In Somnis (Lucid Longing Duet #1)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Lennon

Some days feel like dreams you can’t wake up from.

This is one of those, except it’s a nightmare full of highways and exit signs, and I’m four days deep into it.

My fingers clamp the steering wheel of my yellow Beetle as if I can choke alertness into my body by force. It doesn’t work. Nothing does. Not the cold air blasting against my face, the stale gas-station coffee sloshing in the cup holder, or the throb in my right hip from sitting too long.

I should stop and find somewhere to sleep. Stolen hours of sleep reclined in parking lots here and there have barely touched my exhaustion.

Eight hours in a real bed.

That’s the real dream, but I’m too close now. Only two more hours, but it might not matter because every blink is getting longer and longer, and I’m worried that one of them will be just long enough for me to end up in a ditch.

“Come to me.”

Three words from my best friend, Tessa. That’s all it took for me to cram what was left of my life into two suitcases and launch myself into this road trip from hell.

White floods my vision, and my eyes snap open.

Headlights blind me, and a horn screams, but not as loud as my panic as I realize I’ve drifted out of my lane.

I yank the wheel right, and my Beetle’s tires screech as I swerve back into my lane.

The honking truck blasts past, close enough that the displaced air rocks my entire car.

Oh my God. Oh my God.

I almost…

The thought lodges in my throat. Mom would have been so mad. Watching cancer eat her alive, holding her hand through chemo that made her too weak to lift a fork, counting pills and measuring hope in teaspoons—all of that, so I could throw it away by falling asleep behind the wheel.

Or worse, harming someone else because of my recklessness.

I drag in a breath that tastes like terror while my heart continues its attempts to escape my chest.

That’s it. I’ve found the line. I’m done gambling my life against two more hours of highway.

The irony is not lost on me. I’ve spent the last six months doing nothing but keeping someone else alive. Now that there’s no one left to keep alive but myself, I can barely manage it.

A lit-up sign in the shape of an arrow appears over the next hill from a gas station with a diner attached.

I take the exit, swerving into the parking lot too fast before slamming on the brakes and throwing the car into park.

Soft light fills the space, and I grab my phone from the cupholder, but when I open my “Favorites” list, I freeze.

Who is there to call? To tell about what almost happened?

Who is left to tell I almost died?

My thumb hovers above each name on the list.

Mom

Tessa

Dad Work

Spencer

No one.

They’re all dead, gone, or might as well be dead to me.

That’s the entire list.

The blank space underneath those four names is its own kind of cruelty.

Most people accumulate contacts without noticing until there are too many to keep track of.

I used to be like that. Group chats that never shut up, birthdays, brunches, and last-minute drinks.

I thought that meant something. That noise meant closeness.

Turns out you can be surrounded and still be… optional.

Somehow, I arrived at thirty-five with a Favorites list that fits on one screen and contains nobody I can call.

I go to my voicemails and hover over that message. The one I’ve listened to exactly seventeen times since leaving Boston, just to make sure it still hurts as much as I remember.

Yeah, no. I need a break from that.

I drop my forehead to the steering wheel. There are only three words I need to focus on right now.

“Come to me.”

“I hear you, Tess,” I whisper to the empty car. “I’m trying, but I need a nap first or more coffee.” My stomach growls. “And… maybe something to eat.”

There’s a suitcase on the passenger seat, but it’s all nail kits, lip balms, and pretty skirts and sweaters, comfort for a version of me that still has bandwidth to spare for that. What my soul actually needs is buried in the trunk.

I grab my purse from the back seat, drop my phone into it, and stumble out of the car with shaky legs, smoothing a hand down my favorite white sundress with bright yellow lemons on it. It’s tighter in the belly than it used to be, clingy on the hips, but I don’t have it in me to care right now.

“No black, Lenny. I want your light. Your lemons.”

When I was eight, Mom made me a lemon cake from scratch just because I said yellow felt like happiness. There was no occasion or reason for it. Just flour on her cheek, music too loud, and her voice narrating every step like I was her favorite audience.

“We don’t wait for reasons to make something good, Lenny. We just make it.”

So when my mom asked for sunshine and citrus, she got them, even if she’s not here to see them.

The dress was already snug the morning of her funeral. I kept telling myself it was just stress, just my body doing what it has always done when life gets hard. A few pounds more on top of my already chubby thighs. Temporary, something I could fix once the worst of it passed.

As if grief is something you can out-diet.

After four days of living in this dress, it’s become a lemon-printed sausage casing. The zipper digs into my ribs, the neckline bites my collarbone, and the whole thing presses against my stubbornness, which refuses to let me take it off because Mom wanted lemons and light.

But how many hours does it take to honor a dying wish? When do you stop wearing grief?

Probably as soon as I find a bed and a shower.

I pop the trunk open and dig through my second suitcase until my hands find the oversized cream cardigan.

Mom’s. I press my face into it before I can stop myself, breathing in what’s left of her, laundry detergent, and her favorite cream.

It’s wrinkled to hell, and it won’t smell like her forever.

I’m acutely aware of both of those things as I pull it on, but the fabric is soft in that way that makes your shoulders drop without meaning to, and for one, small, merciful second, I feel held.

Not okay or fixed, but wrapped in her, standing in a parking lot in the middle of nowhere, trying to keep the October chill off my shoulders.

I take another sniff, needing the small connection and ignoring the fact it’ll stop smelling like her eventually, gradually, and then all at once, until I’m left holding something that’s just a cardigan again.

Chin up, Lenny.

I grab my purse again and head toward the diner.

The bell over the door jingles as I step inside.

A scruffy guy is hunched over the counter, broad-shouldered in worn flannel, with dark hair and a vibe that says he’d rather be left alone.

I reach out to tap his shoulder anyway, but pause shy of making contact when I catch sight of my hands under the bright lights of the diner.

My lemon-yellow polish is chipped to hell, half-moons of color clinging on as though they’re as worn out as I am. I painted little smiling citrus faces on them the night before the funeral in the hopes that if my hands looked happy, maybe I wouldn’t fall apart.

They didn’t save me. Nothing did.

I curl my fist, tucking the brightness into my palm.

“Too cute.”

“Too much.”

“Not what a grown woman should wear on her hands.”

The comments echo in a chorus I’ve heard my whole life. Only Mom always smiled when she saw what new art I painted on them. She understood that they weren’t just nails but little pieces of me.

God, I miss her so damn much.

I clear my throat instead. “Mind if I sit here?”

The guy looks up at me from under scruffy brows, then over his shoulder.

Right. Valid point, sir.

Every other seat is empty, plenty of perfectly good booths where I could sit alone and pretend I’m fine, but I’m so done with being on my own. So when he doesn’t object, I slide onto the cracked red stool beside him, plastering on a smile. “Thanks.”

The waitress drifts over, hair piled into a messy bun. “Hey there. Our special tonight is—”

“Yes. I’ll take that. Whatever it is.”

I’m too tired to make decisions, even if food is my specialty. Was my specialty.

Her brow lifts, but then she chuckles. “Burger coming right up.”

As soon as she leaves, the quiet wraps around me again. The unkempt man beside me stares into his glass of water like it might reveal the meaning of life.

Through the pass-through window comes the soft click of a spatula against metal, the hiss of meat hitting a hot pan, and something in my chest pulls toward it.

I know that rhythm. How a kitchen breathes, the line moving as a single organism when it’s good, the bark of “Behind!” threading through the noise.

The satisfaction of a ticket printed clean, how time disappears inside a busy service until the last plate goes out, and you realize four hours passed and you didn’t think about anything except the food.

Months without setting foot in a corporate kitchen haven’t erased how my soul reaches for it without thinking.

I didn’t choose culinary school because I was ambitious.

I chose it because it was the only place where nobody ever told me I was too much.

Not because I was less there, but in a kitchen, too much is the baseline.

Everyone is loud, fast, and moves like the world will end if the sauce breaks or the ticket sits too long.

You don’t stand out for being too loud, you become part of the noise, and the noise is the point.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t overflowing. I was exactly the right volume.