Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Lennon
Ridge sucks a lemon lollipop and smirks at me. “Question it, sweetheart.”
I look down at my hands. My fingers are breadsticks, and there are too many of them. I don’t bother counting because it’s only a formality at this point.
I’m dreaming…
…This is a dream.
I look back up at Ridge and open my mouth, but I don’t know what to ask first. Where are we, or what are we doing, or how long do we have? There’s a list, a whole plan, a reason we’re…
His lollipop disappears as he grabs my face and kisses me like he’s been waiting all day, and the question dies when his lips meet mine.
Then the ground gives way beneath us, and we’re falling.
I gasp into his mouth, but Ridge keeps kissing me through it like a man with nothing to lose until we land on something soft that gives under us, smelling like a hundred summers.
He finally releases me, turning me in his arms so I can see flowers. Yellow flowers, horizon to horizon, going up the curve of the world and over it, and the sky above is the whole Milky Way poured out like someone scattered glitter.
I’ve been here before. Almost here.
It’s the planet he built for me once, in my dreamscape, except it isn’t, not quite. The version he showed me was beautiful, but this one is loud. The yellow is somehow more yellow. The flowers are taller and, all of them, very slightly, lean toward us.
“This is my dreamscape,” Ridge says, nuzzling my throat. “My comfort zone. You wanted to know what it is, right?”
“This is the same one you showed me?”
“Yeah.” He chuckles against my skin. “But I wanted you to see the original. Not the copy. The real thing.” He turns my head toward him and kisses me hard, his hand sliding lower, and I almost forget there’s something we are supposed to do here when someone clears their throat.
I jerk back from Ridge’s mouth so fast I nearly headbutt the galaxy.
Paul is standing in the middle of the flowers, maybe ten feet away, hands in his pockets. He looks around at the planet, then at me, then at Ridge.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“Yes,” Ridge says at the same time I say, “No.”
Ridge tips his head at Paul and pulls me harder against his front. “You couldn’t have given us another minute? Two?”
“It’s a group exercise, Ridge.”
“It can be a flexible group exercise.”
There’s a clatter, and we all look toward the noise as Nevan arrives, like someone shoved him through a doorway he didn’t know was there. He stumbles out of nothing, his feet tripping over everything but also nothing, arms windmilling, but manages to keep his feet.
“Oh,” he says when he straightens, looking at Paul. “You’re already here?”
Paul nods. “Just arrived.”
“Too early,” Ridge says, sighing dramatically and kissing my neck.
Nevan frowns. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” I say, before Ridge derails a perfectly good group lucidity in ninety seconds. “It means nothing, Nevan.” I step out of Ridge’s hold and grab Nevan’s sleeve. “You made it into Ridge’s dreamscape. That’s huge.”
Nevan pinches his nose shut and breathes through it anyway, checking for himself. “Still dreaming,” he says.
“Still dreaming,” I confirm. “Okay. Let’s get to work. Who wants to be Tessa first?”
“Before we do that, let’s see if he can build at all,” Paul says, taking control. “One thing at a time.”
He nods at Nevan, who stares blankly at him. “Build what?”
“Anything,” I say. “That’s the whole point. You can do anything you want here. There’s no wrong one. Just pick a thing and try it.”
I can see him thinking about it, his brow doing the thing, his big shoulders coming up around his ears, and I have just enough time to think, oh no, before the air detonates.
Clouds. Clouds come boiling out of him in every direction, thick, gray, and damp, faster than I can step back, and the planet vanishes. The flowers vanish. Ridge vanishes. There’s nothing but wet cotton and the sound of three people coughing.
“Stop it,” Paul says, choking, somewhere to my left. “Nevan! Stop!”
“How?” Nevan’s voice is panicked, very close, but he’s completely invisible. “I don’t even know what I did, how do I…”
“Pull it back. Same as you pushed it out. Think about pulling it back in,” Paul instructs.
Immediately, the clouds thin, then it goes all at once, sucked back into wherever it came from as fast as it arrived. The flowers are there again along with the galaxy, and Nevan is standing in the middle of it all, looking like a man who just set off a firework in his hands.
Ridge wipes mist off his face. “Wow, baby boy. Clouds? That is so helpful. We’ll absolutely have a need for clouds going into a rescue.”
“Shut up, Ridge,” Paul chimes in. “That can be helpful.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know, but it can be.”
Ridge scoffs, and Nevan glares at him, but it’s undercut by the fact that he’s gone pink to the ears.
“Ridge,” I warn. “Be nice.”
“What? I’m being supportive.” Ridge holds up his hands, all innocence. “I’m genuinely curious, though. Why clouds? I’d have bet money your comfort zone was the inn. Or a skate park. Something with, I don’t know. Ground?”
“I like them. You can lie under clouds all day, and they don’t ask you for anything.”
I want to cross the few steps over the flowers and put my arms around him, but I don’t. Instead, I say, “They were good clouds. I liked them.”
Nevan smiles at me, and I can’t help but smile back.
“Okay.” Paul claps his hands once. “He can build. Good. That’s what we needed to know. Now the real thing. We need to look like Tessa. How about we start by trying? Same thing here, Nevan. You think about how you want to look and let it happen.”
I close my eyes, think of the shape, and the shape comes.
I hold Tessa in my head, the weight on one hip, the gap in her teeth, the exact pink on her nails, and I feel my bones rearrange and grow, a slither under the skin that should be horrifying and somehow isn’t.
A cool slide like stepping into water that’s the wrong temperature for a brief moment and then fine.
I open my eyes and look down at my feet. They aren’t mine.
When I look up, Ridge is already done.
Of course, he is.
He’s the best builder of any of us. Tessa is standing where he was, perfect, top to bottom, and it is so deeply, skin-crawlingly wrong that I have to look away from the face of my best friend on the man I…
“That’s, yeah. That’s exactly right,” I make myself say. “Ridge, that’s perfect.”
“Obviously,” Tessa says in Ridge’s flat voice, and the dissonance nearly takes my knees out.
Paul’s done, too, but he got the hair wrong.
“Your hair’s too warm,” I tell him. “Hers is darker than that. Cooler. And the part’s on the other side.
” He nods, closes his eyes, concentrates, and I watch the color cool and the part slide over.
“Better. That’s her. Now the hands, hold on, your hands are still your size. Think about smaller, yes, that’s good.”
Nevan is having the worst of it, and not because he can’t do it.
He can. He gets there, but he can’t hold it. He thinks Tessa into being, and she flickers, six-foot-seven and broad one second, smaller and slipping the next, his freckles bleeding back through her cheeks every time his focus slides.
I see the lucidity threatening to go each time, that loosening at the edges, the dream trying to drag him back under into the not knowing.
“Hey.” Paul-Tessa steps in close to him. “Don’t grab at it. You’re squeezing. Pick one thing. The eyes. Hold them and let the rest follow.”
Nevan breathes out a long breath.
And it works.
Tessa’s eyes settle into his face, and then the face follows them, and then the rest of him. He wobbles once, twice, his jaw tightening with effort every few seconds like a man holding a plank, but he holds it.
Four Tessas stand on a planet of yellow flowers under the whole spilled galaxy, and it is, without question, the single most upsetting thing I have ever willingly dreamed about.
You’d better wake up after us doing this for you, Tessa.
I make a slow circle around them. Checking hair, hands, and the way they stand. Ridge’s is still flawless. Paul is convincing, and Nevan holds, white-knuckled, but he’s holding onto the illusion.
“Okay,” I breathe out. “Okay, that’s it, you’ve all got it, that’s good, that’s really… change back. Change back right now, please. That is creepy as hell.”
Ridge chuckles, and when the sound is gone, he’s already back to himself again. Nevan bounces back the second he lets go, and Paul changes back to himself in a breath too.
I stand there in the middle of Ridge’s whole universe, three beautiful men around me and a galaxy over my head. All I can think is…
How did I get this?
How did I get to keep them?
All three of them. How does someone like me get all three?
“Lemon, baby.”
I blink a few times. “Yeah?”
Paul smiles. “We want your pretty eyes back, darling.”
“Oh, right.”
I change back to myself, and they look me over at the same time, with the same expression.
It’s not the one I expected, because I can read it in their eyes.
It’s the exact thought turned around and pointed back at me, like they’re each privately doing the same math and coming up just as stunned that I’m theirs.
My pulse trips over itself and forgets, for a second, how to be a pulse.
I don’t know if that’s important, given that I’m dreaming.
“Right,” I murmur, feeling the heat rise in my cheeks. “Looks like we’ve got it.”
“And since we do…” Ridge starts. “How about we go back to where we were before we got so rudely interrupted? I’m just saying being this good at something has to get rewarded. Am I right?”
“I’m not leaving,” Paul protests. “Just so you can…” he gestures, vaguely, at the entire concept “… do whatever it is you do in dreams to her.”