Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lennon
“Even if I wanted to.”
This has to be the worst sentence I have ever heard in my life.
The air still smells like bread. The roses are still too perfect. The birds are still chirping something cheerful in the trees above us, completely unbothered.
And I’m still holding onto my best friend’s hands.
“Your body is giving up, Tess. You have to wake up.”
She tilts her head. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“I can feel it. I know what you mean. What it felt like. In the in-between, my mind and my body were fighting each other the whole time. But now that we’re both here…” she touches her sternum, right over her heart, “… it stopped. I’m healthy.”
“Being stuck in elsewhere is not healthy.”
“We’re not stuck.” She smiles sadly. “We chose this. You chose this. You chose to be with me.”
Dread climbs up my throat, and I try to swallow it.
“I know,” I say when I can speak again. “I know I did. But why am I the one who gives everything up for you? When do you choose me? Can’t you just choose to wake up for me?
You tell me all the time how much we love each other, but right now, I am the only one proving it. ”
“You think I didn’t try? You think if I could have, I wouldn’t have?
Do you think I would have stayed where I was, knowing you were hurting?
Knowing you lost everything? And I could have come to you, and I chose not to?
” She stops and takes a few deep breaths.
“You think I would have let you go through any of that alone if I’d had any choice at all? ”
“Tessa.”
“I wanted to wake up! I wanted to come to you. Be there for you. But I couldn’t, beside visiting you in your dreams. I made a promise, and it kept me here. I couldn’t come to you.” Her hands tighten around mine so hard it almost hurts. “So I told you to come to me.”
“Come to me.”
The three words from my best friend that made me leave everything behind.
“What promise? What promise could possibly—”
“Don’t you girls need to open the restaurant?” Lucien materializes at my shoulder, hands in pockets as he smiles at Tessa. “You know how you hate to rush the prep.”
Tessa blinks once. It’s the smallest thing, the smallest possible movement.
She blinks again, and something rearranges behind her eyes. The anger is gone. In its place is something softer, more pliable, and the crack I watched open seals itself shut as if it were never there.
I turn and glare at him. “You.” The word comes out very level. I’m almost impressed by myself. “You made her promise something.”
He raises one eyebrow.
“You are the reason I lost my best friend, and you’re standing here in this…” I make a sound that is not quite a laugh, “… this perfect little garden with your roses and your entitlement and—”
“Tessa, love.” His voice is gentle in a way that puts my teeth on edge as he cuts me off. “How about you head inside? Get things started. Lennon and I have a conversation that’s long overdue.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” I grit out. “I’m going to grab my best friend, and then we’re leaving.”
Tessa turns to me and squeezes my arm in a way I start to hate. “Talk to him, Lenny,” she says quietly. “Maybe it’ll help.”
Then she turns and walks back up the path toward the restaurant without looking back once.
Great. Fantastic. That’s great.
But I have other shit to worry about because I have no idea how I didn’t notice how wrong all of this is sooner. How I didn’t remember that he is This Man, even if Ridge—
Ridge.
Paul.
Nevan.
Shit. What have I done?
I left one clusterfuck only to step into another one that feels just as real, even if it isn’t.
“You seem unsettled,” Lucien says softly.
Unsettled. Right. Casual word for whatever the fuck this is.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re lying.” He offers me his arm. “Lenny.”
“Don’t call me that.” I walk past him.
He falls into step beside me, unhurried, matching my stride with his way-longer legs. “I thought we had a nice day. A good conversation.”
“That was before I came to my senses.”
“Ah.” He glances down at me with a smirk. “So that’s what this is.”
“Yeah, that’s what this is. Sorry, I know you like the people around you rather mindless.”
“And here I thought you were sweet,” he says teasingly. Why the hell is This Man teasing me? “Looks like there’s some bite to the sugar.”
“Better get used to it for the amount of time I’m staying here.”
“I think I’m going to enjoy this,” he mutters, mostly to himself.
I glare at him, but he looks amused, hands loosely in his pockets as he falls into step beside me again like we’re on a nice little garden stroll and not having the world’s weirdest hostage negotiation.
“Start talking,” I say. “Or I go back to Tessa.”
His mouth twitches.
“And for the record,” I continue. “Tessa is still in love with someone else.”
That finally sobers him up.
“She’s here because she thinks she can’t have him,” I bait. “But she can. He’s waiting for her. He’s literally been waiting for her for twelve years.”
Lucien stays quiet as the gravel keeps crunching under our feet.
“You can’t seriously not know about him,” I scoff. “The way you know everything else about everyone.”
“I know of him.”
Oh?
“Then why are you even doing this?” I stop walking and fully turn toward him now, frustrated enough that it spills out before I can filter it. “Why would you want someone who loves someone else?”
He looks ahead instead of at me as we start walking again.
“There was a woman,” he says eventually. “Before Tessa.”
“That feels ominous already.”
He ignores that.
“She was everything I’d been looking for, quite literally, in this case. Kind but not soft. Smart. Interested in what interested me and equally fierce about things of her own. She knew this space the way very few people do.”
There’s something strange about hearing someone like him sound human.
Not less frightening.
Worse, somehow.
“She loved me very much,” he adds quietly. “And I her.”
“But?”
“But she couldn’t commit elsewhere and chose something else.”
“And you just let her?”
He huffs out a laugh. “She wasn’t the kind of woman you fight for against her will.”
“But Tessa is?”
He doesn’t answer, and I look back at the path ahead.
“So the moral is that you’re still in love with someone else, and you and Tessa have both just settled. Which is…” I consider the word. “Sad. She deserves so much better than that.”
“Don’t act as if you wouldn’t know loneliness, Lennon Maes. I can read it written all over you. Every conversation we’ve had, I can feel it mirroring back.” He gives me a sidelong glance. “We aren’t so different.”
I scoff. “We’re nothing alike.”
He smiles, and I find this significantly more irritating than any argument he could have made.
“Elsewhere,” he says. “Is a place where you never have to feel it again. The loneliness. You aren’t alone here.
You’re simply not. You’re part of something larger than what waking life can offer, and you can have anyone you want here.
” He stops, making me stop too. “Are you missing your writer? The good doctor? Your young friend?”
The light behind me disappears, and my breath catches as shadows stretch over the gravel path. I turn, and they’re standing there.
Ridge is closest to me, dressed in black, shoulders loose in that careless way that somehow still looks guarded. Dark hair falling into his eyes. Mouth already halfway to a smirk like he’s about to say something annoying.
Paul is beside him in his green cardigan, glasses slightly askew, hands folded neatly like he’s trying very hard not to reach for me.
Nevan, with paint-stained hands, a wide grin, and his soft flannel that has been washed too many times.
For one terrible second, relief floods me so hard I nearly move toward them.
Because it’s them.
It’s…
No.
Nevan’s freckles are off. Paul’s beard has no gray threading through it at the jaw, and Ridge’s eyes are half a shade too light.
They are close, close enough to feel cruel.
But they’re not them.
God.
That’s actually so fucking mean.
“I already told Tessa I don’t want copies.”
Lucien’s eyes narrow slightly, enough that I know I hit something, then he flicks two fingers lazily through the air, and they vanish. The space they occupied feels emptier, somehow.
“You could make them better,” he offers. “Everyone can be as good as the memory you hold of them.”
I laugh once. “That’s the creepiest sentence anyone has ever said to me.”
“If you wanted them here, they could be.”
“No.” I turn to him again. “They couldn’t.
Because if copies were enough, you’d have brought her here years ago.
The woman you lost. You’d be sitting with her right now instead of standing on a gravel path talking to me.
But having a copy of her is not enough, because it’s hollow.
You know it is, and no matter how beautiful you make it…
” I gesture at the garden, the impossible roses, the endless afternoon light, “… you’re still just a man alone in a place he built for company that won’t come. ”
“Tessa knows exactly what this is,” he grits out. “We both do. And she made a promise she has to keep.”
“What promise?” I ask again.
“Have you ever heard of soul contracts?”
Cold moves through me alongside a pull to somewhere?
What was that?
“A friend told me about them.” I sound impressively normal.
Surprise flickers in his gaze, but he schools it quickly.
“Tessa promised me to make a soul contract to stay with me in elsewhere.”
“She promised.” I turn the word over. “But she hasn’t made the contract yet.”
“No. She couldn’t.” He tilts his head slightly. “You’re wondering why.”
I know why.
“Because she’s tethered to me.”
“Yes.” He lets that land. “And you weren’t in elsewhere.”
Oh.
Oh, shit.
No, no, no.
The crystal at my chest burns hot enough to hurt.
Get out, Lenny.
Right-fucking-now.
I turn and start walking back toward the restaurant. Fast.
“Lenny.” He’s behind me, but his footsteps on the gravel are unhurried. “I know what you’re thinking, but it isn’t as simple as you want it to be.”
“Walk and talk,” I pant out, already moving faster.
“You haven’t seen half of what this place can be. I’ve kept it to things you recognize, things that feel like home to you. But elsewhere is so much more than a garden, or a restaurant, or a kitchen.”
The world disappears.
One second, there is gravel beneath my feet. The next, nothing I know how to describe. No ground, no sky, no up or down, only colors without shape, light without source, and warmth without touch.
Something wraps around me that doesn’t have arms and somehow still feels like being held.
Accepted.
Loved.
Not despite everything but including it. Every lonely part of me goes painfully still. It feels like what I imagine unconditional love is supposed to feel like.
My breath catches before I can help it.
Then the garden slams back into place.
I stagger slightly, and suddenly his green eyes are close. Very close.
“This is so much more than you can imagine,” he whispers.
“Choose this. I’ll show you all of it. You’ll have Tessa.
You’ll have me. None of us will ever have to be alone again, Lenny.
I’m not a copy. I’m real. And I’m beginning to believe we may be exactly the kind of real both of us have been looking for. ”
The afternoon light falls golden through the leaves, and my chest pulls painfully with something I absolutely refuse to examine.
“But if you leave…”
The warmth drains out of the air before he even finishes the sentence. Cold slips under my skin, and beneath the birdsong, I hear it.
Labored breathing.
A body fighting for air.
Tessa.
“If you leave now, Tessa will be pulled back into the in-between, tethered between you and me.” The breathing turns ragged before the garden swallows the sound again. “And her body won’t be able to hold that state much longer.”
I turn my head slowly, bringing us almost nose to nose.
Green eyes locking onto mine.
Beautiful.
Lonely.
Terrifying.
I think about Ridge telling me that lonely things are dangerous.
And suddenly, the ache in my chest hardens into resolve.
“Sounds like I’ll have to be quick then,” I whisper back.
The gravel shifts hard beneath my feet as I sprint toward the restaurant, lungs burning even though I don’t think lungs are supposed to matter here. The garden blurs at the edges around me, roses smearing into streaks of red and white.
Tessa is standing in the entrance when I reach her, my mother beside her, and one look at Tessa’s face tells me she heard everything.
“Lenny,” she says softly. “What are you doing?”
“What I should have been doing since I got here.”
I stop in front of her, breathing hard, chest aching with panic, grief, and the horrible certainty that I’m running out of time.
“Getting you out.”
“Nothing has changed.” Her voice shakes slightly now. “I promised him.”
“And I’m promising you.” I take both her hands. “I’ll get you out of here. I’ll wake you up.”
“Lenny, I’m too tethered to him. You heard what he said. You saw what happens when it won’t work.”
“Watch me.”
She stares at me.
Tessa.
My person.
Twelve years.
Twelve-fucking-years.
She doesn’t let go of my hands, but I let go of hers anyway, because if I don’t do this now, I won’t. I turn toward my mother, and it hits all over again. Not the realization that she isn’t real. I already know that.
It’s worse than that.
It’s that my brain knows she isn’t real, and my heart doesn’t care.
She’s standing there in her soft cream cardigan, her hands folded, her hair sitting wrong in the same familiar way. Her eyes are warm, tired, and loving.
My chest caves inward.
God, I miss her.
I miss her so much.
“Mom.” My eyes fill with tears. “Can I have a hug really quick?”
Her whole face softens.
“Of course.” She opens her arms, and I go.
She’s warm and smells like her. My arms lock around her so tightly it almost hurts, and I press my face into her shoulder as tears spill hard and sudden down my cheeks.
This is not my mother, but it is built from every memory of her still living inside me, and it’s still the best hug I’ve had in weeks.
A small broken sound leaves me before I can stop it.
I breathe her in desperately.
One more time.
One last time.
“Why quick?” she asks softly while her hand moves through my hair.
I close my eyes and take a shuddering inhale.
“Because I’m going to wake up now.”