Chapter 9 #2
“All right, all right, I’m here,” the familiar voice grumbles, deeper and less razor-edged than last night.
Melanie squeals and bolts inside, and I retreat into my doorway, quietly closing it behind me.
Leaning against the closed door, I listen to muffled voices through the wall—Melanie’s high little squeal, a deeper rumble that must be Ridge, and Derek’s calm baritone. It’s weirdly comforting to know life is happening on the other side of the drywall.
In here, though, it’s just me.
Sighing to nobody, I glance at the oven clock. 5:52 p.m. Almost six. That’s late enough to justify pajamas, legally and spiritually.
After slipping off my clothes, I pull on my softest lounge pants and an oversized lemon-print shirt. The cotton hugs me in all the right ways, and I feel about ten percent more human.
Slumping onto the mattress, I tug the moonstone pendant between my fingers. It warms quickly, like it’s pulsing with my heartbeat.
“Maybe it’s time to test you out,” I whisper. “I could use a nap that isn’t haunted.”
Slowly, I sink backward and grab Mr. Muffin, pulling him to me as the mattress cradles my aching bones. I’m right at the edge of sleep—sweet, overdue sleep—when my phone buzzes violently beside me.
I turn to find Spencer’s name glaring up at me.
“Oh, hell no,” I mutter, and decline the call so fast I might have sprained my thumb.
Two seconds later, it rings again, and I squeeze my eyes shut, pulse ticking higher. I want to block him and never think about him, Sienna, Aubrey, or any of it ever again. But, as horrible as it was, I know we should probably talk. Just not today.
Given this is the first time he has tried to call me since I left Boston, it can wait.
He calls again, and the sound rattles in the empty apartment.
“How about you leave a voicemail?” I mumble and hit the decline with steady fingertips this time.
At least the damn nightmare haunting me has taught me that what I’m feeling toward him is not heartbreak. It seems as though the last six months have already hollowed that part out. I’m just feeling betrayed? Stupid?
Sleep, Lenny. Everything will look brighter when you’ve gotten some goddamn sleep.
I roll onto my side, grip the pendant, and exhale slowly.
Shifting my knee, I focus on breathing slowly, softly, but none of it works.
The exhaustion is still there, full force if I’m honest, but the sleepiness that carried me toward the mattress like a siren song is gone, fled the second Spencer’s stupid name lit up my screen.
Now I’m vibrating with leftover adrenaline, irritation, and the hollow ache that hasn’t quite decided whether it wants to become sadness or rage.
I groan and flip onto my back. “Come on. Please just let me have a nap. Twenty minutes. I’m not asking for much.”
The universe, in its usual fashion, ignores me completely.
About fifteen more minutes pass with me staring at the ceiling like I’m trying to force myself unconscious. I blow out a frustrated breath, push upright, and set Mr. Muffin beside me.
Fine. If sleep won’t come to me, I’ll chase sugar instead.
The half-eaten muffin calls my name, so I grab it from the kitchen, still faintly warm, and carry it to the mattress. I sit, muffin in one hand, and reach for my e-reader, thinking I might read until my eyes finally give up on me.
Naturally, the screen lights up long enough to inform me its battery is dead.
“Traitor.” I snag the charging cable from the floor and plug it into the outlet beside the mattress, then glance around at the mess I’ve created. Clothes, makeup, half-unpacked life strewn everywhere.
Great. Riveting entertainment.
My gaze drifts, inevitably, to the seaweed-green journal that’s been burning a hole straight through my conscience.
“This is wrong,” part of me whispers. This is private.
Another part of me, the part that drove across the country because the girl who owns said journal told me to, is louder. Much louder.
Wasn’t I afraid to read it?
“Oh well,” I whisper as I stand and grab the journal, slumping back on the mattress.
The first pages are exactly what I expect from Tessa. Chaotic scribbles in different pens, little doodles, and half-poems.
My hands always smell like garlic and sugar, and I don’t know if I love or hate it. Who am I kidding? I love it.
I snort despite myself.
No one told me that adulthood is just dishes and pretending you’re not lonely.
“Mood,” I murmur, taking a bite of my muffin.
Her notes are all over the place. Lists of recipe ideas, notes about professors she hates. My name pops up every few pages, making my heart skip each time.
Lenny made lemon tarts again. I swear, she’s trying to seduce the entire class.
Note to self—grab that peachy lipstick Lenny loves so much for Christmas. Hers is almost empty. Or maybe get a better shade.
I huff a laugh, crumbs scattering over the page. “Oh, now you tell me you don’t like my signature color?”
Damn, I still wear that one.
Somewhere around the middle, the tone shifts.
The entries get longer, more focused. Instead of one-line jokes and doodles, there are paragraphs.
She stops writing about school drama and starts writing about a guy.
I remember her being unhappily in love, but she never told me any details about it, only that she had to get over the guy from back home.
It’s embarrassing how long we’ve been stuck in this almost-thing. Everyone at home knows it, so of course, my mom knows, too, and of course, she disapproves. She wants me with someone who fits better. Someone with the right last name, the right future, the right everything.
As if Wells isn’t as good a name as Vaughn.
Wells? She never told me his name. My breath snags, but I keep reading.
I don’t want to be pathetic, you know? I have every privilege a girl could ask for, and I told him that I’d give all of it up to be with him.
And he just looked at me and said I shouldn’t.
Said he didn’t want my life, didn’t want me to leave it either.
Said he would choose someone else, and I should too.
How am I supposed to do that? How do you choose someone else when your whole stupid heart is already ruined?
I sit back a little, swallowing the lump forming in my throat.
I don’t understand how Nora, who has always been nothing but warm and kind to me, could stand between Tessa and her happiness like that. How that sweet woman could look at her daughter, see the beginnings of real love, and say no because the boy Tessa fell for didn’t belong to the “right” world.
But seeing Tessa’s handwriting tremble in this entry, the pain bleeding through every line, I understand how deeply it hurt her.
How alone she must have felt with it.
Knowing she carried all of this without ever telling me, it twists something inside me. I was right there, watching her try to go out with other guys. She told me how she kissed them, even slept with one, but it never felt right.
Now I know why.
Real life doesn’t help. I only forget him in my dreams. Sometimes it’s like I live there more than I live here.
I swallow hard around a lump of blueberry as the entries shift again, this time toward her dreams. She always had the weirdest ones, where she’d be cooking but the burners were beating hearts under the pans.
Or a beach, where when the tide rolled back, there were hundreds of doors in different colors, but she never managed to open one.
They’re all written down in this journal in detail.
I thought she was exaggerating when she told me about them. Turns out she was underplaying it.
I think I became conscious within unconsciousness? I dreamed about the doors again. Rows of rows of them, and I thought, That’s weird, I must be dreaming? And the moment I realized it, I woke up.
What if we could cross the line from imagining?
Shit, imagine it.
I drag my thumb over the edge of the page, trying to do just that, but I don’t even know what that would look like.
I bought a book on lucid dreaming today.
There’s a little doodle of a book underneath, with a tiny Zzz pattern rising from it.
Apparently, you can actually learn to control what you do in your dreams, where you go and who you see. Everything. If I can steer them, maybe I can finally have one part of my life that doesn’t feel like it belongs to everyone else.
The next entry is from a few days later.
I think I almost did it. I was in the dining hall, but all the food was floating.
At first, I thought, aha, budget cuts, and then I realized food doesn’t float.
But I don’t think I was fully lucid because instead of taking over, I just stood there and watched the lasagna orbit my head.
By the time I thought, Maybe this is a dream, I woke up again.
I press my lips together, a weird feeling spreading in my stomach when I read the entry from a few days after this one.
Managed it. Sort of. I was in Mom’s kitchen back home, making pancakes, and halfway through flipping one, I just knew.
Like someone turned on a light inside my skull.
This is a dream, I thought, and everything got sharper, including colors, sounds, the smell of butter.
I got so excited about realizing it that I woke myself up again. Ugh, it’s so frustrating!
Then there’s an entry where it stops being about anecdotes and starts sounding like… study notes.
If you can dream at all, you can learn to lucid dream. That’s what the book swears. Also, anyone used to getting into “the zone” finds it easier because it’s the same trance-y focus, just inside your head.
Cooking = zone
Service rush = tunnel vision
I can do this!
Then she underlines a sentence twice, the ink a little smudged.
Lucid dreaming lets you do anything you’ve ever wanted.
Anything.
With anyone.
Without consequences.
There’s a new paragraph after that, a little messier, like she rode a wave of feeling without lifting the pen.