bedside.
“Spider-Man?” he murmured with confusion.
“Dammit! See, now you’ve woken him up.”
Greg’s gaze slid to the speaker, and he smiled faintly as he recognized Lissianna. It wasn’t the least bit surprising that she should feature in his dreams. His last thoughts before drifting off to sleep had been about the things he’d like to do with her. The woman was turning him into a mass of sexual frustration. The worst part was, she wasn’t even trying to do so. He was managing it all on his own, with his own imaginings.
“You’d best not let Aunt Marguerite hear you talk like that, Lissi,” Spider-Man taunted. “She’ll wash your mouth out with soap.”
“Oh stuff it, Thomas. I’m too old for that,” she said grimly, then turned and bent slightly to address Greg. “I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to wake you.”
He smiled benignly, and said, “It’s okay. You can step into my dreams anytime.”
“Oh, isn’t that sweet. He thinks he’s dreaming us,” a woman in a lavender baby doll said with a smile.
“I don’t know about sweet, Jeanne Louise. Either he does have a cucumber in his boxers after all, or he thinks his dream is a wet one,” a woman in mint green announced, and Greg blinked in surprise as he noted the color of her hair. Short, spiky black hair with fuchsia tipswasn’t something he would normally have thought was erotic and he briefly wondered what she was doing in his dream, then he noticed the silence around him and glanced around to see that everyone’s attention had turned to his groin.
Greg lifted his head and peered down at the erection he was sporting.
“Definitely a wet dream,” a pretty brunette in red pronounced solemnly.
“Maybe we should check and make sure it isn’t a cucumber.” An auburn-haired young woman in a blue baby doll made the suggestion and turned to share a wicked smile with another girl who was her mirror image. The second one—dressed in peach—nodded, and said, “Oh yeah.”
Greg blinked in surprise as he realized the pair were young, teenagers, he’d guess, and was almost horrified to note how well they filled out their baby dolls. When had teenagers started looking so un-teenager-like, he wondered with distress.
“Oh, cut it out,” Lissianna snapped, then turned her gaze to him. “You’re not dreaming. We’re really here. And I’m sorry we woke you, but the girls wanted…”
“We wanted to see her birthday gifts,” the woman with fuchsia-tipped hair finished when she hesitated. “Which includes you.”
“Yes. We’d seen all her other gifts,” the girl in blue explained. “So it was only fair we see you too, you understand?”
“We’re Lissianna’s cousins,” the brunette in red informed him.
“Well, all of us but Mirabeau,” the girl in lavender corrected, and Greg found himself staring at her. She looked vaguely familiar, but it took a moment for his mind toplace her, then he recalled her coming to the door earlier to inform Lissianna, her mother and a man named Thomas that someone had arrived.
Recalling that earlier scenario made Greg give Spider-Man a second look, and he realized that Spidey was Thomas. He wasn’t dreaming.
“I thought I heard voices coming from this room.”
Greg glanced toward the door as the crowd around his bed straightened and shifted guiltily to face the newcomer. Dressed in a lace-edged, red satin robe, the woman had long blond hair the same color as Lissianna’s, but that was the only similarity. Her features were sharper, her face longer, and her eyes were the coldest Greg had ever seen.
“Aunt Martine,” Lissianna sounded taken aback. “We were just—I was showing the girls my birthday gift.”
The woman paused at the foot of the bed and eyed Greg with interest. “So this is the psychologist your mother brought to help with your phobia, is it?”
“What on earth is going on here?” Another ripple went through the group around the bed as Lissianna’s mother appeared
Jaroslav Hašek
Kate Kingsbury
Joe Hayes
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