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Khemjira wakes.
There's a moment where he believes it's nothing. Something innocuous that woke him, a howling of wind, a car passing by.
But the air holds a familiar weight. A chill just beyond his perception. A presence.
He waits.
Eyes straining into the dark. Curled on his side, breathing softly.
A touch to the skin of his bicep, below the end of his sleeve. He startles and jerks away, but the grip firms. A hand devoid of warmth, but full of unnatural strength.
Next, a line along his back. The ghost joins him in bed, rotten flesh poisoning the air. It could be anyone, any age, any walk of life. He doesn't know and would rather not. Whoever it is has become merely an emissary of the dark force that haunts him.
The arm that wraps around his waist feels large though. Firm. A man if he had to guess.
Air sticks in his throat, heavy and viscous, but he doesn't scream. It's as if the touch saps his will, along with his warmth. And if he runs, they'll follow. Or there will be another. The presence, whatever is corrupting them, has no plans to let him go.
It's worse if you fight
So he lies there, rigid. Lets the ghost spoon him. A mockery of the boyfriend he'll never have. Not in this life, with six months left, and the haunting growing worse every day.
His eyes droop. He's so cold, so tired.
None of his insomnia pills, nor the vitamins and healing teas, stand a chance.
The figure tightens his grip, pulling them flush, and Khem bites his lip. His hands clench at empty air. He wants to squirm away, but it's a sure way to be pinned or smothered.
There's a brush against his abdomen, and the hand slides under his sleep shirt, settling against bare skin. He envisions the dead appendage purpling, flaking. Some ghosts look nearly alive, but rarely the ones that come after him.
It's unusual for the haunting to be so… intimate. Used to be, they would just scare him. Now, he's not sure if he's imagining the breath on the back of his neck, the miniscule caresses as the hand inches downwards.
It’s not his imagination when it slips beneath the waist of his shorts. With muscles already locked tight, he jumps in place, and then he is shouting. Thrashing.
The other hand – or another's? – clamps over his mouth. He strikes backwards with his elbow, hitting bone, but there's not even a flinch. The hand below his navel continues its inexorable path. He can't breathe, hindered both by the gag and the stink, and thinks it might be a mercy if he passes out.
He curls his legs up, thighs clenched together. His own hands move to tug at the arm, to cover himself. It doesn't matter. His strength is no match.
At the same moment it touches his shriveled dick, the barrier over his nose and mouth loosens, and he sucks in a desperate breath. He wants to scream, would scream now regardless of the consequences, but his throat clicks and the air escapes him soundlessly.
He's struck with a sudden certainty that he's incapable of the smallest sound. May never speak again.
The hand has wrapped around him now, not harshly, but with deceptive care. A tear leaks down his cheek, sliding towards his ear. There's a finger tracing over him, exploring, from base to crown. Almost teasing, even though he's soft and small and profoundly disgusted.
No. No!
No one has touched him like this. He’d believed no one ever would.
A taunting laugh, dark and feminine, emanates from nowhere. Echoing in his brain.
You saved yourself for me?
Something like adrenaline floods his veins, though he's already long keyed up in terror. His limbs go stiff. The hand squeezes, forming a ring, a clammy circle around his shaft. It jerks into motion, simulating an action so dissonant it's unfamiliar.
It's only then that he realizes, inexplicably, that his dick has hardened too.
He hates it. He wills himself soft. Struggles with every fiber of his being to break free.
He can't tell if he moves at all. Certainly not enough to matter. The feeling of the hand on him, cold skin scraping against warm, devours his consciousness. Everything is centered there, at his cock, what he doesn't want. It throbs with his pulse, though the rest of his body is bloodless.
A shudder wracks his immobile form, flooded in shame. He's being defiled, and it feels good, like any human hand would. Like the boy he has a crush on in his photography class.
You like it
His wayward thought or its? With the rushing in his head, he can't tell.
It's no pleasure he's known. Polluted. Reviled. A miasma tugging him toward a pit, there beneath his stomach, and he knows if he falls he'll never make it back.
He digs his nails into his palms. Tells himself it's his own mind, his own body, his to control.
Instead of denial, the painpricks feed into desire. Isn't he clenching because he's on the edge? There. A gasp of rapture, not fear. There. Tilting into the sordid haze.
He falls.
Khem bucks against the hold, mouth open in a silent shout. The salt of his own tears melts on his tongue as he bites into flesh. A chunk tears free, slimy with blood or worse. He spits, but the hand clamps back down, covering his lips, with the ghostflesh still inside.
Spongy and rigid, a mushroom decomposing, squashed under his palate. Overwhelming his senses: bitter, sulfuric, overripe, rotten meat. He gags, mouth filling with phlegm and spit, gorge threatening to rise. But it's going nowhere.
The crooning laughter comes again.
Swallow
He shakes his head. Something grasps the back of his skull, turning, turning. Neck twisted violently. Face pressed into the mattress. It hurts. He thinks his nose is breaking. Pictures his jaw pushing back until he swallows teeth.
He's out of oxygen. Suffocating, drowning on his own spit, asphyxiating on this piece of not-flesh that has made its way into his trachea. Against his will, he swallows, swallows again, tries to force air past to clear his throat. Brutally aware that he might die here.
Khemjiraaa
His own name hisses in his ears, the way he hears it on the wind sometimes.
He's on his back. A fist like a brick falls on his chest, and he still can't breathe, the wind knocked out of him, as the obstruction slides the rest of the way down.
Every touch disappears.
Next time I'm taking part of you
Hasn't it already? A little more every day.
He's alone in the unnatural black, silent as his grave will be. It feels like full minutes before his lungs next expand. An hour before the noise of late-night traffic seeps back in, headlights fading in and out as they pass.
The first dredges of the sun have reached him, filtered through the curtain, by the time he finds the will to move. Curls up on his side and sobs into his hands.
Shorts painted sticky with white. Skin bruiseless. Sheets rotless.