Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Ridge
Horror movies are not designed to be watched with every light in the house turned on.
There’s a reason my office looks like a cave, and I do my best work between two and four in the morning, when the building makes sounds it doesn’t make in daylight.
Atmosphere is not decoration. What you can’t see is doing almost all the work.
Paul’s aggressively well-lit living room at whatever hour this is, with every lamp blazing down on all seventy-eight emotional support plants, isn’t letting the movie we’re watching be anywhere near spooky.
“This isn’t scary.”
“I find it quite tense,” Paul replies from the end of the couch, not looking away from the screen.
“It’s not tense. It’s atmospheric. And the atmosphere is being murdered by all the…” I gesture vaguely at the room, “… visibility.”
“The lights stay on.”
“I know the lights stay on. I’m just saying it’s the equivalent of reading my books at noon.”
He glances at me. “Which says more about your books than my lights.”
Five years is both a very long time and almost no time at all, depending on what you’re measuring.
Five years of not being in the same room as him? Considerable.
Five years of knowing exactly what he sounds like when he’s pretending not to be affected by something? Apparently no time at all.
I can still read his every tell. The slight tension at the corner of his jaw. The fact that his left arm hasn’t moved in twenty-three minutes. How he’s pretending to be interested in a bowl of decorative fruit every time something scary happens.
He’s not scared of the movie.
He’s simply scared.
Lennon came home hours ago carrying enough new information to collapse several existing belief systems.
Seraphine is trapped in Jasper’s dreams.
We took it apart from every angle, including dream mechanics, soul mechanics, the difference between a 4D dreamscape someone else built, and 5D. Paul did most of the real-time analysis, while I tried to find answers in online forums.
Nobody has heard of someone being trapped in someone else’s dreams before.
Nevan got quieter as the conversation went on, and at some point, he went completely still, which was my cue to send him to bed. He needed sleep, and we needed him to stop looking at us as if he were calculating the distance to the nearest window.
When he left, Lennon went to sleep in my room, saying she wanted to try reaching Derek now that he had the tea, but Paul and I continued digging. Got nowhere. Made coffee. Ran out of theories. Ran out of coffee.
I know Seraphine isn’t lying. I was there. I remember the fury in her voice when she threw me out of Jasper’s dream. She was real and in there.
But I once got yelled at by a psychic woman in somebody else’s subconscious turns out is not a sentence that generates actionable research.
On screen, something lurches out of the dark. Paul’s decorative fruit suddenly requires his full attention.
I scoff and look at the ceiling.
Five years, and I still can’t watch him pretend.
Someone on screen opens a door that no reasonable person would open. I’m preparing a lecture on survival instincts when I hear something behind us.
Crunch.
I turn toward the noise.
“What the fuck?” My hand flies to my chest, and I may have made a sound. “Where are your mittens, man?”
Six feet seven inches of Nevan Shaw stands in the kitchen doorway with his forehead against the upper frame, wearing only his boxers, face blank, eyes focused on nothing, eating a bowl of cereal.
Crunch.
Nevan keeps eating and crunching, the sound making my hair stand on end.
“He’s sleepwalking,” Paul says, in the tone of someone who has better peripheral vision, clocked this thirty seconds ago, and chose not to tell me about it.
“I asked him to leave the mittens off for a few nights to test a low dose of the new medication. I wanted to observe his REM behavior without the containment.” He sighs heavily. “It appears the dose is too low.”
Crunch.
“You don’t say?”
“What?” Paul counters, a tiny smirk on his mouth. “Did the boy scare you under all the blazing lights?”
“He appeared out of nowhere!”
“He went into the kitchen. Got a bowl. Got cereal. A spoon.”
“Appearing from the kitchen still counts as appearing from nowhere when the person is the size of a wardrobe.”
Crunch.
“And I was watching a horror movie.”
Paul hums. “That’s fair.”
Thank you.
I look at Nevan, who has not registered any of the conversation and is still working through the cereal. “Should we…”
“Don’t touch him unless he’s heading for a window.” Paul’s focus returns to the movie. “Let him finish.”
“He’s going to eat the whole box.”
The door to my bedroom opens, and Lennon steps into the living room, drowning in one of Nevan’s shirts, her hair doing something, well, spectacular. She’s holding her phone in one hand while rubbing her eyes with the other.
“Everything okay?” she asks, her voice thick with sleep.
Fuck, she’s cute.
“Everything’s fine, darling. I’m sorry Ridge woke you. Nevan scared him.”
I’m about to protest, but then she heads toward us with her eyes not fully open to navigate, and I reach out to grab her hips before I’ve decided to when she passes me.
When I pull her onto my lap, the smallest gasp leaves her lips.
“Where are you going, hmm?” I murmur against the back of her neck, feeling the shudder go through her before she’s even finished processing what happened, but then she relaxes into my hold, making my heart skip a beat.
She smells like sleep, warmth, lemon, and something sugary that I’ve come to learn is her skin. I breathe it in and press a kiss to the side of her neck.
Mine.
She shivers again and puts her arm over mine.
Crunch.
Lennon frowns and follows the sound, looking over at Nevan, who is still munching on his cereal, unbothered by all existence. “He’s sleepwalking?”
“Yep.” I plant another kiss on the side of her neck because I can’t help it.
“I really hope he’s up in his clouds somewhere,” she whispers. “Just eating dream cereal.”
“I’m sure he is,” Paul says.
She tilts her head back against my shoulder to look up at me.
Those eyes.
“How did it go?” I ask, breathing her in. “Your mission.”
“The tea helped.” She gives me a small smile. “Derek held the lucidity long enough that we could actually go somewhere together. From his dream space to mine.”
“Oh?” My eyebrows shoot up because, damn, that is a big step from not even being able to hold lucidity for more than a few moments.
Maybe I need some of that tea.
She slumps harder against me. “But we didn’t find Tessa. Couldn’t even get to the beach. I called for her, but she wasn’t there.”
“Or she didn’t want to be found.”
That would be reasonable. The whole point of her fleeing into her dreams was to get away from Derek.
Paul makes a sound that isn’t quite agreement. “Or someone made sure she can’t be found.”
I think again about the information Lennon came home with and about the crystal hanging around her neck, which was apparently Seraphine’s.
I hook a finger under the moonstone, brushing my thumb over the smooth surface, warm from her skin.
I’ve spent enough time lurking in strange corners of the internet to know about charged objects, cursed objects, blessed ones, anchors, and talismans. It’s lore that serious practitioners take seriously while everyone else files it under interesting if it were true.
I’ve always been on the side of interesting, which is not the same as believing.
I look back at Lennon’s eyes. They are almost the same color as the flashes inside the moonstone when it’s moved against the light.
She learned to lucid dream in weeks, dream share, build, and navigate spaces that should have taken years to understand.
Every impossible thing I was told required training, discipline, and experience.
At some point, coincidence stops being coincidence.
I move a strand of hair from her face, but she doesn’t react.
She’s watching the movie with a distant focus, telling me she’s only dedicating about twenty percent of her attention to it.
The other eighty percent is somewhere else, probably trying to save everyone again.
It’s something I should find annoying. Instead, I catch myself smiling.
“Do you think This Man is just evil?”
All three of us turn toward the kitchen.
Nevan is still where he was, bowl in hand, but now his eyes are focused and not sleepwalking anymore.
Thank fuck.
“Like a dark entity that’s out for everyone in this town. Otherwise, why would he go after Jasper? And my mom? Me? It makes absolutely no sense. We don’t even know Tessa.”
I point at him. “Starting tomorrow, you’re wearing a bell.”
Lennon chuckles, and I kiss her temple. She turns to kiss my lips, a small peck, but before I can grab the back of her head and kiss her silly, she slides off my lap.
Rude.
She walks to Nevan, takes the bowl out of his hands, and sets it on the coffee table. Paul twitches at the placement, making me huff a laugh.
Lennon looks up at Nevan as she stands in front of him.
It takes some doing, given the difference in altitude, and she takes his hand.
“We don’t know if her being trapped in Jasper’s dreams is his doing or your mother’s.
But no, I don’t think he’s just evil. I think he’s a very sad, very lonely man who hasn’t got anything left except this.
Except for the dreams. That doesn’t make what he’s done right, but it makes it understandable. ”
Nevan nods slowly, and I exchange a look with Paul.
Lennon has this deeply unfortunate habit of finding the humanity in people.
It’s the reason she ended up collecting strays like us.
But what Lennon still doesn’t seem to understand is that lonely things are dangerous.
Or maybe she understands it perfectly and chooses compassion anyway, which is more concerning.
“Come on,” Lennon says, tugging Nevan’s hand. “Let’s get some actual sleep. I need to rest without lucidity or you taking scenic routes through the house in your boxers.”
She stops by Paul on the way out of the living room.
He stands up and moves to where she can reach him, cupping the back of her head as he gives her a brief kiss. “Goodnight, darling.”
“Night.”
Then she looks at me. I manage, barely, not to say anything that would invite her to stay, because she needs to sleep and so does the giant currently waiting to be navigated toward the stairs. She knows I’ll be fine, and I know she knows.
She puts a hand on my shoulder, and I cover it with mine when she leans in and kisses my cheek. “Sleep tight, Ridge.”
“Dream of me, sweetheart.”
She gives me a playful scowl as they walk toward the stairs.
I hate the ground floor.
That’s not entirely accurate. The ground floor is fine. Paul has made the ground floor more than fine. I know what this house looked like before he started making changes for me, and I know what it looks like now. The difference is considerable.
The problem is not the ground floor. The problem is that Lennon is currently going upstairs, and I can’t follow her.
If something bad happens again, like with Nevan and the window, I can’t get to her.
If she asked me to follow her and I could, I wouldn’t complain. I would tolerate Nevan Shaw’s elbows and knees. I would tolerate whatever percentage of a mattress a man who looks like he was assembled from spare lumber consumes.
Fuck it.
I’d cuddle him. Not enthusiastically, but I’d do it.
I’m not going to breathe a word of that to Paul, because if I do, he’ll immediately begin solving the problem.
The man treats obstacles like personal insults.
I’ll wake up tomorrow and find architectural blueprints on the kitchen table, a contractor in the driveway, and three accessibility consultants.
Possibly a crane.
“I’ll call the stairlift company tomorrow,” Paul mutters from beside me.
I close my eyes.
There it is.
“You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do. I’m sorry, I should have done that days ago, but somehow there is always something.”
“The ground floor is fine. You know I’m very quick to complain when something’s wrong.”
“Ridge.”
“I’ve practically built an entire personality around it.”
That gets the corner of his mouth. Barely, but I see it.
“The stairs aren’t the issue.”
“No?” He frowns at me.
“No.” I gesture vaguely toward the ceiling. “The issue is that my girlfriend keeps selfishly sleeping in locations that are not currently accessible to me.”
“Your girlfriend, huh?”
Apparently that’s what came out.
“Did I say, my girlfriend?”
“You did.”
“I meant our.”
“You better.” Paul looks at the television screen for a moment, then he looks at me with the expression he always has at the start of a therapy session.
Great.
“If we’re doing this properly, all of us, in this house, I want it to be proper. Not the version where you’re a guest on the ground floor because the logistics work only that way. This is your home now. I want it to feel like your home, whatever that requires.”
Now I’m the one looking at the decorative fruits.
There’s a version of this where I say something dry and deflect, and we move on. He would let me, because he knows me. But I’m tired of using that version as a default.
“I know, I can see that.” I don’t look away from the fruit. “And I appreciate it. I would very much appreciate a stairlift. Thank you.”
“Of course. But we’ll spend most of our time down here anyway,” he says, settling back into the couch. “Kitchen, living room, and your room has the biggest bed with the best mattress, so…”
I look at him slowly. “Paul.”
“Hmm?”
“Are you telling me you enjoyed sleeping in my bed?”
“I’m simply observing that—”
“Was that the plan? Having me sleep in the biggest bed so Lennon sleeps with me, and you can come cuddle when you’re afraid of the spiders?”
“There are no spiders in this house.”
“That you know of.”
“Ridge!”
“If you try to steal my place in bed next to Lennon, I’ll turn the lights off in my room.”
I wouldn’t. Ever.
“You wouldn’t.” The traitor actually smiles. “Ridge?” he questions, the joking falling away.
“Yeah?”
“You’re my best friend. I wouldn’t do any of this with anyone else.”
My throat closes completely.
Fantastic.
Love that for me.
I force my gaze from the fruit back to the television.
“Same.”
A long silence settles between us, but it’s a comfortable one. I’d forgotten what that felt like.
“The Shaw boy,” I say after another long while.
Paul looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “What about him?”
“He’s all right too. When he’s not appearing from the kitchen in his boxers and subtracting years from my life.”
“Yeah.” Paul’s smile returns when he shifts back on the television. “The Shaw boy is all right.”