Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Nevan
My room is dark except for the small lamp on my dresser, and I can’t sleep, which is unfortunate because that’s the entire reason we’re in my room.
My room. My dresser. In Paul Bennett’s house.
Yeah, that’s weird for sure.
Lennon is curled against my side, warm beneath the blanket, her head on my shoulder.
She is here.
Actually here.
I keep checking. Not consciously, but every few minutes, my arm slightly tightens around her, and my brain goes, yep. Still there.
Outside this room, everything is quiet, but inside my head, nothing is.
I stare at the ceiling, and it stares back. We’re learning about each other.
After a while, Lennon stretches against me. “You awake?”
“No.”
She snorts. “Okay.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Cool.”
We lie there for another thirty seconds.
“Cool,” she agrees.
I sigh.
“What’s going on in that handsome head of yours?”
I stare at the ceiling for another second, then give up pretending I don’t crave talking to her about it.
“I was trying to dream share with my mom earlier.” I turn my head, and Lennon is already looking at me, cheek pressed into my shoulder.
“Why?”
I look back at the ceiling because it’s easier than looking at her. “I kept thinking about what she said.”
“What part?”
I huff a laugh. “Pick one.”
“Fair.”
“Mostly about being stuck in Jasper’s dreamscape.” I rub a hand over my face. “I wanted to know if it was true. Or if I could see her. Or talk to her. Or…”
Or understand.
“So I tried.”
Lennon pushes herself up on one elbow. “Nev.”
“I’m getting better at it. Going lucid and steering myself somewhere, but Mom’s dreamscape doesn’t work. Jasper’s doesn’t either. It’s like there’s a wall there. I get close, and then I wake up.”
Lennon is fully sitting up now, and the blanket slips down one shoulder. My attention snaps to it.
Unhelpful.
“Nevan.”
I drag my eyes back to her pretty face.
“I know that’s frustrating, but you only started learning this stuff a few nights ago.”
“A week.”
“That’s still basically a few seconds in dream time.”
I frown at her, and she shrugs.
“Yeah, I made that up.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Did it sound convincing?”
“A little.”
She nods like she’s proud of herself.
I love her.
That’s not relevant to the conversation, but it’s true.
“Do you want me to try?” she asks. “Maybe I could pull you over if we fall asleep together.”
“Hey.” I reach out to take her hand.
“Yeah?”
“Come here.”
She looks down at our hands, then back at me.
“You need sleep. Real sleep. We can think about dream prisons and psychic moms in the morning. Like actual morning. Not whatever this is.”
I put an arm around her again, and she settles in against my side.
“I’m sorry,” Lennon says, quieter. “About your mom being so—”
“Yeah.” I exhale. “I know.”
I’ve known for a long time what my mom is, and I’ve done most of my grieving, but tonight feels different, thinking about her in Jasper’s dreamscape, trying to teach him things, trying to reach him, and wanting to stay to be somewhere she felt like herself.
Wanting to stay in dreams the same as Tessa does.
“I keep thinking about what it would have been like…” I murmur, “… if she’d gotten whatever she needed. If she’d been able to stay in her dreams years ago. Would it hurt less if she had not woken up, like Tessa?”
Lennon’s hand finds its way into my hair, scratching lightly against my scalp, and I groan. “That’s cheating.”
“What?”
“The hair thing.”
“You love the hair thing.”
“I do.”
She keeps scratching, and I briefly forget every problem I’ve ever had.
“Being a mom has to be difficult,” she says quietly. “Wanting things for yourself while also having these little people depending on you. I’m not saying she was right to neglect you. She wasn’t. She should never have had kids if she wasn’t prepared to show up for them. But even good moms struggle.”
I think about that, then I think about Jasper, me, and all the ways things could have gone differently. “I think that’s part of it.”
“Part of what?”
“Why I don’t want kids.”
Lennon tilts her head slightly. “Oh?”
I shrug. “I already know what happens when somebody looks at you like you’re supposed to have all the answers. Jasper did that to me often enough. And I don’t ever want a kid looking at me how I looked at my mom.”
Her fingers tighten slightly in my hair, not enough to hurt, but enough to tell me she heard it.
“You’d be a good mom.”
“I would be a good mom because my mom showed me every day what a good mom is like,” she agrees. “But not a happy one.”
“So, no kids for us?”
“No kids for us. Besides…” she says, “… it wouldn’t exactly be easy for me anyway.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have PCOS.”
I frown. “You’re gonna have to help me out here.”
“Short version? My body has opinions nobody asked it to have.”
“Is there a longer version?”
“Hormones. Weird periods. A vagina that doesn’t get the memo most of the time. Ovaries being dramatic.”
A vagina that… what?
“That doesn’t seem like a longer version.”
She smiles against my skin. “It’s manageable but annoying.”
“Anything I could do to help?”
“Paul’s on it.”
“Okay.” I press a kiss to the top of her head.
I have to tell Paul that he has to let me help him help her.
“I’ve now told you more about my uterus than I’ve told most people in my life.”
“That’s an honor.”
“It’s not.”
“I feel honored.”
She groans. “Can we please go to sleep?”
“Yeah.” I pull her a little closer. “Yeah, you can go to sleep.”
She settles while I keep my arm around her, and the ceiling continues being informative. After a few minutes, her breathing slows and evens.
Good, she’s asleep. She needed actual non-lucid sleep. We both need that, and I should close my eyes and do the sleep thing too.
She tilts up her face and kisses my jaw.
Not asleep, then.
“Lemon?” I murmur, but she does it again, at the corner of my mouth this time, and then when I turn my head, my mouth.
My pulse skyrockets, and I kiss her back, because, obviously, it’s her.
I’m tempted to do a reality check, but honestly, does it matter if this is a dream or real? I get to kiss her. I pull her closer, and she comes easily. With the closeness, the kiss goes from slow to deep, her fingers curling into my hair again.
Okay. Okay. This is happening.
It’s… she is…
There is not a single coherent thought left in my head.
I’ve been kissed before. I know what that is, but this is not the same category. My heart is doing something I’m going to have to think about later when I’m capable of thinking. Right now, I’m just here.
Just in this.
Just her.
She pulls back eventually, far enough to breathe, and looks at me. “Hi,” she whispers.
“Hi.” My voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere outside my body.
She smiles, then she ducks her head and presses her lips to my collarbone. I feel it everywhere. Then she keeps going down my chest, my sternum, the center of my ribs.
I’m only in my boxers that are cosplaying a tent right now.
Shit.
“Lemon.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“You said you wanted to sleep.”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she presses another kiss against my skin, lower.
“You said…” I stop mid-sentence and mid-thought, because she does something with her mouth that erases the rest of it. “Sleep,” I manage to blurt out.
“I changed my mind.” She keeps going lower. “I think we could both use a distraction.”
“If you don’t stop, I’m going to have you naked and under my mouth in…” I try to do the math. The math is not accessible right now. “Very few seconds.”
She hums against my skin.
“Lemon.”
Her gaze comes up to mine. “Is that a no?”
“Never.”
She smiles as her hand slides down my stomach, teasing the waistband of my boxers before she cups me through the fabric. I’m already painfully hard, and the heat of her palm makes me groan and buck my hips.
“Fuck.”
She rubs me slowly over the thin cotton, feeling the length of me, squeezing gently. Then she leans down and presses an open-mouthed kiss right over the head, licking a warm stripe along the fabric. The wet heat of her tongue soaks through, and I buck up again without meaning to, almost whimpering.
Shit.
She hums, pleased, and does it again, licking, rubbing, and sucking lightly through the boxers until the front is dark with her saliva and my pre-cum, and clinging to me. Every drag of her tongue makes my hips twitch.
I’m leaking, and she can feel it, probably even taste it.
“Lemon, baby, if you keep doing that, I’m going to lose it.”
She nips my skin above the waistband, then looks up at me with those bright eyes, daring me. “Then lose it.”
In one smooth motion, I flip us over, rolling her onto her back. She lets out a surprised laugh that turns into a soft moan when I push the hem of my shirt she’s wearing up, finding black lace panties underneath.
Jesus.
“What are you doing?” she gasps out.
The black lace against her skin, her chest still rising too fast, and the way she’s watching me watch her like she doesn’t know what to do with this kind of attention. I drag one thumb along the inside of her thigh, not touching where she wants it yet, feeling her shiver under my hand.
“You’re unreal, you know that?” I say mostly to myself, palms smoothing over her thick, perfect thighs. “My turn.”
Leaning in, I press my mouth over the lace, licking a slow stripe up her center.
She jolts, fingers tightening in my hair.
Then I rub my tongue over her slit through the lace, pressing the material against her with every stroke.
She rocks up into my mouth, chasing the friction.
I suck gently, then harder, letting the lace drag over her clit while my hands hold her hips down.
“You taste even better than your muffins.” I groan against her.
“Nevan, oh God.”
I slide two fingers under the edge of the panties, teasing her entrance but not pushing inside, working the wet fabric against her while my mouth works her clit. The combination has her thighs trembling around my ears in minutes.
“Let me feel you come like this,” I murmur against her.
“I don’t think I…”
I pull the fabric to the side and suck her clit into my mouth.
And she comes hard.