I could’ve stopped him. I should have. I didn’t.
The dream blurred, details slipping, but the sensations stayed sharp: my back arching, his hands mapping me, the delicious drag of his body against mine, the low sound he made when I tugged his hair. The way he whispered my name like a curse and a prayer all at once.
God, the way he touched me.
The memory did this thing in my chest—splitting it wide open and filling it at the same time. Like he’d found every spot I’d kept hidden and claimed it without asking.
We didn’t make it to the cot at first. My thighs hit the edge of a metal trunk, his body crowding mine, his breath hot against my ear as he told me exactly how badly he’d wanted me from the second I’d stepped off the helicopter. His words were low, filthy, devastating.
The heat built and built until it snapped, pleasure slamming through me in a blinding rush. My fingers clawed at his shoulders, my head dropping back, his name spilling from my lips like I’d been holding it in for my whole life.
It was the best sex I’d ever had.
It still was.
Even in the dream, my body remembered every second of it. Every sound, every shudder, every unguarded moment when I’d let myself believe that maybe, for once, I could have both the story and the man.
Then the dream shifted.
It always did.
One second, it was heat and skin and his mouth on my neck. The next, I was standing outside a nondescript concrete building, camera bag slung over my shoulder, sun beating down.
Waiting.
He was supposed to meet me.
I checked my watch in the dream, the numbers blurring.
He didn’t come.
Radio chatter crackled in the background. A door slammed. Somewhere, an engine revved.
I waited.
He still didn’t come.
And when the door finally opened, it wasn’t him walking out—it was a stone-faced captain who told me there’d been a change of plans. That I didn’t have clearance. That no one had promised me anything.
The betrayal hit like a sandstorm. Stinging, disorienting, getting into places it had no business being. I remembered arguing, my voice rising, my heart cracking in real time.
“He said—” I had started.
But he wasn’t there to confirm it.
He wasn’t there at all.
He’d disappeared.
“You journalists always think you’re owed something,” the captain had sneered.
The dream folded in on itself. Heat turned to hurt. Desire turned to fury.
I opened my mouth to scream at him, but no sound came out.
I jerked awake in the dark, heart jackhammering against my ribs.
For a second, I didn’t know where I was. The canvas walls, the tent pole, the heat—gone. In their place: a hotel ceiling, faint city light leaking in around the blackout curtains, the low hum of the air conditioner.
