Chapter 7 #2
And, usually, I was the sort of person who needed to be emotionally invested in someone before thinking about them that way—
But for some reason, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about Raj Parikh.
It was a terrible idea.
For so many reasons.
First of which was the fact that I was absolutely going to see him again in a work context, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to meet his gold-brown eyes. Not after this.
I lay there, staring up at the ceiling, feeling the wetness in my shorts cooling. My muscles felt loose, but I wasn’t any more tired than I had been.
I knew I shouldn’t do it. Knew in my bones that what I was considering was unethical. Invasive.
Wrong.
I couldn’t stop myself.
No, that’s not true.
I could have.
But I didn’t.
He was standing by the river, his back to me, a wind that I knew was cool ruffling the waves of his black hair.
I always brought people here in dreams, wherever here was.
A river, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but always the same river, water rushing cold over stones.
Sometimes there was a willow tree—like there was now—and sometimes an open field or a dark, foreboding forest.
I tried, for a while, to keep track of when this place—my subconscious? my psyche? I honestly don’t know—looks each way, but I wasn’t really able to figure out any sort of pattern.
What the wind and water did absolutely reflected my mood. The more anxious I was, the more likely it was to storm, to flood, to gust.
Right now, the wind—forceful, but not violent—revealed my anxiety. The swiftly moving water reflected my nerves.
I walked up behind him, not knowing how he would react.
Afraid he would be angry—knowing that he had every right to be angry because I was invading his sleep.
He was looking around himself, studying the landscape, so he saw me before I figured out what I was going to say.
He smiled.
He had no idea I was a dreamwalker on top of everything else—if he had known, he would have reacted very differently.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he said, sounding amused.
“Hi,” was all I managed to come back with.
Was that what he’d expect me to say in a dream?
If I were in his head? I had no idea. I’m not sure what’s going on in my own head most of the time, much less anyone else’s— Well, okay.
I do actually have a pretty good idea what goes on in other people’s heads, just not why.
Which makes guessing what they’re going to do or say difficult.
Then I realized that he wasn’t particularly surprised to see me. Amused. Almost… pleased.
That was not going to stop me from thinking in inappropriate ways about Raj Parikh.
But then he drew my attention back to him.
“So, do you have any idea where we are?”
For a second, I thought he knew that this was all in my head, not his. But then I realized that he couldn’t possibly.
I shook my head, the wind tugging my too-long nondescript blond-brown hair in front of my eyes.
Raj stepped forward. “You know I’d never do this in real life, right?” he asked, laughing a little.
“Real life?” I repeated.
I had to pretend I was a part of his dream. That I wasn’t the one whose mind had formed the landscape around us.
I could hear water gurgling, but I couldn’t take my eyes off his face, the play of light and shadows over his features as the wind ruffled his hair.
Another laugh, soft. Unfiltered. Un-self-conscious.
I wanted to hear him laugh like that outside of the dream world.
He reached out and brushed a strand of hair back, tucking it behind one of my ears, sending a tingle through my entire body.
“Yeah,” he said, and it took me a second to realize that he was answering my supposed question about real life. “You know, real life. At work. Where we’re working on a murder case, not going for walks out in nature.”
“Do you like to go for walks out in nature?” I asked him.
Another smile. “I do. Obviously, or this wouldn’t be in my head.” He looked around. “Not sure where this specific place came from, but—” He shrugged. “I’m also not usually aware of my dream as a dream, either. But the human mind is weird.”
“It is,” I agreed.
Except that this was my mind, not his.
This was wrong.
“So tell me,” he said, stepping even closer—close enough that I should have been able to feel the heat coming off his body, but, of course, neither one of us was actually here. “What are you doing in my head?”
Horror hit me. He knew. He had to know.
Around us, the wind kicked up, and Raj laughed. “I guess you have me pretty worked up.”
“I do?”
He had me worked up. But I couldn’t tell him the wind was my psyche, not his. I didn’t dare.
“Yeah,” he said, reaching out and running a hand through my hair. My breath caught.
Nobody ever touched me.
But he just had.
And I wanted him to do it again.
“Is that okay?” he asked softly.
I nodded. It was more than okay.
His hand slid around behind my head. “This?”
I nodded again.
And then he kissed me.
And I panicked.
I don’t know what happened to Raj when I shoved us both out of the dream—if he woke up, or if he kept dreaming about something else, or if he kept dreaming about us, but it really was him in control of the whole thing.
I just… I had no idea what to do.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted him to kiss me.
Okay, I hadn’t honestly thought about him kissing me. Touching me, yes, but not kissing me. And now I couldn’t stop thinking about him kissing me.
I definitely wanted him to kiss me again.
I rolled out of bed and began to pace, now completely unable to sleep.
I shouldn’t have done it. I’d known that when I did it, but I did it anyway.
It wasn’t fair to him—he didn’t know that I was a dreamwalker. He definitely hadn’t been aware that I was me in the dream, rather than some figment of his own subconscious.
I stopped pacing.
Did that mean that Raj Parikh actually wanted to kiss me in the real world?
I looked down at my shaking hands.
And now that I knew that—and he didn’t know that I knew—I really wasn’t going to be able to look him in the eye. I wasn’t going to be able to be in the room with him. At least not without my face catching on fire.
What have I done?