Page 181 of In Somnis

Nevan

Lemonade.

The soft sweetness that lingers in the air after she’s been in a room for a while.

I breathe in without thinking, as if my body already knows what it’s looking for. My arm tightens automatically around the warmth pressed against me, and I shift my face down into it. My brain supplies the rest of the picture from last night before my eyes even open.

Like it’s been replaying it on a loop without me.

Lennon curled against me, hair falling over my arm, that little sleepy noise she made when she fell asleep almost on top of me.

Something flutters low in my stomach. I press closer without really thinking about it, and my hips roll forward on pure instinct, pressing the ache between my legs right up against the warm curve I know is hers.

“Lemon.” I grind again, my cock is hard and hurts in the best way. I keep rocking, slow, sleepy thrusts, the sheets twisting under my knees. My breath comes out ragged against her neck, but she doesn’t stir. Doesn’t make that little whimper I know she does, she just… stays still.

My palm slides down, expecting the dip of her waist, the flare of her hip. Expecting her. Instead, my fingers sink into plush stuffing, and my eyes snap open.

A fucking muffin is staring back at me with an embroidered dead-eyed smile, smooshed against my chest where her face should be.

The warmth I’ve been grinding against is… a pillow and a very traumatized lemon-scented plushie.

I freeze, cock still throbbing against my jeans, a wet spot already forming where I’ve been leaking for who knows how long. The room is empty, the sunlight is obnoxious, and Lennon’s side of the bed is cool, the dent in the mattress the only proof she was ever here.

I let my forehead drop onto the muffin’s round, judgmental head. “You’re not her,” I rasp out at the plushie.

He does not disagree.

My dick twitches anyway, traitor that it is, still stupidly hopeful against the cotton. I groan and roll my hips one more useless time before turning onto my back. I’m alone, hard as iron, having humped a stuffed muffin in a girl’s bed while she wasn’t even in it.

“Cool,” I mutter to the ceiling. “Real cool.”

This is how people end up on lists.

I don’t move for a minute. Just breathe, letting the ache pulse, and the embarrassment do what it’s going to do.

Then the cold seeps in.

Because why am I thinking about her like that?

Not the half-asleep part. That’s just biology, her smell still in the sheets, and my body doing what bodies do when they’re warm and not quite conscious. Fine. That I can file away and never look at again.

It’s the other part. The part where my brain, completely unprompted, filled in the rest. The dip of her waist. The sound she’d make. The detailed picture of her that my subconscious apparently had ready to go, filed somewhere I wasn’t aware of, waiting for me to stop being awake enough to keep it out.

Shit.

I stare at the ceiling.

Then, because my brain is apparently determined to make this worse, it serves up last night in full. Her weight against my side. How her crying finally slowed, her voice turning quieter as she talked herself empty, and how she felt against me when she finally went under.

The lemon cake with sprinkles. The shoebox. She’ll never know how any of it turns out.

That she’s thirty-five and nobody’s daughter anymore. I’ve been turning that phrase over since she said it. Not because it’s dramatic—Lennon isn’t dramatic, she says the big things like you’d state a fact about the weather—but because I know how much it’s hurting her.

She had a mother who showed up, and now she doesn’t.

I held her while she cried about it, which is the most natural thing I’ve done in years.

My heart does a slow, complicated thing that I’m not going to examine right now.