In fact, I wrote a novella all about it. It’s called ‘Sexsomnia’ and it’s in an anthology called The Lady Smut Book of Dark Desires. Lady Smut.com is a blog where we talk about all things having to do with sex, love, and erotic romances.
Me? I love sleeping. Most of us crave more sleep, and we LOVE paintings of women asleep–they seem vulnerable and unable to resist. There’s something deeply erotic about this condition for us – and I intend to fully exploit this fascination before I’m done. Of course it has it’s flip side too– it’s scary side. I mean, in real life there are cases of men drugging women to have sex with the women while they’re unconscious. Those guys are sick bastards, no mistake.
My stories stay away from that (except when it comes to the real evil villains). When it comes to the heroes and heroines I stay in the more muddled areas of consent—the realm of mistakes and confusion. After all, if someone who you really wanted to have sex with suddenly came up to you and came onto you – why would you ever assume s/he was asleep?
But it happens. Yes, dear folks, there’s something called Sexsomnia. It’s very similar to the kind of thing you see on an airplane when someone takes Ambien and has a bad reaction to it. Instead of falling asleep, they start doing bizarre stuff. It turns out their brain is both awake and asleep at the same time. So with people who actually have sexsomnia (don’t let the fakers fool ya) they end up having sex in their sleep at night. The next morning they remember nothing—nothing at all.
I mean—I had to write a story about this, naturally. Sexsomnia also can expose what someone wants deep down inside. In your sleep those ‘no-i-could-never’ barriers come tumbling down. In real life, sexsomniacs can wind up in court facing charges for some act they don’t remember. In my story, deliciously dirty sex ensues.
Poor Jenny—my heroine–is alternatively satiated and tortured for the whole story. And that’s just a part of our larger anthology. Each story has a little edge of shiver in it. This particular story, Sexsomnia, is the first in a series I’m writing. In the next story I’m going into the pov of the sex demon that lives inside of Jenny.
Thanks KD, for having me on your blog. Hope you and your readers check out the excerpt and our blog. Cheers!
HERE’S AN EXCERPT FROM THE STORY:
SEXSOMNIA
By Madeline Iva
Chapter 1
Her dreams were scalding hot and shameless, leaving her limp and listless by day.
“I’m sorry, what?” Jenny asked the poor woman for the third time.
“I said the machine revealed he kicked his leg sixty times in one hour.”
“In his sleep you said?” Jenny tried to remember the woman’s name. Nadia. Jenny had spilled soup all over her in the lunch line, and they’d ended up eating together. Nadia was a sleep researcher.
“Like a dog trying to run in its sleep. Like that.”
Jenny swallowed. “So how do you get to be a sleep subject for one of these studies?”
“Sure, sure, I get that all the time.” Nadia said, waving her fork. “Everyone’s like, ‘you mean I get paid to sleep fourteen hours a day? Sign me up!’ It’s the secret fantasy of half the adults I meet.”
Jenny was aware she should be putting in face time with her own group, the behavior economics crowd, sitting way at the back of the lunch room. Only, she’d started to develop a secret revulsion towards them. The tone they used when saying her name creeped her out, for instance. Not to mention the touching. There was a lot of touching for such a professional setting.
Nadia was saying her love life was in the toilet. She was stuck in the research lab all night, every night.
“And I was thought there would be men here,” she added. “I mean, single men.” She chewed a sandwich. “You know, waiting on the park benches. And you could pick them up, like fruit in the grocery market.” She smiled around her sandwich, eyes twinkling.
Jenny listened sympathetically. Most of the econ guys were single, but she’d rather poke a fork in her eye than suggest Nadia get close to one of them. On the other hand, she refused to look off to her left where the biology folk sat.
Where Turner sat.
“You’ve got salad dressing on the end of your braid,” Nadia told her.
Jenny wiped it off with trembling hands, her eyes focused on the end of her orange tray. She was not going to look at where Turner was sitting. The effect was too overpowering. She could feel his eyes, sure that he looked all easy-going. His faded maroon T-shirt, complete with a constellation of moth holes in the back, screamed laid back. She both envied the way he wore his own skin and half-hated him for being so completely free from self-consciousness. She was stuck in a body that recoiled from any kind of scrutiny, and when he’d caught her watching him in the lunch line it was bad. It’d made her crash into Nadia, spilling hot soup and wet salad all over her. Her face boiled in a blush as she remembered.
“Have you tried the gym?” Jenny suggested. “I think a lot of the guys go over and work out before dinner.” She could have reported that the biologist Turner, for example, ran three miles on the track every other day and then did sit ups and tummy crunches. Not that Jenny was stalking him or anything.
“Ah, that must be it,” Nadia said, unenthusiastically.
“So Nadia,” Jenny said twisting up her napkin in her hands. “After hearing you talk I’ve been wondering…if I’ve got a sleeping disorder of some kind.”
“Ah.” Nadia put the tips of her fingers together, her light Eastern-European accent thickening a tad. “The doctor is in. What seems to be the problem?”
“I’m sleepwalking maybe? I’m not sure. It’s probably no big deal, right?”
“No, no, now you’ve made me curious. Sleepwalking is rare in adults, actually.”
Jenny launched into her symptoms. She was beyond tired every morning, and it was only getting worse.
“How long has it been going on?”
Jenny told Nadia that it had been really bad at the institute, but she’d been having problems with sleep since spring break.
“So, it’s June, but you’ve been having problems since…April?”
Jenny nodded. “It’s getting worse. A lot worse. I mean, I was just tired before, but now I’m waking up and I’m not in my bed. Also I’ve got rashes or bruises and other marks and I don’t know how to account for them.” Often she woke with a stiff neck, aching back, sore hips or all three.
Nadia raised her eyebrows. Jenny skipped over some of the other soreness she occasionally felt. Mostly, she confessed, she worried about the abrupt shift in demeanor that her colleagues had shown after a few weeks at the institute. They were all in the same dorm, and she wondered if they were…noticing things.
“What do you mean?” Nadia asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe if I’m sleepwalking they see me? Maybe they’re just weird.” Jenny was reluctant to go on, but Nadia pressed her.
They were supposed to be writing a group paper, and at the start Jenny had been rather intimidated. Two senior professors bullied the rest of them—but that was par for the course. In return for lending their illustrious names to the paper, the senior professors made everyone else do most of the work, while they went off to play golf. They were not the problem.
“It’s the five other men who make me profoundly uncomfortable,” Jenny confessed.
In the beginning they were dismissive of all her suggestions. They also made it clear that due to her lack of seniority, her name was going last and she was going to do all the number crunching.
“Basic academic pecking order stuff, whatever.”
Nadia made sympathetic noises.
“That was until two weeks ago. But since then…”
“What happened since then?” Nadia asked.
Suddenly the econ guys all seemed interested in her in a whole new way.
“It’s like they’re being nice, but it’s too nice. It’s creepy. A few of them have started touching me.”
“Touching you!”
“Nothing too gross—it’s like little pats on the arm. Or even grabbing me around the waist to hug me.” Jenny wanted to crawl out of her skin simply describing it to Nadia.
“They sound fond of you, friendly,” Nadia said. Jenny shook her head. She couldn’t express that it wasn’t what they did, it was the way they did it… their eyes cold, lips smirking.
“And I’m so tired all the time,” Jenny added. “I’m at the end of my rope Nadia. I told them I used to sleepwalk and asked if they ever noticed me wandering around at night. This one guy gave me the strangest look. Then they all started laughing but wouldn’t tell me why.”
“That,” Nadia said, wrinkling her nose, “sounds obnoxious. You think you’re sleepwalking and they’re all laughing behind your back or something?”
“Yes.” Jenny remembered how furious she was when she tried to ask Bonifellow straight out if they were laughing at her for some reason.
What do you mean, Jenny? Why would we do that Jenny? Even the way they said her name seemed overly significant and full of secret meaning.
“Well, I could put you in the lab overnight and we could see,” Nadia said, taking the last bite of her sandwich and wiping her hands. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
Nadia nodded, dimpling. “You’ve got such a baby face, I wouldn’t be too surprised by the guys treating you like a student. You said you have a history of sleepwalking?”
“Yeah. Could that be why I feel so tired?” Jenny explained that on her return from Thailand she’d started feeling exhausted every day and had gone to the doctor—who hadn’t found anything.
“Hmph.” Nadia was looking more like a scientist by the second, Jenny thought, her dimples and smiles replaced by a look of no-nonsense clinical analysis.
“Wouldn’t want to say until I saw your stats. But these colleagues are causing you a lot of stress.”
“Yes.”
“Well, stress can disturb your sleep.”
“I guess.” Jenny said, rolling her cherry tomatoes around with her fork. “It’s just…”
Jenny wasn’t going to share the dreams she was having. Erotically-charged dreams of a certain biologist stretched out on a narrow twin bed, gripping his magnificent member in his hand. No shame on his face, just a low lidded stare of promise.
A tap on the shoulder interrupted her thought. The ringleader of their economics group, Bonifellow, stood before them. He had the dark good looks of Italian heritage meeting Eastern Indian, with a generous splash of super-geek. Jenny saw Nadia was suddenly sitting up a little straighter and crossing her legs.
She wanted to tell Nadia he was an arrogant dipstick. He always wore wrinkled white dress shirts and a loosened tie. The heavy smell of Drak Noir announced his presence about a minute or two before he arrived.
“Introduce me to your friend,” he said.
“Bonifellow,” she said, stabbing her cherry tomato with her fork, not looking up, “this is Nadia.”
She saw the smirking leer he gave to Nadia from beneath her lashes, as if he was God’s gift. His hand on the back of her chair moved to walk his fingers up her back. Jenny sat up suddenly, her back arching, and the desire to stab him viciously with her fork almost overcame her.
“Bring her to our table next time, Jenny.”
He smiled and, tipping a mocking salute, he moved on.
“He’s cute,” Nadia said. Jenny sat in shock at her sudden feelings of snarling impotence.
“I can’t stand him,” Jenny spat. “That way he smirked at you.” She gave an involuntary shiver again.
“It’s called flirting,” Nadia said. “Maybe you’re being a little paranoid, yes? Myself, I’m still looking for likely prospects this summer. What about you? How’s your love life?”
“I don’t know,” Jenny said, bending low over the table, playing with her food. The lunchroom was emptying out. She hung her head even lower over her salad, looking off under her bangs towards the biology table. Don’t do it. But she did. Turner and some guy with glasses and a round tender baby face were leaning forward in heavy conversation. Even so, Turner looked over and stared. It was not a friendly stare. You didn’t stare intensely like that at friends. It was clearly an I want to fuck you stare—one she had no idea how to communicate with. She looked away, craning her neck in the other direction.
“So tell me more about that econ guy.” Nadia said. “Single?”
“He’s an asshat, Nadia.”
“Or he’s interested in you. Clearly you’re a hot prospect.”
Jenny shook her head. “Ugh.”
“Come on,” Nadia cajoled. “You’re tall, skinny, blonde, and, well…” Nadia waved a hand.
That morning Jenny had emerged from the dorm room in white cigarette jeans and a cute little teaching blouse. While she was crossing the lounge someone gave a highly inappropriate wolf whistle. She looked down the hall. The guys were all there—she couldn’t spot who had whistled, but they were all staring at her.
So she dived back into her room, only to emerge a minute later with a boxy lemon yellow cardigan, a real granny sweater. It was even embroidered with goldfish.
“So are there?”
“What?”
“Any likely prospects in your group?” Nadia pointed her chin at Bonifellow.
“Bonifellow? Ew. No. Anyway, I’m here to work. This is not economics sex-camp, Nadia.”
Nadia sprayed her milk. Laughing, she wiped her chin.
“Well…actually, there’s this one guy…” Jenny started to confess, slowly. “We met in the elevator the first day.”
Turner, of course. He’d been carrying a duffle over his shoulder and a messenger bag slung across his back. She’d been trying to hold a box of academic files under one arm, along with her suitcase handle, but somehow she kept losing the box as it slipped out from under her arm. Turner took it from her without asking. He held it for the rest of the elevator ride.
I’m Turner, he’d said.
It could have been a nice beginning. She could have said I’m Jenny, thanks for the help. But no. She’d spent the rest of the ride on the world’s slowest elevator her hands sweating, her mind a complete blank. Then she’d decided to be all feminist and insist she have the box back, that she could carry it and should carry it. She still cringed at the memory, her hands tightening on the lip of the table as she related it to Nadia.
He’d given her a look like she was weird.
Then the elevator door had opened, they both stepped out onto a mezzanine floor, and he gave her the box back. She’d taken it with one arm and promptly spilled it all over the entire mezzanine area. He’d helped her clean it up, looking bored.
“Then he asked me if I’d be at the faculty mixer after dinner.”
Jenny had choked out some totally incoherent reply, crammed the papers back in the box, swept it up with her suitcase, and strode away over the bridge that separated his dorm from hers. But she’d been looking back at him as she did so, so she hadn’t seen the glass door that separated the dorms.
“I walked right into it. Wham! Bruised my nose and everything,” she confessed.
“Oh no!” Nadia laughed.
After bouncing off the door and spilling the files again, she’d heard him call out that he’d see her that night. At the mixer. If she got over her concussion. Finding her assigned room, she’d laid down and grabbed a pillow. After putting it over her face, she’d pounded her head through it for a few minutes.
When self-asphyxia hadn’t helped, she’d gotten up, washed her face, changed her attire, and went to the mixer. The room had been incredibly loud with conversation. Turner had came over to her within ten minutes, and she’d asked him about his research. She’d only heard about every three words of what he was saying and had tried to fake her way through her replies, acting all nonchalant like everyone else.
He’d leaned his head in towards her every time she talked, sort of a pecking motion, to try to catch her words over the noise.
“What?” he’d asked several times.
“I hate this, it’s so loud,” she’d said.
“Sorry,” he’d said. “Didn’t quite catch that.”
Into a sudden lull in the conversation she’d yelled, “I said I hate this place, don’t you?”
He’d given her an odd look, “Yes, I gave up twelve weeks of my summer to come here. Because I hate it so much.”
After that no one could get a peep out of her. She’d been on the verge of tears.
“So what happened?” Nadia asked.
“Nothing.”
“No, I mean after.”
“The thing is Nadia, I’ve got no game.” Jenny slapped her hands down on her white jeans, which had an oily soup stain across them now, and stood up. “I admit it, I accept it, and I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I am probably further ahead in my career than most of my peers—because let’s face it, you can get a lot of work done if you never have a social life. Fun is a massive time suck.”
“I smell a summer fling,” Nadia said.
“She who smelt it, dealt it,” Jenny said. “I don’t do flings, I’m no good at them.”
“How can you not be good at a fling? That’s ridiculous. I think you’re over-thinking this stuff.”
“You’re right, I do over-think. Always. I think if I get involved with Turner I’ll probably want it to go on. Meanwhile, he lives on the other side of the entire country to me. So how’s that going to work?”
“You don’t know where he lives.”
“He said at the mixer he spends a few months each summer up in Alaska doing field research.”
“What does Turner study?”
“It’s on the tip of my tongue. It’s a high school mascot.”
“Bears? Eagles?”
“No.”
“Cougars? Wild cats?”
“Some kind of varmint.”
“Wolves? Beavers?”
“Like a muskrat.”
“What sad little high school in America,” Nadia asked, tossing down her crumpled napkin, “has a muskrat for its mascot?”
“My point is, do you realize how expensive airfare to Alaska is these days?”
Nadia crossed her arms to lean in. “Okay, fine. But what about the guy that’s been staring at you for the last five minutes across the cafeteria?”
Jenny looked over, and instantly squinched down in her seat, one hand covering that side of her face.
“That’s him,” she hissed.
Nadia made a purring noise. “The biologist? You didn’t say he was tall and hot. I thought you meant one of those other geeks.” Dropping her voice she said, “You’re crazy not to jump his bones.”
Jenny kept her face hidden. “It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I don’t know how. I couldn’t get from hello to the bed without making a total ass of myself.”
“It’s sex, Jenny. If you have to talk your way through it, you’re not doing it right.”
“You make it sound easy, but he’s a strange man, and I absolutely suck at talking to strange men.”
“He’s coming this way.”
“Oh God.”
It was too late to get up and flee.
“Ladies.”
They murmured in response. Jenny found the pattern on her orange cafeteria tray completely absorbing.
“Jenny.” She was level with his pelvis and swallowed hard, feeling acutely self-conscious. She knew what his face looked like, but could not seem to force her eyes upwards to meet his.
“Want to introduce me to your friend?”
“This is Nadia. Sleep disorders.”
“Hello, Nadia Sleep Disorders,” he said, and then looked at Jenny again. She felt his eyes studying her, waiting. His hair always seemed to need brushing, but the clean, strong lines of a Greek warrior offset his messy hair, just as his broken Roman nose set off the sculpted perfection of the rest of his face. Together his face and body sent her into a deep primal frenzy.
He was sex on a stick and there she was fizzling and popping in his presence, crushed so hard by shyness that she was helpless, simply helpless, to do or say anything coherent in his presence.
That stare she’d received before was now slightly masked, but only slightly. If he could stare at her like that, why couldn’t he take over the situation and move them along to the post-talking stage so they could enjoy the next part of the adventure? The part that would involve kissing and silence. And fucking. She’d lied to Nadia. She’d take a fling with him any day.
She realized she was frowning in alarm as she looked up at him, and made herself stop it and look down again.
“So, Jenny,” Nadia said. “Introduce me.”
“This is…”
She turned away, only to look back up at him completely stricken.
His name had fled her brain.
“This is—?”
He turned to Nadia, obviously pissed. “Turner Michael. Biology.”
“His name is backwards,” Jenny said to Nadia. “I told Nadia that you studied varmints.” She wanted to slap herself. Idiot. Idiot.
“Love these institutes. Smart ladies everywhere you look. Yes, I study varmints.” Then he looked down again. “What are you researching this summer Jenny?”
The paper had been her idea, in fact. “Five crucial aspects of social reality for the continuance of consumer goods spending.”
A conversation-killing silence met that announcement.
“It’s behavior economics,” she explained slowly, wishing she could crawl under the table and die.
“Sounds fascinating,” Turner said. Nadia choked a little. Jenny blushed hard.
Then she swallowed. No one said anything.
“So,” Nadia said. A pause hung in the air. Jenny studied her empty juice glass like it was a precious cultural object in her hand. Turner seemed to notice her indifference.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt you. I’ll be on my way then,” he said. “Just wanted to say hi.”
“Hi,” Nadia said.
“Maybe I’ll see you later,” he said to Jenny softly. Her guts churned over at those words.
He was gone.
Jenny hid her face behind her hand, a fit of fatigue overwhelming her now that all the adrenaline had poured out into her system.
Nadia threw her balled-up napkin into Jenny’s face.
“He is so into you. And trying so hard to be nice to you.”
“I don’t want nice. I want to do him.”
“Jenny! Now that’s more like it.”
“I’d also like him to bring up something we both have in common so we can actually have a conversation.”
“Ask him about varmints again.” Nadia giggled.
Jenny smacked her glass on the table. “I suck.” She tapped her glass in time with her words. “I. Just. Suck.” She stood up. “Moving on.”
“Maybe being over-tired is making it hard for you to think on your feet. I’ll help you with that.”
Jenny tilted her head. “I wish, but no, I’m always this pathetic around guys. I tried blaming it on going to an all girl’s school for years, but…”
“I can help you.” Nadia grabbed her arm and began walking with her out into the steamy green campus. “This guy I know is bugging me to try a new sleep recording device he’s created. Let’s do an intake on you at the lab and then we can try it out tonight.”
“Yeah? Oh Nadia—”
“We’ll see what’s going on. If the device works.”
Blurb:
Four sexy paranormal stories to make you shiver with fear and delight.
· THE IMMORTAL LONGING OF BRENNA BANG, by Liz Everly When a vampire materializes through her computer, successful vampire-romance romance author Brenna Bang finds herself marked for inescapable passion with a tech savvy bloodsucker.
· THE LYING, THE WITCH & THE WARDROBE by C. Margery Kempe Christina tries to figure out how to unlock her grandmother’s wardrobe and uncover what happened all those years ago when the goblins came to offer their sensuous erotic fruits.
· SEXSOMNIA by Madeline Iva Jenny needs to unravel the mystery of what she does at night and who she does it with in order to subdue the sexual demon inside her.
· DIVINE by Elizabeth Shore Locked in an abandoned mental asylum, an ambitious filmmaker soon discovers she’s trapped with a Dionysian god. He offers her a glimpse of astounding future artistic success—but it will only come true if she’ll perform an erotic ritual to free him.
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Bio: LADY SMUT.com
Lady Smut is a blog for intelligent women who like to read smut. On this blog we talk about our writing, the erotic romance industry, masculinity, femininity, sexuality, and whatever makes our pulses race.
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Who doesn’t love a good holiday read? And who doesn’t love a good holiday gift? I’m very excited to offer both all wrapped up in a nice red ribbon. How about a nice Valentine for Christmas … er maybe something Christmasy for Valentine’s Day. Love Under the Mistletoe is FREE through Sunday!
‘Christmas present? You know, happy holidays, noel, peace on earth … ouch! Oh hell that hurts.’ She hissed between barely parted lips and writhed in a way that should have made him sympathetic, but only made him hornier. ‘Could you please untie me so I can take care of this cramp.’
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