Chapter 7 #2
“You left me alone in this town where everybody looks at me like I’m fragile.” My voice cracks around the word. “Like I’m some fucking tragedy they don’t know how to talk to.”
Another shadow lashes toward him.
“You were the only person who didn’t do that.”
He sidesteps again, but the smoothness is gone.
“And then you handed me professional language like that somehow made it better.” I laugh once, breathless. “Boundaries. Necessary separation. Like you weren’t ripping something out by the roots while you said it.”
The apartment darkens at the edges, and plants rustle violently against the walls.
Paul’s expression shifts. It’s a tiny movement, but a devastating one.
“Ridge, I’m…”
“She’s my tether.” The words come out too fast to stop, and I see the exact moment he understands what that means.
“Whatever’s happening between you two, I don’t care,” I say, breathing hard now. “You do not get to walk back into this only to take the one person who looks at me and still sees a fucking person. Lennon is mine.”
Another streak of darkness flies toward him, and I expect him to dodge, but he doesn’t. The shadow slams directly into his chest, and it blooms black across the front of his white shirt. He ignores it, which should tell me all I need to know about how furious I’ve made him.
“What…” he says carefully, “… did you just say?”
“You heard me.”
Every plant in the apartment moves at once. Vines whip free from hooks, shelves, and pots so fast that the air cracks with it. One curls around my wrist before I can react. Another catches my other arm. Then my chest. My waist.
Suddenly, I’m pinned upright against the wall, completely immobilized beneath twisting green things that smell like wet soil.
Paul Bennett is finally losing his composure.
I hate this feeling instantly.
Violently.
My pulse spikes so hard my vision flickers, because apparently being restrained by plants still hits enough like being trapped under a log for my subconsciousness to immediately classify it as absolutely the fuck not.
Paul crosses the room slowly, eyes fixed on me, while a vine curls tighter around my chin and tips my head back until I’m looking directly at him.
“Lennon is mine.”
If that isn’t the wrong thing to say to me while holding me trapped against a wall.
I glare at him while I reach for the structure underneath the plants.
Every dream ever built has seams and weak points. Places where the construction is newer, where the will holding it together thins if you push hard enough. Paul’s dream work is extraordinary. Of course, it is.
But I’ve been doing this for a long time too.
I find the seams and press, and the vines around me twitch slightly.
“That so?” A smile tugs at my lips when I pull at them.
The apartment explodes.
The plants are ripped away from me in an instant. Terracotta shatters across the floor, hooks rip from walls, soil bursts through the air in dark sprays while vines snap violently overhead and plants hurl themselves from shelves in every direction at once.
I’m free in the middle of the destruction, debris raining around us while Paul moves away from me, but not fast enough. Darkness surges out of me and slams around him, pinning him upright exactly the way he pinned me.
I click my tongue softly when I step in front of him.
His eyes blaze.
Oh, he really doesn’t like that.
“You were always better at this than me,” I say lightly. “I know that.”
The shadows tighten around his wrists, and his jaw flexes hard.
“But while you were in your big-ass house being noble about everything…” Another slow pull of darkness, “… did you genuinely think I spent five years doing nothing?”
A sound catches through his teeth low enough to vibrate somewhere near my spine, and his glasses have gone slightly crooked.
He’s furious.
Actually furious.
This is not the Dr. Bennett with the careful voice and professional distance. This one is the man beneath it all. The one who gets angry back, who fights me instead of managing me, who looks at me like an equal.
“I got very good, Paul.”
He breathes out once through his nose, steadying himself. “I can see that.”
The room settles around us in stages, dripping soil and violently green.
Neither of us moves.
Paul because he can’t.
“But you’re still in my dreamscape.” His gaze flicks toward the shadows binding his arms. “And I can remove you whenever I choose to.”
“Do you choose to?”
We hold each other’s gaze for one long second before I ease the darkness back slightly, loosening my grip without letting go entirely. Paul notices immediately, and the corner of his mouth shifts into not quite a smile.
“No,” he says at last. “But only because we need to talk. Preferably without attempting to strangle each other simultaneously.”
I let out a long breath, then release him.
The second I do, the apartment restores itself around us.
Broken terracotta lifts from the floor and seals itself whole midair, soil pours itself neatly back into pots, and vines recoil gracefully up walls and hooks.
The scorch marks vanish from the white paint, the leaves uncurl, and only the black stain across Paul’s shirt stays stubbornly.
I stare at him while the last hanging plant settles into place.
“Still physically incapable of sitting in a mess, I see.”
Paul smooths one hand absently down the front of his ruined shirt. “I don’t know what you mean.”
I snort.
“Sit down, Ridge.” Paul sighs as two white armchairs appear beside us.
“Fine.” I pull a lollipop from wherever dream-lollipops come from, then plop down and cut him a flat look.
Paul settles into the opposite chair with the careful composure of a man pretending we didn’t just try to murder each other, and the plants hang peacefully from the ceiling like they hadn’t participated enthusiastically in attempted assault thirty seconds ago.
Only the tension remains. It sits thick between us, tangled into the silence.
I rotate the lollipop slowly between my teeth and watch Paul reach out to adjust one of the nearby leaves back into place.
Still controlling the environment down to the centimeter.
Still Paul.
And that realization lands somewhere unpleasantly soft in my chest, because under all the anger, this is still the easiest conversation I’ve had in months.
I hate that a little.
“So.” Paul’s gaze finds mine over the rim of his glasses with that infuriatingly patient expression. “Wanna go first, or should I?”
I wanted this.
A chance to apologize.
“It was my fault.” I look at the plant he micromanaged because it’s easier than his face. “I know I pushed too hard.”
I built his worst nightmare inside his head.
“Using what I knew about you against you like that. It was… I had reasons. I thought it would help. I thought if I could get you to untether, you’d understand that it was possible, and we could…
but that’s not the point.” I drag a hand through my hair.
“The point is I should have apologized for it. I was going to. I had the whole thing worked out, what I was going to say, and then you cut me off before I got the chance to, and I was so… I was so angry that I never said it, so I’m saying it now. ”
I make myself meet his gaze. “I’m sorry. For the spiders, the darkness, and for using what you told me in confidence to pin you down in your head. That was an asshole move. But you did not have to be such a complete dickhead because of it.”
“Is that the Ridge version of an apology? Meaning it completely and undermining it slightly in the same breath?”
I scoff and ignore his remark. “Just so we’re clear. You ended it and closed the door. I stood on the other side of it for five years, being furious, because that’s easier than the alternative.”
“Which is?” Paul asks.
“Missing you.” The words come out flat. “I know that’s embarrassing, so I’ll thank you not to make a thing of it.”
“I missed you too.”
Well.
That’s deeply unfortunate for my emotional stability.
“Then why did you do it?”
He straightens slightly but stays quiet.
“You could’ve yelled at me. You could’ve made me grovel properly. Honestly, I deserved that.” I lean back further into the chair. “Instead, you just disappeared.”
“If I told you there was another reason,” he says after a moment. “Would you believe me?”
“Depends on the reason.”
“This Man.”
Cold moves through me at the mention of my personal nightmare. “What about him?”
“When you made me untether, and I stepped into 5D, he saw me. He saw what we were trying to do for Tessa. And when you visited me again after that, he saw what you could do.”
“Which is?”
“Dream share.”
I scoff. “Apparently, being able to dream share is not special. Tessa can do it. So can Lennon.”
Paul’s eyes go wide behind his glasses. “Lennon can dream share?”
“She can do a lot.” I roll the lollipop to my other cheek. “I’ve never seen anyone with that kind of stability. Not even you.”
“I didn’t know she was lucid dreaming at all.”
“She started when she came here.”
“How do you know any of…”
“Later.” I point my lollipop at him. “You were telling me about your reason, and I’m not letting you off the hook now.”
He holds my gaze for a moment, then relents.
“After he noticed me, my nightmares started up again.”
I saw it, the one time I stepped into his dream space to apologize, before he cut the line entirely. He pushed me out immediately, and then he ended the friendship the next morning.
I thought he had the nightmare again because of what I did.
“I’ve had them ever since,” Paul admits.
“Ever since,” I repeat. “As in?”
“Five years, Ridge. He trapped me in my nightmare, and every morning he made me wake up straight into paralysis.”
I shut myself away for five years, and he’s been pinned for five years.
Fuck.
“Why?” I breathe out. “What did he want?”
“I wondered the same all these years.” He looks at the window. “It’s not like he talked to me a lot, but he made me promise one thing when all of this started.”
“Which was?”