8. Elara
Elara
I wake up warm.
Not regular warm. Luxury warm. The kind with weight to it, and I am not opening my eyes, because I have slept — actually slept, the deep kind, the kind I assumed got discontinued sometime in my twenties — and whatever is generating this heat can keep doing it forever.
My pillow is hard.
Not bad hard. Structural. It rises and falls, slow, and under my cheek there’s the steady knock of a heartbeat, and under my palm — my hand is flat on warm skin, skin over muscle that does not give, and when the pillow breathes, the muscle moves.
Interesting. Not my problem. Dreams have their own physics and I don’t make the rules there. In dreams, men are allowed to be built like load-bearing walls, and I am allowed to appreciate the architecture. Those are the rules. I don’t make them.
So I appreciate. My thumb moves a little. Purely structural interest.
Behind me there’s a second body — a wall of one, heat soaking through my shirt from shoulder to hip, breath moving slow in my hair, and a hand settles on my waist like it has always lived there. Heavy. The fingers alone cover half my stomach.
Dream. Obviously. Case closed. Goodnight.
The hand moves. One slow stroke along my side, thumb tracing the bottom of my ribs, and every place it passes reports in, and a voice behind me — low, rough with sleep, directly into my hair —
“Starlight.”
Every system I have comes online at once.
Starlight.
Nobody calls me Starlight. Nobody has ever called me Starlight except — except a man who doesn’t exist, a man I built out of a paperback and cheap wine, a man with silver eyes and thorough hands in a dream I have been aggressively not thinking about, and that man is fictional, and fictional men do not have morning voices, and morning voices do not happen INTO YOUR ACTUAL HAIR—
My eyes snap open.
Facts. I need facts. Fact one. That is a chest. I am on a chest. Fact two. There is an arm across my waist and it is not attached to the chest, which means — I follow it backward, over my own hip, up a forearm absolutely covered in ink, to a shoulder, to a jaw, to —
Rayner. Asleep. Barely. Eyelashes doing a slow confused flutter, hair wrecked, looking like something a museum would guard.
Fact three, late and screaming — the chest is Leif.
I am in a bed. Between them. My hand is — I look at it — my hand is INSIDE Leif’s shirt, flat against his sternum, like it moved there in the night and signed a lease.
The thumb. I moved my thumb. That happened. I was there for it.
I detonate.
The blanket comes with me. Then it changes sides. My foot finds the edge of the mattress, the edge of the mattress declines to be involved, and I go off the end of the bed and come up on the floor with the blanket half-caped around me like a disgraced superhero, pointing.
“YOU.”
Rayner blinks at me. Slow. Soft. “…Morning?”
“YOU. You were — it was YOU.”
Leif is already awake. No stirring, no transition — asleep one second, spectating the next, propped on one elbow like this is being performed for him. I see why Muffin did it.
Asshole.
“You were the guy!” My finger is shaking. I keep pointing anyway. “The dream guy! The — " I gesture at all of him, which takes a while — “the STARS guy!”
And here’s the thing. Here’s what I need everyone to understand about my life now.
He doesn’t deny it.
I’m ready for the denial. I have a whole prosecution loaded, exhibits and everything, and what he does instead is come awake the rest of the way, and look at me standing on their floor in a blanket cape, and his whole face —
His whole face lights up.
“You remembered,” he says.
Like I handed him something. Like it’s a gift.
“That’s not — you don’t get to be HAPPY about — " and then the rest of it lands, the whole dream lands, every extremely detailed minute of it, and my face goes supernova. “Oh my god. How much of that dream were you — what parts were you actually — "
His mouth opens. Honestly. He is going to honestly answer that.
“DON’T.” I hold up a hand. “Don’t answer that. Nobody answer that ever.”
I flee.
I’m in the hallway before the blanket has finished negotiating with me, and I’m yelling before I know who I’m yelling for, except I do know, I’ve apparently always known, because the name that comes out is —
“ERIK!”
His door opens in about a second and a half. Erik, disheveled — actually disheveled, hair in six directions, shirt half-buttoned and wrong by one — with a look on his face like he was prepared to fight something.
“Ella? What—”
“Explain your people.”
He blinks. Down the hall, other doors are opening. Gunnar emerges shirtless, scratching his stomach, tattoos everywhere and clearly furious about being vertical. Brock appears looking suspiciously assembled for this hour, which I am also noting for the record.
“Why,” I say, to Erik, to the hallway, to the building, “was I asleep in a pile of men?”
“You reached,” Leif says.
He has arrived in the doorway behind me, unhurried, sleep-rumpled in a way that is doing things I refuse to think about right now. He says it flat and final, the same voice that spent three hours saying soon and meaning it.
“I — what?”
“In your sleep. You reached for us.”
“I was UNCONSCIOUS.” I pull the blanket tighter, which helps nothing. “Nothing I do while unconscious is admissible. That’s — that’s foundational. That’s day one of being a person.”
Nobody agrees with me. This keeps happening.
Why does this keep happening?
“Okay.” I hold up my hand and start counting, because if the world won’t be reasonable I will at least keep records.
One finger, pointed at Leif. “Cat.” Second finger, Erik.
“Shadow.” Third finger, back down the hall, where Rayner has appeared in the doorway looking exactly zero percent sorry. “Dreams.”
I let the three fingers hang in the air.
“Is there one normal privacy violation left, or have you people collected the entire set?”
Silence. Gunnar’s mouth twitches. I pivot to Brock, because he’s the only one who hasn’t confessed to anything and I need one win this morning.
“You.”
Both hands come up immediately. Palms out. “No dreams. No cats. No shadows.”
“Thank you.” I could cry. “Thank you. Finally. One normal—”
“Mostly.”
“…Brock.”
“What?” He shrugs. “I read people. Not minds — people. Faces, voices, what they mean underneath. And I’ll point out that I didn’t even know you existed until we saw you in the nest, so whatever timeline of crimes you’re building, I’m barely on it.”
He says it like he’s submitting evidence for the defense.
I realize nobody is breathing and it hits me.
“…The what?”
Nobody moves. It’s the dinner table all over again, except now it’s six a.m., half of them aren’t wearing shirts, and every face turns toward Brock — except his. His is on me, and surprise crosses it. Real surprise. Apparently that’s a thing that can happen to him.
He didn’t know I didn’t know.
Or he forgot.
I’m not sure which is worse.
All I know is I need to know now.
“The nest,” I say. “What nest. What NEST, Brock.”
Somewhere to my left, Gunnar makes a sound. A tiny one. The sound of a man clamping down on the funniest moment of his century.
“We may have skipped ahead,” Leif says.
“SKIPPED — " I take a breath. It doesn’t help, so I take another one, and that one doesn’t help either, and fine.
Fine. “Kitchen. Now. All of you. Coffee is happening, and then testimony is happening, and I want the whole of it — the cat, the shadows, the dreams, the nest, whatever Gunnar’s deal is—”
“Rude.”
“I stand by it. I want all of it, because I have been here one day and I still don’t know where here IS, or what any of you actually ARE, and I am done finding out by accident.”
They start moving. Sleepy, chastened, enormous — trooping past me toward the stairs one at a time, and it should feel like winning and instead it feels like the part of the movie right before the map gets unrolled.
Rayner comes last.
He stops in front of me. He’s quiet, and the hallway’s quiet, everyone else’s footsteps going down and away, and up close in daylight his eyes are exactly the color I didn’t make up.
The noise goes out of me all at once.
“You were really there,” I say. “In my dreams. That was really you.”
“Yes.”
No joke. No deflection. Just truth. Like Leif’s answers are true, except warmer.
I should go downstairs. I should be angry. I’m going to be, in a minute, I have it scheduled.
“How long?”
“Years.”