Chapter 34 #2
“Remember what we talked about,” I say quietly.
“Go to her. Tell her you still love her and want her back. If that doesn’t work, have Ridge teach you about lucid dreaming and 5D.
Tell her in her dreams. The beach I told you about.
” I take a deep breath. “There’s a seaweed green journal in my apartment. It was Tessa’s. Read it. It’ll help.”
His expression shifts. “Ridge can actually—”
“Get her back, Derek. Whatever it takes.”
Even if I can’t.
I need him to be the one on the outside with his hand on the rope, because I am going somewhere I can’t pull from, and someone has to pull. It has to be someone who loves her enough to reach all the way in.
“Lennon—”
“Get her back.”
I let go of his sleeve.
Then I’m moving, running, because if I stop, something will catch up with me, and I don’t have time for it to catch up with me.
I get to my car, get in, and turn the key. The engine comes up loud in the quiet night, and through the windshield, all four of them turn at the sound. Their faces find me through the glass, one by one, and I can see my name on their mouths, all four of them, at the same time.
I pull out anyway.
I don’t let myself look back again.
My tumbler is in the cupholder, right where I left it. Seraphine’s tea, the herbs still steeping, filled before I left because I’d thought I’d do this carefully, try after the party, go lucid the right way, with a plan, enough sleep, and something resembling sense.
Plans change.
I take a long sip and merge onto the dark road.
Please don’t leave me hanging, Derek.
The Vaughn house is quiet when I get there, dark except for the light above the front door and the faint warm glow of a lamp somewhere upstairs. I sit in the car after I turn off the engine, both hands still on the wheel, the tumbler empty in the cupholder.
Then I get out.
I don’t knock. The door is unlocked, and I slip inside and stand in the hallway, just listening. From somewhere toward the back, muffled by distance and closed doors, I can hear Nora crying.
The sound stops me colder than the dark house does.
I stand there with it for a moment before I go upstairs.
Tessa’s room is dim, the nightlamp casting everything in soft light, and she’s lying there with her eyes closed, but there’s a new oxygen unit beside the bed, with thin tubing running up and disappearing beneath the sheet, two small prongs sitting in her nose, and I hate it.
I hate the sight of it so much that I have to stand in the doorway for a full breath before I can make myself cross the threshold.
This is real in a way dreams never are.
I slip off my shoes at the door, then I reach into the pocket of my dress and pull out Jasper’s crystals, all of them, the ones he’d arranged on my stomach on the kitchen floor while I complained about chakras.
I arrange them on Tessa’s chest and her forehead as carefully as I can, just like he’d placed them on me.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
I don’t know if it matters, but it feels like something.
And something is better than standing here empty-handed while she disappears.
The last thing in my pocket is the keychain.
I take it out and hold it in my palm. My thumb moves over it before I can stop it, the memory of Nevan’s nose dragging slowly up the bridge of mine.
I touch my lips with two fingers.
Then I close my hand around the keychain, press my fist against my sternum, and push all of it down, somewhere it can’t reach me, before I let the keychain slip into my pocket again.
I get onto the bed beside Tessa, lift the covers, and slide in how I used to in our dorm when one of us had a bad night, and the only solution either of us ever found was to simply be next to each other.
Her shoulder is warm against mine. The oxygen unit hums quietly.
“I’m here, girl.” I take her hand. “I’m coming.”
The tea is already working, or maybe the exhaustion is, or both, because a heaviness is settling behind my eyes. I let it come. If I hesitate now, I won’t do it. I only breathe as I think about my best friend.
Breathe in.
The sound of waves.
Breathe out.
Tessa’s green eyes.
Breathe in.
The sand.
Breathe out.
The doors standing in the tide.
The beach.
The beach… is warm when my bare feet sink into sand that is as fine as powder.
The sound fills in wave by wave, louder than I’ve ever heard water be.
I look up and find doors standing in the surf, hundreds of them, every color I know and some I don’t, frames without walls, all of them facing the water, and the waves are coming higher than they should be, lapping at the bases of the nearest ones, pulling back, coming again.
I know this beach.
I look down at my hand.
They’re breadsticks, which means…
… I’m dreaming.
The lucidity clicks in, and with it, everything else. The urgency, and the thing I came here to do. I look up and down the waterline, and I call her name before I’m even fully oriented.
“Tessa!”
The waves swallow the sound.
“Tessa, I’m here!”
Nothing. There is no sign of her. Nowhere.
I run. The sand pulls at my feet, but I push through it, moving along the waterline, scanning every door I pass, looking for her outline against the color of them. The beach stretches, and the longer I run, the more certain I become of something I don’t want to be certain of.
She’s not here.
I slow, breathing hard, and stand there while the waves come in around my feet and pull back out. I turn toward the end of the beach.
The big door is where it was last time, standing apart from the others, the only one the waves haven’t reached yet. Dark wood, worn smooth, the grain of it in long flowing lines under my palm when I reach it.
I stand there with my hand on it and think about what I’m about to do.
It’s stupid. It is genuinely, objectively stupid.
5D is where identity doesn’t hold the same way, where Tessa has been drifting for twelve years without being able to find her way back out.
I have no idea what going in means for me, whether I can follow her there and still be recognizably myself on the other side.
But if she stays in the in-between, she will keep deteriorating.
What if I get stuck in there?
What if that’s the point?
The thought surfaces quickly, and I let it, because I’m not stupid enough to pretend it isn’t a real possibility. If I go in, and Tessa comes out, and I don’t—if that’s the trade—then someone finds me the way they found her, in a bed, still and breathing.
Whatever it takes.
I think about Nevan, who makes the world feel quiet when I stand next to him.
I let it go.
I think about Paul, who looks at me as if meeting me was never an accident.
I let it go.
I think about Ridge, who fights me like we’re on the same side.
I let that go too.
I let Jasper go.
Derek.
My new apartment.
My Bumble Bitch.
My new job.
Nora, Mable, Seraphine, Sydney.
All of it. The whole tangled, impossible, beautiful mess of the last few weeks, and how I ran from all of it without explaining, without staying, without being brave enough to turn around.
Let it go.
Let it all go.
Only Tessa.
Only this.
I open the door and step through, even if the crystal on my neck warms so much it’s almost burning me. Warning or protest, I can’t tell.
The dark takes me immediately, so completely, that for one ugly second, I think I’ve gone blind. It’s not the soft dark of dreamscape or the dark behind closed eyes. It’s absolute with no floor, no ceiling, and no edges. The cold comes with it, not temperature, but underneath temperature.
“Tessa?”
My voice doesn’t echo. It just stops, swallowed by the darkness.
She’s not here either.
“Tess… shit.”
I turn back for the door. I can feel the wood under my hands before I can see it, and I push, then pull, then push again with both palms flat and all my weight behind it.
It doesn’t move.
It doesn’t even shudder.
I stand there with my hands pressed against it, my forehead almost touching the grain, and I breathe—one breath, two—because panic is not going to help me.
I knew when I opened this door that it might not open again.
I made that choice. I am going to have to live with it, or not, or whatever the appropriate verb is for what happens to a person in 5D.
“Where are you, Tess?” I whisper.
A light snaps on behind me, and a single spotlight cuts down through the dark.
There wasn’t a floor a moment ago, now there is, and someone is standing on it.
Green eyes.
The same beautiful, wrong face from last time.
He’s standing there as if he owns it, like he’s been waiting for me.
For a long beat, he watches me, then the corner of his mouth lifts.
“Welcome to elsewhere, Lennon Maes.”