All she wanted was a cold drink when she woke up

87 degrees was the high. And she’d felt every bit of it. She scratched then rubbed her sunburned arm as she walked along the sidewalk, gazing at each windowsill as she passed by, looking for signs of creativity behind the heavy curtains with their backing that blocked all signs of the hot sun outside.

Ice would be good. A refrigerator would have been better, but she hadn’t thought of it. As she rounded the corner of the covered walkway, following the signs to Ice/Vending, she was dismayed to find an out of order sign.

If she was sleepwalking, this must be a dream. Or a nightmare. She walked back out from the covered area and looked at the closest building. It was pink and hard to miss. She set her sights on the inner core of this building, where the Ice/Vending would surely be functional, and headed off.

She glanced sleepily at the new windows she passed. Nothing caught her eye and when she reached the last window, she stared across the black space between buildings. It wasn’t far in the daylight. At night, it seemed eternal. She walked.

The windows she passed this time were a blur. Her eyes locked onto the Ice/Vending sign and she pleaded with the Ice Powers That Be that they had this machine in working order. In a haze of exhaustion she rounded the corner and saw the ice machine. It seemed to glow in the night with a bright blue-white aura around it.

She placed the bucket on the machine’s receptacle and pressed the button. A little spurt of ice dropped into the bucket. She looked into the bucket as she held the button down and listened to the machine make its ice dispensing noises. No ice came. The machine churned.

In desperation, she flung her other arm onto the front of the machine and laid her forehead against it, still holding the button. The machine churned.

When lips ever so softly kissed the back of her neck, she was somewhere in that state between asleep and awake. She wasn’t sure if there was anything there and she didn’t care. The lips made their way up her neck to her hairline and very gently kissed around to her ear. Nibbling the lobe at first, gently… very gently. Then with a sense of urgency, teeth softly took their place.

She moaned and felt the body press against hers from behind. A hand covered hers on the front of the machine and intertwined its fingers with hers. Another hand reached around her and found her nipple hard to the touch.

She gasped at this touch and arched backwards, feeling the body behind her. It was solid. It felt strong. Parts of it felt hard. The heat between them was suffocating. Her nipple was being pinched now and each pinch became harder and harder. She moaned.

She felt heat and pain in that stage of semi-sleep. Dreaming about the touch she was feeling. Feeling the touch she was dreaming of. And then the pinching stopped. It only took a moment for the heat to melt the ice cube enough for it to soak through her thin shirt. Her nipple burned and hardened more under the ice.

The fingers intertwined with hers squeezed her as the fingers holding the ice made circles on her breast, sending chills all over her body. Heat and cold battled on her skin’s surface. And she rode along with them. Hot breath in her ear made her shudder.

A clattering noise startled her back to reality and she pushed herself off of her arm and away from the machine. Several ice cubes had splattered to the floor as the bucket had filled and overflowed. She shook her head a little to clear it and wondered if she had actually fallen asleep on the ice machine.

She walked out of the little room with the Ice/Vending sign and headed back toward her building, a sea of purple that seemed to not get any closer as she walked through a cloud of pink.

Maybe it was the sun, she thought. She’d gotten too much sun and was having some kind of heat stroke. She walked along. A few more steps.

The bucket became heavy in her hand and she moved it from one hand to the other. As she did, her arm touched the still-cool wet spot that surrounded her nipple. And in the 80-degree weather, she got chills.