Sleep never came to Divine as a soft escape. It arrived like a thief that pressed her down into the mattress, stealing her breath, blurring her edges, and pushing her into places she no longer trusted. That night was no different. The room was quiet except for the faint hum of the ceiling fan and the ticking clock on the wall. She had turned the lights off, curled under the thin blanket, and whispered a prayer that maybe this time she would find peace.
But when her eyes closed, the shadows came alive.
In the dream she was back in the old apartment she once shared with Maverick. The air smelled of cigarette smoke and damp wood, the kind of smell that clung to the skin no matter how hard she tried to wash it away. The walls were stained, the curtains drawn tight as if the room itself was ashamed of what it had seen. She stood in the center, barefoot, her hands trembling, her body remembering before her mind caught up.
Then he appeared. Maverick, though not quite. His frame was the same, tall and broad shouldered, his eyes holding that cruel glint she had tried to forget. Yet something about him shifted with each blink, as if he were stitched together with another presence. The smirk on his lips was not Maverick’s but belonged to someone else. It was too composed, too deliberate. It was the same smirk she had seen described in Xavier Isidro’s novel, etched on the villain’s face in every scene.
“You never left,” the man said. His voice was wrong, layered with two tones. Maverick’s rough edge overlapped with a smoother cadence that slid into her bones like poisoned honey.
Her heart lurched. The smoother tone belonged to Xavier. Not the author she had seen only in photos, but the voice she had imagined while reading his words. The voice that narrated sentences about cruelty, obsession, and possession.
The room pulsed. The villain moved closer. His hand reached for her wrist, and the moment his skin touched hers she felt the old pain flare, the phantom bruise that never healed. Yet instead of fighting, she froze, because it was not just Maverick dragging her back into the nightmare. It was Maverick speaking in Xavier’s voice.
“I wrote you,” the villain whispered. “Every scar, every tremor, every silence. You think they are yours, but they are mine. I placed them in you before you even knew my name.”
Divine tried to scream, but the sound tangled in her throat. She turned toward the door, but the apartment stretched endlessly, hallway after hallway unfurling like a maze. The walls breathed, the floorboards groaned, and the light above flickered in a rhythm that sounded like a typewriter.
Click clack. Click clack.
With each beat of the keys, words floated across the walls. Sentences she had memorized from Xavier’s novels. Lines that Maverick had once repeated when he wanted to remind her that no one would ever believe her story. It was as if fiction had crawled out of its paper prison to claim her.
The villain’s hand clamped on her shoulder, spinning her around. His face flickered like broken film, sometimes Maverick, sometimes a stranger, sometimes a silhouette with Xavier’s eyes.
“You belong to the page,” he hissed. “And the page belongs to me.”
She stumbled backward, tripping over a chair that was not there a second ago. Pain shot up her leg as she hit the ground. The typewriter clacked faster, words spilling across the ceiling. The letters dripped like blood, staining her skin with phrases she could not wash away.
Divine squeezed her eyes shut and whispered to herself that it was only a dream. But when she opened them, the villain was kneeling in front of her, his face so close she could see the pores, the cruel curl of his lips, the hunger in his eyes.
“I will not let you wake until you admit it,” he said. “Admit that I am already inside you.”
The words pierced deeper than any blow. Because part of her knew he was right. Maverick had planted fear inside her, and Xavier had unknowingly watered it with his writing. Or was it unknowingly? She could not tell anymore.
The scene shifted. She was suddenly in a library, the shelves towering above her like prison walls. Every book bore Xavier’s name. She pulled one down and opened it, only to find her diary entries copied word for word. She flipped another and saw her childhood drawings reproduced as illustrations. Another contained photographs of her sleeping, her face twisted in fear.
Divine staggered back, the books falling one by one until the floor was littered with pages. The villain emerged again, stepping on the scattered paper, his footprints burning words into ash.
“Even your dreams are not yours,” he said, his voice echoing in every corner of the library. “I claimed them before you even had them.”
She screamed then, raw and desperate, her voice shattering the silence. And in that instant, she woke.
Her body jerked upward, drenched in sweat. The blanket tangled around her legs, the air heavy with the scent of fear that clung like perfume. She pressed her palms against her face, trying to ground herself in reality. The fan was still humming. The clock still ticked. The room was the same. But her heartbeat refused to slow.
She looked toward her desk, where Xavier’s latest novel lay open. The book glared at her, its pages almost breathing. She remembered the words she had read that afternoon, the passage where the villain whispered to the heroine that her nightmares were only rehearsals for his arrival.
It was too much of a coincidence. Too sharp. Too invasive.
Divine pulled her knees to her chest and rocked slightly, the way she had learned to calm herself in the worst of Maverick’s nights. But even that felt borrowed now, as if the act itself was a scene she had already read in Xavier’s work.
Her phone buzzed suddenly, startling her. A message from Stacy lit the screen.
You up? Had the weirdest dream.
Divine almost laughed, but it caught in her throat. She typed back with shaking hands.
I had one too. I think it is not mine.
She hesitated before pressing send, staring at the words. They felt absurd, yet truer than anything else she could say. Her dreams no longer belonged to her. They were written somewhere else, directed by someone she had never met, someone who somehow knew her better than she wished anyone ever could.
For the first time, she feared not just Maverick’s return, but Xavier’s existence.
ns216.73.216.13da2
and then Add to home screen.