Chapter 32
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Lennon
A quiet huff pulls me out of sleep, followed by a muttered of fucking course, and I stir without fully meaning to, pulling whatever warmth is closest toward me on instinct.
The warmth goes completely still.
I breathe in crystallized ginger, dry cedar, and a hint of musk underneath it all.
God, that smells good.
I pull it closer as if it’s mine.
“Hey.” The voice is low, careful. “You awake?”
I turn my face further into the warmth and breathe again while taking stock of things. The heartbeat under my cheek. The hand that was at my back, frozen now, not moving. The hair tickling my face that isn’t mine.
The warmth of him, everywhere.
Ridge.
Ridge is holding me.
I hold out my hand, still half asleep, and squint at my fingers. Five. Normal. All of them are the correct shape. From above me comes a short and quiet huff.
“Fair,” he mutters, and then his lips press to my forehead, brief, warm, and so gentle.
Nothing like the version of him in my dreams.
“But no.” His mouth stays there, resting, speaking into my skin. “Unfortunately, this is waking life.”
I lower my hand, but then neither of us moves, and the room is doing that early-morning thing where the light hasn’t committed to anything yet, and the world hasn’t decided if it’s day already.
Finally, I look up at him, and there’s something in his expression that moves when our eyes meet—there and gone, quick enough that I could convince myself I imagined it—and then his face does the thing where it reassembles itself into dry and unaffected.
Almost.
“Morning, sweetheart. Finally decided to rejoin the living?”
“Debatable.” My voice comes out sleep-rough, and his mouth twitches.
I glance down, but then immediately glance back up.
We are very close.
Close enough that I can feel his breath shift when I breathe.
I’m draped across him, legs tangled over his wheelchair, one arm around his neck.
“Oh,” I repeat.
“Mm-hmm.”
“You’re… still here.”
“Against my better judgment,” he says dryly, which sounds like a lie.
But his arm hasn’t moved. Neither has mine.
“Before you panic, you climbed into my lap voluntarily.”
“I did not.”
“You absolutely did.”
“I was emotionally compromised.”
“You were still half asleep.”
“Still counts.”
His mouth twitches again. Then he adds, quieter this time, “You were crying. I’m sorry for making you cry. I have issues.”
“Oh, you don’t say.”
He huffs. “I think you saw my issues, and somehow that pushed me straight into my other issue, which is a deadline I can’t fulfill for my next book.”
“There’s a deadline?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t know that. Okay. I’m sorry I’ve been keeping you from your part of the deal.
” I chew my lip. “I’m going to figure out how to be less of a scaredy-cat.
Maybe I could dream up some headphones? Or I could watch a cooking show.
Headphones in, a TV stand, you stand with your back to me, and I just—”
“Hey.” He cuts me off.
I look up. Something in his expression has shifted, the dry layer of him gone.
“You’re apologizing to me and trying to figure out how to help me after what I did.”
“We have a deal, don’t we?”
“Yeah.” His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there a beat too long before coming back up. “The deal.”
“Is that why you’re still here too?”
“You asked me to stay.” He shrugs one shoulder, as if it’s no big deal, like he hasn’t been sitting here for three hours in the dark. “I figured you deserved a better wake-up than round two of screaming.”
My heart does something inconvenient.
“Sweetheart.” His voice is rough.
“Yeah?”
“You’re still stealing my oxygen.”
“Do you want it back?”
His hand at my back shifts, his thumb brushing once against the waistband of my pajama pants before he catches himself. Like he almost forgot where we are.
“Eventually,” he murmurs, but still, neither of us moves.
I register that he’s holding my e-reader in his other hand. “What are you doing with that?”
“You were unconscious on top of me. I had limited entertainment options.”
“That’s mine!” I reach for it.
“Greedy girl.” He holds it out of reach, eyebrows lifting, but then something shifts. The words land between us and sit there. I watch the exact moment he realizes what he just said, because it’s the same moment I do.
My face goes hot.
I know what his mouth feels like on my skin.
And now he’s here, in my actual bedroom, in the actual morning light, and I am very acutely aware that the version of him I’ve been pretending was separate from this one… isn’t.
His expression doesn’t change, but his jaw does something subtle, a slight tightening, before he clears his throat once. “What happens in the dreamscape,” he says, very evenly. “Stays in the dreamscape. For now… okay?”
For now.
I file that away somewhere I’ll deal with later. Or never. Never works too.
“Right,” I agree.
Neither of us looks at the other for a second.
This is fine. This is completely fine. I have absolutely not been fucked with a lollipop by him in my own subconscious, and he has absolutely not looked at me like…
“My reading history is private,” I blurt.
“Why?” The dry layer is back, seamless, like he just stepped back into a coat he’d briefly taken off. “Because you’re into dirty stuff?”
I glare at him. “What if I am? I’m an adult. Adults read about people having sex.”
His eyes heat as he hands the e-reader back. “Noted. You’re a romance reader.” He nods toward the screen. “But the one you’re currently reading is terrible.”
“Hey!” I tuck the e-reader against me, “What’s your problem with romance?”
“Nothing’s wrong with romance.”
“No, you think it’s beneath you.” I point at him. “Because you write horror, and those monsters, which…” I shudder, “… I don’t understand at all, but fine, that’s your thing, except now you’re mocking my books with your superior face…”
The hand at my back strokes upward, to my shoulder, and then his fingers find a loose strand of hair and tuck it behind my ear. My train of thought derails completely.
“Let me ask you something,” he says mildly.
“Okay.”
“What’s better,” he continues. “Dinner or dessert?”
“What?”
“Dinner or dessert?”
Dinner, I think automatically, because I’m a savory person and dessert is a reward system, not a meal.
Also, because something about the way he’s waiting tells me that’s the wrong answer, or maybe the right one, or maybe there isn’t a wrong answer, and that’s exactly the point he’s about to make, and I’m already…
“You can prefer dessert,” he cuts off my internal rambling. “That’s fine. Dessert is excellent, but it doesn’t make dinner worse. Everything has its place and someone who prefers it.”
I narrow my eyes at him.
“Then why were you making fun of my preference?”
“It’s just…” he gestures loosely around us. My yellow lemon pajamas. My messy room. Mr. Muffin sitting on the yellow pillow. “… look at you.”
I glance down at myself.
“What’s wrong with me?”
“It’s a little too neat,” he says thoughtfully.
“Too perfectly assembled. The sweet girl with the yellow nails, lemon pajamas, and the stuffed animals who reads romance.” He tilts his head.
“If you were secretly into horror, at least that would be a surprise. That would give your character some depth.”
I frown at him. “I’m not a character.”
“True, but if I’d written you, people would accuse me of lazy writing.”
I stand up from his lap and flip him off with both hands.
He laughs, startled and real, and it’s such a good sound that I almost don’t follow through on being furious.
Almost.
“Fuck you.”
“Well,” he says, recovering. “Maybe not quite as lazy as I—”
“You’re such an asshole.”
“Again with the pet names.”
“Is this a joke to you?” The words come out before I can stop them. “I know we had that conversation, and you never actually answered, so I’m asking again. Is this… am I just something you’re doing because it’s funny to you?”
Because I don’t think I can do that again.
“Lennon.” His hand closes around my wrist as he exhales through his nose.
The smirk is gone, and I wasn’t prepared for what’s underneath.
“I’m sorry. I’m so far outside my comfort zone right now…
the only way I know how to handle that is sarcasm.
I’m waiting for you to address the elephant in the room, and while I’m waiting, I’m…
” He stops. “I’m nervous. That’s what that was. ”
I look down at the wheelchair, then back up at him.
God. Ridge Wells is a whiplash made flesh.
Dark, twisted, and genuinely unhinged when he wants to be. The man built horrors out of thin air and terrified me so completely that I couldn’t stop screaming when I woke up.
And then he came to comfort me.
“Lennon…” he pleads, squeezing my wrist.
I didn’t even register the chair at first. Not when he was shaking my shoulders and yelling at me to count my fingers.
Not when I climbed into his lap and wrapped my arms around his neck.
Not when I wanted to stay there.
It wasn’t until he’d been stroking my back for a while—those long, slow passes up and down my spine—that I finally noticed. The wheels. The armrest under my thigh.
But even then. Even then, it wasn’t the thing I was thinking about before I fell asleep on him.
What I was thinking about was him. The smell of him, which is the same as the dream version, but more sour and sweet like they got into a fistfight and declared a draw.
Which is, now that I’m thinking about it, probably his whole personality.
He held me as if I were the thing keeping him from drifting away, and letting go wasn’t an option he was willing to consider.
Nobody’s held me that way before.
“My friends call me Lenny,” I murmur.
He scoffs softly, then his eyes find mine again. “My friends call me asshole.”
I grin. “Sounds about right.”
His grip on my wrist moves, loosening, sliding to my waist instead. He tugs once, gently, until I’ve stepped forward, and we’re knees to knees, and he’s looking at me with those dark eyes that give away more than he thinks they do.