Chapter 21 #2
I glance up at him. “You heard me telling her the same thing, so I don’t know why you’re acting like I need convincing.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I said it before you even showed up.” I look back down at his nail. “I’m not letting go of anything. I’m going to wake her up. Now more than ever, actually, because she said she’s going crazy in the in-between, so…” I press my lips together, “… it’s time for her to come back.”
“It is,” Ridge says finally. “But it’s going to be difficult. Especially with This Man involved.”
The brush pauses. “This Man?”
“I think that’s the guy Tessa’s in love with. You’ve never heard of him?”
“Should I have?”
“He’s one of those things that lives in the overlap between what’s real and what people collectively dream up.
It’s an urban legend.” He keeps his hand still while I work, watching the sky above us.
“There are thousands of reports online. People who’ve never met each other, from completely different countries, describing the same face. Same man. He just… shows up in dreams.”
“He’s what, the sandman?”
Ridge chuckles. “I don’t think he’s that cool. It’s more like—”
“A shared psychosis?”
“That’s what psychologists say, yeah.” His mouth curves slightly. “A… friend of mine has a whole theory about it.” He pulls a flower from the ground beside him and turns it between his fingers. “I don’t buy it.”
“Then what do you think he is?”
Ridge is quiet for a moment, which is unusual enough that I look up from his nails.
“That he’s real. That he can move through dreamscape the way I do, except he’s been doing it longer, he’s better at it, and he doesn’t have the same…” Ridge pauses, choosing the word carefully, “… limitations that we do.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he doesn’t have or doesn’t need a tether. Doesn’t need anything to anchor him or anyone to hold onto. He simply moves, wherever he wants, whenever he wants… which sounds like freedom until you think about what it actually means.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means nothing holds him.” He drops the flower. “Not guilt, love, or consequence. He can be exactly what you need him to be, right up until the moment it suits him not to be.”
Cold moves through me. “And what does he want from Tessa?”
“I think she went looking for something in her dreams, but he found her first.”
“Maybe he’s lonely,” I say quietly, still focused on his nails. I don’t know why I’m defending a man who sounds like a nightmare in expensive shoes, but here we are. “If he’s been in here long enough, maybe he doesn’t want to be alone in it anymore.”
Ridge looks at me.
“I mean it,” I say. “I’d go completely crazy in here if I couldn’t leave. If I didn’t have—” I stop.
If I didn’t have you.
“Hmm,” Ridge says, and his tone has shifted, less dismissive than I expected.
“You think I’m wrong.”
“I think,” he says slowly. “That lonely things can still be dangerous things. More dangerous, maybe.” He watches the flowers moving around us. “A thing that wants company badly enough will do whatever it takes to keep it.” He glances over at me from the corner of his eye.
“So he found her,” I start, trying to sort my thoughts. “And gave her everything she wanted, told her she’d have everything in 5D. But she can’t step into it fully, because of me, and now she’s caught between here and there, and he’s been doing something that she can’t wake up either.”
The flowers move around us in a slow wave, and I focus on keeping my lines clean and my breathing even.
“I don’t think the last part is correct.
She’s been choosing to stay. That’s what I can’t figure out.
” He looks down at me. “Dreams run on desire, Lennon. You can’t trap someone in 4D against their will, not permanently.
No matter how bad the nightmare, no matter how deep the sleep paralysis goes, there’s always a way back.
Your own mind eventually fights for the surface… Unless you stop fighting.”
“She wants to come back,” I argue. “I know she does.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes.” I don’t hesitate. “Underneath everything tonight, that was still Tessa. She’s just…
” I search for the right word, “… confused about what she wants more. She’s been in here so long, she’s forgotten what reality feels like.
That it’s better than what she can dream up.
” I look up at him. “We just have to remind her. Find the thing that’s stronger than what he’s offering her. ”
Ridge says nothing, which is its own kind of answer. Not a comforting one.
I wonder if his mind went to his cousin, as mine did.
“All done,” I say, sitting back and clicking the brush back into the bottle.
He lifts both hands and wiggles his fingers at me.
There are three on one hand and six on the other.
I stare at them. “Those are not—”
“Dreams,” he says sagely.
“Ridge.”
“I was actually thinking more like this.” He turns his hands over once, and when he turns them back, the nails are black and white, not in my clean geometric shapes, but in a more checkerboard pattern.
I look at them. Then at the polish I just spent twenty minutes carefully applying, currently sitting in a neat row beside us.
“You could have done that yourself.”
I have never wanted to throw someone into space more.
He grins, and it’s the most genuinely delighted I’ve seen him look.
“Yep. It’s a dream.” He stands, brushing petals off his jeans, and reaches down to pull me up beside him.
“You can be whoever you want to be in here. Look however you want. Change anything.” His short beard thickens, turns enormous, and spills down his chest, making me laugh.
Then it’s gone, but there’s a mess of short red curls on his head now that are so spectacularly wrong for him that I have to press my hand over my mouth.
“Stop,” I choke out.
“What?” He flicks one of the curls out of his eyes. “Don’t like it? Oh, wait, I know…” He stretches taller, broader. “You like your men tall, right?”
He grows another few inches just to be obnoxious.
“You’re so annoying.”
He shifts again, and suddenly Nevan is standing in front of me. Freckles. Tousled dark blond hair. That stupid sunshine grin, but his eyes are all wrong. Blue.
My face heats anyway at the reminder that Ridge has seen me kiss him in my dream.
“You’re such an asshole, you know that?” I snap and shove him hard, both palms flat against his chest.
He laughs—Ridge’s laugh, low and rough—coming out of Nevan’s mouth, which is deeply unsettling.
Then he flickers back to himself in one smooth, almost lazy motion. Hair settling into the loose bun. Beard trimmed. Dark eyes amused.
And God help me, he’s hot.
“Your turn,” he says.
“Absolutely not.”
“Come on.” He tilts his head. “You’re wasting premium dream real estate.”
I hesitate, but then shrug. “I always wanted to know if strawberry blonde was my color.”
It happens immediately when I think about it, my hair shifting in my peripheral vision, lighter, warmer, and faintly reddish in the starlight. Ridge reaches out before I can look down at it and catches a strand between his fingers, rubbing it once like he’s testing the texture.
My heart does an embarrassing flip, making the dreamscape flicker, barely a tremor, but I feel it. So does he.
His eyes lift to mine, and there’s that smirk again. “No,” he says. “Blonde.” He lets the strand go. “Blondie.”
“Don’t call me that.”
He grins, letting me know he will absolutely continue calling me that.
I turn my hair back without another word, but when I glance down at myself and think about what I could do with my outfit, the old, ugly feeling creeps in. That familiar pull, the one that shows up uninvited in dressing rooms, photographs, and any mirror that catches me from the wrong angle.
Before I can stop myself, my waist pulls in. My stomach smooths. The soft places tighten, reshaping into something smaller. Something prettier.
“No.” His hands are on my face before I even register that he moved. “Don’t.”
“Why?” I ask when he brings my gaze up to his, and I hate that my voice comes out thinner than I meant it to. I hate that I sound caught.
I think he’s going to deflect or make a joke. Call me dramatic, maybe, but he doesn’t.
His thumbs press into my cheeks, grounding me. “There’s nothing there that needs changing,” he says, slower now, like he wants me to hear every word. “Not one fucking thing.”
Everything cracks open in me, and the dream shifts violently around us.
The flowers feel it first. They ripple outward from where we’re standing in a long, slow wave, then bend all at once as if they’re leaning in, petals tilting toward us. The sky above begins to soften at the edges, stars bleeding into each other.
“Breathe. Stay with me, sweetheart.” Ridge’s fingers tighten slightly, like he can feel it too, like he’s trying to hold the edges together—
I wake up gasping, ceiling above me, one hand pressed flat to my sternum.
Shit.
The echo of warm palms against my cheeks.
Cedar and crystallized ginger.
“Not one fucking thing.”
My heart is going to need a minute.
Maybe two.