Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lennon
The damn e-reader isn’t working.
I’ve suspected it was broken for a while, but I keep trying to use it anyway, because what else am I going to do?
I drag my eyes across the same line for the fourth time, and the letters just…
don’t. They’re there, all of them, but they refuse to become words.
Like my brain keeps trying to load the page, and the page keeps not loading.
I flip back three chapters, thinking maybe I missed something, and it’s the same there too.
Scrambled. A language that isn’t one.
Reality check.
Text shifts in dreams. I know this.
I put the e-reader down on the duvet and stare at it as if it might apologize for not being real.
It doesn’t.
Time is soup, and I’ve been in this apartment for what feels like years and also possibly twenty minutes. I can’t tell which.
I’ve played with the honey, then let the muffins sing until they ran out of material and started taking requests. I alphabetized the kitchen cupboards in my head. Then I sat on the bed and tried to read.
“I’m going crazy in here, buddy,” I tell Mr. Muffin, who’s resting against the headboard where I left him.
“You might be,” he agrees.
I am off the bed in zero seconds.
“What the…” I back up until my heels hit the wall and press my hands to my chest and breathe, breathe, breathe, while Mr. Muffin is sitting there looking at me with his little stitched face. The voice came from him. It absolutely came from him.
I look down at my hands.
Breadsticks.
Right. Yes. This is a dream.
That is the whole fucking problem.
I breathe out through my nose, and my pulse starts to find its floor again.
“And now I’m talking to my plushie.” I press the back of my wrist to my mouth. “Perfect, Lenny.”
Mr. Muffin makes a sound that is unmistakably a chuckle.
“I liked you better when you couldn’t talk back.”
“No shit.” He wiggles, and I swear if he starts walking and ruins Mr. Muffin in real life for me, I will never forgive him.
I open my mouth to say something cutting, but then I feel it—a pull that feels like gravity deciding to pick a new side.
I turn, expecting Ridge, but it’s Tessa standing in the middle of the room. I look at her, and she looks at me, the weight of everything that passed between us in 5D settling between us. But then I cross the room in three steps, and my arms go around her.
“Tessa.”
Her arms come around me, too, but she only holds on for a short moment before she lets go and gently pushes me back. “Lenny.” She frowns down at me. “What did you do?”
“What did I do? I’m trying to save you. Save us. Both of us.”
She huffs. Not angry, exactly, but something adjacent to it. “There is no saving. I told you I made a promise. Everything you’re doing is prolonging it and making me suffer for it.”
“You are mad at me.”
“No, what I am is in the in-between again. I told you what that was. The pull between here and there, him and you. I’ve been in it for twelve years, Lennon. Years. And you feel it now, too, don’t you? That going-mad thing. Your body fighting your mind.”
I look at Mr. Muffin, and he shrugs. An actual, tiny, fabric shrug.
Unhelpful.
“Yeah,” I admit. “I feel it.”
There’s a tug in both directions.
Ridge is there. The thread between us hums whenever I think about him. That’s the soul contract we made in the flower field, the deal, but the tether to Tessa is different. She isn’t a thread. She’s gravity.
Everything in me keeps turning toward her.
Bigger than waking life.
Bigger than fear.
Maybe that’s what love is.
Maybe that’s why it hurts so much.
Because if I’m right, she should feel it too.
“The pull between us is stronger than anything else,” I admit quietly.
Tessa’s expression softens. She reaches out and brushes a strand of hair over my shoulder. “You’re right.”
Then why are we still having this conversation?
“But I can’t give in to it.” Her hand falls away.
I grind my teeth. “Yes, the promise. Tessa, what can I…”
“It doesn’t matter.” She meets my eyes steadily. “Because I can’t change it. And you can’t either.”
“Then who can?”
“Only him.”
“And he won’t?”
She shakes her head. “He won’t.”
“Why did you even promise him anything?”
“Because I thought he could give me you. And he did. In a way.”
The saddest smile I’ve ever seen tugs at her lips, and it’s the most like her she’s looked since I found her in dreams.
I feel like crying, but before I can even decide to give in to the feeling, Lucien is just there, with his hand clamped on the back of Tessa’s neck.
I look back at her, and not for the first time, I notice the slight shift behind her eyes at the contact.
“You could be together forever if our Lenny weren’t so stubborn.” There’s something in his eyes that might be amusement, but nothing about this is funny.
“Or,” I say. “If you weren’t so stubborn, you could just let her out of the promise.”
He tilts his head, considering, like I’ve said something mildly interesting. “You still don’t understand what I’m offering. I’m doing you both a—”
“Yeah, yeah.” I wave my breadstick fingers at him. “It’s perfect. I’ve been there, done that. I have the trauma response to prove it.”
That startles a laugh out of him. “You are a frustrating little thing, aren’t you?”
“Says you.”
He steps closer, and I make myself hold steady, which takes more effort than I want to admit.
He leans down, and his voice is very quiet and close to my ear when he says, “We could have so much fun together.”
“Hard pass.” I step out of his range, barely holding back a shudder.
“You will come to your senses before you lose them completely. But while I wait for you to stop being a stubborn girl and come back to where you belong, I may find myself bored.”
I roll my eyes. “And how is that my problem?”
“It’s not. But it might become a problem for your doctor, your writer, or your young friend.”
I point one breadstick finger at him. “Don’t you dare.”
A hand comes around my waist and pulls me back a couple of steps.
I’m already turning to tell Ridge to let go of me, and that I’m in the middle of something here, but it’s not Ridge’s warm hand splayed over my stomach.
It’s Paul’s.
His eyes are wide in a way I’ve never seen on him before, and mine are probably doing the exact same thing.
“I’m in your dreamscape,” he whispers, like he can’t quite believe it.
“You are,” I breathe out.
He loosens his arm but doesn’t fully drop it. Behind me, I hear Lucien make a sound that is not quite a scoff.
“Dr. Bennett, I didn’t think you were capable of dream sharing.”
Paul looks at him over my head, and something in his jaw sets. “Looks like I am when I’m not kept like a pet.”
Kept like a pet?
Then Paul looks beside him, and his whole expression falls as he whispers, “Tessa.”
Tessa gives him a little wave. “Hey, Paul.”
An unreasonably hot spike of jealousy pinches my chest.
“You guys are on a first-name basis?” I ask like an idiot, making Lucien chuckle. My gaze flicks to him, but he only smirks in return.
“Paul’s been sitting by my side every day for six years, talking to me,” Tessa explains, her gaze fixed on her psychologist.
“You heard me?”
“Oh, how touching.” Lucien sounds bored, but I recognize the tension in his shoulders, how his hand finds Tessa’s, and how his fingers close around hers. Possessive and jealous.
Even he isn’t immune.
“Don’t make us wait too long, Lenny.”
The air folds, and they’re gone.
I stare at the empty space for several seconds before crossing the room to sit on the edge of the bed. Mr. Muffin has somehow migrated three feet to the left, but I don’t question it.
“Lennon.” Paul’s voice is careful now.
His attention is on me, prickling my skin, and when I don’t answer, he moves.
By the time I look up, he’s kneeling in front of me, both hands settling on my knees as he searches my face.
When I glance away again, he reaches up and cups the back of my head, gently yet firmly.
The exact amount of pressure required to stop me from disappearing into my thoughts.
“Are you okay?” His eyes narrow as he looks me over, as if looking for evidence of injury. “What did he do?”
“Why should he have done something?”
“Because you look like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re trying very hard not to feel something.”
Well.
That’s irritatingly accurate.
His thumb strokes lightly against my hair. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
He looks me over with careful thoroughness, almost as if he’s conducting a damage assessment and trying not to alarm the patient. “You’re not fine.”
He comes up to sit next to me on the edge of the bed.
“I’m sorry we left you alone. I don’t know how long it’s been for you, but it’s only been a few hours for us.”
“It’s been a little more on my end, I think.” I shrug. “I don’t really know.”
“I’m sorry.” His hand strokes up and down my back.
“It’s fine.”
The way his whole face opened when he saw her.
It’s fine.
I dig my nails into my palm.
Something feels wrong.
Not Paul or Tessa. Me.
Like my skin is too tight.
The feeling has been building since I got here.
The constant tug-of-war inside my chest. The part of me that pulls toward Ridge because of the deal.
The part of me that pulls toward Tessa because she’s my tether.
The part of me that wants waking life and the people there, while at the same time wants to stay exactly where I am, because at least then I don’t have to choose.
Everything rubs against everything else.
It feels like being trapped between sneezing and not sneezing, between laughing and crying, running and standing still. And now my brain has decided to latch onto this.
Six years.
Six years of sitting beside her and talking to her.
Six years of showing up.
Of course, he looked at her like that.
Why wouldn’t he?
Tessa is beautiful. Tessa is easy to love. Tessa has always been easy to love.
I shift farther away from Paul, only an inch, but he notices immediately.
Of course, he does.
The man notices when clouds move.
“Lennon.”
I stare at the opposite wall.
Six years. The celibacy thing started five years ago.
Oh.
It’s fine.