Ex Somnis (Lucid Longing Duet #2)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Nevan

My gaze drops to Paul’s hand at the small of Lennon’s back.

Stupid.

I’m so fucking stupid.

I helped with that. Stood in the inn kitchen, told him to take her out, because she deserved someone who would show up with flowers and a plan. And he did. I was glad and meant it.

I was glad for her.

I am glad for her, and yet I kissed her anyway.

My face feels weird. Like… not there. Cold maybe. Or maybe my brain has shut a few things down for efficiency.

Can’t fuck it up worse if you can’t feel it, right?

I had my hands on her face. She was leaning into them, and I thought…

There it is.

That’s the problem.

I thought.

I came to a stop outside the inn, finding Lennon in her yellow dress, with Paul’s hand still splayed on the small of her back, and someone in a wheelchair beside them. It takes me an extra second to place him because I never would have expected him here.

Ridge Wells.

I haven’t seen him since before the logging accident took him off the yard and apparently out of every place I might have found him if I’d kept looking, and I did, for a while, before the silence made it clear he didn’t want to be found.

He looks different.

The same jaw and dark eyes, his hair, which is longer now, is half up, but the rest of him is different.

The wheelchair, sure, but also the harder set of his mouth.

Something in his eyes that wasn’t there when he was the person who made long shifts shorter by having opinions about everything and never once making me feel like my opinions were worth less than his.

I went looking for you, I think, which is a strange thing to think about a guy who was an almost friend, but apparently, tonight is a night for strange things.

He’s looking at Lennon, too, in a way that tells me everything I didn’t ask to know.

Cool.

Cool, cool, cool.

“Lemon.” I make myself take the last few steps and reach her, but my panting has nothing to do with the distance I just crossed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have kissed you like that. I didn’t mean to make you run, please just—”

“You kissed her?” Paul and Ridge ask in perfect unison.

Fuck.

Right. Yeah. Let’s announce it to the room. That helps.

I drag a hand over my face, laugh once under my breath because, of course, I picked tonight to lose my mind completely.

“You fucking kissed her?”

“Why would you do that?”

Yeah, no, fair questions.

I’m seriously considering walking straight back inside, grabbing the rest of the banana cake, and setting myself on fire with the candle, because Lennon is looking up at me.

Her nose is pink from the cold, and her eyes are doing that thing where they’re wet, but she hasn’t decided yet whether she’s going to cry.

My fingers have memorized exactly how much pressure it takes to smooth out the scrunch on her nose, and they want to do it now, automatically, before I’ve chosen to, before I’ve remembered that I’m the one who put the scrunch there in the first place.

I did that.

I made her look like this.

Paul’s hand falls from Lennon’s back when she takes a few steps away from him.

“You kissed her?” His clinical calm is fraying at the edges, and what’s underneath it is not calm at all. “You know very well that I’m dating her. Why would you—”

“Oh, you’re not dating her,” Ridge cuts in pleasantly, which is somehow worse than if he’d been sharp.

Neither of them is looking at me anymore.

Small mercies.

“She’s mine,” Paul states, and the words come out stripped of everything professional, just bare, certain, and furious underneath.

Something like fury stirs up inside me, too, but I shut it down.

“She is not yours.” Ridge’s voice stays flat. “And who said you were dating? Maybe that’s all in your head.”

Paul looks at me, but I shrug. Because yeah, they’re dating. I know they are.

I made that happen.

Because it was the right thing to do, and she deserves someone like him. All of that was still true before I put my hands on her face underneath the fairy lights and felt her lean into it. I knew exactly what I was doing.

I did it anyway.

Stupid.

“She invited me,” Paul throws back.

“Yeah.” Ridge almost smiles. “Me too. So am I dating her, too, by your standards?”

Paul speaks the next words through clenched teeth. “She asked me as a date. I bet you’re just here as a friend. Come to think of it, she never even mentioned you to me. Can’t be that significant a friendship.”

My gaze drifts to Lennon, finding her talking to Derek a few feet away. I would rather be in that conversation, but the two of them have arranged themselves into a wall, and I can’t easily get past them to her. Not without drawing the heat of their glares again.

“Oooh. The good Dr. Bennett has claws.” Ridge makes a sound that is almost a laugh. “She really does mean something to you.”

“Ridge,” Paul warns.

“I’m just noting the gap between your usual register and whatever that was. You’re a composed person, Paul. I’ve seen you composed under considerable pressure. And yet… you have no idea.”

“No idea about what?” he grits out.

That brings my full attention back to this conversation, because yeah. About what?

“What your precious Lennon gets up to during her nights.”

Paul stills for a beat. “What did you just say?”

“I said,” Ridge repeats, visibly enjoying this. “That you don’t know what she does when she’s sleeping. What she’s been doing. Where she’s been going… who she’s been with.”

What the fuck is he even talking about?

“If you’re implying…”

“I’m with her almost every night.” The pleasant voice is gone now. “Inside her head, her dreamscape.”

“You don’t have access to her dreamscape. The mechanics don’t allow for that kind of intrusion unless she’s…” Paul’s eyes go wide before he turns away from both of us. His hand goes to the back of his neck, pressing there, and I watch him absorb something that is apparently very significant.

I understand none of it.

“What is happening?” I ask, but neither of them answers.

“Unless she’s choosing to?” Ridge’s mouth does something that isn’t quite a smile.

“Ridge…” Paul glares when he turns his attention back to him, “… what did you do?”

“Me? I just showed her places. Held her hand… made her come.”

Paul makes a sound that is almost a snarl.

Made her… wait.

What?

“Fuck, man. What are you even talking about?”

Ridge glances at me, a measuring look, like he’s deciding whether I’m worth explaining things to, but I have been decided about by people my whole life. I’m used to coming up short, so I look back at him and wait.

Then a car engine turns over, and every single one of us turns.

I know that sound. Of course, I do.

That stupid little cough before it catches.

Her Beetle.

Shit.

She’s bolting.

Through the windshield, I can see her face with that look she gets when she’s made a decision, and it’s not up for discussion. I’ve seen it in the kitchen when she’s decided how a dish should be, and nothing is going to change her mind. I’ve always liked that look on her, that certainty.

I don’t like it now.

“Lemon.”

Her eyes find mine, and I don’t know what she sees on my face, but there’s something else on hers now. Not anger, which would be easier, but sadder, something that looks like I’m sorry and I can’t at the same time, and then the headlights sweep the lot.

She’s gone.

The space she left is enormous, cold, and shaped exactly like something I did to myself.

I thought the fairy lights, “Yellow” by Coldplay, and Jasper’s thumbs-up in the doorway were the universe giving me permission. The universe was not, in fact, giving me permission. It was doing what it does, absolutely nothing, and the permission was my wishful thinking dressed up as fate.

Stupid.

I should have learned my lesson years ago.

The universe hates me.

“This is your fault,” Ridge accuses behind me, already getting into it with Paul again.

“My fault?” Paul’s voice is sharp. “If you hadn’t been lurking around in her sleep like some kind of…”

This is my fault.

Not their fault. Mine.

“Guys.” Derek steps up between Ridge and Paul, the urgency making them shut up and take note. “I think she’s about to do something stupid, but I don’t understand what.” He looks at Ridge. “She said she is lucid dreaming, and that you could too. That you should teach me.”

Lucid dreaming.

The bookshelves in our living room flash through my head.

My mom’s books, rows and rows of them, everything from dream interpretation to astral projection to things I didn’t have words for when I was ten years old, eating cold leftovers while she slept the afternoon away chasing something I couldn’t reach her in.

It’s hard to swallow past the lump in my throat.

Lennon has a whole part of herself I don’t know about.

No. That’s not right.

I push that thought down hard.

I know exactly who she is.

I just didn’t know everything.

Paul pales, then jolts into action. “I think I know where she’s going.”

“Yeah?” Ridge calls after him. “And where would that be?”

“Tessa,” Derek says quietly beside me. “I think she’s going to Tessa.”

Tessa Vaughn?

“Although,” Derek continues. “I’m not sure if she meant physically, or…”

“Or in her dreams,” Ridge mutters.

I look between Paul, halfway to his Mercedes, and then Ridge and Derek. I’m the only person in this parking lot who is completely lost. I’ve been completely lost before and know what that feels like, but this version is worse.

“This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t kissed her.” It sounds like what I was just thinking, but it came out of Ridge Wells’ mouth in a very accusing tone.

I look down at him. “I know.”

“Fuck your ‘I know.’ I had a plan, boy. A working plan. I could have her when her eyes are closed. You could be what she needed when they’re open.

Everyone gets what they want, and nobody has a crisis in a parking lot.

” He gestures at me. “And then you jump the gun because you can’t read a room, which is fucking stupid. ”

“You are not stupid. Not even close.”

Lennon’s voice in my head, from earlier tonight, before the kiss, when she looked like she was ready to fight every single person who had ever called me slow, dumb, or not worth it.

“This whole town doesn’t know shit.”

I close my eyes for exactly one breath.

Yeah, baby. Maybe. But I kissed you, and you ran, so right now it very much looks like they all might have a point.

“Ridge,” Paul calls from where he’s standing next to his open car door.

“Get your shit together and leave him alone. I’m driving to the Vaughn mansion.

” His voice is back to the controlled version.

He looks at Ridge, and something passes between them that has years in it, more years than tonight. “Come if you want.”

Ridge glances at Derek beside me, who looks more than a little shaky.

“Nah, you go check the Vaughn mansion. Derek and I will check her apartment,” Ridge replies, and Derek exhales a long breath.

Then Ridge angles his wheelchair toward me and, with obvious reluctance, says, “I’m an asshole.”

“No shit,” I mutter.

He almost laughs. It’s a small sound, and it’s gone fast, but it’s there. “Anyway. Are you coming?”

I look at him, then at the road where her taillights were, the empty parking lot, then turn toward the fairy lights still going through the inn windows, and the party that doesn’t even know anything has happened.

“No.” I take a breath. “You’re an asshole, but you’re right.”

I walk back toward the inn.

The door swings shut after I step inside, cutting them out, and the party wraps around me again. Someone in a skeleton costume asks if there’s more beer. I point at the bar without stopping and keep walking.

As I make my way to the back hallway, the noise of it all recedes.

Jasper finds me, or I find him, hard to say. He has his tarot deck out, fanning the cards between his hands the way he does when he’s trying to calm himself down, which is how I know he already knew, or knew something, and has been standing here waiting.

He clocks my face, and the cards go still. “You okay?”

I shrug. “Sure.”

Just done something stupid as usual.

“Promise?” he asks.

I look past him at the kitchen door, at the small square window in it, and the warm, yellow light coming through from the inside.

I don’t promise anything.