JUST LUST - SLEEP
By Isabelle Kohn
Illustration by Claire
It’s 3:43 a.m. and I’m watching strips of light and shadow from window rise and fall on his chest as he breathes in and out.
The silence is heavy like something’s about to happen and I move my feet away from his to a colder spot in the bed to remind myself I’m on guard duty. I’m watching him for signs of life.
He’s been asleep like this for a while, now. Couple hours, at least. Out cold. He’s in the right position, though — on his back, cock readily available should anyone think to pull the blanket down.
How do I get it into my mouth without waking him up? It’s a puzzle I can’t solve, even though we had a plan.
The plan was this:
He gets naked. Check.
Falls asleep on his back. Check.
I wake up at some point — or just lie there for hours, motionless and barely breathing (check). When the timing’s right, I crawl on top of him, careful not to depress the mattress too much or tug the sheets in a way that alerts his body he’s being sexed, and put his cock in my mouth.
Sleep sex. The kind where you find out what it’s like to have zero separation between unconsciousness and pleasure; to experience the fleeting and singular euphoria of being deposited straight into the action without the anesthetizing self-awareness waking consciousness subjects us to. If you time it right, you wake up in the middle of it, too asleep to know whether it’s just a dream, but awake enough to know it feels good.
… Check pending.
I drag the blanket down his chest, one micron at a time. It slips over his stomach and the streetlight and gets divided through the blinds into bands of light and dark like piano keys along the length of it. I want to play them, see if I still remember the chords to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” but I’m sidelined from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by the the task at hand.
I expose his cock at the same speed continents diverge. I glance upwards to see if he’s noticed that he’s about breach a brave new frontier of oral sex, but he hasn’t. Instead, he’s serene; semi-erect and dreaming.
The tension starts to build in this psycho-fellatio drama we’ve created. I’ve reached the big moment where our mutual fantasy will live if I’m graceful, and die if I’m not.
Already I’m imagining my trophy: “2017 Blowjob Generosity Champion.”
I take a deep breath and prop myself up on one elbow. I press myself south towards the bottom of the bed so I’m flush with his dick, just slightly above it. My heart’s beating in my ears. I wrap my hand around his shaft and lean in.
For a moment, the silence is deafening and he’s R.E.M-still. I panic — what if he doesn’t wake up? What if this is actually violating him? It’s only by-the-book sleep sex if it’s consensual and premeditated, and him sleeping through it is neither of those things.
His sharp inhale descends into a moan and the feeling of his hand gripping mine settles that.
He laughs.
“Holy shit.”
For a moment, his eyes are wide and his toes are flexing and he’s smiling like he can’t believe something you just told him. Perfect timing.
I finish the job and wash the taste of success out with Listerine.
The next night, we try me. I take a cocktail of NyQuil and wine and WineQuil because not all of us are skilled enough to sleep through half a blow job.
It’s almost impossible to fall asleep on my back, but we create a stabilization system of pillows and elbow grease to keep me in place. I’m so horny about this I can hardly sleep, but I must have dozed off because I wake up in the morning with the pink hue of dawn revealing he’s not by asleep my side where he usually is.
His tongue is soft and warm and wet and nothing else other than this exists because the only part of my brain that’s awake yet is the reptile one that tells me to breathe and fuck. Everything’s fuzzy like laughing gas and all I have in the world at this very second is the engorged awareness that mouth + pussy = I’ll take it.
The sound of my alarm brings things into focus, but I pretend to be asleep longer than I actually am to give myself a few more seconds of sensory overload and to process.
Part of why this is so hot to me — this sleep sex we’re having — is the consensual violation. The sleeping person has no control; they’re in the most vulnerable state. That means they don’t get to choose when pleasure happens. They’re completely in the hands of their partner, who has the sublime power to to exact orgasm — or something close to it — at will.
Picture how liberating that could be. It takes the pressure off. Unconscious, or during those few seconds of rapidly fading sleep paralysis, you’re not responsible for your own pleasure, or anyone else’s. You don’t have to perform. It doesn’t matter how you look or sound — you’re sleeping, after all. You’re supposed to be still and silent. You can just lie there and take and take and take and steep in your own pleasure without cutting off its circulation to reciprocate.
It’s unadulterated indulgence; the purest, Grade-A, grass-fed, filtered kind that’s not raised on hormones and lives in a wide pasture.
It’s all that and a block of cheese ... or however the saying goes.
The haze clears and I’m fully awake now, skin rippling with the novelty semi-conscious sex. I squirm around a little to let him know the hard part’s over and then we fuck.
The end.
He gets up for work, but I turn over and sink back into velvet sleep, half wondering if it was all just a dream.