The shrill bleating of the smoke detector woke me from a deliciously salacious dream. Of course, as my syrup-thick brain swam up through a deep sleep, I didn’t immediately realize the sound was a fire alarm, and not the enthusiastic cries of my REM lover.

My husband didn’t believed that my nocturnal ecstasy was purely unconscious and not a nightly replay of some day time tryst. He was convince he knew who my secret paramour was, and would lie awake at night in expectation of me uttering a name in my sleep.

I didn’t cuckold him. There was no flesh and blood affair, my romance was with a phantom. The same dream, the same man, every night for months. So intense, and so physical, I lingered as long as I could in bed. As I drifted off, I would hold his face in my mind, and feel his hands on my body.

If I had known the old man would pluck me from my second life with such heated malice, I would have set his bed on fire a long time ago.