CHAPTER 12
Iled the way to my bedroom door.
“Nice paint color you chose. I wonder where I’ve seen that before?” Kessian said.
I flushed. “Lunaris picked it. She’s trying to make you feel—” At home. “—comfortable.”
My “bedroom” was more like half a room with a loft bed and storage underneath. I started rooting through my drawers for a spare pair of pajamas. Given I normally slept naked, there wasn’t much to choose from. I found one pair of flannel bottoms.
“Will these be all right?” I asked, holding them up.
Kessian, without further ado, started unbuckling his belt.
I whipped around to give him privacy, only to hear a snorting chuckle.
“You’ve seen it all before.”
“That was … different.” I paused. “Wasn’t it?”
“Different because we were three drinks deep, or balls deep?”
I blushed so hard, I thought I might be having a hot flash. Did cis men get hot flashes?
“Should I turn around while you change, or can I watch?” Kessian teased.
“Turn around! Please.”
Kessian shrugged. “All right, all right. Keep your knickers on. For now.”
He turned his back, and so did I. My bedroom was silent except for the rustle of clothes hitting the floor and our breathing, and I wondered if I’d inadvertently created a moment more intimate than the one Kessian suggested.
Because he was right, I’d seen him naked before, and he’d seen me.
I could picture the curves of his back and his spine like a strung violin. Those two dimples right above his—
“All done,” he said. “My modesty is preserved. Do you have a preferred side of the bed, or do you sprawl in the middle?”
“The right side, usually.”
“Then I’ll take the left.”
He flipped over the covers and climbed in. Due to the height limitations of the loft, we couldn’t sit up. Once he reached his pillow, he curled up on his side facing the middle, the covers bunched up to his chin.
A masochistic part of my brain took a snapshot of the image, to pull out and flip to when feeling nostalgic about the one time a boy curled up in my bed and looked like he belonged there.
Before getting in with him, I took the amulet off and put it on the bedside, where I could easily retrieve it if need be.
I settled in across from him. Above us, the skylight offered a perfect view of the starry sky, for once so clear you could see every pinprick of light.
I preferred the constellations of freckles on Kessian’s cheeks.
“Goodnight,” I said into the dark.
He said “Goodnight” too, and maybe it was a mirage cast by the witching hour, but I could have sworn it sounded wistful.
I wake in a garden, watching a man with tattoos and his hair in a top knot dig up delphiniums with a spade.
Dominic, my boyfriend. (Ex-boyfriend.) He lays the plants out on some newspaper in two equal bundles.
His strong hands used to pull knots out of my shoulders.
Now they’re pulling up the roots of our life together.
I don’t know if the plants will survive the new soil in the tiny garden where I’m going or succumb to environmental shock.
The soil in Bellgrave is slightly alkaline, but I haven’t had the chance to visit the place I’ll be renting in Shearwater, let alone test the pH of the dirt.
The sound of the roots tearing makes my heart ache.
Dom doesn’t look at me hovering. He didn’t tell me he was going to split everything we owned right down the middle. It works with material possessions, but not so well with living things.
The last night in our shared bed, he reaches across the gulf of mattress to put a hand on my thigh and says, “One last hurrah to say goodbye?”
My stomach turns. “So I’m worth one last fuck, but I’m not worth keeping?”
“Hey, don’t make it like that.”
“You’re the one who made it like that.”
I roll over, as close to the edge of the bed and as far from him as I can be, trying to view my refusal as a victory while a shameful part of me wonders if I could have given him head good enough to convince him he’d made a mistake.
(It wouldn’t, because the sex hadn’t been the problem.
The sex had been the point. The problem was me.)
By the time I’ve packed my old Volvo to the gills with the contents of my life, my hips pop and I ache in muscles I didn’t know I had.
An engine starts behind me, and I turn to watch as Dom pulls out of our drive (not ours anymore) and he doesn’t pause, doesn’t even wave.
(I guess it’s a kind of closure that I wasn’t even worth a goodbye.) It still takes thirty minutes to set off because I can’t see the road through the tears in my eyes.
I pass a sign that reads: Shearwater Spring. Take a magical step through time. (Can it bring me back to the past and leave me there?)
When I arrive outside the park home, the landlord is waiting to meet me. (His name is Westley Warwick, I remind myself. My lease is only for a year. If he’s awful, if the town is awful, I won’t be tied to the place. I won’t have to rip up deep roots again to go somewhere else.)
He puts the key in my hand, and I let myself in to a house of beige carpets, beige walls, and kitchen cabinets that haven’t been updated since the ’80s, furnished with a bed and armchair and dining table, all trying to be so generically inoffensive that they loop right around to being hideous, but there’s a tiny fenced-in garden out back, and the first thing I do is plant the flowers I got to keep.
The delphiniums don’t make it. It’s autumn, and they don’t have the energy outside their growing season to repair from the sudden damage to their root systems. (I don’t heal well, either. I think environmental shock doesn’t just apply to plants.)
It takes a month for me to venture out much, and when I finally visit the spring and sink beneath the surface, the world goes quiet enough that I hear it singing in my ear.
Do you have a home?
(I did once, but I made a mistake. I made my home a person so the breakup felt like an eviction notice.)
I surface from the spring. I, Tal, surface from the spring and the dream. No, I’m suddenly, viscerally aware it wasn’t quite a dream. A memory, but not mine. Kessian’s.
I’m not in the spring anymore. I’m in the kitchen of 37 Culpepper Avenue, light beaming through the window, a sun catcher throwing rainbows across the parquet.
A calico cat grooms one paw while sat on the counter next to a steaming teapot shaped like a peony.
The smell of cinnamon and apples wafts from the oven, a crumble baking within.
I pour a cup, and there’s a ring on my finger, then warm arms slip around my waist.
It doesn’t last. A cloud blots out the sun, and I sink. Through the floor, through the soil, into the underground grave of the Shearwater strid while water fills my lungs.
I woke gasping. I would have jerked upright, but a tight, binding arm around my chest held me down.
Kessian stirred, making mumbling, sleepy noises. He had one arm and a leg thrown over me, the smallest of big spoons. Soft, even breaths tickled the back of my neck. Neither of us had a shirt on, and it was like I had my back to a bonfire, warming me through.
“Bad dream?” he mumbled, only half aware.
I’d frozen, disoriented and unsure what to do. It felt so much like that moment in the dream, standing in the kitchen while someone embraced me from behind. That part had felt like a proper dream, the kind where the real world leaked through, but before that—
That had been too real.
I felt the moment Kessian woke up properly. His body went stiff with the awareness of our proximity.
“Shit. Sorry. I’m like a limpet in my sleep.”
“It’s all right. I did have a bad dream,” I said.
“About the strid?” He extricated himself, the air cool where his skin had been pressed against mine.
I turned to face him. It was invasive to know what I now did. I hadn’t asked to, but something had let me see—no, not just see—experience the breakup that had precipitated Kessian’s move to Shearwater.
I didn’t know whether to tell him or not. It was private. When I’d asked, he hadn’t volunteered to tell me. He’d said they were memories he’d rather not revisit, and I’d visited them myself. Probably through the same magic that allowed us to visit the future while bathing in the spring.
Withholding it didn’t seem right, either. Perhaps his abilities were not limited to the spring, or our connection to the strid had connected us. Either way, we ought to investigate how it had happened.
Hesitantly, I asked, “Did you have any dreams?”
“Maybe. A bit fuzzy, though. I don’t really remember. Doesn’t mean we can’t talk about yours, though.”
I stumbled over my words, not sure how to broach the subject. Sorry for the invasion of privacy, but I may have just eavesdropped on what looked to be an extremely painful breakup. Then I remembered the second part of the dream and flushed.
“Oh, I see.” Kessian smirked, shuffling closer. “You know, kinks and sexual fantasies are all very natural. We all have them. And, frankly, I’ve seen some things in my clients’ heads that would curl your hair. Or your toes, depending on your predilections.”
I flushed harder. “It wasn’t that.”
Unless you counted fantasies about being financially stable and cooking apple crumble with your husband in a mortgage-free house a kink.
I didn’t want to marry Kessian—I’d only just met him.
But dreams of domestic bliss had been a staple of my imaginary playpen from the moment I’d left Shearwater.
Something I did all the time, with whomever caught my attention, wherever I happened to be, in order to soothe the pain of never having that sort of reliable, sturdy love in my life.
My chances of it in reality were slim, so imagination was as good as it got.
Kessian read my expression and said, “Oh. Was it particularly vulnerable, then?”
I steeled myself. “Yes … but not for me.”
He looked confused. I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t know how, but I think the dream was more like a memory. Your memory.”