Chapter 15
Dreams and Lies
JOHANNA
My dream mixes lies with truth.
I shouldn’t be dreaming tonight. While I’ve always dreamed—full-color, multi-sensory affairs, most of which make little sense in the light of day—these plague me most when I’m fraught and not sleeping well or when I’m sleeping alone.
I’ve had two good nights’ rest and am well into a third, cuddled in Corin’s arms.
All the same, a new hallucination sweeps me up.
Hot water laps against my chest as I sink into an almost-full tub. Orange-scented bubbles float on the surface, the bottle sitting on the counter by the sink. It’s a special blend for after-heat recovery, with anti-inflammatory agents and soothing ingredients mixed in.
The dimmable lightbulbs are set on a low level, giving the room an aura of permanent dusk—easy on the eyes.
The tub is long enough that I stretch out fully, yet don’t brush the tips of my toes against the far end.
It’s the one in the main suite that I share with Max, meant to fit two easily and three in a pinch, depending on size.
I rarely fill it up this full, but this time it’s worth it, for the warmth and bubbles ease my aching muscles.
Both doors to the bathroom stand ajar. The bedroom is dark and empty, but periodic buzzing snores resound from the shadowy nest, accessible from bedroom or bathroom.
Max rests in there, fever broken and heat over—or so I hope.
His heats have begun to take place at longer intervals now that he’s in his fifties, shorter and more spiky, with higher highs and longer lows, rather than running a roller coaster around and around for days on end.
Fairly typical for omegas, who never stop having heats as long as they’re healthy, although the odds of pregnancy drop exponentially after fifty.
Still, this particular heat hit him harder than usual.
I had only one alpha to assist, and we’re both worn out.
The smell of hot wax and just-snuffed candles, underscored with the unmistakable musk of alpha, mixes with the orange. The lights shift—this is a dream, after all—flickering as though a dozen orange-scented candles burn along the tub rim.
The alpha sits behind me, ensuring that I lean against warm skin, rather than cool porcelain. I sit within the compass of his legs. His arms press against my sides, hands scooping up bubbles to massage into my breasts and upper chest. Each caress rouses deeper sensations of being cherished.
Turning my head, I smile and whisper thanks.
His head’s no longer as smooth-shaven as when we started.
Grizzled dark stubble grows on the sides to match the once-trim beard, which is getting shaggy.
Deep-set eyes watch me from a face still light brown after nearly two days of solely artificial light.
Nathan Mazarini: lawyer, widower, and alpha—and my accomplice in sating Max.
Wrong! A sharp pang runs through me. Part of me cries out that this is false, untrue, never happened. Yes, Nathan attended the heat. Yes, he started a bath for me, but he didn’t join in.
The dream Nathan paints bubbles on my nipples and whispers kisses along my neck. I absorb the gestures and the warmth they build, making memories to take out on colder, lonelier days.
I push the notion of wrongness away. It’s only a vision, what harm could there be in indulging?
The lights flicker off, then back to the candle-glow. The orange, wax, and alpha scents shift, adding layers of rum and omega.
Max watches from the other side of the tub, resting against a purple cushion. Bubbles hide most of his body. Beneath the waterline, his legs mingle with Nathan’s and mine, but the tub is long enough that he’d have to stretch and point his toes to touch my center.
Short hanks of damp, graying dark hair cling to the sides of his head and hide the tips of his ears, giving him a Spock-like look. One eyebrow quirks upward in a gesture he spent years practicing, further enhancing his resemblance to the science-fiction icon.
It’s a familiar movement, one he deploys most often when viewing behavior he accepts but doesn’t understand—a clear sign that his heat is most definitely over.
His yearly ordeal done, he can forge ahead, free of dread, for ten or more months before starting to plot the who and when of his next.
His shoulders relax rather than hunch up toward his ears.
A smile, relieved or satisfied or some such, plays on his lips.
It’s something else the hallucination gets wrong. I helped Max shower after his heat in lieu of refilling the tub.
Yet this, too, makes embracing the dream worthwhile.
Because I get to see him again: happy and seemingly healthy. In truth, the cancer had probably already started to eat away at him before his heat, though who knows?
Still, this dream version matches the Max I knew long before the end. I drink every detail in, desperate to paint this image of health over the pain-racked, withered visage of his last days and the soulless body in the morgue.
Nathan stops kissing me, but only so he can move his hands upward to massage my shoulders. His fingers find every sore spot, turning me into a moaning pile of goo.
Max laughs. “I thought you’d like each other.”
“You always think I’ll like whomever you select as a heat partner.” I shake a finger at him, but the shaking’s half due to the magic Nathan works on my back. “What’s most important is that you like them enough.”
“I don’t want you to spend the time with someone you don’t like.
Heats are too hard to deal with aggravation so many days in close company.
” Max grabs my feet and massages the soles.
The magic of the dream lets his hands work at the same pace and pressure as Nathan’s.
“We both want the other to be happy—isn’t that half of the recipe for love? ”
“At least half.”
He suddenly stops, twisting to wrap his fingers around my ankles and giving a short jerk to ensure I’m looking at him. “I love you. Always remember that.”
In a blink, the dream changes again.
Max vanishes, leaving just me and Nathan, behind me as before, chest warm against my back.
His legs outside mine, hands resting on my thighs, fingers tracing abstract lines of fire on my skin that the sweet orange-scented bathwater fails to wash away.
My head falls back to rest on his shoulder as he presses another line of gentle kisses along my neck.
“I’ll wait to approach Max for a week or two, then I’ll start courting him if you’re willing.
It’ll take time, but I’m sure I can convince him that he and I can be friends as packmates.
He can keep romancing you—me too, if he wants—because he likes romance.
We’ll romance him back, singly and together.
All the while, I’ll seduce you until we’re both sated.
” Nathan’s lips reach my ear, nose nudging aside my hair to trace the outer rim. “Then we’ll do it again, and again.”
“You’re—” I shake my head, a rush of hope almost immediately drowned in fear and doubt.
“He’s afraid of losing you, but if I go slow and take any objections he offers seriously, eventually, he’ll realize he’s gaining me instead.
” His head bows, forehead against my collarbone, his voice almost muffled by my shoulder.
“If we’d found the two of you earlier, before the rest of my pack died, the three of us would have courted you.
My loves would’ve adored you and Max, both.
They are gone, so I can only offer myself. ”
Rightness and wrongness flood my body, undoing the warmth of the hot water and ripping the dream apart.
That’s how Max’s heat could have ended, but it didn’t. A vision of what I might have wished happened?
When Max fell asleep after, heat broken and body more in need of rest than anything else, I had fumbled my way to the tub alone.
True, Nathan drew a bath while Max worked the last ounce of his heat on my aching body, but he didn’t join me in the tub in real life. He kept several feet away, not wanting to risk accidentally scent marking me and triggering another surprise bout of possessiveness from Max.
Likewise, Nathan never said anything about courting Max so as to seduce me, although desire had shone in his gaze despite the hours we’d already spent in the heat.
We’d exchanged broken apologies for things that weren’t our fault—weren’t anyone’s fault—and then stared at each other across the distance. Him, leaning against the wall as though he needed it to stand; me, curled in the tub with my arms over my chest.
“It’s better I go before he wakes,” Nathan said after the heavy silence had become painful. “I don’t want this to be the end. See you later?”
“Until then,” I’d replied, knowing it wouldn’t happen.
Max chose potential partners for his heats who only tangentially overlapped with his regular circles: distant acquaintances at best, so the odds were against running into them often, if ever.
That way, there was less chance of Max stumbling across a stray reminder of the part of his life he hated most. Only a few heat partners ever came back for a second round.
Occasionally, in the early years, his choices roused hopes that he wouldn’t mind finding someone to be a friend and romantic partner alongside me, someone with whom I could share sexual love as well as romantic—just as Nathan described in the dream—but it never happened.
Max always watched me carefully if the topic of our erstwhile partners arose and showed distinct signs of relief when the subject passed.
As I struggle out of the dream into wakefulness, though, it’s other words the dream Nathan spoke that echo again and again: ‘They are gone.’
Common words, all three, with nothing to make them stand out.
They are gone. Nathan had lost the other members of his pack.
Everyone loses more than one loved person sooner or later. The coincidental phrasing meant nothing, just my sleeping mind borrowing inspiration from life.
Nevertheless, I wake sure as can be that Nathan sent me the roses and book.
Even though he hadn’t seen me again, he cared.