Divergent Limit

November 2nd, Sunday

Claire felt more tired than usual when she woke up. She was by no means a morning person. Jumping out of bed immediately after opening her eyes was already out of the question on a normal day. But she was pretty sure it was the middle of the night and that she had been deeply asleep until moments ago, even though she couldn't tell what had pulled her out of her dreams. Her mind seemed to be wrapped in a cozy warmth that urged her to drift back to sleep. Whatever had woken her up, she was too comfortable to investigate it further.

Ready to surrender to the sweet embrace of sleep once more, she felt it: a pressure, something hard against her stomach that tried to push her off. Her eyes flew open and she immediately jolted upright. Adrenaline pumped through her veins, washing away any lingering fatigue. Where was she? Her eyes darted around the dark room, finding the only source of light, the orange numerals of an alarm clock. It was 4 AM.

How did she get back here? She was panicking, her breaths unsteady and heavy, her hand clinging to her heart. Then she realized. The numerals on the alarm clock in Mark's basement, they were green, not orange. If this wasn't Mark's basement, and if she wasn't in her apartment either, then...?

Jason. She was at Jason's place. It slowly came back to her. It had been six days since she had escaped that hell. Jason had come over to her place, helped her fall asleep, and the next day he had offered to let her stay at his place for a while because she didn't feel safe in her own apartment anymore. Mark knew where she lived after all.

Consciously slowing her breath, she calmed down. She went through her memories of the previous evening. Jason had held her, soothed her, helped her relax like he had done so many times over the last week. She must have fallen asleep on top of him, again. She looked down. There he was, lying on his back, fast asleep. So what woke her up then must have been...?

Her eyes wandered from his face further down his body. He was wearing sweatpants that revealed a sizable bulge, the fabric straining every time his erection throbbed. She gulped. Her last contact with a man's erection was deeply ingrained in her memory.

Jason was her friend. He'd never hurt her, she knew that. And yet, she couldn't help but eye the tent in his pants with caution, as if it might attack her the moment she left it out of sight. Why was he so hard?

Of course she knew the answer to her own question. Jason was asleep, and men experienced multiple erections throughout a normal sleep cycle. If he didn't get hard like this while sleeping, then that would be a reason for concern, something that a doctor should take a look at. Still, to her, his penis looked heavy with malicious intent, even though she knew better.

What unnerved her even more was that her own body was doing the same thing while she was asleep. Not getting hard of course, but pumping blood to her genitals as part of a nightly maintenance routine. The effect was simply less noticeable in her case.

She hadn't been aroused at all since Mark. No fleeting thoughts about sex, no wetness, no desire to masturbate. She couldn't care less about any of that. But while she was asleep, her body did its usual thing without a care in the world for what she had gone through. She found it eerie. She went through this traumatic experience that had consumed so many of her conscious thoughts since then. Yet in her sleep, her body reverted to a more primal state that just went through the motions, like a scheduled program running a regular security check regardless of what had happened since the last one.

She didn't mean to stare at Jason's erection for so long. That wasn't exactly polite. She wouldn't want him to shamelessly ogle her boobs while she was asleep either. But the longer she looked, the more harmless his hard-on felt, and she found comfort in that. The contrast between Jason's relaxed posture and the eager throbbing of his dick began to amuse her.

Jason was just lying there on his back, completely unaware of how she was observing and studying him. He usually slept on his side, not on his back, and it showed. His shirt had slid up, just enough to reveal his bellybutton. One arm was dangling off the bed, the other had slipped from her back and fallen onto the mattress when she had bolted up earlier. He was drooling a little. He looked as relaxed and unthreatening as he possibly could, with the sole exception of his penis straining against his pants as if it hadn't gotten the memo that it was supposed to relax too.

Jason was Jason, nothing scary about him, with or without an erection. She breathed a sigh of relief, then decided to lie back down again, letting her head come to rest on his heart. It pulsed in a slow and steady rhythm she found comforting. She was about to fall asleep once more when she felt that same pressure against her stomach. Claire smiled. Penises were kind of silly, she thought. Jason snored.