew open.
For one disorienting second, they were wide, unseeing, and full of the shock of a sudden, overwhelming sensation with no context. They stared past his shoulder at the dark ceiling, blank and shocked.Her mouth opened in a soundless cry. Then her body seized, a series of violent, beautiful convulsions that locked around him, a vise grip of pure, mindless ecstasy. The tightness was unbelievable, a pulsating, rhythmic strangulation of his dick that ripped a guttural groan from his own throat. Her consciousness, if it had surfaced at all, was instantly swamped by the physical cataclysm. Her eyelids fluttered shut again, but the tremors continued, long waves of release that milked him relentlessly.
He couldn’t hold back. The sight of her eyes opening, blank and innocent in the midst of such profound violation, the feel of her climax triggering his own—it was too much. The careful, prolonged fuck was over.The dam broke.
With a shattered curse, he plunged into her hard, once, twice, losing all rhythm to the brutal, driving need for his own release. He was no longer savoring.He was claiming, finishing, branding.His mind went white. The world narrowed to the blinding, tight heat of her and the brutal piston of his hips. He fucked her through the last of her tremors, his own climax erupting with a force that felt like it was tearing something inside him. He slammed deep and held there, a final, bruising implantation, as his own release poured into her in hot, urgent pulses.
He collapsed onto her, his weight driving her into the mattress, his face buried in the sweat-damp hair at her neck. The air was thick with the smell of them, of sex and exertion and spent desire. His heart hammered against her chest, a frantic counterpoint to her slower, returning rhythm. He was aware, distantly, of the stickiness between them, of his softening weight still inside her, of the complete and terrifying silence that followed the storm.He had done it. He had lived inside her fantasy, and it had been darker, more powerful, and more emotionally devastating than he had ever imagined. He had watched her sleep-shatter around him, had seen her eyes open unseeingly, and had spent himself deep within that vulnerable, trusting flesh.The power was absolute.And it tasted like ashes.
He didn’t move for a long time. He listened to her breathing even out, returning to the deep, untroubled cadence of sleep. She had descended back into it seamlessly, the cataclysm folded into her dreams, perhaps already forgotten.He, however, was wide awake, stranded in the aftermath. The high of the conquest was fading, leaving behind a hollow, cold clarity. He thought of her whispered “I love you” in the garage, a truth offered in a moment of broken surrender. And he thought of what he had just done, what he had reveled in.
Carefully, he pulled out of her.The sound was obscenely wet in the quiet room. He shifted his weight, rolling off her to lie on his back beside her, staring at the blurred lines the streetlamp painted on the ceiling.The cool air touched his skin, raising goosebumps. He felt raw, scraped clean from the inside.After a few minutes, he pushed himself up. He found his boxers and pulled them on.He looked down at her. She had curled onto her side again, one hand tucked under her cheek, a faint, serene smile on her parted lips. Completely untouched by the reality of the last half hour.He had never felt more separate from another human being.
He walked to the bathroom, the floorboards cold under his feet.He didn’t turn on the light. He washed his hands and face in the dark, the water cold, trying to rinse away the feeling, but it was under his skin. He leaned on the sink, his head hanging, and saw the vague shape of her black lace thong where he had tossed it earlier. A tiny, meaningless scrap of fabric holding the ghost of the night’s intent.He returned to the bedroom. He should cover her.He should clean her up. He stood at the foot of the bed, a visitor in his own crime scene.Instead, he simply watched her sleep. The shirt was still rucked up around her ribs, her lower body exposed, glistening faintly in the low light. He had marked her, inside and out.Finally, he moved. He gently pulled the shirt down, covering her.He drew the rumpled comforter over her body, tucking it loosely around her shoulders. He bent, his lips hovering just above her temple.
“I know,” he whispered, the words so quiet they were barely a disturbance in the air. A reply to a confession made days ago in a haze of garage filth and tears.An admission of his own devastating truth.
Then he turned and left the room, closing the door softly behind him, leaving her alone in the dark with the echo of a dream she wouldn’t remember.