Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Ridge
The Douglas firs stretch up so high they could be holding up the sky.
The air smells like sap and sawdust, and Marcus is bitching at me about something—probably my form, my attitude, or the fact that I exist.
“You’re not hooking it right,” he says, gesturing at the chains I’m securing around a massive log. “You want this thing rolling when we lift it?”
“I’ve done this a hundred times,” I mutter, tugging the chain tighter. “Maybe focus on your own shit.”
“My shit is making sure you don’t get yourself killed doing stupid—”
“I’m fine, Boss.”
He opens his mouth to argue, but the radio on his hip crackles with static, and someone’s voice cuts through. He turns away, pressing it to his ear, and I go back to the chains.
The log is huge. Old growth, probably standing here longer than either of us has been alive. My hands work automatically, muscle memory taking over as I thread the chain through the hook and pull it taut. The metal bites into my palms, but I don’t really feel it.
Above us, the crane groans as it shifts position, and Marcus waves his hand in some signal I’m supposed to understand. I step back, giving the log space as the chains go tight.
Everything happens fast after that.
The crane lifts, the log rises about three feet off the ground, and then something snaps.
Not the chain, but something higher up, something in the rigging, maybe, or the anchor point, I don’t know.
I don’t have time to figure it out because the log is swinging, pivoting mid-air as if it’s been let off a leash.
“Move!” Marcus shouts, but I’m already moving, my boots slipping in the wet dirt.
Not fast enough.
The log comes down hard, slamming into my lower back with a force. I go down face-first into the ground, the weight pressing me flat, stealing every molecule of air from my lungs.
But there’s no pain.
I blink against the dirt, my cheek pressed into the cool earth, and I try to process that. A log this size should have broken me in half and crushed my spine into powder. I should be screaming through every nerve ending I have.
But I feel nothing.
Huh?
“Ridge!” Marcus is there, crouching beside me, hands on the log as if he thinks he can lift it himself. “Fuck, fuck, okay… the crane broke. Maybe I can… hold on.”
He pulls, grunting with effort, but the thing doesn’t budge. Not even an inch.
“I can’t…” He’s panting now, panic climbing into his voice. “I need help. I’m getting help. Don’t move, okay? Just… don’t move.”
I would if I could, dickhead.
Marcus crashes through the underbrush, leaving me pinned under several thousand pounds of Douglas fir with nothing but the sound of my own breathing for company.
Except…
The back of my neck prickles, that feeling of being watched, even though the forest is silent around me.
I try to pull myself forward, digging my fingers into the dirt and dragging, but my legs won’t cooperate.
They’re simply there. Dead weight. I reach out with my right hand, trying to find purchase on a root, a rock, or anything, and that’s when I see it.
Three fingers.
I stare at my hand—at the place where my pinky and ring finger should be—and my brain stutters to a stop…
… I’m dreaming.
“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
The colors deepen, the sounds crystallize, and the pain hits like a freight train.
It explodes up my spine, white-hot and all-consuming, radiating out from the point of impact until every nerve in my body is screaming. I suck in a breath that turns into a scream, then another, my hands clawing uselessly at the dirt as my back tries to tear itself apart.
“Fuck!” I gasp, then scream again because screaming is the only thing that feels as if it might help, even though I know it won’t do shit. “Fuck, fuck, fuck…”
I’m lucid, which means I should be able to do something about this.
Fix the crane, summon help, or dissolve the log into mist, but when I reach for that control, it’s like grabbing at smoke.
The dream won’t respond. It just sits there, pinning me down and making me feel every ounce of pain I felt eight years ago.
Like the last hundred days of blockage of either dreamless sleep or being funneled into this—this memory, this trap—I’m unable to change a goddamn thing.
“Great,” I pant out, biting back tears of pain and frustration. “Another night in the torture chamber of my subconscious. Fantastic.”
I try to think of anything else that distracts me from the pain flaring in my back, but of course, my mind spirals backward, dragging me through the aftermath of the worst day of my life, which I’ve relived a thousand times by now.
The hospital. Fluorescent lights burning into my skull while doctors used words like compression fracture or incomplete spinal cord injury. Surgeries. So many fucking surgeries. Metal rods and screws holding my spine together like some kind of nightmare IKEA project. Physical therapy, years of it.
And Paul.
Nope, not thinking about him now. Even if he’s the only person who could ever talk me down from this spiral.
Even if he was the one who saved me when this nightmare plagued me night after night for the first two years after—this exact dreamscape, this exact moment, replaying on loop until I thought I’d lose my mind.
He showed me how to turn lucid, stand up to it, take control, and rewrite the script.
But now I can’t seem to do that anymore, not since Miller got that contract, and I wanted to tell Paul about it and This Man…
Fuck.
Miller.
The other nightmare. The one I can’t wake up from. I need to give him something soon, produce anything, or my publisher will lose patience, my savings account will bleed out, and my entire identity as a writer will crumble because I can’t do the one thing that makes me worth anything.
Tears spike hot behind my eyes, and I take a deep breath, holding it until my lungs burn.
It’ll work out. I have her now. She’ll let me work in her mind.
Lennon will let me…
A gasp cuts through the pain, and then she’s here, dropping to her knees in front of me, blonde hair falling around her face, blue eyes wide with horror.
“Ridge!”
I stare at her, my brain struggling to process. I check my hand again, still three fingers. Did thinking about her conjure a projection?
Is my subconscious really that desperate?
I look back at her and try to push, willing her to dissolve, morph, or do literally anything that proves she’s not real, just part of this nightmare, but she stays solid.
“You’re here?” My voice comes out wrecked, barely more than a whisper.
She reaches for the log, trying to lift it with her bare hands, and I hiss as the movement sends fresh agony tearing through me.
“I’m sorry,” she chokes out, her voice breaking as she pulls at it again. “I’m sorry.”
“Sweetheart,” I grit out through clenched teeth. “This is a dream. Stop trying to be a hero and just think it away.”
She freezes, then moves to kneel next to my head again. I look up to find her eyes squeezed shut, and I feel the shift in the air, that texture of dream fabric bending to will.
The log vanishes.
Fucking finally.
The pressure releases all at once, and I roll onto my back, sucking in air that doesn’t have to fight past several thousand pounds of Douglas fir.
“Goddammit,” I pant out, staring at the canopy of trees that shouldn’t exist. “This shit is getting old.”
“Are you okay?” Lennon leans over me, and her hands come up to cradle my face.
The moment her palms press against my cheeks, that familiar grounding sensation floods through me, and the pain that was screaming through my spine dulls almost to nothing.
My eyes flutter shut without permission, and I lean into the touch before I can stop myself. Her thumbs stroke along my cheekbones, and for one dangerous second, I let her.
“What kind of nightmare is this?” she whispers, her voice so soft with concern that it makes my brain catch up.
My eyes fly open, and I shove down whatever the hell that moment was.
“It’s called my life,” I mutter, pulling back from her hands even though every instinct is screaming at me not to.
I push myself up to sitting, forcing my brain to cooperate with the fact that this is a dream, and I can move however the fuck I want. But the relived trauma is still simmering under my skin like a low-grade fever I can’t shake.
And the fact that she just witnessed me at my lowest point is clawing at something vicious in my chest. Nobody sees me like that. Not anymore. Not since the hospital, and since I learned how to bury it deep enough that it only surfaces when I’m unconscious.
But she was here. She saw.
She’s still kneeling in the dirt beside me, watching me with an expression I’m deliberately not analyzing.
We haven’t talked about anything that happened the last few nights.
We’re apparently not talking about it now either.
“You’re in my dreamscape,” I say instead.
“I am?” Her eyes go wide. “Shit. I am.” She sits back on her heels. “I went to bed after the tea and tried to do what Tessa said. I was thinking very hard about being lucid, intention, and…” She stops. “I wanted to see you. So we could talk. Figure our shit out.”
The thought of her falling asleep thinking about me sends warmth spiraling through my ribs that I’m absolutely not unpacking right now.
“I’m rambling,” she finishes, her cheeks flushing pink.
It’s almost cute.
“Little bit,” I say, but there’s no bite to it.
Christ, what is wrong with me?
“Are you mad at me?” she asks. “Because of last night. The pedestrians.”
“The pedestrians were your fault,” I agree. “But no.”
She exhales, and her shoulders drop. “I was going to apologize. For that. And for…” She stops again, glancing down at the dirt. “Other things.”
I look at her. “Other things?”
“You know what other things.”
I absolutely do not know what other things.
If someone should apologize to someone here, it would be me.
“I’d like to hear you say it.”
Her head comes up. “Is this you being annoying on purpose?”