Chapter 3 #3
“It’s only a theory.”
“Dr. Bennett.” Her voice is careful. “I hired you as a lucid-dreaming therapist because I tried everything else and nothing worked, and because I read my daughter’s journals and know what she was up to before…
all of this. Every person I consulted before you looked at me like I was the one who needed help. I’m all ears for theories.”
I exhale slowly. “There are certain… circumstances where two people can share a dreamscape. The emotional bond between them is strong enough that it’s plausible, maybe even without either of them understanding what they were doing.”
“Is that even possible?”
“It is. Another client was able to step into mine a few years back.”
Ridge kept pushing, night after night. We’d meet in my dreamscape, and he’d tear apart whatever rules we thought were holding the structure in place. He was trying to reach 5D. We both were. For Tessa. To see if the second layer held any trace of what had happened to her, any way in.
I’d approached it methodically and in control, which made it impossible for me to let go enough to step into 5D, even for a moment.
Ridge’s response to that approach was, in retrospect, inevitable.
He pinned me to a table in my dreamscape. Pulled the light and let the dark come, the spiders with it. My personal horror story he’d learned from years inside my head as my patient and my best friend.
He used my deepest fears against me and then screamed at me from somewhere in the dark.
“Let go. Untether. Let go, Paul, or this will eat you alive.”
I knew I could have forced myself awake. I chose not to. For Tessa. To see if it was possible. The dream stopped being mine. It reached past itself, toward something that felt like the edge of a ledge just out of sight.
I made it over. But he was there, waiting.
This Man. Standing in the dark at the edge of what I can only call an ending, with his green eyes and the wrongness of him moving through the air like a drop in temperature, smiling at me.
I woke up screaming inside my head, into paralysis. My body locked, the room full of nothing I could name but couldn’t make leave.
Since then, he’s been everywhere. In the paralysis, the corners. In the dark, I refuse to sit in. He has never let me go. Not in five years.
Not until tonight, apparently.
I don’t know what to do with that yet.
“Well…” Mrs. Vaughn’s voice pulls me back to the now. “My theory is, even if it’s a weak one, that Lennon went to be with her, wherever Tessa is. I think she thought if she were there, Tessa would have company. Maybe that was the idea.”
“Yeah.” I nod. “I think so too.”
“Even if that thought is comforting…” she exhales and turns toward the bed, toward her daughter, “… I didn’t want to say it out loud.
Didn’t want to connect Lennon to any of this.
Because the second I do, it stops being one girl in that bed and becomes two.
Tessa’s been like this for twelve years, and I…
” She swallows hard. “I’m terrified we’ve lost both of them now. Indefinitely.”
“I won’t let that hap—”
My phone lights up on the armrest, and I don’t need to look to know who it is.
The screen has been doing this for three days now, lighting up, going dark, and lighting up again.
A pulse from the ex-best friend I’ve been ignoring before I knew what he was going through.
But there is nothing I can say that fixes this over a phone call at 4:44 a.m. in Tessa Vaughn’s bedroom.
“An emergency?” Mrs. Vaughn asks.
“No.” I pick up the phone. “Ridge Wells. He wants to know how Lennon is.”
That gets her attention. “And what does he have to do with her?”
“I’m not entirely sure.” True enough. “But apparently more than I realized.”
I glance back at the screen.
I thought I knew everything that mattered about my soulmate.
It seems I was wrong about that as well.
“But you’re not answering.”
“I don’t have anything to give him.”
But I have everything to lose.
Mrs. Vaughn is quiet for a moment, her hand resting on the footboard.
She looks at the bed, at Tessa, at Lennon’s open hand on the pillow.
“We know what it feels like,” she says quietly.
“To wait without answers. We know what that kind of silence does to a person. Take his call. Even if all you can give him is nothing.” She squeezes my shoulder, then leaves the room.
The phone stops ringing the moment the door clicks shut, but then immediately starts up again. I let it ring, once, twice. Then answer.
“Ridge.”
A sharp inhale comes from the other side.
“Did she wake up?”
“No.”
A beat of silence.
Then the line goes dead.
I set the phone down on the armrest and do the thing I haven’t let myself do in front of anyone in years. Three days of it, all at once, head in my hands in a room with two women who can’t see me fall apart.
When I finally have a sense of composure, I look up. Lennon’s hand is still open on the pillow, as if still waiting for someone to fill it.
I stand and walk back up to her side and do the only thing I can.
I take it.