I hadn't let him in since that fateful day on Crait. I couldn't. The things he'd offered me before I'd left…the way he'd looked at me. I couldn't handle thinking about it. I couldn't reconcile it with his actions, either past or subsequent.

It wasn't so much that he'd gone back to them, or even that after fighting by my side, he'd desired only power and nothing more…but that I'd entertained notions that things could somehow work out the way I wanted.

The way I'd envisioned.

I felt ashamed. And not because I'd thought that I could somehow bring him back, that he could be Ben Solo again and not the shell of a man he had become, but because deep down I knew that I still thought I could.

I simply just could not help myself.

I however, had resolved myself to never act on this want again. I would not let him in, and I would not entertain childish notions about changing a boy – man – that I knew held no desire to be changed.

Did I know that?

However I tried to hold true to this conviction during the day though, my subconscious seemed to overtly contradict it in the night.

Alone in my small quarters aboard the falcon in the dead of the night I always seemed to dream of him. Sometimes my dreams were violent, and filled with terrors and torture that I woke from frantic and covered in cold sweat. Once I'd even made such a commotion that Finn had rushed down the hall to shake me from my sleep, concern etched all over his broad features.

Sometimes my dreams were just flash backs to our conversations on Arch-to.

But occasionally, my dreams contained visions that made my whole body flush when I tried – however futilely – not to think about them during the day.

They were always the most vivid. And sometimes I awoke swearing I could taste his breath, and his lingering, hungry kisses on my lips even though in truth we were probably galaxies away from each other.

I'd never touched a man – in the way couples or concubines did – once in my life. But in my dreams it was a different story entirely. And the way he always seemed to respond to me, the way his fingers would trail my spine or grab my hips, or lord – the noises – he would make, would always be my anchor, the thing that would convince me that none of it could be real. Because ecstasy the likes of that couldn't possibly exist.

It was awful, the way I seemed to crave those nights where I would envision us entwined like that. He was a killer. A monster. And I physically ached for him.

On a few occasions I'd felt him reaching through the bond. Trying to connect with me again, to say what however, I wouldn't know.

There were so many things I wanted to say to him. But I knew that opening up to him, in any sense, was just not a good idea.

I'd resolved myself to this that day on Crait.

Because before I'd left him on the Supremacy, I'd truly, horrifyingly considered his offer. If only for the briefest of moments.

What he was offering was not what I wanted. I'd thought when he'd fought with me that I could somehow bring him back, that his act of killing Snoke could be a beginning, a way to bridge things between him and the Resistance and that maybe, just maybe, we could start over. In retrospect this notion was of course extremely naive and childish. He had murdered. He had betrayed.

And not only the galaxy, but his own family.

Taking his hand would've meant so many things. And I was glad I hadn't yielded, even though part of me had sincerely yearned to. All he wanted was power, control.

He wouldn't control me.

But as I drifted into a fretful sleep, I swear I could feel his hands fisting in my hair, his body curving to meet mine yet again, and I knew, in the darkest recesses of my mind that Ben Solo would always have some sort of perverse control over me.