Warning: this story opens with some mature, but not explicit sexual content. It's the strongest this story gets so I really don't want to immediately consign it to the "M" category. Additional author's notes at the end of this chapter.
Part I - Charleston
Scarlett's black hair, deeper and more lustrous than the night outside, spilled starkly across white pillows and formed a midnight halo around her flushed face. The room was heavy with quiet, and dimly lit - almost glowing - with low light from an indeterminate source. The sheets were bunched up by her naked hips, their writhing contortions pulling the damp cotton into rumpled furrows. Her skin glistened; the pale light of lamp and flame broke across beads of sweat until she seemed to glitter, until it might have been diamonds scattered on white limbs, rubies crowning her breasts, onyx streaming in her hair. Her hands dripped with an impression of jewels as she raised them to thread her slender fingers through strands of golden hair, matted with sweat and clinging to show the fine shape of the skull beneath, of the head she pressed against the gentle rise of her abdomen.
"Ashley," she whispered, in that dreamy, absent voice she used only for her lover. "Oh, Ashley."
Slender, fine-boned shoulders rose as he moved over her, covering the wealth of her body. Scarlett clasped her arms around the pale shoulders, and the dimpled curves of her knees showed against his narrow hips as she lifted her body to receive him. Ashley buried his face in the sweet, sloping curve between her neck and shoulders, the dampness of his hair deepening its color to tarnished gold. Her reddened lips curved so sweetly when she moaned his name again.
Scarlett opened her eyes, and they were soft like pale green peridot, hazy, unfocused, lost in desire. "Ashley," she repeated, over and over again, in time with the rhythm of her lover's hips. Sometimes her voice caught on a syllable or crested in a whimper. Her perfect, smoothly rounded nails left pink crescents on Ashley's tender shoulders.
She looked past the golden head, looked at first without seeing, beyond Ashley into the hazy room. He knew when she saw him, when limpid, desirous eyes hardened into dark emerald and caught him in their glare.
"Never you," she said, and her knees rose higher along the smooth sides of Ashley's body. Her hands sharpened, claw-like, the marks on her lover's back becoming red and angry as she gripped him more tightly to her breast. "Never. You."
Scarlett moaned, and he could see the answering rhythm of her hips rising to meet Ashley's thrusting body. The moan spilled into a gasp that was her lover's name again. Silently, desperately, he pleaded with her not to look away; to give him that much, at least. Her wicked, feline eyes narrowed, then she moved her hands from Ashley's back and shoulders and cupped his head, pulling his face over hers for a kiss and blocking her eyes from his sight. All that was left for him were the sounds of love that she had saved for Ashley Wilkes, the cries of passion he had tried to steal, and a heart forever closed to him.
Her voice rose in pitch, crying out clear as a bell, "Ashley!"
...
Rhett Butler woke with a start, kicked out of sleep as if a sharp noise had jerked him awake. Indeed, his ears were ringing; but after a moment, consciousness imposed order on his thoughts and he knew the disturbance and its echoes to be a phantom sound. A dream. He was drenched in sweat, the sheets knotted into ropes around him. No breeze came through the open windows of his bedroom to carry the cooling sea air. The Charleston night was humid and still.
Groaning, Rhett slipped his arm free from a noose of cotton and swung his bare legs over the edge of the bed. Elbows on knees, he dropped his head into his palms, and dug his fingers through damp hair. The room was well lit by Bonnie's lamp and after a moment, his ears found the hushed susurration of her breathing and he tried to match the calming rhythm with his own. Nightmares, it seemed, ran in the family. He knew they had plagued his wife for years, then there had been Bonnie's terrors. He had suffered through his own for two years now, and they had grown only more vivid - and frequent - in the last three months. In the months since the birthday party for Ashley Wilkes. In the months since the night he had forced himself back into his wife's bed. Had forced her—?
Rhett swallowed another frustrated groan that might wake his sleeping daughter. He grabbed his dressing gown, slung over the back of a chair pulled purposefully close to the bed. Not even for Bonnie could he bring himself to sleep in clothes in the thick heat of a low country summer, but he kept a dressing gown within reach so he could make himself decent when her nightmares roused him. If she ever decided to slip from her small bed to seek him out, he might have to make the sacrifice. Thus far, whatever frightened her so in dreams kept her rooted to the safety of her bed until her rescuer arrived.
Bonnie. Rhett stopped to kneel by the head of her small cot, and tenderly brushed aside a black curl that humidity had stuck to her pink cheek. At least, there was Bonnie. He watched her sleep for a moment before moving to one of the tall windows that opened on the front of the house, overlooking that most unfortunately named river. He braced his hands against the varnished frame, gripping hard to still the twitching muscles of his arms.
They had been in Charleston with his mother for more than three months, and he feared he had very nearly worn out his welcome. Bonnie was the charming apple of her grandmother's eye, but his mother was less indulgent with her wayward son. Rhett could put on a good show for company and in public, but the forced intimacy of living under the same roof for weeks had done him no favors. His mother had questions he had no wish to answer, and her uncanny ability to know all his misdeeds had not weakened in the intervening years since his childhood. She disapproved of his drinking almost as vocally as Bonnie, but even Bonnie's distaste for the smell of whisky on her Daddy was not strong enough to keep him sober these days.
The waters beyond the Battery were placid, serenely reflecting the bright glitter of the spangled midnight sky. The city itself was ranged invisibly around and behind him. It seemed he looked out from the edge of the world into an emptiness only relieved by the stars. The ringing in his ears faded gradually into the hum of the river. If anyone else in the city was also awake, they were far from this quiet corner at the end of the earth.
What he mightn't give for the days when he could expend his frustrated energy in the contest of wills between himself, the sea, and the blockade, when he could outrace her memory on the tide and bury dreams in exhausted sleep.
Dreams! Rhett slumped in a chair on the piazza, crossing his legs at the ankles and resting the back of his head on the elegantly curved back. What a ridiculous thing to plague him at his age. He didn't remember being so aware of his dreams before. What had he dreamed about, before her? Probably they had been such peaceful, easy nights that he hadn't thought them worth remembering at the time. Blissful reveries, not this torture served up by his subconscious almost nightly.
Rhett now remembered all his dreams, and they were not pleasant. They had started after he had been exiled from their marital bed. Not that first night; the first dream had come more than a week later. He could no longer remember what might have happened to cause it, after so many days had passed since the initial trauma. Compared to the last few months, it had been completely innocuous, in retrospect not even worth the moniker of nightmare. He had simply dreamed of Ashley's hands running through her loose, long hair, an almost hypnotic movement that had repeated for what had felt like hours before finally his disgusted brain had ejected him from sleep.
The dreams were unquestionably worse now, and utterly deserving to be called nightmare. He had dreamed the first one while still in her bed, slumbering with her in his arms for the first time in two years. Reality, and recent experience, had joined forces to make the dream the most vivid - the most horrifying—
Every curve of her body, newly rediscovered, was fresh in his mind. The cadence of her breath with a hitch of pleasure, released in a moan or fading away in a sigh was newly discovered as she had opened for him as never before. The dreams cannibalized his memory and offered it back to him as voyeur as she gave herself instead to Ashley, over and over again before he escaped back into consciousness. The sheets were still damp with both their sweat when he had fled, unable to face her. She had offered him one night - or he had taken it, and Rhett knew he would have taken it, had she not seemed to melt willingly into his arms at last. He couldn't bear to see regret in her eyes, couldn't even bear to see hate, though it wouldn't have been the first time.
The subsequent nights at Belle's had done nothing to ease his mind. He had escaped Atlanta in the hopes that distance might - but here he was, sitting in his dressing robe on the piazza because he couldn't sleep. He was most assuredly far too old for this.
"Daddy?" Bonnie's voice drifted through the open window. Half-asleep, edged with her fear, it was not a call of imperious demand but the soft pleading of a little girl who needed him. Yes, at least there was Bonnie.
This was inspired by a story in which Rhett reveals he has his own nightmares, and briefly details their content. I found the possibilities of Rhett's dreamscapes too tempting to resist. I chose not to set off the dream narratives (by italicizing or using text breaks), a conceit which (I think) worked very well in some instances as I wanted to blur that transition, but at other times it may be more confusing than effective: fair warning given.