Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Lennon
“Well, that was… dramatic.”
Ridge is leaning against a closed shop front with his arms crossed and a lollipop tucked in his cheek.
His long, dark hair falls loose around his face as he watches me with amber eyes.
Then he pushes off the wall and pulls the lollipop from his mouth, holding it between two fingers as if he’s considering it, before letting it drop.
It disappears before it ever hits the ground.
As he starts walking toward me, he hooks his thumb under the hair tie around his wrist, tugs it free with his teeth, and gathers his hair back with both hands. The movement is somehow intimate, making something low in my stomach tighten before I can stop it.
Tessa’s voice echoes in my head.
“You are absolutely craving.”
My pulse jumps.
Shit. Maybe she had a point.
Hair up, Ridge comes to a halt in front of me and reaches down to take my hand, pulling me to my feet in one smooth motion and straight into walking without breaking stride.
“Ridge—” I start.
“Come on. I hate this fucking dreamscape.”
“I don’t have shoes on…” I look down. Shoes, exactly where they should be. “But my milkshake…” I look back. The bench is empty. Both cups, bags, the entire rest of our afternoon gone like it was never there. “Ridge, where are we even going?”
“You are not going anywhere.” His hand tightens around mine.
“Well, right now I’m walking somewhere with you, which I didn’t agree to.”
He stops in front of an empty storefront, and whatever I was about to say dies somewhere in my throat because he’s looking at me with an expression I haven’t seen on him before.
It’s not the lazy amusement or the deliberate provocation but the thing underneath all of that, stripped back and almost irritated.
“You’re staying with me,” he says. “You hear me?”
“Excuse me? I—”
“Fine, maybe you are her tether.” He says it as if it costs him to admit it.
“But you are mine too. And if I’m not completely wrong…
” his jaw tightens, “… I’m yours. Or I can be.
I will be.” He says the last part like he’s making a decision in real time and is slightly annoyed about it.
“I am not going to stand here and let her just sweep in and take you from me.”
He turns and starts walking again, pulling me with him, and I follow because apparently my feet have decided to cooperate without consulting me.
There’s this ridiculous fuzzy feeling spreading through my stomach, and I’m looking at the back of his head and the line of his shoulders and…
“Remember, we have a deal,” he says flatly, cutting off my thought.
Oh. Right.
“I need you conscious and functional, and in possession of your own brain so I can use it.”
The fuzzy feeling retreats, sensibly, back to wherever it came from.
Along with what little dignity I had left.
Of course. The deal. He’s not mad because he’d fight a dream version of my best friend for me, or of anything that sounded, for four seconds, like something else entirely.
“Right,” I say, keeping my voice very even. “The deal. Got it.”
“Good.”
“Wouldn’t want to confuse the situation.”
“Nobody’s confused.”
“Clearly,” I agree.
He glances back at me over his shoulder, and his expression shifts, as if he caught a note in my tone and is deciding whether to address it.
He doesn’t and faces forward again. “Keep up,” he says. “I want us out of Mallworld before we deal with any of that.”
“Mallworld?”
He gestures around at the empty corridors, the dark storefronts, the fountain still running for nobody. “You ever see those posts online? People describing places they dream about that feel weirdly real? Airports with no exits, hotels that go on forever, shopping malls that just keep going?”
I look down the corridor. It does seem to stretch longer than it should.
“They’re not only dreams,” Ridge says. “They’re shared spaces. Leftover architecture from too many people dreaming the same thing. Mallworld is one of the more stable ones.” He glances sideways at me. “Which sounds like a good thing until you realize stable means it doesn’t want to let you out.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It’s fine if you know the exits.” He says it like someone who has learned the hard way. “Toilet World is worse.”
I stare at him. “I’m sorry, Toilet—”
“Don’t ask.”
“Ridge.”
He exhales through his nose. “It’s exactly what it sounds like.
Infinite public bathrooms, but they don’t have doors and are dirty as fuck.
Flickering lights, that specific smell, and the overwhelming certainty that you’ll need a piss soon…
” He pauses. “I spent a whole night in there once before I figured out how to leave.”
“That sounds like a personal hell.”
“It was nothing,” he says grimly. “Come on, this way.”
He pulls me down a side corridor I hadn’t noticed, narrower than the others, past a row of shuttered shops, and then through a fire exit door that opens onto nothing at all.
Just stars.
I grab the door frame on reflex, but Ridge steps straight through without hesitating, pulling me with him, and then we’re falling, or flying, or both, the mall dissolving behind us as if it were never there.
The planet from last night comes up fast above, yellow flowers blazing in the starlight, and I realize with a lurch that we’re upside down, walking on the underside of the sky.
“Ridge!”
“Relax.”
“We’re upside down!”
“Gravity’s subjective.” He sounds almost bored.
I look up, which is down, at the endless field of yellow blooms above my head, swaying softly in a wind that has no business existing this far from anything, then Ridge pulls at my hand, and we fall upward.
I don’t scream this time. It’s over too fast, a rush of warm air and the sweet smell of the flowers. Then we land, gravity righting itself at the last possible second, and I’m sitting in the middle of the field with petals brushing my knees and stars spreading out above us where they belong.
Ridge drops beside me a second later, unbothered, as if falling out of the sky is normal.
I pull my hand from his. The deal comment still stings, a small bright point of embarrassment I’d like to quietly bury somewhere in the flowers and never think about again, but he reaches over and takes it back, not even asking first.
He takes my hand, settling it in his with the easy certainty of someone who has already decided that I would want to hold his hand, and laces his fingers through mine.
I let him, which feels like a choice I’ll probably overthink later.
But the alternative is making it a thing, and I’m not making it a thing.
He looks down at our joined hands, turning mine over slowly, and his thumb moves over my knuckles in that absent way he has.
Then he frowns. “I don’t like this color.”
I look down at my peach nails.
Of course, he doesn’t. Exhaustion moves through me, not quite hurt, just that deflation of having picked something for yourself and having a man immediately have opinions about it.
“Wow.”
“What?”
“Groundbreaking. A man doesn’t like my nail polish. Truly, I have never encountered this before in my life.”
“I’m just saying.” He ignores my tone entirely, still studying my nails with focused displeasure. “It’s bland. It doesn’t suit you.”
“And what, pray tell, does suit me?”
“The yellow,” he says. “The citrus stuff.” He turns my hand over once more, thinking. “I was actually trying to figure out what I’d do if I ever got mine done. Geometric pattern, maybe. Black and white.”
“You want to get your nails done?” I ask, sounding incredulous.
“What?” he asks, glancing back up at me. “You telling me men can’t?”
“No, I mean… I could do that,” I hear myself say. “I could come over to your place tomorrow and bring my kit, if you want to try it.”
Did I just invite myself to his apartment?
He turns his head and looks at me, his expression unreadable. Then he murmurs, “How about we try it here first. So I can decide if I want to commit.”
“It’s nail polish,” I say. “Not a tattoo.”
“I’m aware of what nail polish is.”
“You’re acting like I’m proposing something permanent.”
A nail kit appears next to me in the flowers, but it looks wrong. The bottles are the wrong shape, and the colors are off.
“Is that supposed to be nail polish?” I chuckle at him.
“It’s not like I’ve ever seen a nail kit in person.”
I press my lips together against a smile, close my eyes, and think about my kit. The way the zipper sticks on the left side, the smell of acetone, and the little row of dotting tools I keep in the front pocket.
When I open my eyes, it’s there. All of it, exactly right.
I look up to find Ridge watching me, but his expression is unreadable.
“You’re getting good at this,” he says, and his voice has lost its usual edge.
“It took me years to reach this kind of stability. Even now, I can’t hold it like you do.
” There’s that faint pressure again at the edges of the dreamscape, and I know without looking that it’s him, pushing at the walls of my consciousness.
“I’d never be able to carry a lucid state like this on my own right now. ”
I shrug, looking back at the kit. “I have no idea how I’m doing it either.”
“That’s somehow more annoying.”
“Sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“No,” I agree, a smile tugging at my lips. “I’m not.”
I pull the black polish from the set and turn his hand over so it’s palm down, resting on my thigh. He shifts to make it easier, spreading his fingers, and I try very hard to ignore the warm weight of his hand on my leg and how it wrecks my concentration.
I unscrew the cap and position the brush. “Hold still.”
“I’m not moving.” He watches my hands with that same quiet focus, and I keep my eyes on my work. The dreamscape holds steady around us, smelling of yellow flowers and something sour and sweet that I’m starting to understand is just Ridge.
“So,” I say, starting on his second finger, keeping my eyes on the brush. “You heard all of that.”
“A lot of it.” He shrugs with one shoulder. “And like I said. It’s not going to happen.”