by Rebecca Bernard
In my dreams, the boys love me. Our hands furious against one another’s sides. Often, there’s little fruition, only build up. Usually, I’m still married, but I’ve discovered a loophole that allows for each fleeting tryst, guilt-free. A sundae with whipped cream and two cherries.
I call them boys, but they’re men, of course. Young men. Or younger men. Never are they old sea captains alone in the lighthouse of desire.
These are dreams, of course, so the sky’s the limit. But in my dreams, raising a shirt to expose a belly button seems, in fact, to be the limit. Sexy but chaste.
What’s wild, of course, is the mist I’m left with in the morning—chest florid, stomach airy.
I often can’t remember their faces, details of their personhood, only that they wanted me, and I longed for them. Our bodies pressed against one another in skinny hallways, closets, clandestine classrooms.
The feeling of a crush, even diaphanous and unreal as in a dream, is better than a drink or drug. Inherently melancholy and fleeting as any high. I disembark the balloon and float toward real life. A dream boy can’t love me like my husband does. And yet.
Often, my dream men discover their feelings for me early in the course of the dream. It’s you! All along it’s been you! Hand on my knee, lips against my peach fuzz, hot, post-adolescent breath in my mouth. An aura of summer camp, though we’re too old for bunk beds and mess halls.
Then circumstance—usually in the form of other people—keeps us apart.
I want to be with you, but Valerie/Monica/My Boss/My Mom is right over there.
Later, they promise me. And of course, I believe them. I invented them, after all. Satiation, around the corner, why not?
These are my dreams. The dodo bird longing of what might have been, could be. Was.
In the latest, a tall brunette, an amalgamation of last night’s bartender and a B-list star. Shy, but only just so.
Should we sit on the edge of my bed and hold hands? Of course.
I think you’re cool/smart/hot/funny, could you tell? I wasn’t sure.
The Rolodex of my waking life’s longing, their script. Every hand I never held. Every mouth I wondered about alongside the ones I once knew intimately. I can’t believe it’s you, they tell me, and I can’t believe it either.
I am satisfied in real life, so the dreams needn’t produce an orgasm, instead they douse me with possibility. The glitter of lust. The sense of self we only get from the gaze of others.
How much the true arousal of youth is not knowing what’s to come.
The bartender-heartthrob hugs me in a nondescript doorway. His feverish mouth against my neck, hands grazing the outside of my sweater. I’ve wanted you for so so long. And yet, he has to go—the restaurant/set waits.
I spend the rest of the dream catching glimpses of him from afar. Away and busy, Valerie/Monica/His Boss laughing beside him, all pink tongue and open throat. And all I can hold onto is the wisp of his words, a promise. A memory of a stranger’s pressure against me. The heart’s pale rhythm fading with the sun’s first light.
The kaleidoscope of want, adrenaline of first desire, not lost, not all ether. You’re wanted, girl. All things possible. Can’t that still be true?
Rebecca Bernard is the author of the story collection Our Sister Who Will Not Die (Mad Creek Books, 2022). Her fiction has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Oxford American, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Southern Indiana Review. She is an assistant professor of English at East Carolina University, and she serves as a fiction editor for The Boiler.