Chapter 6 #2
Reluctantly, I hand him the book, and without hesitation, he takes it, finds the page I’ve been stuck on for three days, and starts reading. His voice is the same one he uses for tarot readings, like the information is obvious and the only question is whether you’re ready to receive it.
“Reality checks…” he reads, “… are the foundation of lucid dreaming. They are small, repeated tests you perform throughout the day to determine whether you are dreaming or awake. The goal is to make them habitual, so habitual that you perform them automatically in a dream, at which point the anomalous result triggers lucidity.”
“What does anomalous mean?” I ask, feeling dumb for having to in the first place.
“Weird,” he says, without looking up. “Wrong. Different from what it should be.”
He keeps reading.
“Common reality checks include counting your fingers. In dreams, it frequently produces an incorrect number.”
She did that.
The garden drops half an inch.
Not really. Obviously not really, but my stomach doesn’t know that.
“Nev.” Jasper side-eyes me. “You okay?”
“She was doing that. That night. Before she ran.” I look at my hand, spread flat on my knee. Five fingers. “I thought she was freaking out about the kiss.”
“She might have been doing both.” Jasper shrugs before he starts back up again.
“Reading a passage of text twice, which shifts between readings in dreams. Checking the time on a clock or phone, which changes unpredictably in dreams. Perhaps the most reliable method is to pinch your nose closed with your fingers and attempt to breathe through it. In waking life, this is impossible. In a dream, the breath comes through regardless.”
I lift my fingers to my nose, pinch it closed, and try to breathe in.
Nothing.
The cold is real, the swing is real, and Jasper is sitting next to me, trying not to laugh.
“Waking life,” I say when I let go of my nose.
“Well, what else?”
“It could’ve been a dream.”
“You’ve been awake since four. You would know.”
“Or maybe, all of this is just woo-woo after all.” I drop my hand.
“You have to believe in it a little…” Jasper smiles, then glides a hand through his messy curls, “… for it to work. If you do the nose thing and then immediately tell yourself it doesn’t matter, it won’t matter. The point is to actually mean it. You have to want to lucid dream to be able to do it.”
“The woo-woo philosophy strikes again.”
“It’s not woo-woo. It’s just attention.” He sets the book on his knee. “You have to be willing to notice things. Most people aren’t.”
I think about the fairy lights, the swing moving, and her hands on my face.
I noticed all of that.
A lot of good it did me.
“I fell in love with my best friend,” I admit, because I have to tell someone.
Jasper exhales slowly through his nose. Not surprised. “Well, you didn’t even have a chance.” He shrugs.
“Cheers, Jasp. Really helping.”
“No.” He turns to look at me properly. “I mean, you literally didn’t have a chance.
She was already written for you before you met her.
” He reaches into his leather jacket. The cards are there.
Of course, they are, and he pulls the deck out and holds it without opening it.
“She’s fated in your cards and in your stars, Nev.
The two of you. I saw it the week she arrived, and I’ve been watching it confirm itself every single day since. ”
“That’s the woo-woo talking.”
“Did you know you were both born at four forty-four in the morning?”
I frown at him. “What does that—”
“Four forty-four,” he cuts me off. “You and Lennon. Same time of birth.”
“Lots of people are born at the same time. That doesn’t mean…”
“It’s an angel number.” He turns the deck over in his hands. “The universe doesn’t do that by accident, Nev. You don’t share a birth time with your fate by accident.”
“My fate,” I repeat.
“Your fate.”
She’s way too good to be mine.
“Then why?” I question carefully. “Is she dating someone else?”
Jasper shifts. It’s a small movement, barely anything, but I know every version of Jasper that exists, and this one is the version that has information he’s working out how to deliver.
“Jasp.”
“Okay.” He looks at his cards. “So, there are three significant connections in her chart.”
I wait.
“Three,” he says again, like I might not have heard it.
“I heard you.”
“Like, three parallel—”
“Jasper.”
He looks up. “You. And if I didn’t know better… Paul Bennett and the other guy who were outside the inn when shit went down.”
“You saw that?”
“I may have peeked. I still need their moon signs to confirm,” he adds quickly. “Technically. So it’s not one hundred percent… but yeah. I’m pretty sure.”
“Three,” I breathe out.
“Three.” He nods.
“What does that even mean?”
“It means…” he says carefully, “… that she has three fated connections. Three people she’s meant to—”
“How? She’s with Paul now, and then Ridge, and then maybe eventually I get my turn?” I do the math without meaning to. At least I’ll still be somewhat young when the other two have saggy balls. “When I’m what, forty-five?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Not after each other. Now. All of you. Now and always.”
Why would she need me if she already has them?
The thing about growing up, how I grew up, is you get very good at making yourself smaller than the space you’re in.
You learn to need less, ask for less, take up less, because the alternative is needing something from someone who doesn’t have it to give.
That’s a kind of pain I stopped letting myself feel somewhere around age eleven.
I stopped wanting things I couldn’t have.
Stopped asking.
Stopped hoping for the things that were never going to be mine.
Somewhere in all of that, I think I stopped believing I was the kind of person who gets chosen.
I’m the guy people call when the sink leaks, the car won’t start, or when there’s a body-sized problem, and no one else wants to carry it.
Chosen is different.
Chosen means they didn’t need the nearest pair of hands.
And then she arrived and looked at me like I was worth looking at.
She made me banana bread with sprinkles because she heard the thing I didn’t say.
She bit my arm when she was angry on my behalf, pressed her thumb over my stretch marks, and said they look pretty without making a thing of it.
Somewhere in all of that, I started believing again.
And then I kissed her.
And she ran.
And now Jasper is telling me she might be mine after all, but also theirs.
It’s either the most generous thing the universe has ever offered me or the cruelest joke it’s ever played.
I don’t know if I know how to share her. Not because I’m territorial. I’ve never been possessive about anything in my life. I’ve always had to share everything, including space and what little attention we had.
That’s not the problem.
The problem is I’ve only started to believe I get to have her at all.
I don’t know if I’m big enough to hold that and the rest of it at the same time without one of them collapsing. Which is funny, considering I hit my head on doorframes for a living.
I look at the garden.
At the tree.
At the fairy lights.
Three.
I think about the parking lot. About how Ridge looked at her. The way Paul’s hand was at the small of her back. How Ridge wasn’t surprised by Paul or me being there, as if he’d already been doing some version of this calculation, and I was the last variable.
Everyone gets what they want, Ridge said. “I could have her when her eyes are closed. You could be what she needed when they’re open.”
I thought that was him being his weird self.
Maybe it wasn’t.
“God, I’m so damn stupid.”
“Don’t,” Jasper says immediately.
I look at him. “What?”
“Don’t call my brother stupid. I’ll hex you for it.”
“Rule two. We back each other’s hexes. No questions asked.”
I huff at the thought of Lennon’s rule, and my heart squeezes painfully.
“Does she know that?” I ask. “That she’s got three guys in her stars?”
Because if she knew and still ran from me?
“I may have introduced the idea to her, and she’s starting to figure it out.” Jasper tilts his head. “I think she’s known longer than she’s let herself know. She just needs…”
“Time.”
“And someone to tell her it’s okay.”
Is it okay, though?
“Are you okay?” Jasper looks genuinely worried. “What does it feel like, having this information?”
I honestly think about it.
“Like my life is falling apart.” I give him a fake smile. “Also, like maybe I should probably eat something.”
Damn, I’m craving lemonade and some muffins.
Jasper points at me. “That part is probably science.”
“Don’t ruin your brand.”
He chuckles, then turns serious again. “You know, sometimes, when it feels like things are falling apart, they’re actually aligning.”
I look at my brother’s blue eyes with his tarot cards, rings, and absolute bone-deep certainty about my love life.
“I’m going to need…” I say slowly, “… a lot more information.”
“I know.” He picks up the book. “Should I keep reading?”
“Yeah.” I lean back in the swing. “Please do.”