Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Lennon
The beach goes on forever in both directions.
That’s the first thing I notice, how it stretches, farther than any beach I’ve ever stood on, the sand so fine it looks like powder.
The second thing is the doors. Hundreds of them, standing upright in the sand without frames or walls to hold them, in every color I can think of, and some I don’t have names for.
Some are tall and narrow, some wide enough to drive a car through, some barely knee-height, painted, weathered, and studded with brass and draped in driftwood.
All of them are facing the water, and all of them are closed.
The tide is out as if it left the doors behind.
This is… a weird beach.
I look down at my fingers.
Breadsticks. All of them are breadsticks, slightly glistening…
… I’m dreaming.
The lucidity clicks in like a light coming on in a dark room, and I breathe through it, feeling the dream lock around me. The sand under my feet becomes more itself. The sound of the water fills in properly, wave by wave.
I’m still standing there, orienting myself, when Tessa appears next to me.
“Very good, Lenny.” Her smile is wide when her arms come around me, and I’m holding on with both hands, pressing my face into her shoulder, breathing her in. “You’re getting so good at this.”
“I found you,” I murmur into her shoulder.
“You did.” She pulls back, both hands on my arms, looking at my face. “You found my dreamscape, but I would have come to you. I always come to you.”
“I know.” I wipe my eyes quickly. “I think it was the tea. A friend gave me herbs. Said they were good for dreams, and it felt… easier than usual. Like the door was already open.”
Tessa nods, unsurprised, as if this information fits somewhere she already knew about. She links her arm through mine and starts walking along the waterline, and I fall into step beside her, the doors stretching ahead of us in both directions.
“This is the dream,” I say. “The one you wrote about. The beach.”
“Everyone has one.” She looks out at the water. “A place where the subconscious lives. Your essence, I guess, if that doesn’t sound too strange. The place everything else builds from.” She glances at me. “Yours is the kitchen.”
I think about the kitchen in almost every dream I can remember. “Yeah, I guess that tracks.” I watch a wave pull back from the sand, think about how she’d described this place in her journal, and why she found it in the first place. “Do you know what Derek’s is?”
Tessa’s arm tightens in mine. “Why do you bring him up?”
“I don’t know.” I keep my voice casual. “He seems nice.”
She gives me a look that is entirely her, the sideways quality of it. “I know what you’re trying to do.”
“I’m just saying…”
“It won’t work, Lenny.” Her voice goes quieter, not hard, just careful. “It’s not like my mother doesn’t try to bring him up all the time to get a reaction from me. And it’s not like he ever came to visit.”
I stop walking. “Nora can lucid dream too?”
“No, but she sits with me.” Tessa keeps her eyes on the water. “Sometimes I can hear her.”
“Wait.” I turn to face her. “You can hear what people say to you? In waking life?”
“Sometimes.” She shrugs. “It depends.”
“Tessa, that means—”
“It’s sacred, in a way.” She cuts me off.
“And private. Your comfort zone. Because it has power over you, which means it gives you power too. If you want to be lucid, fall asleep thinking of your place, and it’ll bring you there…
and if you know someone else’s place, you can fall asleep thinking about that instead, and you’ll find yourself in their dreamscape. ”
I watch her profile and decide to let the Derek topic go in favor of this one. “Does the other person have to know you’re coming?”
“No, but it helps.” She smiles. “Connection helps more than knowledge most of the time. Although, you could never enter a dreamscape of someone who doesn’t want you there.
You can think of me, or this beach, when you’re falling asleep.
We have enough between us that it’ll work.
” She squeezes my arm. “Or you could just stay.”
“Tessa.”
“I know, I know.” She says it lightly, but something underneath it isn’t light at all. “I’m just saying. The option exists.”
She keeps her eyes on the water.
“Your space says a lot about you,” she continues before I can push on it.
“Your kitchen is clear. Warmth, nourishment, creativity, home. It’s so completely you, it’s almost funny.
” She looks at the doors around us. “Mine is… this. Doors that lead to different dreamscapes, different worlds, different versions of things. My subconscious wants to explore. It always did. I think I was made to live here.”
I let that sink in as we walk in silence until the doors thin out gradually, and there’s only one left ahead of us. It’s bigger than the others. Not taller, exactly, but weightier, with dark wood worn smooth, the grain of it visible in long, flowing lines.
“It also has…” Tessa says as we come to stand in front of it, “… a door to elsewhere, which tells you a lot about me and where I should end up, I guess.”
My pulse ticks up. “5D?”
“Whatever you want to call it.”
The door swings inward, and behind it is a kitchen.
My kitchen.
Not the one in my dreams, my base, but the one from my childhood home in Boston, the one with the yellow walls, the chipped tile above the stove, and the window over the sink that looked out into the neighbor’s yard.
The one that smelled like lemon cake and coffee and had the warmth of a house that was lived in by people who loved each other.
My mother is standing at the stove.
She’s laughing, her head tipped back, one hand pressed to her chest like she always laughed when something really got her, and beside her is a man I’ve never seen before, but there’s familiarity in the line of him that I can’t place.
They’re both so real and so completely there that the air goes out of me entirely.
“Mom,” I whisper.
I haven’t said that out loud in weeks.
They both turn.
“Lenny.” She smiles at me, and the pull is immediate, gravity but warmer, like something reaching into my heart and tugging. It’s not grief, it’s relief. The sick and very seductive relief of seeing love offered in a form that doesn’t ask anything hard of me except surrender.
I take one step forward without deciding to, drawn toward the threshold, toward the yellow walls, the smell of lemon cake, and her face.
Her face, how it looked before she got sick.
I freeze mid-step.
“Lenny,” Tessa whispers softly as she steps past me and over the threshold.
“We’re all here. Everyone you love.” She gestures somewhere behind my mother, and I follow her hand and see him, my dad, in the hallway, leaning in the doorway like he always did, and I make a sound I can’t describe.
“We miss you. You can visit, sure, but you can’t stay.
Not unless… let go, Lenny. Let go and stay with us. ”
Tears blur everything.
My mother holds out her hand while the man beside her puts his palm on her shoulder as if he belongs there.
“Yeah, Lenny.” His green gaze holds mine. “You’re welcome here.”
Tessa lifts her hand, palm out, and I mirror it without thinking, reaching across the threshold, fingers stretching toward fingers, while the crystal on my neck starts to warm and…
A hand closes around mine from behind, and the presence feels familiar in the way that means it’s been in my dreams before.
“Don’t.” Ridge pulls my hand down.
He holds it, fingers lacing through mine while he looks at the doorway, at the yellow kitchen and everything it means, and then he raises his free hand, giving all of it a middle finger.
Then he turns us around and pulls me back down the beach.
I yank my hand from his before we’ve made it ten steps. “Did you just flip off my parents?”
“I flipped off This Man to show him what I think about his offer.” He doesn’t slow down. “Your parents happened to be in the vicinity.”
“That was This Man?” I turn and look back, but the door to 5D has fallen closed again. “What offer? What are you talking about?”
We stand in front of a tall red door with a brass handle, and he pulls it open without answering. On the other side is a city street, full, loud, and moving, afternoon light cutting between buildings, people flowing past in both directions.
He steps through, dragging me with him.
“Ridge—”
He’s already moving, my wrist caught in his hand as he cuts through the crowd with the purposeful stride of someone who absolutely knows where he’s going.
Even if I’m sure he doesn’t.
“How did you even get into Tessa’s dreamscape?” I ask, half jogging to keep up.
He stops abruptly and turns. “How did you?”
“I…” I open my mouth, then close it, giving it some thought. “I thought about her while I fell asleep.”
“Right.” He turns back and keeps walking.
“That’s not an answer!”
“I wasn’t there for her.”
“Then why were you there?”
He glances over his shoulder. “You’re very nosy for someone who kidnapped my REM cycle.”
“Why are you always pulling me?” I wrench my wrist free and plant my feet. “Every single time, you just grab me and drag me somewhere as if I’m luggage.”
He spins around so fast he almost knocks into someone behind him.
“Because every time I don’t have hold of you, something tries to steal you!”
He looks briefly irritated with himself. Then he rolls his shoulders and smirks as if he didn’t just snap.
“So, yes,” he says lightly, stepping closer again. “I pull your pretty little ass around.”
I stare at him. “Fuck you.”
Something shifts in his expression. The carefulness drops, replaced by something more awake and focused, as if I’ve accidentally said the most interesting thing anyone has said to him in a while.
“Is that an insult or a to-do list?”
Heat floods my face before I can stop it, and I watch him clock it—the exact moment—and the corner of his mouth does that thing.
“We could do missionary,” he adds conversationally as he steps closer. “That way we can keep arguing.”
“You think this is a joke.” Irritation spikes. “Everything is a joke to you.”
“Lennon—”
“What we did,” I cut him off and cross my arms. “That’s a joke, too, is it?”
I hate how much I need the answer.
Because if it meant nothing to him, then I have managed to humiliate myself in yet another dimension, which feels frankly excessive.
He’s quiet for a beat, something moving behind his eyes that isn’t amusement. “As someone who enjoys fucking, safely, might I add…” A lollipop appears in his hand out of nowhere, and he unwraps it, promptly sticking it between his teeth. “… I’d say what happened was—”
I shove him back against the wall before he can finish. My palm lands flat on his chest, and he goes easily, more surprised than resisting.
His eyebrows lift, and I reach up, yanking the lollipop out of his mouth.
“Don’t you dare make fun of me right now.”
He looks at the lollipop in my hand that I’m pointing at him, then at my face, and his gaze drops very deliberately down my body before he reaches out and takes it back. When he slides it between his lips again, his tongue curls against the candy.
A tiny, infuriating smile appears. “I wouldn’t dream of it, sweetheart,” he says mildly around the stick.
“We can absolutely pretend I didn’t make you come around my fingers.
” The grin widens when my thighs involuntarily press together at the memory.
“Or that you didn’t look exactly like this when I did it.
” He pulls the lollipop out of his mouth and taps it once against my lower lip. “It was only a dream, after all.”
The words land exactly the way he knew they would, and I feel the hurt of it move through me before I can get ahead of it.
“I know it’s just a dream!” My voice cracks as I step back.
“This is just a dream too. All of it.” I gesture at the street, the city, the door we stepped through somewhere behind us.
“Everything I want is in a dream. Everything that feels real is a dream.”
And waking life keeps asking me to be grateful for crumbs as if that’s the same thing.
“Everything I—”
My throat closes.
Mom.
Dad.
Tessa.
“It’s all just a dream. None of it is real. Not you, not me, not any of this, not a single person on this street.”
Silence slams down, and the entire city stops moving. Dozens of people turn toward us at the exact same time, staring.
“Shit.” Ridge goes stiff beside me. “Lennon,” he says under his breath. “Don’t move.”
“What?”
“Never…” He steps in front of me, shoving me back against the wall I’d just pinned him to, “… tell the background characters they’re fake.”
One of them takes a step forward.
Then another.
“Why?” I whisper.
“Because now… they have nothing to lose.”
The nearest one lunges, and Ridge turns, grabbing me hard and hauling me into his chest. His arms wrap around my head as he pushes me into the wall with his back to the crowd.
Shielding me.
For one fractured second, my face is buried against him. Ginger. Sugar. The sour citrus of that stupid lollipop.
Then the street erupts—
I wake up in my bedroom, my heart slamming hard enough that I feel it in my throat.
I lie there and stare into the darkness.
Tessa’s face across the threshold.
My mother’s hand reaching.
Ridge’s arms around me, his smell of ginger and sugar. The city erupting behind him.
From the other side of the wall comes only silence.
I press both hands over my face and stay there until my heart decides to behave, which takes longer than I’d like.
Let go, Lenny. Stay with us.
I think about my mom’s smile, about how it felt to take that step toward her.
How close I came.
The anger comes back before I can stop it, and I let it because it’s cleaner than the alternative, and right now, clean is what I need.
I sit up, and before I can think too much about it, I stand and find my cardigan on the floor. I pull it on over my sleep shirt, then shove my feet into my shoes without looking at them.
That’s it.
I’m getting Tessa out.
I don’t know what it costs, what Ridge knows that he hasn’t told me, what This Man wants, or what letting go actually means when it’s the only person who ever…
I’m getting her out.
Even if I have to learn an entirely new language of dreaming to do it.
Even if it costs me whatever version of denial I’ve been living on.
I’m already in the hallway before the thought fully finishes forming, my apartment door clicking shut behind me. The building is quiet, and I’m moving on something that isn’t quite a thought yet, just direction, the furious forward momentum that makes me set one foot in front of the other.
I check the small plaque beside the doorbell. Wells.
Then I knock three times. Not soft.
There’s a pause long enough that I almost knock again, but then the door opens to disheveled dark hair sticking in several directions, a crease on his cheek from a pillow, and tired dark eyes blinking down at me.
“Lennon?”
He looks at me, then down the hallway, then back at me.
“Everything okay?”
I take a deep breath.
“We need to talk, Derek.”