Chapter 4 #2
“I promise to kick your ass.”
He holds my jaw and gaze for one more second, then his grip releases, and he stands back up. The relief that rushes down my neck is only short-lived when the fucking pain of the log still crushing my back flares up again.
“I’m not planning to revisit this,” This Man says quietly, looking down at me with something like disgust. “Do as you wish. Rage. Build your little monsters. Carry on being furious. The promise is already in motion. When it’s fulfilled, you won’t see me ever again.”
“What promise?” My jaw aches from the inside. “What are you talking about? What did she promise you?”
He’s looking at the tree line, and there’s something in the look that is very old and very alone. I’d almost feel something about it if it weren’t for my current predicament and the ghost of his fingerprints still on my face.
“Stay forever in this place. Limit yourself, if that’s what you want. Just think, you have every possibility to build and be in your subconscious, but you can’t even fathom what you could have elsewhere.” He tilts his head, and those green eyes come back to mine. “I pity you, Ridge Wells.”
I open my mouth to tell him where the fuck he can shove his pity when he’s just… gone.
Rude.
A second later, the pressure and pain, which feels like a held breath, is released. Then the ground disappears, and I fall face-first into yellow flowers, a soft carpet of blooms in every direction.
I take a deep breath, the pain in my back no longer, and enjoy the smell that doesn’t exist in the waking world but has always existed in this one.
My clearing on my planet.
The one I’ve been dreaming myself onto since I started this lucid-dreaming thing.
My subconscious comfort zone.
The one I haven’t seen in over a hundred days.
I turn onto my back and stare up at the Milky Way.
This is not the version I brought into Lennon’s dreamscape. This is the original. Lennon only saw the weak copy because I wanted her to see it, to share it with her the way she shared hers with me, but I couldn’t bring her here.
So I brought it to her.
I pick a flower and twirl it between my thumb and forefinger to ground myself in the moment.
Even if the copy was weak, at least it had her in it.
If This Man has really released my subconscious, maybe I can find her now. The pull in my chest is still there, same as before, only directional, no address attached.
I close my eyes, doing what I’ve done a hundred times. Building the intention toward a space, feeling the pull of it, before stepping through. I reach for her kitchen. The big windows. The countertop she was spread out on for me.
Nothing.
Her smell.
Nothing.
Her taste.
Nothing.
I think harder about the line of her jaw, the curve of her mouth, how her eyes pleaded for me, glared at me, and smiled at me.
Her soft blonde hair. The weight of her hand in mine, her breath against my neck, and her citrus fingernails.
I hold all of it as clearly as I’ve ever held anything, and I reach.
The pull says yes, that’s her. That’s exactly her, but it still doesn’t give me the where.
She’s somewhere.
Maybe he did not release me after all?
Maybe this is an illusion?
Another one of his sick tricks.
I open my eyes and reach for the dream architecture.
The first creature comes easily, too many joints and eyes blinking in the wrong order.
Then another. The shadows at the edges peel themselves into shapes that breathe wrong and take up too much room.
I build like I haven’t built in a hundred days, not even in Lennon’s kitchen.
It’s effortless, and it all comes—the whole inventory, whatever I reach for.
All of it works, better than ever.
But it means nothing.
The monsters mill around in the yellow flowers like they’re waiting to be told what to do. I lie back on my back and look at the sky full of stars, then conjure up a lollipop that tastes like sour lemon, but none of this is the point anymore.
The monsters aren’t the point.
The book isn’t the point.
“How could you leave me like this, sweetheart?”
The creatures wait.
The flowers don’t answer.
I make myself wake up, reach for the membrane between dream and waking, and push through it like a door. It takes three attempts before—
I come up, blinking at my bedroom ceiling with the yellow flower smell still in my nose, fading by the second.
I count my fingers.
Five. Normal number, normal shape, all present.
Waking life.
So, if I can’t find her there, how can I find her here?
My phone goes off, and when I reach for it and look at the screen, I see it’s my agent calling. I stare at it through one full ring.
Right. This is apparently what’s happening.
I pick up. “Miller.”
“Ridge. Finally. Why can’t you answer your fucking phone? We need to…”
“I’m not writing the book.”
Silence comes from the other end for at least three heartbeats.
Yeah, I’m shocked as well, buddy.
“I’m sorry?”
“The book.” I turn my head to glance at the shelf with my last published book on it. “I won’t be writing it.”
“Ridge.” Miller’s silence chokes out a reaction of surprise and ends up somewhere between shock and composed as he continues, “Your contract?”
“Yep.”
“Your career?”
“Also aware.”
“You can’t just… fuck. Listen, maybe I can talk to them again, negotiate some more time for you. You’re not the first author with writer’s block. We can…”
“It’s not a block. Not anymore. I just have better things to do.”
A longer silence follows, and I can picture him at his desk with the expression of a man who has worked with difficult writers for twenty years and thought he’d seen the range.
“Better things,” he repeats in disbelief.
“More important things,” I confirm.
“I have stuck my neck out for you three times this year. Told them the block was temporary, that you were worth the wait. If you walk on this contract, I can’t sell that story again. Not for you, and not for the next guy who needs it.”
That should sting more than it does.
“Then don’t sell it.” I shrug. “Tell them the truth. Tell them I’m done.”
“What changed?”
Her. Everything. All of it.
“I’ll call you when I’m less busy, maybe,” I mutter, then hang up.
I lie there for a moment, waiting to feel something, and don’t. That is either a sign I made the right call or a sign something in me has come loose, and I’m not qualified to assess which right now.
Either way, I don’t have time.
I’ve been trying long enough to reach her in the dreamscape alone, and for three nights I’ve hit the same wall. I can feel her, the thread of her like a compass needle that won’t stop pointing north, but I can’t close the gap.
I’ve been running this like a solo excavation, thinking that enough force in one direction from one man will eventually wear through.
But a compass needle doesn’t need to hit harder.
It needs more of them, pointing at the same thing from more places, until triangulation does what one man alone can’t.
More entry points, more of us converging on her from every side we can manage.
Meaning, I can’t do this alone.
I hate that sentence more than most things.
I’ve been doing things alone for years, since the one person who might have known how to help me decided that a friendship with me was a liability and stopped answering. I’ve been building a very comfortable, very functional anger out of it. Apparently, now that’s going to have to change.
But given the big picture, Paul is the easier problem, not because five years of silence is easy, but because he knows the dreamscape and can actually be useful in it from day one.
Derek and the Shaw boy are more complicated. Neither of them can lucid dream. Someone has to teach them before anything else happens.
Apparently, that’s me.
Meaning I have to voluntarily spend sustained time with a twenty-something-year-old who kissed my woman before I managed to.
Fantastic.
I reach for the nightstand, unwrap a lollipop, put it between my teeth, and let the sour hit the back of my tongue.
Then I open my messages with Derek.
He’s been trying to reach me since I locked myself in the apartment after the party. The last thing he sent was a photo of Melanie holding what appears to be a frog, timestamped fifteen minutes ago.
Derek
She found it behind the building. She wants to keep it as a pet. I need backup.
I scroll past it.
Looks like you have a pet frog now, Derek.
We need to teach you lucid dreaming.
Fast.