Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ridge
It’s easier to find Derek than I expected.
I don’t know if dream sharing is getting easier because I’ve been doing it so often lately, or because Derek is my cousin and something in my DNA could track the genetic pieces we have in common all the way to him.
Either way, one second I’m reaching, and the next I’m standing at the edges of his dreamscape.
Derek is having a good dream. A beach at sunrise. Warm pastel light, salt in the air, and waves rolling in soft enough to sound fake. Dream-Melanie is holding his hand, barefoot in the dinosaur pajamas she was wearing a few hours ago.
He’s smiling in a way I haven’t seen in a long time.
It’s sweet enough to make my chest hurt.
But then there’s Tessa Vaughn, holding Melanie’s other hand. I can’t hear what she’s saying to Derek, but I can see the easy back-and-forth of it, her turning to Derek to say something and him laughing, his shoulder hitching. She looks almost like she does in Lennon’s dreams, but not quite.
I study her more closely.
Derek’s subconscious did a hell of a job with her, considering he hasn’t seen her awake in twelve years.
But it’s still not her.
Dream projections always have something missing once you know what to look for. Their awareness bends around the dreamer. Everything this Tessa says, every movement she makes, exists because Derek needs it to.
This version of her is built from longing.
Yesterday, we spent hours of me trying to compress years of accumulated lucid-dreaming knowledge into one afternoon at my apartment, which is the same as trying to teach someone to ride a bike by explaining the physics of gyroscopic motion.
Melanie sat cross-legged on my floor with coloring pencils and produced what she insisted was a horse, but looked more like an ottoman, while I walked Derek through the basics.
Reality checks, intention setting, and holding onto awareness while falling asleep without gripping so hard the dream collapses under you. Derek absorbed all of it with that focus he has that says he already decided he’s going to succeed before he even started trying.
An infuriating quality.
A useful one too.
Dream-Tessa laughs at something Dream-Melanie says, and it’s close enough to real that I feel it like a splinter.
But it’s not real enough.
Derek deserves to have her back.
He needs to meet the actual one.
I walk toward them, and the dreamscape registers me immediately. A ripple goes through the architecture. Dream-Tessa turns her head a fraction, not quite looking at me. Derek doesn’t look at all, still caught in the current of it, laughing at something his daughter did.
I step up to him. “Derek.”
He turns and smiles at me, slightly uncertain. “Hey, Ridge. You can walk?”
Ouch.
“Question it.”
“I do, I mean, good for you, man, but I thought it was permanent.”
“No. Count your fingers.”
The smile slips. “What?”
“Count them. Right now.”
He looks down at his hand, and his brow creases before he looks up at me with wide eyes again. “This is a dream.”
The moment he says it, the dreamscape folds, the horizon going soft at the edges before the whole thing dissolves, and I’m catapulted back into my yellow flowers.
Ah, fuck.
I woke him up.
I sit up with a sigh and let a hand run over my face.
I know Derek will get there, the lucid dreaming. He’s stubborn enough, and he cares enough. In my experience, those two things eventually get you most of the way there. But this sucks. Big time.
I’ll check back tomorrow night.
It gives me the time to do the thing I was dreading.
I close my eyes and think about Paul, which is loaded.
Paul’s dreamscape is familiar territory. I know its texture. I know his subconsciousness, or at least the part of it I used to have access to.
The last time I stepped into that space invited, I made a mistake bad enough that he ended our friendship over it.
The next time I stepped into it uninvited, I spent a hundred days trapped under a fucking log.
So my history with Paul Bennett’s subconsciousness is, objectively, not stellar.
I wonder if he’ll even let me in now.
But Lennon is somewhere unreachable, and Paul is in that Vaughn mansion or wherever he’s set himself up. He is the only person in this situation who has the knowledge base to be actually useful. Meaning, I need him.
It means I have to want something from the last person I wanted something from.
Fantastic.
I think about the set of his jaw when he’s decided something, and there’s no point arguing anymore. The way he wears his glasses lower on his nose than he should, something I used to point out constantly.
He never fixed it.
I think about Paul and how he does nothing quickly and everything intentionally, and how it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that those weren’t the same thing.
Dr. Bennett.
The only person I’ve ever met who makes patience feel like a threat.
Paul Bennett.
Dark eyes behind glasses.
Paul.
The pull catches the gravity of a person I know well enough that my subconscious can find him in the dark. Something slips open at the edges of my awareness, and I open my eyes to brightness.
The apartment that is his dream comfort zone is enormous, even bigger than I remember.
White walls, white furniture, and white shelves. It’s so aggressively white it would feel clinical if the place weren’t being actively overrun by plants.
Not a few plants.
Plants.
Fucking everywhere.
On every surface, climbing up the walls on small hooks, hanging from the ceiling in terracotta pots, and crowding the windowsills three deep.
The whole place smells green. Damp soil, sunlight, and that expensive laundry detergent Paul always uses.
And there he is in the middle of it all with a watering can in one hand, moving methodically from plant to plant.
“I was wondering when you’d come by.” His voice is completely level. No surprise in it, not even a fake surprise.
“Still dreaming about watering plants, I see.”
“I find it calming.” He tips water carefully into the next pot. “I’ve heard other people prefer building monsters.”
I lean against the doorway. “Do they?”
“Mm.” Another plant. Still not looking at me. “The kind horror novels are about. Read some good ones lately? I have, by R.B. Wells.”
My stomach drops so hard it’s honestly embarrassing.
He didn’t talk to me for five years. He didn’t answer even one of my calls.
But he read my books?
I’m standing in his dream comfort zone, and he’s telling me he read my books like five years of not knowing whether your best friend was alive and functional, and getting out of bed in the morning is a normal gap in communication, and he read my books.
That absolute bastard.
I shrug against the doorway. “I read an awful romance recently.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Found it on Lennon’s e-reader.” I click my tongue. “That woman has genuinely terrible taste in her reads. Though I will say she has very nice dreams.”
The watering can stills.
Gotcha.
“Very vivid. Very detailed,” I continue. “You know how some dreams just really commit to the sensory experience.”
“Ridge.” His voice has dropped a register.
“I’m just saying. For someone with such questionable literary standards, she’s got a surprisingly…”
“You will stay away from her.” He’s still calm when he says it, still measured.
And still not looking at me.
And that, more than the warning itself, is what irritates me the most.
“Or what?” I ask.
The apartment hums softly around us. Leaves rustle against each other. Somewhere above us, one of the hanging pots creaks faintly on its hook, which means something is slipping under the surface, whether he wants it to or not.
“Or what, Paul?”
He completely turns away from me. It’s not dramatic or angry, but the movement of a man deciding the conversation is over and physically enforcing it. Something in me snaps so fast I don’t even feel it happen.
No.
Absolutely fucking not.
You do not get to turn your back on me again.
The darkness tears loose before I consciously reach for it, a black streak slicing across the apartment toward him.
Paul sidesteps without even looking. He shifts a step to the left while water continues pouring into the plant.
The shadow smashes into the white wall behind him instead, leaving a long, scorched smear across the paint.
Right.
Paul Bennett has been lucid dreaming his whole damn life.
This is his territory.
And apparently, five years of being furious at him made me forget he’s genuinely terrifying in here.
Still, I send another.
He moves again with that same infuriating economy, still not turning toward me. This one explodes through a shelf instead, terracotta shattering across the floor while soil bursts everywhere. Three plants topple sideways in a spray of vines and broken ceramic.
“Ridge.”
“You turned away from me,” I snap. “Again.”
Another streak of darkness lashes toward him, faster this time.
Paul ducks smoothly beneath it and finally turns enough for me to see his profile. His jaw is tight, tight enough that I know he’s controlling something.
“I’m asking you to stop.”
I send two shadows at once from opposite directions. He catches the first with one hand, and it bursts apart against his palm like black water. The second misses his shoulder by inches before slamming into the wall behind him, hard enough to send a hanging plant swinging violently from the ceiling.
“That one nearly hit me in the head.”
“Nearly,” I say with a smile. “Funny how that works.”
“Ridge.” Almost all the clinical distance is gone now. “I understand you’re angry—”
“You cut me off!”
The next shadow tears out of me harder than the others, bigger and even darker, pushed forward with the full weight of the years I spent choking on this conversation.
“You left me here alone!”
Paul catches it against his forearm. Darkness splashes across the sleeve of his pristine white shirt, staining the fabric black. His gaze flicks down to it for one brief second before returning to me.
Not calm anymore.
Good.