11. Falling Out of Bed
Falling Out of Bed
Jude
The lab lights were dimmed to station cycle night, but Elias had every screen in the room glowing.
SOL’s diagnostics crawled across the central monitor in neat rows of white text.
Everything from radiation metrics, atmospheric composition models, thermal scans—everything the system had collected since the atmospheric probes deployed three loops ago.
I leaned over the console, scrolling through the data again. “Run the atmospheric stability model one more time,” I said.
Elias sighed softly from the opposite terminal. “That will be the fourth time.”
“Humor me.”
He tapped the command anyway. The program churned through the data, projections blooming across the screen in a storm of numbers and probability. After a moment, the result appeared. Stable. Exactly the same as the first three times.
Elias leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with the programming, Ransom.”
I frowned and scrolled through the code again anyway. “There has to be.”
“There isn't.”
The heat signature pulsed quietly on the map of Earth behind us. A small dot along the western edge of what used to be the United States. Elias turned his chair toward me and drummed his fingers on the console.
“You’ve been awake for how long?”
“Not long.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I didn’t answer.
He stood and stretched his back with a quiet groan. “Go to bed, Ransom.”
“I’m not done looking at this.”
“Yes you are. The system checks out. There’s no corruption in the code, no sensor faults, no network lag. Which means one of two things is happening.” He held up two fingers. “Either SOL is suddenly hallucinating, or there’s actually someone alive down there.”
I stared at the amber dot as if I could force it to tell us what it meant.
I’d watched it crawl across the screen for hours, shifting from one position to the next while Elias traced its path directly onto the glass with a whiteboard marker, trying to triangulate the location. It was human. It had to be.
Elias dropped his hand. “Get some sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow we will bring in a translator and contact the bunkers we still have communication with. If anyone else has heard something from that region, they’ll know.”
I exhaled slowly. “Yeah.”
He nodded toward the door. “I’ll brief Commander Zhang. You go get some sleep.” The lab hummed softly as he shut down the secondary monitors, though the dot on the map kept blinking beside the others that were strewn across earth.
I rubbed my eyes and finally pushed away from the console. I wasn’t sure why it bothered me so much. Maybe there really was someone down there. Maybe they’d managed to make it into a bunker. There were countless in that region. My own mom had tried to reach a military bunker when the Scourge began.
But why now? Why all of a sudden? And there was only one, which meant if someone was down there, from what we could tell…
They were alone.
Earth had been blotted out by soot for years. That part of the United States had been dark since the beginning. Nothing should be alive there. Not animals. Not plants. Nothing. Whatever it was—whoever it was—that SOL had found… might be the beginning of hope.
Which was too dangerous.
I couldn’t help a tremor of relief though as I dragged myself toward the door to find my bed. Sleep had been interesting lately as I’d gotten hardly any of it, because when I did, I opened my eyes to find her in my space. No longer only in my head.
Solace was kept alive in my dreams and if that meant waking up groggy and half-exhausted, I’d do it until I collapsed because stealing glimpses of her was like a drug, to which I was an addict.
The burning came first. Then her touch.
Fingers drifted down my chest, hooking into the waistband of my boxers. I caught Solace’s hand in mine, willing her to slow. To make it last.
Each night she appeared, and each night it was the same harried minute of frenzy. Of bliss I’d never experienced before.
Was it selfish to desire lingering here, rather than actually sleep?
If it was, I didn’t care. I missed her so much it physically hurt most days.
Every night I drifted in and out of these pockets of euphoria, and every morning I woke up debilitated as if the time we spent together was real and my body never rested at all.
Tonight she laid across my chest, hair tucked loosely behind her ears. I sat up, gently cradling her face in my palm. She shifted between my legs, and I couldn’t help but savor the warmth of her skin against mine. Even if it only lasted a moment. Sometimes the dreamscape flickered.
I wasn’t sure where I was. The room was dark and cold, and all I could make out was the shape of her. She was bare from the waist up, having lost her shirt somewhere in the trail of kisses she’d left along my jaw.
Like a masochist, I thought, you’re not real, murmuring it against the soft skin behind her ear as my hand tightened gently in her hair.
“Neither are you.” She pushed me back into the covers and swung a leg over mine, settling against me like she belonged there. “If I must dream of you, Jude,” she whispered, “let it be this. Us. Together.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. It was one thing to remember her voice. It was another to hear it—to hear the shape of my name on her lips. “Slow down, Solace.” However, the words lost meaning the moment she swallowed the distance between us, the warmth of her breasts brushing my chest.
For a moment she simply looked at me, like she was memorizing my face, then she kissed me again. It was slow and curious as my hands slid along her back, tracing the curve of her waist.
“You’re trembling,” I murmured.
She let out a soft sound that might have been a laugh or a whimper—I couldn’t tell which. Whatever it was, she was content and that was enough for me. I slipped a hand beneath the lace covering her.
“You’re also wet,” I added roughly. Running my knuckles gently along her seam, I wrapped my arm around her waist and flipped us.
I couldn’t help staring, as she writhed beneath me.
Her face was half-hidden in shadow, but the scar beneath her chin was right where it had been when I’d last seen her.
From where she’d fallen off her bike in fourth grade.
Her hair was longer now, brushing her collarbone.
It was tangled, fanned out over the small bed we laid on.
She appeared older too, her smile far more mature and confident. She was so beautiful.
There was a strange tug at my chest. It was like seeing a ghost. As if she’d never left me, standing right beside me as the years passed. I swallowed thickly. “You’re sure about this?”
“I didn’t imagine you to be so chivalrous,” she giggled, running her hands over my abs. “Or so hairy.”
I glanced down at my stomach, where her fingers pressed against my skin. “You’re cold.” Freezing actually. I frowned.
“Warm me up.” She flashed a mischievous smile. The kind she used when we were kids to get something out of me.
I huffed out a laugh. “Is that a request or a threat?”
“Depends.” Her fingers drifted higher over my stomach. “Are you intimidated?”
“By you?” I caught her wrist, mostly so she wouldn’t notice how badly my hands had started shaking. “Always.”
She grinned at that—slow and pleased, like she’d won something. “I didn’t picture you nervous around women.”
“You’re not women.”
Sitting back, I lowered my head to her stomach and pressed a kiss there as I slid the strip of lace down her legs. She let out a soft laugh when I tucked the underwear into my pocket.
“Keeping souvenirs now?”
I glanced up at her. “Just collecting evidence.”
Her smile turned wicked. “Evidence of what?”
“Of what I’m about to do to you.” With that, I dipped down, tracing her thigh with my mouth. Closer. Closer. Closer—
Solace’s fingers threaded through my hair, tugging at my scalp. Hips tilted, she pressed harder, urging me on. I nipped at her thigh, only to elicit a low moan. I bit harder this time, smoothing the mark over with my tongue.
“God I don’t want to wake up.”
Heart swelling, I curled a brow, “Is that so?” Stretching out over top of her, I settled between her thighs and lapped at her, circling that sensitive bundle of nerves with my tongue. I didn’t want to wake up either. God she was so fucking perfect.
“I’ve dreamt of this longer than I care to admit.”
I stopped, raising my head to meet her eye. “Me too.”
She rose to her elbows. “Really?”
“Really.” I kissed her belly before pulling back, positioning myself until I could feel the heat of her against me. “Care to help me with these?”
Her hands found the buckle at my waist—mine covered hers a moment later, both of us trembling with equal uselessness.
Between the two of us we managed the pants, then her fingers hooked into the waistband of my boxers and dragged them down.
I shifted my weight to remove them, only to fall off the narrow cot.
I hit the floor hard enough to wake up, dream dissolving before I could catch the ending of it.
My watch screamed at me, informing me that my heart rate was elevated. No shit. I lay there staring at the ceiling, sheet twisted around my waist, uncomfortably aware of what the rest of me was doing. My cock was stiff. I let my arm fall over my face. “Fuck.”
The dreams were getting out of control. My room smelled faintly of must and soap, as if I’d actually been there with her.
I caught myself thinking about her more and more—her breath against my lips, her skin warm against mine.
The slow circles I’d run across her back as she slept in my arms. Only a few times had things progressed into… that.
Admittedly, it had been a while since I'd had sex. Loops, actually.
Every time I dreamed of her, real sleep never came. Each time my head hit the pillow she was there, Solace, hand tucked beneath her cheek, watching me—only to dissolve the moment I reached for her. My fingers brushing her hair, tucking it back from her face, and then nothing.
It was fucking cruel.
I missed her. More than I knew how to say, which was saying something, because I couldn't remember the last time I'd told anyone I loved them. But I'd tell her. I'd shout it until my lungs gave out and my throat ran raw if I had to.
I just hadn't realized it until she was gone—Solace had given me somewhere to go.
My viewport window never changed. It was a dark canvas scattered with white specks. It was cold. Empty. Void. Nothing like my dreams of her.
Missing her wouldn't bring her back, and beating off to the ghost of her wasn't going to help either. I stood, kicked my pants off, and climbed back into bed. Rolling over, I pulled the sheets higher and squeezed my eyes shut.
“Fuck off, Ransom,” I muttered. “Go to bed, you filthy bastard.”
When I opened my eyes again, she was there.
I groaned, wishing that I could find rest away from the dead; sleep not plagued by my past.
This time was different though.
Solace slept fitfully on a small cot in a dark space.
It smelled like the room my dreams brought us to earlier, musty and stale.
She wore an old holey sweatshirt that swallowed her frame, the hood pulled tight around her face.
There was a heavy military green wool blanket draped over her waist. I stepped closer and drew it around her shoulders before kissing her forehead.
Sinking into the chair beside her, I watched.
I counted the slow rise and fall of her chest. The dark lashes brushing her cheeks.
She looked fragile. A sleeping lamb. My fists clenched the armrests as I sat there, a red light blinking in the corner of my vision.
The room was just a smaller version of the control center on Station Seven.
It was dim, most of the systems dark, but a large screen spanned an entire wall while a console of buttons and switches stretched beneath it.
The light blinked again, bright, casting a soft crimson glow across the room.
Papers were stacked in uneven piles beside her cot, a few scattered across the floor like she’d dropped them in her sleep. They were covered with a music staff and notes strewn across the page. The sight of them tugged at my chest, then something skittered across them.
I slid out of the chair and crouched down, scooping it up before it could disappear.
Dreams were weird.
It was a gecko. The kind I’d had as a kid. Apparently the survivor’s guilt was getting creative tonight. Maybe my eighth-grade science teacher would walk through the door next.
The little thing was light in my palm and looked sick—like the time I’d left my gecko, Spike, out too long when I was twelve. Beside the control panel sat a small glass tank with a basking stone inside. The mesh cover had been pushed aside and the heat lamp above it hung dark.
“Guess you got loose, huh?” I murmured. I set the gecko back into the terrarium and replaced the mesh lid before reaching up to flick the lamp switch.
Nothing. The plug ran into an extension cord that snaked along the wall, its tiny green light glowing steadily.
Power should’ve been running through it.
I glanced back at the cot where Solace had rolled away from me, curling tighter beneath the blanket.
The gecko watched me with wary eyes.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m working on it.” I unscrewed the bulb and turned it in my fingers, checking the prongs before twisting it back into the socket. One had been a bit bent and loose.
Once I fixed it, the lamp glowed faintly. “There ya go,” I muttered, watching it crawl up onto the basking stone. Solace was sleeping just fine—the lizard too—and apparently so was I, as my dream continued.
Rolling the chair back to the control panel, I began poking at buttons.