Page 10 of Ex Somnis

My Lennon. And her Tessa.

Both of them are exactly where they’ve been for three days, under the bright ceiling light I leave on because I refuse to sit vigil in the dark. Tessa’s chest rising and falling, Lennon with her face turned toward her, lashes still, one hand open on the pillow. She appears to be simply sleeping.

She looks exactly like herself, except for the absolute absence in her that I cannot clinically or otherwise explain. Yesterday, they installed the nasogastric tube that rests along her cheek, disappearing into her nose, and something in me that has spent years learning to look at broken bodies without flinching does not want to look at this one.

The pressure on my chest does not ease. It increases.

I see him before I process what I’m seeing. He’s standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at Lennon.

He’s not really here. This is what always happens when I’m stuck between sleep and waking, when my subconscious still clings to the dream I left.

The dreamscape and waking life overlap in my mind.

His knuckles pass over Lennon’s cheek, right over the tape, but she doesn’t stir.

Every muscle I have strains against the paralysis at the same moment. Both hands clench against the armrests, while my jaw locks so hard I can feel my teeth. I’m trying to stand, trying to speak, to tell him to get his hands off of what is mine. The clinical part of my brain that I normally rely on to get me through the paralysis, has gone somewhere I cannot reach. This is not the ordinary nightmare. This is her, and he is touching her while I’m sitting in a chair completely unable to do anything about that.

He turns to look at me and smiles, because he knows perfectly well what I can and cannot do right now.

“She hasn’t had any difficulty breathing, has she? Tessa… since Lennon found her.”

My throat only produces something that isn’t words.

More stable, I’ve been noting in the chart I keep in my head. Tessa’s oxygen levels and her pulse. The steadying of her breathing since the night Lennon ran away from me. I’d told myself not to read into it.

I’d been reading into it anyway.

“You can stay in elsewhere forever,” he says to the room as he strokes Lennon’s face again, and the sound I make is involuntary and undignified, though I make it anyway. “Lennon will. Just as Tessa does… just as I do.”

The light flickers once, and the paralysis loosens, but just my face. This Man smiles at me, like he expects me to be thankful for that.

“Everyone will be fine. We will be, you will be, and your writer friend will be.”

Your writer friend.

“Ridge?” I press out. “You promised.”

“So did you. But you broke your promise, and because of that, Ridge Wells has been having a rather difficult few months.”

Fuck. I thought he was safe.

“What did you do to him?”

“Oh…” he tilts his head, the picture of mild consideration, “… not much. I simply kept him still, since you couldn’t. The trick was to pin. Him. Down.”

The cold that moves down my spine has nothing to do with temperature.

The log.

Ridge has been under that log for three months.

The light flickers again.

“It was fun, Dr. Bennett.” He smiles again, before he’s…

Gone.

The rest of the paralysis lifts all at once the moment he vanishes. I’m on my feet so fast my chair scrapes along the floor and hits the wall behind me. Two strides and I’m at the foot of the bed, hands already reaching for her.