A virgin by night
- Genre: Paranormal
- Author: Ibanye Ash
- Chapters: 5
- Status: Ongoing
- Age Rating: 18+
- 👁 4
- ⭐ 5.0
- 💬 0
Annotation
Valerie Smith wakes up every morning to evidence of a life she can't remember living. Sand in her sheets. Receipts from midnight cafés. A stranger's watch on her nightstand. For eighteen months, she's been losing time, waking to find that someone else has been living her nights. Then she discovers the journal. Written in her own handwriting but filled with memories that aren't hers, it tells the story of a woman named Night Valerie—confident, fearless, and deeply in love with a man named Daniel Merrick. A man Valerie has never met. According to the journal, they've been dating for months. They're engaged. And Night Valerie has given away something Day Valerie had been saving her whole life. When she finally confronts Daniel, she expects anger or confusion. What she doesn't expect is his genuine love for the woman she becomes after dark—or his willingness to fight for both versions of her. As she delves deeper into her condition, she realizes Night Valerie isn't just a symptom of a sleep disorder. She's everything Emma has been too afraid to be: spontaneous, passionate, and alive. But two consciousnesses can't share one body forever. With the help of a pioneering sleep specialist, Valerie must make an impossible choice: integrate with Night Valerie and become whole, or find a way to coexist with the stranger who shares her skin. One option means losing the person Daniel fell in love with. The other means living in fragments, never fully present in her own life. As the boundaries between day and night begin to blur, she discovers that the real question isn't which version of herself should survive—it's whether she's brave enough to stop running from the parts of herself she's spent a lifetime hiding. A Virgin by Night is a haunting exploration of identity, love, and the courage it takes to embrace every part of who we are—even the parts that terrify us.
Chapter 1: The Waking World
Valerie Smith had learned to fear sleep.
She stood in front of her bathroom mirror at six-thirty in the morning, examining her reflection with the clinical detachment of a scientist studying a specimen. Dark circles shadowed her hazel eyes, testimony to another night of restless half-consciousness. Her chestnut hair hung limp around her shoulders, and her skin had taken on the pallor of someone who spent too much time indoors, too much time afraid. But it was her hands that drew her attention this morning. There was dirt under her fingernails.
Valerie's heart began to race as she held her hands up to the light. Garden soil, rich and dark, packed beneath the neat crescents of her nails. She lived in a fifth-floor apartment in downtown Seattle. She didn't have a garden. She didn't even have a houseplant—she'd killed the last one through sheer neglect three months ago.
She scrubbed her hands furiously, watching the water run brown in the sink, her mind racing through the previous evening. She'd come home from her job at Henderson Translation Services at six o'clock, as always. She'd eaten leftover Thai food while watching a documentary about deep-sea creatures. She'd taken her medication—the sleep aid Dr. Reeves had prescribed—at nine-thirty. She'd gone to bed at ten.
And then?
Nothing. A void. The customary blank space that occupied the hours between sleep and waking, except this morning, there was evidence. Physical, undeniable evidence that her body had been somewhere, doing something, while her conscious mind was absent.
This wasn't the first time.
Valerie dried her hands and walked to her bedroom, a small, spartan space dominated by a queen-sized bed and a bookshelf crammed with medical journals and sleep disorder research. She'd become an expert on her own condition over the past eighteen months, ever since the episodes had begun. Parasomnia, the doctor called it. A broad umbrella term that covers everything from sleepwalking to night terrors to sleep paralysis.
But Valerie's condition was different. More complex. More frightening.
She opened her laptop and pulled up the document she'd been maintaining—a detailed log of every anomaly, every morning she'd woken to find something inexplicably different. The list had grown long. September 12th: Woke with sand in my bed. Beach sand. No memory of leaving the apartment. October 3rd: Found a receipt in my jacket pocket for coffee from a café in Fremont. Time stamp: 2:47 AM.
October 28th: Discovered a man's watch on my nightstand. Expensive. Engraved with initials: D.M. No idea who D.M. is.
November 15th: Woke with the taste of wine in my mouth. I don't drink wine. Found lipstick in my bathroom that I've never purchased—deep red, not my shade.
And now: dirt under her nails.
Valerie added the entry, her fingers trembling slightly as she typed. The logical part of her brain—the part that had earned her a master's degree in linguistics and that translated complex technical documents from seven languages—told her there had to be a rational explanation. Sleepwalking. Perhaps she'd gone outside during the night. Perhaps she'd dug in the small strip of garden behind her apartment building.
But the other part of her brain, the part that was growing stronger and more insistent with each passing day, whispered something else: What if you're living another life while you sleep? What if there's another version of you that emerges when consciousness fades?
The thought terrified her. Valerie's phone buzzed with a text from her best friend, Sarah: Coffee before work? You've been MIA lately. She hesitated, then typed back: Can't today. Big deadline. Rain check?
The lie came easily. She'd been lying to Sarah a lot lately, canceling plans, and making excuses. The truth was that Valerie had begun to withdraw from her waking life, uncertain of what she might reveal, what secrets her sleep-self might have created. She'd stopped dating entirely—a decision made easier by the fact that she was, at twenty-eight, still a virgin. Not for religious reasons or lack of opportunity, but because she'd always been cautious and always wanted to wait for the right person, the right moment.
Now, she couldn't trust herself enough to let anyone get close.
She showered, dressed in her usual work uniform of dark jeans and a simple blouse, and headed out into the gray Seattle morning. The bus ride to her office took forty minutes, time she usually spent reading or listening to podcasts. Today, she found herself studying the other passengers, wondering if any of them led secret lives, if any of them woke up strangers to themselves.
Henderson Translation Services occupied the third floor of a modest building in the International District. Valerie had worked there for five years, translating everything from medical documents to legal contracts to technical manuals. She was good at her job—excellent, even. Languages made sense to her in a way people often didn't. They followed rules, had structure, could be decoded, and were understood.
Unlike her own mind.
"Valerie! Thank god you're here." Her boss, Marcus Henderson, intercepted her before she could reach her cubicle. He was a short, energetic man in his fifties who ran the small company with nervous efficiency. "We've got a rush job from Meridian Pharmaceuticals. Clinical trial documentation, French to English, needs to be done by the end of business tomorrow."
Valerie nodded, grateful for the distraction. "Send it to my queue. I'll start on it right away."
"You're a lifesaver." Marcus patted her shoulder and hurried off to manage the next crisis.
Valerie settled into her cubicle, surrounded by dictionaries and reference materials in a dozen languages. She opened the Meridian files and began to work, losing herself in the familiar rhythm of translation. French was one of her strongest languages, and the medical terminology, while complex, was well within her expertise. But as she worked through the documentation—a study on sleep disorders and new pharmaceutical interventions—she found her attention snagging on certain passages. Subjects with severe parasomnia reported experiences of complete dissociation from their nighttime activities, including complex behaviors such as driving, cooking, and social interaction. In rare cases, subjects described waking memories of an alternate reality, suggesting the possibility of REM sleep behavior disorder combined with lucid dreaming elements..."
Valerie's hands stilled on the keyboard. She read the passage again, then scrolled through the document, searching for more information. The study described a subset of patients who experienced what researchers were calling "dual-consciousness parasomnia"—a condition where the sleeping brain created such vivid, consistent experiences that patients reported having entire relationships, careers, and lives that existed only in their sleep state.
Some patients had difficulty distinguishing which life was real.
Valerie felt a chill run down her spine. She took a screenshot of the passage and emailed it to herself, then forced her attention back to the translation work. But the words haunted her throughout the day, echoing in her mind like a prophecy. By the time she left the office at six, the Seattle drizzle had turned to proper rain. Valerie stood under the awning of her building, watching water cascade from the edge, and made a decision. She pulled out her phone and searched for the contact information for Dr. Reeves, her sleep specialist.
The receptionist answered on the third ring. "Dr. Reeves's office."
"Hi, this is Valerie Smith. I'm a patient of Dr. Reeves. I need to schedule an appointment as soon as possible. It's urgent."
"Let me check his calendar. He has an opening next Tuesday at two."
"Nothing sooner? I really need to see him."
A pause. "I'm sorry, Ms. Thorne. That's the earliest available appointment unless it's an emergency requiring hospitalization."
Valerie closed her eyes. "Tuesday is fine. Thank you."
She ended the call and stepped out into the rain, letting it soak through her jacket as she walked to the bus stop. Five more days. She could manage five more days. She'd been managing for eighteen months, after all. What were five more days?
The bus was crowded, and Valerie stood pressed against the window, watching the city lights blur past in the rain. She found herself studying her reflection in the glass, searching for something—some sign that she wasn't entirely alone in her own body, that there might be someone else looking back. When she arrived home, she went through her evening routine with methodical precision. Dinner. Shower. The herbal tea Dr. Reeves had recommended. She laid out her clothes for the next day, set her alarm, and climbed into bed.
But she didn't take her sleep medication.
Instead, Valerie lay in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, and made herself a promise: tonight, she would try to stay aware. Tonight, she would fight the pull of sleep with everything she had. She would stand guard over her own consciousness and discover what happened when the lights went out.
The hours crept past. Eleven o'clock. Midnight. One in the morning. Valerie's eyes burned with fatigue, her body desperate for rest, but she forced herself to remain alert. She counted ceiling tiles. She recited verb conjugations in all seven of her languages. She dug her fingernails into her palms, using pain to anchor herself to wakefulness.
At two-fifteen in the morning, her body finally betrayed her. Her eyelids grew impossibly heavy, her thoughts began to scatter and fragment, and despite her best efforts, Valerie felt herself slipping away into darkness. But in that liminal space between waking and sleeping, she heard something that made her blood run cold: a voice, soft and familiar, speaking words she couldn't quite grasp. Her own voice, but different somehow. Confident. Amused.
The voice of someone who knew exactly who they were.
And then, nothing.
Valerie woke to sunlight streaming through her bedroom window and the insistent beep of her alarm. She fumbled for her phone, squinting at the screen: seven o'clock in the morning. Wednesday.
She'd lost another night.
Valerie sat up slowly, taking inventory. She was wearing different clothes—not the pajamas she'd gone to bed in, but jeans and a soft gray sweater she didn't recognize. Her hair smelled like someone else's shampoo, something floral and expensive. And there, on her nightstand, was something that made her heart stop.
A photograph.
She picked it up with trembling hands. It was a Polaroid, slightly faded, showing two people sitting close together on what looked like a restaurant patio. The woman in the photo was unmistakably Valerie—same face, same hair, but smiling in a way she never smiled in her waking life. Radiant. Carefree. Beautiful.
The man beside her had his arm around her shoulders. He was handsome, with dark hair and strong features, caught mid-laugh at something beyond the camera's frame. The intimacy between them was obvious this was not a first date or a casual acquaintance. This was a couple.
Valerie flipped the photo over. On the back, written in handwriting she recognized as her own but couldn't remember creating, were three words:
Me and Daniel
Daniel, D.M. The watch.
Valerie's hands shook so badly she nearly dropped the photograph. She set it carefully on the nightstand and stood, her legs unsteady. She walked to the mirror and stared at her reflection, searching for answers in her own eyes.
"Who are you?" she whispered to the stranger looking back. "What are you doing to my life?"
But the woman in the mirror—the daylight Valerie, the virgin who had never even been kissed, who lived a quiet, controlled existence translating other people's words—had no answers.
Only questions that multiply with each passing night.
Chapter 2: The Investigation Begins
Valerie called in sick to work for the first time in three years.
She sat on her living room floor surrounded by evidence of a life she couldn't remember living. The photograph of her and Daniel. The expensive watch. Receipts she'd found in jacket pockets and desk drawers now spread across her coffee table like pieces of a puzzle. Movie tickets. Restaurant bills. A dry cleaning receipt for a dress she'd never seen. Each item was a breadcrumb leading toward a truth she wasn't sure she wanted to discover.
The most disturbing find was tucked inside a book on her shelf—a small journal with a midnight blue cover, filled with handwriting she recognized as her own. But the words, the thoughts, and the experiences described on those pages belonged to someone else.
Valerie opened the journal with trembling hands and began to read.
October 1st
Met him today. Actually met him, face
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