I wake up terrified, jolted from sleep by a terrible vision. Fleeting memories swirl in my mind, horrific images of people being turned into robotic zombies. A familiar face, gaunt and hateful, taunts me over the zombie horde. I feel like I should know his name, but I don’t. My whole body shakes as I try to get a grip on where I am. The room is dark, the windows blacked out. A dream. Just a dream. A message stuck inside my field of vision tells me there's a letter to myself that I need to read, but I’m too groggy to even think about doing that and I really need to pee. I make my way to the bathroom, take care of business, and head back to bed.

Something is wrong.

There’s someone in my bed.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” I demand, turning on the light.

“Hmm? Oh, hey Noah.” The pretty young woman with short, dark hair rubs the sleep from her dark eyes. “Come to bed. Did you wake up before your alarm? You were going to set it for later since we worked so late last night.”

“Who are you?” I repeat.

“Oh, you haven’t read yet.” She yawns. “That’s OK. You’ll know me in a little bit.”

She must be referring to that message telling me to read. I go to open the message but then she rolls quickly across the bed towards me. Her hand reaches out and touches me in an extremely intimate way. Who is this girl? And what makes her think she can just grope me like that?

“Actually, wait,” she says, her pink lips curling into a devious grin. “Don’t read yet. You owe me one, and this will be fun.”

“Look, you seem very nice and all,” I tell her, pushing her hand away, “but I’m not that kind of guy.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Oh, but you are,” she says, sitting up. I can see she’s wearing nothing but an oversized t-shirt. She grabs my arms, surprisingly fast, and pulls me towards her. An invisible force pushes me from behind as she pulls my hands into her soft bosom. I lose my balance and fall right on top of her. “You are exactly that kind of guy.”

She proceeds to start kissing me in a way that I can’t resist. I kiss back, fiercely and hungrily. Why am I so intensely attracted to her?

“Who are you?” I ask again as she moves her lips down to my throat.

“I’m anyone you want me to be,” she says between hungry kisses. “Now take off your boxers. Access level Alpha granted.”

Something tells me I shouldn’t do this with a stranger, but a more primal part of me demands I comply. I hope this isn’t a huge mistake, but I can’t resist the commands of this dark-haired beauty. And she has a lot of commands: some that she speaks, some that appear like magic as text in the air in front of me.

Afterwards, as I start to know who I am again, Lin snuggles against me and scratches my back lazily with one hand. “Was it fun for you too?”

I don’t respond right away. “It was, uh, different. Kind of hot.”

“You seemed to enjoy it.”

“Oh, I did. I especially liked that thing you were doing at the end. Maybe we could do more of that some other time when I know that your name is Lin.”

“Well, you did say that I could do whatever I wanted with you even if you couldn’t remember. I thought this was the kind of thing you meant.”

I look back in my logs to find the conversation I had with her where I said that. Yeah, she’s right. I explicitly gave her permission to do this kind of thing. And this was probably exactly what I was thinking at the time.

“Yeah, I guess I did. I don’t know. It seems like it has some potential to go wrong and end up with one or both of us getting hurt. Emotionally or physically.”

I imagine myself reacting differently than I did this morning. If she had said things differently, done things differently, I could have lashed out instinctively. She could have been hurt. She could have died.

I can’t lose her.

I need her.